U.S. suicide rate is up

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

By Denise Gellene

October 21, 2008
LA Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gellene is a Times staff writer.

denise.gellene@latimes.com

Suicide Predominant in White, Middle-Aged Americans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2007 - 2008 - eFluxMedia

EU Leaders Call for Global Currency

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

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

- Les Blough, Editor

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on date: Oct 20, 2008

By J.D. Seagraves
Citizen Economists

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

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

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

The Monetary Role of Gold

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

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

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

The End of the International Gold Standard

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

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

The Creature from Bretton Woods, NH

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

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

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

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

The Death of Bretton Woods I

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

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

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

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

The Birth of Bretton Woods II?

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

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

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

By Jonathan Tirone

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

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

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

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

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

`Real Economy'

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

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

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

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

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

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

Banks Admit Bailout Won't Work

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

From ClusterStock.com, Oct. 17, 2008:

So much for that story. A few days ago, when Hank Paulson called the heads of the nine families to Washington and shoved cash down their throats, he announced that the banks would use this new taxpayer cash to lend. They won't, of course. They'll hoard it like a starving family who has just been given a grocery cart full of food.

And after a few days of silence, even the banks are finally admitting that. So it's back to the drawing board for Paulson & Co.

Next steps? Find a way to force the banks to write their assets down to nuclear winter levels, so 1) private investors don't have to worry about getting sandbagged and therefore invest more in the banks, and 2) the banks know they won't be forced to take more multi-billion dollar losses. Only then will the banks begin to lend again. And at that point, the only challenge will be finding people and companies to lend to, in an economy headed straight into the tank.)

NYT: , John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, said on Thursday that banks were unlikely to act swiftly. Executives at other banks privately expressed a similar view.

“We will have the opportunity to redeploy that,” Mr. Thain said of the new capital on a telephone call with analysts. “But at least for the next quarter, it’s just going to be a cushion."...

“I don’t think that the market wants to see that capital being put to work to leverage the business up again,” said Roger Freeman, an analyst at Barclays Capital, which acquired parts of the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers last month. “My expectation is it’s quarters off, not months off, before you see that capital being put to work.”...

Jamie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan, said his bank was in a stronger position to use the money than some of its competitors.

“It’s clear that the government would like us to use the capital,” Mr. Dimon said on a conference call with analysts on Wednesday. “If you are a bank that is filling a hole, you obviously can’t do that.”

Who is "a bank that is filling a hole"? Seven of the nine that just got taxpayer money.

See Also:
Sorry, Hank, Bailout Isn't Working
But What About the Next $1 Trillion of Writedowns?

Banks borrow record $437.5 billion per day from Fed

Reuters
Friday, Oct 17, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full article here

G-7 unsuited to global crisis - World Bank

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

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

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

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

Russia set to join

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

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

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

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

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

Economics on global agenda

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

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

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

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

Developing countries

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

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

House to Wall Street: Drop dead

Commentary: Uneasy Republicans couldn't stomach massive bailout

marketwatch.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 22, 2008 02:06 PM Huffington Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fed's Fisher says not certain inflation will ease

By Alister Bull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putin Suggests U.S. Provocation in Georgia Clash

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
NEW YORK TIMES

Published: August 28, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Shobhana Chandra

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economists' Forecasts

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

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

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

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

Fed Forecast

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

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

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

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

Savings Rate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Medvedev: We're not afraid of Cold War

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

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

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

Ian Traynor
The Guardian
August 27, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FDIC may borrow money from Treasury: report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'NATO whitewash and rearm criminal regime of Georgia'

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

Russian General Says Georgia May Commit False Flag Terror Attacks

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, August 18, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgia is a U.S. Project - Russian FM

Russia Today
Friday, Aug 15, 2008

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

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

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

Saakashvili Defends the “New World Order” On Glenn Beck

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
August 12, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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