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...

Chaos is the Financial Plan

Patrick Byrne:

"I’m pretty sure that someone out there wants the finance system to crack."

Several someones, in fact. For your consideration:

... it may come as a surprise that a dozen former top Countrywide executives now stand to make millions from the home mortgage mess.

Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes for pennies on the dollar. They get a piece of what they can collect.

“It has been very successful — very strong,” John Lawrence, the company’s head of loan servicing, told Mr. Kurland one recent morning in a glass-walled boardroom here at PennyMac’s spacious headquarters, opened last year in the same Los Angeles suburb where Countrywide once flourished.

“In fact, it’s off-the-charts good,” he told Mr. Kurland, who was leaning back comfortably in his leather boardroom chair, even as the financial markets in New York were plunging.

As hundreds of billions of dollars flow from Washington to jump-start the nation’s staggering banks, automakers and other industries, a new economy is emerging of businesses that hope to make money from the various government programs that make up the largest economic rescue in history...

A new economy of emerging business- run by banksters, too.

"It's not socialism when we get it"

Krugman on zombie financial ideas that won't die:

...Every plan we’ve heard from Treasury amounts to the same thing — an attempt to socialize the losses while privatizing the gains. We’re going to buy up all the bad assets at premium prices; no, we’re going to offer the banks guarantees against losses; no, we’re going to let private investors buy the stuff, but offer them de facto guarantees against losses in the form of non-recourse loans...

...the insistence on offering the same plan over and over again, with only cosmetic changes, is itself deeply disturbing. Does Treasury not realize that all these proposals amount to the same thing? Or does it realize that, but hope that the rest of us won’t notice? That is, are they stupid, or do they think we’re stupid?

Both.

Endless Denial of Endless Crimes

The New York Pravda's editorial page once again hits close to the mark in two different opinion posts, but never quite dons the full tinfoil jacket regarding the disarray in our society.

After all, it has to make a payroll, and who manages their money?

In Wars, Endless Wars , Bob Herbert questions one of the third rails of the Village:

...The U.S. economy is in free fall, the banking system is in a state of complete collapse and Americans all across the country are downsizing their standards of living. The nation as we’ve known it is fading before our very eyes, but we’re still pouring billions of dollars into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with missions we are still unable to define.

Even as the U.S. begins plans to reduce troop commitments in Iraq, it is sending thousands of additional troops into Afghanistan. The strategic purpose of this escalation, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged, is not at all clear...

Why, he might even question the wisdom of trying to make ExxonMobil customers out of one of the oldest cultures in the world sitting on one of the biggest pools of what ExxonMobil wants so much.

Obviously he isn't listening to Petraeus Caesar's words of wisdom:

...We invaded Afghanistan more than seven years ago. We have not broken the back of Al Qaeda or the Taliban. We have not captured or killed Osama bin Laden. We don’t even have an escalation strategy, much less an exit strategy. An honest assessment of the situation, taking into account the woefully corrupt and ineffective Afghan government led by the hapless Hamid Karzai, would lead inexorably to such terms as fiasco and quagmire.

Instead of cutting our losses, we appear to be doubling down.

As for Iraq, President Obama announced last week that substantial troop withdrawals will take place over the next year and a half and that U.S. combat operations would cease by the end of August 2010. But, he said, a large contingent of American troops, perhaps as many as 50,000, would still remain in Iraq for a “period of transition.”

That’s a large number of troops, and the cost of keeping them there will be huge. Moreover, I was struck by the following comment from the president: “There will surely be difficult periods and tactical adjustments, but our enemies should be left with no doubt. This plan gives our military the forces and flexibility they need to support our Iraqi partners and to succeed.”

In short, we’re committed to these two conflicts for a good while yet, and there is nothing like an etched-in-stone plan for concluding them. I can easily imagine a scenario in which Afghanistan and Iraq both heat up and the U.S., caught in an extended economic disaster at home, undermines its fragile recovery efforts in the same way that societies have undermined themselves since the dawn of time — with endless warfare...

The solution obviously is for the DIA to secretly tap his phones and watch his every move from $500 billion dollars worth of spy satellites. He must have terrorist connections somewhere. If Kevin Bacon does, anyone can. Making those connections is what Information Warfare is all about, anyway.

That's where your tax dollars are going.

In another almost-see-the-light moment, the editorial page notes The Never-Ending Bailout:

Americans awoke to the news on Monday that federal officials had spent yet another feverish weekend concocting yet another bailout. This time, the Obama Treasury Department — sounding a lot like the Bush Treasury Department — promised another $30 billion to the American International Group, the giant insurer.

It was the fourth time since September that taxpayers have been called upon to rescue A.I.G. from collapse. It brings the bailout commitment for that one company to some $160 billion.

...What no one is saying — the Bush folks wouldn’t, and the Obama team seems to have taken the same vow of Wall Street omertà — is which firms would be most threatened by an A.I.G. collapse. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve noted in their statement that A.I.G. is a “significant counterparty to a number of major financial institutions.”

That means that by enabling A.I.G. to avert bankruptcy proceedings, the taxpayer is also bailing out — whom exactly?

Not knowing is not acceptable. At this stage of a deepening crisis, no one is arguing that the government should let A.I.G. collapse into a disorderly bankruptcy. It is too interconnected. During the housing bubble, it used unregulated derivatives to insure mortgage securities that turned out to be toxic — without putting aside reserves in case it had to pay up. If it now went under, there could be a chain of catastrophic defaults among banks that hold the securities and related investments.

The A.I.G. bailouts fail the basic test of transparency: Who ends up with the money? Major financial institutions are not innocent victims of A.I.G.’s demise. They are sophisticated investors, and they should have known the risks being taken — and who profited mightily from the relationship before it all came crashing down.

Whomever the recipients are, they should be investigated for their roles in the crash and, to the extent possible, be made to pay for the bailouts.

The serial A.I.G. bailouts are especially problematic for their connection to the Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs. At the time of the first A.I.G. rescue last fall, it was reported by Gretchen Morgenson in The Times that Goldman was A.I.G.’s largest trading partner, with some $20 billion of business tied into the insurer. Goldman has said that its exposure to risk from A.I.G. was offset, or hedged, by other investments.

What is certain is that Goldman has lots of friends in high places — yet one more reason why this bailout has to be as transparent as possible. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s chief executive, was the only Wall Street executive at a September meeting at the New York Federal Reserve to discuss the initial A.I.G. bailout. Also involved in the discussion was the then head of the New York Fed, Timothy Geithner, who is now President Obama’s Treasury secretary...

Well that's going too far, and I'm sure the Men in Black will be paying a visit to whoever wrote that screed if the Company can scrape together their payroll, anyway.

What's really missing is any connection of the black hole in the economy, the black hole of endless war, and the red hole where so much of the money goes. The NIDA:

...In recent years, the availability of higher purity heroin (which is more suitable for inhalation) and the decreases in prices reported in many areas have increased the appeal of heroin for new users who are reluctant to inject. Heroin has also been appearing in more affluent communities...

All our efforts in Iraqiranistan have secured one thing: a number of consecutive years each with the highest rate of production of the opium poppy ever in history from the world's top supplier.

It's probably a little too tinfoily for the main$tream, but the connections are clear. The pity with conspiracy theories is that criminal conspiracies don't need a Bond-style SPECTRE to hold them together. Hundred of cells of criminal activity can work together and even compete for top dog without any co-ordination at all. This becomes particularly easy in a Republic that's abandoned its Constitution for the lure of Empire.

There are reasons...

Why?

The Law condemns the Man or Woman
Who steals the Goose from off the Common,
But sets the greater Felon loose
Who steals the Common from the Goose.

It's deja vu all over again in the 21st century, with eavesdropping & rendition of the usual suspects but a whole new manifest destiny deal for the aristocrat banksters.

They're not good reasons, of course.

Fireballs Happen

Earthgrazer: The Great Daylight Fireball of 1972

...In 1972, an unusually bright meteor from space was witnessed bouncing off Earth's atmosphere, much like a skipping stone can bounce off of a calm lake. The impressive event lasted several seconds, was visible in daylight, and reportedly visible all the way from Utah, USA to Alberta, Canada. Pictured above, the fireball was photographed streaking above Teton mountains behind Jackson Lake, Wyoming, USA...

What does it mean when Greenspan talks Nationalization?

What does it mean when Free Marketeers embrace socialism?

It's not just simple doublespeak, it's double talk.

Let's reiterate Hudson's conclusion- and Floyd's final comment- here:

...Neoliberal denunciations of public regulation and taxation as “socialism” is really an attack on classical political economy – the “original” liberalism whose ideal was to free society from the parasitic legacy of feudalism.

A truly socialized Treasury policy would be for banks to lend for productive purposes that contribute to real economic growth, not merely to increase overhead and inflate asset prices by enough to extract interest charges. Fiscal policy would aim to minimize rather than maximizing the price of home ownership and doing business, by basing the tax system on collecting the rent that is now being paid out as interest. Shifting the tax burden off wages and profits onto rent and interest was the core of classical political economy in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as the Progressive Era and Social Democratic reform movements in the United States and Europe prior to World War I.

But this doctrine and its reform program has been buried by the rhetorical smokescreen organized by financial lobbyists seeking to muddy the ideological waters sufficiently to mute popular opposition to today’s power grab by finance capital and monopoly capital. Their alternative to true nationalization and socialization of finance is debt peonage, oligarchy and neo-feudalism. They have called this program “free markets.”

The brass of our financial elites is awe-inspiring, indeed almost sublime. In broad daylight, they are taking a gargantuan catastrophe -- for which they are to blame, and for which everyone rightly and angrily blames them -- and they are using it to further entrench their power and privilege. That sure is one hell of a trick...and there sure enough will be hell to pay -- for us, not them -- if they can pull it off.

They will, and there will be. Count on it.

Reality-based enviromentalism

Why am I hearing this from well-educated progressives in the 21^st century:

"... it may be too late to save ourselves from Gaia's reaction to having us around, and many millions are likely to die."

Gaia's doubtless pissed.



Don't laugh. They're serious.
[i have to apologize, they took the original image offline;
this one is almost as anthropomorphically
silly, though]

Unless, of course, the sun's period of extended quiescence from 2007-8 continues to extend itself. In which case the excess CO₂ is all that's keeping us from another Ice Age. In which case, Gaia likes us.

Green cities, planting trees, renewable energy, decreasing carbon emissions and other pollutants are all good rational ideas.

Gaia is a silly concept. We live on a planet. We can screw it up, but we'd be killing ourselves. It would be cause-and-effect, but it wouldn't be the reaction of an angry planetary entity.

More science, please, and less New Age mythology. The neolithic and iron age stuff we're surrounded with is bad enough. There's no Hell below us, and above us only sky.

There's no planetary Goddess, either, any more than there is a Hairy Thunderer, a Cosmic Muffin, or a Flying Spagetti Monster.

Company Wars circa. 1987

The Memory Hole has the .pdfs for the entire Kerry Report. Just sayin'.

In 1987/8, two subcommittees of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held three 14 days of hearings on drug trafficking. Headed by Sen. John F. Kerry (D - Mass.), the panel heard evidence of official corruption in Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. The next year, the government published the transcripts in a 4-volume set that has remained a touchstone for anyone interested in narco-corruption, particularly as it involves US intelligence agencies.

The trouble is, this 1,800-page goldmine of information has been incredibly hard to find. The Memory Hole's copy was given to me by a friend of the family—Lorenzo Hagerty—who told me an interesting story. As soon as the Kerry Report was published, Lorenzo ordered a set of the transcripts from the Government Printing Office. When it arrived, he began reading it and realized how important it was. He immediately called the GPO to order another set. He was told that the set was already out of print and would not be published again. It had been available to the public for one single week.

Small portions of the Kerry Report transcripts have been published online, but they are only a fraction of the entire four volumes. The Memory Hole has scanned and posted the entire thing...

The Company has doubtless come a long way since then, but you won't see an unclassified report from the Feds like this again about it.

The New Third Rail

This one is powering a train headed towards another Bastille Day. Frank Rich:

...G.O.P. pseudopopulism ran riot last week as right-wing troops rallied around their latest Joe the Plumber: Rick Santelli, the ranting CNBC foe of Obama’s mortgage rescue program. Ann Coulter proposed a Santelli run for president, and Twitterers organized national “tea parties” to fuel his taxpayers’ revolt. Even with a boost from NBC, whose networks seized a promotional opening by incessantly recycling the Santelli “controversy,” the bonfire fizzled. It did so because — as last week’s polls also revealed — the mortgage bailout, with a 60-plus percent approval rating, is nearly as popular as Obama.

The Santelli revolution’s flameout was just another confirmation that hard-core Republican radicals are now the G.O.P.’s problem, not the president’s. Rahm Emanuel has it right when he says the administration must try bipartisanship, but it doesn’t have to succeed. Voters give Obama credit for trying, and he can even claim success with many Republican governors, from Schwarzenegger to Crist. Now he can move on and let his childish adversaries fight among themselves, with Rush Limbaugh as the arbitrating babysitter. (Last week he gave Jindal a thumb’s up.)

But that good news for Obama is countered by the bad. The genuine populist rage in the country — aimed at greedy C.E.O.’s, not at the busted homeowners mocked as “losers” by Santelli — cannot be ignored or finessed. Though Obama was crystal clear on Tuesday that there can be “no real recovery unless we clean up the credit crisis,” it was telling that he got fuzzy when he came to what he might do about it. He waited two days to drop that shoe in his budget: a potential $750 billion in banking “asset purchases” on top of the previous $700 billion bailout.

Therein lies the Catch-22 that could bring the recovery down. As Obama said, we can’t move forward without a functioning financial system. But voters of both parties will demand that their congressmen reject another costly rescue of it. Americans still don’t understand why many Wall Street malefactors remain in place or why the administration’s dithering banking policy lacks the boldness and clarity of Obama’s rhetoric.

Nor can a further bailout be easily sold by a Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, whose lax oversight of the guilty banks while at the New York Fed remains a subject of journalistic inquiry. In a damning 5,600-word article from Bloomberg last week, he is portrayed as a second banana, a timid protégé of the old boys who got us into this disaster. Everyone testifies to Geithner’s brilliance, but Jindal, a Rhodes scholar, was similarly hyped. Like the Louisiana governor, the Treasury secretary is a weak public speaker not because he lacks brains or vocal training but because his message doesn’t fly.

Among the highlights of Obama’s triumphant speech was his own populist jeremiad about the “fancy drapes” and private jets of Wall Street. But talk is not action. Two days later, as ABC News reported, the president of taxpayer- supported Bank of America took a private jet to New York to stonewall Andrew Cuomo’s inquest into $3.6 billion of suspect bonuses.

Handing more public money to the reckless banks that invented this culture and stuck us with the wreckage is the new third rail of American politics. If Obama doesn’t forge a better plan, neither his immense popularity nor even political foes as laughable as Jindal can insulate him from getting burned.

It's hard not to dance with the people who brought you to the party. Particularly in Obama's case, the choice is sticky. He can either dance with the voters, who overwhelmed the Republican effort to steal the last election, or dance with the Big Money that bankrolled his half-billion dollar campaign.

But there is all kinds of third rail clutching in Washington these days. The Reptilicans and the DINOcrats (not to mention the Wall Street privateers) continue to gaze hungrily at the Social Security fund, and although Obama continues to mention it in passing he's smart enough not seriously talk about it in front of the children. Then there's the third rail known as the Pentagon. Obama's made a big deal in public about how that budget is getting "frozen" at a 4% increase this year, but every estimate I've seen also acknowledges an extra hundred billion or so will be included to sort of round things out.

Still, selection for doublethink inproves the opacity of the doubletalk at least in the echo chamber.

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional"

-Hunter S. Thompson

Quoth the Dark Wraith:

The Ninth Circuit Court has rejected the Obama Administration's request for an emergency stay to block a lawsuit against the government's warrantless wiretapping program. Attorney General Eric "Paramilitary Law" Holder has been trying to use the so-called "state secrets privilege" in several cases, even though the Administration claims it is engaged in a comprehensive review of this legal fiat.

So here we have yet another example of how odd the polical theatre is becoming as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st Century: the federal judiciary — which had been rubber-stamping anything and everything an openly authoritarian, previous President wanted to do to degrade constitutional rights — is now getting a serious case of intestinal fortitude, while the Executive Branch — which is now under the control of a supposedly "liberal" President — is digging a trench to cabin itself in the very same legalistic wrecking ball of "state secrets privilege" that the miserably Right-wing, incompetent Bush Administration used.

Weirdness abounds. Stay tuned for more. This could get interesting.

Of course, there's the chance rescuing the economy and placating the middle class is a policy decision of the Company board. Remember, Obama kept a lot of the Poppy Bu$h Republicans. Like Robert Gates, for instance.

It's the same old Endless War. They're just no longer gauche enough to call it that.

A good parasite does not kill its host, and Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton were nothing like good parasites.

We're in the good cop phase of the good cop/bad cop dichotomy. We make our concessions now, or the guy with the taser comes back in. Of course, after he recharges his batteries he'll be back in anyway.

Keep your hands off my planet

This is such a mind-bogglingly stupid idea I don't know where to start.

So let's start with one word: Hubris:

Hacking the planet: The only climate solution left?

In a room in London late last year, a group of British politicians were grilling a selection of climate scientists on geoengineering - the notion that to save the planet from climate change, we must artificially tweak its thermostat by firing fine dust into the atmosphere to deflect the sun's rays, for instance, or perhaps even by launching clouds of mirrors into space.

Surely the scientists gave such a heretical idea short shrift. After all, messing with the climate is exactly what got us into such trouble in the first place. The politicians on the committee certainly seemed to believe so. "It is not sensible, is it? It is not a serious suggestion?"

Had the question been posed a few years ago, most climate scientists would have agreed. But the mood is changing. In the face of potentially catastrophic climate change, the politicians and scientists all agreed that since cuts to carbon emissions will likely fall short we need to be exploring "Plan B". Climatologists have hit a "social tipping point" says Tim Lenton of the University of East Anglia, UK.

What's more, respected scientists, including Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, and groups such as the UK's Royal Society, are already assessing the risks and benefits. Are we ready to try to turn down the thermostat? Who will have the authority to push the button? And what would happen if one nation or well-intentioned "green finger" individual decided to go it alone?

Geoengineering schemes range from the low-tech, such as planting trees, to sci-fi, such as placing mirrors in orbit between Earth and the sun. All would work either by diverting solar energy away from Earth or by sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to dampen the greenhouse effect...

...take a look at one of the more mature geoengineering schemes that could provide us with instant cooling today - pumping sulphate particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays back into space. If one country forged ahead, it could have detrimental effects on others. A 2007 study suggested sulphate sunshades could trigger catastrophic drought in some regions. "There would inevitably be winners and losers, as there is not a single global thermostat which will bring about universal and consistent cooling," says David Santillo, senior research scientist at Greenpeace Research Laboratories in Exeter, UK. "By its very nature, if there is to be any purpose in geoengineering, it would have to exert an impact over a vast proportion of the planet..."

You think global warming is bad? According to the fossil record, the most biologically diverse times in history have been when the tropics extended to the poles. The cooling has been a recent thing.



You want ecological disaster? How about a polar ice cap extending to where the Ohio river is now, and a Gulf of Mexico as cool as Hudson's Bay?



You don't dim the face of the sun. You think a sea level rise of 20 meters over the next hundred years due to global warming is a bad thing? Think instead of the American MidWest under a kilometer of ice. Exactly where are you going to grow the food to feed five billion people?

In a warm world, Canada and Siberia become more habitable. The greater part of the land masses of the earth get easier to live in. Many islands disappear, yes. The coastlines change, and populations will be on the move. There will be troubles. But food can still be grown, and the sea level changes are not happening overnight.

If global warming proceeds, humanity had better take its chances with the Gulf up to Shreveport and Manhattan under water instead of under a glacier.

It's Class Warfare Whenever the Proles Complain

It's those commie hippies at Media Matters again:

...Warren Buffett, who knows a thing or two about wealth, has noted that because of the way the tax code is structured, he effectively pays taxes at a lower rate than the secretaries who work for him, concluding: "There's class warfare, all right. But it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

One reason they're winning is that the news media do not use the loaded phrases "class warfare" and "redistribution of wealth" to describe things like the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, or the home mortgage deduction (which favors those who are wealthy enough to buy homes over those who are not) or countless other policies that benefit wealthier Americans at the expense of those who are less fortunate. Instead, the media pretend this is a one-sided war -- as though the wealthy are being unfairly assaulted by an army of bullying waitresses and janitors and farmers and teachers.

Another reason is articles like today's Washington Post front-pager. The Post tells us in paragraph one that Obama plans to raise taxes on the wealthy and waits until paragraph 18 to reveal that he plans to make permanent a tax credit for low- and middle-income workers. A tax increase that applies to almost nobody -- that leads the article. A tax credit that applies to much of the nation's workforce? Buried 18 paragraphs in...

...but he asked about UFOs

CIA Awkwardly Debriefs Obama On Creation Of Crack Cocaine

Class Warfare

A Bold Plan Sweeps Away Reagan Ideas

If only. However, even Krugman approves, and since he is one of only a couple of hundred people who've actually read the monstrosity, this may be a sign of real change.

Now the question one asks, is why the Masters of the Universe would bankroll the One who brings it all about.

For your consideration:

...Before becoming Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers liked to tell a hypothetical story to distill the trend. The increase in inequality, Mr. Summers would say, meant that each family in the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution was effectively sending a $10,000 check, every year, to the top 1 percent of earners.

Mr. Obama’s budget reflects that sensibility. Budget experts were still sorting through the details on Thursday, but it appeared that various tax cuts and credits aimed at the middle class and the poor would increase the take-home pay of the median household by roughly $800.

The tax increases on the top 1 percent, meanwhile, will most likely cost them $100,000 a year.

“The tax code will become more progressive, with relatively higher rates on the rich and relatively lower rates on the middle class and poor,” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center in Washington. “This is reversing the effects of the Bush policies,” he added, and then going even further...

Why? Perhaps the best answer may be found from biology: the well-adapted parasite does not kill its host.

There are some places where the relationship is less the well-adapted one...

...As governors in nine states, mostly in the South, consider rejecting millions of dollars in federal stimulus money for increased unemployment insurance, there is growing anger among the ranks of the jobless in those states that they could be left out of a significant government benefit...

The problem is, those poor Southern whites have a long track record of shooting at exactly the wrong people.

So if you really wanted an excuse to impose martial law, you'd set brother against brother, by inciting the least rational against the rest.

It's what happened to the South in the Civil War. It benefited the Southern whites not one bit to lay down their lives so their aristocrats could continue to exploit their slaves. Of course, the reality of the situation was that the aristocrats also owned the "free" white people they "enlisted".

Of course, they didn't see it that way. That's what mind control is all about. That's what we're up against now, too.

Civil War II? No, another Company war, along the lines of what we've served up in Latin America. The real makeup of the sides, and who profits won't look anything like what's presented by the main$tream.

The blood will be real enough.

"...the tangy metallic kiss of US leadership"

Yahssuh...

The One has a whole different schtick than Der Decider, but he still manages to get facts wrong to please his audience.

Meanwhile, the Company's plan is working, sez the Company:

WASHINGTON — Leon E. Panetta, the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said Wednesday that the agency’s campaign against militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas was the “most effective weapon” the Obama administration had to combat Al Qaeda’s top leadership.



The C.I.A. in recent months has intensified its covert campaign of missile attacks in the tribal areas, carrying out more than 30 strikes against Qaeda and Taliban leaders from drone aircraft. Mr. Panetta stopped short of directly acknowledging the missile strikes, but he said that “operational efforts” focusing on Qaeda leaders had been successful.

“It is for that reason that the president and the vice president and everyone else supports continuing that effort,” he said...

Everyone that's anyone, agrees.



We're still winning, hearts, minds, and livers in Iraq, while we're breaking necks, too:

BAGHDAD — Twenty-eight members of a Shiite messianic cult responsible for brutal attacks on Shiite pilgrims in Iraq were sentenced to death on Thursday, said an official from the federal court in Dhi Qar Province...

I'm glad the new policies are all based on Hope.



If they weren't so warm and fuzzy I'd think someone was up the same old bait and switch with more than a little of the steel cold smash and grab.

"...rearrange the deck chairs and hope the iceberg melts..."

Dr. Krugman doesn't get it, either.

But the One brings us Hope and Change.

I'll go with the Change, anyway.

Day of Ya Reckoning

The Oborg thinks Hope and Change will doubtless assimilate the unFaithful:

"...I want to speak plainly and candidly about this issue tonight, because every American should know that it directly affects you and your family's well-being. You should also know that the money you've deposited in banks across the country is safe, your insurance is secure. You can rely on the continued operation of our financial system; that's not the source of concern.

The concern is that, if we do not re-start lending in this country, our recovery will be choked off before it even begins. You see...You see, the flow of credit is the lifeblood of our economy. The ability to get a loan is how you finance the purchase of everything from a home to a car to a college education, how stores stock their shelves, farms buy equipment, and businesses make payroll.

But credit has stopped flowing the way it should. Too many bad loans from the housing crisis have made their way onto the books of too many banks. And with so much debt and so little confidence, these banks are now fearful of lending out any more money to households, to businesses, or even to each other.

When there's no lending, families can't afford to buy homes or cars, so businesses are forced to make layoffs. Our economy suffers even more, and credit dries up even further.

That is why this administration is moving swiftly and aggressively to break this destructive cycle, to restore confidence, and restart lending.

And we will do so in several ways. First, we are creating a new lending fund that represents the largest effort ever to help provide auto loans, college loans, and small-business loans to the consumers and entrepreneurs who keep this economy running.

Second -- second, we have launched a housing plan that will help responsible families facing the threat of foreclosure lower their monthly payments and refinance their mortgages.

It's a plan that won't help speculators or that neighbor down the street who bought a house he could never hope to afford, but it will help millions of Americans who are struggling with declining home values, Americans who will now be able to take advantage of the lower interest rates that this plan has already helped to bring about. In fact, the average family who refinances today can save nearly $2,000 per year on their mortgage.

Third, we will act with the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money to lend even in more difficult times. And when we learn that a major bank has serious problems, we will hold accountable those responsible, force the necessary adjustments, provide the support to clean up their balance sheets, and assure the continuity of a strong, viable institution that can serve our people and our economy.

Now, I understand that, on any given day, Wall Street may be more comforted by an approach that gives bank bailouts with no strings attached and that holds nobody accountable for their reckless decisions, but such an approach won't solve the problem.

And our goal is to quicken the day when we restart lending to the American people and American business and end this crisis once and for all. And I intend to hold these banks fully accountable for the assistance they receive, and this time they will have to clearly demonstrate how taxpayer dollars result in more lending for the American taxpayer.

This time -- this time, CEOs won't be able to use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks, or buy fancy drapes, or disappear on a private jet. Those days are over..."

"Sez who?", laugh the Masters of the Universe, as they let their sock puppet calm the rubes for the next big scam.

After all, panic profits no one, one reckons.

Nothing to see here

Move along, move along.

Accidents happen, you know.

Gravity Works

...and chaos is the plan. Charles Gasparino, via Deep Capture:

...Earlier this year, high-flying hedge fund Paulson & Co. retained [former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan] for its “advisory board.” The firm is a noted “short seller” of banks and financial stocks - meaning it makes money when these companies’ shares fall.

The thing is, Greenspan is making public comments that inevitably influence public policy and the markets - and some of those comments may well have led to his clients making a nice profit.

In a recent speech to the Economic Club of New York, Greenspan said the recession would likely “be the longest and deepest” since the Great Depression and that Congress might have to allocate more money to save the beleaguered banking system on top of the billions already gone for the Troubled Asset Recovery Program.

Then he told the Financial Times: “It may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring” of their troubled balance sheets.

Such a move would wipe out stockholders, sending shares of banks even lower - thus likely benefiting Paulson. It would also protect bondholders, helping another Greenspan client, the large bond-firm Pimco...

This is like stampeding the cattle over the cliff in order to get some good steak.

Chicago school economics and the benefits of the Free Market for the Faithful. The church of Milton Friedman once again establishes itself as an old fashioned death cult. Drinking kool-aid with the bears is bound to get you eaten.

Thank you for everything you've done, Alan Greenspan.

Krugman today gives some very good reasons why temporary nationalization of these banks is a good idea. Of course, in order for this to work, the government would also have to break the corporate entities that are too big to fail into lots of smaller entities. The government would also have to enact rules to make sure there were not other corporate jackals waiting to eat the little entities alive. The $ystem would have to be changed so that the banks no longer were driven by Wall Street, and so that both Wall Street and the financial industry no longer played by casino rules.

Somehow I think the restructuring will be cosmetic. What's the point in being an oligarch if you can't lord it over everyone?

The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One

Cannonfire on Sir Allen Stanford.

Ponzi investments, drug money laundering, the CIA, suppressed SEC investigations, and political financing that shifted from the Reptilicans in 2004 to the Oborg in 2008.

Oh my.

Read it all, it's very linky, and very good in a trashy spooky sort of way.

Hope and Faith and Obama's Excellent Adventure in Afghanistan is about as much about heroin as VietNam was.

'you people act like it's a bad thing to stand on a mountain of corpses and crow about "victory" '

General Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Surge

Chris Floyd says it all again in a review of a fluff piece for Petraeus Caesar (who, according to the main$tream, is responsible for the latest incarnation of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraqiranistan):

...To be fair, Walsh does note, way down in her review, that the downturn (or, following the brilliant rhetoric of our vice president, Joe Biden, should we not say "downtick"?) in violence in occupied Iraq was due in large part to the American tactic of bribing and arming violent sectarian gangs and giving them chunks of territory to lord over, as an alternative to their previous practice of, well, killing Americans.

This tactic, of course, had nothing to do with the so-called "surge" plan hatched in the bowels of that neocon chicken coop, the American Enterprise Institute -- which Walsh reluctantly praises for its surge plans which "healed" Iraq...

You know, the same way you heal a migraine by drinking yourself into oblivion.

So if and when we run out of money for the warlords- oh, never mind.

There is never an end of money for the warlords in Amerika or Iraqiranistan.

...even Walsh's acknowledgement of the central role played by the "bribes and bullets for local warlords" gambit ignores other major, non-surge-related factors in the downtick.

For instance, the completion of the American-abetted Sunni-Shia civil war, which saw "ethnic cleansing" on a scale that made, say, the Serbia-Kosovo imbroglio or the conflict in Northern Ireland look like a family reunion; and the part played by Iran in backing the American-installed Iraqi government – which is, of course, now run by long-time clients and dependents of Iran.

In other words, the violence has abated to a degree – a degree that still makes Iraq one of the deadliest places on earth – because so many people had already been killed and displaced that there were fewer people to kill and displace, and because the Americans bribed one set of antagonists to quit the battlefield and the Iranians helped tamp down internal violence, especially a potentially catastrophic intra-Shiite conflict between their Green Zone clients and the Mahdi Army.

There was also the American use of death squads, hit teams and "extrajudicial assassinations," as Bob Woodward reported – and lauded – last year. All of these developments that had nothing at all to do with the deployment of 30,000 extra troops that constituted the "surge..."

Hey, don't knock the jobs program. It's likely the only one both Reptilicans and DINOcrats will both support. Moloch, too.

Team Amerika Wants You

Urkaburkastan is developing nukular weapons no matter what that islamofascist IAEA sez!

The New York Pravda:

...“You have enough atoms” to make a nuclear bomb, a senior United Nations official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the topic’s diplomatic sensitivity, told reporters on Thursday...

Anonymously speaking? When the IAEA goes on record saying it isn't so? Unless you want to say the Mormons have their own nukular arsenal because there are enough uranium atoms in the Utah Rockies to make a whole pod of nukes.

That voice from the shadows would probably really be the senior ex-official that Congress would never ratify because his appearance gave self-respecting walruses the willies.

Ecomoronic Opportunities

Another great post from Len Hart.

The problem is the old money infiltrated the CIA as it was being born, and used the tools made available to the CIA to strangle Democracy and create a post New Deal aristocracy.

People point to the current economic crisis as a failure of that aristocracy to manage the $ystem, and it truely is. But the failure we're seeing is also an inevitable and conscious result of the policies the Company has supported. The crisis is intended to destroy the middle class and produce a large underclass in peonage.

The only middle class they want left are the manager/ overseer types that keep the workers in line.



The Company rebuilt economics schools along the Chicago School model of Friedman, with the view that they are there to preach the gospel of Supply Side Jesus. People like Roubini or Krugman are exceptions that don't fit the Company plan. Thus even when they're acknowledged correct, they're ignored in the main$tream press, by many most of their peers, and in the Washington policy formulations by both Reptilicans and DINOcrats.

Job Description Confusion

Some people in academia think their job is to do unbiased investigation of questions of significance to us all. Obviously they haven't been given the Company memo yet.

Biotechnology companies are keeping university scientists from fully researching the effectiveness and environmental impact of the industry’s genetically modified crops, according to an unusual complaint issued by a group of those scientists.

“No truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions,” the scientists wrote in a statement submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency. The E.P.A. is seeking public comments for scientific meetings it will hold next week on biotech crops.

The researchers, 26 corn-insect specialists, withheld their names because they feared being cut off from research by the companies. But several of them agreed in interviews to have their names used.

The problem, the scientists say, is that farmers and other buyers of genetically engineered seeds have to sign an agreement meant to ensure that growers honor company patent rights and environmental regulations. But the agreements also prohibit growing the crops for research purposes.

So while university scientists can freely buy pesticides or conventional seeds for their research, they cannot do that with genetically engineered seeds. Instead, they must seek permission from the seed companies. And sometimes that permission is denied or the company insists on reviewing any findings before they can be published, they say...

Dr. Shields of Cornell said financing for agricultural research had gradually shifted from the public sector to the private sector. That makes many scientists at universities dependent on financing or technical cooperation from the big seed companies.

“People are afraid of being blacklisted,” he said. “If your sole job is to work on corn insects and you need the latest corn varieties and the companies decide not to give it to you, you can’t do your job.”

This makes as much sense as having the tobacco companies fund the research on lung cancer, which is exactly what happened until the field of pulmonary biology started barring people who had such funding from their national meetings and journals.

In the regulatory environment that's evolved over the last 10 years such an action would be considered the moral equivalent of supporting terrorism since it hinders the Holy Free Market.

Until that worship of Supply Side Jesus stops, Monsanto will own agriresearch, just like Pfizer owns the mental health field.

UnAmerikan Activities

You won't see this evaluation in the Wall Street Pravda:

...Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve famed for breaking the back of inflation in the early 1980s, mocked the argument that "financial innovation,'' a code word for risky securities, brought any great benefits to society. For most people, he said, the advent of the ATM machine was more crucial than any asset-backed bond.

"There is little correlation between sophistication of a banking system and productivity growth,'' he said.

He stressed the importance of preventing financial institutions large enough to pose a threat to the entire system from engaging in risky behavior such as running hedge funds or trading for its own accounts...

In other words, a little Las Vegas is still okay. Which is still the problem.

"Special Interest Aliens"

"We have met the Enemy, and he is up der hey," Northcom.

I wish I was making this up.

Chaos Options for Cheap

Christian Science Monitor, via Cryptogon:

Until 2000, Robert Allen Stanford had no record of giving money to anyone in Washington. But then the Clinton administration introduced legislation to crack down on international money laundering.

Suddenly Mr. Stanford, whose company ran a bank in Antigua, made a lot of friends, spreading money to both political parties and their leaders. The legislation languished in a Senate committee until the terrorist attacks of 9/11 convinced Congress it needed to act.

Stanford, accused by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of an $8 billion fraud, continued to give money to scores of members of Congress, as well as the Obama presidential campaign.

The contributions, along with those from accused swindler Bernard Madoff, once again raise questions about the relationship of the rich and sometimes fraudulent to America’s lawmakers...

Questions? You must have Faith and Hope, not Questions!

...In Stanford’s case, since 2000 he, his company, or its employees have delivered $2.4 million to political operations, according to Ms. Krumholz. Stanford and his wife personally gave $931,000.

Although he donated to politicians of both parties, 65 percent of his donations went to Democrats, including $31,750 from Stanford, his family, and employees to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama.

“It’s a lot of money when you consider 99 percent of the public doesn’t even give $200,” the amount needed to gain the attention of the Federal Election Commission, Krumholz says. “It makes him a big player.”

In fact, politicians of both parties have been scrambling to distance themselves from the scandal. An Obama aide says the $4,600 contribution from Stanford himself has been donated to charity. Sen. Bill Nelson (D) of Florida is going one step further, shedding money that came from Stanford or his employees.

“Bill has told his campaign he wants every thin dime associated with Stanford returned to a charity or used in some way that could help folks who were deceived by this guy,” a Nelson aide says in an e-mail.

...The same thing happened after the Madoff financial scandal broke. Mr. Madoff and his wife were also contributors to the political process, giving $238,200 since 1991, according to the CRP. His own donations, plus those of his firm, total nearly $1 million.

Two of the largest recipients, Sens. Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon ($13,000) and Charles Schumer (D) of New York ($12,000), say they have donated the money to charity.

Federal authorities accuse Stanford of “massive” fraud centering on high-interest-rate certificates of deposit (CDs). According to the SEC, in recent weeks the Stanford Financial Group has quoted rates as high as 10 percent on a five-year CD, more than twice the highest current US rate, which bankrate.com says is less than 4 percent.

Stanford, who has not been charged with any crime, may have yet more pressing concerns. According to an ABC News report, federal authorities are investigating the banker regarding money laundering for a Mexican drug cartel. The network, on its website, says one of Stanford’s private planes was detained last year by Mexican officials, who found suspicious checks that might be drug related.

...Cutting down on money laundering and financial fraud became a significant interest of Rep. Mike Rogers (R) of Michigan, a former FBI agent. He introduced legislation to improve the ability of state and federal agencies to share information. With the support of the Clinton administration, it passed the House.

But when the bill reached the US Senate, it stalled.

The public-interest lobbying group Public Citizen became curious about what happened. It found Stanford had given contributions to the “soft money” accounts of then-Sen. Tom Daschle (D) of South Dakota, who was Senate minority leader, as well as other key legislators and both political parties.

“What we concluded was that it was his soft-money contribution, aimed at killing the money-laundering legislation, that got the bill killed,” says Steve Weissman, then at Public Citizen, now associate director for policy at the Campaign Finance Institute in Washington.

Representative Rogers knew from his experience at the FBI that something needed to be done, says a spokeswoman.

“If the law had been adopted, it would have surely impacted transparency and made it easier to prevent the fraud cases we’re seeing now,” she says, quoting him.

But without the fraud, where would we be today? Overall, it's a great investment: a million here, a million there, and billions in returns. Now that's a bull market.

Quoth Dr. Doom: the Party has to End

Roubini: Laissez-Faire Capitalism Has Failed:

...it is now clear that this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the worst economic crisis in the last 60 years. While we are already in a severe and protracted U-shaped recession (the deluded hope of a short and shallow V-shaped contraction has evaporated), there is now a rising risk that this crisis will turn into an uglier, multiyear, L-shaped, Japanese-style stag-deflation (a deadly combination of stagnation, recession and deflation)...

To avoid this L-shaped near-depression, a strong, aggressive, coherent and credible combination of monetary easing (traditional and unorthodox), fiscal stimulus, proper cleanup of the financial system and reduction of the debt burden of insolvent private agents (households and nonfinancial companies) is necessary in the U.S. and other economies...

The process of socializing the private losses from this crisis has already moved many of the liabilities of the private sector onto the books of the sovereign. Among these liabilities are banks, other financial institutions and, soon possibly, households and some important nonfinancial corporate companies...

At some point a sovereign bank may crack, in which case the ability of governments to credibly commit to act as a backstop for the financial system, including deposit guarantees, could come unglued.

Thus the L-shaped, near-depression scenario is still quite possible (I assign it a 30% probability), unless appropriate and aggressive policy action is undertaken by the U.S. and other economies.

This severe economic and financial crisis is now also leading to a severe backlash against financial globalization, free trade and the free-market economic model.

To paraphrase Churchill, capitalist market economies open to trade and financial flows may be the worst economic regime--apart from the alternatives. However, while this crisis does not imply the end of market-economy capitalism, it has shown the failure of a particular model of capitalism. Namely, the laissez-faire, unregulated (or aggressively deregulated), Wild West model of free market capitalism with lack of prudential regulation, supervision of financial markets and proper provision of public goods by governments...

Read it all. This was the man warning everyone 5 years ago what the speculative bubble would do.

But what are the Oborg doing? Trying to bailout the Chicago School model of markets, of course. The cowboys keep on making the deals, but you and I get to bankroll 'em and suck up the losses:

Banks have come to depend on selling mortgages and other loans to investors like hedge funds and insurance companies. This allows banks to make more loans and earn bigger profits.

But the market for these securities has collapsed, contributing to a freeze in lending.

To encourage new lending, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve would provide up to $1 trillion to finance private investment in these securities.


You want to stop the bleeding, Mr. Obama? Listen to Drs. Krugman and Roubini. End the rodeo circus for the Masters of the Universe, now or expect a generation(s)-long Depression.

I know they won't let you back into the faculty club at Chicago, but really, won't your kids respect you for it someday?

For a Few Dollars Less

If the Republicans are really all that serious about cutting the budget, there are things we could do. We could, you know, get rid of the mercenaries

...Blackwater never was a lone bad apple. The entire mercenary industry is rotten and needs to be discarded. Consider Dyncorp and Triple Canopy, the two mercenary outfits that will be filling the hole left by Blackwater. In 1999, for example, Dyncorp employees were implicated in a sex ring in Bosnia that involved the trafficking of women and children as young as 12 years old. When whistleblowers came forward to expose these heinous crimes, they were promptly fired.

And there is no sign that the firm has cleaned up its act in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US state department has repeatedly rebuked Dyncorp for being unprofessional and "too aggressive." In one embarrassing incident, a BBC correspondent actually saw a guard from the company slap the Afghan transport minister.

By comparison, Triple Canopy is a relative newcomer to the mercenary business. With hopes of cashing in on the most privatised war in history, the company was founded immediately after the invasion of Iraq by three US special forces veterans. According to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, Triple Canopy relies far more heavily on so-called "third-country nationals" to cushion its bottom line than either Dyncorp or Blackwater. Paid only $33 a day, these hired guns come largely from developing countries - especially those in Latin America - that have histories of human rights abuses.

Much like Blackwater, Triple Canopy was involved in one of the most infamous shooting sprees of the war in Iraq. On 8 July 2006 - after remarking "I want to kill somebody today" - a heavily armed Triple Canopy guard in Iraq reportedly shot multiple rounds into the windshield of an unthreatening pickup truck and later a taxi for amusement...

Of course, if we fired the mercenaries, there's no one the Company could hire for its black ops, like running drugs out of Afghanistan to pay for cushy offices in Dubai.

Simple Answers to Difficult Questions

More of the Oborg are getting the feeling something's amiss in the Prime Directive.

Billmon:

...My inexpert guess is that full nationalization still would be less expensive and messy than creating the kind of Potemkin markets the Geither plan seems to envision – even if the unintended consequences may be more difficult to control.

At the very least, it would be a more honest solution. One of the things that creeps me out about the political system’s response to the crisis so far – the insolvency of the banking system in particular – are the increasingly desperate attempts to maintain a phony façade of free markets and private enterprise, in an economy now utterly dependent on the federal safety net. I totally expected that from Hank Paulson and the Cheney Administration, but is Obama’s financial team really pressed from exactly the same Wall Street mold?

Yes.

What's in Your Wallet, Give It to Us!

We're going to rescue your retirement, Arrh!

The Existentialist Cowboy has some things you should hear about what the pirates in Washington are about to do to what's left of your retirement.

He quotes Dr. Krugman:

...one of the things that we need to know is that the estimates of the day at which the trust fund runs out, just keep on receding further into the future, because the program is doing so well at running surpluses. So, ten years ago, people said it was going to run out in 2029. Now the official estimate is 2042. Realistically, it’s probably going to go well into the second half of the century. Now how does this become a crisis? Well it becomes a crisis by changing the rules...

You might note the actual statistics from the Social Security actuarial tables support this position nicely.

I'm looking forward to hearing Obama's bipartisan rape plan for Social Security.

I'm sure that unlike the Reptilicans, who just want to end it, the DINOcrats will present us with their improvements whether the American public wants to improve it or not.

The only debate among the Washington Congresscritters will be on whether to just end it or to improve the $ystem.

Except for the Company 'Bots

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

Obviously, someone's been watching the right sci-fi.

...The stark warning – which includes discussion of a Terminator-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters – is issued in a hefty report funded by and prepared for the US Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research .

The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans. Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers...

...Any sense of haste among designers may have been heightened by a US congressional mandate that by 2010 a third of all operational “deep-strike” aircraft must be unmanned, and that by 2015 one third of all ground combat vehicles must be unmanned...

...A simple ethical code along the lines of the “Three Laws of Robotics” postulated in 1950 by Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, will not be sufficient to ensure the ethical behaviour of autonomous military machines.

“We are going to need a code,” Dr Lin said. “These things are military, and they can’t be pacifists, so we have to think in terms of battlefield ethics. We are going to need a warrior code.”

Samurai 'bots will not stand a chance against the Company's Ninja and Yakuza models. Neither will the rest of us. Sadly for them, that includes the Company, but evidence suggests those jokers are hardly people anyway. Putting robots in charge of the robber barons might significantly humanize them, in fact.

Medical Breakthrough

Just like a really bad movie

KABUL, Afghanistan — To many in the Afghan capital, there’s an obvious explanation for the dramatic re-emergence of the Taliban — a force that seemed thoroughly dust-binned after the arrival of the world’s most powerful army seven years ago.

"Now," as one 23-year-old Kabul shopkeeper, Qand Mohmadi, put it, "we think America is supporting both the Taliban and the Afghan government. That’s what everyone says."

Indeed, the rumor of U.S. support for the Taliban is virtually ubiquitous in Kabul. And absurd as it might sound after a year in which American and other Western troops suffered record casualties in fighting with insurgents, many Kabul residents say they see at least a kernel of truth in the story.

"We don’t know for sure why they are doing it," said Daoud Zadran, a middle-aged real estate broker. "Politics is bigger than our thoughts. But maybe America wants to build up the Taliban so they have an excuse to remain in Afghanistan because of the Iranian issue..."

...In recent interviews with Kabul residents, many blamed the lack of progress on Karzai, who is seen as increasingly weak and isolated ahead of this year’s planned presidential elections.

"I see no positive progress since the beginning of the Karzai government, even though we have support from all these other countries," said one resident, Habib Rahman. "We see hundreds of promises every night on the TV, but we see nothing in reality."

From a tarp-covered stall on a street corner, Mohmadi said he too saw little progress.

"There’s no jobs," he said. "I graduated from the 12th grade, and now you see I am selling candy bars by the side of the road."

Many blamed corruption, with some seeing the U.S. or at least western companies in league with pilfering Afghan officials.

"This government is so corrupt that if Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar were crossing the street together right outside, no one would call the police because they know the police would just take a bribe to let them go," Rahman said.

But there’s also another theory about bin Laden.

"A lot of people say that Osama is really from America," said Nasrallah Wazidi, shrugging noncommittally. "They say he’s just playing a role like a movie star."

Obviously the Afghani people have a lot in common with Americans. We also hundreds of promises every night on the TV but see nothing in reality. There are many college graduates these days who would be happy to sell candy bars by the side of the road except no one is buying, and they'd probably get arrested anyway.

The Best and the Brightest Zombies

Brad Hicks:

...But we're not guaranteed anything nearly so smart. Obama is famously a smart guy, one who learns from his mistakes, but he's also most famous as a guy who learns from the people around him if he doesn't go into a situation with an opinion of his own. And I'm not even vaguely happy about the people he's gathered around him, the literally hundreds of held-over Bush appointees and warmed-over right-wing Democrat Clinton-era appointees that David Sirota at the Campaign for America's Future has taken to calling "the Team of Zombies." If he listens to them, he'll reject bold action on the mortgage crisis in favor of a nice, (politically) safe plan to "attract private investment" in order to "harness the energy of the free market" to solve this problem via "a public-private partnership." Or, just as bad, he may have learned now not to trust the Team of Zombies, only to find out that after letting Pelosi and Reid (and House and Senate Republicans, to whom he gave far too many concessions) turn his stimulus bill into a legislative Christmas tree, and after giving Geithner a blank check and no deadline, there's no money left in the treasuries market for him to use to do the right thing. In either case, we're screwed. And I've been losing sleep for days now waiting to find out which it'll be.

Don't worry, Goldman-Sachs' your elected representatives are on the job!

Quagmire v.2

President Barack Obama announced Tuesday night that as many as 17,000 additional troops are headed to Afghanistan in the coming months, administration officials said...

Obama cited a direct threat to the United States from Al Qaeda as part of the rationale for his decision.

“The situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan demands urgent attention and swift action,” Obama said, announcing the deployment in a written statement. “The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda supports the insurgency and threatens America from its safe haven along the Pakistani border.”

Doubtless there are many Amerikans who think that our border with Pakistan is threatened.

Doubtless there are many others counting on the jobs program expansion of the Endless War will provide.

We can find you

Another gee-whiz! pangyric for the Big Brother state:

... Digital map displays on hand-held phones can now show the nearest gas station or A.T.M., reviews of nearby restaurants posted online by diners, or the location of friends. In the latest and biggest example of the map’s power and versatility, Google started a location-aware friend-finding system called Latitude in 27 countries early this month.

On its face, Google’s new service — available on dozens of mobile systems — is simply a way for friends to keep track of one another and meet up, for families to stay in touch or for parents to find comfort in knowing where their children are.

But it will generate a gold mine of new information about where millions of people travel each day, and there is no doubt that Google and others are planning to dig in that mine. “Everyone is watching Google, and this will open a floodgate of location-oriented applications and services,” said Greg Skibiski, the chief executive of Sense Networks, a New York City firm that mines the millions of digital trails left by cellphone users for marketing purposes...

“This is a new metaphor upon which others can build,” said Michael Halbherr, Nokia’s vice president for social location services.

Yes, it's social location services, not Mrs. Grundy looking over your shoulder, watching every move you make, every breath you take, and reporting it to those who would call themselves your peers.

Class War Quagmire

"...Looks more and more like Iraq, right? Everybody "serious" is totally fucked and totally in charge, and everybody who's right gets marginalized. Yay! Another victory for the discipline of free markets!"

Any Which Way But Prosecute

Sometimes you wonder. Other times you know.

...House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., has issued a subpoena requiring Rove to appear next Monday to testify about the firings and other allegations that the Bush White House let politics interfere with the operations of the Justice Department.

Michael Hertz, the acting assistant attorney general, said in a court brief released Monday that negotiations were ongoing.

"The inauguration of a new president has altered the dynamics of this case and created new opportunities for compromise rather than litigation," Hertz wrote in the brief dated Friday. "At the same time, there is now an additional interested party — the former president — whose views should be considered."

Yes, you got that right. The last thing the DINOcrat government wants to do is prosecute the Reptilican government. Funny how that works.

The more things Change, the more they stay the strange.

White Man's Burden

"...this is what is happening to all of us"

The real pity is the average white man suffers from this attitude too in more ways than can be counted. The prey of the Empire isn't just outsiders. It's first and foremost the shock troops the Empire depends on to sustain it.

The advocates of Empire now advise Obama with the same Imperial idiocy they fed Bu$hie.

Perhaps the biggest difference between 2003 and now is the type of response this tripe elicits from the readers of The Washington Pravda.

All you Americans who recognize the folly of a Republic trying to be an Empire deserve the kudos real Patriots receive.

The Imperial Centurions at the NSA are doubtless harvesting your IP addresses for dealing with later, at the Empire's convenience.

What's a little fraud among friends?

Hearts and minds and certify it anyway since they were the D.o'D.'s designated winners.