My Other Blog & Comments

News and Information Feed

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Ron Paul says his 'Audit the Fed' bill has been "gutted" by Democrat chairman

(Bloomberg) -- Representative Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who has called for an end to the Federal Reserve, said legislation he introduced to audit monetary policy has been “gutted” while moving toward a possible vote in the Democratic-controlled House. The bill, with 308 co-sponsors, has been stripped of provisions that would remove Fed exemptions from audits of transactions with foreign central banks, monetary policy deliberations, transactions made under the direction of the Federal Open Market Committee and communications between the Board, the reserve banks and staff, Paul said today. “There’s nothing left, it’s been gutted,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is not a partisan issue. People all over the country want to know what the Fed is up to, and this legislation was supposed to help them do that.”...Paul, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, said Mel Watt, a Democrat from North Carolina, has eliminated “just about everything” while preparing the legislation for formal consideration. Watt is chairman of the panel’s domestic monetary policy and technology subcommittee...Cont'd...LINK

Shocking wealth transfer from US taxpayers to federal workers, who average $120k per year in wages, benefits--twice that of private sector counterpart

(The Daily Bail) -- In 2008 the average federal worker earned twice that of his private-industry counterpart in wages and benefits: $120,000 per year versus $60,000. Check out the difference in slope of the two lines. Yowza. Federal pay and benefits are up 58% since 2000 compared to just 28% in the private sector...

Well, it's all the Democrats fault undoubtedly. Wait, looks like it was Bush.

■The George W. Bush years were very lucrative for federal workers. In 2000, the average compensation (wages and benefits) of federal workers was 66 percent higher than the average compensation in the U.S. private sector. The new data show that average federal compensation is now more than double the average in the private sector.
■If you drive through Northern Virginia, you will find nearly entire neighborhoods of $500,000 to $900,000 homes owned by government workers or contractors. Then you can drive five streets over and find $200,000 to $400,000 homes owned by those who pay the salaries for those government employees. It’s a fascinating distribution of wealth. Most government employees and contractors could not earn more than $60,000 on the free market. Their only chance to make that kind of money comes from having an employer that not only never has to make a profit but can forcibly take money through taxation...Cont'd...LINK

Madoff says SEC chair "dear friend," professes amazement that he wasn't caught earlier

(WSJ.com) -- Tonight the Inspector General of the Securities & Exchange Commission gives us Bernie Madoff in his own words — A jailhouse interview that Madoff granted to the SEC’s watchdog during his stay at Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan on June 17. Madoff spent much of the interview slamming the SEC: “Everything the SEC did prior to 2006 was a waste.” He said that the inspectors who combed through his books found only “ridiculous violations.” Madoff adds that he never supplied false documents to the SEC, but that it was “amazing to me” that he didn’t get caught...At one point, he called the SEC’s current head Mary Shapiro a “dear friend,” but doesn’t elaborate on how he knew her. CNBC was reporting tonight that the SEC rejects that characterization...Cont'd...LINK

Friday, October 30, 2009

Banksters part of noxious war-profiteering complex, according to report

(Reuters) -- Leading banks have funded arms manufacturers, whose products include cluster bombs, to the tune of $5 billion in the past two years, despite an international accord to ban such weapons, a study said on Thursday. The report by Profundo consultancy and several NGOs said the banks loaned money to companies whose products include cluster bombs or their components. It did not say the funds went directly to make cluster bombs. The manufacturers could use the money for any of their production lines. The top five loan providers were Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Barclays and Goldman Sachs, the study said...Cluster bombs, which open in mid-air and scatter a multitude of bomblets over a wide area, have killed and maimed tens of thousands of civilians, campaigners say. Nations agreed to outlaw cluster bombs in May 2008. The resulting convention will come into force when 30 countries have ratified it -- 23 have already done so. Neither the United States nor Britain, where the top five loan providers are based, have yet ratified the treaty...Cont'd...LINK

Buchanan: Bush decried the "false comforts of isolationism," but look what interventionism has gotten us

(TakiMag) -- If we had it to do over, would we send an army into Afghanistan to build a nation? Would we invade Iraq? While these two wars have cost 5,200 dead, a trillion dollars and a divided America facing an endless war, what have we won? Gen. Stanley McChrystal needs 40,000 to 80,000 more troops, or we risk “mission failure” in Afghanistan. At present casualty rates—October was the worst month of the war—thousands more Americans will die before we see any light at the end of this tunnel, if ever we do...Looking back, how has all this fighting advanced U.S. national interests? We have a “democratic” Iraq that is Shia-dominated and tilting to Iran. We have an open-ended war in Afghanistan that will likely do for Obama what Iraq did for Bush. But we can’t pull out, it is said, for if we do, Kabul falls and Afghanistan becomes the sanctuary for an Islamist war to take over Pakistan and its nuclear weapons...We ran Saddam out of Kuwait and put U.S. troops into Saudi Arabia. And we got Osama bin Laden’s 9-11. We responded by taking down the Taliban and taking over Afghanistan. And we got an eight-year war with no victory and no end in sight. Now Pakistan is burning. We took down Saddam and got a seven-year war and an ungrateful Iraq...“America rejects the false comfort of isolationism,” said George W. Bush in his 2006 State of the Union. And we did reject that false comfort. And now we can enjoy the fruits of interventionism...Cont'd...LINK

Mistakenly leaked document reveals dozens in Congress under investigation for corruption; Even ethics committee part of cover up?

(Washington Post) -- House ethics investigators have been scrutinizing the activities of more than 30 lawmakers and several aides in inquiries about issues including defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling, according to a confidential House ethics committee report prepared in July. The report appears to have been inadvertently placed on a publicly accessible computer network, and it was provided to The Washington Post by a source not connected to the congressional investigations. The committee said Thursday night that the document was released by a low-level staffer. The ethics committee is one of the most secretive panels in Congress, and its members and staff members sign oaths not to disclose any activities related to its past or present investigations. Watchdog groups have accused the committee of not actively pursuing inquiries; the newly disclosed document indicates the panel is conducting far more investigations than it had revealed...cont'd...LINK

Ron Paul schools Michael Moore on corporatism vs. free enterprise capitalism, and what decades of Big Government have really gotten us

U.S. economic growth claims are fabricated on more debt spending

(Counterthink) -- While the White House is celebrating a 3.5% reported growth in GDP last quarter -- the first economic growth in a year -- they conveniently forget the simple fact that it's easy to fake economic growth with debt spending. This so-called "growth" was really just the result of the U.S. Treasury flooding the economy with more debt-ridden "stimulus dollars" that will drive the nation even deeper into irreversible debt. That's not genuine economic growth, it's just really bad economic planning. For example, if a family is living on credit card debt to buy groceries, and they're two years behind on credit card payments, and then they suddenly take out a huge cash advance against their credit cards so they can spend even more money, that's not "economic growth." That's just more stupid spending. The U.S. government has done precisely the same thing: It's spending money it doesn't have, then claiming "an end to the recession" because the nearly $1 trillion in stimulus dollars did, indeed, manage to spend a lot of money and create "economic activity." But rather than being good news, it's actually really bad news because it's all borrowed money...Cont'd...LINK

OECD: Among all member countries, income inequality now highest in US; Job off shoring, government wealth transfer from taxpayers to Wall St to blame?

(Rense) -- Income inequality in the US is now the most extreme of all countries. The 2008 OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] report 'Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries' concludes that the US is the country with the highest inequality and poverty rate across the OECD and that since 2000 nowhere has there been such a stark rise in income inequality as in the US. The OECD finds that in the US the distribution of wealth is even more unequal than the distribution of income.

The increase in US income inequality in the 21st century coincides with the offshoring of US jobs, which enriched executives with 'performance bonuses' while impoverishing the middle class, and with the rapid rise of unregulated OTC derivatives, which enriched Wall Street and the financial sector at the expense of everyone else. Millions of Americans have lost their homes and half of their retirement savings while being loaded up with government debt to bail out the banksters who created the derivative crisis. The financial insiders running the Treasury, White House, and Federal Reserve (Rubin , Greenspan etc.) shifted to taxpayers the cost of the catastrophe that they had created. Goldman Sachs, saved with the public's money, recently announced that it was paying massive six and seven figure bonuses to every employee...LINK

Ahmadinejad: Iran will pursue nuclear program as long as Israel maintains nuclear weapons

(JTA) -- Iran will continue to progress in its nuclear program as long as Israel continues to have nuclear weapons, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said. The Iranian president made the remarks Tuesday during a meeting with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the semi-official state news agency ISNR reported. "When an illegal regime possesses nuclear weapons, the other countries' rights for peaceful nuclear energy cannot be denied," ISNR quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons but has never admitted to having them...LINK

Showman/liberal-activist Sting buys Obama's act: "In many ways, he's sent from God"

(Breitbart) -- Sting isn't a religious man, but he says President Barack Obama might be a divine answer to the world's problems. "In many ways, he's sent from God," he joked in an interview, "because the world's a mess." But Sting is serious in his belief that Obama is the best leader to navigate the world's problems. In an interview on Wednesday, the former Police frontman said that he spent some time with Obama and "found him to be very genuine, very present, clearly super-smart, and exactly what we need in the world."..."It's aggressive and violent and full of fear," he said of the backlash against Obama. "They don't want change, they want things to feel the same because they feel safe there."...LINK

Thursday, October 29, 2009

MSNBC does for Obama what Fox News did for Bush

"Dark Pools" latest Wall Street banker/crony lawmaker ploy to swindle average American masses

Obama treads carefully between angry public, bankers who own him, in order to "save the capitalist system”

(New York Times) -- Mr. Obama will fly to New York on Tuesday for a lavish Democratic Party fund-raising dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel for about 200 big donors. Each donor is paying the legal maximum of $30,400 and is allowed to take a date. Four of the seven “co-chairs” listed on the invitation work in finance, and Democratic Party organizers say they expect that about a third of the attendees will come from the industry. But from the financial giants like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup that received federal bailout money — and whose bankers raised millions of dollars for Mr. Obama’s election — only a half-dozen or fewer are expected to attend (estimated total contribution: $91,200)...

“There are sensitivities there,” said Scott Talbot, a lobbyist for the industry’s Financial Services Roundtable. Political contributions “can make a donor a target,” Mr. Talbot said. Many involved, though, say the low attendance from those Wall Street giants also reflected a broader disenchantment with Mr. Obama over the angry language emanating from the White House over the million-dollar bonuses and anti-regulatory lobbying...

“There is some failure in the finance industry to appreciate the level of public antagonism toward whatever Wall Street symbolizes,” said Orin Kramer, a partner in an investment firm who is a Democratic fund-raiser and one of the event’s chairmen. “But in order to save the capitalist system, the administration has to be responsive to the public mood, and that is a nuance which can get lost on Wall Street.”...

Dr. Daniel E. Fass, another chairman of the event who lives surrounded by financiers in Greenwich, Conn., said: “The investment community feels very put-upon. They feel there is no reason why they shouldn’t earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don’t want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown.”...LINK

Democrat legislators hard at work playing computer solitaire during crucial budget debate

House Minority Leader Lawrence F. Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk, far right, speaks while colleagues play solitaire on their computers as the House convenes to vote on a new budget for the fiscal year in the Capitol on Monday [AP Photo/Jessica Hill].
(Courant) -- A photo of two Democratic legislators playing solitaire has ignited controversy at the state Capitol and in the blogosphere. The Associated Press picture has appeared in any number of venues, and it shows two lawmakers sitting in the back row of the historic Hall of the House in Hartford during the lengthy debate over the two-year, $37 billion state budget. On the left is Rep. Barbara Lambert, a freshman Democrat from Milford who won her first legislative election in November 2008. She replaced longtime Milford Democrat James Amann, who ended his legislative career as the House Speaker and is now running for governor against Republican M. Jodi Rell. Lambert is playing spider solitaire in the photo, while Rep. Jack F. Hennessy, a Bridgeport Democrat who has served in Hartford since 2005, is playing regular solitaire. They both voted in favor of the Democratic-written budget...LINK

People of conscience weak, ignorant, and to be ignored: Do Brzezinski's attitudes exemplify those of America's hostile elite?

(After Downing Street) -- Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke at a RAND Corporation forum on Afghanistan in a Senate caucus room on Thursday. His first statement was that "Withdrawal from Afghanistan in the near future is a No-No." He offered no reasons why and suggested that his other statements would be more controversial.During a subsequent question-and-answer period, I asked Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, why he had provided no rationale for his first rule. I asked him why such a rule should be considered uncontroversial when approximately half of Americans oppose the occupation of Afghanistan. I asked how he would respond to the arguments of a US diplomat who just resigned in protest. Brzezinski's response would make Dick "So?" Cheney proud. He responded that it was understandable but that a lot of people are weak and don't know any better, and they should be ignored...LINK

$787 billion federal recovery program misstates job creation numbers by up to 10x

(LA Times) -- The government has overstated by thousands the number of jobs it has created or saved with federal contracts under the president's $787-billion recovery program, according to an Associated Press review of data released in the program's first progress report. The errors could be magnified Friday with the release of data expected to show the creation or preservation of hundreds of thousands of jobs. The White House seized on an initial report from a government oversight board weeks ago that claimed federal contracts awarded to businesses under the recovery plan already had helped pay for more than 30,000 jobs. The administration said the number showed the stimulus program had exceeded expectations toward reaching the president's promise of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year. But the 30,000 figure is overstated, at the very least, by nearly 5,000, based on AP's limited review of some of the contracts -- because some federal agencies and recipients of the money provided incorrect job counts. The review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs were credited to stimulus spending when, in fact, none were produced...LINK

Revealed: British left-liberal governments used mass immigration to deliberately convert country to statist multi-culturalism

(Daily Mail) -- There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire democratic process. Now, however, we learn that this is exactly what did happen. The Labour government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage. This astonishing revelation surfaced quite casually last weekend in a newspaper article by one Andrew Neather. He turns out to have been a speech writer for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett. And it was he who wrote a landmark speech in September 2000 by the then immigration minister, Barbara Roche, that called for a loosening of immigration controls. But the true scope and purpose of this new policy was actively concealed...The Government's 'driving political purpose', wrote Neather, was 'to make the UK truly multicultural.' It was therefore a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country. It was done to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions. It was done to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another 'multicultural' identity in its place. And it was done without telling or asking the British people whether they wanted their country and their culture to be transformed in this way...LINK

Culture in decline: 15-year-old gang raped outside school dance as fellow students look on, take pictures

(Daily Mail) -- The brutal gang rape of a teenager, while up to a dozen people watched and filmed the assault on mobile phones, has been described as 'something out of a horror movie' by shocked U.S. police. The 15-year-old victim was found unconscious after the terrifying assault in the grounds of a school in California. Police said she had been raped by up to six people in an ordeal lasting two-and-a-half hours before being beaten and left for dead. But what has shocked police in Richmond, California, is that as many as 12 others watched the attack take place and did nothing to help...Police arrested Manuel Ortega, 19, at the scene as he attempted to flee. Two other men are being questioned by police...LINK

Did liberal and corporatist-Right hate campaign against Lou Dobbs lead to gun attack on his house?

(Alipac) -- We have just learned that someone has fired a gun at the home of Lou Dobbs, with his wife just a few feet away from the incident. The gunfire followed a series of threatening phone calls. Lou Dobbs is being targeted by the pro-illegal alien groups and pundits who feel that Dobbs is stopping Amnesty from passing. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti Defamation League, the National Council of La Raza, Media Matters, and Geraldo Rivera of Fox News are using false information to foment hatred towards Lou Dobbs or any American who speaks out against Amnesty or illegal immigration. They have pushed for Lou Dobbs to be fired and since CNN has refused to do that some people are now turning to violence to try and achieve their goals. The lies and hate coming from these radical pro-illegal alien groups is now manifesting in the form of gunfire fired into the occupied home of an innocent multi-racial family...LINK

As chairman of New York Fed, Obama's treasury secretary essentially gifted Goldman Sachs billions of taxpayer dollars

(Gawker) -- Thanks to Bloomberg News, we now have a good idea how much of that $13 billion pass-through bailout Goldman Sachs got from AIG last year was pure taxpayer-financed gravy: $5.2 billion, courtesy Tim Geithner. AIG collapsed last year in part because it had written insurance policies on billions of dollars in stupid bets made by Goldman, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and others. Since it was functionally bankrupt, last September AIG thought it would be able to convince those banks to accept significantly less than face value on the credit default swaps it had sold them...Then a funny thing happened: The New York Fed opened an $85 billion credit line for AIG, staving off bankruptcy with a massive influx of taxpayer dollars and effectively taking control of the insurer. Habayeb was pushed aside as chief negotiator with Goldman and the other banks on the issue of how much AIG owed for those swaps and replaced by Tim Geithner, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York...We'll never know how much Goldman would have accepted in the end, or how much the other banks would have accepted, or if one or all of them would have forced AIG into bankruptcy. But we know this: AIG's target was 60 cents on the dollar, and after Geithner turned on the taxpayer-financed spigot the banks got everything...LINK

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Out of control federal spending pushes deficits to highest levels since WWII

(Yahoo) -- The federal budget deficit has surged to an all-time high of $1.42 trillion as the recession caused tax revenues to plunge while the government was spending massive amounts to stabilize the financial system and jump-start the economy. The imbalance for the budget year ended Sept. 30, more than tripled last year's record. The Obama administration projects deficits will total $9.1 trillion over the next decade unless corrective action is taken. As a portion of the economy, the budget deficit stood at 10 percent, the highest since World War II, according to government data released Friday...For 2009, the government collected $2.10 trillion in revenues, a 16.6 percent drop from 2008. The plunge reflected declining income tax collections as millions of Americans lost their jobs or saw their wages cut...Failure to curb runaway deficits could trigger a financial train wreck that would push interest rates and inflation higher, and send the dollar crashing if foreigners suddenly started dumping their holdings of Treasury securities...LINK

Soros says big Wall Street bank profits ‘gifts’ from state, calls for break up

(FT) -- The big profits made by some of Wall Street’s leading banks are “hidden gifts” from the state, and taxpayer resentment of such companies is “justified”, George Soros, the fund manager, said in an interview with the Financial Times. “Those earnings are not the achievement of risk-takers,” Mr Soros said. “These are gifts, hidden gifts, from the government, so I don’t think that those monies should be used to pay bonuses. There’s a resentment which I think is justified.” Mr Soros, who joins a transatlantic chorus calling for limits on risk, leverage and compensation at big banks, said proprietary traders belong at hedge funds, not at banks, and that the compensation at Wall Street companies should be limited to prevent excessive risk...LINK

Whistleblower FBI agent Colleen Rowley discusses 9/11 and "the cover up of the truth of why it happened"

Lawrence Wilkerson says Empire is destroying America, and oil imperialism is behind Cheney's conversion from conservative to Neocon

Obama just as monstrous as Bush, but he appeals to liberal sensibilities, so none of that matters

(John Pilger) -- Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning another war to add to his impressive record. In Afghanistan, his agents routinely extinguish wedding parties, farmers and construction workers with weapons such as the innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of your lungs. According to the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying under the Obama-led alliance, which permits only $29 per head annually to be spent on medical care...At home, the man of peace has approved a military budget exceeding that of any year since the end of the Second World War while presiding over a new kind of domestic repression. During the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, hosted by Obama, militarised police attacked peaceful protesters with something called the Long-Range Acoustic Device, not seen before on US streets. Mounted in the turret of a small tank, it blasted a piercing noise as tear gas and pepper gas were fired indiscriminately...LINK

Scheer: The year's biggest hoax and the media shills who enable it

(Pasadena Star News) -- The rationale for saving Goldman and the other too-big-to-fail usurers was that the rescue would increase lending to businesses and consumers and thus revive the economy. But Goldman made money last quarter by shunning such loans and instead putting the government-guaranteed low-interest money it now can borrow toward acquisitions and bond and stock trading. As The New York Times reported: "Titans like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are making fortunes in hot areas like trading stocks and bonds, rather than the ho-hum business of lending people money."...Now if we could get one of the banking lobbyists to float a duct-taped flying saucer balloon, Wolf Blitzer might cover the real hoax...LINK

Roberts: US-Israeli missile defense war game signals Israeli attack on Iran

(Information Clearing House) -- There’s no word in the Western press, but Al Jazeera reports that the US and Israel are conducting tests of the high altitude missile defense system that the US has provided to Israel. The anti-missile system is useless against the short range rockets of Hamas and Hezbollah. Its purpose is to protect Israel from longer range Iranian missiles. Everyone understands that Iran would not attack Israel except in retaliation. It is logical to conclude that the missile defense system signals an upcoming Israeli attack on Iran...LINK

Is more government really the solution to a problem caused by Big Government commissars and their bankster cronies?

(Information Clearing House) -- History can help point the way out of this mess, but not if policymakers shrug-off the lessons of the past and press on with half-measures that just eat up resources and extend the misery. Stuffing the banks with reserves and hoping that struggling consumers start borrowing again, is pointless. It is equally pointless to ignore tattered household balance sheets which will have to be patched before spending resumes. Government has to get more engaged and play a bigger role. This isn't a problem that can be worked out by the Fed and Treasury alone. It will take a major public mobilization, similar to preparing for a war. Federal money will have to be used to make up for lost state revenues. Government work programs will have to be created to rebuild critical infrastructure, expand green technologies, and modernize energy systems. At the same time, the administration will have to re-regulate the financial system, resolve or euthanize insolvent banks, and create a system of locally-controlled banks which function as public utilities to provide low interest loans to businesses and consumers...LINK

Editor's note: If a system of small, locally controlled banks is the solution to the problem of concentrations of money and power in centralized, corrupt, mega-banks, then why isn't small, localized government the solution to the problem of concentrations of money and power in centralized, corrupt mega-government?

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

After a quarter century of economic bungling in Congress, Barney Frank and liberal cronies "trying on every front to increase the role of government"

Video...LINK

ADL-engineered "hate law"--recipe for racial, religious and social strife--to be signed by Obama tomorrow

(TruthTellers.org) -- America is now following hate law countries such as Canada, England, and Australia in erecting a bias-oriented justice system existing parallel to traditional law. The government will now become especially attuned to the question of whether bias has motivated a crime on the state level. If they decide it has, the federal government will have complete jurisdiction to enter the case, forcing states to obtain the verdict the government wants. If the state fails to do so, the government can force it to re-try the case until federal prosecutors are satisfied. Thus, federal law enforcement will be uniting tomorrow afternoon with local law enforcement in a seamless unity of jurisdiction and power -- the definition of a police state...As indictments are handed down by the government against alleged hate criminals in the months and years ahead, these cases will be appealed. Predominantly liberal judges will broaden this legislation, protecting minorities not only from physical hate crimes but from "verbal violence," e.g., Biblical "hate speech."...LINK

Neocon's new book yet another in a long line of ethnocentric confessionals

(V Dare) -- Podhoretz’s Why Are Jews Liberals? is a combination of history of the last 2,000 years of Jewish victimization, voting analysis of 20th Century Presidential elections, and latest rendition of Podhoretz’s autobiography, all from a single, relentless perspective: Is it good for the Jews?...LINK

Where corrupt government fails, Mexican drug gang steps into breach

(Amconmag.com) -- An article in the October 23 Washington Times points to what I think may be the next important evolution in Fourth Generation war. The piece concerns Mexico’s third-largest drug gang, La Familia. La Familia is best known for beheading people it does not like. But according to the article, its real claim to fame may be as a pioneer in seizing the mantle of legitimacy previously worn by the state. La Familia is based in a poor, remote Mexican province, Michoacan, where the Mexican state has long been little more than another gang. Unlike the state, La Familia actually provides services for the province’s people...LINK

Frontline documentary covers the origins of the economic meltdown and the Wall Street/State Capitalist officials responsible



(PBS) -- In the devastating aftermath of the economic meltdown, FRONTLINE sifts the ashes for clues about why it happened and examines critical moments when it might have gone much differently. Looking back into the 1990s, veteran FRONTLINE producer/director Michael Kirk ("Inside the Meltdown," "Breaking the Bank") discovers early warnings of the crash, reveals an intense battle among high-ranking members of the Clinton administration and uncovers a concerted effort not to regulate the emerging, highly complex and lucrative derivatives markets that would become the ticking time bomb within the American economy.

Watch "The Warning" on air and online beginning Tuesday, October 20 on PBS (check local listings) and at...LINK

Obama adopts Bush admin's culture of secrecy, abuse of power

(New York Times) -- The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up...LINK

Plutocrat-socialist Left's latest scam: cap and trade

(Campaign For Liberty) -- They don’t usually call it “global warming” anymore. The lingo for a few years has been “climate change,” since it provides a much more rhetorically strong ground from which to deride skeptics. Lambasting those who “deny climate change” is more compelling than to scoff, “how could you deny the earth is warming?” Especially now that we know it has been cooling for a decade...Merely to express doubt of this theory has been called “treason against the planet” by Paul Krugman, who probably speaks for a large segment of left-liberals. It is seen as unseemly, unpatriotic and hysterical to wonder if humans are causing the earth to warm in unsustainable and disastrous ways. Another Nobel Prize winner, Al Gore, even said a year ago that businesses (conveniently ones that compete with his own favored industrial interests) should be censored for voicing doubt on climate change...At home the immediate threat is so-called “cap and trade,” a scam to legalize and normalize pollution, regulate industry and impose massive costs onto the American people...Link

The buck stops there: Cosmetic fixes to plundered economy a delicate dance for Fed, so Obama hides under table

(Politico) -- The biggest decision of the economic recovery will be made in the next six months, and Barack Obama will have almost nothing to do with it. Forget the debate over TARP, and never mind the questions about a second stimulus. This decision is about when to pull out $1 trillion that’s propping up the U.S. banking system. And it will be Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and his Fed colleagues who make the call...LINK

Ron Paul questions why Obama daughters haven’t taken Swine Flu vaccine

(Infowars) -- Congressman Ron Paul has questioned why, despite his efforts to encourage the general public to get vaccinated against the H1N1 virus, President Barack Obama has refused to allow his own daughters to take the swine flu shot. Despite the fact that Obama on Friday declared a national emergency in response to the H1N1 outbreak, he apparently doesn’t deem it enough of a threat to have his two daughters vaccinated against the virus...Link

Celente: From Bush through Obama, Wall Street has hijacked Washington D.C.

Video...Link

The government, for all practical purposes, now controls the entire housing mortgage market

(Economic Policy Journal) -- A senior economist at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, John Krainer, said in a report that that government sponsored enterprise intermediation of mortgage lending will make it difficult for the housing market to "return to normal." Krainer said that GSEs such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae now guarantee over 80% of originations, while non-agency mortgage securitization and loans have pretty much dried up...Link

UN General Assembly debates Israel war crimes

(Press TV) -- The UN General Assembly sets a date for debating Israeli war crimes in Gaza, paving the way for a possible Security Council inquiry into the issue. An Arab League diplomat said on Monday that Richard Goldstone's UN report on the conflict in Gaza would be discussed at the Assembly on November 4th with the aim of passing a resolution approving the report and then requesting a formal debate at the Security Council, which has the power to open a war crimes prosecution against senior Israeli officials at the International Criminal Court. The US --Israel's staunchest ally-- however, is expected to veto any call for ICC action against Israeli officials. Washington has vetoed several anti-Israeli revolutions...Link

Makow: Why were lessons of 1998 mini-crash ignored?

(Truth Seeker) -- The American financial system almost collapsed in 1998 when a hedge-fund, "Long Term Capital Management" went belly up. In a harbinger of 2008, banks had placed huge derivative bets on the Russian economy with LTCM. The Fed forced 13 US and international banks to purchase the hedge-fund. Altogether $4.6 Billion was lost. A PBS Frontline Documentary "The Warning" magnificently shows that although the American (and world) economies are at stake, the Clinton and Bush Administrations refused to regulate the derivative market, and allowed it to grow to an eventual $595 Trillion during the housing bubble. Not only did they refuse to regulate the industry, they forced out Brooksley Borne, the Chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, who had demanded action. During the credit crisis last year, former fed chairman Alan Greenspan was hauled before Congress and asked why he had refused to regulate these markets. The documentary shows him confessing that he had been "mistaken." The "world view" that had guided him for 40 years --that markets were self regulating-- had been wrong...Link

Russia pledges to continue arms supplies to Iran

(Google News) -- Russia on Thursday said it would continue military cooperation with Iran amid widespread unease in the West over Moscow's controversial contract to sell advanced anti-aircraft missiles to Tehran. "The Russian Federation implements and plans to further implement the military-technical cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran in strict accordance with existing legislation and its international obligations," Russia's Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation said...Link

Culture in decline: Girls accept rape to join gangs for protection

(Times Online) -- Teenage girls wanting to join violent male gangs are being forced into having sex and ferrying guns, knives and drugs, police and charities have found. The girls, some as young as 13, want to join gangs to raise their own profile or to seek protection. Often they are swayed by the status given to the senior members of the gang. When they first join they are told they must have sex with one member of the gang — and then find several of the gang waiting for them. What has shocked welfare workers is that the girls accept the situation as normal and do not appreciate that they are being violated...Link

Eclipsed by truth-seeking Internet? U.S. newspaper circulation plunge accelerates

(Reuters) -- The plunge in U.S. newspaper circulation is accelerating, according to the latest figures released on Monday, as more people cancel their subscriptions and publishers cut distribution and sales of discounted copies. Average weekday circulation at 379 daily newspapers fell 10.6 percent to about 30.4 million copies for the six months that ended on Sept. 30, 2009 from the same period last year, according to the U.S. Audit Bureau of Circulations...Link

Turkish PM exposes nuclear rift in Nato

(Guardian) -- The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has exposed divisions in Nato by accusing the west of treating Iran unfairly over its nuclear programme and describing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, its vehemently anti-western president, as a friend...Link

Britain's left-liberals attacked Right by socially-engineering multi-culturalism

(Telegraph) -- The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett. He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote"...Link

Detroit now a Midwestern wasteland?

(Reuters) -- On the auction block in Detroit: almost 9,000 homes and lots in various states of abandonment and decay from the tidy owner-occupied to the burned-out shell claimed by squatters...Despite a minimum bid of $500, less than a fifth of the Detroit land was sold after four days...Link

Roberts: U.S. a failed state

(Information Clearing House) -- Evidence that the US is a failed state is piling up faster than I can record it. One conclusive hallmark of a failed state is that the crooks are inside the government, using government to protect and to advance their private interests. Another conclusive hallmark is rising income inequality as the insiders manipulate economic policy for their enrichment at the expense of everyone else. Income inequality in the US is now the most extreme of all countries. The 2008 OECD report, “Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries,” concludes that the US is the country with the highest inequality and poverty rate across the OECD and that since 2000 nowhere has there been such a stark rise in income inequality as in the US. The OECD finds that in the US the distribution of wealth is even more unequal than the distribution of income...Link

Sunday, October 04, 2009

The back and forth on my expulsion from Mondoweiss for anti-liberal heresy

Anti-Semites, go away
(Pilip Weiss, Mondoweiss) -- My post likening Israeli racists to the anti-mongrelization of the white race crew back in the Old South got a lot of comment yesterday, including anti-semitic comments. Chris Moore showed up, who runs Judeofascism.com, also someone quoting Kevin MacDonald. I know, I’ve quoted MacDonald myself, still, he chills me, I think he dislikes Jews. I zapped the Chris Moore comment for the same reason, I don’t think he has anything nice to say about my original community...

Banned from Mondoweiss: Creeping Left censorship?
(Chris Moore, Judeofascism.com) -- For those who are interested, here is my (censored) comment from the Mondoweiss post that Philip Weiss professed to believe was anti-Semitic, and used as a pretext for my banning: ...

Jewish racism: Not just for Zionists
(Chris Moore, Judeofascism.com) -- Self-described "assimilationist Jew " Philip Weiss thinks I dislike Jews. In a front page post on anti-Zionist blog Mondoweiss titled ‘Anti-semites go away,’ he claims I “don’t have anything nice to say about [his] original community,” and says he doesn’t want me offering my opinion of Jews on his site, hence I have been banned from commenting on Mondoweiss.

Fair enough. It is his site and he can ban whomever he wants. But his blanket assessment that I dislike Jews, and his inference that the comment from the post that led to my banning was removed because it contained a general expression of dislike for Jews, are both false; and his insinuation that I am an anti-Semite who has deemed the Zionist problem to be “racial or irremediable” is a wrong-headed smear as well. All of which deserves a published rebuttal...

More on the anti-Semitism charge
(Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss) -- Chris Moore is angry that I "tarred" him with the anti-Semite label in a post I did last week. He’s responded on his site– the charmingly-titled Judeofascism.com– here and has challenged me to publish the post. I won’t, but you can go look at it...

Refining the definition of “Judeofascism” to account for its secular-left cult of Jewish exceptionalism (Chris Moore, Judeofascism.com) -- Perhaps no one better personifies this axis of leftist thought, Jewish exceptionalism, and a vision of authoritarian imposition of Jewish messianicism than Moses Hess, an early Jewish socialist who was a 19th Century precursor to the Jewish Bolsheviks. A compatriot of, and tremendous influence upon, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels -- whose ideas became the basis of Communism and socialism through The Communist Manifesto and other seminal leftist writings (a basis that remains to this day) -- Hess was a pioneer of socialism who also became a Zionist socialist obsessed with “the race struggle” between ethnic nations for predomination...