One Hopeless Bad Idea

Go tell the One to shove it up where the sun doesn't shine of whatever beaurocrat that thought it up.

And he better Hope that no one traces this idea to his Change.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance.

But the proposal would be "dead on arrival" if it's sent to Congress, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, said.

Murray used that blunt terminology when she told Shinseki that the idea would not be acceptable and would be rejected if formally proposed. Her remarks came during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs about the 2010 budget.

No official proposal to create such a program has been announced publicly, but veterans groups wrote a pre-emptive letter last week to President Obama voicing their opposition to the idea after hearing the plan was under consideration.

The groups also cited an increase in "third-party collections" estimated in the 2010 budget proposal -- something they said could be achieved only if the Veterans Administration started billing for service-related injuries.

Asked about the proposal, Shinseki said it was under "consideration..."

Why don't you just go ahead and lick that Third Rail, Mr. Hopeful Audacity? Yes indeed, this is exactly the kind of thing that made America hate Bu$hCo and Darth Rumsfeld. You just continue to listen to Robert Gates and see where it gets you.

Far from the hand of any god but Mammon

The New York Pravda outlines what all the locals know but the Faithful can not believe:

It's been a year since Bear Stearns collapsed, kicking off Wall Street’s meltdown, and it’s more than time to debunk the myths that many Wall Street executives have perpetrated about what has happened and why. These tall tales — which tend to take the form of how their firms were the “victims” of a “once-in-a-lifetime tsunami” that nothing could have prevented — not only insult our collective intelligence but also do nothing to restore the confidence in the banking system that these executives’ actions helped to destroy...

...Can it possibly be true that veteran Wall Street executives like Messrs. Cayne, Schwartz and Fuld — who were paid an estimated $128 million, $117 million and at least $350 million, respectively, in the five years before their businesses imploded — got all that money but were clueless about the risks they had exposed their firms to in the process?

In fact, although they have not chosen to admit it, many of these top bankers, as well as Stan O’Neal, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch (who was handed $161.5 million when he “retired” in late 2007) made decision after decision, year after year, that turned their firms into houses of cards.

...Mr. Cayne never seriously considered raising the firm’s equity, which we now know was perilously low, nor did he seriously consider selling or merging it. Rather, he deliberately chose to take Bear deeper into the manufacture and sale of all those risky mortgage-backed securities, as well as into the business of doing trades with hedge funds. Why? Simply put, Bear’s board paid him and the other four members of Bear’s executive committee — including Mr. Schwartz and another former chief executive, Alan C. Greenberg — to maximize the firm’s “return on equity” calculation, which is Wall Street lingo for figuring out how much money one can make using as little capital as possible.

This directive encouraged Mr. Cayne to make the firm as profitable as possible — a worthy goal, no doubt — but without raising any more cash or issuing any new stock, as doing either would increase the denominator of the return-on-equity calculation, and thereby lower the bonus pool Mr. Cayne and his executives could split among themselves.

When viewed through this simple prism, it is not the least bit surprising that when Bear Stearns ran into trouble soon after its two hedge funds blew up in June 2007, Mr. Cayne — and later Mr. Schwartz — chose not to raise new equity, even though they could easily have done so back then. So Bear’s balance sheet remained larded with extremely risky assets that the firm had leveraged to the hilt by borrowing cheaply in the overnight financing markets...

Like Mr. Cayne, Mr. Fuld had made huge and risky bets on the manufacture and sale of mortgage-backed securities — by underwriting tens of billions of mortgage securities in 2006 alone — and on the acquisition of highly leveraged commercial real estate. Five days before the firm imploded, Mr. Fuld proposed spinning off some $30 billion of these toxic assets still on the firm’s balance sheet into a separate company. But the market hated the idea, and the death spiral began.

Even Goldman Sachs, which appears to have fared better in this crisis than any other large Wall Street firm, was no saint. The firm underwrote some $100 billion of commercial mortgage obligations — putting it among the top 10 underwriters — before it got out of the game in 2006 and then cleaned up by selling these securities short. Basically, Goldman got lucky.

When in the summer of 2007 questions began to be raised about the value of such mortgage-related assets, the overnight lenders began getting increasingly nervous. Eventually, they decided the risks of lending to these firms far outweighed the rewards, and they pulled the plug.

The firms then simply ran out of cash, as everyone lost confidence in them at once and wanted their money back at the same time. Bear Stearns, Lehman and Merrill Lynch all made the classic mistake of borrowing short and lending long and, as one Bear executive told me, that was “game, set, match.”

Could these Wall Street executives have made other, less risky choices? Of course they could have, if they had been motivated by something other than absolute greed. Many smaller firms — including Evercore Partners, Greenhill and Lazard — took one look at those risky securities and decided to steer clear. When I worked at Lazard in the 1990s, people tried to convince the firm’s patriarchs — André Meyer, Michel David-Weill and Felix Rohatyn — that they must expand into riskier lines of business to keep pace with the big boys. The answer was always a firm no.

Even the venerable if obscure Brown Brothers Harriman — the private partnership where Prescott Bush, the father and grandfather of two presidents, made his fortune — has remained consistently profitable since 1818. None of these smaller firms manufactured a single mortgage-backed security — and none has taken a penny of taxpayer money during this crisis.

Then of course, the punchline:

...there can be no restoration of confidence in the banking system — and therefore no hope for an economic recovery — until Wall Street comes clean. If the executives responsible for what happened won’t step forward on their own, perhaps a subpoena-wielding panel along the lines of the 9/11 commission can be created to administer a little truth serum.

With this statement, the whole editorial turns into high comedy. In other words, make a government inquiry to scape the right goats. Because a Commission will only ensure the wolves get to keep wearing the sheepskins.

Chipping your chicks

The New York Pravda, amazingly enough, publishes an Op-Ed against the Department of Agriculture's drive to microchip all farm animals and in the process drive all family farms out of business.

...So who would gain if the identification system eventually becomes mandatory, as the Agriculture Department has hoped? It would help exporters by soothing the fears of foreign consumers who have shunned American beef. Other beneficiaries would include manufacturers of animal tracking systems that stand to garner hefty profits for tracking the hundreds of millions of this country’s farm animals. It would also give industrial agriculture a stamp of approval despite its use of antibiotics, confinement and unnatural feeding practices that increase the threat of disease.

At the same time, the system would hurt small pasture-based livestock farms like my family’s, even though our grazing practices and natural farming methods help thwart the spread of illnesses. And when small farms are full participants in a local food system, tracking a diseased animal doesn’t require an exorbitantly expensive national database...

Exactly the point.

Opium of the People

More Simple Answers to Simple Questions

At Kos, bobswern asks a simple question:

Wall St. Bailout: Is A Massive Scandal About To Unfold?

...Reports have been circulating, based upon leaks to the media over the past 24 hours, that:

1.) AIG ("Bad Bank" #1): $50 billion of the $173 billion forked over to AIG, since September, has been doled out to a handful of Wall Street heavy-hitters--a/k/a the "couterparties" that paid AIG to insure their toxic paper--to support their so-called insurance claims, backed by the good faith of AIG; folks who happened to make a pantload of money writing insurance policies on these Credit Default Swaps and Commercial Debt Obligations over the past few years.

We have Ms. Morgenson in the NY Times telling us the counterparties' sweetheart deals are "likely to increase" in terms of sheer numbers of billions of taxpayer dollars. But, it's the additional documentation ("NEW INFO") below Morgenson's quote which is most troublesome...it's not $50 billion...it's already $80 billion...and these same firms are receiving 100 cents on the dollar for this toxic paper, too!

...It's already a LOT more than $50 billion, which was reported as "the number" in the past 24 hours; it's at least $80 billion and growing, or almost half of all the funds sent to AIG to date...and growing; perhaps much more if not MOST of the funds dished out to AIG to date all going to the same usual suspects...

The facts are we may just be scratching the surface on the AIG matter. It's going to--and already is--getting much more out-of-hand than originally reported, and virtually all of those funds has gone to the same 20-25 firms (and that's only as of late December '08); and, perhaps even more outrageous, it appears that a trend had developed early on with regard to these toxic debt purchases, whereby the recipients (that same list of 25+/- firms) of the Treasury Department's and the Federal Reserve's largesse were profiting to the tune of 100% on the actual value of the paper being purchased. They're doing this by allowing the counterparties to KEEP the collateral, on top of receiving the payments!!! (See story link and quote, immediately below.) In other words, the Fed was overpaying these firms to the tune of full face value, 100 cents on the dollar, on paper that was only worth from 20 cents to 60 cents on the dollar in the marketplace!

...The Treasury Department is currently in the process of providing a $500 billion infusion (along with another $1.5 trillion government guarantee to the hedge fund industry) into the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. And, while some naive speculation in the MSM is focused upon a handful of large bank defaults with regard to how this money is going to be spent, the reality is that it's apparently the stealthiest way for the government to actually provision that "Bad Bank" that everyone's been hearing about. (Some have said that the first bad bank was, in effect, AIG. But, based upon the sheer magnitude of Geithner's plans--already on record in a few stories--for this massive FDIC scam, the AIG mess pales in comparison.) You see, Geithner's stated plans call for "private investment" (i.e.: hedge funds and sovereign funds) to buy up as much as another $2 trillion in toxic debt; but here's the scam: the government is going to insure 100% of all investor's funds via the FDIC, under something they're calling, a "Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program," basically eliminating all risk in the deall for these hedge fund investors!

...1.) AIG: Almost all of the $173 billion that's passed through AIG may be going to these 20-25 key Wall Street "players." It's not the $50 billion that's been widely reported in the past 24 hours. We know it is at least $80 billion...and growing. And, these good ole' boys are getting 100 cents on the dollar on assets that are only worth between 20 cents and 60 cents on the dollar now.

2.) FDIC: It appears that the primary reason the FDIC's sole mission is being contorted is to: a.) provide a massive handout to the hedge fund and sovereign fund sectors, b.) avoid the negative spin that would occur if this was labelled for what it actually is, a bad bank and a massive extension of TARP, c.) and a situation where much more control of our nation's traditional banking services are being put in the hands of a grossly underregulated hedge fund industry cowboys...the exact opposite of the much more intensive regulation which is, both, so desperately needed and for which so many are clamoring as I write this. (In reality, we're turning over the keys to the car to the very "drivers" that got us into this mess in the first place.)

Simple answer: No. There is scandal, but it will only proceed, not unfold.

Obama is owned by the Free Marketeers.

There will be no real fixes, only patches that give the privateers more license to steal from us in more inventive ways, while the Faithful read the latest Washington Scripture.

Seeing is believing.

All I see is a lot of posturing while letting the banksters of Goldman-Sachs continue to steal the show.

Even if he stopped it all tomorrow, the money would be gone. He won't, he can't. Instead he continues to try to ride the tiger that's eating him. His excuse is that he has to compromise to effect change.

Once we all pass through the colon of the Company we'll have change, alright.

For us, the change I see is more like a Joan Rivers facelift for progressive policy.

The wrinkles are gone, but it's still the same old story underneath.

Codex Alimentarius

If you headed an multinational corporation that wanted to have a monopoly on all the world's food supply, what would you do?

Well, first you might pay for some multinational regulations in the guise of Free Trade.

Then you might go about making it illegal for anyone but your corporation to grow and sell food. Or make it illegal to eat it if you didn't grow it. All in the guise of "food safety".

Now once upon a time the FDA handled things like this, but that was before Bu$hie drowned the government in a bathtub. So now that the official face of guvmint has changed from Stern Daddy to Soul Big Brother, there will be action. Of course, not by reviving the FDA.

Where's the campaign contributions profit in that?

Jobs Program

Pork is what the other guy spends your money on.

...Congressional and industry leaders say they recognize that defense spending is peaking, and the time has come — given the many financial strains on the federal government — to overhaul an acquisition system that has resulted in smaller, but more expensive, fleets of combat planes and ships.

There is also broad political support for the Pentagon’s plans to shift some of the more than $650 billion in defense spending from futuristic weapons programs to simpler arms that the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan can use now.

But with a labor report on Friday showing that the economy has lost 4.4 million jobs since the recession began, “if you’re talking about canceling major weapons systems, that becomes hard,” said William S. Cohen, a former senator from Maine who served as defense secretary under President Bill Clinton.

“Given the economic climate we’re operating in now, any congressman or senator is going to say, ‘I’ve got to protect the jobs in my district or state,’ and that’s understandable,” Mr. Cohen said. “The difficulty now is how do you get a majority to vote against their own interests, even if you could persuade them that the changes would be best for the national defense?”

Doubtless we should continue to use hundreds of billions of dollars a year on futuristic weapons we can only use to fight Skynet, which we are also using hundreds of billions of dollars a year to create.

Shearing the Sheep Before They Eat Mutton

Last week Jon Stewart said what should have been said:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

But, Deep Capture has been talking about CNBC's motivations for doing this for awhile.

Yes, Virginia, it is organized crime.

It is organized crime working in the interests of very old money. It is organized crime working with an aim. The aim is de-modernization of most of America and most of the rest of the world.

As unpalatable as this is coming from the overtly aristocratic Republicans, it's important to realize this same kind of attitude is endemic in many environmentally conscious and socially active Democrats as well. Their fallacy comes in thinking that you can end the rapacious industrialism of the their Republican adversaries by returning the world to a pre-industrial state.

This is exactly wrong. The rapaciousness of those who would be feudal lords in increased in a demodernized world. The modern values of rationality, of education, of separation of church and state are what allowed the progress of the world in humanitarian advances in the 20th century.

Take that away and there will be collapse and a new Dark Age.

It's a matter of national security

Loose Change, Final Cut.

Also, what the bailout money's being used for.

Check it out.

Law of motion

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Catherine Austin Fitts:

The full page ad in Ruppert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for its “Future of Finance Initiative” starts off by saying that the financial system has stopped working.

I completely disagree.

The financial system is working for the first time since Bob Rubin and his colleagues created the “strong dollar policy” complete with gold market manipulation and mortgage bubble. It is working because a wide group of market participants do not want to invest capital in unproductive activities or banks, lawyers and accounting firms that intentionally engage in criminal fraud.

To date, the Fed and Treasury theory is that $10 trillion of central bank and government guarantees and subsidies will permit a fraudulent system to continue to function. The answer is, of course, no it won’t. Hence, the proposal for a new initiative to make sure markets are not allowed to work.

I got my MBA at Wharton. I have heard it all my life and I know it is true. When something is unproductive, overpriced or unhealthy, markets shift capital away. That is a good thing.

A market is like a human body in trauma. It moves the blood away from the toes and preserves it for the heart, brain and lungs.

However, the institutions that made this mess—the likes of Goldman Sachs, Sullivan & Cromwell, The Carlyle Group, and the academic institutions that give them air cover and many more - are now persuaded that a financial system that no longer trusts them needs “fixing” and they are the men for the job. They want to show us how we can shift more blood out of the heart, lungs and brain and into the them and their fellow toes.

This conundrum of keeping the unproductive in control is why the Administration is proposing a massive defense and enforcement budget. Only financial totalitarianism can keep something this expensive and destructive going.

Such arrogance proves that we do indeed need markets to continue to work. We need those who need $10 trillion of bailouts (and counting) to fail and, as legendary investor Jim Rodger suggests, learn how to drive a taxi, or better yet a tractor.

If you have any question exactly what the movement really is, you should read another piece of Ms. Fitts':Financial Coup d'Etat.

Make no mistake: the economic crisis is 9-11.v.2.

Every Watchman's got to know his limitations

Wherein Masters of the Universe show themselves totally unable to dislodge Richard Nixon.

And totally uninterested in doing so.

Arrgghh, teh Stupid, it Burns.

Of course, 15 minutes of go Army, go National Guard, and rock & roll- country music Marines come-on-and-enlist commercials was the perfect warm-up to a killer evening of blood and sex. And of course deep dialog.

Dither into action if it serves as a distraction

After a lot of campaign noise about reversing the regulations on stem cell research, it seems Obama is set to actually do it.

One supposes it is better to have the bobbleheads foment on this than where all the AIG money went. Saudi Arabian oil, Columbian cocaine, or Afghani heroin?

Another Family Guy

Keeping it all in the Family, doubtless.

MARAJ, Lebanon — For 25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both sides of the bitterest divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school.

To Israel, he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983.

Now he sits in a Lebanese prison cell, accused by the authorities of betraying his country to an enemy state. Months after his arrest, his friends and former colleagues are still in shock over the extent of his deceptions: the carefully disguised trips abroad, the unexplained cash, the secret second wife...

...From his home in this Bekaa Valley village, Mr. Jarrah, 50, traveled often to Syria and to south Lebanon, where he photographed roads and convoys that might have been used to transport weapons to Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group, investigators say. He spoke with his handlers by satellite phone, receiving “dead drops” of money, cameras and listening devices. Occasionally, on the pretext of a business trip, he traveled to Belgium and Italy, received an Israeli passport, and flew to Israel, where he was debriefed at length, investigators say...

...Several current and former military officials agreed to provide details about his case on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss it before the trial began. Their accounts tallied with details provided by Mr. Jarrah’s relatives and former colleagues.

It is not the family’s first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, declined to discuss Mr. Jarrah’s situation, saying, “It is not our practice to publicly talk about any such allegations in this case or in any case.”

[via Res ipsa loquitur @ Swedish Meatballs Confidential]

It's doubtless another case of you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours.


[img via Bag News]

You know it's getting hard for even the players to tell the players or even the plays even with their scorecards.

Denial Is Just Another Brand of Kool-Aid

Krugman hits it again:

...The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern.

Here’s how the pattern works: first, administration officials, usually speaking off the record, float a plan for rescuing the banks in the press. This trial balloon is quickly shot down by informed commentators.

Then, a few weeks later, the administration floats a new plan. This plan is, however, just a thinly disguised version of the previous plan, a fact quickly realized by all concerned. And the cycle starts again.

Why do officials keep offering plans that nobody else finds credible? Because somehow, top officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that troubled assets, often referred to these days as “toxic waste,” are really worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them — and that if these assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away.

Call it the "clap louder" approach to policy. Rumsfeldian, isn't it? It's because the financial equivalent of NeoCons- the Chicago School Free Marketeers- ran the Bu$hCo economy, and run the Oborg economic collective too.

...Thus, in a recent interview Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, tried to make a distinction between the “basic inherent economic value” of troubled assets and the “artificially depressed value” that those assets command right now. In recent transactions, even AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities have sold for less than 40 cents on the dollar, but Mr. Geithner seems to think they’re worth much, much more.

And the government’s job, he declared, is to “provide the financing to help get those markets working,” pushing the price of toxic waste up to where it ought to be.

What’s more, officials seem to believe that getting toxic waste properly priced would cure the ills of all our major financial institutions. Earlier this week, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, was asked about the problem of “zombies” — financial institutions that are effectively bankrupt but are being kept alive by government aid. “I don’t know of any large zombie institutions in the U.S. financial system,” he declared, and went on to specifically deny that A.I.G. — A.I.G.! — is a zombie.

This is the same A.I.G. that, unable to honor its promises to pay off other financial institutions when bonds default, has already received $150 billion in aid and just got a commitment for $30 billion more...

...So why has this zombie idea — it keeps being killed, but it keeps coming back — taken such a powerful grip? The answer, I fear, is that officials still aren’t willing to face the facts. They don’t want to face up to the dire state of major financial institutions because it’s very hard to rescue an essentially insolvent bank without, at least temporarily, taking it over. And temporary nationalization is still, apparently, considered unthinkable...

It's not because it's a dirty commie idea, as much as they posture about it. As a matter of fact, people like Alan Greenspan have also advocated it. It's a war of bankster factions, some of which have postured themselves to profit if the feds buy the toxic waste, others of which have postured themselves if the feds do a takeover.

It's a Mafia style gang war playing out in high finance. One wonders, if no one is willing to yield their turf, who is going to be sleeping with the fishes. Aside from the American people, that is.

Mobius Rabbitholes

TocqueDeville at Kos has noticed that CNBC has become quite the anti-Obama financial policy platform, including staging a bogus uprising against Obama's mortgage plan. Among other things.

...This rabbit hole involves the thugs surrounding Jim Cramer and some of the top financial "journalists" from the New York Times, WSJ, Fortune magazine and BusinessWeek, top hedge funds, the Mafia, and the DTCC. It also includes "blackmail, smear campaigns, espionage, fraud, harassment, extortion, bribery, rumor-mongering, sabotage, off-shore money laundering, political cronyism, frivolous lawsuits, witness tampering, biased financial research, false identities, bogus credit ratings, bribery, libelous blogs, bad science, forgery, wiretapping, counterfeiting, collusion, lying, cheating, threats and theft."

And if that wasn't fun enough, it may be the underlying story of what collapsed the entire, global banking system or at least served as the catalyst for the collapse...

It's always good to see the Oborg notice the world they live in.

Now, if they would only notice the other crowd of banksters that actually surrounds and guides policy for The One is the same crowd that surrounded and guided policy for Bu$hie in his final months at the behest of Poppy.

And they're making enemies.

The question is , do Chicago style banksters have Chicago style vendettas?

In the world of Bu$hCo, we saw internal struggles within the CIA that reflected the dissent within the Company. The repercussions of this internal war led to the Der Decider ignoring the pre-9-11 warnings, while propagating his own biases. The outing of Plame was part of a wider war for control.

That produced the Endless War in Iran, and screwed it up so bad Poppy had to knock Rummy out of the driver's seat with Gates.

Similarly, Paulson was sent in to manage the money once it became clear the Kewl Kids had drunk a little too much of their own Kool-Aid and actually believed their own cooked books. He didn't really solve anything, he only made things appear more solvent. Geithner's a similar sort of man doing a similar sort of thing.

In the world of the Oborg, we are seeing a similar factional dispute in the administration of economic policy. The One has no more real control of the Company's financial machine than Der Decider did of its war machine. What he does do is set the tone among the factions. Negotion instead of confrontation. Still, all those two-bit gangsters the Cheney administration elevated to positions of power and inflluence are now being discarded. Change has come, and the short changed, both the innocent and the shyster, are increasingly outraged.

The reality is, many of the banksters that profited under the old Bu$h smash-and-grab are real gangsters. Many are people who can't keep up with the New World Order they brought upon themselves. Many will do more than curse those who ride higher on the new wave of chaos they themselves propagated.

I believe the saying is: There Will Be Blood.

Bipartisan Gittin' Yer Iran On v2

It's déjà vu all over again, as the PNAC walk among us in their latest incarnation as the "Bipartisan Policy Institute" task force.

The disbelief among the Oborg Kool-Aid drinkers Lotus-eaters registers in various permutations at b's and Floyds separate posts as:

"yes, but why is this leaked? If it was policy surely Obama would say so publicly?"

Like The One really runs things. Like He'd really talk about the pending Pentagon jobs program when he needs to take care of all the unemployed. Like he doesn't remember what happened to a Kennedy who blocked a CIA-Pentagon invasion of Cuba in the 1960s.

Elections may have consequences, but so does embarrasing the Company in an obvious way.

"Americans are like mushrooms..."

...In general, they like being kept in the dark and fed bullshit. They’re absolutely content to bathe in official PSYOP and .gov will give ‘em what they want.

As long as someone else is willing to buy U.S. Treasuries in ever larger amounts, the vast, dumb horror show will play on.

My guess is that the next major false flag event will occur at some point after U.S. Treasury auctions begin to fail and the Fed starts buying the paper. It’s game over at that point, so why not light off a nuke?

It would be like hitting a reset switch. It would induce total and instant amnesia in the small, neural swellings between the ears of the zombie sheep...

Agreed, Kevin. Most Amerika won't even admit psyops exist. Perhaps it's because at any given moment there are dozens of independent sources broadcasting their own takes into the consensual reality of the main$tream.

Only the Rahmmer knows for sure

...every step He takes.

While profiling White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel for The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza saw something interesting in Emanuel’s office. It’s mentioned only in passing:

Next to his computer monitor is a smaller screen that looks like a handheld G.P.S. device and tells Emanuel where the President and senior White House officials are at all times.

So, Obama, Biden, and other “senior White House officials” are lojacked?

One wonders who holds Rahm's leash, too.

Secret Government v2

You thought- may still think- your vote made a difference.

George Washington knows better:

Yesterday, in his appearance before Congress, Bernanke revealed with a single word who really runs the United States:

Senator Sanders: "Will you tell the American people to whom you lent $2.2 trillion of their dollars?"

Bernanke: "No"

No?

Indeed, Bernanke and Treasury refuse to provide this information even confidentially and off-the-record to Congress. And the official overseer of the TARP bailout program can't even get the information of where all the bailout money is going.

With his single word "no", Bernanke revealed that Congress is impotent and out of the loop. In other words, Congress doesn't really run the country in the core area of business, finance and the economy. The financial giants and their servants at the Fed and Treasury do.

Indeed, Bernanke's testimony is related to - and as important as - the fact that the warmongers gave themselves dictatorial powers.

The warmongers and the financial elite run the country. The people and their elected representatives do not, except to the extent that those representatives play ball with the real powers-that-be behind the scenes...

This seems to surprise a lot of people. Others vehemently deny it. George Washington seems aware of it, giving a long list of quotes that suggest it's been our lot for some time. Like ever since the country was founded.

Cause & Effect "In a Time of War"

Avedon pulls together a lot of posts responding to the revelation that, duh, Bu$hie's kewl cruel crew pretty much operated like a dictatorship:

...no one mentions the other big hole in what appears to be everyone's excuse for this illegal madness, which is that people got a bit carried away in the days after September 11th of 2001. See, this doesn't work too well with the revelation that the NSA program of illegal spying on Americans was initiated months earlier. It wasn't power they took in the heat of the moment after being shaken by a terrorist attack, nor was it something they did because it was "necessary" in time of war, but something they had started doing almost immediately upon taking office. It makes their entire argument moot; there was no "wartime" to "justify" the violations they were committing in March, not September, of 2001...

This is a dirty little secret that was in fact no secret at all.

People were exposing this virtually from the time Bu$hie seized office.

"Seized office" being another dirty little non-secret of the Bu$h years. There were two stolen presidential elections. The only reason this one didn't get stolen was there were too many pissed people showing up to vote for the republicans to get away with it.

The main$tream continues to act surprised by all of this. But they ignored and ridiculed us then, just as they ignore and ridicule us now. The only difference is larger and larger audiences ignore them because they can't ignore what they've done to the economy and the nation.

Which brings me to something Greenwald said:

... It's just not possible to have a rotting, bloated, deeply corrupt and completely insular political ruling class -- operating behind impenetrable walls of secrecy -- and avoid the devastation that is now becoming so manifest. It's just a matter of basic cause and effect...