Gender: male Member Since: June 04, 2008 Last Signed In: November 07, 2009 Profile Views: 999 Blog Views: 42730 Clinic threatens to pull treatment, call cops for patient’s 1979 60 minutes swine flu vac report DVD Excellent Article & Interview: How Goldman Sachs secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash 81-year-old Tasered by Eielson Air Force Base police Was Fort Hood Killer On Psychotropic Drugs? Flashback (Great Article): NPR News: National Pentagon Radio? Judge rules activist's beliefs on climate change akin to religion (Live 9 am-1 pm) TODAY ON THE ALEX JONES SHOW: Ron Paul,Laurence Kotlikoff, Joe Rogan (In Studio) ELEMENTARY EPIDEMIC: 11 Uncovered Videos Show School Children Performing Praises to Obama Conservatives’ Blind Support of Our Troops and Their Unintended Defense of the Big Lie You guys are right about Sam Heath.... June 08 July 08 August 08 September 08 October 08 November 08 December 08 January 09 February 09 March 09 April 09 May 09 June 09 July 09 August 09 September 09 October 09 November 09 "IF YOUR'E GOING TO PUT YOUR FAMILY IN A NURSING HOME... YOU BETTER VISIT THEM AT LEAST EVERY TWO DAYS, YOU BETTER LIVE NEAR THEM, YOU BETTER BRING THEM LUNCH, YOU BETTER SIT THERE AND WATCH TV WITH THEM, YOU BETTER SIT THERE AND RUB THERE FEET AND LOVE YOUR PARENTS (voice raises in anger) THAT WIPED YOUR BUTT, THAT TOOK CARE OF YOU, YOU SCUMBAG YUPPIES!!!"
"What a bunch of garbage, liberal, Democratic, conservative, Republican, it's all there to control you, two sides of the same coin! Two management teams, bidding for control of the CEO job of Slavery Incorporated!" --Alex Jones We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years......It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries. Author: David Rockefeller, Source: Trilateral Commission meeting, June, 1991 
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This video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast October 29, 2008.
Ron Paul: Obama won't pull troops out of Iraq rawstory.com/news/2008/Ron_Paul_Obama_wont_pull_t roops_1030.html David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster On Wednesday's Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, the rising-star host spoke with 'political phenom' Ron Paul, a popular Republican congressman from Texas, about whether or not the GOP is at an 'end.' http://www.youtube.com/watc...
As the 2008 election draws near, the American people are dying for change. We believe that we can change our future by voting for a democrat or republican. If we look at history, the status quo has never changed with either party. We never question the two party system which has caused so much destruction to other nations and to our civil liberties. Before you vote, look at the real issues, think outside of the box, and don't forget that Barack Obama and John McCain are not the only people running for president. U.S. Government Anticipates Bin Laden Election Tape
Return of Emmanuel Goldstein required to make Americans fear their own shadow again
Paul Joseph Watson Seemingly desperate for Emmanuel Goldstein to remind Americans that they should still fear their own shadow, the corporate media is maniacally preempting the release of a Bin Laden tape before or after the election, despite there being no actual evidence that one is forthcoming. If the CIA really want to resurrect the ultimate boogeyman yet again as we sail past Halloween, they really ought to get a move on with the election just four days away. The lack of a video tape statement from Bin Laden has the mainstream press evidently worried, but the government assures them that one is on the horizon.
In a related development, an alleged Al Qaeda leader purportedly called for Republicans and George W. Bush to be “humiliated,” seemingly unaware of the fact that Bush was not running for re-election. Former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke told CNN last week that Osama Bin Laden would attempt to influence the 2008 U.S. election with a terrorist attack or the release of a video tape. The ABC News report about the anticipated tape also cites exit polls in making the case that Bin Laden’s video appearance right before the 2004 election did not impact the result. The problem with that is the same exit polls predicted a reasonably comfortable Kerry win, so their reliability proved to be useless (or the election was stolen anyway, whichever you prefer). The fact is that both Kerry and Bush attributed the result to the Bin Laden tape and veteran news broadcaster Walter Cronkite called the video message a Karl Rove-orchestrated set up. Bin Laden’s chastisement of Bush resulted in a 6 point swing, enabling Bush to seal a second term in office. If Bin Laden does pop up over he next few days, it will only be to John McCain’s benefit. Indeed, McCain’s own adviser Charlie Black let the cat out of the bag back in June when he said that a terror attack on American soil would be a “big advantage” to McCain’s election hopes.
China And Russia Hint At Dropping US Dollar
Vladimir Putin joins scores of other heads of state in calling for complete overhaul of global financial system Steve Watson Reports from the Russian media suggest that the country is on the verge of an agreement with China to renounce the US dollar and stop using it in international settlements. “The recent meeting between Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Wen Jiabao, created a financial sensation,” reports RIA Novosti. “Wen said that the two nations could withstand the global financial crisis if they joined forces; Putin urged him to go farther and stop using U.S. dollars in Russian-Chinese settlements.” Russia Today reports that Putin has also called for a complete overhaul of the world’s financial system to “end monopoly in world finance”. The move comes as the dollar is rebounding and gaining strength for the first time in months, leading some to suspect the move is part of a wider political agenda. Igor Nikolayev, chief strategic analyst at FBK private auditing firm told RIA Novosti “I think it was a political statement rather than an economic decision. There is a dominant public sentiment that the United States is the source of all evil, so let’s stop using the dollar,”. Despite recent gains, negative dollar sentiment has now become global. Over the past year the dollar has hit all time lows, mainly due to continued rate cuts and injections of liquidity by the Federal Reserve. China has threatened repeatedly to use the so called “nuclear option” and liquidate its vast holding of US treasuries in response to continued pressure on the Communist state to force a yuan revaluation. According to a reports earlier this year, such an event “could trigger a dollar crash” which would now have disastrous consequences for an American economy already firmly in a recession. Questions remain, however, over what would take the place of the dollar as an international currency, with China not likely to accept use the ruble or the Euro and Russia unlikely to agree to use the yuan. Vladimir Putin’s call for a new financial world order echoes that of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who wants dozens of world leaders to meet at a “Bretton Woods II” summit where they would rewrite the rules of international finance encompassing “very large and very radical changes”.
Ex-Italian President: Provocateur Riots Then “Beat The Sh#t Out Of Protesters”
Cossiga says Italian government should “do what I did” under Operation GLADIO - infiltrate protest groups with agent provocateurs
Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga has offered a solution to the Italian government in dealing with widespread demonstrations by students and teachers over a cut in state funding of education - use agent provocateurs to start riots and then have the police “beat the snap! out of the protesters”. Cossiga, former Italian President, Prime Minister, Minister of the Interior, and one of the founders of the Operation GLADIO covert intelligence unit, encouraged Silvio Berlusconi and current Minister of the Interior Robert Maroni to “do what I did when I was Minister of the Interior,” namely infiltrate what so far have been relatively peaceful demonstrations, radicalize them, start riots, then engender public support for a heavy-handed police response. Cossiga’s full statement translated reads as follows.
Cossiga is essentially describing the problem-reaction-solution dialectic that he exploited when he was in government. Under the banner of Operation GLADIO, which was unveiled after parliamentary investigations in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium, NATO sponsored secret armies committed acts of violence and terrorism and blamed the attacks on left-wing political movements, allowing far-right governments to seize power in numerous European countries. “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game,” right-wing terrorist and GLADIO agent Vincezo Vinciguerra explained the so-called “strategy of tension” in sworn testimony. “The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.” GLADIO-orchestrated false flag terror attacks, such as the Bologna train bombing in 1980 which killed 85 people, were revealed during the Italian parliamentary investigation as having been overseen by elements of the U.S. intelligence apparatus. At the very least, U.S. intelligence sat on prior knowledge of bombings and allowed them to go ahead. Cossiga’s call to infiltrate protest groups and provocateur violence, giving the police public backing to “beat the snap!” out of them, is a false flag tactic that has been employed numerous times during major protest events around the world. Indeed, the scenario Cossiga is describing is exactly what happened at the violent 2001 Genoa G8 summit, during which Italian police planted bombs in headquarters being used by protest groups as an excuse to conduct raids and “beat the snap!” out of peaceful demonstrators. A similar tactic was also attempted during last year’s SPP summit protest in Quebec Canada. Canadian police were caught dressed up as rock-wielding anarchists intent on causing riots. Peaceful protesters identified the agent provocateurs and the police later had to admit the fact despite going to the lengths of publicly staging the arrests of their own officers. Last year, Cossiga drew on his first-hand personal experience in conducting false flag terror operations to declare that 9/11 was an inside job and that this fact was “common knowledge” amongst global intelligence agencies. ---------------------------------- Paul Joseph Watson
RAND Lobbies Pentagon: Start War To Save U.S. Economy
EXCLUSIVE: Shocking proposal urges military leaders to attack major foreign power
According to reports out of top Chinese mainstream news outlets, the RAND Corporation recently presented a shocking proposal to the Pentagon in which it lobbied for a war to be started with a major foreign power in an attempt to stimulate the American economy and prevent a recession. A fierce debate has now ensued in China about who that foreign power may be, with China itself as well as Russia and even Japan suspected to be the targets of aggression. The reports cite French media news sources as having uncovered the proposal, in which RAND suggested that the $700 billion dollars that has been earmarked to bailout Wall Street and failing banks instead be used to finance a new war which would in turn re-invigorate the flagging stock markets. The RAND Corporation is a notoriously powerful NGO with deep ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex as well as interlocking connections with the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations.
Current directors of RAND include Frank Charles Carlucci III, former Defense Secretary and Deputy Director of the CIA, Ronald L. Olson, Council on Foreign Relations luminary and former Secretary of Labor, and Carl Bildt, top Bilderberg member and former Swedish Prime Minister. Carlucci was chairman of the Carlyle Group from 1989-2005 and oversaw gargantuan profits the defense contractor made in the aftermath of 9/11 following the invasion of Afghanistan. The Carlyle Group has also received investment money from the Bin Laden family. Reportedly, the RAND proposal brazenly urged that a new war could be launched to benefit the economy, but stressed that the target country would have to be a major influential power, and not a smaller country on the scale of Afghanistan or Iraq. The reports have prompted a surge of public debate and tension in China about the possibility that a new global conflict is on the horizon. China’s biggest media outlet, Sohu.com, speculated that the target of the new war would probably be China or Russia, but that it could also be Iran or another middle eastern country. Japan was also mentioned as a potential target for the reason that Japan holds the most U.S. debt. North Korea was considered as a target but ruled out because the scale of such a war would not be large enough for RAND’s requirements. The reported RAND proposal dovetails with recent comments made by Joe Biden, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and others, concerning the “guarantee” that Barack Obama will face a major “international crisis” soon after taking office. It also arrives following a warning from Michael Bayer, chairman of a key Pentagon advisory panel, who echoed the statement that the next administration will face an international crisis within months of taking office. One would hope that good people, or at least sane people who don’t wish to start a global nuclear war, will oppose the RAND proposal, such as top the military generals who threatened to quit if Bush ordered an attack on Iran. Admiral William Fallon, the head of US Central Command, quit in March last year as a result of his opposition to Bush administration policy on Iran. Translations from Chinese provided by Yihan Dai. SOURCES Sohu.com - http://news.sohu.com/200810... Ifeng.com - http://news.ifeng.com/mil/4... ----------------------------------- Paul Joseph Watson & Yihan Dai http://www.prisonplanet.com...
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You can translate the Chinese article using Babel Fish: Just copy the url of the source material or the article text
Border security forum to be held at CSUBwww.csub.edu/csubnews/2008/fall/security.shtml October 27, 2008
CONTACT:
Kathy Miller, 661/654-2456, or
Jaclyn Hernandez, 661/654-2138,  Robert Pastor, a former national security advisor for Latin America, will be the guest speaker at California State University, Bakersfield's public forum "Can You Secure America at the Border? An Alternative Vision" slated for Thursday, Nov. 6, at 6 p.m. in the Student Union multipurpose room. Pastor is professor of international relations and founding director of the Center for North American Studies at American University. He served as the national security advisor for Latin America from 1977 to 1981 and has been a consultant to the Departments of State and Defense. Pastor received his doctorate in political science from Harvard University and his master's in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. The event is sponsored by the CSU Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence, along with the CSUB Intelligence Fellows program, Global Affairs Club, political science department and Associated Students, Inc. The forum is free and open to the public. For details, please call (661) 654-2141. __________________________ "Robert Pastor and the Rockefeller Council on Foreign Relations are seeking to overthrow the US Constitution. The CFR was established in the 1920s by the Rockefellers and other elites who wanted a centralized world government to control and enslave the entire world. The NAU is just one more plank in their platform toward that goal." ___________________________
Meet Robert Pastor: Father of the North American Union Posted 07/25/2006 ET
Updated 07/25/2006 ET
Robert Pastor intends to give away U.S. sovereignty to a newly forming North American Union exactly as he gave away the Panama Canal to Panama during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
As we are taught in grade school, George Washington is the Father of our nation. If the North American Union comes into existence as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) asserts, then we all better get prepared for a new hero. Robert Pastor is the person most likely to be proclaimed the father of the North American Union, a designation consistent with his decades-long history of viewing U.S. national interests through the lens of an extreme leftist almost anti-American political philosophy. Dr. Pastor’s early professional career involved a working association with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Here he participated on the Ad Hoc Working Group on Latin America, which produced a 1977 report, “The Southern Connection: Recommendations for a New Approach to Inter-American Relations,” arguing for the U.S. to abandon our anti-communist allies in Latin America in favor of supporting “ideological pluralism,” a code word for the revolutionary socialist forces taking hold in Latin America, including the communist Sandanistas and other revolutionary terrorist groups that were developing in countries such as El Salvador. Author David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks.org identifies the IPS as “America’s oldest leftwing think tank” that “has long supported Communist and Anti-American causes around the world,” with a place for KGB agents from the Soviet embassy in Washington “to convene and strategize.” From February 1975 to January 1977, Dr. Pastor was executive director of the Linowitz Commission on U.S./Latin American Relations. The Linowitz Commission supported President Carter’s decision to negotiate a treaty to turn over the Panama Canal to Panama. Pastor left the Linowitz Commission to join become director of the Office of Latin American and Caribbean Affairs in the National Security Council in the Carter White House. There Pastor served as Carter’s “point man” in getting the Senate to narrowly vote for the Carter-Torrijos Treaty on April 18, 1978, despite staunch objections from conservative politicians including Ronald Reagan. In December 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated Pastor to be U.S. ambassador to Panama. Pastor’s nomination was approved by a 16-3 vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his confirmation looked virtually certain. The nomination failed, however, and was withdrawn by the administration in February 1995, after then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R.-N.C.) swore to prevent a Senate vote on Pastor’s nomination. Helms, who had vehemently opposed the turn-over of the Panama Canal, placed much of the blame squarely on Pastor, declaring when he opposed Pastor’s nomination that Pastor “presided over one of the most disastrous and humiliating periods in the history of U.S. involvement in Latin America.” Helms also claimed that Pastor bore responsibility for what Helms saw as “a Carter administration cover-up of alleged involvement by Nicaragua’s Sandinista government in arms shipments to leftist rebels in El Salvador.” Dr. Pastor has also co-authored a 1989 book with his long-time friend, Jorge G. Castañeda, who began his career as a member of the Mexican Communist Party. Castañeda, a life-long admirer of the radical left, published in 1998 an admiring biography of the revolutionary “hero” Che Guevara. Castañeda, like Pastor, has sought to work in government positions to implement his theories, not satisfied to be a political scientist who writes books and teaches at universities. Castañeda too has mixed his career as a government employee by alternating time spent as an author of more than a dozen books and a university professor at various times on the faculties of the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, and the New York University. Castañeda was an aggressively pro-illegal immigration foreign minister when he accompanied President Vincente Fox in the U.S. in 2001. Those were the days when Vincente Fox was declaring himself to be the president of 100 million Mexicans at home and 23 million Mexicans in the United States. Castañeda also attended with President Fox on a three-day state visit to pre-9/11 Washington. There in a joint statement on Sept. 6, 2001, the two leaders announced a bilateral “Partnership for Prosperity,” which after 9/11 evolved into the trilateral summit statement of a “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,” announced in Waco, Tex., on March 23, 2005. Castañeda is probably best remembered for telling in 2001 a group of mostly Latino union workers that Mexico was going to press for “the whole enchilada,” intending to legalize all illegal Mexicans aliens in the U.S. In his pressing enthusiasm for realizing the NAU, Robert Pastor argued in a 2004 article in CFR’s Foreign Affairs, entitled “North America’s Second Decade,” that the United States would benefit by giving up U.S. national Sovereignty. “Countries are benefited,” he wrote, “when they changed these [national sovereignty] policies, and evidence suggests that North Americans are ready for a new relationship that renders this old definition of sovereignty obsolete.” Characteristically, Dr. Pastor has seen the U.S. as a North American bully that needs to be restrained, for the good of the region and possibly even for the good of the world. On Oct. 21, 2003, he testified to the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs along these lines: A new approach to the Americas needs to begin with some humility and a willingness to bridge the post-Iraq gap. The United States needs to realize that its power has limits and obligations. U.S. power can compel other governments to take our agenda seriously, but if we brandish it or ignore other views, we unintentionally invite resistance or simply no cooperation. To achieve our goals in the region (and elsewhere), we need to listen more and lecture less.In 2004, Dr. Pastor declared his support for the presidential campaign of John Kerry. Dr. Pastor’s 19-page curriculum vitae (c.v.) on the website of American University where he is currently a faculty member documents that Dr. Pastor has served as an adviser to every Democratic Party presidential candidate for three decades, since he first supported Jimmy Carter in 1976. Dr. Pastor was the co-chair of the May 2005 CFR report, “Building a North American Community,” argued that the Security and Prosperity Partnership signed by President Bush with Mexico and Canada on March 23, 2005 should become by 2010 a “North American economic and security community, the boundaries of which would be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter.” According to his published c.v., Dr. Pastor was the “principal editor” of this CFR report as well as the vice chair of the task force that produced it. The May 2005 CFR task force report made clear that the borders between the U.S. and Mexico and between the U.S. and Canada would be erased, with the only border to be protected to be around North America. As the report stated on page 3, the boundaries of the North American Union “will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within which the movement of people, products, and capital will be legal, orderly, and safe.” The “outer security perimeter” referred specifically to the border around Canada, the U.S., and Mexico -- such that the borders between these countries would be virtually erased. Dr. Pastor left no doubt about his view of U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada in his June 2005 testimony to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee: Instead of stopping North Americans on the borders, we ought to provide them with a secure, biometric Border Pass that would ease transit across the border like an E-Z pass permits our cars to speed through toll booths.Note that Dr. Pastor’s reference was to “North Americans,” a term he meant to replace the current designations of “Mexicans,” “Americans,” and “Canadians,” much as he also was arguing for the NAU to replace the USA. Dr. Pastor himself proclaims that the May 2005 CFR task force report on which he was vice chair and principal editor was a “blueprint” for the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP). In his June 2005 testimony to the U.S. Senate, Dr. Pastor informed the Foreign Relations Committee of this link: Entitled “Building a North American Community,” the report offered a blueprint of the goals that the three countries of North America should pursue and the steps needed to achieve these goals. The CFR report, under Robert Pastor’s direction, recommended expanding the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) into a North American military command, creating a North American Development Fund to help pay for Mexico’s economic development, establishing a North American Union Court to resolve disputes, establishing a North American Advisory Council to serve as the NAU executive branch, and creating a North American Inter-Parliamentary Group to act as NAU lawmaker. These recommendations derive directly from Robert Pastor’s many published books and papers, as well as his extensive professional testimony to Congress and groups such as the Tri-Lateral Commission. His most comprehensive statement of his views on creating the NAU by transforming NAFTA into a political entity were expressed in his 2001 book, "Toward a North American Community", where he also advocated the creation of a common NAU currency, the Amero, as first proposed by Canadian economist Herbert Grubel.
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Jerome R. Corsi is a staff reporter for WND. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in political science in 1972 and has written many books and articles, including his latest best-seller, "The Late Great USA." Corsi co-authored with John O'Neill the No. 1 New York Times best-seller, "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry." Other books include "Showdown with Nuclear Iran," "Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil," which he co-authored with WND columnist Craig. R. Smith, and "Atomic Iran."
The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1416598065/bookst orenow99-20
______________________ Links to check out:
www.judicialwatch.org/SPP.shtml
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Union
www.forthecause.us/000ftc-newstopic-nafta-corrido r.shtml
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_Prosperity_Par tnership_of_North_America
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Currency_Uni on
www.nwo101.com/2007/12/who-hell-is-dr-robert-past or-and-why-is.html
_______________________ Montana Libertarian Candidate Stan Jones Speaks on The North American Union _______________________ www.stopthenorthamericanunion.com/ _____________________ This is a link to Anti-NAU groups www.stopthenorthamericanunion.com/AntiLinks.html
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Here is a link to pro NAU groups www.stopthenorthamericanunion.com/ProLinks.html
On the Bus With Willie: ‘Hell yeah there’s a reason to investigate 9/11′
Authorities would destroy evidence and cover-up truth only if it were concealing the real crime
Aaron Dykes
(Note: If the videos don't play via Bakersfield.com, go here: www.infowars.com/) RELATED: MORE EXCLUSIVE VIDEO - Political Renegades: Gov. Ventura and Willie Nelson challenge two-party stranglehold
IN MORE EXCLUSIVE VIDEO, Willie Nelson invites Alex and Jesse onto his world famous tour bus, where they discuss a number of topics including the family farm, the banker’s consolidation, and the 2008 election. But much of the conversation turns to the lingering questions about 9/11– still unanswered, in part, due to a government that refuses to answer and a public that is unwilling to question. Appropriately wearing a trucker’s hat that reads, ‘Follow no one,’ Nelson says that for himself, it was never a question after seeing the buildings collapse on 9/11. “It’s not a clear cut situation; never was to me,” the music icon and activist commented about 9/11. But, “Is there a reason to investigate?” he said. “Hell yeah.” “Those buildings were blown up internally,” he said, before humbly adding, “I’m not a smart guy, but I can see that.” PUBLIC DELUSION & PROFESSIONAL SILENCE But Nelson’s point is valid in spite of his obvious intelligence– it doesn’t take anything greater than common sense to see that the story doesn’t add up. On the other hand, that same analysis holds up (necessarily) to scientific scrutiny– so long as the scientists aren’t investigating on behalf of government agencies. The work of qualified professionals like Richard Gage, Steven Jones, Kevin Ryan, and many others who have investigated 9/11 from a technical point of view have been ignored by the media, and instead, are often run out of their various positions via intimidation.
In spite of publicly available research and widespread questions, much of the public simply can’t face the facts and refuses to accept the truth. Gov. Ventura doubted that they ever will. WAR WAS A MOTIVE Nelson says his theory is that “they did it so we could go to war.” After all, it’s not just 9/11 that has fooled the public. An estimated 30% of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11 attacks; a similar 30% believe WMDs were found in Iraq and millions are still waiting for the President to ‘hunt down bin Laden’ in Afghanistan. Willie said he’s ‘not worried’ about the ‘certain percentage’ of people ‘in their own worlds’ who lack the capacity to believe their government could do such things. After all, Willie agreed, from an authority as high as the President, there would be those in the public who would even ‘believe the moon was made of cheese.’ So why do they mislead and deceive the public? For Willie, it isn’t so complicated. “Why do they do everything? So we could go to war.” “We’re the biggest arms dealer in the world; we sell bullets to both sides. We start a war over there & a war over there, and we stir it up. You know, whoever we want to win, we give the best bullets. And that’s what we’ve been doing for a long time.” Additionally, the state of crisis combined with the state of war allows the government to violate civil liberties and threaten the freedoms of anyone bold enough to dissent. DESTROYING EVIDENCE SUPPRESSES THE TRUTH Yet, the public seems unwilling to recognize this, and the official truth may never emerge. “The truth about JFK still hasn’t come out,” Willie reminded. “I don’t know what happened, but we know a lot of investigations were stifled. But, like 9/11… we’ll never know for sure.” Gov. Ventura agreed, “The simple way they get to that is by removal of all evidence.” Ventura cited the fact that LBJ had Kennedy’s limo sent for clean-up and restoration before the homicide evidence could be taken or examined. “That limo shouldn’t have been touched until investigators went through it with a fine-toothed comb.” THE COVER-UP CONCEALS THE REAL CRIME “That’s what causes, for me, a light to go on,” Gov. Ventura said. “Because when they start doing a crime investigation the exact opposite of the way it’s supposed to be done, that tells you that there’s ulterior forces involved here.” Similarly, Ventura says, “with 9/11, the priority is with removal of everything– not investigating it.” Evidence should have been set aside for thorough investigation, he said. Willie said investigating “was what we all assumed they were doing.” Instead, Gov. Ventura points out, steel from the towers was destroyed, sold to China and even used to build a memorial ship. Now, Ventura asserts, with all the relevant evidence destroyed, “We are all valid investigators.” Thus, questions should always be allowed and encouraged. For many investigators, the cover-up itself often points to the real crime. So why do the authorities refuse to answer questions about 9/11? Perhaps the cover-up benefits them more than the truth. “Anytime you cover-up evidence or take evidence away, you have an agenda there. You’re trying to stop people from knowing what happened. And I really do believe that’s what happened.” Ventura agreed that this would prevent us from ever knowing officially what really happened. If the official story were actually true, Ventura suggested, the government would easily be able to ‘debunk’ conspiracy theories– because the truth would brush aside everything that had no merit. Instead, the government maintains its silence, and conspiracy theories continue to flourish.
If the videos don't play in this blog just go here:www.prisonplanet.com/political-renegades-gov-vent ura-and-willie-nelson-challenge-two-party-strangl ehold.html _________________________ Political Renegades: Gov. Ventura and Willie Nelson challenge two-party stranglehold
Ventura: Patriots must hold government’s ‘feet to the fire’ or else it goes bad Aaron Dykes IN EXCLUSIVE VIDEO, legendary music icon Willie Nelson meets up with former Governor Jesse Ventura and Alex Jones to discuss the implications of the 2008 Election, the effects of widespread economic downturn and lingering questions about 9/11.
Gov. Ventura hopes to challenge the ‘horse-race’ voting mentality that has made both parties unresponsive to the people. “If we break the trend of electing Democrats and Republicans, and start electing independents, we will get out of the problem we’re in,” Ventura told News 8 Austin, urging people to vote their ‘heart’ and ‘conscience’ outside The Backyard, where Willie Nelson performed at the venue’s final event.
Jesse Ventura and Alex Jones addressed the need to dissent against the status quo and reminded those watching online that the First Amendment is meant to protect even unpopular speech.The former Minnesota Governor said people cannot be afraid to criticize the government. He insisted that patriots must ‘hold government’s feet to the fire’– otherwise, bad government will result. Ventura was a political rarity, as an unexpected independent victor in Minnesota’s 1998 Gubernatorial race, a clear threat to the two-party dictatorship that dominates the political landscape. Willie Nelson lambasted the government’s corrupt bailout of Wall Street while the traditional family farm continues to erode away in the wake of economic downturn, allowing corporate farming to further dominate.
Last week, the ardent Farm Aid activist challenged Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke to bailout the family farm, instead. “I have written a letter as president of Farm Aid to whoever controls that money that we would like to have $1 billion dollars from that 700….$1 billion dollars is I think all we’ll need to turn the economy around if we start out taking care of our family farmers,” Nelson told The Alex Jones Show. Former Gov. Ventura, Author of ‘Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me’ also joined Alex in the car where he explained the problem with the fact that many government agencies simply refuse to discuss the official 9/11 story.
Ventura criticized government agencies for putting out reports and being unwilling to defend them, and simply refusing to answer any questions. “If they’re not hiding something– let me put it this way– they’re certainly not cooperative.” If government reports are truthful, Ventura challenges, “then why does the government behave in a manner that makes them look guilty of something and then allows conspiracy theorists the foothold to go with that.” Governments, Ventura says, simply issue their reports and take no questions from anyone. And that just can’t stand.
Unaccounted government will only lead to greater abuses, which in turn will demand greater resistance on the part of its people. Ventura and Nelson, veteran renegades of the 60s and 70s, say they’ve seen the history cycle through more than once already. They only hope people now awake to government abuses can stay awake long enough to make a difference this time around. Both Gov. Ventura and Willie Nelson have appeared on the Alex Jones Show to discuss their doubts about the official 9/11 story, particularly the apparently inconsistent manner in which the Twin Towers and WTC 7 collapsed after two planes struck the World Trade Center on 9/11. ________________________ Sarah Palin Supports New 9/11 Investigation
Alaska Governor gives unexpected answer during Ohio rally
Paul Joseph Watson John McCain’s presidential running mate Sarah Palin, much to the bewilderment of the 9/11 truth community, seemingly expressed support for a new investigation into the terrorist attacks during a rally in Ohio last week. Asked by We Are Change Ohio, “Do you support the family members and first responders who are calling for a new 9/11 investigation?,” Palin responded, “I do.” “I do because I think that helps us get to the point of never again, and if anything that we could do could still complete that reminder out there,” the Alaska Governor added. Palin was aware of the context because she then asked the cameraman if he had been affected by 9/11. Of course, one would have to be incredibly naive to think that Palin, at best a befuddled Republican poster child and at worst another establishment Neo-Con, would follow through on her support and back a new 9/11 investigation should John McCain snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and take the White House. And despite the fact that John McCain himself once gladly posed with 9/11 truth activists for photographs, the Arizona Senator penned a scathing foreword to Popular Mechanics’ (non-political, they assure us) hit piece book Debunking 9/11 Myths, in which he claimed that questioning the official 9/11 story is an insult to the victims, despite the fact that the victims and first responders are the ones calling for a new investigation. For most people, Palin’s expression of support for a new investigation seems to be borne out of a desperate attempt to say anything to get votes as McCain slips further behind Obama in the polls on a daily basis with the election just five days away. Other politicians who have been confronted on 9/11 by chapters of We Are Change have either ignored the question altogether, or in the case of Bill Clinton, gone on the offensive and verbally scorned 9/11 truth activists.
Obamaton:
The first four videos are Obamaton cult videos....the last two videos are examples of Idiot McCain supporters. Obama & McCain supporters are completely propagandized & brainwashed.
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My choice is Chuck Baldwin.....If not Baldwin, my second choice would be Cynthia McKinney.
here is the list of presidential candidates. Link: www.politics1.com/p2008.htm
Chuck Baldwin on youtube: www.youtube.com/results
Cynthia McKinney on Youtube: www.youtube.com/results
Do your own research.....use Google. If you love your country, don't vote for McCain Or Obama. Ron Paul has always been my first choice but he is asking his supporters to vote third party.
(The U.S. Presidential campaign has taken a new turn with the former candidate Ron Paul launching a crusade against both John McCain and Barack Obama. At a news conference, Paul joined three third-party candidates in presenting a united front to shift attention away from the front runners.)
_____________________ Senator Predicts “Revolution” If Banks Don’t Lend
Dodd highlights rising public anger at credit crunch, bailout
Senator Christopher Dodd has shockingly predicted that public anger at banks’ refusal to disperse credit could lead to a “revolution,” while another analyst says government intervention could mean banks are cut out of the loop entirely. “If it turns out that they are hoarding, you’ll have a revolution on your hands. People will be so livid and furious that their tax money is going to line their pockets instead of doing the right thing. There will be hell to pay,” Dodd told the New York Times this weekend. Meanwhile, Chief Investment Strategist Sean Corrigan from Diapason Commodities Management told CNBC this morning that banks may have to be “cut out of the loop” if the freeze in credit markets continues, forcing governments to act as the lender of last resort. Corrigan said that banking was, “A business which is desperately in need of a cull in the world but nobody wants a bank to go down for fear that they bring all banks down, so we’ve locked ourselves into this position.” Saying that the big mistake by central banks was the move not to save banking, but to save individual banks, Corrigan stated, “Ultimately yes, if the banks don’t restart, the authorities will have to start acting as the monetizers of last resort, they’ll have to start dispensing commercial credit between non-financial institutions and cut banking out of the loop if necessary.” As the George Washington Blog documents, the banks have openly stated that they will keep hoarding cash no matter how much money the feds give them. ____________________ Paul Joseph Watson
This is a tribute to the patriot weapon of choice for our day, the AR15 Rifle. ______________________________
Our great Country has been hijacked by the globalist......... United States Code Title 4 Chapter 1 — The Flag. Section 8a: The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property. | |||||||
As stated in a famous quote from Henry David Thoreau, the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation, marked by a state of resignation which is confirmed desperation. This phenomenon, which is so antithetical to the joyful natural instincts of newborns, has not come about by accident, but rather through the careful crafting of a cold-blooded global oligarchy. An oligarchy whose insidiousness calls to mind an ancient story in which a perfect murder is committed by Brak the ice man, who kills a woman with an icicle dagger: both he and his weapon melt away in the next day’s sun, leaving nothing behind as a basis for prosecuting the crime.
For in addition to brute force and the power to hurt, the global elite uses another form of power that is as stealth like and chilling as Brak’s perfect crime: sophisticated techniques for psychological control stemming in large part from the ability to mold the perceptions and behavior of the populace through mental and emotional manipulation of the very reality it experiences. As observed by Aldous Huxley in 1962 in explaining his novel Brave New World, these are methods of control that are "probably a good deal more efficient" than control "exercised wholly by terrorism and violent attacks upon the mind-body of individuals."1
Although it would take volumes to do justice to deconstructing the crimes against the human spirit perpetrated by the globalists, I will here attempt to expose several of their common themes: normalizing the abnormal, learned helplessness, and the disorientation of the betwixt and between syndrome. In my view, if we explore the ways these states of mind disempower us, they will be stripped of their disabling mystique and reveal the very ways they can be neutralized. This truth is stated well by Jungian Analyst and wise woman Clarissa Pinkola Estés in discussing the core agenda of terrorists, that of casting a net of mental poison over their victims by trying to deprive them of hope - by trying to limit their living life as a completely free person focused on goodness, love, peace, and happiness:
"How strongly that poisonous net holds when one is unaware of what it is made of, and how easily it falls apart when one consciously begins to contradict its malicious urgings."2
Normalizing the Abnormal
Dr. Estés observes that the disorder of normalizing the abnormal is rampant across cultures. When there are formidable punishments for breaking silence, for pointing out wrongs, for demanding change, we cut away our rightful rage and become used to not being able to intervene in shocking events. Despair, fatigue and resignation follow.3
Normalization of the abnormal has been achieved in large part through the power elite’s control of the news media and entertainment. This dominance has permitted not only deciding the "information" the public is allowed to receive, but also the molding of public opinion and behavior. One example is sponsorship of the TV show 24, carefully designed to desensitize the viewers to the use of torture. Another is the use of TV commercials showing stars cheerfully endorsing invasive personal identification technology, as part of a carefully designed program for grooming us to accept Big Brother surveillance and control, including the eventual implantation of microchips under our skin.
The power elite goes to any lengths to keep the public misled, distracted, fearful, and ultimately imprisoned in a matrix of disinformation, rampant consumerism and the lowest common denominators of human nature, including raw violence and mindless sexuality. As Huxley observed in 1962, the controlling oligarchy has long been at work developing scientific methods of control to "induce people to love their servitude" - to make them "enjoy a state of affairs which by any decent standard they ought not to enjoy."4 This dystopic scenario was echoed by Bertrand Russell, who predicted that as a result of the gradual and ruthless use of technological advances, "a revolt of the plebs would be as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton."5
I would contend that the disorder of normalizing the abnormal consists in large measure of reshaping our very construct of human nature in terms of its basest parameters, especially in the areas of acquisitiveness, violence, and sexuality. Massive effort has gone into studying and modifying human behavior to serve the global elite’s greed for money and power. The modern consumer is not reflective of genuine human nature, but rather a phenomenon created in great part by the psychoanalytic studies, experiments and recommendations of the brilliant capitalist asset Edward Bernays. The widespread aberration of a dumbed down populace, unaware and largely uncaring regarding its destiny, has taken years of careful elitist effort to orchestrate. And the disgusting extremes of human sexual behaviors that are fast approaching the excesses of the infamous last days of the Roman Empire are similarly a product of diligently researched scientific techniques of psychological and social control.
It is terrifying but essential to come into awareness that it is in great part the knowledge of human nature gained through the application of torture techniques by intelligence agencies that has infused the broader mind control strategies of the ruling class. More generally, its control techniques have evolved in large measure from "black" psychological operations (psyops) that are carefully compartmentalized and hidden from our bone fide representatives in all three branches of government. Many of the current mind control techniques have been derived from barbaric projects secretly conducted by governments, private laboratories and universities. In his 2000 book titled The Mind Controllers, Dr. Armen Victorian used the Freedom of Information Act to document experiments by the CIA and other agencies exploring new forms of "non-lethal" weapons which exploited hospital patients, pregnant women, school children, prisoners and military veterans without their consent. Other extremely dangerous experiments, including nuclear radiation experiments, have been conducted on an unsuspecting public at large, and even on our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.6
Learned Helplessness
The phenomenon of normalizing the abnormal was given experimental validation in the 1970s through controlled studies with groups of dogs. The experiments revealed a great deal about the innate flight or fight reactions to danger and indicated that self-protective instincts can be overriden by inducing "learned helplessness." In one experiment the bottoms of cages were wired to produce a shock on one side only, resulting in the expected avoidance behaviors; then the entire floors of the cages were wired to give random shocks, resulting in confusion, then panic, and then just lying down in resignation, taking the shocks as they came and no longer trying to avoid or outsmart them. Next the cage doors were opened, but the dogs did not move to escape as expected, leading to the hypothesis that they had adapted to or "normalized" their pain and were consequently exhibiting symptoms similar to chronic clinical depression.7
Learned helplessness manifests in everyday situations or environments in which people perceive, rightly or wrongly, that they have no control over what happens to them, e.g., war, famine, or detention (those who refused to care or fend for themselves in the Nazi concentration camps were called Muselmänner). When the instincts for self-determination are injured, as observed by Dr. Estés, humans will ‘normalize’ assault after assault, acts of injustice and destruction toward themselves, their offspring, their loved ones, their land, and even their moral and spiritual values.8
The electroshock of the dogs in the learned helplessness experiments has, as Naomi Klein documents, been copied on a societal level by the financial oligarchy. The capitalist elite shocks a nation with an event like 9/11, and in the ensuing stage of confusion and panic rushes in with salvation in the form of protective father figures who provide a narrative that offers a perspective on the shocking events that allows the profoundly disoriented victims to make sense of the trauma.9 Hence the extraordinary power of the mind control matrix known as the War on Terror.
But what is learned can be unlearned; what has been forgotten can be relearned. Especially in the case of our inherent instincts of preservation, we can engage in forensic analysis with a view to restoring the natural skills that give us power:
"[The] normalizing of the shocking and abusive is refused by repairing injured instinct….To re-learn the deep…instincts, it is vital to see how they were decommissioned to begin with….[We compose] a map of the woods in which we live, and where the predators live, and what their modus operandi is….[Then] if our wild nature has been injured by something, we refuse to lie down to die. We refuse to normalize this harm. We call up our instincts and do what we have to do."10
Klein demonstrates a similar optimism: "Once the mechanics of the shock doctrine are deeply and collectively understood, whole communities become harder to take by surprise, more difficult to confuse-shock resistant."11
The Betwixt and Between Syndrome
The relentless march toward tyranny in the United States and other nations with a heritage of freedom, underscored by the blatant criminality of the recent bailout package implemented against the political will and interest of the populace, seems to portend a terrifying future for humanity. It leaves us in a no man’s land between the familiarity of our previous reality and the uncharted dangers lying ahead.
This loss of bearings should be seen as a form of psychological control by the globalists over the populace for two reasons. First, it is a situation they have engineered, and engineered in such a way as to serve their self-interest. Second, our fear of a destiny they have designed for us keeps us from exercising our full potential of actively opposing its unfolding. At a time of the implementation of what can only be perceived as their endgame, we find ourselves floundering and cut off from our inner fire.
Humans have an instinctive fear of the unknown, which is exacerbated if trends indicate an unknown that is negative rather than positive. In the present case the unknown seems to be characterized by the probability of enormous global destabilization, with massive suffering in store for the populace. Although the world as we have known it is far from acceptable, the horizon appears quite possibly unbearable–hence the phrase "looking into the abyss" used recently by a number of analysts.
This makes the betwixt and between predicament more difficult to navigate than it would be in less extreme situations, such as adolescence as a normal and predictable transition from childhood to maturity. Another exacerbation is the endless onslaught of crises that the oligarchy orchestrates in order to keep us in a state of continual disorientation, seemingly unable to process one trauma before the next one hits.
But as in the case of normalizing the abnormal and learned helplessness, the solution lies in keen understanding of the problem. Once we dissect the betwixt and between predicament, a predicament that all of us have experienced and navigated in our personal lives but may well not have recognized and named as such, our fear will lose its hold and we can reclaim our power.
The betwixt and between predicament occurs whenever we are forced to revise our previous sense of self and reality, and are required to remain in a zone of unfamiliarity, disorientation and loss of control until a new set of truths emerges and is integrated. All of us have faced this predicament again and again in our lives, e.g., during the teen years, after a major loss, and in our daily lives when our personal growth process entails the death of old aspects of the self and the birth of new ones. Even transitions that one welcomes gladly, such as marriage, a better job, or moving, are in fact highly stressful because of their magnitude.
Anthropological insights on initiations and rites of passage have much to teach us regarding the betwixt and between phenomenon. Rites of transition are marked by distinct (although often overlapping) stages:
"Separation: a detachment or departure from a previous state, whose familiarity provided a sense of security;
Marginality / Ambiguity: entering the margin between the former and the new state of being, not quite here but not quite there, having lost the security of familiar boundaries and facing disorientation; * Consummation: a culmination in which one integrates a new state of being and sense of self." 12
In a classic essay on the betwixt and between predicament, Victor Turner observes that the transition from separation to ambiguity is marked by temporary invisibility: one cannot be classified either in the old or the new way and is therefore structurally invisible.13 This goes a long way in explaining the fear that marks major transitions and initiations.
The good news is that, as with the process of grieving, there is a well-charted process by which we can move from the frightening state of ambiguity and achieve a new equilibrium: a new equilibrium that is in fact healthier and more resilient because it is based on full awareness of the truth of things. It is less painful to accept the need for change than to stay in denial. Indeed, as the renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell stresses, there is great dignity in answering the call to heroism, a call that is now sounding to all of humanity.
The good news goes further: Turner and others in fact see potential gifts in the betwixt and between ambiguity that is so emotionally difficult. The inability to classify oneself, while one is in the stage of uncertainty and not-knowing, is also freedom to explore new ways of constructing reality and identity. The stage of ambiguity can become one of enormous creativity and fertility as we move to a new reality that we ourselves construct. It is vital to keep this awareness as we face and oppose the unfolding of the financial elite’s endgame of cementing its global control through the current economic crises and so-called solutions it has itself engineered. As an advancing power nears its goal of full spectrum dominance, its crimes break the surface for all to witness, as evidenced by the audacity of the corporatocracy in forcing the passage of the bailout package and in its brazenly self-serving implementation.
Our Republic was not always ignorant and apathetic in the face of such criminality. In reaction to an offer in 1905 of a $100,000 donation by John D. Rockefeller for the missionary work of the U.S. Congregationalist Church, its most eminent leader asked, "Is this clean money? Can any man, can any institution, knowing its origins, touch it without being defiled?" The Reverend Washington Gladdington, echoing the prevalent outlook of the era, berated the accumulation of wealth on every side "by methods as heartless, as cynically iniquitous as any that were employed by the Roman plunderers or robber barons of the Dark Ages. In the cool brutality with which properties are wrecked, securities destroyed, and people by the hundreds robbed of their little, all to build up the fortunes of the multi-millionaires, we have an appalling revelation of the kind of monster a human being may become."14
No longer can the oligarchs use the insidiousness of the iceman Brak to further their agenda. And longer do we need to allow them to disempower us through technocratic techniques of psychological control. The efficacy of these techniques has stemmed in great measure from our internalization of oppression, a process we can work to reverse once we understand it.
The technocrats would have us believe we are helpless to join battle. We are not. I support this optimistic claim with a comment on Part I of my deconstruction of the power of the global elite, which serves as a powerful ending to end Part ll:
"I for one have been subjected to much of this torture as being part of a marginalized class of society. The criminal global elites like to practice their abuse experiments on the less fortunate that cannot defend themselves and offer any resistance, but as the author so rightly observed, the human spirit is indominitable and will not go quietly into the night. Excellent job in exposing these psychological crimes for what they are. When people start realizing they were once human beings and hate what the behavioural criminals are doing, we can stop this learned helplessness and say with Patrick Henry, ‘Give me Liberty or give me death.’ "15
Endnotes
1. http://www.lib.berkeley.edu...
2. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, "An Open letter: Healing from Terrorism Sickness," September 15, 2001, p.3. www.mavenproductions.com/estes
3. Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves, Ballantine Books, New York, 1992, p. 244.
4. http://www.lib.berkeley.edu...
5. Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1953, pp. 49-50
6. Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, passim.; Dr. Armen Victorian, The Mind Controllers, Lewis International, Inc., Miami, 2000; Colin A. Ross, The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists, Manitou Communications,
Inc., Richardson, TX, 2006.
This phenomenon brings to mind another form of disempowerment that afflicts freedom fighters and others who see all too clearly the abnormal and grotesque nature of the oligarchy’s evil: the evil is so horrific to those with an open eye that they recoil utterly. There is a powerful Latin phrase for phenomena (such as incest) that are so far outside the archetypal realm of acceptability that they fall under a special category: "contra naturum." The power elite’s audacity is indeed opposed to the very laws of nature. Rather than allowing our disbelief and horror to disable us, including our horror over dehumanization efforts that attempt to degrade the majesty of the human species, we must find the outrage needed to confront and eradicate it as an evil that is so aberrational as to be itself sub-human.
7. Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves, p. 244.
8. Ibid., p. 246.
9. Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, p. 458; Keith Olbermann interview with Naomi Klein: "Iraq Is the Classic Example of The Shock Doctrine" [VIDEO] December 2, 2007 http://www.alternet.org/blo... 10. &nbs p;Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves, p. 252-53.
11. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, p. 459.
12. Victor Turner, in Stanislov Grof, ed., Spiritual Emergency, Jeremy P. Tarcher, New York, 1989.
13. Ibid.
14. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty, Holt, Reinhart and Winston, New York, 1976, p. 3.
15. See Keepers of the Trust community on the author’s website: http://freefalltofascism.ho...
By: Jim_Willie_CB
www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article6942.html
The US Dollar rally in the last several weeks has been remarkable. At closer examination, it highly resembles a spurt prior to death. Imagine an old man who just had a heart attack, lost feeling in certain body parts, his mind not working right, plenty of nonsense gibberish coming from his mouth, and now he is dancing hard on some last gasps. The vast liquidation movement is akin to the old man going through an embalming process while dancing atop the tables at the funeral parlor, as bidding proceeds for his cadaver.
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Are Americans last to realize the financial structure destruction means the US Economy does not enter a recession, but rather a bizarre unprecedented disintegration? It seems so. The liquidation of speculative positions, the massive de-leveraging, the payout's of defaulted bonds, these events are the opposite of developments toward revival or resuscitation, like business investment!! Liquidation is the exact opposite of investment, and precedes job cuts, not job creation.
The following survey of important issues is covered in depth in the October Hat Trick Letter. This month, an additional Crisis Coverage report was included, since too much has been happening, most of it confusing. Plenty of stories are occurring behind the stories, many covered. Here is a quick survey touching the surface on issues discussed and analyzed more in depth for subscribers.
What is pushing the US Dollar up cannot be construed as anything remotely resembling healthy factors. In no way whatsoever does it resemble investment. It is more like paid off death contracts, paid off death investments, paid off transfers from toxic US bonds into what are falsely regarded as safer US bonds with a guarantee from a crippled USGovt. Foreign financial entities are liquidating on massive scale. They need a tremendous amount of US Dollars in order to complete transactions. Also, a tremendous amount of US Dollars are needed for CDSwap payout's as defaulted bonds are resolved. Almost all CDSwap and other credit derivatives are paid out in US Dollars The Lehman Brothers payout was full of lies, again. The Lehman Brothers total volume of corporate bonds was $160 billion, but $400 billion existed in total CDS volume tied to them! It is no surprise that the Dow and S&P500 stock indexes fell hard (by almost 400 points on Dow) and on the Lehman resolution day. And market mavens boasted of no impact on the Lehman funeral date!
The DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corp) reported only a net $5.2 billion payout on the Lehman Brothers failure CDSwap resolution. The ‘Dis-Trust Clearing Corp' might want to check credit derivative experts who claim between $220 billion and $270 billion in that total after netting. By the way, the DTCC is the official banking entity that oversees all stock clearing overnight, including all the naked shorting. The de-leveraging process has left the central bankers empty handed, exposed as having empty financial cupboards. Thus the need for massive central bank swaps from the US Fed, which has perversely farmed out its function to foreigners. In fact, the foreign central banks might be in possession of more US$ inventory items than the US Fed So the US central bank has asked foreign central banks to do its job, and to manage the world reserve currency? This amidst a US$ rally!?!
The Credit Default Swaps are capable of burning Hiroshima holes all over the US financial system, resulting in US Economic implosion from eliminated bank and financial system structures almost entirely. The process has only begun, but in darkness. The other purpose for big bailouts was to prevent CDSwap explosions, risking a string of bombs to go off. The key aspect of CDSwap contracts is their hidden nature, with fuses intersecting in the dark.
When the market mavens talk about the de-leverage process, they refer to speculative investments being liquidated. Oftentimes, they do not include in the story how Wall Street firms, desperate to stave off bankruptcy, are targeting viciously their own clients. The big accounts lie in hedge funds, where the private wealthy are being decimated. Credit is being pulled. Margin calls are being delivered. Margin ratios are being raised. Those funds whose positions are aligned with the predators on Wall Street continue in their investment portfolios. Those funds in opposition are attacked with artillery, carpet bombs, and early morning raids. The US
Dollar is rallying amidst this type of sinister liquidation.
The result has been numerous spread trades anchored by the USTreasury Bond are forced into sale. That means a USTBond buyback occurs from the short cover on the trade. Whether a spread on mortgage bonds, corporate bonds, emerging market bonds, or crude oil, or gold, the trade is liquidated, and a USTBond is bought back. NO TANGIBLE END DEMAND, ONLY USTREASRY BOND SHORT COVERS. This is the basis for a US$ rally?
How many times have we seen the US stock market go down, non-government bond yields rise, the US Dollar rise, and the USTBond yields fall? That has been the norm in the last few weeks. These are death signals, not investment signals. The US Economy cannot afford liquidation and constricted credit, a well-known fact, seemingly forgotten today. These signals come amidst falling confidence, more bank distress measures, more job loss, more home foreclosures, and lately, trouble with letters of credit at port facilities.
Financial markets, including the US Dollar, have yet to factor in the deep US Economic recession.
The US Dollar rally flies in the face of deteriorating fundamentals. See job cut announcements at Caterpillar, Merrill Lynch, General Motors, Chrysler, several Wall Street firms including Goldman Sachs today. Weekly jobless claims at close to half a million per week, equal to peak during the unrecognized 2001 recession. See the UMichigan consumer sentiment, Philly Fed index, Empire Fed index, leading economic indicators, durable goods orders, on and on. Retail sales, the backbone of the backwards US Economy, are plummeting. That is, the plummet is before inflation price adjustments. Car sales are plummeting also.
Exports are to be worse from the higher US$ exchange rate on the table, combined with slower foreign economies. The improved export trade has been a big boast from the lunatics running the asylum. The US Economy is accelerating in its decline, certain to produce a recession and huge USGovt deficits. That deficit is likely to at least double and possible quadruple next year. USTreasury Bond issuance cannot conceivably finance all, or at least half, of the commitments. The printing press will do the rest, which will cut down the US$ valuation. The US Dollar decline lies ahead, when the distortions slow or come to an end. Gold will soar on the other side of this liquidation.
An extreme backlash attack is coming against the US Dollar Rising import prices in foreign economies have already caused alarm. Foreigners will soon attack the US$ in a matter of time, using heavy US$-based reserves. Their banking sectors are in disarray, primarily because they are intimately tied to the US$ and USTBonds. The process has begun with Brazil and Mexico in Latin America, to use their strong reserves and sell into this queer US$ strength. That is what reserves are for. The process will spread to other nations.
The gap between the physical gold market and paper gold market is widening. An example bears this out. In Toronto this week, a major off-market gold transaction took place. The price paid was $1075 per ounce on the physical transaction. Its volume was in the multi-million$. There was no US involvement in the transaction, and the settlement was in euros. Enormous repositioning is ongoing by the groups that will participate in the new, partially gold-backed currency. My take is this movement is from a large financial entity with global activity, and ties to central banks. It might be tied to the upcoming split in the euro, into a Nordic Euro and trashed Latin Euro. The Nordic version might contain a gold component. This and other transactions are taking place with European settlement. They are being satisfied in the alternative market, far from the distortions of COMEX. This was a physical transaction with the real metal being moved. Big shifts occur behind the scenes. A couple of months ago, 400 metric tonnes were moved into storage with the Royal Canadian Mint by a sovereign entity.
The more massive the paper manipulation, the more violent the coming correction. The asylum managers are losing control of their paper-physical arbitrage. Watch the gold lease rates, and silver lease rates, which have each more than tripled in the last two months. Lease rates precede price movement. Bullion bankers, including central banks, are reluctant to lease their physical supply. This time is no different, an event to come after the COMEX criminality is swept aside, or simply overwhelmed in return. One well-informed source, with over two decades of gold market experience, actually expects arrests to take place among COMEX officials before long.
John Embry of Sprott Asset Mgmt has raised the possibility of a December gold futures contract default. He is not predicting it, or claiming it as certain, but rather mentions how talk centers on the December gold contract as having extreme stress for actual delivery. Pressure is building. The December contract not only is end of quarter, but end of year. He suggests a possible default. He said, “there is probably going to be such an event to change perceptions.” He cited a possible force majeure that could act as a “seminal event that defines the whole situation.” He explained that the physical gold price would then dictate the paper gold price, a return to normalcy, and with a gigantic move up in the gold price. Right now the paper gold market is overwhelming the physical side, but the physical side is constricted on supply. He explained that hedge funds are being unwound on a massive scale, slaughtered by margin calls. The long side must call for delivery on many contracts. He also expects there will be many questions on the Exchange Traded Funds soon as well, although those are surely not as important as the COMEX contract defaults. Watch and listen to his interview on the Canadian Business News Network (CLICK HERE ), and be sure to move to the 10 to 11 minute mark.
Last weekend in Brussels, G8 Finance Ministers met. Among other things, they discussed a reform to the global banking structures. For the many challenged on geography, that city is in Belgium, headquarters for many European Union functions, in Western Europe. Creditors were not present, which means the finance ministers were talking to themselves. Credit masters were not invited. The nations whose banking systems are in the process of implosion are essentially attempting to revise the global currency system. Those in attendance constitute the losers! However, the Arabs and Chinese were not present. This seems entirely backwards. The bankrupt nations do not dictate to the creditors terms of a revised agreement.
Imagine a large business saying the following. “We are bankrupt. We want a meeting. We are going to dictate to you bankers anyway. We are broke. Our economies are shattered. Our banking systems are in ruins. But we going to tell you how we are to restructure our debt and rework a new system. We realize our debts to you are bigger than we can ever repay. We realize we cannot continue in commerce without your continued extended credit. But we will force upon you a new system. It does not matter what your opinion is. You do not have a seat on this elite committee, sorry!” THIS FLOW IS NOT FROM THE WORLD OF REALITY!
No! Bankruptcy receivership is next, where creditors will be left with few options. They will be compelled to run management committees, and dissolve many functions of government. Creditors will probably await the G8 initiative, then summarily reject it. They will next propose their own new global financial structure. The teenager's credit card is about to be taken away, when the irresponsible kid proposes a new repayment system, new promises, new chores done even. The kid has burned down half the neighbourhood, yet thinks he can call the shots! Sadly, the parents will probably ground him and force a tutor to direct his studies, and force a strict drill sergeant to direct his work activities. His friends will not be permitted to form new teams that include him. A ‘Post-US World' is being planned, and Americans are the last to know. Entire new barter systems between a key pair of nations is about to be launched. Regional bond and commodity organizations are being formed, with exclusion of the US. The US press reports nothing on these important developments.
Foreign creditors will form new committees, which will be recognized in time as the Receivership Committee. Foreigners are watching in horror. Decisions have already been made, with Americans the last to know. In order to arrest the cancer they so clearly see, they are ready to force a complete upheaval. The US Dollar will lose its global currency status, a thoroughly abused privilege. The above lack of disclosure only reinforces their motive to take action. They will move when they must, upon a system failure, or when they are challenged, or when flimsy attempts by debtors are made to dictate reform.
Without any changes forthcoming soon, the foreign banking systems and economies face huge threats to failure. To friends, family, and contacts, my approach has been to attempt to explain the underlying forces behind revolutionary financial change. Foreigners must cut off a cancerous body part, the one attached to the United States. Foreigners must cut off flow from a toxic systemic organ, the one attached to the United States. CUT IT OFF OR RISK DEATH. They must disconnect of US Dollar from the global currency system attached intimately to their own financial and economic systems. They must to survive.
Arabs clearly lust to control and manage a global gold trading center. It will be in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The new Gulf dinar currency will pave the road to that center. The Gulf Coop Council is biding time, cutting time delay deals, warding off pressure by the USGovt, appeasing with weapons contracts from the USMilitary, and is working behind the scenes to create a new dinar currency. The new Gulf dinar is likely to be primarily gold in its backing. So, foreign nations will soon be forced to purchase the dinar for all or most of crude oil payments. This forces the purchase of gold in order to purchase crude oil. The demand for gold will thus fortify the global banking system, by means of commodity settlements. Many details are unknown, but the basic structure has been slowly come to light. A new motive flashes red in front of Arabs to institute some changes FAST. The crude oil price is down, cut in half from July. Their revenues are sharply reduced. Russia figures into the complex deal to launch the dinar. The Saudis and small sheikdoms need security protection. The next chapter will involve protection amidst a gold-backed currency, not a military-backed currency, in Saudi eyes.
The other side to the Arab dilemma is that the USTreasury Bond demand is quickly eroding from Petrodollar recycle on trade surplus. The USGovt finds itself as relying far too much on foreign central banks for demand of USTBonds, relying far too much soon on the printing press. The USTBond demand is missing the oil surplus in recycle. Their reduced and unstable oil revenue motivates the Arabs to install a new payment system, based upon an end to the ugly defacto Petrodollar standard. It shamefully is the basis of what my analysis has called a Protection Racket.
The incredible fact evident in the data is that until mid-September, the US Federal Reserve has drained liquidity from the US private banking system in order to offset its colossal bond swap bailouts for major Wall Street and New York money center banks. Their objective was to avoid undue US$ money supply growth. THEY WERE TARGETING GOLD. They essentially drained the lifeblood from the US Economy on Main Street in order to subsidize fraud sanctioned and approved on Wall Street. Only since mid-September has the US Fed been monetizing USTBond debt issuance. They are running scared, printing with abandon. The gold price is falling as the US Dollar printing press is rapidly heating up, no longer offset by bank system drains. Details are in the Hat Trick Letter report.
Can you believe what is happening before a Congressional banking committee? Greenspan is being grilled, as his past errors are vividly pointed out. His past memos are being read back to him. His wrong premises are being questioned as having being totally discredited. His opposition to credit derivative disclosure is being challenged. His opposition to Fannie Mae reform is being challenged. He has been brought to task for his steadfast opposition for reform in the past during his tenure as US Fed Chairman. He is being interrupted by lowly Congressional reps. His time to speak is being cut, in defense of others to be grilled. HE IS BEING SHOWN THE DISRESPECT DESERVED OF ANY FAILED PUBLIC OFFICIAL. Maybe they will demand to know who paid his second paycheck from Switzerland, and what his agenda was! Not likely! My view is that Greenspan was a primary key person used to take down the US banking system, to pave the way for a bigger agenda. These are intelligent people who knew what they were doing, who were the cheerleaders, even the Mythology High Priest.
Greenspan admitted a grand flaw in his free market ideology. He admitted being shocked that financial markets did not self-regulate. Hey Alan! They never self-regulate amidst a Fascist Business Model, since regulators and law enforcement is compromised as much as humanly or institutionally possible! He admitted a failure in the global financial market structure as he perceived it, a stunning admission. He acknowledged the US Economy is faltering badly. He sees the rise in job layoffs and unemployment. He sees the retrenchment in consumer spending. He sees the price declines in housing without abatement. He forecasted a worsening recession.
His biggest admission is this. He admits to a flaw in the structural model perceived in the critically function for global banking. Wow! THAT IS A BIG ADMISSION, NOT PROPERLY PERCEIVING THE GLOBAL BANK STRUCTURE. He admits to how his risk pricing model did not take into account periods of financial stress. Hey Alan! Is that not what they are designed for? He used to boast for a full decade how offloaded risk via credit derivatives was a sign of sophistication, which enabled economic expansion. Instead, my view is that risk offload devices contributed toward an expansion atop a bubble, which when burst, killed the entire US banking system and then the US Economy He used to boast that credit derivatives shared the risk, but in fact it resulted in destruction on a widespread systemic basis. Recall the many claims made by Bernanke, that the subprime mortgage bond bust would be contained. The former Princeton Professor is not a good student of banking and economics! Unlike me, he is greatly encumbered by the limitations of economics credentials! Mathematics and statistics are pure science and its application as artistry.
Almost all US-based bailouts to date are to pay for dead financial firms. Their shareholders and bond holders and asset base have been repaired but not restored. To think this benefits the loan process is folly. It facilitates retirement to the Caribbean for corrupt bank executives. The flow of federal funds will not find its way to the people, or at least only pennies per dollar will. The ‘Top-down Approach' is destined to fail because the corruption, bond fraud, accounting fraud, financial instrument shell game, and other assorted illicit procedures are the cause of the problem, and all lie at the top of the structure intended to trickle down!
To expect benefits downstream is lunacy. In fact, the devices to assist and subsidize the criminal behaviour at the top are vastly expanding with multiple branches. No less than five special purpose vehicles created by JPMorgan Chase were announced on Wednesday. The number of US Fed lending facilities, all to big banks, none to people on Main Street, has exploded to such an extent that one needs a sports book guide to comprehend all the acronyms. David Rosenberg of Merrill Lynch even coined the YAP, yet another program. Proliferation might be what the architects of the Financial Coup d'Etat intended. Confusion is the best friend of coup architects, just like truth is the first victim of war.
The people receive $1 for every $500 given to Wall Street elite in fraud redemption. The rank & file population entered a ‘Revolving Door' of loan repayments that often do not reduce the loan balance, assured to end in foreclosure within a year or so. The same nonsense of ‘Trickle Down' was prevailed when it has no past precedent of succeeding.
The lack of disclosure is a tragedy. Congress demands no better disclosure, and receives none. The Lehman Brothers resolution has been conducted in total darkness. Evidence coming my way indicates that JPMorgan is using the dead Lehman carcass as a vast private arsenal to attack hedge funds. Some such funds have most of their assets frozen, while their positions are attacked. What is happening is criminal, a climax of this administration, which has been taken over by Wall Street. A complaint has been made that Treasury Dept documents look like redacted CIA documents, hardly what is needed to instill confidence. One official decree after another undermines investor confidence, the last being short rule restrictions on financial stocks, with an exemption given to Goldman Sachs. This is a selective bailout of Wall Street, a process run by Wall Street, permitting financial crimes worthy of 1000-page indictments.
Big disruptive events are occurring in the distribution system. Letters of credit are routinely being refused by export nations who distrust US sources. A fall of 10% to 20% in shipping traffic to western US ports has been reported. Ships are empty at Asian ports, some even loaded but interrupted on their voyage to US ports and European ports. Many details are given in the October Hat Trick Letter reports. Even manufacturers of shipping vessels are being severely affected, as credit has interrupted construction projects. Indian suppliers are often demanding 100% upfront on costs to east coast retailers, again showing the distrust. Almost total attention has been given to banks and credit markets and stock markets. The US Economy is moving from recession toward something different from depression. The current interruption could actually be more like disintegration. Short-term credit is soon to interfere greatly with truckers and railways in distribution channels on the domestic side, much like letters of credit are wrecking havoc on the overseas shipper side.
The next big shoe to drop is credit cards. Bank of America has announced plans, not yet fully implemented, to cut back on credit cards to lower FICO scorers. The lower 60%-ile of credit score recipients will find themselves without credit cards at all. One friend told me that he used to own 10 credit cards. Recently, all but four were simply discontinued, but a few were not used. Other friends said most of their credit limits were slashed. Changes are coming. Then the next big shoe to drop will be commercial mortgage default. No reprieve, rest, or respite for US bankers. Changes are coming. It will force defaults in most every conceivable financial corner.
The system is breaking down. Just when the heart attack signals are actually improving, although only slightly, the US Economy is falling off a cliff, as unprecedented decay is occurring. Some improvement has been seen with the short-term LIBOR rate, the money market funding, TED spreads, and mortgage bond spreads. But bankers and financial subsidiaries are in focus for dishonour.
The following message came yesterday to my desk. It pertains to General Electric. It involved dishonoured Letters of Credit (L/C). The US banks not only distrust each other, they are engaging in criminal activity, like contract fraud. If big enough, or connected well enough to the power center, it is permitted. Again, no solutions, only proliferation of chaos.
“Try this one on. One of our clients did a bond early last year (underwritten by RBC/Dain Rauscher) backed up by a General Electric Letter of Credit. There is a tag end of $1 million. The deal was the sale and lease back of 13 bank branches. One remains. The tenant is a regional bank. RBC cannot remarket the bond now because the market is still frozen. So the client, per the documents, called on the L/C for performance (as allowed in the L/C, which extends to 2021). GE has reneged on the L/C and will not pay unless the two principals come up with $1M in cash. The client has said no way, the L/C has no such provision. GE has said, too bad, if you don't like it, talk to our attorney. We're not paying.” Stories like this are probably surfacing all over the North American landscape. US banks are defending themselves by dishonouring contracts.
========================Jim Willie CB is a statistical analyst in marketing research and retail forecasting. He holds a PhD in Statistics. His career has stretched over 25 years. He aspires to thrive in the financial editor world, unencumbered by the limitations of economic credentials. Visit his free website to find articles from topflight authors at www.GoldenJackass.com . For personal questions about subscriptions, contact him at JimWillieCB@aol.com
Peaceful Solution, Peace Revolution, Take Back America event to be streamed live online at PrisonPlanet.com and Infowars.com
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Willie Nelson, Jesse Ventura, Alex Jones and Jimmie Vaughan will all appear live at the Backyard Live Oak Amphitheater this Sunday 26th for the Peaceful Solution, Peace Revolution, Take Back America event, which will be streamed live on the Internet for free.
As well as a fantastic helping of live music from Willie Nelson and others, Nelson, Jones and Ventura will each give a speech and conduct a question and answer session during the course of the evening.
The title for the event originates from a lyric from Willie Nelson’s “Peaceful Solution” song.
The event will be video streamed live on Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com from 9pm CST onwards for free.10/26/08
Both Willie Nelson and former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura have been vociferously outspoken in recent months against the 9/11 cover-up, the war in Iraq and the recent Wall Street bailout.
Nelson made headlines earlier this year after he told the Alex Jones Show he thought the twin towers were imploded like condemned Las Vegas casino buildings.
Ventura has been similarly forceful in his comments about the attacks throughout 2008, citing his training as a Basic Underwater Demolition Seal to call into question the freefall collapse of the towers and Building 7.
For press representatives who wish to talk with Alex Jones, Jesse Ventura or any of the event organizers, time will be made on Sunday afternoon for interviews. Please contact aaron@infowars.com to arrange interviews in advance.
Former counter-terrorism czar tells CNN terrorist attack or video tape will be “October surprise
Former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke told CNN yesterday that Osama Bin Laden would attempt to influence the 2008 U.S. election with a terrorist attack or the release of a video tape, an October surprise to replicate that of 2004 when Bin Laden swung the election for Bush.
“At the moment, as far as I can tell, the FBI, other intelligence agencies, do not have any credible information that would lead them to believe an attack might take place. Why are we asking this, though?” said Clarke.
“Because in 2004, bin Laden did try to influence the US election. Whether or not he succeeded, who knows? But he issued a video tape on Halloween, a few days before the election, that implied that he supported Senator Kerry.”
“He knew, that if he seemed to be supporting Senator Kerry, that would help President Bush. And it did.”
“So, we know he likes to try to influence elections,” said Clarke. “So, we can look forward to perhaps another video tape like that, or an attack. But an attack is a heck of a lot harder for them to stage than the easy job of putting out a video tape.”
The CNN panel highlighted the fact that federal law enforcement officials were less worried about an Al-Qaeda attack than they were about a “lone wolf” American because “50 per cent of the country was going to be pissed off on election day either way”.
Host Rick Sanchez read from an alleged Al-Qaeda affiliated website which stated that if an attack took place, it would be in support of McCain.
Both John Kerry and George W. Bush attributed Bush’s 2004 success to a video tape featuring Bin Laden that was released days before voters went to the polls. Veteran news broadcaster Walter Cronkite called the tape a Karl Rove-orchestrated set up.
As we wrote on the eve of the vote four years ago, “Bush’s poll numbers have been significantly boosted and this will be enough to win him re-election.”
Bin Laden’s chastisement of Bush resulted in a 6 point swing, enabling Bush to seal a second term in office.
Who will the finger of suspicion point to should we witness the emergence of yet another dubious Bin Laden tape or a catastrophic event linked with Al-Qaeda?
Consider the comments of one of McCain’s top advisors, Charlie Black, who in June said that a terror attack on American soil would be a “big advantage” to McCain’s election hopes. Black added that last December’s assassination of Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had helped McCain to win the New Hampshire primary, a state he had to win to save his candidacy.
The “chatter” surrounding the probable entrance of Bin Laden or Al-Qaeda to impact the election is widespread.
According to a New York Sun report, in August America’s military and intelligence agencies intercepted messages indicating that “Al-Qaeda” was planning to launch operations to coincide with the November election.
Earlier this month, the L.A. Times speculated that the recent incursions into Pakistan are aimed at capturing Bin Laden before Bush leaves office.
The report coincided with pulitzer prize winning journalist Bob Woodward’s admission to CNN’s Larry King that the U.S. had devised a new secret weapon in the war on terror. “We’ll see - maybe they can use it on Bin Laden and all of a sudden the September or October surprise is gonna be the apprehension or the death of Bin Laden,” Woodward said.
The fact that the media is hyping the inevitability of an “October surprise” should be cause for concern, especially when allied to reports of police departments across the country “preparing for possible civil unrest and riots” in the aftermath of the election.
Watch the CNN clip below courtesy of Raw Story.
_________________________
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, October 24, 2008
www.prisonplanet.com/clarke-bin-laden-to-influenc e-us-election.html
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berg_v._Obama
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Tuesday, 21 October 2008 11:05
For Immediate Release: - 10/21/08 - Complete contact details and pdfs of this press release and motions filed by plaintiff Berg today are at the end of this article
(Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania – 10/21/08) - Philip J. Berg, Esquire, the Attorney who filed suit against Barack H. Obama challenging Senator Obama’s lack of “qualifications” to serve as President of the United States, announced today that Obama and tbe DNC “ADMITTED”, by way of failure to timely respond to Requests for Admissions, all of the numerous specific requests in the Federal lawsuit. Obama is “NOT QUALIFIED” to be President and therefore Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for President and the DNC shall substitute a qualified candidate. The case is Berg v. Obama, No. 08-cv-04083.
Berg stated that he filed Requests for Admissions on September 15, 2008 with a response by way of answer or objection had to be served within thirty [30] days. No response to the Requests for Admissions was served by way of response or objection. Thus, all of the Admissions directed to Obama and the DNC are deemed “ADMITTED.” Therefore, Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for President.
OBAMA - Admitted:
1. I was born in Kenya.2. I am a Kenya “natural born” citizen.
3. My foreign birth was registered in the State of Hawaii.4. My father, Barrack Hussein Obama, Sr. admitted Paternity of me.
5. My mother gave birth to me in Mombosa, Kenya.6. My mother’s maiden name is Stanley Ann Dunham a/k/a Ann Dunham.
7. The COLB [Certification of Live Birth] posted on the website “Fightthesmears.com” is a forgery.8. I was adopted by a Foreign Citizen.
9. I was adopted by Lolo Soetoro, M.A. a citizen of Indonesia.10. I was not born in Hawaii.
11. I was not born at the Queens Medical Center in Hawaii.12. I was not born at Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Hawaii.
13. I was not born in a Hospital in Hawaii.14. I am a citizen of Indonesia.
15. I never took the “Oath of Allegiance” to regain my U.S. Citizenship status.16. I am not a “natural born” United States citizen.
17. My date of birth is August 4, 1961.18. I traveled to Pakistan in 1981 with my Pakistan friends.
19. In 1981, I went to Indonesia on my way to Pakistan.20. Pakistan was a no travel zone in 1981 for American Citizens.
21. In 1981, Pakistan was not allowing American Citizens to enter their country.22. I traveled on my Indonesian Passport to Pakistan.
23. I renewed my Indonesian Passport on my way to Pakistan.24. My senior campaign staff is aware I am not a “natural born” United States Citizen.
25. I am proud of my Kenya Heritage.26. My relatives have requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my first name.
27. My relatives have requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my last name.28. My relatives have requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my place of birth.
29. I requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my first name.30. I requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my last name.
31. I requested changes to the portion of my birth certificate that identifies my place of birth.32. The document identified as my Indonesian School record from Fransiskus Assisi School in Jakarta, Indonesia is genuine.
33. I went to a Judge in Hawaii to have my name changed.34. I went to a Senator and/or Congressman or other public official in Hawaii to have my name changed.
35. I had a passport issued to me from the Government of Indonesia.36. The United States Constitution does not allow for a Person to hold the office of President of the United States unless that person is a “natural born” United States citizen.
37. I am ineligible pursuant to the United States Constitution to serve as President and/or Vice President of the United States.38. I never renounced my citizenship as it relates to my citizenship to the country of Indonesia.
39. I never renounced my citizenship as it relates to my citizenship to the country of Kenya.40. I am an Attorney who specializes in Constitutional Law.
41. Kenya was a part of the British Colonies at the time of my birth.42. Kenya did not become its own Republic until 1963.
43. I am not a “Naturalized” United States Citizen.44. I obtained $200 Million dollars in campaign funds by fraudulent means.
45. I cannot produce a “vault” (original) long version of a birth certificate showing my birth in Hawaii.46. My “vault” (original) long version birth certificate shows my birth in Kenya.
47. The only times I was to a Hospital in Hawaii was for check-ups or medical treatments for illnesses.48. Queens Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii does not have any record of my mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama) giving birth to me.
49. Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii does not have any record of my mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama) giving birth to me.50. I was born in the Coast Province Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya.
51. I represented on my State Bar application in Illinois that I never used any other name other than Barack Hussein Obama.52. I went by the name Barry Soetoro in Indonesia.
53. My Indonesian school records are under the name of Barry Soetoro.54. I took an Oath to uphold the United States Constitution when admitted to the State Bar of Illinois to practice Law.
55. I took an Oath to uphold the United States Constitution when I was Sworn into my United States Senate Office.56. I hold dual citizenship with at least one other Country besides the United States of America.
DNC - Admitted:
1. The DNC nominated Barrack Hussein Obama as the Democratic Nominee for President.2. The DNC has not vetted Barrack Hussein Obama.
3. The DNC did not have a background check performed on Barrack Hussein Obama.4.The DNC did not verify Barrack Hussein Obama’s eligibility to serve as President of the United States.
5. The DNC admits Barrack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya.6. The DNC admits Barrack Hussein Obama is not a “natural born” United States citizen.
7. The DNC admits Barrack Hussein Obama was not born in Hawaii.8.The DNC admits they have not inquired into Barrack Hussein Obama’s citizenship status.
9. The DNC admits they have a duty to properly vette the Democratic Nominee for President.10.The DNC admits Lolo Soetoro, M.A., an Indonesian citizen adopted Barrack Hussein Obama.
11. The DNC admits the Credentials Committee has been aware of this lawsuit since August 22, 2008 as the lawsuit was faxed to our Washington D.C. Office on August 22, 2008.
12. The DNC admits their Credentials Committee failed to verify and/or inquire into the credentials of Barack Hussein Obama to serve as the President of the United States.
13. The DNC admits their Credential Committee’s Report failed to address the issues of Barack Hussein Obama’s ineligibility to serve as President of the United States.14.The DNC admits Howard Dean, Chair Person has and had knowledge Barack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya and ineligible to serve as the President of the United States.
15. The DNC admits Plaintiff and all Democratic citizens of the United States have been personally injured as a result of not having a qualified Democratic Presidential Nominee to cast their votes upon.16. The DNC admits Plaintiff and all citizens of the United States have a Constitutional Right to vote for the President of the United States and to have two (2) qualified candidates of which to choose from.
17. The DNC admits Plaintiff and all citizens of the United States have a Constitutional right to have a properly vetted Democratic Presidential Nominee of which to cast their vote.18. The DNC admits an FBI background check is not performed on the Presidential or Vice Presidential Candidates.
19. The DNC admits the United States Constitution does not allow for a Person to hold the office of President of the United States unless that person is a “natural born” United States citizen.20. The DNC admits they collected donations on behalf of Barack Hussein Obama for his Presidential campaign.
21. The DNC admits Plaintiff and Democratic citizens donated money based on false representations that Barack Hussein Obama was qualified to serve as the President of the United States.22. The DNC admits if Barack Hussein Obama is elected as President and allowed to serve as President of the United States in violation of our Constitution, it will create a Constitutional crisis.
23. The DNC admits Barack Hussein Obama took an Oath to uphold the United States Constitution.24. The DNC admits allowing a person who is not a “natural born” citizen to serve as President of the United States violates Plaintiff’s rights to due process of law in violation of the United States Constitution.
25. The DNC admits allowing a person who is not a “natural born” citizen to serve as President of the United States violates Plaintiff’s rights to Equal Protection of the laws in violation of the United States Constitution.26. The DNC admits the function of the DNC is to secure a Democratic Presidential Candidate who will protect Democratic citizen’s interests, fight for their equal opportunities and fight for justice for all Americans.
27. The DNC admits the Democratic National Committee has been promoting Barack Hussein Obama’s Presidential election knowing he was ineligible to serve as President of the United States.
Our website
now has 50.7 + million hits. We are urging all to spread the word of our website – and forward to your local newspapers, radio and TV stations. Berg again stressed his position regarding the urgency of this case as, “we” the people, are heading to a “Constitutional Crisis” if this case is not resolved forthwith.
Philip J. Berg, Esquire
555 Andorra Glen Court, Suite 12
Lafayette Hill, PA 19444-2531
Cell (610) 662-3005
(610) 825-3134
(800) 993-PHIL [7445]
Fax (610) 834-7659
philjberg@obamacrimes.com
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www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/22/163652/37/734/6 38977
By Barry Steinhardt, Director, ACLU Technology & Liberty Program
You’re driving along a remote, dusty road, when suddenly you come upon a border patrol checkpoint. There, agents demand to see your identity papers, and search your car. You are taken by surprise, because you know you haven’t wandered across the Texas-Mexico border. In fact, you’re quite sure of that, because you’re driving through rural Wisconsin countryside west of Green Bay. Even the Canadian border is more than 90 miles away.
This scene is not as far-fetched as you might want to believe. The government is turning vast swaths of our country into a "Constitution-Free Zone" in which U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is allowed to exercise extraordinary authority that would not normally be permitted under the Constitution. The government says that "the border" — where there is a longstanding view that the Constitution does not fully apply — actually stretches 100 miles inland from the nation’s "external boundary." And increasingly, we are seeing DHS vigorously utilize that authority.
Today we held a press conference at the National Press Club here in D.C. to try to draw attention to this problem — and the fact that, as we showed, nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population live within this "Constitution-Free Zone." That’s 197.4 million people.
We calculated this using the most recent, 2007 numbers from the U.S. Census, and released a map showing the cities and states that are enveloped by this zone. It includes some of the largest metropolitan areas in the country: New York City, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. States that are completely within this Constitution-Free Zone include Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. When you say "border," they think "all of New England."
CBP has been setting up checkpoints far inland— on highways in states such as California, Texas and Arizona, and at ferry terminalsin Washington State. Typically, the agents ask drivers and passengers about their citizenship. People are also reporting that even after they provide passports or state driver’s licenses, CBP continues to interrogate them and try to pressure them into permitting a search.
At our press conference today in the National Press Club here in DC, two U.S. citizens described their experiences with CBP.
Vince Peppard, a retired social worker, told of being stopped and harassed by the border authorities at least 15 miles from the Mexico border with his wife, Berlant.
Craig Johnson, a music professor at a San Diego college, told how he participated in a peaceful demonstration near the border to protest against the destruction of a state park so that offense could be constructed along the U.S. border. CBP agents monitored the protest and collected the license plate information of those who participated. Since this protest, Mr. Johnson has twice crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and, each time, he has been pulled aside for additional screening. He was taken to another room, handcuffed and questioned. On his first crossing, he was also partially stripped and subjected to a body cavity search. A CBP agent also told Mr. Johnson that he was on an "armed and dangerous" list. Before the protest, Mr. Johnson crossed the U.S.-Mexico border numerous times without incident. It is difficult to believe that his subsequent harassment at the border is unrelated to his protest activity. If it is related, that would constitute a significant abuse.
Congress needs to hold hearings to investigate these egregious violations of Americans’ civil liberties, and then pass new laws protecting Americans’ rights.
I guarantee you that if these powers are not challenged, if the American people do not push back, sooner or later a factory worker in southern New Hampshire, a farmer in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, or yes, some guy driving across rural Wisconsin, will wake up to find that they have lost their right to go about their business, and travel around inside their own country, without interference from the authorities.
Missouri "Truth Squads" To Protect Obama Campaign
"The Barack Obama campaign is asking Missouri law enforcement to target anyone who lies or runs a misleading TV ad during the presidential campaign."
St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce and St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch have been threatening citizens not to post negative character 'attacks' about Barack Hussein Obama. That includes negative information about 'soft money operations.'
Looks like Barack HUSSEIN Obama wants to "Change" your right to free speech.
Source: www.kmov.com/video/index.html
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Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
September 26, 2008
In Missouri, if you “lie” about Barack Obama the cops may arrest you. “The effort appeared to be part of a move by the Obama campaign to block advertisements to which it objects. The campaign also sent ‘threatening’ letters to several news agencies in Pennsylvania and Ohio demanding they stop airing ads exposing Obama’s gun stance, according to the National Rifle
Association,” writes WorldNetDaily, never mind Obama is a gun-grabber who claims to support the Second Amendment.
Obama told http://whynotbarackobama.bl... target="_blank">ABC he supports the D.C. handgun ban. His campaign told the Chicago Tribune “Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.” Obama served on the board of the Joyce Foundation, probably the largest private funder of anti-gun and pro-ban groups and research in the country. In addition, Obama voted for a bill that would “expand the definition of armor piercing ammunition” and “support[ed] banning the sale of ammunition for assault weapons,” including 223 and .308 caliber bullets, the most common rifle ammunition. He supported the Illinois Firearms Owners Identification (FOID) Card, mandatory for residents when they buy any firearm in the state. (For more information on Obama’s assault on the Second Amendment, see Analysis: Fact-Checkers Fall Short in Criticizing NRA’s Anti-Obama Ads.)
In other words, if you cite Obama’s voting record or his publicly stated opinions and this rubs his “truth squads” wrong, they will sic the cops on you. “We want to keep this campaign focused on issues,” Jennifer Joyce, a Missouri prosecutor, told told KMOV (see video). “We don’t want people to get distracted. Missourians don’t want to be distracted by the divisive character attacks,” that is to say she does not want the sheep distracted by the truth — Obama is a gun-grabber who pretends to respect the Second Amendment. In addition to Joyce’s warming, Obama lawyer Robert Bauer threatened Missouri television and radio station managers that he would rat them out to the Federal Communication Commission if they dared tell the truth.
This is precisely how political campaigns are run in despotic third world countries and dictatorships that pretend to be democracies. In Bolivia, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Burma, Georgia, Haiti — there is no shortage of recent examples — the opposition is routinely arrested, even killed, but we are supposedly above such tactics here in America. Instead, we just fix the voting machines and nix thousands of voters from the rolls.
It appears all of this has changed under Obama. Isn’t this the sort of behavior Hitler’s goons engaged in before he swept into power and killed millions of people, beginning with his political opponents? Isn’t this the sort of thing Stalin and Mao did, eventually graduating to mass murder and genocide? Didn’t East Germany’s Stasi encourage people to turn in their neighbors, even their family and friends, for holding the wrong political opinions?
Of course, Obama is no Stalin and his opponents are not showing up dead on the side of the road. But with this effort to silence the critics through coordinated police action we can see such fascism in a germination stage. Remember, Hitler’s brownshirts started out by intimidating communists, anarchists, and Social Democrats and then graduated to beatings, murder, and finally death camps.
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Joe Biden’s “guarantee” that an “international crisis” will unfold shortly after President Obama takes office conjures up several different possibilities, but it seems the likely outcome will revolve around an announcement that Iran has developed a nuclear bomb, prompting a potential military attack.
“It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy,” Biden told an audience in Seattle this past weekend.
“Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
The assured tone with which Biden delivered his forecast was staggeringly convincing, and left the observer in no doubt that there will be a major world crisis shortly after Obama takes office. “Mark my words, mark my words,” Biden stressed, adding that “tough” and “unpopular” foreign policy decisions will have to be made.
“I promise you it will occur,” Biden added, “As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee you it is going to happen.”
Biden’s use of the word “generated” is even more startling. One of the dictionary definitions we find for the word “generated” is “to bring into existence; cause to be; produce,” which begs the question, will this be another staged and manufactured crisis like the 9/11 attacks, which occurred less than 8 months after Bush took office?
Or will it be something even more serious, a nuclear conflagration involving Russia or Iran?
John McCain raised the specter of nuclear war yesterday when he warned that the United States faces “many challenges here at home, and many enemies abroad in this dangerous world,” before mentioning the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis.
Echoing Biden’s comments, McCain said the next president “won’t have time to get used to the office” and “I know how close we came to a nuclear war and I will not be a president that needs to be tested. I have been tested. Senator Obama has not.”
What is the test to which McCain and Biden refer, and how can they be so sure that it will arrive shortly after Obama takes office should he win the election as expected? What was Colin Powell referring to on Meet The Press when he said, “There’s going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now.”
The most likely scenario seems to revolve around Iran announcing, or the U.S. government claiming, that they are ready to build their first nuclear bomb.
Indeed, the Mossad front news outlet Debka File reported yesterday that “Iran will be ready to build its first bomb just one month after the next US president is sworn in.” The very next sentence of the report ties this in with Biden’s promise of an international crisis immediately after Obama takes office.
“DEBKAfile’s military sources cite the new US timeline: By late January, 2009, Iran will have accumulated enough low-grade enriched uranium (up to 5%) for its “break-out” to weapons grade (90%) material within a short time. For this, the Iranians have achieved the necessary technology. In February, they can move on to start building their first nuclear bomb,” according to the report.
Of course, the legitimacy of these claims are likely to be completely fabricated - the official U.S. National Intelligence Estimate concluded in December that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons campaign in late 2003 - but the Israelis may be laying the groundwork for a propaganda offensive similar to the “weapons of mass destruction” scam that preceded the invasion of Iraq.
Will the military assault on Iran occur not under the highly unpopular Bush administration, as many had predicted, but under an Obama presidency? Riding into office on a wave of popular approval and support, Obama will have the political capital to get the country behind the attack if the threat of imminent danger is cited - or at least stand by and allow Israel to do the dirty work.
Will a nuclear flash point on the scale of the Cuban Missile Crisis turn out to be the “international crisis” that Biden so vehemently promised? Or will the event take on a different characteristic.
Bush exploited 9/11 to realize the pre-set agenda of his Neo-Con masters months after he was inaugurated and Bill Clinton seized upon the Oklahoma City Bombing shortly into his second term to expand federal power. What will Obama’s crisis be that enables him to offer his contribution to building the American police state?
- A terror attack, or a series of attacks, on major American cities, possibly involving crudely designed nuclear bombs or dirty bombs?
- A complete economic collapse and a new great depression leading to food riots and the imposition of martial law?
- A military showdown with Russia should Russia attempt to invade Georgia or another pro-U.S. Russian satellite country?
- A nuclear showdown with Russia should Russia start a nuclear war with Ukraine, as has been threatened?
- The necessity for another military attack on Afghanistan should the Taliban continue to regain control of the country?
- A confrontation with Venezuela should it be revealed that Hugo Chavez is receiving nuclear bomb technology from Russia or Iran?
- A new escalation in the Middle East should Israel deploy its nuclear arsenal to attack Iran, Syria Lebanon, or even Egypt?
Whatever the new “international crisis” that we have been guaranteed turns out to be, you can bet your bottom dollar that the response to it will ultimately lead to more carnage and a further assault on the fast-disappearing freedoms that we still enjoy - and in that sense under an Obama presidency, the more things “change,” the more they will stay the same.
Above:Thomas Malinowski, 48, who lived on New York's streets for 13 years, sits on his cot in the "Safe Haven" shelter in Manhattan on January 21, 2007.
A surge in families seeking housing aid or shelter has followed rising home foreclosures nationwide.
Foreclosures Jan.-Aug.
2006: 801,354
2007: 1,341,295
2008: 2,049,782
Source: RealtyTrac
Local authorities say the number of families seeking help has risen in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle and Washington.
"Everywhere I go, I hear there is an increase" in the need for housing aid, especially for families, says Philip Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates federal programs. He says the main causes are job losses and foreclosures.
Other factors have been higher food and fuel prices hitting families with "no cushion," says Nan Roman of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Many mayors have 10-year plans to end homelessness and had reported progress until this year. The most recent official count, in January 2007, found 671,888 people living on U.S. streets or in shelters, down 12% from January 2005.
"We saw family homelessness began to increase last winter," says Sally Erickson, Portland's homeless program manager. "There's definitely a spike in the last six months." The number of requests for emergency shelter doubled from fiscal year 2007 to fiscal 2008, which ended in June.
Darlene Newsom, who runs United Methodist Outreach Ministries' New Day Centers, which provide shelter programs for families in Phoenix, says the number of requests is "alarming." She says families who never sought help before are calling.
Los Angeles says it has no 2008 data. Miami reports no major change. Chicago has not had a surge in requests, but more come from renters evicted because of landlords' foreclosure, says Nancy Radner of the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness.
USA TODAY found:
• In New York City, 2,747 families applied for shelter in September 2008, up from 2,087 in September 2007.
• In Hennepin County, including Minneapolis, 880 families were in shelters from January through August 2008, up from 698 in that period last year. At least 10% this year came from foreclosed properties where most had been renters, says Cathy ten Broeke, county coordinator to end homelessness.
Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania professor of social policy, expects foreclosures to cause a "big increase" in homeless families.
Mangano says a new federal law gives communities $3.9 billion to buy foreclosed properties or provide services to the homeless.
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www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-te.tentcity2 8sep28,0,7143626.story
RENO, Nev. - A few tents cropped up hard by the railroad tracks, pitched by men left with nowhere to go once the emergency winter shelter closed for the summer.
Then others appeared - people who had lost their jobs to the ailing economy or newcomers who had moved to Reno for work and discovered no one was hiring.
Within weeks, more than 150 people were living in tents big and small, barely a foot apart in a patch of dirt slated to be a parking lot for a campus of shelters Reno is building for its homeless.
Like many other cities, Reno has found itself with a "tent city" - an encampment of people who had nowhere else to go.
From Seattle to Athens, Ga., homeless advocacy groups and city agencies are reporting the most visible rise in homeless encampments in a generation.
Nearly 61 percent of local and state homeless coalitions say they've experienced a rise in homelessness since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, according to a report by the National Coalition for the Homeless.
The group says the problem has worsened since the report's release in April, with foreclosures mounting, gas and food prices rising and the job market tightening.
"It's clear that poverty and homelessness have increased," said Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the coalition. "The economy is in chaos, we're in an unofficial recession and Americans are worried, from the homeless to the middle class, about their future."
The phenomenon of encampments has caught advocacy groups somewhat by surprise, largely because of how quickly they have sprung up.
"What you're seeing is encampments that I haven't seen since the '80s," said Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, an umbrella group for homeless advocacy organizations in Los Angeles,
and
, Calif.; Portland, Ore., and Seattle.
The relatively tony city of Santa Barbara has given over a parking lot to people who sleep in cars and vans. The city of
, Calif., is trying to manage several proliferating tent cities, including an encampment where people have made shelters out of scrap wood. In Portland and Seattle, homeless advocacy groups have paired with nonprofits or faith-based groups to manage tent cities as outdoor shelters. Other cities where tent clusters have either appeared or expanded include Chattanooga, Tenn., San Diego and Columbus, Ohio.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently reported a 12 percent drop in homelessness nationally in two years, from about 754,000 in January 2005 to 666,000 in January 2007. But the 2007 numbers omitted people who previously had been considered homeless - such as those staying with relatives or friends or living in campgrounds or motel rooms for more than a week.
In addition, the housing and economic crisis began soon after HUD's most recent data was compiled.
"The data predates the housing crisis," said Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for HUD. "From the headlines, it might appear that the report is about yesterday. How is the housing situation affecting homelessness? That's a great question. We're still trying to get to that."
In Seattle, which is experiencing a building boom and an influx of affluent professionals in neighborhoods the working class once owned, homeless encampments have been springing up - in remote places to avoid police sweeps.
"What's happening in Seattle is what's happening everywhere else - on steroids," said Tim Harris, executive director of Real Change, an advocacy organization that publishes a weekly newspaper sold by homeless people.
Homeless people and their advocates have organized three tent cities at City Hall in recent months to call attention to the homeless and protest the sweeps - acts of militancy, said Harris, "that we really haven't seen around homeless activism since the early '90s."
In Reno, officials decided to let the tent city be because shelters were already filled.
Officials don't know how many homeless people are in Reno. "But we do know that the soup kitchens are serving hundreds more meals a day and that we have more people who are homeless than we can remember," said Jodi Royal-Goodwin, the city's redevelopment agency director.
Those in the tents have to register and are monitored weekly to see what progress they are making in finding jobs or real housing. They are provided times to take showers in the shelter and told where to go for food and meals.
Sylvia Flynn, 51, came from northern California but lost a job almost immediately and then her apartment.
Since the cheapest motels here charge upward of $200 a week, Flynn ended up at the Reno women's shelter, which has only 20 beds and a two-week limit on stays.
Out of a dozen people interviewed in the tent city, six had come to Reno from California or elsewhere over the past year, hoping for casino jobs.
"I figured this would be a great place for a job," said Max Perez, a 19-year-old from Iowa. He couldn't find one and ended up taking showers at the men's shelter and sleeping in a pup tent barely big enough to cover his body.
And the casinos are starting to lay off employees.
"Sometimes I think we need to put out an ad: 'No, we don't have any more jobs than you do,'" Royal-Goodwin said.
The city will shut down the tent city as soon as early next month because the tents sit on what will be a parking lot for a complex of shelters and services for homeless people.
The complex will include a men's shelter, a women's shelter, a family shelter and a resource center.
Reno officials aren't sure whether the construction will eliminate the need for the tent city. The demand, they say, keeps growing.
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21340764/
WASHINGTON - Though they may spar across the political aisle, Vice President Dick Cheney is close enough to Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama to call him “cousin.”
Eighth cousin, that is.
Lynne Cheney, the vice president’s wife, revealed this tantalizing bit of political trivia during a television interview Tuesday.
She said she uncovered the long-ago ties between the two while researching her ancestry for her latest book, “Blue Skies, No Fences,” a memoir about growing up in Wyoming.
“This is such an amazing American story that one ancestor ... could be responsible down the family lines for lives that have taken such different and varied paths as Dick’s and Barack Obama,” Lynne Cheney told MSNBC.
According to her spokeswoman, Sen. Obama, D-Ill., is a descendent of Mareen Duvall. This French Huguenot’s son married the granddaughter of a Richard Cheney, who arrived in Maryland in the late 1650s from England, said Ginny Justice, a spokeswoman for Lynne Cheney.
The vice president’s full name is Richard B. Cheney.
A spokesman for Obama, who wants to be the first black U.S. president, offered a tongue-in-cheek response. “Every family has a black sheep,” said spokesman Bill Burton.
Lynne Cheney did not reference the ancestral ties between her husband and Obama in the book.
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(CBS) By David Paul Kuhn,
CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/04/politics/main6 04163.shtml
NEW YORK, March 4, 2004
President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry are related. Well, sort of. They're ninth cousins, twice removed. So what's a little competition between family?
The two presidential contenders also share a widely known common relative, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who is the ninth cousin of both men (the number nine is a coincidence). Twice removed from Mr. Bush, Hefner is a slightly closer relation to Kerry, only once removed.
"Well I feel closer to Senator Kerry," Hefner chuckled, over the phone from the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.
"You know I'm an 11th generation direct descendent of William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower, a direct descendent of a puritan," Hefner continued proudly, finding no irony in the fact. "I suppose that it is not a big surprise but it is certainly unique to be a relation to both candidates."
Previous research released last month found that Mr. Bush and his de facto Democratic challenger were 16th cousins. Now the two candidates expected to compete in one of the bitterest and certainly longest general elections in decades are nearly twice as close as first thought. Like brothers, more or less; well, more less than more.
"You never know, they may be closer, this is only what has been connected so far," said Bruce Harrison, who heads a group called Millisecond Publishing which puts out a line of ancestral history CDs from Waimea, Hawaii. "I hope it means that people will be nicer to each other and you always hope for a nicer campaign."
Millisecond Publishing's massive database collects family trees of notable figures. According to their research, the shared ancestors of both men are Thomas and Welthian Richards of Weymouth, Mass., early 17th century Plymouth Colony residents who were some of the original Pilgrims, emigrants from England.
The Richards' daughter Mary married Thomas Hinckley, governor of the Plymouth Colony, and through their son, Samuel, they are the ancestors of President Bush. Their daughter Anna married Captain Ephraim Hunt, and through their son Thomas they are the ancestors of Kerry.
Through the same lineage, both men are linked to Gen. Douglas MacArthur and President Franklin D. Roosevelt; even infamous traitor Benedict Arnold and attempted presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr., have thick enough blue-blood roots to call themselves relations. The two candidates also have very distant links to Princess Diana and President George Washington.
Kerry's most quirky relation is Johnny Appleseed. Yes, there really was a Johnny Appleseed. Kerry and Appleseed are sixth cousins. Appleseed, whose real name was John Chapman, was born in 1774 and made a name for himself as a naturalist traveling the country for 50 years, growing, of course, apple trees among other things.
"You have your first cousin and you share the same grandparents; your second and you share the same great grandparents. So when you get back to your ninth cousins that means you share the ancestor 11 generations ago," explained Tony Burroughs, a genealogist at Chicago State University.
"Bush and Kerry might find it odd. They might not even like that they do share a common ancestor and I don't think they consider themselves relatives – only a genealogist would," Burroughs said. "But it is a really good piece of trivia."
Hefner, who also said he found his relationship to the two men interesting if not necessarily relevant, finds his link to Mr. Bush and Kerry through Major William Bradford. One of the Richards' daughters, Alice, married Bradford, and it's through their son, Lieutenant Thomas Bradford, that Hefner is descended.
The Playboy magnate, who said he is keeping up with the election, finds it all very funny. Neither candidate has recognized the other as a relation, but Hefner thinks they should and that the link would lead to a less combative election year.
"I hope they have a campaign that deals with the real issues and not personalities," Hefner said, adding that he would do his best to help Kerry raise money.
Nonetheless, Hefner still had good words for Mr. Bush, his unbeknownst cousin until Thursday.
"I wish him well, he's our president," Hefner said, hoping both men would visit him at the Playboy Mansion for a little rest and relaxation. "I would be delighted to invite both President Bush and Senator Kerry for a family reunion," Hefner added, laughing to himself.
------------------------------------------
June 13, 2004
Full Article Here>www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/02/60minutes/main 576332.shtml
(CBS) As opposite as George Bush and John Kerry may seem to be, they do share a common secret - one they've shared for decades, and one they will not share with the electorate.
As if to affirm Joe Biden’s comments about a “generated crisis” if and when Obama is anointed, Gen. Colin Powell went on Meet the Press over the weekend and told Tom Brokaw a “crisis” will “come along on the 21st or 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now.”
Does Colin Powell know something that is being kept from the commoners? Obviously, otherwise he would not make such a definitive statement. As an insider, Powell is privy to exclusive information. Like Biden, he is providing us with a hint — it will probably have something to do with the engineered destruction of the economy. Our rulers seem to be fond of allowing their minions to divulge amorphous details of impending events.
In addition to Biden’s cryptic comments — reported today in the neocon-infested New York Post — over the weekend a website in upstate New York reported on a secret meeting between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their European counterparts in the Adirondacks.
As Biden noted, the elite apparently have a diverse menu of scenarios to choose from, including crises in the Middle East, Russia, or the economy. Having a heavy-hitter like Powell weigh in adds credibility to the possibility of an engineered event occurring.
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
October 21, 2008
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Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, Oct 21, 2008
Colin Powell has made bizarre comments that echo the recent declaration by Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden that there will be an "international crisis" early into Barack Obama’s presidency that will test the new president by forcing him to make unpopular decisions.
Speaking on meet the press two days ago, Powell officially endorsed Obama and also made the following statement:
"The problems will always be there and there’s going to be a crisis which will come along on the 21st, 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now.
So I think what the President has to start to do is to start using the power of the oval office and the power of his personality to convince the American people and convince the world that America is solid, that America is going to move forward, we are going to fix our economic problems, we’re going to meet out overseas obligations."
Is Colin Powell referring to a theoretical crisis that could occur at any time? If so why does he choose a specific date, within the first two days after the inauguration? Also why does he refer to general problems that the new president will have to deal with in a separate context? We are already in an economic crisis, everyone knows that, so what new crisis is Powell talking about?
Whatever you read into Powell’s comments, they sound somewhat bizarre, particularly as they come on the back of Joe Biden’s "guarantee" of a "generated crisis" to "test the mettle" of the new leader within six months of the new presidential term:
What does Biden mean by "generated crisis"? It is an undeniably strange term to use.
His reference to John F. Kennedy indicates that Biden may have been referring some kind of geopolitical crisis in the vain of the Cuban missile crisis of April 1961. The confrontation between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba at the height of the Cold War came within the first four months of JFK’s presidency.
Obama’s running mate made the comments at a fundraising event in Seattle two days ago, on the same day Powell also spoke of a coming crisis.
We shouldn’t be surprised at Powell’s comments however, given that the former Secretary of State seemingly has a knack for predicting events before they take place.
Previous to the beginning of the Iraq war in February 2003, an audio tape containing a voice described as that of Osama Bin Laden was touted as proof positive of Al Qaeda links with Saddam Hussein.
Hours before the tape was discovered and aired by TV channel Al Jazeera, Powell announced in the US Senate that a “Bin Laden tape is coming proving Iraq’s links with Al-Qaeda.”
This led some to raise the question how does Colin Powell know what Al Jazeera are going to broadcast before they do?
In an amazing and timely coincidence, the tape came barely a week after Powell’s attempts to link Al Qaeda and Saddam in his botched presentation of lies and exaggerations before the UN Security Council.
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For people who don't know.....Colin Powell endorsed Obama.
www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/bulletin/bulletin_ 081020.htm
VACAVILLE, Calif. -- A teacher's gender reassignment surgery has caught the attention of some parents who want to know why the school district didn't notify them ahead of time about the change.
A music teacher at Foxboro Elementary School, who was formerly a woman, returned to school as a man at the beginning of the school year.The teacher, who was not identified by KCRA 3, is now being addressed as "Mister."Some parents told Travis Unified School District that they feel like their rights to know were violated."All the information came straight from our kids and didn't come from the school board or the teachers ... this has all been second-hand information," parent Melissa Oiland said.The district said it has to respect privacy and personal issues, and that it must preserve privacy rights of the teachers.The school board said such disclosure would violate HIPAA privacy rules."I understand what parents are saying, but we have a right as an employer, we have a legal obligation as an employer to protect our employees," Superintendent Kate Wren Gavlak said.Gavlak said the district consulted with lawyers and determined that legally, it could not disclose any information about the teacher's gender change."We will not be discussing personal matters with either the students, or the parents or the community at large ... because we cannot," Gavlak said.Parent Angela Weinzinger, who has three children at the school, said she has since transferred her children out of the class."I wasn't given the opportunity to make a choice on what I wanted to do with the situation," Weinzinger said.So far, 23 students from 15 different families have transferred their children out of the music class and into a physical education class.
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HA Ha this reminds me of the infamous South Park episode when Mr. Garrison gets a sex change. If you haven't seen that episode you can watch it at the following link.
www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/eyeonasia/arc hives/2008/10/japanese_anger.html
With Japan playing an important role in the current financial crisis, not least Mitsubishi UFJ’s $9 billion bailout of Morgan Stanley, one might think the U.S. government would be trying hard not to upset a key ally. Yet, the Bush administration’s decision to take North Korea off the http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/...>list of nations considered to be sponsors of terrorism appears to have been done with little, if any, consideration for Japan.
Predictably, the decision was met with mixture of anger and disbelief in Japan where the fate of Japanese kidnapped by North Korea in the late 1970s and early 1980s understandably remains an emotive issue. “I cannot help feeling empty because everything is decided somewhere beyond our reach. I feel completely helpless,” said Shigeo Iizuka, 70, who leads the group which represents the Japanese abductees’ families, reported Kyodo News. Teruaki Masumoto, another member of the group, described the U.S. move as the “betrayal” of an ally.
The manner of the announcement also leaves much to be desired. While the official line is that the move won’t affect Japanese-U.S. relations, the Asahi newspaper reported that Japan had been caught hop, with Prime Minister Taro Aso only alerted by Washington thirty minutes before the announcement.
Japanese state broadcaster NHK said Japan’s Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa broke off from talks about rescuing the world’s financial system to press President Bush on the matter. Bush told him to speak to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who apparently
said the removal will not have a large impact on the kidnapping issue. Nakagawa described the move as “extremely regrettable.”
The U.S government is also receiving low marks for its handling of the financial crisis. While officials haven’t publicly criticized the U.S., economists in Japan have been dismayed at the handling of the bailout, complaining that the U.S. has been slow to learn from Japan’s mistakes during its own financial meltdown a decade ago. That ensuing upheaval contributed to the 24% fall in the Nikkei 225 Index last week—its worst ever week.
JOHN SPINK / jspink@ajc.com
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Keovongsa Siharath was arrested in Henry County on charges he punched his stepfather.
Jeffrey Churchill was charged with assault in an altercation with a woman in a mall parking lot.
Calvin Thomas was taken into custody in DeKalb County on a concealed weapons charge.
All three are now officers with the Atlanta Police Department.
More than one-third of recent Atlanta Police Academy graduates have been arrested or cited for a crime, according to a review of their job applications. The arrests ranged from minor offenses such as shoplifting to violent charges including assault. More than one-third of the officers had been rejected by other law enforcement agencies, and more than half of the recruits admitted using marijuana.
“On its face, it’s troubling and disturbing,” said Vincent Fort, a state senator from Atlanta. “It would be very troubling that people might be hitting the streets to serve and protect and they have histories that have made them unqualified to serve on other departments.”
But Atlanta police say it’s not so simple. Officials have been trying without success for more than a decade to grow the department
to 2,000 officers, an effort hurt by this year’s budget crisis. With competition for recruits intense among law enforcement agencies, Atlanta has had to make concessions.
“We would like, in an ideal world, to see every applicant with a clean record, but obviously that’s not reality,” said Atlanta police Lt. Elder Dancy, who runs the department’s recruitment unit. “I don’t think you’ll find any departments who hire only applicants with squeaky-clean records.”
Three decades ago, a police officer with a criminal record was much less common than it is now, said Robert Friedmann, a criminal justice professor at Georgia State University. But times have changed and many agencies have had to relax their hiring policies, Friedmann said.
Other local police agencies have hiring guidelines similar to Atlanta’s. Police departments for Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties don’t hire recruits with felony convictions but do hire those with misdemeanor arrests, on a case-by-case basis.
Dancy would not divulge all of Atlanta’s restrictions but said the department won’t hire anyone with felony convictions, or those with convictions for obstruction of justice, sex or domestic crimes.
Even so, police documents show that many of their recruits have blemishes on their records.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, through an Open Records Act request, asked in mid-August for the job applications of the Atlanta Police Department’s two most recent graduating classes. The department provided 36 applications for police recruits who graduated June 10 and Aug. 4. All the graduates are currently Atlanta police officers.
The most revealing portion of the application is a questionnaire that includes some probing questions:
Have you ever used marijuana?
Have you ever been with a prostitute?
Have you ever driven under the influence of alcohol or drugs?
And: Have you ever been physically arrested or cited with criminal charges?
Twelve out of 33 officers — 36 percent — said they have been arrested or cited with a criminal offense.
“It does not mean they’re not a quality candidate,” Dancy said, adding that the department runs criminal background checks on all recruits. “It just means they made a mistake in their past.”
Officer Siharath was taken to the Henry County Jail in December 2005 after an altercation with his stepfather at his family’s home in Stockbridge, according to a police report.
Siharath, then 24, returned home to find his stepfather moving his belongings back into his mother’s house. He told his stepfather to leave, but the older man refused, the report said.
They argued, then Siharath pushed the man onto the floor and punched him in the head, the stepfather and Siharath’s mother told police. The battery charge against Siharath was later dropped in court.
Siharath could not be reached for comment on the incident, and Atlanta police would not make him available for an interview.
A decade earlier, Officer Thomas was arrested during a traffic stop in DeKalb County on charges of having a concealed weapon, he wrote in his job application.
The officer asked Thomas “if I had any weapons in the car, [and] I stated yes,” he wrote. “The officer asked where, and I told him under the seat. I was arrested for a misdemeanor — carrying a concealed weapon.”
Thomas, who paid a fine and spent a year on probation, declined to comment for this article.
Officer Churchill wrote that he was arrested in December 1995 on a charge of fourth-degree assault. Without getting into much detail, he wrote that he got into an argument with a woman in a mall parking lot, received two years of probation and an order to pay a $71 fine. Churchill could not be reached for comment on the incident, and Atlanta police would not make him available for an interview.
Friedmann, the criminal justice professor, said he “would have hoped the number [of recruits with prior arrests or criminal citations] would be lower.”
He and another criminal justice professor, Peter Fenton of Kennesaw State University, say the arrest numbers are not as significant when three factors are considered: the severity of the incident, how long ago it happened and whether it resulted in conviction.
With those factors considered, “your numbers will probably drop to about half of that,” Friedmann said.
The AJC could not analyze all those factors because recruits sometimes gave incomplete answers on the application.
Fenton, a former Cobb County police officer, said he was more concerned with the AJC’s next finding: Twelve out of 33 graduates — 36 percent — acknowledged that they had been rejected by other law enforcement agencies, including some in metro Atlanta.
“That, frankly, is more troubling to me — especially when these people have been rejected by multiple agencies,” he said.
Three officers’ rejections stemmed from failing the psychiatric or psychological portion of police agencies’ screening processes. Others were turned away because they failed lie-detector tests or offered conflicting statements about issues such as drug use.
Dancy said those issues raise red flags, but what matters most is whether recruits can pass the Atlanta Police Department’s tests and interviews.
When asked whether the department was getting top-shelf candidates, Dancy said, “as long as those applicants meet the guidelines, then we feel like we are hiring the type of officers who are [fit to be] Atlanta police officers.”
Officer Mark Moore applied for jobs with other police agencies before graduating from the Atlanta Police Academy. He tried to get a job with Atlanta police in 2004 but was rejected. He also failed a written test for the Knoxville police.
When he applied to another police department in 2002, “their psychologist deemed me to be ‘psychologicaly incompatable’ [sic] for the L.A.P.D.,” he wrote in his Atlanta job application.
Moore declined to comment when reached by phone.
More than half the graduates admitted using marijuana, though many said they did it only a few times during their high school or college years.
News researchers Nisa Asokan and Sharon Gaus and former data analyst Megan Clarke contributed to this report.
Poses question “are we being purposefully led into a one world financial system?”
Like him or loathe him, last night CNN’s Glenn Beck became the only mainstream media source thus far to address on national TV the reality of the situation Americans are facing with the manufactured financial implosion - the direct threat of domestic martial law and a global financial dictatorship.
Beck’s guest, Peter Schiff, respected author of “Crash Proof” and president of the brokerage firm Euro Pacific Capital, joined him in outlining that martial law, the use of armed troops on the streets to quell dissent, is a real possibility should the economic crisis not improve or worsen to the point where civil unrest is fomented.
The following exchange between Beck and Schiff, who was also economic adviser to Ron Paul during his presidential campaign, is from the CNN transcript of last night’s show:
SCHIFF: You know, what`s going to happen, of course, is as inflation starts running out of control and prices start going through the roof, the government again is going to focus on the symptoms and not the disease.
And they`re going to impose price controls on energy, on food, on a lot of other things that are vital, which means shortages, which means long lines, black markets, civil unrest. All this stuff is coming if we don`t stop. [...]
BECK: Peter, let`s talk a little bit about martial law. Why would that even be a consideration?
SCHIFF: Well, I don`t think it was a threat if they had rejected the bailout Bill, but I think it is a possibility a few years down the line. We just spoke a little bit about price controls and the effect that they`re going to have.
If we have shortages of food, if we have rolling blackouts. And people are upset, and they`re hungry, and they`re cold, there could be civil unrest. There could be looting, rioting, and that might be the impetus for the government to declare martial law.
BECK: You know, I don`t think you`re a couple of years away from something like that. I mean, honestly, Peter, I mean, look at what`s happening. In a half hour, I`ve got a congressman on about — about the racism cries. I mean, there are people that are right now so disenfranchised, and I think being encouraged to be disenfranchised on both sides, that at any time this damn thing could break apart.
SCHIFF: Yes. And we`re giving the government so much power. And you know, you give up a lot more civil liberties. When you have martial law and you`ve got the military policing our streets, when you`ve got suspension of habeas corpus, you`ve got curfews, you can`t be out of your house after dark, and they can just pick you up and put you in prison and keep you there indefinitely without charges, and there`s nothing you can do about it?
I mean, we`re giving up one liberty after another, all to protect ourselves from this economic crisis, which needs to happen anyway, but it doesn`t need to be nearly this bad.
BECK: Peter, this is — I mean, we`re in Crazytown, USA. But my gut tells me that, two years down the road — let`s just use that number — this country is not going to look anything like it does today. Our world has changed; it just hasn`t caught up.
During the ten minute segment, Beck and Schiff also pointed out that America is headed for Weimar Republic style hyperinflation at the hands of global bankers, stated that the financial implosion has been manufactured by design, warned that the Treasury has been given dictatorial powers and raised the question of whether the end game is a one world currency and one world financial governance.
Beck also played the now infamous clip of Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman from October 2nd stating that several members of Congress were threatened before the bailout vote that martial law would be instigated in America if the legislation was not passed.
Watch the entire segment via youtube: www.youtube.com/watch
Though Beck was unable to bring Rep. Sherman on to his show, the Congressman did appear exclusively on the Alex Jones show on October 3rd to discuss the threat of martial law. Peter Schiff also appeared on the Alex Jones show recently to discuss this important issue.
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008
*********************
Related Reading:
FEMA sources confirm coming martial law
U.S. Troops In Homeland “Crowd Control” Patrols From October 1st
Economic Collapse As Precursor To Open Plan For Martial Law?
Bush’s Martial Law Plan Is So Shocking, Even Congress Can’t See it
The plans to implement martial law in America have been taking shape for decades, hidden behind "Continuity of Government" contingency planning. Now, with public outcry over the banker bailout bill at fever pitch, all of the pieces are in place for the U.S. Army to start policing American citizens.
For more information and analysis, please visit
http://www.corbettreport.co...
(Self assured Ne'er do wells, go back to hanging out at Tilted Kilt....or wherever you know it all yuppies festoon the latest trinkets & act important)
Behind the panic: Financial warfare over the future of global bank power onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3857.sht ml Oct 10, 2008, 00:30 What’s clear from the behavior of European financial markets over the past two weeks is that the dramatic stories of financial meltdown and panic are deliberately being used by certain influential factions in and outside the EU to shape the future face of global banking in the wake of the US subprime and asset-backed security (ABS) debacle. The most interesting development in recent days has been the unified and strong position of the German chancellor, finance minister, Bundesbank and coalition government, all opposing an American-style EU Superfund bank bailout. Meanwhile, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pursues his crony capitalism to the detriment of the nation and benefit of his cronies in the financial world. It’s an explosive cocktail that need not have been. Stock market falls of 7 to 10 percent a day make for dramatic news headlines and serve to foster a broad sense of unease bordering on panic among ordinary citizens. The events of the last two weeks among EU banks since the dramatic state rescues of Hypo Real Estate, Dexia and Fortis banks, and the announcement by UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling of a radical shift in policy in dealing with troubled UK banks, have begun to reveal the outline of a distinctly different European response to what in effect is a crisis ‘Made in USA.’ There is serious ground to believe that US Goldman Sachs ex CEO Henry Paulson, as Treasury secretary, is not stupid. There is also serious ground to believe that he is actually moving according to a well-thought-out long-term strategy. Events as they are now unfolding in the EU tend to confirm that. As one senior European banker put it to me in private discussion, ‘There is an all-out war going on between the United States and the EU to define the future face of European banking.’ In this banker’s view, the ongoing attempt of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and France’s Nicholas Sarkosy to get an EU common ‘fund,’ with perhaps upwards of $300 billion to rescue troubled banks, would de facto play directly into Paulson and the US establishment’s long-term strategy, by in effect weakening the banks and repaying US-originated asset backed securities held by EU banks. Using panic to centralize power As I document in my forthcoming book, Power of Money: The Rise and Decline of the American Century, in every major US financial panic since at least the Panic of 1835, the titans of Wall Street -- most especially until 1929, the House of JP Morgan -- have deliberately triggered bank panics behind the scenes in order to consolidate their grip on US banking. The private banks used the panics to control Washington policy, including the exact definition of the private ownership of the new Federal Reserve in 1913, and to consolidate their control over industry, such as US Steel, Caterpillar, Westinghouse and the like. They are, in short, old hands at such financial warfare to increase their power. Now they must do something similar on a global scale to be able to continue to dominate global finance, the heart of the power of the American Century. That process of using panics to centralize their private power created an extremely powerful, concentration of financial and economic power in a few private hands, the same hands which created the influential US foreign policy think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921 to guide the ascent of the American Century, as Time founder Henry Luce called it in a pivotal 1941 essay. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that people like Henry Paulson, who by the way was one of the most aggressive practitioners of the ABS revolution on Wall Street before becoming Treasury secretary, are operating on motives beyond their over-proportional sense of greed. Paulson’s own background is interesting in that context. Back in the early 1970s Paulson started his career working for a notorious man named John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s ruthless domestic adviser who created the Plumbers’ Unit during the Watergate era to silence opponents of the president, and was left by Nixon to ‘twist in the wind’ for it in prison. Paulson seems to have learned from his White House mentor. As co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, according to a New York Times account, in 1998 he forced out his co-chairman, Jon Corzine ‘in what amounted to a coup.’ It is becoming clear Paulson, and his friends at Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase, had a strategy, as did the godfather of asset backed securitization and deregulated banking, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, as I have detailed in my earlier series, Financial Tsunami, Parts I-V. Knowing that at a certain juncture the pyramid of trillions of dollars of dubious subprime and other high risk home mortgage-based securities would come falling down, they apparently determined to spread the so-called ‘toxic waste’ ABS securities as globally as possible, in order to seduce the big global banks of the world, most especially of the EU, into their honey trap. They had help. In recent testimony under oath by Eric Dinallo, the superintendent of the New York Insurance Departmen,t at the AIG bailout oversight hearing into the AIG rescue by Paulson, Dinallo said that funding cutbacks in recent years directed by the Bush-Cheney administration had reduced the responsible department that should regulate or watch over the $80 trillion in asset backed securities (ABS), which included the toxic subprime and Alt-A mortgage securities and much more. The Bush administration cut the staff of more than 100 people down to one -- yes that was not a typo. One as in ‘uno.’ Was that just ideological budget cutting fervor, or was it deliberate? Was former Goldman Sachs’ man, the man who convinced the president to hire Paulson, Bush’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Joshua Bolten, now the president’s chief of staff, responsible for insuring there was no effective government oversight of the exploding securitization of mortgage assets? These are perhaps some questions which the good congressmen ought to be asking people like Henry Paulson and Josh Bolten, and not such red herring questions as how large Richard Fuld’s bonus pay at Lehman was. Are Mr Bolten’s fingerprints on the corpse here? And why is no one questioning the role of Paulson as CEO of Goldman Sachs, then the most aggressive promoter of exotic and other asset backed securitization products on Wall Street? It now would appear that the Paulson strategy was to use a crisis -- a crisis that was pre-programmed and predictable as far back as 2003 when Josh Bolten became head of OMB -- when it exploded, to panic the more conservative European Union governments into rushing to the rescue of US toxic waste assets. Were that to have happened, it would in the process destroy what was left of sound EU banking and financial institutions, bringing the world one step closer to a global money market controlled by Paulson’s cronies -- US-style crony capitalism. Crony capitalism is certainly appropriate here. Paulson’s predecessor at both Goldman Sachs and at Treasury, Robert Rubin, liked to accuse the Asian bankers of Thailand, Indonesia and other lands hit with the speculative attacks of US-financed hedge funds in 1997 of ‘crony capitalism,’ leaving the impression the crisis was homegrown in Asia and not the result of a deliberate executed attack by US-financed financial institutions to eliminate the Asia Tiger model among other goals, and turn Asia into the funder of US debt. Interesting to note is that Rubin is now a director of Citigroup, obviously one of Paulson’s crony bank ‘survivors,’ and the bank which to date has had to write off the largest sum in toxic waste securitized assets. If the allegation of preplanned panic, a la the Panic of 1907, is accurate, and it is a big if, then the plan worked . . . up to a point. That point came over the weekend of October 3, coincidentally the national unification holiday of Germany breaks with In closed door talks well into the evening of Sunday October 5, Alex Weber the hard-nosed head of the Bundesbank, BaFin head Jochen Sanio and representatives of the Berlin coalition government of Chancellor Merkel came up with a rescue package for Hypo Real Estate of a nominal €50 billion. However, behind the dramatic headline number, as Weber pointed out in a September 29 letter to Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück that has been made public, not only did the private German banks have to come up with 60 percent of that figure, the state with 40 percent. But also, given the careful manner in which the government, in cooperation with the Bundesbank and BaFin, structured the rescue credit agreement, the maximum possible loss, in a worst case scenario, to the state would be limited to €5.7 billion, not €30 billion as many believed. It’s still real money but not the blank check for $700 billion that a US Congress under duress and a few days of falling stock market prices agreed to give Paulson. The swift action by Finance Minister Steinbrück to fire the head of HRE, in stark contrast to Wall Street where the same criminal fraudsters remain at their desks reaping huge bonuses, indicates as well a different approach. But that does not cut to the heart of the issue. The situation of HRE arose as noted previously, from excesses in a wholly-owned daughter bank of HRE subsidiary DEPFA in A British policy shift In the The government will buy preference shares from Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, Barclays Plc and at least six other banks, and provide about 250 billion pounds of loan guarantees to refinance debt, the Treasury said. The Bank of England will make at least 200 billion pounds available. The plan doesn’t specify how much each bank will get. That means the UK Government will at least partially nationalize its most important international banks, rather than buy their bad loans as under the unworkable Paulson plan. Under such an approach, costs to The new nationalization policy is a dramatic contrast to the Paulson ideological ‘free market’ approach of buying the worthless bonds held by the select banks Paulson chooses to save, rather than recapitalize those banks to allow them to continue to function. The battle lines drawn What has emerged are the outlines of two opposite approaches to the unfolding crisis. The Paulson plan is now clearly part of a project to create three colossal global financial giants -- Citigroup, JP MorganChase and, of course, Paulson’s own Goldman Sachs, now conveniently enough a bank. Having successfully used fear and panic to wrestle a $700 billion bailout from the By agreeing on a strategy of nationalizing what EU finance ministers deem are ‘EU banks too systemically strategic to fail,’ while guaranteeing bank deposits, the largest EU governments, Germany and the UK, in contrast to the US, have opted for what will in the longer run allow European banking giants to withstand the anticipated financial attacks from the likes of Goldman or Citigroup. The dramatic selloff of stocks across European bourses and across A functioning solvent banking and interbank system is far the more strategic issue. The ABS debacle was ‘Made in The coordinated interest rate cut by the ECB and other European central banks while grabbing headlines, in effect do little to address the real problem: banks fear to lend to each other until their solvency is assured. By initiating state partial nationalizations across the EU, and rejecting the Berlusconi/Sarkozy bailout scheme, the governments of the EU, interestingly enough this time led by the German, are laying a more sound foundation to emerge from the crisis. Stay tuned, it’s far from over. This is a fight for the survival of the American Century which has been built since 1939 on the twin pillars of American financial dominance and American military dominance -- Full Spectrum Dominance. Asian banks, badly burned by Wall Street’s manipulated 1997-98 Asia Crisis, are apparently very little exposed to the
By F. William Engdahl
Online Journal Contributing Writer
By MIKE WHITNEY
www.counterpunch.org/whitney10122008.html
Stock markets across the world are in a state of hysteria. The tidal wave of sell-offs, which began when Henry Paulson announced the Bush administration's $700 billion bailout plan for the sinking banking system, has swelled into a global tsunami racing round the globe. Shares fell sharply across Europe and Asia for the fifth straight day following a 679 drop on the Dow Jones. Nearly $900 billion was wiped off the value of U.S. equities in just one trading day. The Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, the "fear index", soared to a record 64. Credit markets remain frozen. Libor, the London interbank offered rate, nudged up slightly on Thursday night, signaling even greater resistance to lending between the banks. Until there is relief in the credit markets, stocks will continue to slide. But trust has vanished. The 50 basis points rate cut that was coordinated with foreign central banks has had no effect. The market is being driven by fear and pessimism.
White House press secretary, Dana Perino said Thursday that President Bush will address the country on Friday morning:
"He will assure the American people that they should be confident that economic officials are aggressively taking every action to stabilize our financial system. The Treasury Department is moving quickly to use new tools to improve liquidity, which is the root cause of this problem."
Bush still believes that the problem is "liquidity" rather than "insolvency". When liabilities vastly exceed assets, liquidity does not help. The bad banks need to be closed so the good ones can be strengthened with capital injections.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said, "Last month, when the U.S. Treasury Department allowed Lehman Brothers to fail, I wrote that Henry Paulson, the Treasury Secretary, was playing financial Russian roulette. Sure enough, there was a bullet in that chamber: Lehman’s failure caused the world financial crisis, already severe, to get much, much worse."
Lehman's credit default swaps, (the derivatives which Warren Buffett calls "financial weapons of mass destruction") are "unwound" on Friday. It could be a "non event" or it could trigger another sell off; it is impossible to know. If tens of billions of dollars are drained from already weakened balance sheets in counterparty deals that have turned sour, the market will react violently. Wall Street is on tenterhooks waiting for the news from Lehman.
There is general agreement among economists about what needs to be done to stabilize the financial system. The banks have to be recapitalized, all deposits have to be guaranteed (beyond the $100,000 FDIC limit) and additional stimulus has to be provided to increase consumer demand. Otherwise the United States is on the lip of another Great Depression. Too much time has been wasted on Paulson's failed bailout for G-Sax and his friends on Wall Street. Buying the bad assets of underwater banks does not fix the problem. The banks need capital so they can resume lending and transmit credit to consumers and businesses.
Former head of the FDIC, William Isaac, summed it up like this:
"I was opposed to the bailout bill, mostly because I don't think it will work. The banks -- taking $700 billion of bad loans out of the banks doesn't help get banks lending again. It just solves some problems in some banks. And it doesn't have any leverage to it. If the Treasury were to put that same $700 billion and used that to invest in bank capital, the banks can loan $10 for every dollar of capital, roughly, which means that the Treasury would be creating $7 trillion of new lending capacity in the banks. And that is vastly superior to buying $700 billion of problem loans. It just -- it will really give some punch to the economy. It will get banks back into the lending business..... And to do that we need to get some capital back in there."
Isaac added: "The other major thing they really need to do... They really need to have the FDIC declare that there is a financial emergency. And when the FDIC does that, the FDIC should announce that during this period of crisis, all general creditors, all depositors, insured and uninsured, bondholders in our banking system, will be protected if a bank fails. And that, I think, will get the inter -- the financial markets working again and get banks willing to loan to each other again."
Nearly one third of all deposits ($2.5 trillion) are not insured under present FDIC guidelines. If these deposits are not insured, as Isaac says, there will continue to be a slow run on the banks which is why the credit markets are paralyzed.
Much of this week's volatility in the market is the result of program trading (many sell orders were automatically executed when the Dow hit 9,000) and massive deleveraging in the hedge funds, the secretive $1.7 trillion industry. As credit gets tighter, the funds are unable to roll over their short-term debt and have been forced to dump their assets in an illiquid market at firesale prices. This explains the recent see-saw motion in the stock market; the huge 2 to 3 per cent intraday swings (positive/negative) This has added to the fear of smaller investors who have left the market in droves for the safety of US Treasuries or cash. That's why the dollar has strengthened even though the Federal Reserve is printing money at a furious pace. The inflationary effects will not be apparent until the destruction of credit abates.
The biggest danger we face, in the short term, is a run on the financial system. Calm must be restored if we want to avoid another depression. Investors have already pulled a record $72 billion from stock and mutual funds, and put the money in US Treasuries and government-insured bank deposits. If the trend continues, the financial system will collapse. This is where leadership and credibility really matter. The Bush administration's record on these issues is dismal. If the government overreacts and limits bank withdrawals or closes the stock market; the sense of desperation and panic will only grow. That increases the likelihood of rioting and violence, which is what took place in China just this week.
The falling stock market reflects the mood of the country as a whole. Confidence in the system has disappeared. The government has lost the moral authority to rule. People have lost faith in everything. Bush has created a tinder box which could explode in flames at any time. It is a dangerous situation.
The econo-blogs were abuzz all night Thursday. The prevailing feeling is that the Wall Street implosion marks the end of America's dominance as the lone superpower. As always, economist Nouriel Roubini provided a chilling analysis of the present financial malaise:
Nouriel Roubini:
"The US and advanced economies’ financial system is now headed towards a near-term systemic financial meltdown as day after day stock markets are in free fall, money markets have shut down while their spreads are skyrocketing, and credit spreads are surging through the roof. There is now the beginning of a generalized run on the banking system of these economies; a collapse of the shadow banking system... and now a roll-off of the short term liabilities of the corporate sectors that may lead to widespread bankruptcies of solvent but illiquid financial and non-financial firms.
“On the real economic side all the advanced economies...entered a recession even before the massive financial shocks that started in the late summer made the liquidity and credit crunch even more virulent and will thus cause an even more severe recession than the one that started in the spring. So we have a severe recession, a severe financial crisis and a severe banking crisis in advanced economies.
“At this point the risk of an imminent stock market crash – like the one-day collapse of 20 per cent plus in US stock prices in 1987 – cannot be ruled out as the financial system is breaking down, panic and lack of confidence in any counterparty is sharply rising and the investors have totally lost faith in the ability of policy authorities to control this meltdown....
“When markets that are clearly way oversold that even the most radical policy actions don’t provide rallies or relief to market participants, you know that you are one step away from a market crack and a systemic financial sector and corporate sector collapse. A vicious circle of deleveraging, asset collapses, margin calls, cascading falls in asset prices well below falling fundamentals and panic is now underway." (Nouriel Roubini's Global EconoMonitor)
There's a way forward but it will take a lot of digging out and a vision of the future that doesn't center on Wall Street.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com
CNBC hosts unable to grasp basic economic principles
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, October 10, 2008
Legendary investor Jim Rogers warned during a CNBC interview this morning that global central banks are creating the environment for an inflationary holocaust by their ceaseless overprinting of currency, a measure that isn’t even successful in stabilizing the stock market.
Rogers said that the only solution to the market crisis was to let failing banks and speculators go bankrupt and stop pumping endless amounts of liquidity into the system, labeling it outrageous that responsible investors and taxpayers are being made to bail out crooks on Wall Street.
“The way to solve this problem is to let people go bankrupt,” Rogers stressed, “All of this pumping money into the system is not going to save it - see what the market is saying, it’s saying we don’t buy that, let people go bankrupt,” he added.
“Then you will hit bottom and then you start over. The people who are sound will take over the assets from the people who aren’t sound and we will start over. This is the way the world has worked for a few thousand years,” said Rogers.
Rogers warned that the reliance on governments printing money would not aid a recovery and would only lead to the problem becoming worse in the future.
“We’re setting the stage for when we come out of this of a massive inflation holocaust,” he said.
Rogers said that excesses of credit and people becoming over-leveraged meant that they would now have to take some pain.
“Never before in world history were people able to buy houses with no money down, many people bought four or five houses with no money down and no job and then they did it with cars and student loans and credit card loans, you just think we say well that’s too bad we’re gonna start over nobody loses his job….be realistic,” said Rogers.
Rogers said that the G7 leaders, who are meeting this weekend, should “go down to the bar, have a beer and leave the rest of us alone, let the people who are sound succeed and let the other people fail.”
“What I’m afraid of is they’re gonna keep doing what they’ve been doing - which the market hates, you can see the market hates it - because this is going to unleash rampant inflation around the world, rampant confusion in the currency markets and you’re gonna have currencies gyrating all over the world,” said Rogers, repeating that the central bankers were unleashing an “inflationary holocaust”.
A CNBC expert then expressed his confusion at Rogers’ argument that overprinting of currency caused hyper inflation, seemingly displaying less grasp of basic economic cause and effect principles than a 5-year-old would.
Rogers again made the point, “When you print gigantic amounts of money and you flood the world with money, throughout history that has led to inflation.”
Watch the clip: www.youtube.com/watch
__________________________
www.prisonplanet.com/rogers-global-bankers-have-u nleashed-inflationary-holocaust.html
rawstory.com/news/2008/ABC_NSA_agents_admit_spyin g_on_1009.html
ABC: NSA agents admit spying on Americans' private calls
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Thursday October 9, 2008
The Bush administration has repeatedly defended its warrantless surveillance of Americans as being directed only against "people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations."
Now two intercept operators who worked for the National Security Agency at Fort Gordon in Georgia have come forward to tell ABC News that isn't true.
David Murfee Faulk described to ABC's Brian Ross how he had listened to "personal phone calls of American officers, mostly in the Green Zone [in Baghdad], calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses and sometimes their girlfriends."
"Co-workers of mine were ordered to transcribe these calls," Faulk stated. "When one of my co-workers went to a supervisor and said, 'But sir, these are personal calls,' the supervisor said, 'My orders were to transcribe everything.'"
Adrienne Kinne, who like Faulk is an Arab linguist, said she had received the same orders and had listened to hundreds of Americans in the Middle East simply calling home. She emphasized that these were "Americans who are not in any way, shape, or form associated with anything to do with terrorism. It was just personal conversations that really nobody else should have been listening to."
When asked about President Bush's statement that the intercepts were directed only at known al-Qaeda suspects, Kinne stated, "That is completely a lie." She said that military officers, journalists, and Red Cross workers were among the people whose calls she transcribed.
Faulk told ABC that certain calls were even passed around among the intercept operators like office jokes. "I was told, 'Hey, check this out, there's some good phone sex.' ... It was there, stored the way you'd look at songs on your iPod."
"I feel that was something the people should not have been doing, including me," Faulk acknowledged.
Both whistleblowers' stories are included in a new book by investigative reporter James Bamford, The Shadow Factory. Bamford told ABC that although Americans were told the surveillance program was needed to keep us safe, "What it turns out to be is for a more prurient reason, listening for the sake of listening and then laughing."
CIA Director Michael Hayden, who was previously head of the NSA, has issued a statement saying that "any suggestion General Hayden sanctioned or tolerated illegalities of any sort is ridiculous on its face."
More details are available from ABC here.
This video is from ABC's Good Morning America, broadcast October 9, 2008.
Attempts to succinctly explain banker bailout scam that Obama helped push through met with mindless bleating
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, October 9, 2008
www.prisonplanet.com/obama-sheeple-cheer-police-v iolation-of-free-speech.html
Police kicked protester Benjamin Harms off Belmont University campus this week before the presidential debate for the crime of “trespassing” as hundreds of mindless Obama supporters cheered the outright violation of free speech.
The protagonist’s attempts to succinctly explain the banker bailout scam - which Barack Obama has fully supported - in clear and concise terms was met with the mindless bleating of “Obama, Obama, Obama” - perfectly underscoring the vacuum of Obama’s empty platitudes of “change” and the deluded idolatry of his supporters.
“Obama and McCain are the same,” chanted another demonstrator as police and security thugs moved in to ensure that anyone that dared use their freedom of speech to communicate a real message was hastily ejected, while the Obama cult members were left completely alone to continue their pointless rhetoric.
“Kick him out, kick him out,” chanted the Obama-ites as the group tried to explain to the police the meaning of the first amendment.
“I am now being escorted away by police from the scene because I don’t have a right to free speech,” said Harms, to which the Obama crowd responded with whoops, cries and hollers of “yeeeeahhhh” in celebration of the fact that cops were crushing the first amendment.
“I have a right to speak my mind just like all of you do,” added Harms.
“They don’t like what I’m saying so I’m being escorted by the police off of the campus.”
Police threatened to arrest Harms and refused to tell him where the property line of the campus was. They were also unable to tell him why the use of a bullhorn was illegal, enforcing a claimed law of which they had no knowledge.
Watch the video clip: www.youtube.com/watch
Thousands of Troops Are Deployed on U.S. Streets Ready to Carry Out "Crowd Control"
Background: the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, three to four thousand soldiers, has been deployed in the United States as of October 1. Their stated mission is the form of crowd control they practiced in Iraq, subduing "unruly individuals," and the management of a national emergency. I am in Seattle and heard from the brother of one of the soldiers that they are engaged in exercises now. Amy Goodman reported that an Army spokesperson confirmed that they will have access to lethal and non lethal crowd control technologies and tanks.
George Bush struck down http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...>Posse Comitatus, thus making it legal for military to patrol the U.S. He has also legally established that in the "War on Terror," the U.S. is at war around the globe and thus the whole world is a battlefield. Thus the U.S. is also a battlefield.
He also led change to the 1807 Insurrection Act to give him far broader powers in the event of a loosely defined "insurrection" or many other "conditions" he has the power to identify. The Constitution allows the suspension of habeas corpus -- habeas corpus prevents us from being seized by the state and held without trial -- in the event of an "insurrection." With his own army force now, his power to call a group of protesters or angry voters "insurgents" staging an "insurrection" is strengthened.
U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman of California said to Congress, captured on C-Span and viewable on YouTube, that individual members of the House were threatened with martial law within a week if they did not pass the bailout bill:
"The only way they can pass this bill is by creating and sustaining a panic atmosphere. … Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill on Monday that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day and a couple of thousand on the second day, and a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no."
If this is true and Rep. Sherman is not delusional, I ask you to consider that if they are willing to threaten martial law now, it is foolish to assume they will never use that threat again. It is also foolish to trust in an orderly election process to resolve this threat. And why deploy the First Brigade? One thing the deployment accomplishes is to put teeth into such a threat.
I interviewed Vietnam veteran, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel and patriot David Antoon for clarification:
"If the President directed the First Brigade to arrest Congress, what could stop him?"
"Nothing. Their only recourse is to cut off funding. The Congress would be at the mercy of military leaders to go to them and ask them not to obey illegal orders."
"But these orders are now legal?'"
"Correct."
"If the President directs the First Brigade to arrest a bunch of voters, what would stop him?"
"Nothing. It would end up in courts but the action would have been taken."
"If the President directs the First Brigade to kill civilians, what would stop him?"
"Nothing."
"What would prevent him from sending the First Brigade to arrest the editor of the Washington Post?"
"Nothing. He could do what he did in Iraq -- send a tank down a street in Washington and fire a shell into the Washington Post as they did into Al Jazeera, and claim they were firing at something else."
"What happens to members of the First Brigade who refuse to take up arms against U.S. citizens?"
"They'd probably be treated as deserters as in Iraq: arrested, detained and facing five years in prison. In Iraq a study by Ann Wright shows that deserters -- reservists who refused to go back to Iraq -- got longer sentences than war criminals."
"Does Congress have any military of their own?"
"No. Congress has no direct control of any military units. The Governors have the National Guard but they report to the President in an emergency that he declares."
"Who can arrest the President?"
"The Attorney General can arrest the President after he leaves or after impeachment."
[Note: Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has asserted it is possible for District Attorneys around the country to charge President Bush with murder if they represent districts where one or more military members who have been killed in Iraq formerly resided.]
"Given the danger do you advocate impeachment?"
"Yes. President Bush struck down Posse Comitatus -- which has prevented, with a penalty of two years in prison, U.S. leaders since after the Civil War from sending military forces into our streets -- with a 'signing statement.' He should be impeached immediately in a bipartisan process to prevent the use of military forces and mercenary forces against U.S. citizens"
"Should Americans call on senior leaders in the Military to break publicly with this action and call on their own men and women to disobey these orders?"
"Every senior military officer's loyalty should ultimately be to the Constitution. Every officer should publicly break with any illegal order, even from the President."
"But if these are now legal. If they say, 'Don't obey the Commander in Chief,' what happens to the military?"
"Perhaps they would be arrested and prosecuted as those who refuse to participate in the current illegal war. That's what would be considered a coup."
"But it's a coup already."
"Yes."
See more stories tagged with: war on terror, amy goodman, vincent bugliosi, u.s. constitution, posse comitatus, 1807 insurrection act, rep. brad sherman
Naomi Wolf is the author of Give Me Liberty (Simon and Schuster, 2008), the sequel to the New York Times best-seller The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green, 2007).
While mainstream corporate media lied to Americans claiming economy was strong, we were warning about a “global crash” and a faux solution of “predatory globalism” nearly two years in advance
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
http://www.prisonplanet.com...
The global economic crisis and the centralization of power that would be implemented under the pretext of fixing it were predicted by this website as well as regular guests who appeared on The Alex Jones Show for the past three years-plus.
This compilation is not an attempt to blow our own trumpet and say “we told you so,” we were merely warning about the obvious consequences of what was unfolding as well as shining a light on what the elite were saying behind closed doors.
It is offered, however, as a reminder of the fact that while the mainstream corporate media were lying to the American people in continually claiming “the economy was strong,” we were pointing out that the foundation of the financial system was crumbling to the ground, leading to the chaos that we see ensuing today.
Global Crash & Solution Of “Predatory World Government” Predicted By This Website In December 2006
In this article, we predicted the continued devaluation of the U.S. dollar, which occurred over the course of the next 18 months and an eventual “global crash” that would lead to the implementation of measures of predatory globalism to “solve the crisis”.
As talking heads on corporate media networks were blissfully parroting each other in their mantra that the economy was doing great, we predicted a “Meltdown that the cavalier and dangerous financial policies of the U.S. government….will inevitably engender.”
The call for a centralized world system of financial control, which has now been proposed, was one of the measures of “predatory globalism” that we warned about nearly two years before the bubble burst.
UN’s Promise to ‘Save The World’ In Return For Global Economic Governance (February 2006)
In February 2006, we reported that the The UN demanded the creation of a $7 trillion body to enforce co-operation between countries, applied through six specific financial tools. The price? “An admission that the nation-state is an old-fashioned concept that has no role to play in a modern globalised world where financial markets have to be harnessed rather than simply condemned.”
The London Telegraph reported today that, “Opinion is now hardening around the case for a new global architecture to enforce rules that ensure lessons are learnt.”
Bilderberg member and recently appointed UK Business Secretary Peter Mandelson argued last week that new global solutions are needed because “the machinery of global economic governance barely exists”, adding: “It is time for a Bretton Woods for this century.”
Influential media giants like the Wall Street Journal are pushing a “new world order” to solve the crisis, while British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a “a new global financial order” to supersede the institutions created after World War II.
The elite were waiting to burst the bubble so they could implement the process of global centralization of banking power that they had planned all along.
Correctly Predicting Spike In Oil 2 Years Beforehand
In this article, written in May 2005, we correctly foresaw the dramatic rise in oil prices in order to fulfil Bilderberg’s agenda of a “post-industrial revolution”. We didn’t have a crystal ball - Daniel Estulin and others got the information straight from the horses mouth - the Bilderberg Group.
In a follow up article on the same subject in September 2007 we predicted, “A global economic crash” that would “torpedo the middle class”. We also predicted “A global economic crash, another great depression and the total evisceration of the middle class.”
Predicting The Decline Of The Pound & Euro
In November 2007, when the pound and the Euro were touching all time highs against the ailing dollar, we predicted that the “Euro and the pound (would) follow the dollar’s descent over the next two years as Europe is impacted by the economic tsunami of stagflation and recession in the U.S.”
Today, gold hit all time highs in denominations of pound sterling and Euro, highlighting the dramatic fall in the two currencies that we predicted nearly a year ago at a time when they were both thriving.
In the same article we warned of “A global financial meltdown” that would take place “despite the desperate efforts of the elite (the bailout) to restrain a horse that has already bolted.”
Ron Paul Predicts Stock Market Crash On Alex Jones Show
In August 2007, Ron Paul, speaking on the Alex Jones Show, dismissed the Fed’s efforts to pump liquidity into the system and predicted a stock market crash.
Paul said “If in 6 months or a year there is total chaos who knows what they might try to do,” speaking in relation to the possibility that martial law may be announced to curb riots if a depression ensues. Congress members were threatened with physical martial law last week after they refused to pass the bailout bill at the first time of asking.
Roberts Predicts Breakdown
In January, Paul Craig Roberts predicted a “real serious breakdown” of the global economy as a result of the overissuance of dollars and the Fed pumping liquidity into the markets.
January Warning Of “Financial Train Wreck”
Also in January we warned that the stock market was grossly overvalued due to the ceaseless inflation of the dollar and that a “financial train wreck” would arrive unless Yuppies opted for a soft landing immediately.
“Facing the reality of the fact that the stock market is grossly overvalued due to the weakness of the dollar and is due a severe correction seems impossible to accept for the yuppies who have buried their heads in the sand and consumed establishment propaganda that the economy was “in good shape” for the past three years,” we wrote, adding that Bernanke and Paulson had instead chosen to “pillage America for their own crooked agenda” which would lead to “economic chaos and a possible depression”.
The pillaging has now begun with the ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs being appointed to oversee the banker bailout.
The Yuppies who e-mailed us at the start of the year, mocking our pessimistic outlook, are probably a little less jovial today after the Dow dropped another 200 points, adding to the 777 point dive on September 29th and the 875 point collapse at the start of this week.
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 3:47 PM on 07th October 2008
Icesave customers were beginning to panic after the internet bank stopped savers withdrawing their cash.
Customers hoping to access their account were met with a message on the bank's website this morning which said that Icesave was not 'currently processing any deposits or withdrawal requests'.
There was no explanation for the move but it comes as Iceland's government grappled with a major crisis in its banking sector.
Click photo to enlarge: The message on the Icesave website this morning stating that customers were no longer able to make withdrawals or deposits
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Steve, 48, a self-employed textile management agent from Derby, tried to transfer a total of £12,000 from two Icesave accounts to another bank account this morning after learning of the nationalisation, and was worried the transfer would not go through.
His wife had £10,500 in an Easy Savings account and £1,500 in an ISA at Icesave.
He said: 'My wife and I need to pay up to £12,000 for renovations on our bungalow next week and I have no idea if we'll be able to access our money to do so.
'I've been panicking this morning and I can't concentrate on my work. I just keep checking all the websites and forums to try and find out the latest.
'I'm worried we'll lose all the money if the Icelandic government doesn't have enough in its coffers to guarantee everyone's savings.'
Another customer, a 28-year-old woman with ISA savings of £6,300 in Icesave, was also concerned she would be unable to access her money if she needed to.
She said: 'I decided to put my savings there because it offered the best deal - the best interest rate.
Other customers were trying to put on a brave face.
Andy Bloice, 42, from Northamptonshire, who works in management at a supermarket chain, has between £3,000 and £4,000 across two Icesave accounts.
He said: 'I know I'll get my money back but I'm spreading my money around between different banks.
'I'm not desperately worried because I don't urgently need my cash at the moment.
'But I am concerned about the culture of panic that leads people to rush to withdraw all their funds.'
This morning Iceland used emergency powers adopted on Monday to dismiss the board of directors of Landsbanki, the bank that owns Icesave, and put the bank into receivership.
'Landsbanki would like to stress that the bank has not been put into liquidation but is in receivership which gives it a temporary protection from payment of debts and obligations as they fall due,' the bank said in a statement.
The notice on the Icesave website read: 'We are not currently processing any deposits or any withdrawal requests through our Icesave internet accounts.
'We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause our customers. We hope to provide you with more information shortly.'
More than 300,000 British investors in the internet bank Icesave were unable to make any deposits or withdrawals from their accounts.
Debenhams and Oasis are owned by retail investor Baugur. Kaupthing, one of Iceland's three main banks, is a prime mover in Baugur
Angry customers wrote on MailOnline's sister website , thisismoney.co.uk about their situation.
Justin Smith, an IT consultant from West London, said: 'I feel confused and badly informed by Icesave - there has been no direct communication from the firm and now I am unable to withdraw my life savings, with no idea on what happens from here.
'I only recently transferred all my ISA savings to the bank, attracted by high interest rates and guarantees and now I am facing the prospect of having to go through the painful process of claiming back from two governments and the possibility of losing my ISA tax wrapper on nearly 10 years' of savings.'
If Icesave is declared insolvent, British customers with sole accounts will be able to reclaim up to £50,000 and those with joint accounts are protected up to £100,000.
But the payouts are complicated by the fact that the Icelandic scheme would pay the first 20,887 euros (£16,170) people lost, with the FSCS topping up the rest.
If the Icelandic scheme was unable to cope with the scale of the payouts, other Nordic compensation schemes would step in as part of a reciprocal agreement the countries have.
The move from the Reykjavik government followed a day of frantic activity which saw financial shares in the country suspended and the currency plummet by a third.
Worried British customers of Icesave were unable to access their accounts yesterday after its website crashed.
Some were informed they faced a wait of 'several hours' before they could access their money. Those ringing its phonelines were told that the bank was receiving 'unprecedented call volumes'.
The internet bank insists it has ample reserves to pay back UK customers.
However, it admitted savers had been reducing their balances to the compensation level.
Iceland's slide towards national bankruptcy has left a huge shadow hanging over some of the best-known names on Britain's high street.
Businesses ranging from Hamleys to French Connection have all been bought up or backed by Icelandic firms in a remarkable spending spree over the past decade.
As the Icelandic government desperately wrestles with the biggest financial crisis in the country's history, tens of thousands of employees wait anxiously to see if their jobs are secure.
So far one Icelandic bank - Glitnir, the country's third biggest - has had to be rescued and five others are under the close supervision of the government. About 300,000 British savers have deposits with Icelandic banks such as Kaupthing and Landsbanki.
Last night retail conglomerate Baugur, the most aggressive Icelandic corporate raider, issued a statement aimed at reassuring staff, banks and suppliers.
It said the crisis, which has given Iceland the unenviable status of the developed world's first "sub-prime" economy, would have no direct impact on its roster of British retailers.
The company said most of its funding came from international, not Icelandic banks, and the businesses were trading well. Baugur added:
'What is happening in Iceland will not flow into the UK high street as some people have tried to speculate and will not lead to a forced sale of assets.'
However, in the current febrile climate any Icelandic connection is being viewed with suspicion by the credit and financial markets.
Baugur has already been hit by the withdrawal of trade credit insurance cover for its suppliers following the collapse of Glitnir last week.
Today the Icelandic authorities prepared to take unprecedented action after emergency legislation was passed late last night. With a population of just 300,000, a national economy of £11 billion but foreign debts of almost £80 billion, the Scandinavian island is in grave danger of national insolvency.
In an address to the nation, prime minister Geir Haarde said the country's top financial-regulator will have wide-ranging authority to dictate a bank's operations and could even force it to merge with another firm or declare bankruptcy.
In an address to the Reykjavik parliament, the prime minister raised the spectre of a complete financial collapse if the Bill had not been agreed.
He said: 'We were faced with the real possibility that the national economy would be sucked into the global banking swell and end in national bankruptcy. The legislation is necessary to avoid that fate."
Yesterday the Icelandic crown had shed 30 per cent of its value in a day to a record low exchange rate of 230 to the euro. In the wake of the currency fall, inflation in the country, which is heavily dependent on imports, is set to rocket.
In a further blow for the once thriving economy, Iceland's national debt was last night downgraded from A- to BBB status by the Standard & Poor's credit rating agency, leaving it perilously close to 'junk' status.
Angry consumers today accused Icesave of using high interest rates to tempt people to handover their money to shore up the group.
Consumer websites were littered with comments from people who had money saved with the group and were worried about when they would get it back.
They also expressed outrage that the Icelandic government had promised to guarantee the money of domestic savers, but not that of people in the UK.
A forum on the issue on MoneySavingExpert.com had received more than 1,500 posts by lunchtime today.
E.G. Callagan, of the West Midlands, said on Thisismoney.co.uk: 'They have tempted us with higher interest rates and now they go and do this.
'Shame on the Icelandic government, they should be guaranteeing the safety of our savings as well as their own nationals.'
Mike, of Battle, said on Thisismoney.co.uk: 'How can the Icelandic Government possibly guarantee the savings of its domestic investors to the detriment of the UK customers?
'Surely we must all be treated the same. Is this a case of robbing Peter (in the UK) to pay Paul (in Iceland). Surely this has to be illegal under international banking law.
'Will the new owners of the bank pay off their own citizens and then leave all the others to claim under the much lower compensation scheme?'
Justin Smith, an IT consultant from West London, said: 'I feel confused and badly informed by Icesave - there has been no direct communication from the firm and now I am unable to withdraw my life savings, with no idea on what happens from here.
'I only recently transferred all my ISA savings to the bank, attracted by high interest rates and guarantees and now I am facing the prospect of having to go through the painful process of claiming back from two governments and the possibility of losing my ISA tax wrapper on nearly 10 years' of savings.'
Watch the late Aaron Russo film, AMERICA FREEDOM TO FASCISM
RIP Aaron Russo
February 14, 1943 - August 24, 2007
Aaron, you changed America with your presence, you have awoken millions to the truth, we will finish the game.
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Outing the Constitutional Criminals
www.populistamerica.com/outing_the_constitutional _criminals
An Analysis and Review of Aaron Russo's Film, America: Freedom to Fascism
We'll talk some details. But, in the last analysis, Aaron Russo's 2006 film, "America: Freedom to Fascism" is a force of nature. It rips through the secret society corruption culture's history, from 1913 on.
Aaron Russo's film is a deal-breaker. The deal -- the social compact between Americans and their secretly-fascist-since-1913 national government -- will be broken for most ethically normal Americans at the film's first viewing. The Russo-shepherded truths are self-evident.
Russo has outed the constitutional criminals and class-war slavers of the US-national-govt / private-central-banks partnership. And he's done it in such a way as to present one of the first coherent-whole, high-impact pictures of their sneak-thief moves against Americans.
"America: Freedom to Fascism" is available in hi-Q DVD and pay-per-view. It's also available for free viewing online through lower-Q Google Video. In its "final cut", it runs 1 hour, 49 minutes, and some change. Go to Russo's site at --
http://www.freedomtofascism...
and scroll down through the list of options. Free viewing is at "Watch the Movie Online". Just click on "Go". Or, of course, you can purchase it and support Mr. Russo's work.
Less than two minutes into the film, Russo has nailed together the events of the unconstitutional personal income tax (February 1913 fraudulent ratification of the insufficient 16th Amendment) and the unconstitutional Federal Reserve (December 1913 illegal delegation of one of Congress' essential legislative functions -- the coining and valuing of money).
Money from the "voluntary compliance" personal income tax pays toward the national debt that the usury of the Federal Reserve stacks against the nation in daily windrows.
The Federal Reserve usury is like a giant magnifier for the superrich. Its treasonous "fractional reserve" hocus pocus creates indebtedness with every dollar created and loaned. The lawful counterfeiting of unsecured "fiat" money out of thin air -- horrendously unconstitutional -- multiplies the money supply ad nauseum, automatically reducing the value of the dollar while it creates automatic inflation. Every dollar created out of thin air has its bogus and usurous "interest rate" attached (read, "usury fee"), drawing very real compound interest. The overall effect is one of superprofits to the superrich private bankers who own the Federal Reserve -- an ownership list that is as secret as is the amount of currency in the money supply -- and daily increases of power within the Federal Reserve to go right on magnifying its profits and power.
The purpose of the personal income tax is to redistribute wealth upward and to control the civil society. The purpose of the Federal Reserve is to redistribute the wealth upward and to control the civil society. The receivers of the redistributed wealth and the controllers of the society are the private owners of the Federal Reserve -- not the government.
The timing of the secret societies' income tax and Federal Reserve machinations is no mystery. It was the Reform Era. We the sovereign people were demanding state-level citizen lawmaking to end the Gilded Age's Robber Baron corruptions. By December 1913, citizens in seventeen states had rammed direct democracy down the elitist throats of their state constitutions, and it looked like there would be many more. We were on the brink of a new political dynamic that could shut down all of the elites' corruption machines. Courts across the country, including SCOTUS, had rejected the elites' arguments and ruled citizen lawmaking intrinsic to the Constitution. We were scaring the hell out of the murderous elites. The only answer to their corrupt situation was more corruption.
For days after my first viewing of "Freedom to Fascism", my mind continually replayed Russo's quote from Paul Warburg, member of the Council on Foreign Relations and architect of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. The quote is from Warburg's speech to the US Senate, 17 February 1950: "We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether world government will be achieved by conquest or consent".
Predator elitism's strategies for world government have been clear to them since the 1694 founding of the first central bank, the Bank of England. The authors of the Constitution knew and despised usurous central banks. They did everything they could to ensure that no such creature would ever hold power in the US. Surprise. Since the 1913 founding of the Federal Reserve, the intentions of the Constitution's authors have been the laughing stock of the secret societies from Skull and Bones, to the CFR, to the Trilateral Commission, to the Bilderberg Group. Americans are way out on the edge of the near-future Owellian world government.
The central bankers knew, from their approx 220 years experience with the Bank of England and other European central banks prior to 1913, that American indebtedness would grow so large that the central bankers would eventually own the American nation.
Has that happened? We have (1) a national debt of $8.6 trillion, (2) the value of the dollar reduced to 4 cents in 1930 dollar-value by the continual inflation of the Fed's unsecured currency watering down dollar value by continual increases of the money supply, (3) the Bush-Cheney package of tax cuts for the multinational, stateless superrich helping to skyrocket the national debt, (4) the absurd, unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous war in Iraq helping to skyrocket the national debt, while it provides war profiteering for the central bankers who finance it, with their phoney "interest" usury added on, (5) corporate taxation at an all-time low, and corporate tax evasion at an all-time high, helping to skyrocket the national debt, (6) a back-door, undebated, and undeliberated "Real ID Act" effective May 2008 -- attached as a rider to a May 2005 funding bill for the Iraq war by the "Conference Committee" (one of the most evil, stupid, anti-democracy, and unAmerican corruption machines in the national government) -- set to turn us into a very real police state for the benefit of money-power in May 2008, and (7) the fascist leaders of the US, Canada, and Mexico -- unchecked by their civil societies -- about to use the media-hushed and secretive North American Union to reduce our three nations to the slave pool that the EU "Constitution" nearly achieved in Europe last summer, and to replace the dollar with the central bankers' Canusmex currency, the Amero, in the process.
Do the central bankers own our nation? Russo thinks so. Most of his film is about the details of that ownership. And the more details he lays on, the more persuasive his sustained argument is.
Near film's end, he gives a 1991 quote from David Rockefeller, a member of predator elitism's Council on Foreign Relations. It trumpets the criminal CFR's secrecy, national ownership, and world-governing arrogance.
"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years.
"It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years.
"But now the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government.
"The supra national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."
I'm doomed to fail the CFR sophistication test. I'm convinced that the elites want to take away our rights, freedoms, and liberties to cut their costs, increase their profits, make their power over us predictable and safe, and turn our children into corporate zombies with short and miserable lives. There is no group of them that I'm willing to trust with the time of day, let alone the governance decisions that will rule human life worldwide. I'm unfit for their world. They'll just have to kill me.
As such thoughts sink in and spread because of Russo's work, Americans will become more and more combative. We didn't come all this way to be gang-banged by a bunch of prissy superrich. The unconstitutional IRS wreckage of American lives like those of Joe Louis, Willie Nelson, and John Colaprete will beg vengeance. The unconstitutional wreckage of our rights, freedoms, and liberties under the 3-branch, Bush-Cheney fascist despotism will beg vengeance. There is a new wall-slamming, smash-mouth American politics coming.
In the first two minutes of film, Russo has already said that US Secretary of State Philander Knox fraudulently certified the 16th Amendment's ratification. Because of this fraud, Russo says, the American people were led to believe that there was a legitimate, graduated tax on their labor and wages, when there was not.
Per several SCOTUS rulings since, the 16th Amendment granted no new taxation power. Constitutionally, we still have only indirect taxes, which are avoidable and must apply nationwide (excise tax is an example), and direct taxes, which are unavoidable and must be spread equally among the people ("apportioned" in tax jargon). The "graduated", unapportioned, direct income tax, Russo and many of his conmmentators argue, is as unconstitutional today as it was the day after its fraudulent ratification in 1913.
The fraudulent ratification of the 16th Amendment is a minimum-mention item. Go for the evidence.
The evidence shows that, instead of the approving 36 states required for and certified by Know, there were only two -- two -- state ratifications that were constitutionally and legally valid (if the minor defects of spelling, capitalization, and punctualization are ignored).
As the evidence is examined, it becomes clear that Knox knew, or should have known, that he was certifying many invalid ratifications as genuine ratificaitons. The prima facie case for intentional fraud in Knox's certification is overwhelming. See especially, the synopsis of William Benson's research on the We the People web site; William Benson's own site, The Law That Never Was; and the expanded Benson research -- with defects chart -- on Political Resources
To point the viewer at a recent piece of 16th Amendment evidence, Russo quotes US District Judge James C. Fox in a 2003 ruling: "If you ... examined [the 16th Amendment] carefully, you would find that a sufficient number of states never ratified that amendment".
Judge Fox's quoted statement can be found on page 23 of the ruling's 26 pages. The ruling was in Sullivan v. U.S., 03-CV-39, US District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, Wilmington, 21 March 2003. (Most readers will find the entire ruling riveting. Colonel Sullivan had asked for the court's injunction against the US invasion of Iraq, arguing in depth that the president does not have the constitutional power to declare war, that only the Congress has that power, and that it was unconstitutional for Congress to delegate that power to the president. The hearing was held one day after the invasion formally began.)
There is nothing about Judge Fox's ruling that is out-of-context with the case that Russo is making against government and private corporation unconstitutionalities.
Judge Fox used the invalid ratification of the 16th Amendment as an example to argue that some parts of the Constitution are in there because of long-term usage, despite those parts' being properly unconstitutional. Judge Fox comments that no federal court will throw out the 16th Amendment, no matter what evidence of its improper ratification is brought, precisely because of its long-term use.
It is exactly that federal bench motiff -- that nothing be done about past unconstitutionalities -- that Russo rightfully attacks throughout his film.
David Cay Johnston of the NY Times provides a pro-elites review of "Freedom to Fascism". Under a mile-high headline that says, "Facts Refute Filmaker's Assertions on Income Tax in America", Johnston asserts that "every court that has ever ruled on those issues has upheld the constitutionality of the income tax".
Whoa. Russo's commentators provide eight SCOTUS decisions that squash the constitutionality of the income tax. Those SCOTUS decisions ruled that the 16th Amendment gave no new power of taxation, and did not alter the restrictions on taxation given in the Constitution. Equals unconstitutional income tax every time.
In fact, as the constitutionality argument unpacks, Russo documents that nobody in the IRS, from top to bottom, is willing to go on-camera to discuss the issue. He gets a former IRS Commissioner (Sheldon Cohen) on camera only to have him assert that SCOTUS rulings are "inapplicable" to the tax code. And he shows that lower federal courts continually bar SCOTUS decisions from being brought as evidence.
For example, US District Judge Dawson (presiding over his railroaded conviction of author Irwin Schiff) is quoted as saying, "I will not allow the law in my court room". He rejects SCOTUS rulings as "irrelevant". And he tells the jury, "You must follow the law as I give it to you". Schiff was convicted on Dawson's enforcement of jury ignorance.
Russo's material shows conclusively that no recent or lower court that has ever ruled on the constitutionality of the income tax is to be trusted. The juries that get the text of the law safely acquit the defendant. The judges are pro-elites mouthpieces who force convictions whenever they can. They are not about to rule against the cash cow that has financed the corruption machines since 1913.
And then NY Times towering giant Johnston writes: "... Mr. Russo says in the film that the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified and thus a tax on wages is unconstitutional. This claim has been made in various forms by thousands of tax protesters since 1913, and so far their batting average with the courts is .000."
Pretty twisted stuff. The issue bearing on guilty/not-guilty is not the use by thousands of 16th Amendment unconstitutionality. The issue bearing on guilty/not-guilty is whether there is a law requiring US citizens to file an income tax return. "Show me the law", defendant Harrell says in open court, and he will gladly pay his tax. "Show me the law" is the centerpiece throughout the film's IRS seqment. IRS officials and judges go dark. No lights on. Nobody home.
Russo asks Harrell-case juror Marcy Brooks why officials don't just show the law. Ms Brooks replies, "Because there is no law."
Russo wades through the recent juries' not-guilty verdicts for Whitey Harrell, Vernice Kuglin, Franklin Sanders (along with his twenty-three co-defendants) and former-IRS-agent-gone-truth-rogue Joe Banister. Against that back-drop of acquitals, he shows a recent video clip of former IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti saying: "When the matter is put to the test, which means in terms of court and enforcement action, there is a hundred percent success rate in shooting down these arguments".
NYT Johnston's zero batting average for tax protestors and IRS Rossotti's hundred percent success rate in shooting down anti-income-tax arguments have a suspicious similarity. But neither have a factual basis.
David Cay Johnston's pseudo-facts crash and burn against his mile-high headline.
With this film, the IRS hierarchy, the Federal Reserve and their international central banking cabal, the Congress, and the predator elites' secret societies have already lost. However, given their nine-plus decades of arrogant, anti-Constitution winning, only a wall-slamming, smash-mouth American politics will convince them of their loss. Murderers do not stop murdering until they are stopped. And make no mistake, those people are psychopathic murderers anytime it means secret profits.
Ethically normal Americans, who will like the Russo film, will suddenly understand the culture of corruption in which Bush is immersed as he shouts that the Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper. Insider Bush, Empire prince of the blood, secret society predator from frat-boy "Skull and Bones" to king of the world in the boss-of-bosses secret society, the "Bilderberg Group", would see the Constitution from the corruption culture's point of view. From that point of view, the Constitution is just a godddamned piece of paper.
The corruption culture's point of view is alien to ethically normal Americans -- until they see the Russo film. Then the corruption culture's point of view crashes home.
For US elected officials who pretend that there is anything about our national fascist despotism that is politics-as-usual until the IRS and Federal Reserve racketeering frauds are repealed, watch your six. Something's going to be gaining on you. There is a new smash-mouth American politics coming. (See especially the "Unity America" action plan in "Open Letter to Susan--Making Bush-Cheney Null & Void", on this site.)
The specter of a Constitution-regaining, bloody revolution/civil-war is looming larger and closer.
Fed May See Companies, States as Next Crisis Fronts
By Scott Lanman and John Brinsley
Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke may find the next fronts of the financial crisis to be just as chilling as last month's downfall of Wall Street titans: its spread to corporate America and state and local governments.
Companies from Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. and Duke Energy Corp. to Gannett Co. and Caterpillar Inc. are being forced to tap emergency credit lines or pay more to borrow as investors flee even firms with few links to the subprime-mortgage debacle. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says his and other states may need emergency federal loans as funding dries up.
A cash crunch on Main Street would endanger companies' basic functions -- paying suppliers, making payrolls and rolling over debt. The widening of the crisis suggests that Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson may have further fires to put out even as the Treasury sets up the $700 billion financial- industry rescue plan approved last week.
``The rest of the economy is clearly being affected right now by the tightness of credit,'' said Kurt Karl, chief U.S. economist at Swiss Reinsurance Co. in New York. ``It's just gathering momentum in the wrong direction.''
Bernanke announced new moves today aimed at easing the lending crunch. The Fed will double its auctions of cash to banks to as much as $900 billion and is considering further steps to unfreeze short-term lending markets.
The market for commercial paper, which typically matures in 270 days or less and is used to help pay for expenses such as payroll and rent, shrank to a three-year low of $1.6 trillion in the week to Oct. 1, Fed data show.
Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper publisher, said Oct. 1 it drew on a revolving credit line to ensure it had funds to repay its commercial paper.
Duke, Caterpillar
Duke Energy, the owner of utilities in five U.S. states, last week tapped about $1 billion from a $3.2 billion credit agreement after concluding it may not be able to meet its plan for new financing. Caterpillar, the biggest maker of earthmoving equipment, had to pay the biggest premiums over Treasuries in at least three decades at a sale of five-year and 10-year notes.
``Credit is the lubricant that oils the engine of the economy'' and if it dries up ``then the engine seizes up,'' said Republican Representative Michael Conaway of Texas, who switched his vote last week to support the financial rescue. The inability of a major corporation to renew its short-term loans would have ``a devastating impact on the economy.''
Even as confidence grew that Congress would pass the bailout, banks hoarded cash, indicating the proposed purchases of devalued mortgage assets may not be able to stop the credit crunch from widening.
No `Quick Turnaround'
``It's not going to solve all the problems, and don't expect a quick turnaround,'' said Mickey Levy, chief economist at Bank of America Corp. in New York. ``This is the typical time of the credit cycle where banks are tightening lending standards.''
Corporate bond sales shrank to $1.25 billion last week, capping the worst four-week slump since 1999.
Lending between banks is also seizing up. The gap between the three-month London interbank offered rate and the overnight indexed swap rate, a gauge of cash scarcity among banks, climbed to a record 2.80 percentage points three days ago.
Republican Representative Jerry Moran of Kansas, in an interview with Bloomberg Television, encouraged the Fed to consider guaranteeing loans between banks.
``We will continue to use all of the powers at our disposal to mitigate credit-market disruptions,'' Bernanke said in a statement Oct. 3. He delivers a speech on the economy tomorrow.
Fed Powers
The central bank has power to extend credit to any company under ``unusual and exigent circumstances.'' It already used that authority this year to avert the failure of Bear Stearns Cos., take over American International Group Inc. and lend to banks to shore up money-market funds. The Treasury last month set up a program selling debt to help the Fed expand its balance sheet.
Investors anticipate the Fed will cut rates in an attempt to lower borrowing costs and encourage banks to lend. Futures prices show 100 percent odds of a half-point reduction in the 2 percent benchmark rate at or before the Oct. 28-29 policy meeting.
State and local governments having trouble meeting cash needs may push for help. Schwarzenegger told Paulson in an Oct. 2 letter that California and other states ``may be forced to turn to the federal Treasury for short-term financing'' if the crisis doesn't ease.
``If states can't access the credit markets because of market conditions, then the Treasury should consider providing it,'' said Ben Watkins, a member of the debt committee of the Government Finance Officers Association, a group of public finance officials.
Services Endangered
Without funding, states ``can't operate the health-care system, schools, roads and other services they provide,'' said Watkins, who also serves as head of Florida's bond sales.
Market disruptions forced Oregon to cancel a $21 million sale of bonds for the state university system and several other planned issues are in jeopardy, State Treasurer Randall Edwards said. ``There's really no market, there's no buyers out there,'' Edwards said.
State and local government funding ``has to be a concern for Bernanke and Paulson,'' said Adam Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. ``There are two issues now: stop the immediate panic and restructure the financial system.''
Those aren't the only areas Fed and Treasury officials may be concerned about.
Since 2005, New York Fed President Timothy Geithner has been pushing to reduce risks in the $54.6 trillion credit-default swaps market. Concerns rose after the Fed had to rescue AIG with an $85 billion loan to cover obligations at a unit that sold protection against debt default.
``We're not at the end of the line yet,'' said former Fed Governor Lyle Gramley, now senior economic adviser at Stanford Group Co. in Washington.
To contact the reporter on this story: Scott Lanman in Washington at slanman@bloomberg.net; John Brinsley in Washington at jbrinsley@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: October 6, 2008 10:24 EDT
Texas Congressman Ron Paul has warned that the amended bailout legislation that passed Congress on Friday is not only far worse than the original bill but is also unconstitutional.
Paul speaking just minutes after leaving the floor of the House on Friday, explained that the tax portion of the bill was written by the Senate, when under the Constitution only the House can originate tax bills.
“That in itself was unconstitutional but it’s been done before and it will be done again.” The Congressman said.
Paul highlighted that the passage of the bill defied logic because it was even worse than the original rejected version:
“It’s amazing, you take a very very bad bill, appropriating $700 billion, you can’t get enough votes to pass it so you take it back out, you make it much worse and take it up to over $800 billion.” Paul commented.
“Today is an even sadder day that on Monday,” Paul stated, “Here today when the special interests got their two cents in, or their $10 million worth of lobbying in, the members switched their vote.”
The Congressman decried the fact that 57 members, mostly so called conservatives, switched their votes on Friday. He urged that those who have destroyed the economy and our freedoms not be allowed to dictate how the system is rebuilt in America.
Paul also compared the economic situation to that of the Soviet Union in 1989, urging that the current economic meltdown stems from empire building foreign policy, and that we are now dealing with the bankruptcy of the United States.
Watch Ron Paul’s reaction to the passage of the bailout: www.youtube.com/watch
Earlier in the day Ron Paul had taken the floor in the House to express his opposition to the bailout, stating that it represents an evasion of the real problem and more of the same inflationary practices that have caused the crisis in the first instance.
Watch the video:
====================
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, Oct 6, 2008
Global Stocks Retreat, Led by Banks, as Credit Crisis Widens
By Adria Cimino and Chua Kong Ho
Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Stocks tumbled around the world, the euro fell the most against the yen since its debut and oil dropped below $90 a barrel as the yearlong credit market seizure caused bank bailouts to spread. Government bonds rallied.
The Standard & Poor's 500 Index retreated 5.9 percent, extending the worst weekly slump since 2001, as concern slower global growth will curb demand for commodities sent Alcoa Inc. and U.S. Steel Corp. down more than 7 percent. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index headed for its biggest loss in at least two decades and exchanges in Russia and Brazil halted trading. Europe's Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index had its steepest decline since 1987.
Today's plunge erased about $2.5 trillion from global equities after the German government was forced to bail out Hypo Real Estate Holding AG, overshadowing the $700 billion U.S. Treasury plan to revive credit markets. The euro weakened 6 percent against the yen, the most since 1999.
``It's like a fire,'' said Emmanuel Soupre, a fund manager at Neuflize OBC Asset Management in Paris, which oversees the equivalent of $33 billion. ``It's easier to extinguish five minutes after the start. Now we're about an hour into it. We have to act quickly to assure the continuity of the financial system to avoid an irreversible contamination of the entire economy.''
Two-year Treasury yields plunged 0.19 percentage point to 1.39 percent as investors sought the relative safety of government bonds. The MSCI World Index slid 6.9 percent as every industry fell at least 5 percent. Rio Tinto Plc, the world's second-biggest aluminum producer, fell 15 percent and UBS AG, the largest Swiss bank, lost 13 percent.
Seeking Safety
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 545 points, falling below 10,000 for the first time since October 2004. Europe's Stoxx 600 sank 7.6 percent, the biggest decline since the October 1987 stock market crash.
National benchmark indexes fell in all 18 western European markets. London's FTSE 100 dropped 7.9 percent, the most in 20 years. Russia's Micex plunged 19 percent, led by OAO Gazprom's 21 percent decrease. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index lost 4 percent, as Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. and Macquarie Group Ltd. retreated more than 9 percent.
An 11 percent tumble in Brazil's Bovespa Index and 10 percent drop in Indonesia's Jakarta Composite Index pushed the MSCI Emerging Market Index down 10 percent, the steepest in two decades.
``We're seeing panic all over the markets right now,'' said Javier Barrio, head of equity sales for Spanish clients at Banco BPI SA in Madrid. ``Governments are taking steps to try to reduce investors' fears but confidence is weak.''
National Markets
The plunge in stock markets accelerated along with bailouts of financial institutions and subprime-related credit losses that have approached $600 billion. The MSCI World is valued at 13.2 times the earnings of its companies, the lowest since at least 1995, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Europe's Stoxx 600 trades at 10.4 times earnings, near the lowest level since at least 2002, while the S&P 500 is valued at 20.9 times earnings.
UBS, the European bank worst hit by credit crisis, lost 3.08 to 20.90 francs. The bank's earnings will be ``challenged for some time,'' and UBS may write down $3.1 billion in the third quarter, Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Meredith Whitney wrote in a note to clients. The Swiss bank has posted $44 billion in losses, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Japan Banks
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Japan's largest bank, fell 9.2 percent to 806 yen. Mizuho Financial Group Inc. dropped 7.8 percent to 402,000 yen.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest U.S. bank by deposits, slid 6.8 percent to $42.80.
BNP Paribas SA dropped 5.4 percent to 67.50 euros. France's biggest bank agreed to take control of Fortis in Belgium and Luxembourg for 14.5 billion euros ($19.8 billion) after an earlier government rescue failed to ensure the company's stability.
Hypo Real Estate plunged 37 percent to 4.70 euros. The German government and the country's banks and insurers agreed on a 50 billion-euro rescue package for the commercial property lender after an earlier bailout faltered.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the government will guarantee savings of private account holders to prevent a rush of withdrawals from the nation's banking system.
U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling said Britain is ``ready to do whatever it takes'' to help its banks, while Denmark said commercial lenders will provide as much as 35 billion kroner ($6.4 billion) over the next two years to a fund to insure depositors against losses. The Fed said today it ``stands ready'' to foster ``liquid money market conditions.''
Bailout Package
U.S. President George W. Bush last week signed a $700 billion rescue package into law to stem a banking crisis that has claimed Bear Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
The euro tumbled as bank failures in the region increased, falling to 141.97 yen, the weakest since May 18, 2006. All the world's most-traded currencies declined against the yen, which strengthened 5.7 percent against the euro and 11 percent against the Australian dollar.
``The euro zone is the second domino of the globe to be falling over after the U.S.,'' said Alex Sinton, a senior currency dealer at ANZ National Bank Ltd. in Auckland.
Money market rates climbed as investors lost confidence in financial markets. The interest rate that banks charge each other for overnight loans in dollars jumped to 2.37 percent from 2 percent, the British Bankers' Association said.
Commercial Paper
Yields on overnight U.S. commercial paper jumped 0.94 percentage point to 3.68 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That's the highest since Sept. 30, the day after the U.S. House of Representatives first rejected the bank bailout.
Investors are growing increasingly concerned that higher borrowing costs will worsen a slowdown in world economies, reducing demand for metals and fuel. The Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index of 19 commodities slipped 3.5 percent to the lowest level in a year.
Rio Tinto Group slipped 15 percent to 2,888 pence. Freeport- McMoRan, world's largest publicly traded copper producer, lost $4.23 to $41.63. Marathon Oil, the largest refiner in the U.S. Midwest, sank $3.58 to $32.
Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe's biggest oil company, dropped 5.4 percent to 1,540 pence. PT Bumi Resources, Indonesia's biggest power-station coal producer, tumbled 32 percent to 2,175 rupiah, extending a six-day, 19 percent slide.
Crude oil fell for a fourth day in New York, dropping as much as 5.3 percent to $88.89 a barrel. Power station coal prices at Australia's Newcastle port dropped 6.1 percent last week, a seventh decline. Copper fell 6.5 percent to $5,620 a metric ton on the London Metal Exchange.
UBS's Hong Kong-based economist Duncan Wooldridge reduced his growth forecast in Asia excluding Japan next year to 6.1 percent from 6.9 percent, saying the region will face ``recession-like conditions.''
To contact the reporter for this story: Adria Cimino in Paris at acimino1@bloomberg.net; Chua Kong Ho in Shanghai at kchua6@bloomberg;
Last Updated: October 6, 2008 13:25 EDT
October 6, 2008
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
www.counterpunch.org/roberts10062008.html
America has become a pretty discouraging place. Americans, for the most part, will never know what happened to them, because they no longer have a free and responsible press. They have Big Brother’s press. For example, on September 28, 2008, a New York Times editorial blamed the current financial crisis on “antiregulation disciples of the Reagan Revolution.”
What utter nonsense. Every example of deregulation that the New York Times editorial provides is located in the Clinton Administration and the George W. Bush administration. I was a member of the Reagan administration. We most certainly did not deregulate the financial system.
The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial from investment banking, was the achievement of the Democratic Clinton Administration. It happened in 1999, over a decade after Reagan left office.
It was in 2000 that derivatives and credit default swaps were excluded from regulation.
The greatest mistake was made in 2004, the year that Reagan died. That year the current Secretary of the Treasury, Henry M. Paulson Jr, was head of the investment bank Goldman Sachs. In the spring of 2004, the investment banks, led by Paulson, met with the Securities and Exchange Commission. At this meeting with the New Deal regulatory agency tasked with regulating the US financial system, Paulson convinced the SEC Commissioners to exempt the investment banks from maintaining reserves to cover losses on investments. The exemption granted by the SEC allowed the investment banks to leverage financial instruments beyond any bounds of prudence.
In place of time-proven standards of prudence, computer models engineered by hot shots determined acceptable risk. As one result Bear Stearns, for example, pushed its leverage ratio to 33 to 1. For every one dollar in equity, the investment bank had $33 of debt!
It was computer models that led to the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, the first systemic threat to the financial system. Why the SEC went along with Paulson and set aside capital requirements after the scare of Long-Term Capital Management is inexplicable.
The blame is headed toward SEC chairman Christopher Cox. This is more of Big Brother’s disinformation. Cox, like so many others, was a victim of a free market ideology, itself a reaction to over-regulation, that was boosted by academic economic opinion, rewarded with Nobel prizes, that the market “always knows best.”
The 20th century proves that the market is likely to know better than a central planning bureau. It was Soviet Communism that collapsed, not American capitalism. However, the market has to be protected from greed. It was greed, not the market, that was unleashed by deregulation during the Clinton and George W. Bush regimes.
I remember when the deregulation of the financial sector began. One of the first inroads was the legislation, written by bankers, to permit national branch banking. George Champion, former chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, testified against it. In columns I argued that national branch banking would focus banks away from local business needs.
The deregulation of the financial sector was achieved by the Democratic Clinton Administration and by the current Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, with the acquiescence of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Paulson bailout saves his firm, Goldman Sachs. The Paulson bailout transfers the troubled financial instruments that the financial sector created from the books of the financial sector to the books of the taxpayers at the US Treasury.
This is all the bailout does. It rescues the guilty.
The Paulson bailout does not address the problem, which is the defaulting home mortgages.
The defaults will continue, because the economy is sinking into recession. Homeowners are losing their jobs, and homeowners are being hit with rising mortgage payments resulting from adjustable rate mortgages and escalator interest rate clauses in their mortgages that make homeowners unable to service their debt.
Shifting the troubled assets from the financial sectors’ books to the taxpayers’ books absolves the people who caused the problem from responsibility. As the economy declines and mortgage default rates rise, the US Treasury and the American taxpayers could end up with a $700 billion loss.
Initially, the House, but not the Senate, resisted the bailout of the financial institutions,whose executives had received millions of dollars in bonuses for wrecking the US financial system. However, the people’s representatives could not withstand the specter of martial law and Great Depression with which Paulson and the Bush administration threatened them. The people’s representatives succumbed as they did during the New Deal.
The impotence of Congress traces to the Great Depression. As Theodore Lowi in his classic book, The End of Liberalism, makes clear, the New Deal stripped Congress of its law-making power and gave it to the executive agencies. Prior to the New Deal, Congress wrote the laws. After the New Deal a bill is merely an authorization for executive agencies to create the law through regulations. The Paulson bailout has further diminished the legislative branch’s power.
Since Paulson’s bailout of his firm and his financial friends does nothing to lessen the default rate on mortgages, how will the bailout play out?
If the $700 billion bailout is based on an estimate of the current amount of bad mortgages, as the recession deepens and Americans lose their jobs, the default rate will rise. The $700 billion might not suffice. The Treasury will have to go hat in hand to its foreign creditors for more loans.
As the US Treasury has not got $7, much less $700 billion, it must borrow the bailout money from foreign creditors, already overloaded with US paper. At what point do America’s foreign bankers decide that the additions to US debt exceed what can be repaid?
This question was ignored by the bailout. There were no hearings. No one consulted China, America’s principal banker, or the Japanese, or the OPEC sovereign wealth funds, or Europe.
Does the world have a blank check for America’s mistakes?
This is the same world that is faced with American demands that countries support with money and lives America’s quest for world hegemony. Europeans are dying in Afghanistan for American hegemony. Do Europeans want their banks, which hold US dollars as their reserves, to fail so that Paulson can bail out his company and his friends?
The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. It comprises the reserves of foreign central banks. Bush’s wars and economic policies are destroying the basis of the US dollar as reserve currency. The day the dollar loses its reserve currency role, the US government cannot pay its bills in its own currency. The result will be a dramatic reduction in US living standards.
Currently Treasuries are boosted by the habitual “flight to quality,” but as Treasury debt deepens, will investors still see quality? At what point do America’s foreign creditors cease to lend? That is the point at which American power ends. It might be close at hand.
The Paulson bailout is predicated on cleaning up financial institutions’ balance sheets and restoring the flow of credit. The assumption is that once lending resumes, the economy will pick up.
This assumption is problematic. The expansion of consumer debt, which kept the economy going in the 21st century, has reached its limit. There are no more credit cards to max out, and no more home equity to refinance and spend. The Paulson bailout might restore trust among financial institutions and enable them to lend to one another, but it doesn’t provide a jolt to consumer demand.
Moreover, there may be more shoes to drop. Credit card debt could be the next to threaten balance sheets of financial institutions. Apparently, credit card debt has been securitized and sold as well, and not all of the debt is good. In addition, the leasing programs of the car manufacturers have turned sour. As a result of high gasoline prices and absence of growth in take-home pay, the residual values of big trucks and SUVs are less than the leasing programs estimated them to be, thus creating more financial problems. Car manufacturers are canceling their leasing programs, and this will further cut into sales.
According to statistician John Williams [ http://www.shadowstats.com/... ] who measures inflation, unemployment, and GDP according to the methodology used prior to the Clinton regime’s corruption of these measures, the US unemployment rate is currently at 14.7 per cent and the inflation rate is 13.2 per cent. Consequently, real US GDP growth in the 21st century has been negative.
This is not a picture of an economy that a bailout of financial institution balance sheets will revive. As the Paulson bailout does not address the mortgage problem per se, defaults and foreclosures are likely to rise, thus undermining the Treasury’s estimate that 90 per cent of the mortgages backing the troubled instruments are good.
Moreover, one consequence of the ongoing financial crisis is financial concentration. It is not inconceivable that the US will end up with four giant banks: J.P. Morgan Chase, Citicorp, Bank of America, and Wachovia Wells Fargo. If defaulting credit card debt then assaults these banks’ balance sheets, who is there to take them over? Would the Treasury be able to borrow the money for another Paulson bailout?
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation refinanced one million home mortgages in order to prevent foreclosures. The refinancing apparently succeeded, and HOLC returned a profit. The problem then, as now, was not “deadbeats” who wouldn’t pay their mortgages, and the HOLC refinancing did not discourage others from paying their mortgages. Market purists who claim the only solution is for housing prices to fall to prior levels overlook that rising inventories can push prices below prior levels, thus causing more distress. They also overlook the role of interest rates. If a worsening credit crisis dries up mortgage lending and pushes mortgage interest rates higher, the rise in interest rates could offset the fall in home prices, and mortgages would remain unaffordable even in a falling housing market.
Some commentators are blaming the current mortgage problem on the pressure that the US government put on banks to lend to unqualified borrowers. However, whatever breaches of prudence there may have been only affected the earnings of individual institutions. They did not threaten the financial system. The current crisis required more than bad loans. It required securitization and its leverage. It required Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s inappropriate low interest rates, which created a real estate boom. Rapidly rising real estate prices quickly created home equity to justify 100 percent mortgages. Wall Street analysts pushed financial companies to improve their bottom lines, which they did by extreme leveraging.
An al
