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Thursday, December 31, 2009

Was George Washington being anti-Semitic when he argued against foreign entanglements?

Ben Stein Explains His Attack on Ron Paul, Creating More Questions Than Answers
(Examiner.com) -- by Thomas R. Eddlem --

Ben Stein published an explanation of his attack on Rep. Ron Paul of Texas on his American Spectator blog December 30. Two days before Stein had termed Rep. Paul 's argument against the ever-increasing U.S. intervention in Muslim nations in the war on terror an “anti-Semitic argument” in a debate on CNN's Larry King Live.

Rep. Paul – who favored the attack on Afghanistan in 2001 as a legitimate response to the September 11 attacks – has in recent years argued that the more than eight-year-long occupation of Afghanistan and military strikes on other Muslim nations are increasingly being viewed by Muslims as a foreign occupation force that props up corrupt governments rather than a legitimate anti-terrorism effort. Regarding the most recent hijacking of an airline on Christmas day, Paul noted that interventionist-minded policy-makers are “never asking the question: What is the motive?” Dr. Paul went on to explain that the most recent would-be airline hijacker “said why he did it. He said because we bombed Yemen two weeks ago. That was his motive.”

Stein said on Larry King Live December 28 that Rep. Paul's words constituted an “anti-Semitic argument” and explained further in his American Spectator column that:

“...in my long experience, those who talk about the U.S. 'occupying' Moslem lands soon go to criticism of the U.S. for helping Israel -- a line long associated with Rep. Paul, as I understand, and again, maybe I am misinformed -- and then to biting criticism of Israel and then to bitter comments about Jews generally.”

Rep. Paul had never mentioned Israel or anything Jewish during the debate, nor is there any statement in the former obstetrician's 35-year public record that gives a whiff of hostility to Jews or Judaism. Stein's explanation, and his performance on the original Larry King Live segment, raise two issues related to the war on terror.

1. Anti-Semitism. The first issue is whether a person can advocate that the United States have a policy of minding its own business and staying out of foreign quarrels, as President George Washington advised in his farewell address, and not be an anti-Semite.

Stein argued on the Larry King Live segment that the United States must help all of its “friends” or be considered anti-Semitic. According to Stein, one is an anti-Semite even if he refuses to support the corrupt Islamic state of Yemen with military force because the Yemeni government is among “our friends.” Two days later Stein qualified the statement in his American Spectator blog – two days after he let his “anti-Semitic argument” fly – by adding that if Ron Paul accepted U.S. support for Israel that he may not be an anti-Semite. “I was about to add that I was sure that Rep. Paul was not going that far,” Stein explained. “So let me say right now that if Rep. Paul says he is not taking that line, and is not an anti-Semite, I believe him, good for him and I am happy to know him.” Essentially, Stein was saying that even though he labeled Rep. Paul's arguments “anti-Semitic” on national television, he was willing to admit that perhaps Rep. Paul was not an anti-Semite after all.

If someone does take George Washington's view of keeping out of foreign entanglements, Stein modified his argument on his American Spectator blog, a person is an anti-Semite only if he applies the principle to all nations, including Israel. Whereas Rep. Paul has advocated a foreign policy perfectly in tune with Washington's farewell address – one without any favoritism or intervention whatsoever – Stein may indeed still consider him an anti-Semite.

2. Blowback. The more relevant issue revolves around military intervention and whether the United States becoming the policeman of the world creates what is called “blowback” in the intelligence world. Stein denies the possibility that anyone could be motivated to attack the United States because our government is in the business of blowing up people across the Middle East. “They're terrorists and murderers because they are psychos, same as all terrorists and murderers,” Stein told Rep. Paul during the Larry King debate. Stein argues that terrorists are crazy, that they do not act in a rational way, and that they therefore cannot be reacting to the death of a loved one or fellow countryman. Terrorists attack without reason, Stein flatly stated.

If Stein is correct and terrorists are indeed insane and acting without a reason (a reason may have merit or be entirely devoid of merit), then there is no reasonable expectation that they would target the United States any more than any other government, person or object. If there is no reason, then the attacks are purely random. In fact, if terrorists are truly insane and without reason, logic suggests they would be far less likely to attack the United States. Attacking the United States requires extraordinary travel preparations for Middle Eastern terrorists and intricate planning that is ordinarily beyond the capacity of most insane people to accomplish. And it certainly doesn't fit the random pattern under which Stein insists terrorists heed.

Stein went on to explain that Ron Paul's arguments were wrong and that the United States has an obligation to prop up the corrupt government of Yemen...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

If Stein truly believes it is anti-Semitic for Americans to want to get Israel off our welfare dole, and to object to sending Americans off to fight wars for Israeli interests -- which begets ever more attacks by Islamic militants on American positions, then he is living proof that American Zionists put Israeli Jews ahead of American Gentiles, and should never be trusted in positions where Israeli and American interests might come into conflict. And I'm not just taking about Jewish Zionists. George W. Bush was a Gentile Zionists who put Jewish Israeli interests ahead of American interests when he pursued the elective Iraq war, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks on 9/11 -- attacks that likely would never even have taken place but for U.S government interventionism in the Mideast on behalf of Israel, and Washington's blank check support for the Jewish state.

For example, Jeff Gates notes that 'Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the mass murder of 9-11, conceded that the motivation for that attack was to focus “the American people…on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people and America’s self-serving foreign policy that corrupts Arab governments and leads to further exploitation of the Arab Muslim people.”'

What Americans are dealing with in Zionism is an insidious, elitist ideology that operates by incorporating American politicians on their rise up the ladders of power (as was the case with Barack Obama), or once they have reached the pinnacle of power (as was more the case with George W. Bush.) And eventually, Zionism actually becomes an elitist, sacraficialist state of mind, wherein it's perfectly acceptable to send lower class Americans to their deaths on behalf of Zionism's interests. In fact, Zionism even manages to incorporate poorer and more ignorant Americans by invoking the Old Testament and suggesting that Americans are fighting for the heritage of Western civilization by protecting the progeny of the tribes of biblical Israel. Actually, the opposite is true. Many Jews harbor profound grudges against Western civilization because of its Christian basis and its historical intolerance for Jewish ethnic rackateering, and thus stab it in the back at nearly every opportunity.

Ron Paul is too smart to fall for Zionism's platitudes and methods, which is what drives guys like Ben Stein crazy.

Israel can sink or swim on its own merits. Ending American interventionism around the world is in no way throwing Israel to the wolves, as Stein seems to suggest. It is forcing it to quite acting like a parasite and stand on its own two feet -- something that is apparently anathema to mentality's like Stein's.

Americans need to implement a new litmus test for their politicians. Instead of being pro-Zionist as the price of entry to the upper echelons of power, politicians should be tested as either Zionist neutral, or anti-Zionist to get elected. Because just like its bastard twin Communism, Zionism will ultimately destroy whatever it touches.

How Wall Street and its corrrupt political cronies got rich by engineering the collapse of the American economy

How Goldman Sachs Made Tens Of Billions Of Dollars From The Economic Collapse Of America In Four Easy Steps
(theeconomiccollapseblog.com)

Investment banking giant Goldman Sachs has become perhaps the most prominent symbol for everything that is wrong with the U.S. financial system, but most Americans cannot even begin to explain what they do or how they have made tens of billions of dollars from the economic collapse of America. The truth is that what Goldman Sachs did was fairly simple, and there may not have even been anything "illegal" about it (although they are now being investigated by the SEC among others).

The following is how Goldman Sachs made tens of billions of dollars from the economic collapse of America in four easy steps....

Step 1: Sell mortgage-related securities that are absolute junk to trusting clients at vastly overinflated prices.

Step 2: Bet against those same mortgage-related securities and make massive bets against the U.S. housing market so that your firm will make massive profits when the U.S. economy collapses.

Step 3: Have ex-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the U.S. government so that bailout money can be funneled to entities such as AIG that Goldman has made these bets with so that they can get paid after they win their bets.

Step 4: Collect the profits - Goldman Sachs is having their "most successful year" and will end up reporting approximately $50 billion in revenue for 2009.

So is it right for the biggest fish on Wall Street to make tens of billions of dollars by betting that the U.S. housing market will collapse?

You see, when you are talking about a financial giant the size of Goldman Sachs, the line between "betting that something will happen" and "making something happen" gets blurred very quickly.

Not that Goldman Sachs was the only one betting against the housing market.

According to the New York Times, firms like Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley also created mortgage-related securities and then bet that they would fail...MORE...LINK

Egyptian government cracking down on Gaza Freedom marchers; U.S. media silent

Press release: Protesters are being brutalized in Tahir Square right now – 500+ protesters violently forced into pens, others barricaded in their hotels
(Firedog Lake)

Will Rachel Maddow and the rest of the MSNBC team cover this? Doubt it. You have to be a protester in Iran or a teabagger to get their attention,

‘From a Gaza Freedom March press release:

Members of the Gaza Freedom March are being forcibly detained in hotels around town (Lotus, Liala) as well as violently forced into pens in Tahir Square by Egyptian police and additional security forces. Reports of police brutality are flooding a delegate legal hotline faster than the legal support team can answer the calls. The reports span from women being kicked, beaten to the ground and dragged into pens, at least one confirmed account of broken ribs, and many left bloody. The assault is ongoing, legal team and other spokespeople can be reached at the Nile Hotel or by contacting the phone numbers listed above.

The Gaza Freedom March was organized to focus attention on the one-year mark since Israel’s 22-day assault, which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, injured more than 5,000. Although the invasion technically ended, the effects on the ground have only worsened in the past 12 months. No re-building materials have been allowed in and more than 80 percent of Gazans are now dependent on handouts for food.

The marchers had planned to enter Gaza through Egypt’s Rafah Crossing on Dec. 27, then to join with an estimated 50,000 Palestinian residents to march to Erez Crossing into Israel to peacefully demand an end to the siege. However, the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announced just days before the hundreds of delegates began arriving in Cairo that the march would not be allowed to go forward. It cited ongoing tensions at the border. When marchers demonstrated against the decision, the government cracked down, often using heavily armed riot police to encircle and intimidate the nonviolent marchers"

Amazing to think that this is the treatment that non-violent protesters are receiving. Medea Benajamen stated loud and clear to the UN that they had contacted the Egyptian government for permission to march, they had mad commitments for a peaceful march and this is the treatment that they are receiving. Our MSM SILENT...LINK

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Hustlers, grifters, con artists and thieves: Judicial Watch Announces List of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” for 2009

Judicial Watch Announces List of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” for 2009
(Judicial Watch) -- Click for full accounting

1. Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT):

2. Senator John Ensign (R-NV):

3. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA):

4. Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner:

5. Attorney General Eric Holder:

6. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)/ Senator Roland Burris (D-IL):

7. President Barack Obama:

8. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA):

9. Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) and the rest of the PMA Seven:

10. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY):

"Bolshevik Barney" Frank's $4 trillion insurance policy for Wall Street banksters concentrates ever more power in Leviathan

Bankers Get $4 Trillion Gift From Barney Frank: David Reilly

Dec. 30 (Bloomberg) -- To close out 2009, I decided to do something I bet no member of Congress has done -- actually read from cover to cover one of the pieces of sweeping legislation bouncing around Capitol Hill.

Hunkering down by the fire, I snuggled up with H.R. 4173, the financial-reform legislation passed earlier this month by the House of Representatives. The Senate has yet to pass its own reform plan. The baby of Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the House bill is meant to address everything from too-big-to-fail banks to asleep-at-the-switch credit-ratings companies to the protection of consumers from greedy lenders...

Here are some of the nuggets I gleaned from days spent reading Frank’s handiwork:

-- For all its heft, the bill doesn’t once mention the words “too-big-to-fail,” the main issue confronting the financial system. Admitting you have a problem, as any 12- stepper knows, is the crucial first step toward recovery.

-- Instead, it supports the biggest banks. It authorizes Federal Reserve banks to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes. So much for “no-more-bailouts” talk. That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into markets this time around. The size of the fund makes the bribes in the Senate’s health-care bill look minuscule...

-- The bill also allows the government, in a crisis, to back financial firms’ debts. Bondholders can sleep easy -- there are more bailouts to come...

-- Since Congress isn’t cutting jobs, why not add a few more. The bill calls for more than a dozen agencies to create a position called “Director of Minority and Women Inclusion.” People in these new posts will be presidential appointees. I thought too-big-to-fail banks were the pressing issue. Turns out it’s diversity, and patronage...

-- Best of all, the bill contains a provision that, in the event of another government request for emergency aid to prop up the financial system, debate in Congress be limited to just 10 hours...MORE...LINK

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

America's decade of decline: We bought the snake oil

America’s Decade of Decline
(The American Conservative) -- by Patrick J. Buchanan

About the first decade of what was to be the Second American Century, the pessimists have been proven right.

According to the International Monetary Fund, the United States began the century producing 32 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. We ended the decade producing 24 percent. No nation in modern history, save for the late Soviet Union, has seen so precipitous a decline in relative power in a single decade.

The United States began the century with a budget surplus. We ended with a deficit of 10 percent of gross domestic product, which will be repeated in 2010. Where the economy was at full employment in 2000, 10 percent of the labor force is out of work today and another 7 percent is underemployed or has given up looking for a job.

Between one-fourth and one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs have disappeared in 10 years, the fruits of a free-trade ideology that has proven anything but free for this country. Our future is being outsourced — to China.

While the median income of American families was stagnant, the national debt doubled.

The dollar lost half its value against the euro. Once the most self-sufficient republic in history, which produced 96 percent of all it consumed, the U.S.A. is almost as dependent on foreign nations today for manufactured goods, and the loans to pay for them, as we were in the early years of the republic.

What the British were to us then, China is today.

Beijing holds the mortgage and grows impatient as we endlessly borrow on equity and refuse to begin paying it down. The possibility exists of an eventual run on the dollar or even a U.S. debt default.

Who did this to us? We did it to ourselves.

We sold ourselves a lot of snake oil about the Global Economy, interdependence, free trade and “it doesn’t make any difference where goods are produced.” The George W. Bush Republicans ran up the deficit with tax cuts, two wars and a splurge in social spending to rival the guns-and-butter of the Great Society...

...We believed all that hubristic blather about our being the “greatest empire since Rome,” the “indispensable nation” and “unipolar power” advancing to “benevolent global hegemony” in a series of “cakewalk” wars to “end tyranny in our world.”...MORE...LINK

Ron Paul: $75 billion spent on intelligence gathering, and lap bomber with all kinds of red flags still gets through. What's the agenda?

Ron Paul on Terrorism


(Campaign For Liberty) -- Congressman Ron Paul gives his thoughts on Yemen, the attempted airline bombing, the motivations of Al Qaeda, the radicalization of the Middle East, and the negation of our liberties to government provided "security."...LINK

How the MSM keeps Americans on the warlike Necon/Neoliberal plantation

Changing the Narrative for War
(Campaign For Liberty) -- By Philip Giraldi --

In spite of the calamities of the past eight years, there continues to be no shortage of neoconservatives in one’s face in the media, advising their fellow Americans that wars can be won quickly and decisively and that using military force to change how other nations behave is sound policy. The Washington Post features Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, all three Kagans, John Bolton, and Eliot Cohen on a regular basis. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is the epicenter for those who favor muscular interventionism. The New York Times, America’s most influential newspaper, is somewhat more circumspect, featuring neocons-lite David Brooks and Thomas Friedman regularly, but also including the more measured foreign policy analysis of Frank Rich and Roger Cohen. But even at its best The Times never really breaks the mold by bringing in someone who rejects the entire American imperial and interventionist enterprise. Such individuals do exist and many appear regularly at Ron Paul events and on Campaign for Liberty, but it is as if the mainstream media has decided that such views are outside the pale, the journalistic equivalent of praising Mussolini for making the trains run on time or advocating the disenfranchisement of women voters. And occasionally the Times features a real game breaker that goes in the other direction in the form of an op-ed that sets new benchmarks in terms of audacious support of Washington’s self proclaimed right to enforce its own standards on the world. Such an op-ed was “There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran” by Professor Alan J. Kuperman which, ironically, appeared on Christmas Eve.

As a former intelligence officer I frequently shake my head when I read a piece like “There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran” because I know exactly how what the Soviets used to call disinformation works. When the policy stinks and you have to create buzz about it anyway, you dig up someone who can plausibly describe himself as an “expert” and then find some obliging folks in the media to publish a piece that enables you to change the story line. That is what I used to do myself back in the days when I was working hard to demonize the Soviets. Take an incident or development, twist it a bit so you can come to a conclusion that is at odds with the facts, get your paid asset to write it up, hand it over to another paid agent in the media, and then let it fly. It will be picked up here and there, spread around the world and incorporated into other news coverage, and eventually everyone is saying we have to stand up to the Russians. Or Chinese. Or Iranians. Or the Yemenis.

Recently we have seen change the narrative applied to justify all sorts of outrages, including the pastel revolutions in Eastern Europe, where, so the accepted story goes, brave bands of reformers took on corrupt and authoritarian old regime leaders. The reality was much different, with European and American Non-Government Organizations funding one group of criminals against another with not a touch of genuine reform in sight. And then there is poor little Georgia, hardly plausible that Tbilisi might have been the aggressor against Russia, was it? But it was (John McCain please take note).

That kind of narrative shift is precisely what Kuperman and those who are like minded are doing, changing the story to turn black into white to make war appear to be the only option to resolve a thorny international problem. Appearing in The Times is particularly damaging because when the Grey Lady gives over its pages to someone like Kuperman they are providing their seal of approval and legitimizing his point of view. Even if they don’t explicitly endorse the article they are in effect saying that the argument is extremely credible and worth considering. With the Times imprimatur, the story then becomes part of the broader neoconservative narrative which can exploit the appearance in the Times to convince Americans that a war against Iran would not be such a bad thing and could, in fact, be the best way to eliminate the possibility that Tehran might develop a nuclear weapon.

The only problem is that the entire Kuperman narrative is itself nonsense...MORE...LINK

Israeli ambassador to Washington says "warm" Obama preparing "paralyzing" sanctions against Iran

'US readying paralyzing Iran sanctions'
(Jerusalem Post) --

The US administration is heading towards placing "paralyzing" sanctions on Iran, Israeli Ambassador to Washington Michael Oren said Tuesday. Speaking to Army Radio, Oren added that although it was "too early," the US had also not yet abandoned the military option.

"The Americans attribute the highest importance to the Iranian issue," he said during the interview. "The US, along with other countries, is preparing to impose paralyzing sanctions on [Iran], and preparations are happening even now."

Oren went on to reject claims that US President Barack Obama was trying to downgrade relations between Washington and Jerusalem, saying, "The man is very warm towards us… I hope that during the next year he will also come [to Israel], and bring that [warmth] to the Israeli public."...MORE...LINK

Obama exploits tenuous ties of 'lap bomber' as yet another opportunity to flex "national power"

Obama Vows 'Accelerated Offensive' in Yemen
( AntiWar.com) -- Jason Ditz --

Taking time out from his Hawaii vacation to comment on last Friday's lap bombing on a Detroit bound airliner, President Barack Obama vowed an "accelerated offensive" against militants in Yemen.

The president said he would not rest and would commit "every element of national power" to the new mission of attacking those speculatively accused of some vague complicity in the failed bombing.

Several Congressmen are already chomping at the bit to use the lap bomber as a justification for a war in Yemen, and the Yemeni government, which would presumably be further aided in its assorted civil wars by the US, eagerly declared that the attacker had been to Yemen.

With the scent of terrorism in the air, President Obama will likely be able to parlay the lap bomber into a justification for anything and everything he might want. Officials are already talking of scrapping plans to close Guantanamo Bay over it, and America's role in the attempted assassination of US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki last week can now readily be justified on speculation that the bomber's alleged al-Qaeda links can be combined with Awlaki's alleged al-Qaeda links to form alleged links between the two...MORE...LINK

Neoconned GOP made it "standard practice" to run up deficit, unapologetic Hatch says

Sen. Hatch admits GOP ’standard practice’ was to run up deficit
(Raw Story) -- By David Edwards and Daniel Tencer --

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow believes she has found the smoking gun proving Republicans' hypocrisy on health care and the budget deficit: an admission by Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch that, during the Bush administration, "it was standard practice not to pay for things."

"Every single Republican opposed the health reform bill when it was voted on on Christmas Eve, and that includes the 24 Republicans who voted for George Bush's Medicare prescription-drug expansion in 2003," Maddow said on her show Monday night. "Now that expansion in 2003, unlike the reform bill that's being currently debated, added tens of billions of dollars to the deficit. And this makes for some awkward politics, because many Republicans are citing worries about the deficit as their reason for voting against health reform now."

The host of The Rachel Maddow Show then quoted Sen. Hatch, who told the Associated Press that, when the Medicare expansion was passed in 2003, "it was standard practice not to pay for things." The AP reported:

Some Republicans say they don't believe the CBO's projections that the health care overhaul will pay for itself. As for their newfound worries about big government health expansions, they essentially say: That was then, this is now.

Six years ago, "it was standard practice not to pay for things," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. "We were concerned about it, because it certainly added to the deficit, no question." His 2003 vote has been vindicated, Hatch said, because the prescription drug benefit "has done a lot of good."...MORE...LINK

Monday, December 28, 2009

Left-wing, Big Government economist admits decade of Neocon centralizing resulted in zero economic growth

The Big Zero
(New York Times) -- By Paul Krugman

...from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. O.K., the headline employment number for December 2009 will be slightly higher than that for December 1999, but only slightly. And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened.

It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.

It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early: right now housing prices, adjusted for inflation, are roughly back to where they were at the beginning of the decade. And for those who bought in the decade’s middle years — when all the serious people ridiculed warnings that housing prices made no sense, that we were in the middle of a gigantic bubble — well, I feel your pain. Almost a quarter of all mortgages in America, and 45 percent of mortgages in Florida, are underwater, with owners owing more than their houses are worth.

Last and least for most Americans — but a big deal for retirement accounts, not to mention the talking heads on financial TV — it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. Remember the excitement when the Dow first topped 10,000, and best-selling books like “Dow 36,000” predicted that the good times would just keep rolling? Well, that was back in 1999. Last week the market closed at 10,520...MORE...LINK
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Flashback: Neocon admits his own ideology's Leftist-based economics

They Call us Leftists
By Vasko Kohlmayer

..."If by a leftist we mean someone who expands government and the state, then surely we neoconservatives have displayed some leftist tendencies of late.

"Consider the last eight years. It is generally agreed that the policies of the Bush administration were largely shaped by a neoconservative outlook and ideals. Much has, of course, been said and written about the administration's foreign policy whose main objective was to make the world safer by spreading democracy. Its domestic policy, on the other hand, received comparatively less attention. It can, however, be summed up easily in two words - government expansion.

"Under President Bush the federal government grew more than under any president since Lyndon Johnson. By whatever criterion we may choose to measure it - budget, spending, the size of federal workforce, national debt, entitlements, regulatory burden, bureaucratic apparatus - the growth was truly prodigious.

"Consider this. During his term in office, President Bush expanded public spending by more than 70 percent. He was the first president in 176 years to go through an entire term without vetoing any legislation or spending bill. When Bush was sworn into office our national debt was $5.7 trillion. By the time he left, it stood at $10.6 trillion, an increase of more than 100 percent. When military personnel and contract employees are included, the number of people who worked for government rose from 11 million in 1999 to nearly 16 million in 2008, an increase of nearly fifty percent.

"When Bush came into office, the Federal Registry -- the quintessential tool of the federal regulatory muscle -- contained some 64,000 pages. By the end of his term, the Registry had grown to almost 80,000 pages. Economically significant regulations - defined as those which cost more than $100 million a year -- increased by 70 percent. According to a study by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in 2007 alone federal regulatory agencies "issued 3,595 final rules, ranging from boosting fuel economy standards for light trucks to continuing a ban on bringing torch lighters into airplane cabins...

"There may be those who would say that the Bush's domestic policies represent an unfortunate betrayal of neoconservative principles. But if that should be the case, then you would expect a corrective rebuke from the neoconservative establishment. How did, then, neoconservative commentators, intellectuals and opinion makers respond to the administration's obvious leftward lurch toward statism?

"Surprisingly, not much was said about it. Occasionally an objection was raised, but there was no strong reaction overall. Sharp criticism was rare. Many neoconservatives were, in fact, instrumental in supporting the president's key domestic initiatives. When the president needed to come up with arguments for some of his more questionable programs he could always count on the neoconservative intelligentsia to make an eloquent case. Bill Kristol, the founder of Weekly Standard and one of America's leading neoconservative thinkers, was, for example, a vocal and visible supporter of the president's immigration bill. It is fair to say that overall the neoconservative establishment was firmly behind Bush"...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

In the first column, left-wing Neoliberal Krugman says the Bush admin's Republican "policies of tax cuts and deregulation have led us into an economic quagmire..." In the second column, right-wing Neocon Kohlmayer admits there never was deregulation (true, except perhaps for the Wall Street banksters and con men also in bed with Krugman's Neoliberal ilk), and that Bush's was essentially, economically speaking, a left-wing administration.

I say there is no significant difference between the Neoliberals and the Neocons, and that they all subscribe to sleight-of-hand, Magical Marxist Economics based on fraudulent fiat currencies, fractional banking, warmongering, and a spend, spend, spend ethos, wherein most of the money ends up being redistributed from the American people (and put on the national credit cards for their progeny to pay) into the pockets of government-connected cronies, corporatists, Marxists, neo-fascists, Zionists and assorted other gangsters, grifters and criminals.

America is being destroyed by its corrupt, thieving, post-Christian, Big Government-pushing "elite." And it will never recover until they have all been slapped into political oblivion.

Egyptian authorities strangle Gaza freedom march, maintain Israeli/Egyptian blockade of Palestinian lifeline

Gaza marchers on hunger strike in Egypt
Riot police have penned marchers in outside the UN mission in Cairo
Protesters trying to march into Gaza a year after an Israeli offensive are on hunger strike after Egypt blocked them from crossing the border.
(BBC) --

Hundreds of people in Cairo have been prevented from getting close to the border with Gaza.

A group who got as far as the Sinai port of El Arish have been detained by the Egyptian police.

A separate convoy of vans delivering medical supplies is stuck in the Jordanian port town of Aqaba.

At least 38 people of various nationalities were picked up by Egyptian security services in El Arish and held in their hotel rooms, AFP news agency reported.

'Whatever it takes'

In Cairo hundreds of activists are camped outside the United Nations mission in Cairo trying to get them to pressure the Egyptians to let them cross the border with the Gaza Strip.

The marchers have gone on hunger strike and want the UN to help them
"I've never done this before, I don't know how my body will react, but I'll do whatever it takes," 85-year-old Hedy Epstein told AFP.

The American activist is a Holocaust survivor, the agency reported.

Meanwhile a convoy of vans carrying supplies which travelled all the way from London to Jordan has been told by Egyptian officials it must go all the way back to Syria to get into Egypt.

The "Viva Palestina" convoy, led by British MP George Galloway, has been blocked from getting on a ferry from Aqaba to the Egyptian town of Nuweiba where it planned to continue by road to the Rafah border crossing.

But now the convoy faces a potentially budget-draining journey back through Jordan to the Syrian port of Latakia, followed by several ferries to El Arish.

'Sensitive situation'

Earlier in December, Egypt rejected a request to allow activists to march across the border into the Gaza Strip to mark the anniversary of last year's conflict.

The Egyptian foreign ministry said the march could not be allowed because of the "sensitive situation" in Gaza.

Over 1,000 activists from 42 countries had signed up to join "the Gaza freedom march" to mark the anniversary of the Israeli military incursion into Gaza last year.

Palestinians and human rights groups say more than 1,400 Gazans were killed in the 22-day conflict that ended in January, but Israel puts the figure at 1,166.

Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, were killed.

Gaza is under a tight Israeli and Egyptian blockade, tightened since Hamas took over the strip in 2007...MORE...LINK

Authoritarian Arab regimes imposing tyrannical yoke top recipients of U.S. arms sales

Arab Dictatorships Take 4 of Top 5 Spots in Purchase of U.S. Weapons and Services
(AllGov.com) --

Most of the leading buyers of American military hardware in 2008 had two characteristics in common: they speak Arabic and their governments are opposed to democracy and basic freedoms. Information compiled by the Congressional Research Service revealed that the biggest recipients of U.S. arms sales last year were (in order): the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Iraq and Egypt. With the exception of the popularly-elected government in Baghdad, all of these American military partners are ruled by autocratic or theocratic regimes.

The leading defense contractors manufacturing the weapons for these governments are Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Raytheon.

Earlier this month, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency notified Congress of the potential for $2.2 billion of new weapons sales to Arab dictatorships, in particular $1.2 billion worth to Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt for air-to-surface missiles, anti-ship missiles, aircraft engines, and Fast Missile Crafts (FMC). The rest of the proposed weapons sales are for the royal families of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE...MORE...LINK

Blatantly corrupt for years, big investment banks finally under investigation by "regulators" for rigging markets

Goldman Sachs and Others Investigated for Betting Against Securities They Created
(AllGov.com) --

Betting against their own securities has prompted numerous investigations of Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street institutions. Prior to the financial collapse, Goldman and others figured out a way to package risky securities, such as subprime mortgages, and sell them to investors who were told they were buying sound investments. Little did the investors know that the firms selling the synthetic collateralized debt obligations (or CDOs) turned around and bet that the CDOs would fail—costing pension funds and insurance companies billions of dollars.

“The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” Sylvain Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York, told The New York Times. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”

In addition to Goldman, CDOs were sold and bet against by Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Tricadia Inc.—an investment company whose parent firm’s CDO management committee was overseen by Lee Sachs. Sachs is now a special counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

The schemes are now being investigated by Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Wall Street’s Financial Industry Regulatory Authority...MORE...LINK

Growing number of U.S. military enlisted and veterans fed up with never-ending deployment and wars of Empire

'The US military is exhausted'
(Al Jazeera) -- By Sarah Lazare --

The call for over 30,000 more troops to be sent to Afghanistan is a travesty for the people of that country who have already suffered eight brutal years of occupation.

It is also a harsh blow to the US soldiers facing imminent deployment.

As Barack Obama, the US president, gears up for a further escalation that will bring the total number of troops in Afghanistan to over 100,000, he faces a military force that has been exhausted and overextended by fighting two wars.

Many from within the ranks are openly declaring that they have had enough, allying with anti-war veterans and activists in calling for an end to the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with some active duty soldiers publicly refusing to deploy.

This growing movement of military refusers is a voice of sanity in a country slipping deeper into unending war...MORE...LINK

Yet another reason to end the Fed: Worst decade for stocks ever; even 1930's beat it

Investors Hope the '10s Beat the '00s
Since End of 1999, U.S. Stocks' Performance Has Been the All-Time Clunker; Even 1930's Beat It
(WSJ.com) -- BY TOM LAURICELLA --

The U.S. stock market is wrapping up what is likely to be its worst decade ever.

In nearly 200 years of recorded stock-market history, no calendar decade has seen such a dismal performance as the 2000s.

Investors would have been better off investing in pretty much anything else, from bonds to gold or even just stuffing money under a mattress. Since the end of 1999, stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange have lost an average of 0.5% a year thanks to the twin bear markets this decade...MORE...LINK

Lieberman, Specter already thumping chests for war in Yemen due to 'lap bomber' alleged ties

Officials Eye Yemen War in Wake of Lap Bombing
Speculative Ties to Yemen a Good Enough Excuse for Some
(Antiwar.com) -- by Jason Ditz

Friday’s “lap bombing” did only superficial damage to the Detroit-bound plane, though it badly burned would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s lap. Still, the real fireworks may be yet to come, as some top US officials are looking to use it as an excuse to attack Yemen.

Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), the head of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, was the first to declare Yemen “tomorrow’s war,” urging a preemptive attack on the nation now. Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) concurred, saying an attack should be considered.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) said President Obama should be held responsible for the attack, and also declared Yemen a “hot spot” that needed to be dealt with. He also alleged that the attack was probably somehow tied with US cleric Awlaki, though this link appears to be purely speculative.

Yet so far the only evidence linking the lap bomber to Yemen are his own claims that he is a member of al-Qaeda and got the bomb (essentially a condom with some explosive inside) from al-Qaeda bomb makers in Yemen. Law enforcement officials concede that can’t corroborate any of this...MORE...LINK

Renowned civil libertarian Nat Hentoff: Obama worse than Bush, but the Left too enraptured by its latest deity to notice

America Under Barack Obama
An Interview with Nat Hentoff by John W. Whitehead
(LewRockwell.com) --

...JW: Do you consider Obama to be worse than George W. Bush?

NH: Oh, much worse. Bush essentially came in with very little qualifications for presidency, not only in terms of his background but he lacked a certain amount of curiosity, and he depended entirely too much on people like Rumsfeld, Cheney and others. Bush was led astray and we were led astray. However, I never thought that Bush himself was, in any sense, "evil." I am hesitant to say this about Obama. Obama is a bad man in terms of the Constitution. The irony is that Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing weakens the Constitution.

In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now. The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency. The NSA has the capacity to keep track of everything we do on the phone and on the internet. Obama has done nothing about that. In fact, he has perpetuated it. He has absolutely no judicial supervision of all of this. So all in all, Obama is a disaster.

JW: Obama is not reversing the Bush policies as he promised. But even in light of this, many on the Left are very, very quiet about Obama. Why is that?

NH: I am an atheist, although I very much admire and have been influenced by many traditionally religious people. I say this because the Left has taken what passes for their principles as an absolute religion. They don't think anymore. They just react. When they have somebody like Obama whom they put into office, they believed in the religious sense and, of course, that is a large part of the reason for their silence on these issues. They are very hesitant to criticize Obama, but that is beginning to change. Even on the cable network MSNBC, some of the strongest proponents of Obama are now beginning to question, if I may use their words, their "deity."...MORE...LINK

Pre-Christmas "lap bomber" incident has all the characteristics of a false flag operation

The Lap Bomber Mystery
A case that just gets curiouser and curiouser
(AntiWar.com) -- By Justin Raimondo --

...We are asked to believe that a highly privileged young man, with everything to live for, was suddenly seized with a desire to commit suicide as an act of jihad: that he disappeared from his life of ease, on a street lined with Mercedes Benzes and Ferraris, in a fashionable district of London, and traveled to Yemen, where he received what may have been a defective bomb, which was sewn into his underwear by his jihadist trainers. This bomb then went undetected in Amsterdam airport, where the security arrangements are said to be tight (and a personal interview is conducted), and where he was let on a plane headed for the US in spite of explicit warnings given by his own father.

I’m not buying it, and, furthermore, in the context of Haskell’s testimony, another narrative seems just as likely: that this was a staged incident, a false flag operation, launched by those who have everything to gain by ramping up the atmosphere of hysteria and fear that regularly precedes America’s wars. This – admittedly speculative – scenario, of which I am equally skeptical, is buttressed, however, by the testimony of Jasper Schuringa – the passenger who leapt out of his seat on the other side of the plane, put out the fire, and secured Umar is a headlock – who says of the alleged terrorist:

“He was shaking. He didn’t resist anything. It’s just hard to believe that he was trying to blow up this plane. He was in a trance. He was very afraid.”...MORE...LINK

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Dem "gift" to young Americans: perverse Christmas-eve vote to raise debt ceiling to massive $12.4 trillion

Congress raises debt ceiling to $12.4 trillionDigg it
(Associated Press) --By LAURIE KELLMAN --

The Senate voted Thursday to raise the ceiling on the government debt to $12.4 trillion, a massive increase over the current limit and a political problem that President Barack Obama has promised to address next year.

The Senate's rare Christmas Eve vote, 60-39, follows House passage last week and raises the debt ceiling by $290 billion. The vote split mainly down party lines, with Democrats voting to raise the limit and Republicans voting against doing so. There was one defection on each side, by senators whose seats will be on the ballot next year: GOP Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio and Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., did not vote.

"I would not support raising the debt ceiling because Congress has not adopted a credible process to restrain spending and eliminate red ink," Bayh said a statement after the vote.

The bill permits the Treasury Department to issue enough bonds to fund the government's operations and programs until mid-February. The Senate will vote again on the issue Jan. 20...MORE...LINK

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Lenin's vision of "totalitarian democracy" comes to America

Dems Will Reconcile Senate and House Obamacare Bill Versions Behind Closed Doors
(Infowars.com) -- By Kurt Nimmo

Democrats in the Senate have rammed through their totalitarian Obamacare at gunpoint bill. But there is much work to be done before they can foist this monster on the American people. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid need to reconcile the different House and Senate versions. This is usually done through conference committees, but the process will be modified for the precious Obamacare legislation...

This is how the Soviet system worked. Top party leadership acted as political brokers and ensured that the Supreme Soviet adhered to party decisions. The Democrats under Pelosi and Reid have formed an American version of the Central Executive Committee and the Supreme Soviet which exercises exclusively all legislative power.

We are now witnessing what Lenin called “totalitarian democracy” at work in America...MORE...LINK
--------------------------

Chris Moore comments:

Did Neocon-Republicans really believe there would be no consequences to the creation of an imperial presidency and a corrupt system of abusive power during the Bush II years? How short-sighted, and incredibly ignorant they were, and apparently still are. Today, they (but more importantly, the American people) are reaping the consequences of their growing government during the Bush administration into an impervious Leviathan, and concentrating more power in Washington than any presidency since FDR. It’s just that now the Democrats hold Leviathan’s reigns -- the actualization of a possibility that should have occurred to even the most obtuse and pompous Empire Republicans during the Bush years, but apparently didn’t.

The sick irony is that as the Dems continue even further down the path of concentrating ever more tyrannical power in Washington so they can stick it to the “opposition,” the main victims of their folly will be the American youth, and future generations of Americans buried under mountains of debt and the apparatus of an increasingly totalitarian police state, who had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the crimes and idiocy of the Bushcons.

Americans are today paying for the sin and incredible selfishness and short-sightedness of electing successive generations of Big Government-peddling, Marxist-ethic buffoons on both the Left and Right. And they certainly can’t say they weren’t warned: political prophets Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan have been frantically issuing warnings for decades.

But I guess the “more sophisticated” majority of the American post-war generations new better, or convinced themselves they did.

Perhaps the only laudable outcome of the whole sorry story is that historians will undoubtedly record the Silent Generation and the Boomers as the worst generations in American history, bar none. Never have so few so selfishly plundered, despoiled and frittered away so much so fast -- probably in the entire history of the world. We went from the most prosperous, stable and powerful super power on earth to…this -- all in the course of couple of decades. Pathetic

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Central banksters and Big Government grifters double down on casino economy with greatest outpouring of money and credit in history

The Greatest Outpouring Of Money And Credit In History
(The International Forecaster) --

12.7 trillion donated to bankers, solving a problem they created, buy bonds, or gamble in the markets? Inflation on the way, could the US default on its debt? Food aid and unemployment rising together, yet another bank collapse, Dubai bailed out. The past two years have seen the greatest outpouring of money and credit from central banks and governments in history. In most countries interest rates cannot fall much lower being presently under 1% or close to zero. You might call this an attempt at fiat money recovery. As a result of pump priming for the past six months or more investors have returned to the same gambling and risk taking they engaged in before, the losses of which caused the world economy to come to the edge of the financial abyss. All sectors of investment are again affected by a casino mentality.

We see $12.7 trillion donated without their consent of the lender taxpayers to the top world economies, or about 20% of world GDP. These funds, a good part of which will never be retrieved, have been stuffed into the pockets of bankers, Wall Street, insurance companies and GM and AIG. 80% of the problems we have had to face were caused by these very same entities, which along with the Fed, propose to solve the problem they created. It is as if they are the only ones in the world who know best what is good for our system and for us. They as well continue to play in the giant casino as if nothing ever happened. While this transpires there are still trillions of dollars in bad debt and impaired assets on the books that have to be written off. The solution to that is to not truthfully report companies’ financial conditions. If you can believe this, the Chairman of the Board of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the FASB that sets American accounting standards has called for the “decoupling” of bank capital rules from normal accounting standards. His proposal would encourage bank regulators to make adjustments as they determine whether banks have adequate capital while still allowing investors to see the current fair value. In order words it is ok to have two sets of books and to mark assets to model, which is marking assets to fantasy. Telling investors the truth is secondary. For almost 20 years banks have had to use GAAP for the basis for capital rules. If banks had their way there would be no rules. The FASB has been compromised and resides in the back pocket of the bankers. There you have it. Bankers are more equal than others. Their balance sheets are worthless. This should not be allowed to happen in America.

At first the G-20 nations wanted to remove monetary stimulus and now they say it is too early to do so. What they do not tell you is if they did remove trillions from their economies they would collapse. Europe, the UK and US have losses of $1.7 trillion they haven’t written off of yet. In addition, they have hundreds of billions in losses for foreclosed loans that are still flowing in, to further befoul their balance sheets. We have to laugh when central bankers talk about draining trillions from the system. If they pull liquidity the system collapses. Other than feeding money and credit into the system the bankers have no solution. Keeping them in charge is like giving a pyromaniac matches. Even if $500 billion more in stimulus is added to the system from TARP funds or from Congress, it is only going to keep growth in place until the end of next year. As a result inflation is going to soar. There is no real recovery. All we have seen is the Fed pouring trillions of dollars into the US and world economy...MORE...LINK

The Fed is NOT a private bank; it's a fascist cartel run by and with the central government to manipulate the people and control the system

The Fed is a Fascist Cartel
(The Daily Bell) -- By Nelson Hultberg --

No one in the freedom movement today disputes that the Federal Reserve is the source of many of our economic woes. Where disagreement arises is in defining the precise nature of the Fed and the source of its capacity to create the harm it does. Many who support gold money and free enterprise claim that the Federal Reserve is a "private corporation" run by capitalist mega-financiers. This I believe to be mistaken.

The Federal Reserve, in my opinion, should not be classified as a private corporation. It should be termed a government-run fascist cartel. There are several important reasons for this. For example, all nationally chartered banks in the Federal Reserve system are forced by the government to join the cartel. Bernanke and his board of governors are appointed by the President and approved by the Senate. The Federal Reserve came into being because of an act of Congress, and it can be altered or legislated out of being at anytime by Congress. These factors are not how private corporations are created or operated. The Fed entails government involvement in a massive way. Without the special monopoly privileges legislated by Congress that sustain the Fed, it disappears...

For example, Exxon Corporation is considered a private corporation. So let's compare it to the so called "private" Federal Reserve corporation. Does Exxon have its CEO and board of directors appointed and confirmed by the government? No, but the Fed does. Are 97% of Exxon's profits turned over to the federal Treasury? No, but the Fed's profits are. Can Exxon be voted out of existence tomorrow by Congress? No, but the Fed can. Therefore despite what our courts maintain, the Fed is not a private corporation; it is a government run cartel.

The fact that the courts define the Fed as "private" is the way that tyrannical ideologues pull the wool over the people's eyes. This is done to make the people think we are still a free, "private" enterprise country. This is how they smuggle us into corporate statism, i.e., economic fascism -- by getting the intelligentsia of the country to buy into their redefinition of words. The courts are run by statist judges, and the schools are run by statist professors -- all pretending that we are still a "free" enterprise system. In fact, many of them actually believe their own warped logic. It's the way they were taught, and they lack the intellectual rigor to investigate the fallacies of their assumptions. They ritualistically use the term "private" because it conveys the image of "free." But private in this instance is in name only. If a private entity does not have control over its operations, its profits, and its policies, then it is no longer private; it is public, and socialist or fascist to some degree or another.

So do the bankers control the government, or does the Federal Government control the bankers? One way to answer this question is to ask who can abolish who? Can the Federal Government abolish the Fed? Certainly. Anytime it wants to, Congress could eliminate the Fed by a majority vote of its members. But can the mega-bankers, with all their power to influence politicians, abolish the Federal Government? Hardly. In this respect of creation and abolition, the Federal Government is the power behind the evil of our Federal Reserve system. But in actual practice, I think it is more accurate to say that the evil comes from the combine of the two forces. Separately, neither the mega-bankers, nor the Federal Government would be able to wield the dangerous control over our lives that they gain in concert. It is only when they join forces to become "partners" that they gain the power to do the evil they do...MORE...LINK

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Dems lecture on carbon emissions, then turn around and mass-deploy one of world's largest sources of C02 in U.S. Military

The Elephant in the Room: The U.S. Military is One of the World's Largest Sources of C02
(Washington's Blog) -- Sara Flounders writes:

By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.
***
The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon's aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world.
***
Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries (out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon.
***
This information is not readily available ... because military emissions abroad are exempt from national reporting requirements under U.S. law and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change" ...

Bryan Farrell in his new book, "The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism," says that "the greatest single assault on the environment, on all of us around the globe, comes from one agency ... the Armed Forces of the United States."...MORE...LINK

Ever more taxpayer wealth-transfers to billionaires at Goldman Sachs

Taxpayers Help Goldman Reach Height of Profit in New Skyscraper
(Bloomberg) --

In the first six months of 2010, about 6,000 employees of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will take a break from their spreadsheets and move across the southern tip of Manhattan to a new 43-story, steel-and-glass skyscraper.

The building was a bargain — and not just because the final cost is expected to be $200 million less than the $2.3 billion price the company had estimated when construction began in November 2005. Goldman Sachs also benefited from the government’s determination to avoid losing jobs in lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Building a new headquarters cater-cornered to where the World Trade Center once stood qualified the firm to sell $1 billion of tax-free Liberty Bonds and get about $49 million of job-grant funds, tax exemptions and energy discounts. Henry Paulson, then Goldman Sachs’s chief executive officer, threatened to abandon the project after delays in addressing his concerns about safety. To keep the plan on track, state and city officials raised the bond ceiling to $1.65 billion and added $66 million in benefits. The interest expense on the financing is about $175 million less over 30 years than if the company had issued corporate debt at the time, according to data compiled by Bloomberg...

Goldman Sachs, which set a Wall Street profit record of $11.6 billion in 2007 and may have earned $11.4 billion this year, according to the average estimate of 15 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, won new and larger concessions from taxpayers in 2008. This time it was the threat of a financial meltdown that prompted the U.S. government, with Paulson as Treasury secretary, and the Federal Reserve to supply an unprecedented amount of aid to firms deemed critical to the financial system, including Goldman Sachs.

The 140-year-old company received $10 billion in capital, guarantees on about $30 billion of debt and the ability to borrow cheaply from the Fed. The Fed’s bailout of American International Group Inc., and its decision to pay the insurer’s counterparties in full, funneled an additional $12.9 billion to Goldman Sachs...MORE...LINK

Pompous Obama rates himself a "strong B+" but most in U.S. find his performance a "bad for America" F

Poll Reveals Mass Unrest Amongst Americans
Healthcare bill opposition, Obama disapproval and global warming skepticism all highlighted by Judicial Watch survey
(Infowars.net) -- By Steve Watson

A new poll reveals that the vast majority of Americans are dissatisfied with president Obama’s performance in office, with almost two thirds voicing opposition to the government healthcare bill and a majority also indicating they believe political corruption is rife.

The poll, conducted by Survey USA and commissioned by respected government watchdog group Judicial Watch, focused on several different topics, highlighting great disquiet wih voters.

While Obama has rated his performance as a “strong B+” recently, the poll revealed that 58% of Americans believe decisions taken by Obama have been “bad for America,” while just 37% think the administration’s decisions have been “good for America.”...MORE...LINK

Made men: Political ties, Federal Reserve connection key to bankster bailout funds, study shows

Banks with political ties got bailouts, study shows
(Reuters) – By Steve Eder Steve Eder

U.S. banks that spent more money on lobbying were more likely to get government bailout money, according to a study released on Monday.

Banks whose executives served on Federal Reserve boards were more likely to receive government bailout funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, according to the study from Ran Duchin and Denis Sosyura, professors at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.

Banks with headquarters in the district of a U.S. House of Representatives member who serves on a committee or subcommittee relating to TARP also received more funds.

Political influence was most helpful for poorly performing banks, the study found.

"Political connections play an important role in a firm's access to capital," Sosyura, a University of Michigan assistant professor of finance, said in a statement.

Banks with an executive who sat on the board of a Federal Reserve Bank were 31 percent more likely to get bailouts through TARP's Capital Purchase Program, the study showed. Banks with ties to a finance committee member were 26 percent more likely to get capital purchase program funds...MORE...LINK

Democrat Senator essentially declares foes of health care bill Nazis on Senate floor

Sen. Whitehouse: Foes of health care bill are birthers, right-wing militias, aryan groups
(Washington Times) -- By Kerry Picket

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) today took shots at those who are not supporting the health care legislation. During a floor speech, he excoriated Senate GOP members for holding up the pending health care bill and accused their supporters of being birthers and fanatics in right-wing militia and Aryan support groups...

"Voting 'no' and hiding from the vote are the same result. Those of us on the floor see it. It was clear the three of them who did not cast their yes votes until all 60 Senate votes had been tallied and it was clear that the result was a foregone conclusion. And why? Why all this discord and discourtesy, all this unprecedented destructive action? All to break the momentum of our new young president.

They are desperate to break this president. They have ardent supporters who are nearly hysterical at the very election of President Barack Obama. The birthers, the fanatics, the people running around in right-wing militia and Aryan support groups, it is unbearable to them that President Barack Obama should exist. That is one powerful reason. It is not the only one."...MORE...LINK

"Constitutional lawyer" Obama shaping up as little more than a Stalinist thug

Dred Scott Redux: Obama and the Supremes Stand Up for Slavery
(Empire Burlesque) -- by Chris Floyd --

...After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a "person." They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever -- save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

This extraordinary ruling occasioned none of those deep-delving "process stories" that glut the pages of the New York Times, where the minutiae of policy-making or political gaming is examined in highly-spun, microscopic detail doled out by self-interested insiders. Obviously, giving government the power to render whole classes of people "unpersons" was not an interesting subject for our media arbiters. It was news that wasn't fit to print. Likewise, the ruling provoked no thundering editorials in the Washington Post, no savvy analysis from the high commentariat -- and needless to say, no outrage whatsoever from all our fierce defenders of individual liberty on the Right...

The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of "national emergency." And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.

And yet this is what Barack Obama -- who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer -- has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution. They can't even been sued for, in the specific case under review, subjecting uncharged, indefinitely detained captives to "beatings, sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, extreme hot and cold temperatures, death threats, interrogations at gunpoint, and threatened with unmuzzled dogs."...MORE...LINK

Rotting Establishment: Obama’s “celebrated” economic adviser was allowed to gamble away nearly $1 billion of Harvard's endowment

Harvard Swaps Are So Toxic Even Summers Won’t Explain
(Bloomberg) -- By Michael McDonald, John Lauerman and Gillian Wee

Anne Phillips Ogilby, a bond attorney at one of Boston’s oldest law firms, on Oct. 31 last year relayed an urgent message from Harvard University, her client and alma mater, to the head of a Massachusetts state agency that sells bonds. The oldest and richest academic institution in America needed help getting a loan right away.

As vanishing credit spurred the government-led rescue of dozens of financial institutions, Harvard was so strapped for cash that it asked Massachusetts for fast-track approval to borrow $2.5 billion. Almost $500 million was used within days to exit agreements known as interest-rate swaps that Harvard had entered to finance expansion in Allston, across the Charles River from its main campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The swaps, which assumed that interest rates would rise, proved so toxic that the 373-year-old institution agreed to pay banks a total of almost $1 billion to terminate them. Most of the wrong-way bets were made in 2004, when Lawrence Summers, now President Barack Obama’s economic adviser, led the university. Cranes were recently removed from the construction site of a $1 billion science center that was to be the expansion’s centerpiece, a reminder of Summers’s ambition. The school said last week they will suspend work on the building early next year.

‘Case Study’

“For nonprofits, this is going to be written up as a case study of what not to do,” said Mark Williams, a finance professor at Boston University, who specializes in risk management and has studied Harvard’s finances. “Harvard throws itself out as a beacon of what to do in higher learning. Clearly, there have been major missteps.”...MORE...LINK

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Political jet-setter Blair now finds British local-yokels too provincial to appreciate his international canvas

It’s only you Brits who don’t appreciate me, insists Tony Blair
(Sunday Times) --

Tony Blair has hit back defiantly at his British critics, insisting that he is appreciated overseas much more than at home. He also defended his money-making activities.

“If I did what these people who criticise me here wanted, I’d end up just sitting in a corner, but that is never going to be me,” he said.

Interviewed for today’s News Review, the former prime minister said: “You get to a position where the criticism you get, you just have to live with. It’s the way it is. When you are someone like me, you create a lot of controversy one way or another. You just decide to do what you are going to do and let that speak for itself.”

He blamed his negative image in Britain on the press, saying: “They don’t approach me in an objective way. Their first question is how to belittle what I’m doing, knock it down, write something bad about it. It’s not right. It’s not journalism. They don’t get me and they’ve got a score to settle with me. But they are not going to settle it.”...MORE...LINK

Who ever granted our presumptuous leaders the right to enter into dangerous and grandiose "global agreements"?

There'll be nowhere to run from the new world government
(Telegraph) -- Janet Daley --

...The dangerous idea that the democratic accountability of national governments should simply be dispensed with in favour of "global agreements" reached after closed negotiations between world leaders never, so far as I recall, entered into the arena of public discussion. Except in the United States, where it became a very contentious talking point, the US still holding firmly to the 18th-century idea that power should lie with the will of the people.

Nor was much consideration given to the logical conclusion of all this grandiose talk of global consensus as unquestionably desirable: if there was no popular choice about approving supranational "legally binding agreements", what would happen to dissenters who did not accept their premises (on climate change, for example) when there was no possibility of fleeing to another country in protest? Was this to be regarded as the emergence of world government? And would it have powers of policing and enforcement that would supersede the authority of elected national governments? In effect, this was the infamous "democratic deficit" of the European Union elevated on to a planetary scale. And if the EU model is anything to go by, then the agencies of global authority will involve vast tracts of power being handed to unelected officials. Forget the relatively petty irritations of Euro‑bureaucracy: welcome to the era of Earth-bureaucracy, when there will be literally nowhere to run.

But, you may say, however dire the political consequences, surely there is something in this obsession with global dilemmas. Economics is now based on a world market, and if the planet really is facing some sort of man-made climate crisis, then that too is a problem that transcends national boundaries. Surely, if our problems are universal the solutions must be as well.

Well, yes and no. Calling a problem "global" is meant to imply three different things: that it is the result of the actions of people in different countries; that those actions have impacted on the lives of everyone in the world; and that the remedy must involve pretty much identical responses or correctives to those actions. These are separate premises, any of which might be true without the rest of them necessarily being so. The banking crisis certainly had its roots in the international nature of finance, but the way it affected countries and peoples varied considerably according to the differences in their internal arrangements. Britain suffered particularly badly because of its addiction to public and private debt, whereas Australia escaped relatively unscathed.

That a problem is international in its roots does not necessarily imply that the solution must involve the hammering out of a uniform global prescription: in fact, given the differences in effects and consequences for individual countries, the attempt to do such hammering might be a huge waste of time and resources that could be put to better use devising national remedies. France and Germany seem to have pulled themselves out of recession over the past year (and the US may be about to do so) while Britain has not. These variations owe almost nothing to the pompous, overblown attempts to find global solutions: they are largely to do with individual countries, under the pressure of democratic accountability, doing what they decide is best for their own people...MORE...LINK

Friday, December 18, 2009

Roberts: "Macho Americans who prance around as if they owned the world are nothing but the puppets of Israel. The US is not a country. It's a colony."

The Israeli Stranglehold
(Counterpunch) -- By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS --

...In the Israeli-controlled American media, we hear endlessly that Palestinians are terrorists who strap on explosives in order to kill innocent Israelis and who terrorize Israeli towns by firing rockets into them. One look at the maps above is enough to make clear who the real terrorist is. The success of Israeli propaganda in the face of totally obvious facts damns the ignorance and unconcern of the American people.

The Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, which also has a moral conscience and is intelligent to boot, wrote on December 4, 2009: “Every appointee to the American government must endure a thorough background check by the American Jewish community.”

Ha'aretz notes that any American that the President of the United States proposes for an appointment to his government is subject to the approval of the Israel Lobby, which can blackball appointees at will.

Ha'aretz gives the example of Charles Freeman, whom President Obama intended to appoint as head of the National Intelligence Council. The Israel Lobby proved, again, that it was more powerful than a mere American President and prevented the appointment, citing Freeman’s “anti-israel leaning.” In other words, because Freeman was not an overboard apologist for Israel’s crimes he was unacceptable to the Israel Lobby.

Ha'aretz reports: “The next attempt to appoint an intelligence aide, in this case, former Republican senator Chuck Hagel, also resulted in vast criticism over his not having a pro-Israel record.” The Israel Lobby has blocked Hagel’s appointment by President Obama. Hagel doesn’t want to start a war with Iran for Israel’s benefit and was blackballed by Morton A. Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America. Hagel, it seems, “refused to sign a letter calling on then-president George Bush to speak about Iran’s nuclear program at the G8 summit that year.”

Now it is a Jewish daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Hannah Rosenthal, whose appointment to head the US Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, an office that is another indication of America’s puppet state status, is under attack. Rosenthal was the head of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs during 2000-2005. Her black mark came from serving on the advisory board of the J Street Lobby, a recently-formed American Jewish organization formed in opposition to AIPAC’s murderous militarism.

The Israel Lobby’s opposition to Hannah Rosenthal shows that no moral person can survive the Israel Lobby’s blackball.

The US, “the world’s only superpower,” has no independent voice in Middle Eastern affairs. The real power rests in the hands of the settler thug, Avigdor Lieberman, Deputy Prime Minister of Israel and Minister of Foreign Affairs. This is the man who controls the Obama government’s Middle East policy. Lieberman forced the “all-powerful President of the US, Barack Omama,” to rescind his order to Israel to halt the illegal settler settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Obama was given the bird and submitted to his master.

Macho Americans who prance around as if they owned the world are nothing but the puppets of Israel. The US is not a country. It is a colony...MORE...LINK

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Infowars.com has eerie video of an unemployed, largely abandoned Detroit

Reports of travel crackdowns, police state activity...LINK

Claims of pressing need for cap and trade belied by Obama's escalation of hyper-polluting war in Afghanistan

Global WARming
(Washington's Blog) --

As I have previously pointed out:
Continuing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will more than wipe out any reduction in carbon from the government's proposed climate measures ...

The continuance of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars completely and thoroughly undermines the government's claims that there is a global warming emergency and that reducing carbon output through cap and trade is needed to save the planet.

I can't take anything the government says about carbon footprints seriously until the government ends the unnecessary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I now have some figures to back this up...MORE...LINK

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Today's America: Oligarchy? Financial plutocracy? Tax trickle-up economy? Whatever it is, it's no longer capitalism

Obama is proving to be another handmaiden of the plutocrats
(Online Journal) -- By Paul Craig Roberts --

Goldman Sachs senior executives are arming themselves with New York gun permits, according to Alice Schroeder on Bloomberg.com. The banksters “are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.”

One can understand why the banksters are worried. The company, now known as Gold Sacks, has a large responsibility for the financial crisis and the fraudulent “securities” that wrecked the world economy and Americans’ pensions. A former Gold Sacks CEO had control of the US Treasury during the Bush regime from which he diverted $750 billion to bail out the banks, thus supplying them with free capital. Gold Sacks made $27,000 million during the first three quarters of 2009 and is paying out massive bonuses, leaving the busted taxpayers with the debt and interest charges.

Little wonder the US can’t afford health care for the uninsured and unemployed. It is far more important to finance multimillion dollar bonuses for investment bankers. I mean, what would we do without capitalism?

Of course, it is not really capitalism. It is an oligarchy or a financial plutocracy.

In a failed state, the government’s priorities are totally separate from those of the people. The US can’t afford health care or a bailout for jobless homeowners, but it can afford a pointless war and multimillion dollar bonuses for banksters who wrecked the economy.

Millions of laid-off workers lost their health insurance subsidies on December 1, the day President Obama announced a $30 billion “surge” in Afghanistan.

The expensive “surge” came 24 hours after the Detroit Free Press published a 127-page supplement of home foreclosures in its metro area. In Michigan 48 percent of mortgages are on properties that are worth less than the loan, according to a report from First American CoreLogic.

As bad as it is in Michigan, the state ranks seventh in foreclosures, so six states are in even more dire straits.

Why does President Obama think the US can afford a war in Afghanistan when the US economy is falling apart? Massive joblessness. Massive homelessness. Millions of Americans without medical care.

The additional $30 billion for the war comes on top of the $65 billion already appropriated for the year. These appropriations are always fattened with supplementary appropriations. The true cost is well in excess of $100,000,000,000.

Who’s going to pay for it? Democratic Representative David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee proposes to raise income taxes on everyone earning more than $30,000.

This is called “trickle-up” economics. You tax the little guy and give the money to the armaments companies...MORE...LINK

Years of Washington bungling spells end of petro-dollar, dollar hegemony as Arab states follow Europeans in developing own currency

Gulf petro-powers to launch currency in latest threat to dollar hegemony

The Arab states of the Gulf region have agreed to launch a single currency modelled on the euro, hoping to blaze a trail towards a pan-Arab monetary union swelling to the ancient borders of the Ummayad Caliphate.

(Telegraph) -- By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard --

"The Gulf monetary union pact has come into effect,” said Kuwait’s finance minister, Mustafa al-Shamali, speaking at a Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) summit in Kuwait.

The move will give the hyper-rich club of oil exporters a petro-currency of their own, greatly increasing their influence in the global exchange and capital markets and potentially displacing the US dollar as the pricing currency for oil contracts. Between them they amount to regional superpower with a GDP of $1.2 trillion (£739bn), some 40pc of the world’s proven oil reserves, and financial clout equal to that of China.

Dubai, Abu Dhabi stock markets rise Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar are to launch the first phase next year, creating a Gulf Monetary Council that will evolve quickly into a full-fledged central bank.

The Emirates are staying out for now – irked that the bank will be located in Riyadh at the insistence of Saudi King Abdullah rather than in Abu Dhabi. They are expected join later, along with Oman.

The Gulf states remain divided over the wisdom of anchoring their economies to the US dollar. The Gulf currency – dubbed “Gulfo” – is likely to track a global exchange basket and may ultimately float as a regional reserve currency in its own right. “The US dollar has failed. We need to delink,” said Nahed Taher, chief executive of Bahrain’s Gulf One Investment Bank.

The project is inspired by Europe’s monetary union, seen as a huge success in the Arab world. But there are concerns that the region is trying to run before it can walk...MORE...LINK

Obammunism's main mission: Protect the international-bankers and Wall Street shylock-class from the angry American people and their pitchforks

Obama's fat cats
(The Smirking Chimp) -- By Brent Budowsky --

When President Barack Obama denounced "fat cats" during his performance on "60 Minutes," and made weak comments after his meeting with bank CEOs, I was reminded why so many Americans are angry with everyone in Washington.

The president says Wall Street doesn't get it. He has it backward. Wall Street gets it. He still doesn't.

Wall Street knows that "sticks and stones can break my bones, but faux anger cannot hurt me." Wall Street believes the president can be rolled, Congress can be bought, consumers can be screwed, jobs can be destroyed, the nation can be harmed, the public can be enraged -- and it can continue these practices without limit and without shame and pay itself gigantic bonuses for it, and nobody will fight to change this.

The president famously told bankers he stood between them and pitchforks. Presumably he meant the pitchforks are country rubes like myself and 250 million Americans who think that when troops give their lives to serve our nation, bankers who get huge bailouts might ask what they can do for our country, instead of enriching themselves to levels that historians will discuss for a hundred years...MORE...LINK

An idiot evil Empire run by buffoons: tens of thousands dead, hundreds of billions spent, Russia, Europe, China land the Iraqi oil

(CNN via America-Hijacked.com)

I’m Wolf Blitzer.

You’re in THE SITUATION ROOM.

Critics of the Iraq War long maintained oil was the driving force behind the U.S. invasion. But the U.S. is actually one of the biggest losers in the latest battle over rights to tap Iraq’s lucrative oil fields.

Who won?

Get this — the Russians, the Europeans and the Chinese.

Our foreign affairs correspondent, Jill Dougherty, is joining us now with more on this story.

I would assume the U.S. has a right to be pretty angry, given the trillion — maybe a trillion dollars the U.S. taxpayers have spent in Iraq and the thousands of American lives lost.

JILL DOUGHERTY, CNN FOREIGN AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Yes, you know, and when you look at the contracts, you have Russia’s LUKOIL along with Norwegian’s Statoil gaining a huge contract. Chinese got contracts. Even Angola got a contract. Now, it’s not as if the Americans were completely exed out, because Exxon and Occidental as a consortium did get in contracts. This shows business is business, and we’re free from outside influences. In fact today, Wolf, I asked Secretary Clinton about this and she’s putting the best face on it. She says what we think is important is that foreign investment is back in Iraq. If it came out the other way, if Americans got all the contracts, it would be very hard to defend against that idea that the United States went into Iraq because of oil.

BLITZER: It does come at a time, at an awkward moment for the Obama administration. Just the other day Defense Secretary Robert Gates went to Iraq, risking his life still to go there. He had a scheduled meeting with the Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki he says I don’t have time to see you so he went back to his little area, had dinner with other folks. That was pretty shocking.

DOUGHERTY: Pretty notable. They did reschedule it for the next day. But look at his situation, al Maliki is in a very bad domestic situation. They’ve had this spate of terrorist attacks. He’s under the gun, in fact that meeting he went back to was on that subject, and the other part is the elections are coming up March 7th. He has to look as if he’s not under the numb of the Americans.

BLITZER: Still, when you think about it, it’s — I guess it’s pretty shocking given the huge American investment of treasure and blood that was made in Iraq...MORE...LINK

Orwell’s nightmare begins: Government-paid citizen snoops in Britain

Council 'snooper' wardens rise by one fifth

(Telegraph) -- The number of wardens and private security guards with power to issue fines has risen by one fifth in only 12 months, according to new figures. There are now 1,667 park wardens, dog wardens, car park attendants and shopping centre guards permitted to hand out fines for littering, dog fouling and criminal damage, according to a report.

A further 478 civilians have been given the power to stop vehicles to check for out-of-date tax discs.

The powers are given under the Community Safety Accreditation Scheme under Jacqui Smith, the former Home Secretary.

However, critics say it creates a ‘third tier of policing’ below police and community support officers.

The accredited wardens have the power to issue penalty notices for specific offences ranging from graffiti, truanting, and throwing fireworks to trespassing on a railway, begging or dog fouling.

The figures, reported in the Daily Mail, show the number of civilians accredited under the scheme has increased from 1,406 to 1,667 in the past year.

The number of employers with accredited staff – including town halls – rose from 95 to 109.

Councils and other public sector organisations pay between £300 and £315 to be accredited to the scheme, and between £35 to £90 per employee...CONT'D...LINK

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Global warming and the public till

(By Chris Moore) -- About the only fact that is clear in the whole “climate change” debate is that global temperatures ebb and flow like tides, only over the course of years.

What the clever socialists and cynical “public servants” are doing is declaring of the flow tide (global warming): “We’re being inundated by water. Quick, pay us plenty to prevent the village from being flooded!” And when the tide stops of its own accord, they'll declare: “Thank God we were here!”

They perform the inverse on the ebb tide. (As recently pointed out here, there was an orchestrated “global cooling” scare back in the 1970’s.)

As government grows ever bigger so that there are ever increasing numbers on the public payroll whose fat paychecks and benefits are dependent upon its largess, the hysterical bleating and elaborate swindles designed to extract from the hapless taxpayers the ever increasing operating funds necessary to sustain it grow exponentially in both number and sophistication.

The orchestrated pandemic “global warming” hysteria may be the most sophisticated scam in terms of ambition yet (following upon the heels of the orchestrated “war on terror” hysteria).

I wouldn't be surprised if most of the “consumers” and defenders of global warming theory have their hands directly in the public till in some way, shape or form. University bureaucrats and professors, for example. They then use their "authority" to declare that man-made global warming is a reality.

Not a bad grift for the Marxist-shyster types who go in for those kinds of things.

Ten percent hikes for federal agencies? What is going on?

Boom Times for Big Government
(American Conservative Blog) -- by Patrick J. Buchanan

"It’s time to stop worrying about the deficit — and start panicking about the debt,” the Washington Post editorial began. “The fiscal situation was serious before the recession. It is now dire.”

The editorial continued:

“In the space of a single fiscal year, 2009, the debt soared from 41 percent of the gross domestic product to 53 percent. This sum, which does not include what the government has borrowed from its own trust funds, is on track to rise to a crushing 85 percent of the economy by 2018.”

What are the risks of an exploding U.S. public debt?

The Chinese, Japanese, and Arabs still buying that debt will begin to suspect they are holding onto paper on which the United States will default or will cheapen by inflating its currency — as the Germans did in 1923 to avoid paying war reparations.

When they do, they will stop buying U.S. debt and start dumping. The Fed will then have to raise interest rates to attract borrowers, throwing the economy into a tailspin.

Is Congress even aware of what is happening?

Harry Reid is talking about doubling Medicare rolls to include folks 55 to 64. Facing a second straight $1.4 trillion deficit, Congress is moving to raise the debt ceiling by another $1.8 trillion.

And the lead story in the Post Monday began:

“The Senate cleared for President Obama’s signature on Sunday a $447 billion omnibus spending bill that contains thousands of earmarks and double-digit increases for several Cabinet agencies.”

Total cost of the Senate bill passed Sunday was “$1.1 trillion, including average spending increases of 10 percent for dozens of federal agencies.”

Ten percent hikes for federal agencies? What is going on?

Democrats say the money is needed to make up for the neglect of the George W. Bush years. But the Bush years were the fattest years for federal social spending since the Great Society...CONT'D...LINK
-------------------------

Chris Moore comments:

The irony is that all of this “crucial” deficit spending is coming out of the hides of future generations of Americans, and of developing countries around the world as the Empire deploys the garrisons to prop up the dollar at gunpoint.

So all of these Democrats (and Bushcons/Neocons) who go around declaring what a moral imperative it is to spend, spend, spend are actually the most ruthlessly selfish blood suckers on the face of the earth. Not only are they robbing America's youth and yet-to-be born of their very future, but they are extracting blood from the developing world to do it.

Vampires, truly.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Copenhagen unravels as developing nations get wise to the World Bank/IMF scam at its core

The Real Reason Behind The Copenhagen Walk-Out

Developing nations discovered neo-colonial agenda behind globalist carbon tax scam

(Prisn Planet.com) -- By Paul Joseph Watson -- December 14, 2009

Developing countries have walked out on the Copenhagen climate talks, but one of the primary reasons as to why nations like China and India have boycotted the summit is being hidden by the corporate media – namely the fact that the negotiations were doomed once poorer countries learned of the globalist’s neo-colonial agenda as a result of the Danish text leak.

“Negotiations at the UN climate summit have been suspended after developing countries withdrew their co-operation,” reports the BBC.

“Delegations were angry at what they saw as moves by the Danish host government to sideline talks on more emission cuts under the Kyoto Protocol. As news spread around the conference centre, activists chanted “We stand with Africa – Kyoto targets now”.

However, the media has completely failed to highlight the real reason behind the walk out – the fact that funds from climate financing, originally allocated to go to the UN and then be doled out piecemeal to third world nations, would instead be paid directly into the coffers of the World Bank and IMF, organizations that have made a habit out of looting poorer countries with crippling debts that cannot be paid back, forcing such countries to hand over their entire infrastructure to globalist loan sharks.

In the leaked Copenhagen text that emerged last week, leaders of third world countries were horrified to discover that developed nations would take on less of a burden than anticipated and that more would be demanded of poorer countries despite the fact that any further cuts in CO2 emissions would further cripple their flimsy economies and poverty-stricken people.

Billionaire elitist George Soros subsequently told Copenhagen delegates how poorer nations would be forced to take on what he described as “green loans” in the name of combating climate change, a policy that would land the already financially devastated third world with even more debt, payable to globalist institutions such as the IMF.

Soros said that $100 billion should be provided in loans to poorer nations to help slow global warming. The proposal would entail third world countries paying back interest to the governments of the richer nations to stem a perceived crisis that they have had little or no direct involvement in creating.

In what amounts to little more than modern day colonialism, debt forgiveness requires countries to sell their health, education, electric, water and other public services to globalist corporations. Such “structural adjustment conditionalities” have led to massive cuts to health and education budgets in the third world.

Poorer countries have also had to discontinue subsidies and trade restrictions that support local business and development...CONT'D...LINK