Pulling Back the Wizards' Curtains

The Reagan Years Revisited!

2010-02-26T05:44:00.000-08:00

One of My Favorite Writers!

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2010/02/24/of-high-treason-and-economic-incompetenc

Of High Treason and Economic Incompetence: The Reagan Years Revisited!
February 24th, 2010 3:39 AM
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Ronald Reagan was already a 'grandfather' figure when he came to office in 1981. It may be unfair to say that he won the election with a single phrase: 'Well....there ya' go again!' In retrospect, it is all that one remembers of Reagan's empty promises and equally empty platitudes! Those and a head nod won him the White House. It is this surface veneer we remember --not his cowardly refusal to assent to Mikhail Gorbachev's offer of complete nuclear disarmament, not his two year long 'depression' which left millions homeless, not the act of 'high treason' called Iran/Contra.

Reagan was no friend of the poor, the working class, the cities. On numerous occasions, Reagan would offer up his own version of 'let them eat cake'. Reagan implied that the poor were lazy and welfare recipients 'crazy'. He invented --full cloth --a 'welfare Grandma' who drove a Cadillac and had ripped off $150,000 from the government using 80 aliases, 30 addresses, a dozen social security cards and four fictional dead husbands. Many reputable journalists tried to find this 'welfare cheat'! None succeeded! At last, they were forced to admit that this infamous 'welfare cheat' did not exist. She was either one Reagan's bald-faced lies or one of his many psychotic delusions. I will be charitable to Reagan's memory. She did not exist! Reagan was not nuts, he was just a common, goddamned liar! Tragically, the image stuck. Reagan might have known it would. The lasting image of the 'Cadillac driving' cheat was behind the 1996 'welfare reform law' which the GOP stuck on Clinton who, to his same, signed. It demonstrate the power of the 'big lie' technique which the GOP clearly learned from Hitler.

Of aids victims, he might as well have said what he really believed: 'let them die and decrease the surplus population!'. Reagan is evidence if not proof that evil is what Nuremberg psychologist Dr. Gustav Gilbert said it was: 'the utter lack of empathy!'.Later, Reagan would pay tribute to Nazi SS, saying of them that they, likewise, 'sacrificed'. Yeah --but for what? Nazism, genocide and enslavement, that's what!

Recessions, like the one following Ronald Reagan's improvident tax cut of 1982, harmed workers. American recessions, like periods of prosperity, are inequitable in their effects, harming wage earners at the outset and paying off an increasingly tiny elite on tax day. The conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter confirmed as much when he compared recessions to a "cleansing douche", a characterization that lifelong goppers must surely apply to everyone but themselves and their country club cronies.

"When you think about what Ronald Reagan did to the American people, to the middle class to the working people," former Sen. John Edwards shot back at an event in Henderson, Nevada.

"He was openly -- openly-- intolerant of unions and the right to organize. He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country...He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment."Edwards added, "I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change."

Washington Post, Obama's Reagan Comparison Sparks Debate

When I think about what Ronald Reagan did to this nation, I think of how he struck at and perhaps killed-off a viable labor movement. I think about how middle class families --made homeless --lived under bridges and overpasses in boomtown Houston. I think about how Reagan, like Bush, waged a phony war on terrorism during which terrorist attacks increased some three fold. I think about how Ed Meese waged a war on porn even as a gay prostitution ring operated right out of the White House. I think about how Ronald Reagan neutered affirmative action, the fairness doctrine, and the industries that had kept the middle class in the middle class. I remember how Ronald Reagan was worshipped by the gullible who remembered Reagan's reign at the Republican National convention of 1992: "Reagan made us feel good about ourselves", they swooned.

Reagan was both a liar and hypocrite. He occupied the White House with a mandate to cut federal spending. It was his raison d'etre. Conservatives bought it. Reagan became the biggest spending 'President' in U.S. history, doubling the size of the Federal Bureaucracy, tripling the deficit! He would escalate the military budget, enriching his crones on K-street and the Military/Industrial Complex. It was a laundered payoff for their unswerving support.

Reagan can be given no credit for restoring the nation's prosperity. It was not enough that he destroyed the labor movement by he would cut off its raison d'etre by exporting jobs and industry abroad. Whatever economic growth occurred benefited only the upper quintile, a fact easily proven by cold, hard stats available to the public at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. His tax cut of 1982 benefited only the upper quintile and, inevitably, the chasm between the rich and everyone else widened. To be expected, wages declined; home ownership declined; infrastructure declined. The rich remember Reagan fondly. They alone prospered. Everyone else lost ground. In fairness, that trend was reversed briefly in Clinton's second term but --to be expected --resumed with Bush Jr. Today --just one percent of the U.S. population owns more than 95 percent of the remaining population combined. The Reagan years were heady boom times for the idle rich, offshore banks and the Military-Industrial complex. But in real America, only poverty and crime increase.

Why does the GOP insist upon repeating failed strategies? Reaganites promised that the stimulated economy would outgrow the deficit. The budget, they said, would be balanced "...within three years, maybe even two." It didn't! Reagan tripled the deficit and, on the way, he doubled the size of the federal bureaucracy. Reagan's tax cuts were followed promptly by the longest and worst recession since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression. As Robert Freeman correctly points out: "...Jimmy Carter's last budget deficit was $77 billion. Reagan's first deficit was $128 billion. His second deficit exploded to $208 billion. By the time the "Reagan Revolution" was over, George H.W. Bush was running an annual deficit of $290 billion per year."

How will Bush compare to Reagan? By the year 2002, Citizens for Tax Justice were already writing:

Over the ten-year period, the richest Americans—the best-off one percent—are slated to receive tax cuts totalling almost half a trillion dollars. The $477 billion in tax breaks the Bush administration has targeted to this elite group will average $342,000 each over the decade.

By 2010, when (and if) the Bush tax reductions are fully in place, an astonishing 52 percent of the total tax cuts will go to the richest one percent—whose average 2010 income will be $1.5 million. Their tax-cut windfall in that year alone will average $85,000 each. Put another way, of the estimated $234 billion in tax cuts scheduled for the year 2010, $121 billion will go just 1.4 million taxpayers.

Although the rich have already received a hefty down payment on their Bush tax cuts—averaging just under $12,000 each this year—80 percent of their windfall is scheduled to come from tax changes that won’t take effect until after this year, mostly from items that phase in after 2005.

1968 was the year in which measured postwar income was at its most equal for families. The Gini index for households indicates that there has been growing income inequality over the past quarter-century. Inequality grew slowly in the 1970's and rapidly during the early 1980's. ...Generally, the long-term trend has been toward increasing income inequality. Since 1969, the share of aggregate household income controlled by the lowest income quintile has decreased from 4.1 percent to 3.6 percent in 1997, while the share to the highest quintile increased from 43.0 percent to 49.4 percent. Most noticeably, the share of income controlled by the top 5 percent of households has increased from 16.6 percent to 21.7 percent. Over the same time period, the Gini index rose 17.4 percent to its 1997 level of .459.

—Income Inequality, Census Bureau

The trend began then has continued: October 2003 figures from the US Census Bureau make stark reading:
Median household incomes are falling The number of Americans without health insurance rose by 5.7 percent to 43.6 million individuals.

The number of people living below the poverty line ($18,392 for a family of four) climbed to 12.1 percent — 34.6 million people.

Wages make up the majority of income for most American families. As "Downward Mobility," NOW's report on workers and wages illustrates, many American workers are facing corporate efforts to cut pay and benefits, which could lead to more American families struggling to stay out of poverty.

The results in black and white:

Twenty percent of the population owns 84% of our private assets, leaving the other 80 percent of the population with 15.6 percent of the assets.
In 1960, the wealth gap between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent of Americans was thirty fold. Four decades later it’s more than seventy-five-fold.
Either way -- wealth or income – America is more unequal, economists generally agree, than at any time since the start of the Great Depression…
And more unequal than any other developed nation today.
—Inequality.org
The most pernicious effect of GOP economic policy is the effect of declining opportunity, a corollary of declining in wealth among all but the very rich.

It is merely rhetorical to ask: why does the GOP seem to repeat ad nauseum utterly failed strategies that have never been shown to work?The answer is simple: the GOP sales pitch is what David Stockman called a 'Trojan Horse'. The purpose of the tax is not to trickle down. The tax cuts always do precisely what the GOP insiders know they will do: they enrich the GOP base! It's a payoff for their support. Here is how someone who lived through the Reagan nightmare remembers it:

I was in the automotive field at the time, and dozens and dozens of established tool manufacturers, unionized shops, producing high quality tools, small companies with deep roots and real a commitment to the towns they were in all across the Midwest and the local communities, went out of business.

Why? Because with deregulation any hustler could get virtually unlimited financing and set up manufacturing plants overseas producing exact copies of American made tools and flood the US market with them with no fear of the Reagan administration enforcing any laws against them.

It also became easier, and far less risky, to get financing to set up a thousand junky identical chain outlets than it did for small local businesses to get credit or tax relief - restaurants, auto parts stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, florists - thousands and thousands of small businesses chewed up and destroyed.

We have a younger generation of people who have no personal experience with so many things - local businesses and tight knit communities, affordable, convenient and efficient public transportation, wages that allowed one person in a household enough income to support the family, homes that were homes, not investments, easy access to public recreation, confidence in the safety of food and other consumer items, all regulated and inspected for the public welfare, freedom from the relentless intrusion of corporations into our lives, and on and on and on.

Reagan destroyed the country, and if we try to gloss over that (which at the very least Obama's remarks have done) or if we buy into the dishonest rationales and excuses and obfuscations that the Reagan administration used to disguise their agenda and to sell it to the public, we surrender any chance at real change, we bury the coffin forever into which the right wingers have put the left - and by extension, the majority of the American people, and we condemn ourselves to living in this ongoing nightmare of destruction and human suffering.

It is not time to make nice with the Reagan legacy propagandists, even by implication or omission. It is time to relentlessly and fearlessly point out that the crisis the country is in is best described and analyzed as the chickens coming home to roost from the Reagan era.

It is time to fight. It is not time to heal or move on—no matter how attractive and appealing this may be—it is not time to paper over the profound divide in the country, it is not time to accommodate or apologize for

--Found on the Democratic Underground

Paul Krugman can always be depended upon to put this kind of thing in perspective.
Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”

Contrast that with Mr. Obama’s recent statement, in an interview with a Nevada newspaper, that Reagan offered a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

Maybe Mr. Obama was, as his supporters insist, simply praising Reagan’s political skills. (I think he was trying to curry favor with a conservative editorial board, which did in fact endorse him.) But where in his remarks was the clear declaration that Reaganomics failed?

For it did fail. The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

When the inevitable recession arrived, people felt betrayed — a sense of betrayal that Mr. Clinton was able to ride into the White House.

Given that reality, what was Mr. Obama talking about? Some good things did eventually happen to the U.S. economy — but not on Reagan’s watch.

--Paul Krugman, Debunking the Reagan Myth

Reagan/Bush tax cuts are payoffs to the already rich for their support. The GOP prescription is simple: just take another dose of what's making you sick.

Reagan was clearly aloof, indifferent to anyone's plight but his base of ultra rich robber barons, idle rich boys and the war mongers of the Military/Industrial complex. Reagan cared nothing for 'urban voters' which for him meant: 'black people' or 'brown folk'. There was only one black face in his cabinet, that of (HUD) Secretary Samuel Pierce. At a reception, he asked him: "How are things in your city!" Unfortunately, I don't have the reply. I hope it was: "Fuck you, Mr. President!" Reagan got away with a housing scandal because no one knew anything about it until Reagan had left office. How convenient!

It was during the Savings and Loan Scandal, often described as an 'orgy of commercial real estate speculation', that Reagan managed to rise above it all by closing his eyes to 'widespread corruption, mismanagement and the collapse of hundreds of thrift institutions' across the nation. As we have seen recently, the Savings and Loan scandal preceded a huge bailout which stuck the tax payer for $billions$ The Reagan administration was a racket!

Widespread, endemic, institutionalized racial discrimination by banks, real estate agents and landlords, went unrestrained and un-monitored. Big banks exploited what was called 'red lining', openly violating the Community Re-investment Act, to deprive minority and poor neighborhoods of capital. Only eight of some 40,000 applications from banks seeking to expand their operations were denied by the Reagan administration because they had violated CRA regulations.

Reagan cut federal assistance to local governments by some 60 percent. His administration eliminated general revenue sharing, slashed public service jobs and job training, and all but dismantled federally funded legal services for poor people. Other targets: the anti-poverty Community Development Block Grant program and any program having to do with public transit. It was primarily the 'inner cities', which Reaganites considered to be 'black', which suffered. Reagan's favorite 'urban' program' provided aid to highways and that was favored only because it benefited 'white suburbs' not 'black' inner cities.
I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

--Barack Obama, Washington Post

Following is a very brief checklist of a variety of Reagan abuses that defy easy categorization.
During the Reagan years, federal aid to cities dropped from 22 percent to six. Causalities included urban clinics, hospitals, and police.
In early 1984 on Good Morning America, Reagan defended himself against charges of callousness toward the poor in a classic blaming-the-victim statement saying that “people who are sleeping on the grates…the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice.' And to that, I say: bullshit! Prove it!
Various groups, community organizations et al, fought to limit the damage. Some victories were won including, during the Clinton years, the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and stronger enforcement of the CRA. But funding for low-income housing, legal services, job training and other programs are still lost and may never be restored short of a revolution that will undo Reagan's very worst legacy: the fact that the rich have gotten exponentially richer as everyone else, including the middle class, have lost gains. I will repeat this until someone gets it: today, just one percent owns more than some 95 percent combine. That is Reagan's most horrible legacy and the one from which almost every other evil springs.
Reagan was called the 'great communicator' but used his talent to divide the nation, perhaps, irreparably! Obama inherited a nation in which there is extreme wealth among the very, very, very few but obscene poverty and deteriorating conditions among the many. The middle class is no longer smug but threatened and the increase in foreclosures throughout suburbia will attest.
Iran-Contra: A Case of Treason!

In 1986, the Reagan administration was implicated in two illegal and secret U.S. Government stemming from the Reagan administration's support for Nicaraguan 'contra' rebels. At the time, U.S. law prohibited aid and/or the sale of arms as had transpired in Iran/Contra. The scandal called 'Iran/Contra' came to light Reagan administration officials announced that government had sold arms to Iran. Iran was, at the time, an avowed enemy of the United States. It was not so long ago, that U.S. embassy personnel had been recently released by the 'revolutionary' government in Iran. Proceeds from the arms sales to Iran were diverted --of the books --to the 'contra' rebels in Nicaragua.

As the 'scandal' came to light, Attorney General Ed Meese sought the appointment of a 'special prosecutor', a position in which Lawrence E. Walsh would assume the role of 'independent counsel' to investigate and prosecute possible crimes arising from what was already called 'Iran/Contra'.

It was alleged that Director Casey's 'unswerving support of President Reagan's contra policies' encouraged the CIA officials to exceed legal restrictions in both operations, though it cannot be said that Iran/Contra was the origin of CIA 'off the book' operations. The Boland Amendment of October 1984 had sought to prohibit and prevent the CIA from aiding the 'contras' either directly or indirectly. As the 'scandal' came to light, it became increasingly clearly that Casey had made an end run around Boland and was, in fact, the architect of North's role in a so-called 'contra-support team'.

North's role --described as 'dove-tailing' CIA activities --violated the Boland restrictions even as Casey either ordered or supported arms sales to Iran. 'Operatives' Alan Fier and Claire E. George lied to Congress for the purpose of keeping 'the spotlight off the White House'. When the arms ales were made public in November, 1986, it was clear that Congress had been lied to, the people, the nation had been misled.

Four CIA officials were charged with crimes. George, the third highest-ranking CIA official, was convicted of two felony counts of false statements and perjury, i.e, 'lying' to Congress. Two CIA 'operatives' were awaiting trial when they were pardoned by Reagan whom Special Prosecutor Walsh clearly implicated in his 'Final Report' on Iran/Contra matters.

The Iran/contra investigation will not end the kind of abuse of power that it addressed any more than the Watergate investigation did. The criminality in both affairs did not arise primarily out of ordinary venality or greed, although some of those charged were driven by both. Instead, the crimes committed in Iran/contra were motivated by the desire of persons in high office to pursue controversial policies and goals even when the pursuit of those policies and goals was inhibited or restricted by executive orders, statutes or the constitutional system of checks and balances.

The tone in Iran/contra was set by President Reagan. He directed that the contras be supported, despite a ban on contra aid imposed on him by Congress. And he was willing to trade arms to Iran for the release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East, even if doing so was contrary to the nation's stated policy and possibly in violation of the law.

The lesson of Iran/contra is that if our system of government is to function properly, the branches of government must deal with one another honestly and cooperatively. When disputes arise between the Executive and Legislative branches, as they surely will, the laws that emerge from such disputes must be obeyed. When a President, even with good motive and intent, chooses to skirt the laws or to circumvent them, it is incumbent upon his subordinates to resist, not join in. Their oath and fealty are to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to the man temporarily occupying the Oval Office. Congress has the duty and the power under our system of checks and balances to ensure that the President and his Cabinet officers are faithful to their oaths.

Lawrence Walsh, Concluding Observations, FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS

'Conspiracies of Rich Men' to Commit War Crimes and Aggression

2010-02-12T13:11:00.000-08:00

http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2010/02/conspiracies-of-rich-men-to-commit-war.html

FEBRUARY 02, 2010

'Conspiracies of Rich Men' to Commit War Crimes and Aggression
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The establishment derides conspiracies and, for awhile, it was fashionable to deny the existence of 'conspiracies'. In fact, conspiracies are how things get done. Very little is accomplished by one person working alone. If what is to be accomplished is illegal, the 'conspiracy' is called a 'crime syndicate' or 'orgnized crime'.

If the 'conspiracy' in question is legal, however questionable, it is called a corporation or a business enterprise. Theorists on the high court have said corporations are people! But, should you call five idiots who have thus conspired to subvert the U.S. Constitution by the term 'conspirators', you are likely to be called a nut job! But SCOTUS believes mere words on paper is a real, living breathing person if it happens to have a seal on it supplied to you by the Delaware Secreatary of State! So --I ask you --who is nuts?

The government often cites the specter of 'organized crime' in order to rally voters to a 'right wing' cause like 'law and order', a big issue in the 1960s. In order to fully exploit this 'threat', this 'clear and present danger' to the lives of middle America who seemed to have been cowering in fear, it was necessary to promote all manner of fears --hippies, black people, rock n' rolll, and crime syndicates. Law and order' was, therefore, a big issue among the GOP hoping to exploit the fears of 'hippies' and 'black people' --both of whom were unhappy with increasing poverty, denial of rights, the seemingly endless, mindless and destructive war in Viet Nam. It was a war fought on behalf of a 'conspiracy of rich men' --ITT, Honeywell et al --all of whom hoped to make a killing with defense contracts.

George H. W. Bush, otherwise called Sr now, had hoped to achieve high office by exploiting those fears. It is no stretch to conclude that George H. W. Bush had made a Faustian bargain with the leadership of GOP. George H. W. Bush --by the time I met him --has already sold his soul to what St. Thomas More has already described as a 'conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodites'.

The Senior Bush won two elections for a seat in the House of Representatives, but lost two bids for a Senate seat. It was in during one of his Senate races that I first met the Senior Bush who was not so well known when I interviewed Bush Sr with regard to this very issue. I was a very young reporter, somewhat naive, learning the ropes and had not yet made it to a major market or a network. Honestly --I did not know what to make of Bush's 'non'-answer. It consisted of slogans, buzzwords, and meaningless gobbledy gook. Little has changed. The Bush family still talks like that!

After Bush's second race for the Senate, President Nixon appointed him U.S. delegate to the United Nations. He later became Republican National Committee chairman. He headed the U.S. liaison office in Beijing. It was years later, in Houston, that the Senior Bush would regale me with a story about how he was 'duped' into eating 'dog lips' --apparently a Chinese delicacy --at a formal, diplomatic dinner in the Forbidden City.

Bush would eventually become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the time, many wondered what, precisely, was it that qualified Bush to head up the CIA, an agency that I have called 'World's Number One Terrorist Organization'. Despite his criticism of Reagan's “voodoo economics" , Bush became Reagan's running mate in 1980; by 1984, Bush had won acclaim for his devotion to Reagan's conservative agenda. Thus would espouse an utterly failed policy and one that he himself has opposed. Reagan's 'voodoo economics' caused a two year long recession, the deepest and most severe depression since Hoover's great depression of 1929. But that clearly did not matter to Bush Sr. He would hitch his wagon to whatever star was ascendant and, at the time, it was the ascendant Ronald Reagan who would preside over a 'conspiracy' to sell arms to Iran, which was, at the time, an officially declared enemy of the United States, a sponsor of world wide terrorism. This 'conspiracy' on behalf of rich men would then funnel the proceeds of those sales to the so-called Contras in Nicaragua. There is a word for this: high treason:

The Iran/contra investigation will not end the kind of abuse of power that it addressed any more than the Watergate investigation did. The criminality in both affairs did not arise primarily out of ordinary venality or greed, although some of those charged were driven by both. Instead, the crimes committed in Iran/contra were motivated by the desire of persons in high office to pursue controversial policies and goals even when the pursuit of those policies and goals was inhibited or restricted by executive orders, statutes or the constitutional system of checks and balances.

The tone in Iran/contra was set by President Reagan. He directed that the contras be supported, despite a ban on contra aid imposed on him by Congress. And he was willing to trade arms to Iran for the release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East, even if doing so was contrary to the nation's stated policy and possibly in violation of the law.

The lesson of Iran/contra is that if our system of government is to function properly, the branches of government must deal with one another honestly and cooperatively. When disputes arise between the Executive and Legislative branches, as they surely will, the laws that emerge from such disputes must be obeyed. When a President, even with good motive and intent, chooses to skirt the laws or to circumvent them, it is incumbent upon his subordinates to resist, not join in. Their oath and fealty are to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to the man temporarily occupying the Oval Office. Congress has the duty and the power under our system of checks and balances to ensure that the President and his Cabinet officers are faithful to their oaths. --Lawrence Walsh, Special Prosecutor, Concluding Observations, FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL

FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS
No one ever called Sr a 'conspiracy theorist'. That's because he was not a theorist; he was a 'conspirator' for real!
"I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth."- Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia

Last time I checked the Cornell Univ Law Library and FINDLAW, I found hundreds if not thousands of court decisions, including SCOTUS, having to do with conspiracies large and small, of one sort or another. Someone should inform SCOTUS that conspiracies do not exist, but, I suspect, the very fact that they are recognized by the higher courts, including SCOTUS, creates them if they had not existed prior.

In his 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich', William Shirer described what St. Thomas More would have called a 'conspiracy of rich men' to invade the nations of Europe, steal their resources and divide up the booty.

Goebbels was jubilant. "Now it will be easy," he wrote in his diary on February 3, "to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money."(2)

The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its business as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany's leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler, head of the United Steel Works. The record of this secret meeting has been preserved.

Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. "Private enterprise," he said, "cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality . . . All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen . . . We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist." He promised the businessmen that he would "eliminate" the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament). "Now we stand before the last election," Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that "regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat." If he did not win, he would stay in power "by other means . . . with other weapons." Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of "financial sacrifices" which "surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years."

All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who, according to Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to appoint Hitler, jumped up and expressed to the Chancellor the "gratitude" of the businessmen "for having given us such a clear picture." Dr. Schacht then passed the hat. "I collected three million marks," he recalled at Nuremberg.(3) --William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34

We are fortunate that no one 'informed' informed Shirer that conspiracies do not exist before he bothered unearthing the mountain of Nazi documents that prove the meeting, the Nazi conspiracy to wage war and genocide for the benefit of global corporations that participated. This meeting of 'industrialists' took place just as surely as did the meeting of Dick Cheney's 'Energy Task Force' which carved up an 'alloted' the oil fields of Iraq long before the events of 911 would give these 'conspiractors' the pre-text they would require to attack Iraq, wage war upon that nation and, in the process, steel its resources for the likes of Dick Cheney's own Halliburton and other members of an energy consortium.

The results were published in a 'National Energy Policy' report in May 2001, several months before 911 would give them the pretext to make the report come true. This is precisely the kind of of conspiracy that had been described so accurately, precisely by St. Thomas More in his "Utopia", a classic of English literature.

I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.

They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth's sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws. But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!
Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia

Another example is Heinrich Heydrich's infamous meeting at Wansee, attended by Nazi bureaucrats, and corporate kiss ups. Over a civilized lunch, this 'conspiracy of rich men' planned the extermination of the jews of Europe.

... within a few months after the meeting, the first gas chambers were installed in some of the extermination camps in Poland. These six camps, Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka were in operation in Poland.

Responsibility for the entire project was placed in the hands of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, and head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS.

The Wannsee Conference did not mark the beginning of the "Final Solution." The mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Rather, the Wannsee Conference was the place where the "final solution" was formally revealed to non-Nazi leaders who would help arrange for Jews to be transported from all over German-occupied Europe to SS-operated "extermination" camps in Poland. Not one of the men present at Wannsee objected to the announced policy. Never before had a modern state committed itself to the murder of an entire people--The Wannsee Conference, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

Very little is EVER accomplished by one person working alone unless you happen to be Michelangelo. Conspiracies exist! Our own Supreme Court has said so and, by law, they have defined themselves as 'infallible'. They are, themselves, of late, a conspiracy of Republicans to subvert the Constitution.

Because conspiracy --in fact --exist, wars will continue to be fought by the poor for the benefit of the rich. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is called the military-industrial complex. It's job is to divide the spoils of war among Dick Cheney's oil buddies and other 'paid thugs' like Blackwater, who conveniently hide behind the monicker --'defense contractor'.

For eons wars have been fought for booty! That's why the US fights them today. Rome invaded Dacia for the gold. The U.S. wages war in the Middle East for oil, the booty du jour! To deny one the right to oppose those wars --as Supreme Court Justice Holmes denied Eugene Debs --is a recipe for military dictatorship. In a text-book example of the false analogy, Holmes likened Debs' opposition to U.S. entry in WWI to yelling 'fire in a crowded theater'. I ask: isn't it more dangerous NOT to shout fire if the theater really is on fire?

Today --the theater is on fire. Our government has repeatedly failed us on almost every front. We are expected to die abroad in order to enrich numerous conspiracies of rich men --oil barons, arm merchants, the very minions of the Military-Industrial Complex. Corporations, we are told, are people and the conspiracy we used to dignify with the term --Supreme Court --has said so! And I ask you: if the MIC is not a 'conspiracy of rich men', then what is? If the Supreme Court has not deteriorated into a conspiracy of right wing ideologues, then why are not the dictionaries re-written and the thousands of pages of case law burned or dumped offshore so that we cannot learn the truth for ourselves. We are expected to buy the lies and die for this wicked, venal conspiracy. Well, I won't and never will!

St. Thomas More would have called the Military-Industrial complex and their shills on K-street a "conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities in the name and title of the commonwealth!" [See: Thomas More, Utopia] This is why wars have been waged throughout the ages! If Justice Holmes were alive, I would tell him that it is wrong NOT to yell fire in a crowded theater if the theater is, indeed, on fire! At this moment in our history, the American republic is threatened, and among those threatening it is the US Supreme Court itself!

I am yelling FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite

2010-02-03T14:27:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Budgets-War-and-Blind-Amb-by-Chris-Floyd-100202-167.html

February 2, 2010
Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite
By Chris Floyd

The American elite's unbounded, unquestioned, indeed unconscious sense of imperial entitlement and dominance -- based ultimately on war, the threat of war and the profit from war -- is one of the defining characteristics of our age. And if you would like to see a glaring example of this attitude in action, look no further than the front page of Tuesday's New York Times, where one David Sanger gives us his penetrating "news analysis" of the Administration's just-announced $3.8 trillion budget.

Sanger focuses on the huge, continuing deficits that the budget forecasts over the next decade. Completely ignoring the plain truth that his own expert source tell him later in the story -- that "forecasts 10 years out have no credibility" -- Sanger boldly plunges forward to tell us just what it all means. You will not be surprised to hear that the upshot of these big deficits is that neither Obama nor his successors will be able to spend any money on "new domestic initiatives" for years to come. But let's let Sanger, savant and seer, tell it in his own words:

In a federal budget filled with mind-boggling statistics, two numbers stand out as particularly stunning, for the way they may change American politics and American power.

The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country's entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.

But the second number, buried deeper in the budget's projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama's own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. ...

For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country's influence around the world eroded.

What is most interesting here, of course, is not Sanger's noodle-scratching over imaginary numbers projected into an unknowable future, but his total and apparently completely unconscious adoption of the mindset of militarist empire. For as he puzzles and puzzles till his puzzler is sore on how in God's name the United States can possibly find any money at all to spend on bettering the lives of its citizens over the next 10 years, it becomes clear that Sanger -- like the rest of our political and media elite -- literally cannot conceive of an end to empire. Our elites and their courtiers literally cannot imagine life without a permanent war for global dominance, fueled by a gargantuan war machine spread across hundreds and hundreds of bases implanted in more than 100 countries.

And so this consideration, this possible outcome, does not figure in Sanger's "analysis" because it cannot: it lies far outside the scope of his consciousness. The only possible alternative he can conceive to the empire's bloody and bankrupting business as usual is some kind of divine intervention, "miraculous growth" or some "miraculous political compromise."

And make no mistake: the "miraculous political compromise" he is talking about has nothing to do with ending or even trimming the empire. A "compromise" on this issue could only be posited if there was some present conflict over it. But both parties are deeply committed to increasing spending on the wars and the war machine.

No, by "compromise" Sanger means some sort of "Grand Bargain" between the parties to cut Social Security and Medicare, along the lines of the "blue-ribbon panel" of entitlement cutters now being pushed by the Obama Administration. An effort to impose this kind of elitist, unaccountable commission failed in the Senate a few weeks ago -- although the Republicans have proposed such panels before, they didn't like this one because Obama proposed it -- but the idea will keep coming back. Sanger and the elite will doubtless get their "miracle" of slashing the remaining bits of the safety net to shreds in due time.

For these are the only possibilities for deficit-cutting that Sanger can even remotely contemplate: some whiz-bang new techno gizmo -- or maybe some hot new "financial instruments" cooked up by Wall Street -- that will goose the economy with a bright new bubble ... or else finally telling our old, sick, vulnerable and unfortunate to just crawl off and die already. That's it. That's all that our elite can envision.

Yet the ending of the imperial wars and the dismantling of America's global military empire -- and its global gulag -- would save trillions of dollars in the coming years. Not only from direct military spending, but also from the vastly reduced need for "Homeland security" funding in a world where the United States was no longer invading foreign lands, killing their people, supporting their tyrants -- and inciting revenge and resistance.

This would release a flood of money for any number of "new domestic initiatives," while also giving scope for deep tax cuts across the board. Working people would thrive, the poor, the sick and the vulnerable would be bettered, businesses would grow, opportunity would expand, the care and education of our children would be greatly enhanced, our infrastructure could be repaired and strengthened, our environment better cleansed and cared for. In short, people could keep more of their own money while government spending could be directed toward improving the quality of life of all the nation's citizens.

This is no utopian vision. Many problems, much suffering would remain. But it would be a better society -- more humane, more just, more secure, more peaceful, more prosperous than it is now. Such an alternative is entirely achievable, by ordinary humans; it would require no divine miracles, no god-like heroes to bring it about.

But such a society is precisely what our elites cannot -- or, to be more accurate, will not -- imagine. Because, yes, it would "erode" their "influence" around the world to some extent. Although they would still be comfortable, coddled and privileged, they could no longer merge their individual psyches with the larger entity of a globe-spanning, death-dealing empire -- a connection which, although itself a projection of their own brains, gives them a forever-inflated sense of worth and importance.

And on a more prosaic level, the end of empire would mean an end to the horrendous economic distortion wrought by our war-profiteering industries. Other businesses would inevitably come to the fore, economic activity would be spread more evenly across more sectors. And so, yes, those who have feasted so gluttonously for so long on blood money would not be quite as rich as they are now.

A better world -- again, not perfect, by no means perfect, but much better -- is entirely possible. We could easily dismantle the empire -- carefully, safely, with deliberation -- over the next ten years. It is a reasonable, moderate, serious option. It would not require violent revolution or vast social upheaval. But our elites do not want this. They can no longer fathom life without the exercise -- and worship -- of unrestricted power that empire entails. They will not accept -- or even contemplate -- any alternative to it.

And thus every option and policy we are offered -- whether from right-wing Republicans or "progressive" Democrats, or from "serious" news analysts on "serious" papers -- must fall within these pathetically cramped, constricted mental horizons. Empire -- the imposition of dominion by violence and threat of violence, and the financial and moral corruption this breeds, the malevolent example it sets at every level of society -- is the canker in the body politic. Until it is dealt with, there will be no healing, no hope, no change -- just more degradation and disaster all down the line.

The Cabal: Power Concedes Nothing Without A Demand

2010-02-03T10:45:00.001-08:00

http://wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/6934

The Cabal: Power Concedes Nothing Without A Demand
By: Fahim A. Knight

The American people, in particular and the world in general, have no real idea that everything around them isn't what it appears. There has always been and old saying that states, “perception means everything and reality, means absolutely nothing.” Interpret to mean you have to just look good and not necessarily be of any substance. President George Bush just has to look and sound good, but in reality, all of his decisions and all of our decisions are under the dictates of some powerful hidden entitles. President George Bush appears to be one of the most powerful men in the world and yet he is under the dictates of the real and invisible decision makers. He was elevated in 2000 to the highest office in world because of a willingness to serve and carryout their well calculated agenda. Does he work for the House of Rothschild, the Carlyle Group, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Russell Group, and Bilderberger Group? (Reference: Texe Marrs: “Circle of Intrigue: The Hidden Inner Circle of the Global Illuminati Conspiracy”)

Dr. John Coleman in his book titled, “Conspirators Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of the 300” stated, “It is the Committee of 300 which has established control networks and mechanisms far more binding than anything ever seen in this world. Chains and ropes are not needed to restrain us. Our fears of what is to come does that job far more efficiently than any physical means of restraint. We have been brainwashed to give up our Constitutional right to bear arms; to give up our Constitution itself; to allow the United Nations to exercise control over our foreign policies and the IMF to take control of our fiscal and monetary policies; to permit the President to break United States law with impunity and to invade a foreign country and kidnap its head of state. In short we have been brainwashed to the extent where we, as a nation, will accept each and every lawless act carried out by our government almost without question.” (Reference: Dr. John Coleman: “Conspirators Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of the 300”).

How many people truly believe and know that there is an Elite Cabal of Emperors who function with autonym and world sovereignty, and are above the laws of all nations? This writer recently watched President Bush meet with King Abdullah, the Royal King of Saudi Arabia and they were so-called discussing Saudi Arabia’s possibilities of increasing Oil Production drilling (at least that is what they conveyed on camera) and what OPEC can do to so-called ease the Oil tension in the West. This writer said to himself, Wow! "How many people believe that OPEC can make that decision and fail to understand that OPEC is just a Front Organization for the Cabal and the Hidden Emperors?" The mass mediums sent their talking heads and spin doctors out to convince the American people, in particular and world the people in general, that the Oil crisis is a matter of supply and demand. The last time this writer checked, the price of crude Oil, it had risen to over $130.00 USD per Barrel. Some of the ignorant would like to blame the Arabs—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Algeria, etc., for the Oil crisis and have no idea that someone more powerful and more sinister is guiding this so-called crisis. Some would even prefer blaming Hugo Chavez the charismatic and idealist President of Venezuela for the United States Oil crises.

Andy Stern in his book titled, “Oil: From Rockefellers to Iraq and Beyond’ stated, “The freewheeling gold rush years in the US soon gave way to the all-devouring empire created by John D. Rockefeller, whose fortune was built on sharp business practices, corruption of government at the highest levels, and created of one of the most successful and enduring cartels the world has ever seen. Then as now in the US, government and Big Oil were closely interlinked. Rockefeller had agents all over the world, forming a semi-official a semi-official diplomatic structure that negotiated trade deals directly with national governments. Today, the links are even closer, with former oil executives occupying many of the top positions in the current US administration, and taking policy positions highly favourable to the industry in which they made their fortunes. As the thirst for oil, and the vast profits it offered, enticed companies beyond their national borders, British, French and US oil have sought to exploit oil resources overseas, and have not hesitated to corrupt or subvert governments, be they in Africa, Asia or Latin America, in order to gain control of these valuable assets.” (Reference: Andy Stern: “Oil: From Rockefellers to Iraq and Beyond’).

Thus, they had never heard of the Elite Dynastic Families, this inner secret Cabal that is so rich and powerful that they are hidden under many layers of deceptions. They have the ability to create international crisis—wars, economic recessions, political tension (instigating and supporting rivals on both sides), etc., for their benefits. The people have been reduced to mere pawns. This writer was having a discussion with some of the KEEPING IT REAL think tank members and the question came up, about Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, in particular, but here is the top 20 billionaires of the world listed by Forbes—Carlos Slim Helu, Lakshmi Mittal, Mukesh Ambani, Anil Ambani, Ingvar Kamprad, KP Singh, Oleg Deripaska, Karl Albrecht, Li Ka-shing, Sheldon Adelson, Bernard Arnault, Lawrence Ellison, Roman Abramovich, Theo Albrecht, Liliane Bettencourt, Alexei Mordashov, Prince Alwaleed, Mikhail Fridman, etc., being two of the most wealthiest and powerful men in the world. This writer started laughing because even some of them did not understand that these public billionaires were nothing but front men and gophers; they have no power even with all the billions of dollars, they have accrued. Gates and Buffet, as well as all the others listed on the public billionaire list are agents for the secret Cabal.

The Oil crisis has nothing to do with supply and demand, but is being driven by greed and motivated by the lust of power. They have the ability dismiss and invite whom they please. Do you remember prior the 9/11 (September 11, 2001) hoax, the Nation of Libya and the Arab Jamahiriya was considered a "Rogue Nation" and part of what Bush called the “Axis of Evil”. Muammar al- Qaddafi in 1969 after overthrowing King Idris, became the champion of a Pan-Arabism, and Pan-Islamism causes, but more importantly he supported liberation struggles around the world. For example, in Sub-Sahara Africa, Central and South America (I can recall him embracig Daniel Ortega back in the 1980s, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Maurice Bishop of Grenada, Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso and supported African liberation struggles in various parts of Sub-Sahara Africa from West Africa too Cape Town . He also supported the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Ireland, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) against Zionist occupation of Palestinian’s land and territories; Qaddafi even back in the 1980s gave Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, a five (5) million dollar interest free loan and was cozy with the Nation of Islam’s patriarch, Elijah Muhammad. Qaddafi was considered by America and Israeli propaganda machines as public enemy number one. (Reference: Noam Chomsky: “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance.”)

But after 9/11 hoax and the United States invasion of Iraq; thus, Qaddafi had seemed to soften his anti-American and anti-West political rhetoric and even submitted to an international compromise over the 1988 Lockerbie, Scotland incident, where as 270 people were killed in what was deemed as a terrorist act, which Libyan nationals were accused. Qaddafi began to gradually shake off the label of being an exponent in exporting terrorism around the world and even furthered soften his rhetoric against the West. He disbanded his aspirations of acquiring Nuclear Weapons capability as a North African Nation in order to set a military balance in the Middle East between the Muslims (Arabs) and the Israeli (Jews). The United States and the United Nations even lifted the trade embargoes and economic sanctions against Libya that were imposed almost three decades ago as a measure of rewarding Qaddafi for demonstrating good behavior. The seven OIL SISTERS—Exxon, Mobil, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil, Texaco, Gulf (As of 2005, the surviving companies are ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP, now members of the "supermajors" group). and their hidden profiteers are the ones that determine the Oil Market and they have had their eyes have on Tripoli for over three decades. (Reference: William C. Chasey: “Pan AM 103: Lockerbie Cover Up”)

This writer grew to admire Muammar al- Qaddafi and was very much disappointed in his flip-flop positions and now has to question whether or no he was an agent provocateur for the Cabal all the while.

They do not give a damn about some Islamic Sheik in Saudi Arabia or some crooked rogue government in Nigeria or even the sovereignty of these nations means absolutely nothing to them. These Oil producing Nations and leaders have mortgage their people and nations, over to the Secret Cabal. Did Muammar Qaddafi, the self-proclaimed revolutionary who once had a vision to unite the nation of Libya and Egypt and advocated a United Federated States of Africa; he also chaired the Organization of African Unity (OAU), but carried out some reactionary politics in Chad and Niger; was he a pawn of the Cabal all the while? I must reference Allen and Larry Abraham's book titled, "None Dare Call it Conspiracy." They talked about how the Cabal applies pressure from the top and pressure from the bottom, which to create the political, economic and social conditions to ascertain the results they desire. Perhaps they have invited Qaddafi and the Nation of Libya to the table, which to partake in the economic crumbs.

However, Libya and Cuba had to find out the hard way and a difficult lesson because they had brought into NATO (representative of the United States and the West and WARSAW PACT nations representative of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc Nations), but in 1989 only to discover that there were no real antagonistic contradictions between Socialism and Capitalism; Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Regan were both low level operatives that was only carrying out their assignments. Soviet Union wasn't dismantled nor did it collapse.

It was reorganized and strategically set-up for the betterment of the international bankers—to access the Siberian Oil fields and using companies like LUKOIL—to grease the palms of the international bankers that sit on top of Moscow. The Cabal—the International Bankers who inspired and instigated 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and gave life to the concept of a Socialist Revolution; did it for their own political and economic interest. Moreover, by 1989, they had, had enough of Leninism, Marxism, Stalinism and this naive concept that the major means of production and distribution were owned and controlled by the State and that Communism benefited the masses of its people. Communism from its inception ultimately only benefited the Russian Elite and that small Hidden Minority that rule the world. (Reference: Gary Allen and Larry Abraham: “None Dare Call it Conspiracy”)

William Cooper who authored one of the best treatise in helping us decode these conspiracies and exposed the agenda of the Cabal stated in his monumental book titled, “Behold A Pale Horse,” stated, “Many of them, however, disagree on exactly who will rule this New World Order, and that is what causes them to sometimes pull in opposite directions while nevertheless proceeding toward the same goal. The Vatican, for instance, wants the Pope to head the world coalition. Some want Lord Maitreya to head the New World Order. Lord Maitreya is the front runner, I believe, since witnesses say he was present on the ship at Malta with Bush and Gorbachev, and the ten regional heads of the New World Order. ‘Approximately 200 dignitaries from around the world attended a major conference initiated by Maitreya in London on April 21 and 22, 1990. Representatives of governments (including the USA) members of royal families, religious leaders. . .” (Reference: William Cooper: “Behold A Pale Horse.”)

The Oil crisis is an artificial crisis—The United States and the West consumes over 70 percent of this vital commodity (the West is truly an Oil Junkie) and the international bankers and the market wizards will continue to feed them, as much as they desire to consume, at an escalated and inflated financial rate. Bush who is a masterful conman has even suggested that the Oil Crisis should be blamed in part, on the American people, because the conservation advocates and the naturalist, have put up such political opposition to Oil drilling in Alaska and not allowing Bush Government to possible destroying the sanctity of this virgin wilderness, but most of us know that Halliburton and energy tycoon, Vice President Dick Chaney is licking his chops along with Bush because the Cabal will handsomely reward them if Alaska, the last Oil Reserves in the United States is open up for drilling, as well as, for economic and mineral exploitation.

The international bankers and the Cabal always manage to get what they want. The rising fuel cost on the consumer level, is designed to create that pressure from the top and pressure from the bottom in order to foster a condition where as the masses of the people will be propelled to believe and accept that giving Bush the authority to drill for Oil in Alaska will somehow alleviate the immediate Oil crisis in the United States. No, it will only further enrich the Cabal and the international bankers to the detriment of the suffering masses.

The United States in 1991 colonized Kuwait (although up until 1947 Kuwait was a part of Iraq, but British instigation led to Kuwait succeeding from Iraq and from that perspective Saddam Hussein was absolutely correct) and March 20, 2003 Bush and the United States Government began their efforts to colonize Iraq, the second largest Oil Reserve in the world and when these reactionaries forces went into Iraq, the international cost for a barrel of Iraqi Crude Oil was $ 29.00 USD per barrel and it now stands at $130.00 USD per barrel just five years later. The bloodsuckers of the poor keep human resistance at a minimum by selling the masses and nations, unbearable debt, which consumes them and dim resistance. The Cabal set-up the European Common Market and Euro currency, which to destabilize Western European Nation's sovereignty and to compromise nationalism, all for their benefit. The one currency concept had been in the making for a very long time; just as The United States, Canada, and Mexico and perhaps all points south, will eventually convert their money over to a new money currency called Amero. This will only further empower the Rothschild’s, Rockefellers, Oppenheimers, Morgans in their enslavement over humanity.

In the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” Protocol number 24 stated, “I pass now to the method of confirming Dynastic Roots King David to the last strata of the earth. This confirmation will first and foremost be included in that in which to this day has rested the force of conservatism by our Learned Elders of the conduct of all the affairs of the world, in directing of the education of thought of all of humanity. Certain members of the seed of David will prepare the kings and their heirs, selecting not by right of heritage but by eminent capacities, inducting them into the most secret mysteries of the political, into schemes of government, but providing always that none may come to knowledge of the secrets. The object of this mode of action is that all may know that government cannot be entrusted to those who have not been inducted into the secret places of its arts.” (Reference: “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”).

Did you know that in 1967 a one world government system was organized in Geneva, Switzerland by a United Nations meeting? and on that date, they decided to dissolve the United Nations to make room for a One World Government. The One World Government will seize all possessions, savings and personal bank deposits. Every man, woman and child will receive a certain amount of money and a number from the One World Government system. The One World Government currency is already printed and ready to be put in circulation. Every dollar will be traded. You will in the near future receive one dollar for every ten dollars; the banker will handle what money you get, eventually we will not be handling any money. At that same United Nations meeting they stated that you would receive a number from the One World Government. In March of 1974, it was stated by the European economic market that they needed a leader. They initially suggested Henry Kissinger as leader of the New World Order.

Carroll Quigley in his monumental book titled, “Tragedy and Hope”, stated, “I know the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies. . .but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”

The majority of the American people and the people of the world do not understand that there is no such thing as democracy—one man, one vote, this is only an illusion designed to give the impression and to pacify the ignorant masses into believing that they matter in the political systems of the world and it is just to the contrary. The Cabal will never leave picking their high power servants and operatives up to a ballot box and at the political discretion of an electoral process. Voting is only a matter of going through the motions and placating the ignorant masses, but the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberger they are the real POWER BROKERS, it is their job to select the next United States president and your vote, popular vote count, delegates, superdelegates, etc., do not factor into their decision; thus, regardless of the outcomes that will take place at the Democrat and Republican National Conventions. Many of you will not believe that the next United States president has already been selected and decided upon and he is prepared to serve; although the general election is slated for November 2008 and you have yet to cast your ballots. (Reference: David Icke: “The Biggest Secret”).

It does not matter whether the presidential candidate is John McCain, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton; they have not ascended up the political latter on their own recognizance. They are fully aware who they owe their allegiance and it is not to the American people. Some will try to dismiss my research as mere conspiracy theories and fail to grasp the fact that these are dangerous times which we live. The next United States president has already been given a play book, script and agenda, which is not up for negotiation or deviation; for execution only. United States domestic and Foreign Policy agenda is already set for next eight (8) years and for that matter, the political agenda for the entire world has also been set. Senator McCain has made it crystal clear that if he had to, he would commit United States troops to Iraq for next 100 years; either this is a backwards decision or is McCain given us a hint of what to expect from U.S. Foreign policy the next eight years—this sounds like business as usual, and as an extension of George Bush's cowboy and wild, wild west reactionary Foreign Policy agenda.

William Cooper, “Behold A Pale Horse” goes on to state, “It is important that you know that the members of the Order take and oath that absolves them from any allegiance to a any nation or king or government or constitution, and that includes the negating of any subsequent oath of allegiance which they may be required to take. They swear allegiance only to the Order and its goal of a New World Order. George Bush is not a loyal citizen of the United States but instead is loyal only to the destruction of the United States and to the formation of the New World Order. According to the oath Bush took when he was initiated into the Skull & Bones, his oath of office as President of the United States of America means nothing.”

The Hidden Emperors have their sights on Oil and every nation and their people are considered expendable in lieu of profits, greed and accumulation of wealth. How much money is enough? The United States war machines continues to murder thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens in name of Oil diplomacy. They have raked up these immoral and unethical tragedies in Iraq, as the price of doing business. These are criminal acts, but who can make war with the beast other than God himself. The Hidden Emperors have Muslims fighting and debating over artificial labels and concepts—Sunni versus Shia instigating and creating sectarian tension and violence and then removing their filthy hand as though they are innocent.

But their motive is stealing Oil and they are trying to set the stage to attack and invade Iran by demonizing President Mahmoud Ahmadjindine, which to justify going into Iran an stealing more oil. The next United States President will have his marching orders and do not be surprised if U.S. Foreign policy does not lead them right into Tehran, but what can not be overlooked, is that the Israelis (Zionist Jews) influence that is driving the United States into deep international isolation, specifically in the so-called Middle East. You can not have a one-sided debate and conversation relative to the Palestinians (Arabs) and the Israelis (Jews) over the question of land rights and sovereignty. Both sides must-be held equally accountable, if you are serious about one day achieving a peaceful resolution and compromise in Palestine. Bush and the United States Government is quick to condemn and repudiate Hamas and Hezbollah for so-called using Lebanon as a terrorist haven and yet did not criticize the Israelis unprovoked attacked against Lebanon in 2006. The United States Foreign Policy in the Middle East can not be based on double standards. (Reference: Obadiah Shoher: “Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East”).

The world continues to be duped and misled by an evil Cabal who has wrapped its tentacles around the whole of humanity and controls every facet of our lives; they use their most powerful tool—the media, both electronic and print, to lure us to sleep and most of all make their thoughts our thoughts. They work out of various fronts such as the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberger, etc., but is by no stretch of the imagination limited to these three powerful organizations. They intertwine with Freemasonry (I mean high degree Masonry and I am not referring to those who are initiated in 33rd degree; there is a Dynastic Freemasonic brotherhood—that evolves around blood lineage and wealth, which this Order is not open to rank and file Freemasons). The Cabal is the one pulling the purse strings on the Oil crisis and they are motivated by greed and power. President Bush is a loyal pawn and is only following the orders given to him by this INVISIBLE CABAL. John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all have swore loyalty to continue the AGENDA.

Fahim A. Knight Chief Researcher for KEEPING IT REAL THINK TANK located in Durham, NC; our mission is to inform African Americans and all people of good will of the pending dangers that lie ahead; as well as decode the symbolisms and reinterpret the hidden meanings behind those who operate as invisible forces, but covertly rules the world. We are of the belief that an enlighten world will be better prepared to throw off the shackles of ignorance and not be willing participants for the slaughter. Our MOTTO is speaking truth to power. Fahim A. Knight can be reached at fahimknight@yahoo.com.

STAY AWAKE UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN,
Fahim A. Knight

Cramer: The Bavarian Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, Goldman Sachs and the Queen of England are not all bad

2010-02-02T13:44:00.000-08:00

Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction

2010-01-30T04:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/democracy_in_america_is_a_useful_fiction_20100124/

Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction
Chris Hedges
Truthdig
Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:22 EST

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d'état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

Much of the outrage expressed about the court's ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of "inverted totalitarianism."

Inverted totalitarianism represents "the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry," Wolin writes in "Democracy Incorporated." Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.

Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by "power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions," Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, as this court ruling illustrates, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes do. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation. This exploitation ensures that huge corporate campaign contributions are protected speech under the First Amendment. It ensures that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is interpreted as an application of the people's right to petition the government. The court again ratified the concept that corporations are persons, except in those cases where the "persons" agree to a "settlement." Those within corporations who commit crimes can avoid going to prison by paying large sums of money to the government while, according to this twisted judicial reasoning, not "admitting any wrongdoing." There is a word for this. It is called corruption.

Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.

There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are allowed to have virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on "American Idol." Mass emotions are directed toward the raging culture wars. This allows us to take emotional stands on issues that are inconsequential to the power elite.

Our transformation into an empire, as happened in ancient Athens and Rome, has seen the tyranny we practice abroad become the tyranny we practice at home. We, like all empires, have been eviscerated by our own expansionism. We utilize weapons of horrific destructive power, subsidize their development with billions in taxpayer dollars, and are the world's largest arms dealer. And the Constitution, as Wolin notes, is "conscripted to serve as power's apprentice rather than its conscience."

"Inverted totalitarianism reverses things," Wolin writes. "It is politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash."

Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media's censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.

"It seems a replay of historical experience that the bias displayed by today's media should be aimed consistently at the shredded remains of liberalism," Wolin writes. "Recall that an element common to most 20th century totalitarianism, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility towards the left. In the United States, the left is assumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of 'the left wing of the Democratic Party,' never of democrats."

Liberals, socialists, trade unionists, independent journalists and intellectuals, many of whom were once important voices in our society, have been silenced or targeted for elimination within corporate-controlled academia, the media and government. Wolin, who taught at Berkeley and later at Princeton, is arguably the country's foremost political philosopher. And yet his book was virtually ignored. This is also why Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, along with intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, are not given a part in our national discourse.

The uniformity of opinion is reinforced by the skillfully orchestrated mass emotions of nationalism and patriotism, which paints all dissidents as "soft" or "unpatriotic." The "patriotic" citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and possible terrorist attacks, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and the militarized state. This means no questioning of the $1 trillion in defense-related spending. It means that the military and intelligence agencies are held above government, as if somehow they are not part of government. The most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be monitored and archived. We endure more state control than at any time in American history.

The civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the Founding Fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist. Our government and judiciary have no real sovereignty. Our press provides diversion, not information. Our organs of security and power keep us as domesticated and as fearful as most Iraqis. Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, when it emasculates government, becomes a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force, best described as inverted totalitarianism, is plunging us into a state of neo-feudalism, perpetual war and severe repression. The Supreme Court decision is part of our transformation by the corporate state from citizens to prisoners.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, writes a column published every Monday on Truthdig. His latest book is "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle."

Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows

2010-01-30T04:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aaIuE.W8RAuU

David Reilly
Bloomberg News
Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:06 EST

The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week's congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.

Wednesday's hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.

We're talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system -- apart from the matter of AIG's bailout -- deserves further congressional scrutiny.

The New York Fed is in the hot seat for its decision in November 2008 to buy out, for about $30 billion, insurance contracts AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank AG, among others. That decision, critics say, amounted to a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been allowed to fail.

That move came a few weeks after the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department propped up AIG in the wake of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s own mid-September bankruptcy filing.

Saving the System

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was head of the New York Fed at the time of the AIG moves. He maintained during Wednesday's hearing that the New York bank had to buy the insurance contracts, known as credit default swaps, to keep AIG from failing, which would have threatened the financial system.

The hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform also focused on what many in Congress believe was the New York Fed's subsequent attempt to cover up buyout details and who benefited.

By pursuing this line of inquiry, the hearing revealed some of the inner workings of the New York Fed and the outsized role it plays in banking. This insight is especially valuable given that the New York Fed is a quasi-governmental institution that isn't subject to citizen intrusions such as freedom of information requests, unlike the Federal Reserve.

This impenetrability comes in handy since the bank is the preferred vehicle for many of the Fed's bailout programs. It's as though the New York Fed was a black-ops outfit for the nation's central bank.

Geithner's Bosses

The New York Fed is one of 12 Federal Reserve Banks that operate under the supervision of the Federal Reserve's board of governors, chaired by Ben Bernanke. Member-bank presidents are appointed by nine-member boards, who themselves are appointed largely by other bankers.

As Representative Marcy Kaptur told Geithner at the hearing: "A lot of people think that the president of the New York Fed works for the U.S. government. But in fact you work for the private banks that elected you."

And yet the New York Fed played an integral role in the government's bailout of banks, often receiving surprisingly free rein to act as it saw fit.

Consider AIG. Let's take Geithner at his word that a failure to resolve the insurer's default swaps would have led to financial Armageddon. Given the stakes, you might think Geithner would have coordinated actions with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Yet Paulson testified that he wasn't in the loop.

"I had no involvement at all, in the payment to the counterparties, no involvement whatsoever," Paulson said.

Bernanke's Denials

Fed Chairman Bernanke also wasn't involved. In a written response to questions from Representative Darrell Issa, Bernanke said he "was not directly involved in the negotiations" with AIG's counterparty banks.

You have to wonder then who really was in charge of our nation's financial future if AIG posed as grave a threat as Geithner claimed.

Questions about the New York Fed's accountability grew after Geithner on Nov. 24, 2008, was named by then-President- elect Barack Obama to be Treasury Secretary. Geither said he recused himself from the bank's day-to-day activities, even though he never actually signed a formal letter of recusal.

That left issues related to disclosures about the deal in the hands of the bank's lawyers and staff, rather than a top executive. Those staffers didn't want details of the swaps purchase to become public.

New York Fed staff and outside lawyers from Davis Polk & Wardell edited AIG communications to investors and intervened with the Securities and Exchange Commission to shield details about the buyout transactions, according to a report by Issa.

That the New York Fed, a quasi-governmental body, was able to push around the SEC, an executive-branch agency, deserves a congressional hearing all by itself.

Later, when it became clear information would be disclosed, New York Fed legal group staffer James Bergin e-mailed colleagues saying: "I have to think this train is probably going to leave the station soon and we need to focus our efforts on explaining the story as best we can. There were too many people involved in the deals -- too many counterparties, too many lawyers and advisors, too many people from AIG -- to keep a determined Congress from the information."

Think of the enormity of that statement. A staffer at a body with little public accountability and that exists to serve bankers is lamenting the inability to keep Congress in the dark.

This belies the culture of secrecy obviously pervasive within the New York Fed. Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns noted during the hearing that the bank initially refused to disclose even the names of other banks that benefited from its actions, arguing this information would somehow harm AIG.

'Penchant for Secrecy'

"In fact, when the information was finally released, under pressure from Congress, nothing happened," Towns said. "It had absolutely no effect on AIG's business or financial condition. But it did have an effect on the credibility of the Federal Reserve, and it called into question the Fed's penchant for secrecy."

Now, I'm not saying Congress should be meddling in interest-rate decisions, or micro-managing bank regulation. Nor do I think we should all don tin-foil hats and start ranting about the Trilateral Commission.

Yet when unelected and unaccountable agencies pick banking winners while trying to end-run Congress, even as taxpayers are forced to lend, spend and guarantee about $8 trillion to prop up the financial system, our collective blood should boil.

(David Reilly is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions express

Rothschilds & Rockefellers: Trillionaires Of The World

2010-01-18T07:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.infowars.com/rothschilds-rockefellers-trillionaires-of-the-world/

Posted By admin On January 17, 2010

New World Order
Infowars.com
January 17, 2010

“Money is Power”, or shall we say, “The Monopoly to Create Credit Money and charge interest is Absolute Power”. (Alex James)

Amsel (Amschel) Bauer Mayer Rothschild, 1838:

“Let me issue and control a Nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws”.

Letter written from London by the Rothschilds to their New York agents introducing their banking method into America: “The few who can understand the system will be either so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while, on the other hand, that great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that Capital derives from the system, will bear its burden without complaint and, perhaps, without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”

Nathan Rothschild said to the Commons Secret Committee on the question early in 1819: “In what line of business are you? – Mostly in the foreign banking line. “Have the goodness to state to the Committee in detail, what you conceive would be the consequence of an obligation imposed upon the Bank [of England, which he owned] to resume cash payments at the expiration of a year from the present time? – I do not think it can be done without very great distress to this country; it would do a great deal of mischief; we may not actually know ourselves what mischief it might cause. “Have the goodness to explain the nature of the mischief, and in what way it would be produced? – Money will be so very scarce, every article in this country will fall to such an enormous extent, that many persons will be ruined.”

The director of the Prussian Treasury wrote on a visit to London that Nathan Rothschild had as early as 1817: “.., incredible influence upon all financial affairs here in London. It is widely stated.., that he entirely regulates the rate of exchange in the City. His power as a banker is enormous”.

Austrian Prince Mettemich’s secretary wrote of the Rothschilds, as early as 1818, that: “… they are the richest people in Europe.”

Referring to James Rothschild, the poet Heinrich Heine said: “Money is the god of our times, and Rothschild is his prophet.”

James Rothschild built his fabulous mansion, called Ferrilres, 19 miles north-east of Paris. Wilhelm I, on first seeing it, exclaimed: “Kings couldn’t afford this. It could only belong to a Rothschild!”

Author Frederic Morton wrote that the Rothschilds had: “conquered the World more thoroughly, more cunningly, and much more lastingly than all the Caesars before…”

As Napoleon pointed out: “Terrorism, War & Bankruptcy are caused by the privatization of money, issued as a debt and compounded by interest “- he cancelled debt and interest in France – hence the Battle of Waterloo.

Some writers have claimed that Nathan Rothschild “warned that the United States would find itself involved in a most disastrous war if the bank’s charter were not renewed.” (do you see the similarities here? If you don’t play the game an economic disaster will fall on you and you will be destroyed.)

“There is but one power in Europe and that is Rothschild.” 19th century French commentator.

Lord Rothschild (Rockefellers and Rothschilds’ relatives) in his book The Shadow of a Great Man quotes a letter sent from Davidson on June 24, 1814 to Nathan Rothschild, “As long as a house is like yours, and as long as you work together with your brothers, not a house in the world will be able to compete with you, to cause you harm or to take advantage of you, for together you can undertake and perform more than any house in the world.” The closeness of the Rothschild brothers is seen in a letter from Soloman (Salmon) Rothschild to his brother Nathan on Feb. 28, 1815, “We are like the mechanism of a watch: each part is essential.” (2) This closeness is further seen in that of the 18 marriages made by Mayer Amschel Rothschild’s grandchildren – 16 were contracted between first cousins.

“Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.” The Communist Manifesto. In the case of the Bolshevik revolution, Rothschilds/ Rockefellers’ Chase Bank owned the state. In the US, the FED owners “own” the state.

Rothschilds’ favorite saying who along with the Rockefellers are the major Illuminati Banking Dynasties: “Who controls the issuance of money controls the government!”

Nathan Rothschild said (1777-1836): “I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire and I control the British money supply.”

Rockefeller is reported to have said: “Competition is a sin”. “Own nothing. Control everything”. Because he wants to centralize control of everything and enslave us all, i.e. the modern Nimrod or Pharaoh.

The Rothschild were behind the colonization and occupations of India and the Rothschild owned British Petroleum was granted unlimited rights to all offshore Indian oil, which is still valid till this day.

“Give me the control of the credit of a nation, and I care not who makes the laws.” The famous boastful statement of Nathaniel Meyer Rothschild, speaking to a group of international bankers, 1912: “The few who could understand the system (cheque, money, credits) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.” The boastful statement by Rothschild Bros. of London.

These people are the top masterminds and conspired for the creation of illegal FEDERAL RESERVE BANK in 1913: Theodore Roosevelt, Paul Warburg – Representative Of Rothschild, Woodrow Wilson – U.S. President Signed FED Into Act, Nelson W. Aldrich – Representative Of Rockefeller, Benjamin Strong – Representative Of Rockefeller, Frank A. Vanderlip – Representative Of Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller – Rockefeller Himself, Henry Davison – Representative Of J. P. Morgan, Charles Norton – Representative Of J. P. Morgan.

In the last century, members of the British Fabian Society dynastic banking families in the City of London financed the Communist takeover of Russia. Trotsky in his biography refers to some of the loans from these British financiers going back as far as 1907. By 1917 the major subsidies and funding for the Bolshevik Revolution were co-ordinated and arranged by Sir George Buchanan and Lord Alfred Milner. [no doubt using money from Cecil Rhodes' South African gold and diamond legacy - Ed] The Communist system in Russia was a “British experiment” designed ultimately to become the Fabian Socialist model for the British takeover of the World through the UN and EU. The British plan to takeover the World and bring in a “New World Order” began with the teachings of John Ruskin and Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University. Rhodes in one of his wills in 1877 left his vast fortune to Lord Nathan Rothschild as trustee to set up the Rhodes Scholarship Program at Oxford to indoctrinate promising young graduates for the purpose, and also establish a secret society [Royal Institute of International Affairs RIIA, which branched into the Round Table, the Bilderbergers, the CFR, the Trilateral, etc -- Ed] for leading business and banking leaders around the World who would work for the City to bring in their Socialist World government.

Rothschild appointed Lord Alfred Milner to implement the plan.

Benjamin Freedman (Friedman) said this in 1961, Washington (he was a millionaire insider in international Zionist organizations, friend to 4 US presidents, and was also part of the 117-man strong Zionist delegation at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 where Germany was forced into bankruptcy to the Zionist BankLords and social chaos): “Two years into WW1, Germany, which was then winning the war, offered Britain and France a negotiated peace deal, but German Zionist groups seeing the opportunity made a deal with Britain to get the United States into the war if Britain promised to give the Zionists Palestine.”

In other words, they made this deal: “We will get the United States into this war as your ally. The price you must pay us is Palestine after you have won the war and defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey.” They made that promise, in October of 1916. And shortly after that — I don’t know how many here remember it — the United States, which was almost totally pro-German because the newspapers and mass communications media here were controlled by the Zionist bankers who owned the major commercial banks and the 12 Federal Reserve Banks (the original Stockholders of the Federal Reserve Banks in 1913 were the Rockefeller’ s, JP Morgan, Rothschild’s, Lazard Freres, Schoellkopf, Kuhn-Loeb, Warburgs, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, all with roots in Germany’s Zionists like the British Royal family, J.P. Morgan, Carnegie, Bush, Rumsfeld, Clintons, the Nazis that were brought into the CIA, etc. http://land.netonecom.net/tlp/ref/federal_reserve.shtml ) and they were pro-German because they wanted to use Germany to destroy the Czar of Russia and let the Communists whom they funded take over. The German Zionist bankers — Rothschilds, Rockefeller, Kuhn Loeb and the other big banking firms in the United States refused to finance France or England to the extent of one dollar. They stood aside and they said: “As long as France and England are tied up with Russia, not one cent!” They poured money into Germany, fighting with Germany against Russia, to lick the Czarist regime. The newspapers had been all pro-German, where they’d been telling the people of the difficulties that Germany was having fighting Great Britain commercially and in other respects, then after making the deal with the British for Palestine, all of a sudden the Germans were no good. They were villains. They were Huns. They were shooting Red Cross nurses. They were cutting off babies’ hands. And they were no good. The Zionists in London sent cables to the US, to Justice Brandeis: “Go to work on President Wilson. We’re getting from England what we want. Now you go to work, and you go to work on President Wilson and get the US into the war.” And that did happen. Shortly after President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany.

The power of the Rothschild family was evidenced on 24 Sept 2002 when a helicopter touched down on the lawn of Waddedson Manor, their ancestral home in Buckinghamshire, England. Out of the helicopter strode Warren Buffet, – touted as the second richest man in the World but really a lower ranking player- and Arnold Schwarzenegger (the gropinator), at that time a candidate for the Governorship of California. Also in attendance at this two day meeting of the World’s most powerful businessmen and financiers hosted by Jacob Rothschild were James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank and Nicky Oppenheimer, chairman of De Beers. Arnold went on to secure the governorship of one of the biggest economies on the planet a year later. That he was initiated into the ruling class in the Rothschilds’ English country manor suggests that the centre of gravity of the three hundred trillion dollar cartel is in the U.K. and Europe not the U.S.

A recent article in the London Financial Times indicates why it is impossible to gain an accurate estimate of the wealth of the trillionaire bankers. Discussing the sale of Evelyn Rothschild’s stake in Rothschild Continuation Holdings, it states: …[this] requires agreement on the valuation of privately held assets whose value has never been tested in a public market. Most of these assets are held in a complex network of tax-efficient structures around the World.

Queen Elizabeth II’s shareholdings remain hidden behind Bank of England Nominee accounts. The Guardian newspaper reported in May 2002 … “the reason for the wild variations in valuations of her private wealth can be pinned on the secrecy over her portfolio of share investments. This is because her subjects have no way of knowing through a public register of interests where she, as their head of state, chooses to invest her money. Unlike the members of the Commons and now the Lords, the Queen does not have to annually declare her interests and as a result her subjects cannot question her or know about potential conflicts of interests…” In fact, the Queen even has an extra mechanism to ensure that her investments remain secret – a nominee company called the Bank of England Nominees. It has been available for decades to the entire World’s current heads of state to allow them anonymity when buying shares. Therefore, when a company publishes a share register and the Bank of England Nominees is listed, it is not possible to gauge whether the Queen, President Bush or even Saddam Hussein is the true shareholder.

By this method, the trillionaire masters of the universe remain hidden whilst Forbes magazine poses lower ranking billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as the richest men in the World. Retired management consultant Gaylon Ross Sr, author of Who’s Who of the Global Elite, has been tipped from a private source that the combined wealth of the Rockefeller family in 1998 was approx (US) $11 trillion and the Rothschilds (U.S.) $100 trillion. However something of an insider’s knowledge of the hidden wealth of the elite is contained in the article, “Will the Dollar and America Fall Down on August 19?..” on page 1 of the 12th July 2001 issue of Russian newspaper Pravda. The newspaper interviewed Tatyana Koryagina, a senior research fellow in the Institute of Macroeconomic Researches subordinated to the Russian Ministry of Economic Development (Minekonom) on the subject of a recent conference concerning the fate of the U.S. economy:

Koryagina: The known history of civilization is merely the visible part of the iceberg. There is a shadow economy, shadow politics and also a shadow history, known to conspirologists. There are [unseen] forces acting in the World, unstoppable for [most powerful] countries and even continents.

Ashley Mote (EU): “Mr President, I wish to draw your attention to the Global Security Fund, set up in the early 1990s under the auspices of Jacob Rothschild. This is a Brussels-based fund and it is no ordinary fund: it does not trade, it is not listed and it has a totally different purpose. It is being used for geopolitical engineering purposes, apparently under the guidance of the intelligence services.” “I have previously asked about the alleged involvement of the European Union’s own intelligence resources in the management of slush funds in offshore accounts, and I still await a reply. To that question I now add another: what are the European Union’s connections to the Global Security Fund and what relationship does it have with European Union institutions? “Recently, Ashley Mote of the European Union (EU) asked this volatile question in a public EU meeting, a question never answered, as Mr. Mote, merely by asking this question, was immediately scratched from the White House Christmas card list and placed on its top ten hit list. The Illuminati’s cash cow, grazing freely on the World wide pasture of greenbacks, isn’t called “Elsie” but instead is called the Global Security Fund, a name actually meaning in the secret cult’s language Global Terrorist Fund. In simple terms, it’s a gigantic illegal trust fund, estimated by undercover overseas financial investigators at 65 trillion dollars, set-up for “Illuminati rainy days” and established when it is desperately needed in a pinch for bribery, assassinations and sponsoring World wide terrorist activities to divert attention from their banking mafia. Although the fund is cloaked in secrecy and made possible by the Western civilization’ s Federal Reserve banking system, investigators trying to pry into the Illuminati’s secret treasure trove have uncovered some interesting facts.

The Quiet Coup

2010-01-08T11:38:00.001-08:00

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

by Simon Johnson
The Quiet Coup
May 2009

ONE THING YOU learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your “clients” come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You’re never at the top of anyone’s dance card.

The reason, of course, is that the IMF specializes in telling its clients what they don’t want to hear. I should know; I pressed painful changes on many foreign officials during my time there as chief economist in 2007 and 2008. And I felt the effects of IMF pressure, at least indirectly, when I worked with governments in Eastern Europe as they struggled after 1989, and with the private sector in Asia and Latin America during the crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over that time, from every vantage point, I saw firsthand the steady flow of officials—from Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and elsewhere—trudging to the fund when circumstances were dire and all else had failed.

Every crisis is different, of course. Ukraine faced hyperinflation in 1994; Russia desperately needed help when its short-term-debt rollover scheme exploded in the summer of 1998; the Indonesian rupiah plunged in 1997, nearly leveling the corporate economy; that same year, South Korea’s 30-year economic miracle ground to a halt when foreign banks suddenly refused to extend new credit.

But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work. Almost always, countries in crisis need to learn to live within their means after a period of excess—exports must be increased, and imports cut—and the goal is to do this without the most horrible of recessions. Naturally, the fund’s economists spend time figuring out the policies—budget, money supply, and the like—that make sense in this context. Yet the economic solution is seldom very hard to work out.

No, the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis.

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

In Russia, for instance, the private sector is now in serious trouble because, over the past five years or so, it borrowed at least $490 billion from global banks and investors on the assumption that the country’s energy sector could support a permanent increase in consumption throughout the economy. As Russia’s oligarchs spent this capital, acquiring other companies and embarking on ambitious investment plans that generated jobs, their importance to the political elite increased. Growing political support meant better access to lucrative contracts, tax breaks, and subsidies. And foreign investors could not have been more pleased; all other things being equal, they prefer to lend money to people who have the implicit backing of their national governments, even if that backing gives off the faint whiff of corruption.

But inevitably, emerging-market oligarchs get carried away; they waste money and build massive business empires on a mountain of debt. Local banks, sometimes pressured by the government, become too willing to extend credit to the elite and to those who depend on them. Overborrowing always ends badly, whether for an individual, a company, or a country. Sooner or later, credit conditions become tighter and no one will lend you money on anything close to affordable terms.

The downward spiral that follows is remarkably steep. Enormous companies teeter on the brink of default, and the local banks that have lent to them collapse. Yesterday’s “public-private partnerships” are relabeled “crony capitalism.” With credit unavailable, economic paralysis ensues, and conditions just get worse and worse. The government is forced to draw down its foreign-currency reserves to pay for imports, service debt, and cover private losses. But these reserves will eventually run out. If the country cannot right itself before that happens, it will default on its sovereign debt and become an economic pariah. The government, in its race to stop the bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national champions—now hemorrhaging cash—and usually restructure a banking system that’s gone badly out of balance. It will, in other words, need to squeeze at least some of its oligarchs.

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.

Eventually, as the oligarchs in Putin’s Russia now realize, some within the elite have to lose out before recovery can begin. It’s a game of musical chairs: there just aren’t enough currency reserves to take care of everyone, and the government cannot afford to take over private-sector debt completely.

So the IMF staff looks into the eyes of the minister of finance and decides whether the government is serious yet. The fund will give even a country like Russia a loan eventually, but first it wants to make sure Prime Minister Putin is ready, willing, and able to be tough on some of his friends. If he is not ready to throw former pals to the wolves, the fund can wait. And when he is ready, the fund is happy to make helpful suggestions—particularly with regard to wresting control of the banking system from the hands of the most incompetent and avaricious “entrepreneurs.”

Of course, Putin’s ex-friends will fight back. They’ll mobilize allies, work the system, and put pressure on other parts of the government to get additional subsidies. In extreme cases, they’ll even try subversion—including calling up their contacts in the American foreign-policy establishment, as the Ukrainians did with some success in the late 1990s.

Many IMF programs “go off track” (a euphemism) precisely because the government can’t stay tough on erstwhile cronies, and the consequences are massive inflation or other disasters. A program “goes back on track” once the government prevails or powerful oligarchs sort out among themselves who will govern—and thus win or lose—under the IMF-supported plan. The real fight in Thailand and Indonesia in 1997 was about which powerful families would lose their banks. In Thailand, it was handled relatively smoothly. In Indonesia, it led to the fall of President Suharto and economic chaos.

From long years of experience, the IMF staff knows its program will succeed—stabilizing the economy and enabling growth—only if at least some of the powerful oligarchs who did so much to create the underlying problems take a hit. This is the problem of all emerging markets.

Becoming a Banana Republic
In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

Top investment bankers and government officials like to lay the blame for the current crisis on the lowering of U.S. interest rates after the dotcom bust or, even better—in a “buck stops somewhere else” sort of way—on the flow of savings out of China. Some on the right like to complain about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or even about longer-standing efforts to promote broader homeownership. And, of course, it is axiomatic to everyone that the regulators responsible for “safety and soundness” were fast asleep at the wheel.

But these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside.

The financial industry has not always enjoyed such favored treatment. But for the past 25 years or so, finance has boomed, becoming ever more powerful. The boom began with the Reagan years, and it only gained strength with the deregulatory policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Several other factors helped fuel the financial industry’s ascent. Paul Volcker’s monetary policy in the 1980s, and the increased volatility in interest rates that accompanied it, made bond trading much more lucrative. The invention of securitization, interest-rate swaps, and credit-default swaps greatly increased the volume of transactions that bankers could make money on. And an aging and increasingly wealthy population invested more and more money in securities, helped by the invention of the IRA and the 401(k) plan. Together, these developments vastly increased the profit opportunities in financial services.

Click the chart above for a larger view

Not surprisingly, Wall Street ran with these opportunities. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight—a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent.

The Wall Street–Washington Corridor
Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world’s most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson’s predecessor, left to become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond markets.

These personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the ties between Washington and Wall Street. It has become something of a tradition for Goldman Sachs employees to go into public service after they leave the firm. The flow of Goldman alumni—including Jon Corzine, now the governor of New Jersey, along with Rubin and Paulson—not only placed people with Wall Street’s worldview in the halls of power; it also helped create an image of Goldman (inside the Beltway, at least) as an institution that was itself almost a form of public service.

Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the world go round. A civil servant from Washington invited into their conference rooms, even if just for a meeting, could be forgiven for falling under their sway. Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.

A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets are well known. Yet Greenspan was hardly alone. This is what Ben Bernanke, the man who succeeded him, said in 2006: “The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly sophisticated. … Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks.”

Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t. AIG’s Financial Products division, for instance, made $2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005, largely by selling underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood securities. Often described as “picking up nickels in front of a steamroller,” this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fall, AIG had outstanding insurance on more than $400 billion in securities. To date, the U.S. government, in an effort to rescue the company, has committed about $180 billion in investments and loans to cover losses that AIG’s sophisticated risk modeling had said were virtually impossible.

Wall Street’s seductive power extended even (or especially) to finance and economics professors, historically confined to the cramped offices of universities and the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance became more and more essential to practical finance, professors increasingly took positions as consultants or partners at financial institutions. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, Nobel laureates both, were perhaps the most famous; they took board seats at the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, before the fund famously flamed out at the end of the decade. But many others beat similar paths. This migration gave the stamp of academic legitimacy (and the intimidating aura of intellectual rigor) to the burgeoning world of high finance.

As more and more of the rich made their money in finance, the cult of finance seeped into the culture at large. Works like Barbarians at the Gate, Wall Street, and Bonfire of the Vanities—all intended as cautionary tales—served only to increase Wall Street’s mystique. Michael Lewis noted in Portfolio last year that when he wrote Liar’s Poker, an insider’s account of the financial industry, in 1989, he had hoped the book might provoke outrage at Wall Street’s hubris and excess. Instead, he found himself “knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share. … They’d read my book as a how-to manual.” Even Wall Street’s criminals, like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, became larger than life. In a society that celebrates the idea of making money, it was easy to infer that the interests of the financial sector were the same as the interests of the country—and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington. Faith in free financial markets grew into conventional wisdom—trumpeted on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and on the floor of Congress.

From this confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade, a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight, astonishing:

• insistence on free movement of capital across borders;

• the repeal of Depression-era regulations separating commercial and investment banking;

• a congressional ban on the regulation of credit-default swaps;

• major increases in the amount of leverage allowed to investment banks;

• a light (dare I say invisible?) hand at the Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory enforcement;

• an international agreement to allow banks to measure their own riskiness;

• and an intentional failure to update regulations so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial innovation.

The mood that accompanied these measures in Washington seemed to swing between nonchalance and outright celebration: finance unleashed, it was thought, would continue to propel the economy to greater heights.

America’s Oligarchs and the Financial Crisis
The oligarchy and the government policies that aided it did not alone cause the financial crisis that exploded last year. Many other factors contributed, including excessive borrowing by households and lax lending standards out on the fringes of the financial world. But major commercial and investment banks—and the hedge funds that ran alongside them—were the big beneficiaries of the twin housing and equity-market bubbles of this decade, their profits fed by an ever-increasing volume of transactions founded on a relatively small base of actual physical assets. Each time a loan was sold, packaged, securitized, and resold, banks took their transaction fees, and the hedge funds buying those securities reaped ever-larger fees as their holdings grew.

Because everyone was getting richer, and the health of the national economy depended so heavily on growth in real estate and finance, no one in Washington had any incentive to question what was going on. Instead, Fed Chairman Greenspan and President Bush insisted metronomically that the economy was fundamentally sound and that the tremendous growth in complex securities and credit-default swaps was evidence of a healthy economy where risk was distributed safely.

In the summer of 2007, signs of strain started appearing. The boom had produced so much debt that even a small economic stumble could cause major problems, and rising delinquencies in subprime mortgages proved the stumbling block. Ever since, the financial sector and the federal government have been behaving exactly the way one would expect them to, in light of past emerging-market crises.

By now, the princes of the financial world have of course been stripped naked as leaders and strategists—at least in the eyes of most Americans. But as the months have rolled by, financial elites have continued to assume that their position as the economy’s favored children is safe, despite the wreckage they have caused.

Stanley O’Neal, the CEO of Merrill Lynch, pushed his firm heavily into the mortgage-backed-securities market at its peak in 2005 and 2006; in October 2007, he acknowledged, “The bottom line is, we—I—got it wrong by being overexposed to subprime, and we suffered as a result of impaired liquidity in that market. No one is more disappointed than I am in that result.” O’Neal took home a $14 million bonus in 2006; in 2007, he walked away from Merrill with a severance package worth $162 million, although it is presumably worth much less today.

In October, John Thain, Merrill Lynch’s final CEO, reportedly lobbied his board of directors for a bonus of $30 million or more, eventually reducing his demand to $10 million in December; he withdrew the request, under a firestorm of protest, only after it was leaked to The Wall Street Journal. Merrill Lynch as a whole was no better: it moved its bonus payments, $4 billion in total, forward to December, presumably to avoid the possibility that they would be reduced by Bank of America, which would own Merrill beginning on January 1. Wall Street paid out $18 billion in year-end bonuses last year to its New York City employees, after the government disbursed $243 billion in emergency assistance to the financial sector.

In a financial panic, the government must respond with both speed and overwhelming force. The root problem is uncertainty—in our case, uncertainty about whether the major banks have sufficient assets to cover their liabilities. Half measures combined with wishful thinking and a wait-and-see attitude cannot overcome this uncertainty. And the longer the response takes, the longer the uncertainty will stymie the flow of credit, sap consumer confidence, and cripple the economy—ultimately making the problem much harder to solve. Yet the principal characteristics of the government’s response to the financial crisis have been delay, lack of transparency, and an unwillingness to upset the financial sector.

The response so far is perhaps best described as “policy by deal”: when a major financial institution gets into trouble, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve engineer a bailout over the weekend and announce on Monday that everything is fine. In March 2008, Bear Stearns was sold to JP Morgan Chase in what looked to many like a gift to JP Morgan. (Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s CEO, sits on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which, along with the Treasury Department, brokered the deal.) In September, we saw the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, the first bailout of AIG, and the takeover and immediate sale of Washington Mutual to JP Morgan—all of which were brokered by the government. In October, nine large banks were recapitalized on the same day behind closed doors in Washington. This, in turn, was followed by additional bailouts for Citigroup, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup (again), and AIG (again).

Some of these deals may have been reasonable responses to the immediate situation. But it was never clear (and still isn’t) what combination of interests was being served, and how. Treasury and the Fed did not act according to any publicly articulated principles, but just worked out a transaction and claimed it was the best that could be done under the circumstances. This was late-night, backroom dealing, pure and simple.

Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here. In September 2008, Henry Paulson asked Congress for $700 billion to buy toxic assets from banks, with no strings attached and no judicial review of his purchase decisions. Many observers suspected that the purpose was to overpay for those assets and thereby take the problem off the banks’ hands—indeed, that is the only way that buying toxic assets would have helped anything. Perhaps because there was no way to make such a blatant subsidy politically acceptable, that plan was shelved.

Instead, the money was used to recapitalize banks, buying shares in them on terms that were grossly favorable to the banks themselves. As the crisis has deepened and financial institutions have needed more help, the government has gotten more and more creative in figuring out ways to provide banks with subsidies that are too complex for the general public to understand. The first AIG bailout, which was on relatively good terms for the taxpayer, was supplemented by three further bailouts whose terms were more AIG-friendly. The second Citigroup bailout and the Bank of America bailout included complex asset guarantees that provided the banks with insurance at below-market rates. The third Citigroup bailout, in late February, converted government-owned preferred stock to common stock at a price significantly higher than the market price—a subsidy that probably even most Wall Street Journal readers would miss on first reading. And the convertible preferred shares that the Treasury will buy under the new Financial Stability Plan give the conversion option (and thus the upside) to the banks, not the government.

This latest plan—which is likely to provide cheap loans to hedge funds and others so that they can buy distressed bank assets at relatively high prices—has been heavily influenced by the financial sector, and Treasury has made no secret of that. As Neel Kashkari, a senior Treasury official under both Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner (and a Goldman alum) told Congress in March, “We had received inbound unsolicited proposals from people in the private sector saying, ‘We have capital on the sidelines; we want to go after [distressed bank] assets.’” And the plan lets them do just that: “By marrying government capital—taxpayer capital—with private-sector capital and providing financing, you can enable those investors to then go after those assets at a price that makes sense for the investors and at a price that makes sense for the banks.” Kashkari didn’t mention anything about what makes sense for the third group involved: the taxpayers.

Even leaving aside fairness to taxpayers, the government’s velvet-glove approach with the banks is deeply troubling, for one simple reason: it is inadequate to change the behavior of a financial sector accustomed to doing business on its own terms, at a time when that behavior must change. As an unnamed senior bank official said to The New York Times last fall, “It doesn’t matter how much Hank Paulson gives us, no one is going to lend a nickel until the economy turns.” But there’s the rub: the economy can’t recover until the banks are healthy and willing to lend.

The Way Out
Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.

Big banks, it seems, have only gained political strength since the crisis began. And this is not surprising. With the financial system so fragile, the damage that a major bank failure could cause—Lehman was small relative to Citigroup or Bank of America—is much greater than it would be during ordinary times. The banks have been exploiting this fear as they wring favorable deals out of Washington. Bank of America obtained its second bailout package (in January) after warning the government that it might not be able to go through with the acquisition of Merrill Lynch, a prospect that Treasury did not want to consider.

The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.

In some ways, of course, the government has already taken control of the banking system. It has essentially guaranteed the liabilities of the biggest banks, and it is their only plausible source of capital today. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has taken on a major role in providing credit to the economy—the function that the private banking sector is supposed to be performing, but isn’t. Yet there are limits to what the Fed can do on its own; consumers and businesses are still dependent on banks that lack the balance sheets and the incentives to make the loans the economy needs, and the government has no real control over who runs the banks, or over what they do.

At the root of the banks’ problems are the large losses they have undoubtedly taken on their securities and loan portfolios. But they don’t want to recognize the full extent of their losses, because that would likely expose them as insolvent. So they talk down the problem, and ask for handouts that aren’t enough to make them healthy (again, they can’t reveal the size of the handouts that would be necessary for that), but are enough to keep them upright a little longer. This behavior is corrosive: unhealthy banks either don’t lend (hoarding money to shore up reserves) or they make desperate gambles on high-risk loans and investments that could pay off big, but probably won’t pay off at all. In either case, the economy suffers further, and as it does, bank assets themselves continue to deteriorate—creating a highly destructive vicious cycle.

To break this cycle, the government must force the banks to acknowledge the scale of their problems. As the IMF understands (and as the U.S. government itself has insisted to multiple emerging-market countries in the past), the most direct way to do this is nationalization. Instead, Treasury is trying to negotiate bailouts bank by bank, and behaving as if the banks hold all the cards—contorting the terms of each deal to minimize government ownership while forswearing government influence over bank strategy or operations. Under these conditions, cleaning up bank balance sheets is impossible.

Nationalization would not imply permanent state ownership. The IMF’s advice would be, essentially: scale up the standard Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation process. An FDIC “intervention” is basically a government-managed bankruptcy procedure for banks. It would allow the government to wipe out bank shareholders, replace failed management, clean up the balance sheets, and then sell the banks back to the private sector. The main advantage is immediate recognition of the problem so that it can be solved before it grows worse.

The government needs to inspect the balance sheets and identify the banks that cannot survive a severe recession. These banks should face a choice: write down your assets to their true value and raise private capital within 30 days, or be taken over by the government. The government would write down the toxic assets of banks taken into receivership—recognizing reality—and transfer those assets to a separate government entity, which would attempt to salvage whatever value is possible for the taxpayer (as the Resolution Trust Corporation did after the savings-and-loan debacle of the 1980s). The rump banks—cleansed and able to lend safely, and hence trusted again by other lenders and investors—could then be sold off.

Cleaning up the megabanks will be complex. And it will be expensive for the taxpayer; according to the latest IMF numbers, the cleanup of the banking system would probably cost close to $1.5 trillion (or 10 percent of our GDP) in the long term. But only decisive government action—exposing the full extent of the financial rot and restoring some set of banks to publicly verifiable health—can cure the financial sector as a whole.

This may seem like strong medicine. But in fact, while necessary, it is insufficient. The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.

Oversize institutions disproportionately influence public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their power from being too big to fail. Nationalization and re-privatization would not change that; while the replacement of the bank executives who got us into this crisis would be just and sensible, ultimately, the swapping-out of one set of powerful managers for another would change only the names of the oligarchs.

Ideally, big banks should be sold in medium-size pieces, divided regionally or by type of business. Where this proves impractical—since we’ll want to sell the banks quickly—they could be sold whole, but with the requirement of being broken up within a short time. Banks that remain in private hands should also be subject to size limitations.

This may seem like a crude and arbitrary step, but it is the best way to limit the power of individual institutions in a sector that is essential to the economy as a whole. Of course, some people will complain about the “efficiency costs” of a more fragmented banking system, and these costs are real. But so are the costs when a bank that is too big to fail—a financial weapon of mass self-destruction—explodes. Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.

To ensure systematic bank breakup, and to prevent the eventual reemergence of dangerous behemoths, we also need to overhaul our antitrust legislation. Laws put in place more than 100 years ago to combat industrial monopolies were not designed to address the problem we now face. The problem in the financial sector today is not that a given firm might have enough market share to influence prices; it is that one firm or a small set of interconnected firms, by failing, can bring down the economy. The Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus evokes FDR, but what we need to imitate here is Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting.

Caps on executive compensation, while redolent of populism, might help restore the political balance of power and deter the emergence of a new oligarchy. Wall Street’s main attraction—to the people who work there and to the government officials who were only too happy to bask in its reflected glory—has been the astounding amount of money that could be made. Limiting that money would reduce the allure of the financial sector and make it more like any other industry.

Still, outright pay caps are clumsy, especially in the long run. And most money is now made in largely unregulated private hedge funds and private-equity firms, so lowering pay would be complicated. Regulation and taxation should be part of the solution. Over time, though, the largest part may involve more transparency and competition, which would bring financial-industry fees down. To those who say this would drive financial activities to other countries, we can now safely say: fine.

Two Paths
To paraphrase Joseph Schumpeter, the early-20th-century economist, everyone has elites; the important thing is to change them from time to time. If the U.S. were just another country, coming to the IMF with hat in hand, I might be fairly optimistic about its future. Most of the emerging-market crises that I’ve mentioned ended relatively quickly, and gave way, for the most part, to relatively strong recoveries. But this, alas, brings us to the limit of the analogy between the U.S. and emerging markets.

Emerging-market countries have only a precarious hold on wealth, and are weaklings globally. When they get into trouble, they quite literally run out of money—or at least out of foreign currency, without which they cannot survive. They must make difficult decisions; ultimately, aggressive action is baked into the cake. But the U.S., of course, is the world’s most powerful nation, rich beyond measure, and blessed with the exorbitant privilege of paying its foreign debts in its own currency, which it can print. As a result, it could very well stumble along for years—as Japan did during its lost decade—never summoning the courage to do what it needs to do, and never really recovering. A clean break with the past—involving the takeover and cleanup of major banks—hardly looks like a sure thing right now. Certainly no one at the IMF can force it.

In my view, the U.S. faces two plausible scenarios. The first involves complicated bank-by-bank deals and a continual drumbeat of (repeated) bailouts, like the ones we saw in February with Citigroup and AIG. The administration will try to muddle through, and confusion will reign.

Boris Fyodorov, the late finance minister of Russia, struggled for much of the past 20 years against oligarchs, corruption, and abuse of authority in all its forms. He liked to say that confusion and chaos were very much in the interests of the powerful—letting them take things, legally and illegally, with impunity. When inflation is high, who can say what a piece of property is really worth? When the credit system is supported by byzantine government arrangements and backroom deals, how do you know that you aren’t being fleeced?

Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can’t seem to get into gear.

The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we’ll be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and—because eastern Europe’s banks are mostly owned by western European banks—justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration’s current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy “stress scenario” that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks’ balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.

Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect of a national and global collapse, minds may become more concentrated.

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.

Obama Science Advisor Called For “Planetary Regime” To Enforce Totalitarian Population Control Measures

2009-12-27T09:44:00.000-08:00

Go to URL below to see screenshots of pages from the book!

http://www.whale.to/b/obama9.html

Obama Science Advisor Called For “Planetary Regime” To Enforce Totalitarian Population Control Measures
In 1977 book, John Holdren advocated forced abortions, mass sterilization through food and water supply and mandatory bodily implants to prevent pregnancies

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, July 11, 2009

President Obama’s top science and technology advisor John P. Holdren co-authored a 1977 book in which he advocated the formation of a “planetary regime” that would use a “global police force” to enforce totalitarian measures of population control, including forced abortions, mass sterilization programs conducted via the food and water supply, as well as mandatory bodily implants that would prevent couples from having children.

The concepts outlined in Holdren’s 1977 book Ecoscience, which he co-authored with close colleagues Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, were so shocking that a February 2009 Front Page Magazine story on the subject was largely dismissed as being outlandish because people couldn’t bring themselves to believe that it could be true.

It was only when another Internet blog obtained the book and posted screenshots that the awful truth about what Holdren had actually committed to paper actually began to sink in.

This issue is more prescient than ever because Holdren and his colleagues are now at the forefront of efforts to combat “climate change” through similarly insane programs focused around geoengineering the planet. As we reported in April, Holdren recently advocated “Large-scale geoengineering projects designed to cool the Earth,” such as “shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays,” which many have pointed out is already occurring via chemtrails.

Ecoscience discusses a number of ways in which the global population could be reduced to combat what the authors see as mankind’s greatest threat – overpopulation. In each case, the proposals are couched in sober academic rhetoric, but the horrifying foundation of what Holdren and his co-authors are advocating is clear. These proposals include;

- Forcibly and unknowingly sterilizing the entire population by adding infertility drugs to the nation’s water and food supply.

- Legalizing “compulsory abortions,” ie forced abortions carried out against the will of the pregnant women, as is common place in Communist China where women who have already had one child and refuse to abort the second are kidnapped off the street by the authorities before a procedure is carried out to forcibly abort the baby.

- Babies who are born out of wedlock or to teenage mothers to be forcibly taken away from their mother by the government and put up for adoption. Another proposed measure would force single mothers to demonstrate to the government that they can care for the child, effectively introducing licensing to have children.

- Implementing a system of “involuntary birth control,” where both men and women would be mandated to have an infertility device implanted into their body at puberty and only have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.

- Permanently sterilizing people who the authorities deem have already had too many children or who have contributed to “general social deterioration”.

- Formally passing a law that criminalizes having more than two children, similar to the one child policy in Communist China.

- This would all be overseen by a transnational and centralized “planetary regime” that would utilize a “global police force” to enforce the measures outlined above. The “planetary regime” would also have the power to determine population levels for every country in the world.

The quotes from the book are included below. We also include comments by the author of the blog who provided the screenshots of the relevant passages. Screenshots of the relevant pages and the quotes in their full context are provided at the end of the excerpts. The quotes from the book appear as text indents and in bold. The quotes from the author of the blog are italicized.

Page 837: Compulsory abortions would be legal

“Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

As noted in the FrontPage article cited above, Holdren “hides behind the passive voice” in this passage, by saying “it has been concluded.” Really? By whom? By the authors of the book, that’s whom. What Holdren’s really saying here is, “I have determined that there’s nothing unconstitutional about laws which would force women to abort their babies.” And as we will see later, although Holdren bemoans the fact that most people think there’s no need for such laws, he and his co-authors believe that the population crisis is so severe that the time has indeed come for “compulsory population-control laws.” In fact, they spend the entire book arguing that “the population crisis” has already become “sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

Page 786: Single mothers should have their babies taken away by the government; or they could be forced to have abortions

“One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.”

Holdren and his co-authors once again speculate about unbelievably draconian solutions to what they feel is an overpopulation crisis. But what’s especially disturbing is not that Holdren has merely made these proposals — wrenching babies from their mothers’ arms and giving them away; compelling single mothers to prove in court that they would be good parents; and forcing women to have abortions, whether they wanted to or not — but that he does so in such a dispassionate, bureaucratic way. Don’t be fooled by the innocuous and “level-headed” tone he takes: the proposals are nightmarish, however euphemistically they are expressed.

Holdren seems to have no grasp of the emotional bond between mother and child, and the soul-crushing trauma many women have felt throughout history when their babies were taken away from them involuntarily.

This kind of clinical, almost robotic discussion of laws that would affect millions of people at the most personal possible level is deeply unsettling, and the kind of attitude that gives scientists a bad name. I’m reminded of the phrase “banality of evil.”

Not that it matters, but I myself am “pro-choice” — i.e. I think that abortion should not be illegal. But that doesn’t mean I’m pro-abortion — I don’t particularly like abortions, but I do believe women should be allowed the choice to have them. But John Holdren here proposes to take away that choice — to force women to have abortions. One doesn’t need to be a “pro-life” activist to see the horror of this proposal — people on all sides of the political spectrum should be outraged. My objection to forced abortion is not so much to protect the embryo, but rather to protect the mother from undergoing a medical procedure against her will. And not just any medical procedure, but one which she herself (regardless of my views) may find particularly immoral or traumatic.

There’s a bumper sticker that’s popular in liberal areas which says: “Against abortion? Then don’t have one.” Well, John Holdren wants to MAKE you have one, whether you’re against it or not.

Page 787-8: Mass sterilization of humans though drugs in the water supply is OK as long as it doesn’t harm livestock

“Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.”

OK, John, now you’re really starting to scare me. Putting sterilants in the water supply? While you correctly surmise that this suggestion “seems to horrify people more than most proposals,” you apparently are not among those people it horrifies. Because in your extensive list of problems with this possible scheme, there is no mention whatsoever of any ethical concerns or moral issues. In your view, the only impediment to involuntary mass sterilization of the population is that it ought to affect everyone equally and not have any unintended side effects or hurt animals. But hey, if we could sterilize all the humans safely without hurting the livestock, that’d be peachy! The fact that Holdren has no moral qualms about such a deeply invasive and unethical scheme (aside from the fact that it would be difficult to implement) is extremely unsettling and in a sane world all by itself would disqualify him from holding a position of power in the government.

Page 786-7: The government could control women’s reproduction by either sterilizing them or implanting mandatory long-term birth control

Involuntary fertility control

“A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.

The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”

Note well the phrase “with official permission” in the above quote. John Holdren envisions a society in which the government implants a long-term sterilization capsule in all girls as soon as they reach puberty, who then must apply for official permission to temporarily remove the capsule and be allowed to get pregnant at some later date. Alternately, he wants a society that sterilizes all women once they have two children. Do you want to live in such a society? Because I sure as hell don’t.

Page 838: The kind of people who cause “social deterioration” can be compelled to not have children

“If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.“

To me, this is in some ways the most horrifying sentence in the entire book — and it had a lot of competition. Because here Holdren reveals that moral judgments would be involved in determining who gets sterilized or is forced to abort their babies. Proper, decent people will be left alone — but those who “contribute to social deterioration” could be “forced to exercise reproductive responsibility” which could only mean one thing — compulsory abortion or involuntary sterilization. What other alternative would there be to “force” people to not have children? Will government monitors be stationed in irresponsible people’s bedrooms to ensure they use condoms? Will we bring back the chastity belt? No — the only way to “force” people to not become or remain pregnant is to sterilize them or make them have abortions.

But what manner of insanity is this? “Social deterioration”? Is Holdren seriously suggesting that “some” people contribute to social deterioration more than others, and thus should be sterilized or forced to have abortions, to prevent them from propagating their kind? Isn’t that eugenics, plain and simple? And isn’t eugenics universally condemned as a grotesquely evil practice?

We’ve already been down this road before. In one of the most shameful episodes in the history of U.S. jurisprudence, the Supreme Court ruled in the infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell case that the State of Virginia had had the right to sterilize a woman named Carrie Buck against her will, based solely on the (spurious) criteria that she was “feeble-minded” and promiscuous, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes concluding, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Nowadays, of course, we look back on that ruling in horror, as eugenics as a concept has been forever discredited. In fact, the United Nations now regards forced sterilization as a crime against humanity.

The italicized phrase at the end (”providing they are not denied equal protection”), which Holdren seems to think gets him off the eugenics hook, refers to the 14th Amendment (as you will see in the more complete version of this passage quoted below), meaning that the eugenics program wouldn’t be racially based or discriminatory — merely based on the whim and assessments of government bureaucrats deciding who and who is not an undesirable. If some civil servant in Holdren’s America determines that you are “contributing to social deterioration” by being promiscuous or pregnant or both, will government agents break down your door and and haul you off kicking and screaming to the abortion clinic? In fact, the Supreme Court case Skinner v. Oklahoma already determined that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment distinctly prohibits state-sanctioned sterilization being applied unequally to only certain types of people.

No no, you say, Holdren isn’t claiming that some kind of people contribute to social deterioration more than others; rather, he’s stating that anyone who overproduces children thereby contributes to social deterioration and needs to be stopped from having more. If so — how is that more palatable? It seems Holdren and his co-authors have not really thought this through, because what they are suggesting is a nightmarish totalitarian society. What does he envision: All women who commit the crime of having more than two children be dragged away by police to the government-run sterilization centers? Or — most disturbingly of all — perhaps Holdren has thought it through, and is perfectly OK with the kind of dystopian society he envisions in this book.

Sure, I could imagine a bunch of drunken guys sitting around shooting the breeze, expressing these kinds of forbidden thoughts; who among us hasn’t looked in exasperation at a harried mother buying candy bars and soda for her immense brood of unruly children and thought: Lady, why don’t you just get your tubes tied already? But it’s a different matter when the Science Czar of the United States suggests the very same thing officially in print. It ceases being a harmless fantasy, and suddenly the possibility looms that it could become government policy. And then it’s not so funny anymore.

Page 838: Nothing is wrong or illegal about the government dictating family size

“In today’s world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?”

Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?

Why?

I’ll tell you why, John. Because the the principle of habeas corpus upon which our nation rests automatically renders any compulsory abortion scheme to be unconstitutional, since it guarantees the freedom of each individual’s body from detention or interference, until that person has been convicted of a crime. Or are you seriously suggesting that, should bureaucrats decide that the country is overpopulated, the mere act of pregnancy be made a crime?

I am no legal scholar, but it seems that John Holdren is even less of a legal scholar than I am. Many of the bizarre schemes suggested in Ecoscience rely on seriously flawed legal reasoning. The book is not so much about science, but instead is about reinterpreting the Constitution to allow totalitarian population-control measures.

Page 942-3: A “Planetary Regime” should control the global economy and dictate by force the number of children allowed to be born

Toward a Planetary Regime

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.”

“The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

In case you were wondering exactly who would enforce these forced abortion and mass sterilization laws: Why, it’ll be the “Planetary Regime”! Of course! I should have seen that one coming.

The rest of this passage speaks for itself. Once you add up all the things the Planetary Regime (which has a nice science-fiction ring to it, doesn’t it?) will control, it becomes quite clear that it will have total power over the global economy, since according to Holdren this Planetary Regime will control “all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable” (which basically means all goods) as well as all food, and commerce on the oceans and any rivers “that discharge into the oceans” (i.e. 99% of all navigable rivers). What’s left? Not much.

Page 917: We will need to surrender national sovereignty to an armed international police force

“If this could be accomplished, security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force. Many people have recognized this as a goal, but the way to reach it remains obscure in a world where factionalism seems, if anything, to be increasing. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.”

The other shoe drops. So: We are expected to voluntarily surrender national sovereignty to an international organization (the “Planetary Regime,” presumably), which will be armed and have the ability to act as a police force. And we saw in the previous quote exactly which rules this armed international police force will be enforcing: compulsory birth control, and all economic activity.

It would be laughable if Holdren weren’t so deadly serious. Do you want this man to be in charge of science and technology in the United States? Because he already is in charge.

Page 749: Pro-family and pro-birth attitudes are caused by ethnic chauvinism

“Another related issue that seems to encourage a pronatalist attitude in many people is the question of the differential reproduction of social or ethnic groups. Many people seem to be possessed by fear that their group may be outbred by other groups. White Americans and South Africans are worried there will be too many blacks, and vice versa. The Jews in Israel are disturbed by the high birth rates of Israeli Arabs, Protestants are worried about Catholics, and lbos about Hausas. Obviously, if everyone tries to outbreed everyone else, the result will be catastrophe for all. This is another case of the “tragedy of the commons,” wherein the “commons” is the planet Earth. Fortunately, it appears that, at least in the DCs, virtually all groups are exercising reproductive restraint.”

This passage is not particularly noteworthy except for the inclusion of the odd phrase “pronatalist attitude,” which Holdren spends much of the book trying to undermine. And what exactly is a “pronatalist attitude”? Basically it means the urge to have children, and to like babies. If only we could suppress people’s natural urge to want children and start families, we could solve all our problems!

What’s disturbing to me is the incredibly patronizing and culturally imperialist attitude he displays here, basically acting like he has the right to tell every ethnic group in the world that they should allow themselves to go extinct or at least not increase their populations any more. How would we feel if Andaman Islanders showed up on the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C. and announced that there were simply too many Americans, and we therefore are commanded to stop breeding immediately? One imagines that the attitude of every ethnic group in the world to John Holdren’s proposal would be: Cram it, John. Stop telling us what to do.

Page 944: As of 1977, we are facing a global overpopulation catastrophe that must be resolved at all costs by the year 2000

“Humanity cannot afford to muddle through the rest of the twentieth century; the risks are too great, and the stakes are too high. This may be the last opportunity to choose our own and our descendants’ destiny. Failing to choose or making the wrong choices may lead to catastrophe. But it must never be forgotten that the right choices could lead to a much better world.”

This is the final paragraph of the book, which I include here only to show how embarrassingly inaccurate his “scientific” projections were. In 1977, Holdren thought we were teetering on the brink of global catastrophe, and he proposed implementing fascistic rules and laws to stave off the impending disaster. Luckily, we ignored his warnings, yet the world managed to survive anyway without the need to punish ourselves with the oppressive society which Holdren proposed. Yes, there still is overpopulation, but the problems it causes are not as morally repugnant as the “solutions” which John Holdren wanted us to adopt.

It is important to point out that John Holdren has never publicly distanced himself from any of these positions in the 32 years since the book was first published. Indeed, as you can see from the first picture that accompanies this article, Holdren prominently displays a copy of the book in his own personal library and is happy to be photographed with it.
It is also important to stress that these are not just the opinions of one man. As we have exhaustively documented, most recently in our essay, The Population Reduction Agenda For Dummies, the positions adopted in this book echo those advocated by numerous other prominent public figures in politics, academia and the environmental movement for decades.

Consider the fact that people like David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, and Bill Gates, three men who have integral ties to the eugenicist movement, recently met with other billionaire “philanthropists” in New York to discuss “how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population,” according to a London Times report.

Ted Turner has publicly advocated shocking population reduction programs that would cull the human population by a staggering 95%. He has also called for a Communist-style one child policy to be mandated by governments in the west.

Of course, Turner completely fails to follow his own rules on how everyone else should live their lives, having five children and owning no less than 2 million acres of land.

In the third world, Turner has contributed literally billions to population reduction, namely through United Nations programs, leading the way for the likes of Bill & Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet (Gates’ father has long been a leading board member of Planned Parenthood and a top eugenicist).

The notion that these elitists merely want to slow population growth in order to improve health is a complete misnomer. Slowing the growth of the world’s population while also improving its health are two irreconcilable concepts to the elite. Stabilizing world population is a natural byproduct of higher living standards, as has been proven by the stabilization of the white population in the west. Elitists like David Rockefeller have no interest in “slowing the growth of world population” by natural methods, their agenda is firmly rooted in the pseudo-science of eugenics, which is all about “culling” the surplus population via draconian methods.

David Rockefeller’s legacy is not derived from a well-meaning “philanthropic” urge to improve health in third world countries, it is born out of a Malthusian drive to eliminate the poor and those deemed racially inferior, using the justification of social Darwinism.

As is documented in Alex Jones’ seminal film Endgame, Rockefeller’s father, John D. Rockefeller, exported eugenics to Germany from its origins in Britain by bankrolling the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute which later would form a central pillar in the Third Reich’s ideology of the Nazi super race. After the fall of the Nazis, top German eugenicists were protected by the allies as the victorious parties fought over who would enjoy their “expertise” in the post-war world.

The justification for the implementation of draconian measures of population control has changed to suit contemporary fads and trends. What once masqueraded as concerns surrounding overpopulation has now returned in the guise of the climate change and global warming movement. What has not changed is the fact that at its core, this represents nothing other than the arcane pseudo-science of eugenics first crafted by the U.S. and British elite at the end of the 19th century and later embraced by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

In the 21st century, the eugenics movement has changed its stripes once again, manifesting itself through the global carbon tax agenda and the notion that having too many children or enjoying a reasonably high standard of living is destroying the planet through global warming, creating the pretext for further regulation and control over every facet of our lives.

The fact that the chief scientific advisor to the President of the United States, a man with his finger on the pulse of environmental policy, once openly advocated the mass sterilization of the U.S. public through the food and water supply, along with the plethora of other disgusting proposals highlighted in Ecoscience, is a frightening prospect that wouldn’t be out of place in some kind of futuristic sci-fi horror movie, and a startling indictment of the true source of what manifests itself today as the elitist controlled top-down environmental movement.

Only through bringing to light Holdren’s shocking and draconian population control plans can we truly alert people to the horrors that the elite have planned for us through population control, sterilization and genocidal culling programs that are already underway.

America's Greediest: The 2009 Top Ten

2009-12-22T13:33:00.000-08:00

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009125120/americas-greediest-2009-top-ten

America's Greediest: The 2009 Top Ten
By Sam Pizzigati
Created 12/20/2009

Home Feature Box:
Who deserves to sit on this year's list of our most avaricious? We could pick ten eminently deserving greedy straight from any big bank on Wall Street. But why spoil all the fun?

Who deserves to sit on this year's list of our most avaricious? We could pick ten eminently deserving greedy straight from any big bank on Wall Street. But why spoil all the fun?

Has picking a year’s greediest “top ten” ever been easier? We don't think so. We could, this year, fill an entire top ten just with bankers from Goldman Sachs — or JPMorgan Chase or any of a number of other Wall Street giants. All sport executive suites packed with power suits who fanned the flames that melted down the global economy, then helped themselves, after gobbling down billions in bailouts, to paydays worth mega millions — at a time when, in over half our states, over a quarter of America’s kids are living [1] off food stamps.

[2]Now that’s greed. But that’s also not the whole picture. The Great Recession’s greedy don’t just sit on Wall Street. They occupy perches of power throughout the reeling U.S. economy. So we’ve tried, in this our latest annual ranking of avarice, to survey that bigger picture.

Where does all this greed come from? We humans have always, of course, had greed among us. But levels of greed vary enormously from one historical epoch to another — and from one society to another.

What determines which societies see the most greed and grasping? In a word: inequality. The more wealth concentrates, the more greed grows. The United States remains the most unequal nation in the developed world. Next year, we suspect, will bring us still another bumper crop of greedy.

10: Richard Anderson

America’s airlines have been flying, for the most part, under the media radar ever since the nation’s banks went into meltdown mode, and that suits Delta CEO Richard Anderson just fine.

Delta, now the world’s biggest airline, has been richly rewarding Anderson ever since he became the airline’s top exec in September 2007. If folks were paying attention, they might wonder why. Delta, after all, lost $8.9 billion in 2008. In 2009, Delta and other U.S. carriers, says the International Air Transport Association, will likely lose a combined $1 billion.

Passengers are certainly feeling this red ink. Delta and other carriers have been trimming seating capacity, a move, notes [3] the Orlando Sentinel, designed to “enable them to raise ticket prices more often.” Delta is also squeezing passengers with airport bag fees. In August, the airline’s bag charges bounded [4] to $20 for the first bag and $30 for the second.

Anderson and his family, meanwhile, don’t just fly free on Delta. The airline also pays the taxes due on Anderson’s free tickets — and lots more, too [5].

For agreeing to become Delta’s chief, 28 months ago, Anderson picked up $8.5 million in stock awards. Seven months later, another $3.4 million. Six months after that, to celebrate the Delta-Northwest merger, more options to buy Delta stock, worth $7.3 million, and more actual shares, worth $6.1 million.

With all those rewards, Anderson must be devoting every waking hour to making Delta soar, right? Well, almost every waking hour. Anderson has been spending some of his precious hours serving on the corporate board of Medtronic, a medical tech firm. In 2009, from the good people at Medtronic, he’ll pocket [6] $188,000 for his directorship services.

9: George David/Marie Douglas-David

This power couple hit the headlines last March, with a nasty divorce trial. We tried to pick the most greedy of the pair. We failed. Here’s why.

The 67-year-old George David, the former CEO of defense contracting powerhouse United Technologies, comes with impeccable greed credentials. In the four years after the 9/11 attacks, David hauled home bigger paydays than any other defense executive, over $200 million in all, including $88.3 million in 2004, a sum that made him that year’s top-paid CEO.

Taxpayers, noted [7] the Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess CEO pay report in 2006, provide a third of United Technologies annual operating income.

But George has found his match in avarice. Marie Douglas-David, a Wall Street investment banker before she married George in 2002, signed a pre-nup [8] before her wedding day that entitled her to $20,000 a week should the marriage break up, a not unreasonable possibility given the 30-year age gap between the two.

The couple did separate last year and this past spring went to court after Marie sued to overturn the pre-nup. She demanded $53,000 a week. Marie needed extra cash, said her lawyers, to cover her basic expenses. Among those basics: “$4,500 a week for clothes, $8,000 for travel, and $1,500 for eating out.”

8: Steve Wynn

Last February, Las Vegas gaming industry kingpin Steve Wynn announced [9] an across-the-board wage and hour cutback for all employees at his resort empire. The total savings for Wynn Resorts: between $75 and $100 million.

In November Wynn Resorts announced a special $4-per-share dividend. Total cost of the dividend payout to Wynn Resorts: $492 million. Total dividend check that will go to Steve Wynn: $88.6 million [10].

Wynn currently rates 141st [11] on the annual Forbes list of America’s 400 richest. But his fortune has faded some $900 million, to just $2.3 billion now, since last year. A typical American family, according to Census Bureau figures [12], would have to work nearly 18,000 years to make $900 million.

Wynn, ever the trooper, isn’t crying in his cocktails over his near-billion-dollar misfortune. He “rang in [13]” the 2009 new year skimming the Caribbean on a 183-foot mega yacht, then went on to spend lovely winter days dodging gossip columnists [14] on the Riviera and in the Alps.

7: Robert Rubin

Back in 1997, then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin won huzzahs the world over for his efforts to fix the Asian financial crisis. One crisis “solved,” Rubin proceeded to help create another — by brokering the 1999 deal that repealed the New Deal’s most important [15] financial industry reform legislation.

That reform, the Glass-Steagall Act, essentially prevented investment banks from speculating with the cash commercial banks and insurance companies were collecting from depositors and policy holders. Glass-Steagall would be weakened over the years, but still had enough oomph, at century’s end, to prevent Citicorp from finalizing a merger with Travelers Group insurance.

Citi, America's biggest bank, and Travelers needed Glass-Steagall eliminated. Rubin obliged. His contacts and credibility, notes [16] Public Citizen president Robert Weissman, helped speed repeal through Congress — and paved the way for the wild Wall Street run that crashed the U.S. economy.

Rubin, a Goldman Sachs alum before his stint at Treasury, would go on to join the newly merged Citigroup as a senior strategist. Citi, betting heavily on subprimes, would go on to lose over $65 billion during Rubin’s stint, and, this past January, Rubin formally resigned his Citi duties.

Overall, Rubin pocketed [17] $126 million in cash and stock for his Citi labors. But he seems to regard his years at the bank as something akin to public service. Declared Rubin in one exit interview [18]: “I bet there's not a single year where I couldn't have gone somewhere else and made more.”

6: Andrew Hall

If you happen to be Andrew Hall, the world’s most celebrated commodity trader, you don’t care what other people think. Hall waged a four-year battle — against his neighbors in the posh Connecticut town of Southport — to keep a 80-foot-long concrete sculpture on his lawn.

The neighbors won, and Hall had to remove the concrete eyesore. He promptly replaced it with two garishly painted “cartoonlike [19]” sculptures of cars.

Hall can afford plenty of sculptures. He took home $100 million betting on oil futures and other commodities in 2008 — after picking up a quarter-billion over the previous five years — and stood to receive another $100 million this year.

But his employer, Citigroup, balked. Citi, by that time, was sitting on $45 billion in taxpayer bailout dollars, and handing $100 million to Hall, the honcho of Citi’s commodity-trading subsidiary, would have created a PR disaster for the bank — and the Obama administration as well.

Hall didn’t care. He demanded his trading fee. Citi ended up having to sell off Hall’s subsidiary, at a bargain basement price, to end the Hall headache.

Our story, to be sure, does have a happy ending — for Hall, Citi, and federal pay czar Kenneth Feinberg. Hall will get his $100 million, but not until next year. That deferral let Citi claim a zero pay expense for Hall in 2009, and Citi’s pay outlays for the year now show up about $100 million less than last year.

This accounting razzmatazz helped skew [20] the 2009 executive pay totals for the seven biggest bailout basket cases and enabled pay czar Feinberg to claim that pressure from his office had, “on average [21],” reduced executive cash comp at the seven by an impressive — and thoroughly misleading — 90 percent.

5: John Chambers

Earlier this year, with lawmakers mulling over legislation to limit CEO pay, a high-powered New York business group convened a “Task Force on Executive Compensation” to show that corporations could clean up their own act.

The final report [22] from this task force, issued this fall, asked companies to commit themselves to executive pay that's “fair” and “clearly aligned with actual performance.” Among the first half-dozen companies to make that commitment: Cisco, the Internet networking giant.

Just days later, a federal filing revealed that Cisco was awarding [23] “discretionary bonuses” to its five top executives for the fiscal year that ended this past July. Why “discretionary”? The company couldn’t give the execs regular bonuses since all five missed their “performance” targets.

Cisco says the five execs delivered “solid financial performance” while facing “tough economic challenges.” Not that solid. Cisco has laid off [24] over 1,500 workers since the economy turned challenging. Cisco CEO John Chambers, for his part, has pocketed [25] $232.7 million over the last five years.

Back in 2000, Cisco reigned briefly as the world's biggest company, as measured by total share value. Then the dot.com bubble burst. But Chambers unloaded a ton of shares before the bubble popped — and cleared a $156 million [26] windfall.

The janitor who cleaned Cisco's executive suites that year, observed the San Jose Mercury News at the time, would have to work 8,653 years to earn what Chambers made in one.

4: Rupert Murdoch

Billionaires never rest. They don’t let their assets rest either. Take media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for instance. Three years ago, Murdoch shelled out an estimated $30 million for a 183-foot yacht he calls the Rosehearty. He’s apparently enjoying his investment. Billionaire-watchers have sighted him holidaying offshore with actor Mel Gibson and crooner Billy Joel.

But what do billionaires do when they can’t find an aging celebrity to join them aboard? They rent their boats out, says Superyacht World — discreetly, of course, through charter agencies [27] that never reveal the boat’s actual owner.

But sometimes that identity does slip out. Murdoch’s Rosehearty, an enterprising reporter has disclosed [28], charters for just under $300,000 per week. Murdoch’s “exceptionally solicitous staff” comes included in the fee.

Speaking of fees, Murdoch has launched [29] a crusade to force Web surfers to pay for the newspaper articles they read online. One reason: His take-home last year from the News Corp. — the base of his media empire — dropped [30] 14 percent to $27.5 million.

3: Mark Hurd

Computer printer ink, a high-tech financial analyst pointed out [31] a few years ago, “costs more per drop than expensive perfume.” Mark Hurd, the CEO at Hewlett-Packard since 2005, wouldn’t have it any other way.

HP, under Hurd, has been busy squeezing every bit of revenue possible out of the printer ink cash cow. Last year, HP upped ink prices up at double the inflation rate. The typical $30 ink cartridge, SmartMoney reported [32] this past June, costs $3 to make.

Hurd apparently enjoys cutting wages and jobs as much as raising prices. In May, he axed [33] 6,000 workers off the HP payroll and cut paychecks for the survivors from 5 to 15 percent.

Hurd did take a 20 percent salary cut himself for 2009. But “salary” in 2008 only accounted [34] for $1.45 million of Hurd’s $26.04 million in cash compensation. He took in another $7.9 million in new stock awards — and cleared still another $10.1 million cashing out previously awarded stock options.

Hurd’s CEO stint at HP has so far seen about 40,000 [35] employees lose their jobs.

2: Richard Scott

Mike Snow, a regional health care executive, earlier this month recalled [36] that evening a dozen years ago when his then-boss, Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. CEO Richard Scott, revealed to Snow and the rest of the company’s top management that the FBI had just raided the firm’s El Paso office.

Scott defiantly declared the government had no case. Mike Snow and his fellow execs lustily applauded. Remembers Snow: “Like so many others that night, I drank the Kool-Aid.”

The federal government went on to indict key Columbia/HCA personnel for “bilking Medicare [37] while simultaneously handing over kickbacks and perks to physicians who steered patients to its hospitals.” The company ended up pleading guilty to 14 felonies and paying $1.7 billion in criminal and civil fines.

The board of Columbia/HCA, then the nation’s biggest for-profit hospital chain, would go on to ease Scott out the door, but ever so gently. He left with a $10 million severance package and stock worth $300 million.

This past spring, Richard Scott burst back into the news, pouring more Kool-Aid as the moving force behind the year’s first media blitz designed to demonize the Obama administration’s drive for health care reform.

If President Obama ever gets his way, Scott warned [38] in one ad that his multimillion campaign ran, bureaucrats will “decide the treatments you receive, the drugs you take, even the doctors you see.”

Scott’s ads would set the “Tea Party” tone for the year’s health care debate — and help leave tens of millions of Americans without affordable health care, a state of affairs that has never bothered Scott, originally a corporate attorney specializing in buyout deals.

As Scott used to rail [39] back in his CEO days: “Do we have an obligation to provide health care for everybody? Where do we draw the line? Is any fast-food restaurant obligated to feed everyone who shows up?”

1: Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison appeared on our “greediest” list last year. He may appear every year. No one may better personify, personally and professionally, the self-absorption, arrogance, and insensitivity that separates the merely greedy from the greediest.

In 2008, Ellison, the CEO of Oracle business software, contested the $166.3 million tax appraisal on his Northern California estate. The assessment appeals panel gave him a $3 million tax refund in a ruling that will cost the local school system an annual $250,000 [40], the cost of hiring and supplying three teachers.

Ellison, the holder of a $27 billion fortune, spent a good bit of 2009 sparing no expense [41] to build a yacht speedy enough to win next year’s America’s Cup, the world’s top sailing race. His new racing yacht has a $10-million mast “18-stories tall and sails large enough to cover a baseball infield.” Some 30 designers and scientists spent 130,000 hours putting the vessel together.

For more casual water fun, Ellison takes to the seas on his 453-foot mega yacht, the Rising Sun, a boat he co-owns with Hollywood mogul David Geffen. This five-story little ship boasts [42] 82 rooms and a basketball court that doubles as a helicopter pad. The construction cost in 2004: $200 million.

[43]On the business side, Ellison did his best in 2009 to top the $557 million [44] he took home as Oracle’s CEO in 2008. His magic formula: Ellison’s a serial merger. He buys companies, takes their customers, and fires their workers. His top 2009 gobble-up: Silicon Valley’s Sun Microsystems.

The Sun merger, analysts believe [45], will almost certainly end up eliminating more jobs than the 5,000 positions lost when Oracle bought out rival PeopleSoft.

And did we mention the dividends? Oracle this past spring announced plans to pay out its first dividend [46]. The announcement, CNBC estimated [47], meant a $57.5 million quarterly check for Ellison in May and another $230 million in dividend checks over the next 12 months.

In 2009, the old Silicon Valley joke still rang true [48]: “What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison? Answer: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.”

Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much [49], the online weekly on excess and inequality.

Summary:
Who deserves to sit on this year's list of our most avaricious? We could pick ten eminently deserving greedy straight from any big bank on Wall Street. But why spoil all the fun?

The Great American Racket

2009-12-21T14:07:00.001-08:00

Protection
The Great American Racket
By Jim Kirwan
12-20-9

RISK & STABILITY

"Protection" despite the way many might see it, has always been the unseen major industry that hides everything it does in plain site. But protection is no longer just "an option," it's become a government requirement almost across the board, in far too many ways. Government is not just a full partner in the protection industry; it has actually taken control over everyone and virtually everything, to provide this much "needed" 'PROTECTION' to everyone of course! The only real problem that this government does not provide us with 'protection' from-is that most basic protection-from the government itself that all of us must have if we are to be able to live and prosper at the same time! This is what is at issue between the fluidity and challenges of Risk and the frequently rigid requirements that Stability often prefers to use, to guarantee continued success.

For decades the health insurance industry and those few that want to direct the lives of everyone else, having been trying to force the public to BUY protection by creating some very special laws which they have written, because they fear that their lives and their possessions might be endangered if there is no legally guaranteed protection for them: from those of us that do not have "insurance." This is such bullshit that it is almost unspeakable.

However this is how mandatory auto-insurance quietly made it into the lexicon of life, and was soon followed by another massive income stream; The SEAT-BELT industry that was soon joined by the helmet safety programs. These 'ideas' were never about safety as much as they were about insurance: This has always been about the power to dictate protection for a whole class of the worst people, to be paid for by the rest of us-whether we as a nation need it or not.

Before you go ballistic about the saintliness of "the data" that disproves what I just said, you might want to read a bit further. The proposition that PROTECTION is something that can be purchased is an artificial construct. Life is unpredictable, and always has been. Insurance was created to protect people, in theory, from Life's most unexpected events. But that theory didn't make the people that offered the policies enough money; because not everyone on the planet was involved in buying what has become their bogus protection from life in all its many forms. So the Insurance industry began to court the government with ideas that could make them both far more influential.

Home Owners Insurance became a requirement, but the regulation of these "insurance schemes" have never been as fairly regulated; when it comes to what if anything shall be paid to policy-holders, when claims were filed to pay policy-holders what they thought they had the right to expect. Ask anyone caught up in a national disaster like a firestorm, a flood or a Katrina just how well did their required insurance 'protect" anyone except the insurance companies themselves? The same is true of every other area in which insurance-of-some-kind is mandated.

When the payment of premiums is MANDATED, the insurance will be revoked the second that payments are interrupted: And everything already paid in is kept by the company. But when it's the Insurance Companies' turn to deliver on the promises they made in their contracts-there is no defender of the rights of those that routinely get the royal-purple-shaft from these supposedly legitimate crooks that call themselves pillars of our society. This is because the companies hide behind their armies of lawyers and the government for protection, or they declare bankruptcy, rather than PAY what was agreed on, in many cases several decades before.

Last week we just added the entire world of medical-insurance to the requirements that people must now pay for or go to jail. And as it is in other industries where the law forces citizens to buy what they do not believe in; there are no strict requirements being forced upon the government or the medical profession to provide the person with the insurance, or any real CARE of any kind: in fact the industry is still free to disqualify anyone that they believe might actually need to use the policy they have just forced millions of people to buy!

There is no watchdog agency that insures that anyone gets the treatments that might be needed in US hospitals or clinics. The way that this once worked was that IF the insurance companies failed to provide the services they sold to consumers-then the market would force them out of business. But that was before the entire medical community climbed into bed with that whore of all whores: the US Government! There is no reciprocal-responsibility involved in this latest theft of the right of Americans to decide for themselves how to provide for themselves and their families-in light of the now totally fraudulent fascism that has overtaken this nation.

What is always overlooked is that this is PROTECTION at its finest, if you and yours are the ones that know they NEED be protected from the great unwashed, whether we are driving cars, or spreading germs in public places-the rich must insure that the rest of us will provide them with a healthy settlement should the rich ever need to sue any of the less fortunate.

"Protection" is a common requirement in almost every society, in some form. The poorer the country the more brutal is the requirement for protection from the powers that be. Whether you're a small shop owner in New York that needs protection from street gangs and the cops; or you're in the rag-business or the diamond trade "rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief" everyone pretty much needs some kind of protection for themselves and for what they do. But only the rich can require the rest of us to pay for bogus insurance so that their properties and persons can be protected from the common herd. How long will it be before the lawyers begin demanding that the public have legal insurance, for those times just ahead when so many will be arrested? How superb would that be to have prepaid legal insurance against the certainty of an arrest for something that you did not do?

Whenever these philosophies have gotten out-of-control in the past, things like the Guillotine began to get a lot of very public use; because these strong-armed tactics whether by police thugs or blatantly illegal government decrees that violate every tenant of American law and practice all of it leads to failure and directly to the total destruction of the society that chose this particular-path to self-destruction.

This PROTECTION racket has been going on big-time in America since Madison Avenue first began to realize that Americans are afraid of everything including their own shadows: and soon 'The Great American Protection Racket' was born! Now hundreds of trillions of dollars later the whole charade is being applied to every phase of life in this country.

This does not involve just companies and the government it's become part of the life of ordinary individuals. Why do lawyers exist? To PROTECT something that someone wants to protect from harm or loss. Doctors exist to PROTECT people from disease and to help them to recover should they become ill. Professions of all kinds have been converted from creating things, such as better ways to live the lives that each of us have been given; to PROTECTING people from things that no one has any right to be protected from; in the normal course of living. Shrinks, teachers, researchers every profession must now consider how they can "assist people" (while forcing the unwilling) with PROTECTION from things that are mostly just another aspect of life.

The greatest protection from life is contained in the way one chooses to live it. It is both that simple and that complex. And all of the folly that is being pursued so avidly by this fascist government and their pirate-leaning private- associates will not in the end profit them at all: Because everybody dies. The question really is, how we choose to live the lives we have been given? Buying into PROTECTION simply speaks to the failure of individuals to live openly and well because they are not living in opposition to most of life, but are in sync with the universe and themselves.

The government is now in the PROTECTION business and has been running on overtime for the last nine years: Yet this countries' citizens have never lived in a more dangerous world, thanks to our protectionist polices worldwide. All of our PROTECTIONS (in the form of the rights we were all born with) are now gone; because they have been stolen by the government in the name of private-corporate-needs or just because it's far more profitable for those providing the services that are now being managed, by the same government agencies, that were supposed to be 'protecting us' from all this fascism and the enforced obligations that neither government nor private industry has the right to dictate to any citizen of this country.

This practice however is not limited to Americans; because we've forcefully applied these same rules and totally arbitrary arrangements to other countries. One example was when Cheney and Bechtel decided to privatize the entire water supply for all of Bolivia; even claiming that they owned their rainwater as well. However the citizens of Cochabamba kicked them out of the country-forcefully-unlike the cowardly Americans that have not stopped a single criminal act by their so-called government in the last nine years. (1)

This coercion has become common practice now because we must all be PROTECTED; just not from those who are demanding that we BUY their bogus services, but for every possible and usually idiotic distortion of any real threat to life & limb; such as what TSA does to every possible passenger, except those that are flying on private planes.

Never forget that PROTECTION is a Racket as old as organized crime; and that when the government of any country adopts PROTECTION wholesale, as the preferred method for dealing with its citizens then that nation is finished as anything that could be worth saving.

The balance between RISK & STABILTY, as indicated in the illustration, has always been with people since the beginning. How we choose or fail to choose to deal with that equation now is what shall ultimately decide the immediate future, not just for this country but for the world. Because this criminal-cabal has become our government, and because we have failed to curb its worst intentions toward the rest of the planet it is our responsibility now to do something NOW to stop these bastards that run this place from continuing to brutalize, to torture and to murder the rest of the planet in the name of this overzealous PROTECTION for the elites!

This is what is responsible for the idea that Americans are too dumbed-down, too drugged-out and just too deeply affected by all the toxins in the air, the water, the food and the land to think clearly. It is this artificial NEED for a PROTECTION that cannot really exist that is at the bottom of the real fear that has kept this nation paralyzed, in the face of annihilation by the monsters that own us. Speak now or forever hold your piece!

kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net

1) Cochabamba: From War to Water Management
http://www.alternet.org/water/140393/cochabamba:_from_war_to_water_management/

Who Really Owns the Assets of America

2009-12-20T15:19:00.001-08:00

Walter Burien is a personal friend of mine and his message about economics is one of the most important one on the planet!
His website is www.CAFR1.com It is one of my favorite websites!

The Billionaires Behind the Hate

2009-12-19T10:00:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=103332

December 8, 2009
RADICAL RIGHT
THE BILLIONAIRES BEHIND THE HATE

Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch are the wealthiest, and perhaps most effective, opponents of President Obama's progressive agenda. They have been looming in the background of every major domestic policy dispute this year. Ranked as the 9th richest men in America, the Koch brothers sit at the helm of Koch Industries, a massive privately owned conglomerate of manufacturing, oil, gas, and timber interests. They are best known for their wealth, as well as for their generous contributions to the arts, cancer research, and the Smithsonian Institute. But David and Charles are also responsible for a vicious attack campaign aimed directly at obstructing and killing progressive reform. Over the years, millions of dollars in Koch money has flowed to various right-wing think tanks, front groups, and publications. At the dawn of the Obama presidency, Koch groups quickly maneuvered to try to stop his first piece of signature legislation: the stimulus. The Koch-funded group "No Stimulus" launched television and radio ads deriding the recovery package as simply "pork" spending. The Cato Institute -- founded by Charles -- as well as other Koch-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, produced a blizzard of reports distorting the stimulus and calling for a return to Bush-style tax cuts to combat the recession. As their fronts were battling the stimulus, David's Americans for Prosperity (AFP) spent the opening months of the Obama presidency placing calls and helping to organize the very first "tea party" protests. AFP, founded in 1984 by David and managed day to day by the astroturf lobbyist Tim Phillips, has spent much of the year mobilizing "tea party" opposition to health reform, clean energy legislation, and financial regulations.

STOPPING CLEAN ENERGY: David Koch presents himself as a champion of science. Next year, because of his donations, a wing of the Smithsonian will be named after him. Nevertheless, Koch has done more to undermine the public's understanding of climate change science than any other person in America. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, funded in part by Koch foundations, has waged an underhanded campaign to falsely charge that a set of hacked e-mails somehow unravels the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring. Koch finances the "Hot Air" tour, a nationwide roadshow using a balloon to depict climate change science as "hot air." Despite the brothers' extravagant wealth, Koch's Americans for Prosperity has run populist ads mocking environmentalists as spoiled brats more concerned about their "three homes and five cars" than about economic conditions. In addition to its efforts to misinform the public, Koch Industries has spent nearly $9 million dollars so far on direct lobbying, much of it on climate change legislation. With a team of Koch-funded operatives going as far as attempting to crash the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this week, the brothers may succeed in scuttling any prospect for addressing climate change.

STOPPING HEALTH REFORM: Much of the fierce opposition to health reform can be credited to Koch organizations. As the health care debate began, AFP created a front group, known as "Patients United," dedicated itself to attacking Democratic health care reform proposals. Patients United has blanketed the country with ads distorting various provisions of the health reform legislation, particularly the public option. Patients United even centered a media campaign around Shona Robertson-Holmes, claiming she had a brain tumor the Canadian system refused to treat. However, the Ottawa Citizen reported that Patients United has been exaggerating Holmes' case, and that she in fact had a benign cyst. In their quest to block health care reform, Koch-funded groups have fostered extremism. A speaker with the roving Patients United bus tour repeatedly compared health reform to the Holocaust while an eight-by-five foot banner at an AFP health care rally with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) read, "National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, Germany" superimposed over corpses from a concentration camp. Although many were surprised at the level of anger AFP channeled into Democratic healthcare town halls in August, it wasn't the first time Koch groups have helped to hijack the health reform debate. Back in 1994, Americans for Prosperity, then known as Citizens for a Sound Economy, worked closely with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich to bring mobs of angry men to health reform rallies with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.

A LONG HISTORY OF STOPPING PROGRESS: The Koch brothers clearly have a financial stake in blocking reform. Koch Industry oil refineries are major carbon dioxide polluters, and George-Pacific, a Koch Industries timber subsidiary, is one of the largest contributors to the loss of carbon-sink capacity. According to the EPA, Koch Industries is responsible for over 300 oil spills in the U.S. and has leaked three million gallons of crude oil into fisheries and drinking waters. So there are clear business-related reasons why Koch would want to block regulatory enforcement, clean energy, labor, and other reforms. But part of their opposition stems from a long family tradition of funding conservative movements to shift the country to the far right. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David and the company's namesake, helped to found the John Birch Society in the late 1950s. The John Birch Society harnessed Cold War fears into hate against progressives, warning that President Kennedy, Civil Rights activists, and organized labor were in league with communists. By presenting progressive reform as a capitulation to the Soviet Union, Fred Koch and the other industrialists bankrolling the Birch Society were able to galvanize hundreds of thousands of middle class people into supporting their narrow agenda of cutting corporate taxes and avoiding consumer regulations.

Neocon Con Game

2009-12-18T14:55:00.000-08:00

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/121709a.html

Time to End the Neocon Con Game
By Bruce P. Cameron
December 17, 2009

As Washington’s long debate on the Afghan war unfolded, one group had an unhealthy advantage though – based on its record – it should have had no influence at all. These are the neoconservatives, and they have captured The Washington Post’s editorial pages along with other outlets of elite opinion.

Over the past three decades, the neocons have carved this important place for themselves in Washington by purporting to stand for liberal values, such as democracy and human rights, while using those worthy goals to justify the frequent use of military force.

For the neocons, war also is not just a last-resort option. Rather, it is how they have gained – and how they maintain – their prominence. When the United States is at peace – or without a war looming – the neocons are at a loss.

(Of course, one of the signature characteristics of the neocons is that few have served in the military next to the soldiers whose blood the neocons so reflexively are willing to spill as a “solution” to nearly any problem. As elite intellectuals, the neocons view soldiers from inner-city or small-town America as expendable for the grander cause.)

What the neocons do excel at is the internal Washington policy debate. They are well-schooled and self-assured; they are fierce debaters; they understand media; and they don’t hesitate to question the patriotism or toughness of anyone who disagrees with them.

On the Iraq War, the neocons were the ones who gave inspiration to two of their own, L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, head of the occupation, and Douglas Feith, Under Secretary for Policy in the Defense Department, who was responsible for day-to-day Pentagon operations in Iraq in 2003.

In eight days – after the U.S. invading force had ousted Saddam Hussein’s government – Bremer and Feith changed the whole tenor of the occupation from a quick get-in and get-out to a complex nation-building scheme that was designed to bring free-market “democracy” to Iraq.

Bremer and Feith did this by abolishing the Iraqi army and the civilian bureaucracy, thereby placing American solders in the middle of a Sunni insurgency that followed soon afterwards.

Neocons Abandoned Reagan

The neocons also have claimed as their chief credential, their participation in Ronald Reagan’s muscular foreign policy at the end of the Cold War. In reality, however, they abandoned Reagan from 1985 on, when he began the real work of ending the Cold War by negotiating with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

In his first term, Reagan was a neocon favorite, treating the Soviet Union in the black-and-white manner that the neocons prefer. He coined the phrase “evil empire”; promoted guerrilla warfare against leftist governments; and built up the U.S. military budget along with introducing the Star Wars missile defense.

Neocons played a major role in the intellectual architecture of these policies: Richard Perle on nuclear strategy, Elliott Abrams on the Nicaraguan contra rebels; Jeane Kirkpatrick on the immutability of leftist dictatorships.

However, as Reagan rethought the nuclear stalemate, the President became intellectually prepared, even eager, to embrace Gorbachev as a man who was sincere about changing the Soviet Union.

In Gorbachev, Reagan found a negotiating partner who would join in a game of give-and-take, and Gorbachev gave more than he took. Gorbachev was also capable of grand intellectual leaps.

At Reykjavik in October 1986, Gorbachev proposed eliminating all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. He renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine that had called for using force to keep Eastern Europe in the Soviet orbit.

Gorbachev and his commitment to perestroika – the restructuring of the Soviet system – confounded neocon ideology, which held that only force could roll back the Soviet empire and uproot its allied governments around the world.

The neocons had no intellectual framework for accepting the changes occurring under Gorbachev. The neocon view remained frozen: there would always be a Soviet Union; there would always be a Cold War; Gorbachev's reforms were a trick.

Perle kept insisting that the Soviets would revert to type and Reagan should make no substantial moves toward them. Kirkpatrick agreed, after all it was her doctrine that leftist dictatorships could not evolve toward democracy. Both eventually resigned.

To the neocons’ dismay, Reagan joined in the liberal give-and-take approach toward negotiations. Reagan “had an Emersonian sense of the becoming and unfolding of all things,” in the words of his biographer John Patrick Diggins. Reagan never saw the Soviet Union or nuclear weapons as permanent.

Reagan’s engagement with the Soviet Union in his second term could be viewed as a continuation of the gradual, fits-and-starts winding down of the Cold War that began with John F. Kennedy’s arms-control outreach to Nikita Khrushchev in the 1960s, through Richard Nixon’s Soviet détente in the early 1970s and Jimmy Carter’s emphasis on human rights which put the Soviets on the defensive in the late 1970s.

In that analysis, Reagan’s first term was more an anomaly than a turning point. But if that historical narrative were accepted, then the neocon war strategies would be viewed as unnecessarily brutal, inflicting widespread death and destruction in places like Central America, Angola and Afghanistan while accomplishing little.

So, in the years after Reagan engaged Gorbachev and Gorbachev’s perestroika sped the end of the Cold War, the neocons used their extraordinary influence in the opinion circles of Washington to reshape the history.

Rather than seeing the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as an outcome driven by Moscow’s own internal failings combined with a half century of Western containment policies – capped off by Reagan’s collaboration with Gorbachev – the neocons claimed that it was their application of force in the 1980s that did the trick.

The neocons, who had abandoned Reagan early in his second term, re-embraced him. They then whitewashed Reagan’s second-term emergence as Gorbachev’s peace partner and locked in the memory of Reagan’s “evil empire” phase.

For instance, neocon intellectual Joshua Muravchek called Reagan the arch-neocon, which is perhaps the greatest intellectual theft of the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first centuries.

Neocons Screw Up Iraq

Having reinvented themselves as “winners of the Cold War,” the neocons became fixtures at key Washington think tanks and at prominent policy magazines. They became talking heads on the Sunday talk shows and wrote influential foreign policy pieces for major newspapers like The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

So, by the time George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, the neocons were ready for phase two, with new plans for flexing American military muscle around the globe. Neocons filled key positions in Bush’s young administration, especially inside the Pentagon and the White House.

To replace the Soviet Union as the evil enemy, neocons targeted hard-line Arab states and looked forward to a “war of civilizations” with Islamic militants. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 opened the way for these ambitious neocon plans to remake the Middle East through violent regime change.

Within nine days of the 9/11 attacks, the neocon Project for the New American Century (PNAC) announced to the world:

“Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”

The PNAC had been organized by William Kristol, editor of the neocon magazine The Weekly Standard, and Robert Kagan, a contributing editor. The signers of PNAC’s letters and policy prescriptions read like a who’s who of the neocon community.

Yet, in their drumbeat for invading Iraq, the neocons were wrong about many of the supposed “facts” used to rally a frightened American public behind the neocon agenda. They were wrong about Iraq’s WMD stockpiles, about Saddam Hussein’s links to al-Qaeda, and about how the U.S. military conquest of Iraq would terrify other U.S. adversaries – like Iran, Venezuela, Syria and Lebanon – into retreat.

But perhaps the most costly neocon error was the mismanagement of the Iraq occupation.

Originally, Gen. Jay Garner was put in charge. When he arrived in Iraq after the invasion, he hoped the occupation could be over in 90 days. His plan was to find and eliminate any weapons of mass destruction, get the Iraqi government working again, hold a quick election to select new Iraqi leaders, and leave.

Soon, however, Garner – with little staff and less money – found himself in an uphill bureaucratic battle with powerful neocons at the Pentagon. Toward the end of April 2003, he was fired.

In his place came the new head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Jerry Bremer, who made common cause with Doug Feith, the Pentagon’s Undersecretary for Policy. The pair made key decisions that effectively destroyed the Iraqi bureaucracy and military.

Bremer and Feith put more than 500,000 Iraqis on the streets in one week, including disgruntled soldiers who kept their guns and seasoned bureaucrats who knew how to build an organization. These people would become the backbone of an insurgency that would kill more than 4,300 American soldiers.

The violent disorder in Iraq also created fertile ground for al-Qaeda extremists to put down roots. Though Islamists had been kept in check by Saddam Hussein, they flourished for a time as the neocons organized a long-term U.S. occupation of Iraq. Extremist violence was soon ripping the country apart.

Neocon Crisis

The Iraq War disaster and the growing American public awareness of the neocons’ central role in the catastrophe created a new crisis for the neocons. But they still had an important card to play – their dominance of the opinion centers of Washington.

Much as the neocons rewrote the closing narrative of the Cold War – by whiting out Reagan’s second-term collaboration with Gorbachev – the neocons claimed that their courageous support for George W. Bush’s Iraq troop “surge” in early 2007 brought the violence under control and “won” the war.

Over the past two years, this story of the “successful surge” has essentially rehabilitated the neocons. Yet the surge was only one of many components that contributed to the lessening of the Iraqi bloodshed, and the surge was possibly one of the least significant.

In 2006, before the surge began, Sunni tribal leaders had turned against the excessive violence of al-Qaeda’s Iraq faction under the leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The U.S. military also had begun paying the Sunni leaders to turn their guns on al-Qaeda extremists, a process that became known as the Sunni Awakening.

In June 2006, Zarqawi’s location was betrayed and he was killed by a U.S. airstrike.

The sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite also began burning out as the two groups, which had once lived side by side in peace, retreated to their own enclaves, separated by concrete walls running through Iraqi cities. With the targets of sectarian violence harder to reach, the killing declined.

There were other important factors unrelated to the surge, like the decision of the anti-American Shi’a leader Muqtada al-Sadr to order his militias to demobilize. By 2008, it also became apparent to Iraqis that their government would succeed in forcing the Bush administration to accept a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal, thus calming down those insurgents motivated by nationalism and hatred of foreigners.

Yet in the neocon domain of Washington, the decline in Iraqi violence was simply explained as the “surge worked.” Despite the horrendous loss of life and the war’s cost of some $900 billion, the neocons were largely forgiven and kept their prized spots on the talk shows and op-ed pages.

Manichean World View

Another signature characteristic of the neocons is that they far better understand how to shape perceptions in Washington than to deal with realities in other countries. Indeed, despite their confidence in expounding about foreign policy, they really don’t know much about specific countries or regions.

After all, such detailed knowledge would disrupt their easy prescription of more war, since anyone who truly knows a country and its people would not so casually advocate violence or arrogantly dictate its domestic policies.

But what the neocons do know is what sells in Washington. So, they have consistently professed their love of “democracy” and put it at the center of what they do.

In my view, all the neocon hoopla about spreading freedom is a public relations device to put a patina of democratic nobility on right-wing, often repressive governments that the neocons view as desirable allies.

Too many times in the 1980s, I saw neocons rush to embrace governments that may have shown some democratic promise, but still had deep-seated human right problems.

However, by making “democracy” at least a rhetorical goal, the neocons were picking up on a favorite theme of Ronald Reagan, who prescribed “democracy” as a necessary cure for leftist dictatorships even as he made excuses for brutal right-wing regimes in countries such as Argentina and Guatemala.

Though Reagan deserves credit for recognizing the promise of Gorbachev’s initiatives to resolve the Cold War, Reagan viewed the Third World with a Manichean eye, seeing too much "good versus evil" and overlooking the complexities of any specific country, as the neocons did.

One of the most tragic examples of Reagan’s distorted Third World vision was El Salvador.

In the early 1980s, tens of thousands of Salvadorans – including Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, four American churchwomen and six civilian leaders of the political opposition – were butchered, but Reagan and the neocons insisted on viewing the violence through a Cold War lens. They deflected guilt away from the right-wing regime in order to justify increasing U.S. military aid.

After a series of elections put a Christian Democrat at the head of the government – even as the military continued its brutal counterinsurgency practices in the field – El Salvador faded as an issue of controversy in U.S. political circles. (The civil war was resolved only after the Reagan administration ended and more pragmatic leaders, including Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Connecticut, and Salvadoran exile Leonel Gomez, stepped forward with new approaches.)

The Contra War

By the mid-1980s, El Salvador had been replaced at the top of the neocons’ Central American agenda by Nicaragua, which emerged as a test of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s theory that a Soviet client state could only be dislodged by force – that reform was impossible.

In December of 1985, I found myself, a liberal, supporting the contras in their war with Nicaragua’s leftist government. In this heresy, I had been joined by three other Democrats: Bob Leiken, the late Penn Kemble, and Bernie Aronson.

One night we gathered at Kemble’s house to receive a visit from Elliott Abrams, the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, who was accompanied by Robert Kagan, Abrams’s personal assistant, and a State Department officer.

Abrams had been in his job for only three months, but he had been well briefed on who the Sandinistas were and what they had done.

He spent some time describing the contents of a weapons-bearing truck that had been blown up in Honduras, transiting from Nicaragua to its destination, a leftist rebel camp in El Salvador. He knew the contents, and the backgrounds of the people who had been driving it. He knew a lot about the Sandinistas.

But Abrams knew next to nothing about the contras, especially the rifts between the civilian and military leadership.

When Abrams and Kagan finally left, the four of us sat stunned, speaking not a word. Although each of us had our neocon friends, we were not ourselves neocons. To us, it was important who the contras were and what they were fighting for.

With this unwillingness to master details about the excessive violence and troubling corruption within the contra movement, the Reagan administration’s neocons could not fashion a sensible policy that would inspire widespread support inside Nicaragua.

The neocons could not understand the dreams for Nicaragua of the two moderate leaders – Arturo Cruz and Alfonso Robelo – whom they had convinced to join the contras. Each battle that Cruz and Robelo had with the old contra leadership started out on a very idealistic plane and wound up as a fight for jobs and money.

Cruz and his associates had big ideas about middle-class recruitment, but in the end his aides only struggled for a stipend for Cruz and for someone to fill the human rights slot in the contra leadership. Finally, after 2 ½ years of futility trying to secure reforms, Cruz resigned for good.

That following Monday, Robert Kagan went to the morning State Department staff meeting with a paper bag on his head, to announce to his colleagues that he was a dunce for supporting Cruz for so long. In my view, he should have brought dunce caps for his colleagues who had resisted Cruz’s initiatives.

Kagan knew very well that Cruz had finally resigned because of a message brought to him by someone from Elliot Abrams’s office. Cruz was told that he would not be allowed to challenge Enrique Bermudez, the notoriously corrupt head of the contra army, over the issue of civilian control of the contra military forces.

In tearing up a contra unity document that had accepted civilian control, Bermudez had said, “I have signed hundreds of agreements and have never complied with any of them.”

Cruz was told he could not hold Bermudez accountable for what Cruz had been hired and rehired by the Reagan administration to do – lead. After Cruz resigned, the administration never won another major vote on aid to the contras.

Nicaragua II

By July 1987, the Nicaraguan conflict was in a standoff, both in the field and in Washington where Reagan and his team wanted to overthrow the Sandinistas and the Democrats in Congress did not.

At that point, House Speaker Jim Wright agreed to a joint statement with Reagan regarding a peace plan for Nicaragua. Its formula was simple: in exchange for the Sandinistas allowing free elections there would be no more contra aid and the contras would be demobilized.

This plan was issued on a Monday; by Friday night it was one of two peace plans being considered by five Central American Presidents. At the end of Saturday night, there was tentative agreement on the plan by Costa Rica’s Oscar Arias, which was essentially the same as the Wright-Reagan plan: elections in exchange for an end to the contras.

Hesitation by Honduras, which had become the major staging base for contra military operations, was overcome by the indirect intervention of Wright and the plan became binding on all Central Americans by Sunday morning.

The Arias Accords were not self-executing, however. Arias, Wright and other members of the Democratic leadership of the House had to intervene forcefully with the Sandinistas and occasionally with the opposition.

Reagan also balked. Even as he opened up to Gorbachev on the world stage, he continued to empower the neocon hardliners on Central America. Reagan refused to let Secretary of State George Shultz send his negotiator to strengthen provisions of the Arias Accords.

Instead, Reagan backed Abrams in his hostility to the Arias plan. Reagan and Abrams staked everything on a Feb. 3, 1988, vote on providing more aid to the contras, which they lost 219-212.

By failing to show flexibility, Reagan didn’t share in the success in Nicaragua that was achieved with the Arias Accords by opening up the political system. In February 1990, abiding by the accords, the Sandinistas held an election and lost 55 percent to 41 percent. They didn’t regain power until 2007.

Mozambique

Though the neocons and other hardliners dominated Reagan’s policies toward most Third World hot spots – from Central America to Africa to Afghanistan – there was one major exception, Mozambique, where Reagan showed flexibility and it worked.

Mozambique was a former Portuguese colony that won its independence late and had to fight for it. In the 1970s, Mozambique embraced Marxism-Leninism as the ruling ideology of its one party, the Frelimo, and concluded a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union.

However, the Reagan administration did not embrace the rebels fighting the Frelimo. In fact, the administration concluded that the Mozambican rebels were a proxy force of South Africa’s apartheid regime and guilty of horrific human rights violations.

Under the policy of Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker, the Reagan administration called for “constructive engagement” with Mozambique and offered the government military aid and special assistance to its railroads. However, Congress said no to these initiatives and prohibited seven different kinds of aid.

I was hired by the Mozambique government in 1987 to lobby for the removal of these restrictions. On the theory that Mozambique was ready to abandon the Soviet model and embrace multi-party elections and a free-market economy, I was successful in the first three months in winning the removal of three of the seven restrictions.

Was I telling the truth or were the right-wingers right?

Everything I saw and every person I talked to convinced me there was no deception. But the final event that cinched my belief in the Mozambicans was a conversation I had with President Chissano in May 1988.

He related a recent conversation with an Eastern European president, who told him that although we say we are for the people, those who do well under our system are the Party and its apparatchiki. Where the people do well and where the governments have succeeded is Western Europe. Those are the countries we must now emulate.

Today, Mozambique is on the path of peace, yearly economic growth, and a maturing citizenry. Reagan showed good sense on Mozambique; to my knowledge no neocon played a role in moving Mozambique toward the West.

I cite these three examples – El Salvador, Nicaragua and Mozambique – because I was involved in each of them and each showed the folly of following the Manichean view of two sides – one good and one bad.

The Nicaraguan war – and the bloody struggle in nearby El Salvador – were finally resolved when more flexible individuals, who did not see the situations in blacks and whites, took control of the policy and recognized how to put together a package that gave peace a chance.

I thus fear the real-life consequences when the neocons declare how they will bring “democracy” to the Third World by force of arms if necessary. They respect neither the role of history nor the power of culture in determining how a country will respond to democratic initiatives.

Neocons – absorbed by their ideological certitude – don’t know when to back off. Country specialists often do.

Neo-Cons on Afghanistan

Despite the neocons’ long history of bloody and costly miscalculations, they are back at center stage again, influencing the new Obama administration and setting the parameters for Washington’s debate about the war in Afghanistan.

Again, highflying rhetoric at the conceptual level is where the neocons are most comfortable. Read the words of Robert Kagan, now an influential columnist, and a Washington Post editorial (both published in March 2009) as they celebrated President Obama’s initial decision to pursue a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

As Kagan wrote: “An effective counter terrorism approach requires an effective counterinsurgency strategy aimed … at strengthening Afghan civil society and governing structures, providing the necessary security to the population so that it can resist pressures from the Taliban, and significantly increasing the much-derided ‘nation-building’ element of the strategy.

“The United States, he [Obama] argues, has to help the Afghan people fulfill ‘the promise of a better future,’ by rooting out government corruption, helping the elected government provide basic services, fighting the narcotics trade, and, in general, advancing ‘security, opportunity, and justice.’ This is the opposite of a ‘minimal’ approach.” [Robert Kagan, “Obama’s Gutsy Decision on Afghanistan” The Washington Post, March 27, 2009. Emphasis added.]

The next day, Kagan’s views were echoed in a Washington Post editorial, which instructed its readers that:

“The lesson is that only a strategy that aims at protecting and winning over the populations where the enemy operates, and at strengthening the armies, judiciaries, and police and political institutions of Afghanistan, can reverse the momentum of the war and, eventually, allow a safe and honorable exit for U.S. and NATO troops.” [Editorial “The Price of Realism,” Washington Post, March 28, 2009. Emphasis added.]

If Kagan and the Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt cared about details or even bothered to read the reporting in The Washington Post, they would know that beneath the terms “governing structures” (Kagan) and “political institutions” (Hiatt), at least outside Kabul, there is nothing.

The fundamental problem with Obama’s Afghan counterinsurgency strategy is the lack of qualified government officials and a functioning Afghan government. Afghanistan has been without a qualified cadre of bureaucrats since the communist government collapsed in 1992.

While President Hamid Karzai’s administration is rightly denounced for corruption, it also deserves condemnation for ignoring the tedious work of building a skilled cadre of government workers.

And it makes little sense for a beefed-up U.S. military to occupy unsecured areas and provide government services when Afghanistan lacks the civil affairs personnel to take over those jobs.

This past summer, after 4,500 U.S. Marines routed Taliban forces from parts of Helmand Province, U.S. officials were struck by the shortage of trained Afghan troops to augment the force and by the unwillingness of Afghan officials to provide government services in a relatively remote and dangerous area.

Rather than a second wave of Afghan bureaucrats providing civilian services, the Marines were followed by a small international “stabilization team.”

As Post correspondent Pamela Constable reported, U.S. and British officials said “several factors, including a lack of qualified and educated workers in the remote province, a shortage of housing and office facilities for professionals from larger cities like Kandahar or Kabul, and a series of tensions and rivalries among various Afghan agencies, were impeding the kind of follow-up needed to convince residents that the Afghan government is credible, committed and a better alternative than the Taliban …

"‘What we need is to put visible Afghan government in these areas,’ said John Weston, a U.S. civilian aide in Helmand who also had worked in Iraq. … Without a solid Afghan presence, he added, 'we will have a lot of well-meaning Americans doing good things, but it will be a trap.’" [Washington Post, July 18, 2009]

In Afghanistan, the key issue is not specific U.S. troop levels, but the need to build up a government infrastructure, a competent Afghan military, and an effective army of government bureaucrats.

On Oct. 22, another intrepid Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran found little progress on the problem that Constable identified.

He wrote: “Skeptics of [Gen. Stanley] McChrystal's [counterinsurgency] strategy worry that the Afghan government will not move with haste to take advantage of security improvements created by the United States. Despite repeated requests, the government in Kabul has not sent officials to Nawa to help on issues that matter most to local people: education, health, agriculture and rural development. …

“For now, the Marines are focused on another big risk to progress here – the lack of basic services. They are working with diplomats and U.N. officials in Kabul to prod key ministries to set up offices in Nawa.”

Still, Robert Kagan and his neocon allies in charge of the Post’s editorial pages gave full support for a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan that the newspaper’s own reporters revealed is possibly fatally flawed because of the dearth of qualified civilian experts who can take on the job of providing basic services at the local level.

Why, at long last, should we pay any attention to what the neocons have to say? They miss the essence of things every time.

Dubya: The Surreal Afterlife of an Ex-President

2009-12-16T12:15:00.000-08:00

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/15-1

December 15, 2009 by The Independent/UK
Dubya: The Surreal Afterlife of an Ex-President
What has the most unpopular US President of all time been doing during his first year of retirement? Telling bad jokes – and defending his reputation in Texas
by Alex Hannaford

George W Bush is clearly enjoying himself. Alone on the stage, mic in hand, he tells a story about a moment earlier this year when he was walking his dog, Barney, around the Dallas suburb he now calls home. "I wanted to say hello to my neighbours," says Bush, "because I was worried we'd inconvenienced them when word was out that George Bush was moving where they lived. I hadn't walked in a neighbourhood in eight years. Ain't that interesting? Barney had never walked in a neighbourhood either ... he only knew the lawn of the White House; he only knew Crawford, Texas, he only knew Camp David."

George W Bush with President Obama after his 2009 swearing-in. (AFP) He decided to go up to a neighbour and say hello, Bush tells us. But just as he goes to shake the neighbour's hand, Bush realises that he still has a plastic poop bag covering his hand like a glove.

The image of Dubya holding a poop-scoop mitt settles on the audience who have come to see him speak at a stadium in San Antonio, Texas. Then he launches into another anecdote - an old favourite about the time Laura asked him to go out and buy a battery from the local hardware store and someone asked whether anyone had ever told him he looked just like the former President. It happens all the time, he'd replied. "The guy then takes a couple of steps away then turns round and says, 'That must make you mad'."

He soaks up the applause from his position on a stage in the centre of the stadium. I can see Bush fairly clearly from my seat, although his voice is occasionally drowned out, not just by the cheers of the crowd, but by four middle-aged women who are yelling "war criminal" at him at the top of their lungs. He can't hear them though, and after a while they're escorted out of the venue by security guards. Bush looks at ease with this crowd as he strides from one corner to the other. He is wearing a sharp grey suit, and smiles regularly as he regales us, a mostly adoring audience, with tales of how, at 63, he is now adjusting to life as a 'regular guy'.

This is the 'Get Motivated' business seminar, and Bush is top billing to a host of other speakers. Around 15,000 people have paid just $10 each, in some cases less, to be here. With tactical scheduling, Bush is one of the last on stage - at around 3pm. Most of us have been here since 6.45am. Motivational talks have been the hallmark of Bush's retirement (he is reported to charge a fee of $150,000, or around £92,000, for each appearance) - which so far hasn't amounted to much more than a gentle schedule of low-key appearances in the safety of the South.

His new life isn't just a far cry from the Oval Office, it's a world apart from the activities of other former Presidents, including his father (the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, for example, raised over $130m for victims of the hurricane).

So is Bush Jr content with his lot on the can't-complain trail? Two weeks before he left office, he told Fox News he was looking forward to going back to Texas. "I love Texas," he said. "I love my wife. And you know, I'm excited about the next chapter in my life."

After what Norman Ornstein, writing in the International Herald Tribune, described as a "gentlemanly-goodbye exit" from the White House in January ("presidential transitions are always difficult, but beginning well before the election, Bush ... removed many of the usual obstacles, fostering co-operation and harmony"), Bush and the former First Lady moved into a modest house in a Dallas suburb and promptly disappeared. Has the world's most notorious Texan become the Lone Lounger?

***

Daria Place is a cul-de-sac in the pleasant Preston Hollow neighbourhood north of Dallas. The Bushes' single-storey 8,500 sq ft house apparently sits on an acre plot here, and was bought by the couple for $2.7m. Just before the Bushes arrived in January, Dallas City Council approved their request to erect a security gate at the junction of nearby Meaders Lane - the only access to Daria Place.

Today, pink pansies sit in a little flower garden beside the gate, and if you look carefully you can see a discreet camera positioned to one side of the entrance. But apart from the new gate, there's really nothing special about Daria Place or its adjoining streets. Actually, it's all fairly drab by Dallas standards. Modest single-storey bungalows stand side-by-side with more elaborate Tuscan-style villas (the really big mansions are elsewhere in Preston Hollow). It just looks like any other middle-class Dallas street. It's quiet too. Leaves clutter the gutters of houses in the next street, and a couple of children play on a small blue scooter outside their home.

The Bushes' home is close to a busy tollway and Dallas Love Field airport, so travel is easy. He has been spotted mountain biking (followed by a Secret Service detail) in Rochester Park a few miles up the road, and just south is the Southern Methodist University (SMU) where his Presidential Library will be built. Beyond that is the Highland Park United Methodist Church which he and Laura occasionally attend. Until recently the Dallas Police Department had posted an officer outside their house, but not any longer: budget cuts have meant the Bushes have to rely solely on Secret Service protection now.

Do Americans prefer their former Presidents to maintain a presence on the world stage, or, like Gerald Ford, do they expect them to just play golf in "retirement"?

Leaving office with a presidential approval rating of 22 per cent - the lowest in 60 years - two unfinished wars and the deepest recession since the Great Depression is no excuse for laziness.

Nixon, whose presidency was unceremoniously ended by Watergate, worked hard at rehabilitating himself for years into his retirement, writing books and counselling on foreign policy issues that commentators say were regarded by parties on both sides of the divide as being reasoned and thorough. It took time, but Nixon proved it could be done.

When Jimmy Carter left the White House in 1981 he launched into an ambitious second career attempting to broker peace in the Middle East, monitoring elections and helping to bring about conflict resolution. His Carter Centre worked at bringing agricultural self-sufficiency to sub-Saharan Africa, while its health programmes in Africa and Asia have helped try to eradicate a parasite afflicting 10 million people, also addressing diseases such as river blindness and trachoma.

Bill's Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) was set up in 2005 to help eradicate poverty, combat the spread of AIDS, curb childhood obesity and fight global warming.

Sure, George W Bush will have his presidential library for posterity, in a tradition which began in 1939 when Franklin Roosevelt donated his personal and public documents to the federal government, and which has now become a network of repositories for preserving all presidential papers.

Bush has said publicly that he wants to use his George W Bush Institute - part of the George W Bush Presidential Centre in Dallas, which will include his archives and library - to "promote human freedom" and search for "practical solutions to important public policy problems, guided by the principles of freedom, responsibility, opportunity and compassion."

But although Bush tried to make democracy a theme of his presidency (in his 2005 inaugural address he said "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world"), he has very little credibility on the issues of freedom, opportunity and compassion.

"It may be a genuine aspiration, but I don't know how he can do it," says Jacob Weisberg, journalist and author of The Bush Tragedy. Bush is simply paying lip service to the tradition of a post-office public role, says Weisberg.

"There's no single template for an ex-President. I think Carter redefined the role in a significant way and that he has been a tremendously effective ex-President - in a lot of ways a much more successful ex-President than President. But he has set a fairly high bar. Clinton, while not following it to the letter, has tried to emulate Carter's best qualities. And I think the first Bush did, too, to some extent, with his international humanitarian work."

But since he left office on 20 January, humanitarian work hasn't taken up too much of Bush's schedule. Just one week after walking out of the White House, he and Laura went to a women's basketball game between Baylor and Oklahoma in Waco, where he received a "prolonged standing ovation" from fans.

In February, he paid a surprise visit to 30 students at a political science class at the Southern Methodist University, or SMU, in Dallas. When he walked in "the students applauded but you could tell they were just shocked", said SMU President R. Gerald Turner.

So what has he been doing? In March it was announced that Bush would be writing his memoirs. Publishers Crown, part of the Random House group, paid a reported $7m ($5m less than Clinton's advance for My Life) for a book entitled Decision Points, which is scheduled to launch at the end of 2010.

Instead of telling his life-story, Bush will concentrate on explaining approximately a dozen choices he has made throughout his life - from the decision to quit drinking to sending troops to Iraq. "I want people to understand the environment in which I was making decisions," he told journalists earlier this year. "I want people to get a sense of how decisions were made, and I want people to understand the options that were placed before me."

But it is this year's schedule of low-key ex-presidential glad-handing that has raised eyebrows. This summer Bush and the former First Lady surprised residents of the small town of Woodward, Oklahoma by turning up to their 4th July celebrations. "It's nice of you to give a retired guy something to do," he told them. Johnny McMahon, editor of the local Woodward News tells me the couple was well-received. "He met a few dignitaries in town. He's very popular here. He gave a fine speech but it wasn't political - it was more about the 4th July. It's an extremely conservative area."

Then, in October, Bush gave the keynote address at the "Celebrators" conference in Sevierville, Tennessee - an evangelical Christian outreach event for "seniors" organised by Phil Waldrep Ministries. "Around 8,500 people came and it was sold out," Waldrep, a Southern Baptist evangelist, says. "We could have had 20,000, but that was all the facility would hold."

Waldrep says Bush didn't give a political speech but that it was a "patriotic event celebrating our country and its war veterans". Bush told attendees about pictures he had hanging in the Oval Office, and also most of the usual anecdotes he likes to tout around the speaking circuit.

"He was extremely well-received," Waldrep says. "Particularly when he talked about his love of our country and for his mum and dad. I had the opportunity to spend some time with him privately beforehand. He's a very engaging, gracious man. This is probably a phrase from the American South, but we like to say, 'He's very down to earth'."

***

When Bush left office he said he wasn't going to criticise incoming President Barack Obama. "He deserves my silence," he told guests at a private event in Calgary in March. But some say that the attacks on his policies from the Obama administration have been relentless (Obama recently told a group of Democratic donors, "I don't mind cleaning up the mess that some other folks made, but while I'm there mopping the floor I don't want someone saying 'You're not mopping fast enough'"), and that it's as if Bush no longer cares.

"I give him credit for being true to his word and butting out - but is it indifference?" Jacob Weisberg asks. "There is something of a tradition of not criticising your successors, but it's a tattered tradition. And he has taken going silent on world affairs to the extreme. He has so vanished from the scene that you could think, boy, he shouldn't have been there in the first place, that he is simply not engaged in these subjects."

Weisberg wonders whether he is saving it for his memoirs. "Bush's genius has been setting expectations low. I think Sarah Palin may have helped him out here - the bar has just dropped to the basement."

According to Bruce Bartlett, former domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a US Treasury official under George Bush senior, Bush Jr has left the attacks on Obama to his former Vice President, Dick Cheney.

"I can't help but notice that Cheney has more than filled the gap in terms of making obnoxious and irresponsible statements about the current administration's foreign policy," Bartlett says. "Bush may simply feel he has nothing to add to what Cheney is saying."

Bartlett suggests that Bush may be biding his time, and that his silence so far will pay off. "It may be that the expectations for Bush are so low that as long as he can walk and chew gum at the same time, he may find some extremely modest little thing to do in the future that people will say, 'Oh, he wasn't such a bad guy after all'."

Other commentators believe that Bush does care about criticism of his presidential record, but is biting his tongue. Brian Roberts, a politics professor at the University of Texas, describes attacks on the Bush by the Obama administration as "gratuitous".

"They're very aggressively pointing to Bush administration policies - one after the other - as being the root of all evil, and Bush hasn't risen to the bait. If he was to engage that agenda it would not serve the country well - and it wouldn't be becoming of a former President. But Cheney has - and he's gone beyond in many instances.

Roberts points to the library project as the cornerstone of Bush's fightback. "Presidential libraries often have public policy schools appended to them and tend to be the focus of post- presidential fundraising. One of the things that Bush W is doing is aggressively seeking that bricks-and-mortar legacy that other Presidents have. He's not coming out of the gate and launching some Carter-like human rights initiative. As with Clinton or his father or Reagan, he's getting the library infrastructure in place because that becomes the physical legacy of the presidency and the forum for setting the record straight - or at least setting it in a certain way."

What do Bush's own people say about his post-presidency plans? In a telephone call, his spokesman David Sherzer tells me that Bush believes he must allow his successor to govern and not "weigh in on that".

"The role of a former President and former Vice President - or anyone else who served in the administration - is vastly different. He appreciates [former] Vice President Cheney's service very much and he appreciates him and his strong advocacies of the policies he implemented," says Sherzer.

As for retirement, Sherzer says Bush is "done with politics but not with policy. He's a young man and feels like he has a lot of energy left. He and Mrs Bush are excited about using the Institute as a force for peace, to promote human freedom, global health, accountability in education and economic growth.

"He's excited about continuing to promote these things at a policy institute in the heartland of America." Sherzer points out that since 20 January, Bush has actually given 30 speeches (including the motivational seminar in San Antonio), not only in the US but in India, Korea, China and Japan. In Delhi he told an annual gathering of business leaders the hardware-store anecdote - again - and flew to Korea to give a speech on Seoul-Washington relations at the World Knowledge Forum. "He enjoys sharing reflections from his presidency, his decision-making and management style," Sherzer says.

And for the record, says his spokesman, Bush is 5/6ths of the way through his book ("he's one of the most disciplined people you'd ever meet") and works on it every day - not, Sherzer adds, with a ghost writer, but with a team of researchers and fact-checkers.

As for the anecdotes he likes to relay in his paid speeches, he apparently really did go to the hardware store - Laura sent him out to buy a battery as they'd just moved into their house the day before. He took his secret service protection because, Sherzer says, "he will never regain his anonymity, but he has had a great opportunity to become part of the Dallas community."

Laura too has been busy speaking at conferences around the country. "And she is very involved leading the women's initiative at the presidential centre. They both believe that women will be at the forefront of freedom in the Middle East," Sherzer says. "She has been involved in designing the library. And she's working on her own book, due out in the spring."

I ask if Bush is still friends with anyone from his administration. "He is in touch with a lot of different folks," Sherzer says. "He doesn't miss being President but he misses the team - he sees Condi Rice, Don Evans [former Secretary of Commerce], Josh Bolten [former White House Chief of Staff] still."

***

On stage at the San Antonio arena, Bush is half-way through his 30-minute speech. "I sat behind a desk given to the US by Queen Victoria," he tells a crowd that is now feeding from his hand. "Franklin Roosevelt used that desk. He was in a wheelchair. 'Course, I'm the guy who ate the pretzel and passed out," he jokes, referring to the 2002 incident. "Everyone knows I ate the pretzel, and hardly anyone knew Roosevelt was in a wheelchair."

There are lots of soldiers here today, in full uniform, and he plays up to them and this largely Republican crowd (to be fair to Bush, he and Laura recently attended Fort Hood in Texas to speak to those injured in the shooting last month, but told senior army officials they wanted the visit to remain private and didn't want the media there). He says it dawned on him shortly after 9/11 that the busts he had chosen to stand in the Oval Office, of Churchill, Eisenhower and Lincoln, were all wartime Presidents.

"I didn't put them in there because they were wartime leaders," he says. "When I campaigned I never said 'Elect me, I look forward to being a wartime leader'. It's the worst thing a President ought to be, and it's the last choice of a President to put his troops into harm's way. But I made the decision that the best way to protect the country from cold-blooded killers was to go on the offensive, stay on the offensive and bring them to justice before they hurt us again."

If anybody here this afternoon remains ambivalent, a reference to his Southern roots and a touch of homespun wisdom should seal the deal. "I came to Washington with a set of values, many of which I learned here in Texas," Bush goes on. "And I wanted people to understand I wasn't going to change those values. The temptation in life is to try to be the popular guy, but the important thing is to look in the mirror and be proud of what you see."

The stadium erupts with whooping and applause. Some people are standing. "It wasn't popular," Bush says. "But I believe it was right."

It seems Bush is defending his record in retirement - but at home, in front of crowds of adoring fans. On one politics blog, a commenter (presumably someone who had been in the audience at one of his many speeches and heard the much-repeated dog-walking anecdote) wrote: "I'm sure the former President is much more relaxed in his speaking style now that the pressure's off. We aren't worried about his 'faux poos' reflecting on our national image, and neither is he." Quite.

Out of office: Lives of the ex-Presidents

Bill Clinton (US President 1993-2001)

Clinton has written two books: his 2004 autobiography, My Life, and the charity manual Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World, in 2007. Last August, he made a surprise trip to North Korea to negotiate the release of two US journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling; they were released the next day and flew back with him. In the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, he advocated vigorously on behalf of his wife, Hillary.

George H W Bush (1989-1993)

In 2005 appeared with Clinton in a series of TV ads encouraging aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Otherwise limits public appearances to occasions such as the state funeral of Ronald Reagan in June 2004.

Ronald Reagan (1981-1989)

Publicly campaigned for issues including the repeal of the 22nd Amendment, which prohibits a president from serving more than two terms. Established the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation in California, which contains a library with information on his presidency.

Jimmy Carter (1977-1981)

Of the recent former presidents, arguably Carter has enjoyed the most prolific post-office career. Has conducted peace missions in North Korea and Gaza, winning him the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, and has been a prominent critic of the death penalty in certain parts of the US. Has also authored 27 books including a children's book, The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer, illustrated by his daughter, Amy.

Gerald Ford (1974-1977)

In 1977, Ford founded the Gerald R Ford Institute of Public Policy in Albion, Michigan, to give undergraduates training in public policy. Was an outspoken critic of George W Bush's decision to use Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for invading Iraq.

Richard Nixon (1969-1974)

Spent much of his time trying to rebuild his reputation post-Watergate, most famously through his 1977 television interviews with David Frost. Wrote 10 books, and offered his opinions on diplomacy to subsequent Oval Office residents. Rob Sharp

Triumph of the Money Party

2009-12-16T10:23:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Triumph-of-the-Money-Party-by-Michael-Collins-091216-299.html

December 16, 2009
Triumph of the Money Party
By Michael Collins
Health Care Reform DOA. Why the Surprise?
They Did what they Always Do

The Money Party is a small group of enterprises and individuals who have most of the money in this country. They use that money to make more money. Controlling who gets elected to public office is the key to more money for them and less for us September 30, 2007

Dr. Howard Dean, MD, just said pull the plug on the current health care reform effort. The cure is worse than the disease according to the good doctor.

Why the surprise?

Last week the president announced that he's sending 30,000 troops to Afghanistan without a declaration of war by Congress and without Afghanistan posing a direct threat to the United States violating both the United States Constitution and international law at the same time.

The bailed out Wall Street failures are paying back just enough of their loans to the Treasury Department to allow a new round of huge bonuses. At the same time, they continue to get tons of cash through the Federal Reserve. Pay back a few billion, get seven trillion dollars in credit. Not a bad deal.

Congress failed to pass a bill to help with foreclosures. We're at eight million so far since 2008 with another four million predicted for 2010. The beat goes on.

The Justice Department and Congress failed to seriously investigate massive mortgage fraud from the very top on down to loan officers during the real estate bubble.

The White House and Congress forgot to include a cap on credit card rates in its credit card bill of rights. How unfortunate since the credit card companies jacked rates way up shortly after the bill passed.

The official unemployment rate of 10% is far below the true unemployment rate of about 17% or higher. Why? Because it might upset us to know that we're at Great Depression levels of unemployment.

Poverty is rising at a rapid rate with no end in sight but you'd never know it for all the attention it gets. Let the markets take care of it.

The people who made the financial mess on Wall Street are now running the U.S. Treasury. Key players, Secretary of the Treasury Geithner and insider extraordinaire Larry Summers, were appointed right after the inauguration.

The constitutional rights stolen by the previous administration are still missing in action with no real effort underway to restore them. The Patriot Act is alive and well. The feds can still tap your phone and email. They can get at any of your financial data they want and it's all done in secret. But we still haven't had a real investigation of 911.

Congress is about to consider an international treaty of copyright that will turn anyone with a public blog or web site into a cop required to enforce the new laws or face prosecution.

Throughout it all, not one member of Congress or the financial elite will miss a meal, worry about their health care, lose their house, or ever face prosecution for destroying the economy of the United States.

Their Ponzi scheme is literally too big to fail. If there were ever the least bit of concentrated scrutiny on the various wars and financial rip offs over just the past decade, it would be the end of all of them.

But The Money Party is a permanent fixture in our lives. It dominates politics, the media, and the economy. It's a self fulfilling prophecy that is always accurate. Rig the game so only those with money can run for office. Hold elections with invisible ballots on electronic voting machines that nobody really understands. Allow all sorts of legal bribes for legislators. And never allow the term election fraud to be mentioned anywhere but on a few internet web sites.

Marginalize the poor, ethnic groups, immigrants, and anyone who protests the system. Kill the unions. Then intimidate those who have the courage to show up and protest with SWAT Teams decked out for a serious beat down.

Take all you can from the middle class to support the big casino in banking and on Wall Street. Make husbands and wives work two jobs and be grateful for the opportunity. Provide children a lousy education that costs more every year while you talk about how much you love education.

Create false issues that pit one group against another --race against race, class against class -- so that the great horror is never realized -- a unified public movement to demand freedom, dignity, and respect in our personal and public lives and a chance to earn a decent living in return for our hard work.

The Money Party has no ideals or goals other than to take as much as they can, at every turn, all the time and never let up.

Blame citizens for the fraud committed by the financiers.

Turn a blind eye as people lose their homes, savings, health care, and jobs.

Blame humanity for pollution when it's just a few industries that create the filth that's threatening us daily.

Create side shows not worthy of a second rate carnival that you call politics and never mention that changes in administrations are really cosmetic and stylistic, not substantial. Meet the new boss, not exactly the same as the old boss, but close enough.

It's all good if you're at the top or on the take. The river keeps flowing, filthy as it is, in your direction with more and more based on the real work and the real economy of citizens who, despite all of this, strive to improve their lives and contribute to the larger good.

If things get too hot, you can just stage a big drama, get everybody upset, and make people feel grateful that they have the opportunity to be perpetual victims of the most rapacious, relentless, and callous scheme around to transfer wealth from the many to the very few.

It's only class war when we fight back and they're ready with their distracting dramas and debates on issues where the two sides are separated by just a few degrees of difference. Then demand bipartisan solutions where compromise is routinely used to break major campaign promises.

They don't care if we live or die although they do want us to be as productive as possible up to the end, as long as we don't expect to retire or enjoy the fruits of our labor.

We are nothing to them.

END

Leaders of the Rich World Are Enacting a Giant Fraud

2009-12-11T14:29:00.000-08:00

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/11

December 11, 2009 by The Independent/UK
Leaders of the Rich World Are Enacting a Giant Fraud
by Johann Hari

Every delegate to the Copenhagen summit is being greeted by the sight of a vast fake planet dominating the city's central square. This swirling globe is covered with corporate logos - the Coke brand is stamped over Africa, while Carlsberg appears to own Asia, and McDonald's announces "I'm loving it!" in great red letters above. "Welcome to Hopenhagen!" it cries. It is kept in the sky by endless blasts of hot air.

This plastic planet is the perfect symbol for this summit. The world is being told that this is an emergency meeting to solve the climate crisis - but here inside the Bela Centre where our leaders are gathering, you can find only a corrupt shuffling of words, designed to allow countries to wriggle out of the bare minimum necessary to prevent the unravelling of the biosphere.

Staggering across the fringes of the summit are the people who will see their countries live or die on the basis of its deliberations. Leah Wickham, a young woman from Fiji, broke down as she told the conference she will see her homeland disappear beneath the waves if we do not act now. "All the hopes of my generation rest on Copenhagen," she pleaded. Dazed Chinese and Indian NGOs explain how the Himalayan ice is rapidly vanishing and will be gone by 2035 - so the great rivers of Asia that are born there will shrivel and cease. They provide water for a quarter of humanity.

Mohamed Nasheed, the President of the drowning Maldives, said simply: "The last generation of humans went to the moon. This generation of humans needs to decide if it wants to stay alive on planet Earth."

We know what has to happen to give us a fighting chance of avoiding catastrophe. We need carbon emissions in rich countries to be 40 per cent lower than they were in 1990 - by 2020. We can haggle with each other over how to get there but we can't haggle with atmospheric physics over the end-goal: the Earth's atmosphere has put this limit on what it can absorb, and we can respect it, or suffer.

Yet the first week of this summit is being dominated by the representatives of the rich countries trying to lace the deal with Enron-style accounting tricks that will give the impression of cuts, without the reality. It's essential to understand these shenanigans this week, so we can understand the reality of the deal that will be announced with great razzmatazz next week.

Most of the tricks centre around a quirk in the system: a rich country can "cut" its emissions without actually releasing fewer greenhouse gases. How? It can simply pay a poor country to emit less than it otherwise would have. In theory it sounds okay: we all have the same atmosphere, so who cares where the cuts come from?

But a system where emissions cuts can be sold among countries introduces extreme complexity into the system. It quickly (and deliberately) becomes so technical that nobody can follow it - no concerned citizen, no journalist, and barely even full-time environmental groups. You can see if your government is building more coal power stations, or airports, or motorways. You can't see if the cuts they have "bought" halfway round the world are happening - especially when they are based on projections of increases that would have happened, in theory, if your government hadn't stumped up the cash.

A study by the University of Stanford found that most of the projects that are being funded as "cuts" either don't exist, don't work, or would have happened anyway. Yet this isn't a small side-dish to the deal: it's the main course. For example, under proposals from the US, the country with by far the highest per capita emissions in the world wouldn't need to cut its own gas by a single exhaust pipe until 2026, insisting it'll simply pay for these shadow-projects instead.

It gets worse still. A highly complex system operating in the dark is a gift to corporate lobbyists, who can pressure or bribe governments into rigging the system in their favour, rather than the atmosphere's. It's worth going through some of the scams that are bleeding the system of any meaning. They may sound dull or technical, but they are life or death to countries like Leah's.

Trick one: hot air. The nations of the world were allocated permits to release greenhouse gases back in 1990, when the Soviet Union was still a vast industrial power - so it was given a huge allocation. But the following year, it collapsed, and its industrial base went into freefall - along with its carbon emissions. It was never going to release those gases after all. But Russia and the eastern European countries have held on to them in all negotiations as "theirs". Now, they are selling them to rich countries who want to purchase "cuts". Under the current system, the US can buy them from Romania and say they have cut emissions - even though they are nothing but a legal fiction.

We aren't talking about climatic small change. This hot air represents 10 gigatonnes of CO2. By comparison, if the entire developed world cuts its emissions by 40 per cent by 2020, that will only take six gigatonnes out of the atmosphere.

Trick two: double-counting. This is best understood through an example. If Britain pays China to abandon a coal power station and construct a hydro-electric dam instead, Britain pockets the reduction in carbon emissions as part of our overall national cuts. In return, we are allowed to keep a coal power station open at home. But at the same time, China also counts this change as part of its overall cuts. So one tonne of carbon cuts is counted twice. This means the whole system is riddled with exaggeration - and the figure for overall global cuts is a con.

Trick three: the fake forests - or what the process opaquely dubs "LULUCF". Forests soak up warming gases and store them away from the atmosphere - so, perfectly sensibly, countries get credit under the new system for preserving them. It is an essential measure to stop global warming. But the Canadian, Swedish and Finnish logging companies have successfully pressured their governments into inserting an absurd clause into the rules. The new rules say you can, in the name of "sustainable forest management", cut down almost all the trees - without losing credits. It's Kafkaesque: a felled forest doesn't increase your official emissions... even though it increases your actual emissions.

There are dozens more examples like this, but you and I would lapse into a coma if I listed them. This is deliberate. This system has been made incomprehensible because if we understood, ordinary citizens would be outraged. If these were good faith negotiations, such loopholes would be dismissed in seconds. And the rich countries are flatly refusing to make even these enfeebled, leaky cuts legally binding. You can toss them in the bin the moment you leave the conference centre, and nobody will have any comeback. On the most important issue in the world - the stability of our biosphere - we are being scammed.

Our leaders are aren't giving us Hopenhagen - they're giving us Cokenhagen, a sugary feelgood hit filled with sickly additives and no nutrition. Their behaviour here - where the bare minimum described as safe by scientists isn't even being considered - indicates they are more scared of the corporate lobbyists that fund their campaigns, or the denialist streak in their own country, than of rising seas and falling civilisations.

But there is one reason why I am still - despite everything - defiantly hopeful. Converging on this city now are thousands of ordinary citizens who aren't going to take it any more. They aren't going to watch passively while our ecosystems are vandalised. They are demanding only what the cold, hard science demands - real and rapid cuts, enforced by a global environmental court that will punish any nation that endangers us all. This movement will not go away. Copenhagen has soured into a con - but from the wreckage, there could arise a stronger demand for a true solution.

If we don't raise the political temperature very fast, the physical temperature will rise - and we can say goodbye to Leah, and to the only safe climate we have ever known.

Why is Lloyd Blankfein

2009-12-11T12:55:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Why-is-Lloyd-Blankfein-by-Aetius-Romulous-091209-518.html

December 10, 2009
Why is Lloyd Blankfein
By Aetius Romulous

Lloyd Blankfein is the name of the human who is the Chief Executive Officer (the big man) of the global finance corporation called Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is one of history's most successful human endeavours, a legal set of contracts that has accumulated over a trillion dollars in wealth. As CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein is an agent of the corporation - the top agent - and so another set of legal contracts rewards him with a share of that wealth in return for his agency service. His share amounted to about 65 million USDs in 2007.

Lloyd Blankfein is ranked among the top 1% of all humans in financial wealth and power by any earthly measure. Except for this fact, and all facts that trail from it, Lloyd Blankfein is a pretty average human in all other regards. There are thousands of Lloyd Blankfeins atop thousands of similar bundles of legal entities - as well as a number of illegal ones. However, there are billions of humans of exact biology on the planet, 99 out of every one hundred (or more) without the wealth, power, and prestige of the very few Lloyd Blankenfein subsets.

One might expect that in a situation such as this, the 99% side would simply knock Lloyd Blankfein on the head with a stick and take all his stuff. There are more of them, after all. Strange, however, that they don't. In fact, on the occasion that anybody ever tries to force a more equitable arrangement (as sometimes happens) members of the 99 club chuck the pushy bugger into jail. Or worse.

How did it come to pass that such a system grew and flourished where the set up is so head - scratchingly inequitable? Why does the near entirety of the human race voluntarily acquiesce to such a system? Why have millions wasted human ingenuity, labour, production...and their very own precious lives to defend a status quo that is grievously unnatural? Are people stupid?

Sort of.

At some distant point in the long forgotten past, in the age where humans became humans, Lloyd Blankfein's direct descendant was among the first to trade his half eaten fish for some other guys stinking hunk of gazelle. This was a time in pubescent civilization where nature was powerful, both giving and taking with equal resolve and mystery. The earth and its gifts were venerated - the fickle bounty of celestial beings, spirits which cowering humans called gods. All beasts took from the earth's natural resources to their sustainable limit, and no more. Homo Habilis Lloyd Blankenfein survived by using his new and wonderfully adaptable brain to sate his desire for sustenance. Community and cooperation improved the human condition. Progress was born.

The "economics" were pretty simple. The earth's resources were abundant and free, belonging to no man. Humans took from the earth, and by applying their peculiar skill and resolve, manufactured goods to meet their desires. From nothing came something; a rock became a tool, a log became a boat, a cave became a home. All the products of human production were composed of only two things - the natural and free resources of the world within reach, and the application of human exertion and creativity. The rock - chipped into a sharp edge - became the reward for human labour. A prehistoric scraping tool the wages of a day's labour to the man who invested the effort.

The confluence of labour and natural resources gave rise to an inventory of human production; that inventory was the created wealth of human existence. Some of that wealth was used to increase the production of more wealth. Some of it was directed to community sustenance. None of it was wasted, as overproduction was pointless. All the produce of human endeavour was added to a pool of wealth from which was drawn by exchange the individual desires of the cooperating community. The wages humans received for their individual effort were retained for use, or traded for the wages of others in the form of goods that met additional desires. Equilibrium was reached where the pooled wealth of the community was enough to sustain mankind, and provide from the pool enough surpluses that some could become capital used to continuously improve production, and thus wealth. Community and equality - where an individual soul could take no more wealth than that which he invested in his own tradeable labour - lifted the condition of man from savage beast to wondrous civilization.

This setup lasted for... a week or so, maybe. Who really knows?

What happened next became a signature event in the history of civilization as we understand it. Until that moment, only a man's labour was his own - the products of that labour by extension his own property to do with what he pleased. Then, suddenly, there arose a class of people who changed the rules forever, folks whose actions have become cemented into modern consciousness as accepted norm, the status quo, and the way it is and always should be. A distant Lloyd Blankfein decided that his share was not enough, and over reached to claim the share of others. Lloyd Blankenfein's lineal ancestor created private property, picked up a weapon, and announced that this land was no longer common, but his alone. Since that moment all of history has been a defence or rationalization of that singular act - the violent appropriation of the free and unbounded by a few, at the expense of the many. And the rest, as they say, is history.

For over twenty thousand years humans have been enshrining as natural law that which is unnatural. The violent expropriation of another's labour has disappeared from view, covered by the complex blanket of social economics we call normal. Free markets, democratic freedoms, patriotism, religion, and dogma off all kinds have celebrated and defended Lloyd Blankfein types throughout the ages. Civilization's measure has become the very uncivilized pursuit of accumulating more than your fair share. All wealth comes - ultimately - from the natural environment. By privatizing that environment and keeping it from free use, we deny others their equal due. That natural environment is finite, and the fencing of one part decreases the balance for the rest. Lloyd Blankenfein can only exist at the expense of others, a fact we just seem to love to death.

Our wretched poverty and excess are firmly buttressed by law and custom - law and custom created and defended over centuries by the established aristocracies of expropriated wealth. We used to call these governments. Now we call them corporations. The vast majority of law in any language is still property law - rules for getting more than your share, forests of tomes on then defending it from others. And lawyers. Lloyd Blankfein is just following the rules, and living within the full extent of both law and custom. Which is, of course, an understatement. Lloyd Blankfein exists because we think we need him to, and so acquiesce despite the fact that deep down inside, every one of us knows that something about that is just wrong somehow.

Wrong somehow. Only the most ideology riddled Luddite amongst us does not question, in some small way, the overwhelming wealth of some at the same time as the spirit breaking lack of same of so many, many others. Every person alive today feels to some degree a deep, gut anger and simmering resentment at the difference between us and ours, and Lloyd Blankfein and his. I know it, and you know it. Why can't we simply admit our basic human instinct, buried deep in our genes and our DNA and every atom of our humanness, that this is wrong and is neither civilization, nor progress. We can't admit it because of the constraints society, culture, and dogma place upon us, built there stick by stick over tens of thousands of revolutions of the earth about the sun. Are we stupid? Sort of. We are conflicted, beaten and subjugated by the rules we were born under, and we know no other. We have a good excuse I guess, and plasma TVs with which to enjoy it.

Of course, there is always the chance that we are wrong, that earth is not meant to be shared, and that poverty and squalor should rejoice at Lloyd Blankfein. Still, it just seems too awfully squishy to accept it the way it is. As that simmering inequity grows, the gap widens and the pie shrinks, don't we all feel more and more like we should do something about it? Don't we just wish someone would step into history and deal with this thing? Or are we waiting for someone else to do it?

Or am I the only person who feels this way?

Captains of industry write EU's script

2009-11-30T14:18:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/27/europe-industry/print

Captains of industry write EU's script
The real power in Europe isn't wielded by MEPs or by unelected officials, but by male-dominated corporations
David Cronin
guardian.co.uk,
27 November 2009

It is little wonder that José Manuel Barroso is seldom seen without a grin on his face these days. For the European commission chief is one of the luckiest guys in international politics. First, the appointment of a low-profile Belgian as the EU's first permanent president has meant that Barroso will be able to keep on behaving as if he is the most powerful man in Brussels. And now, it looks likely that Barroso won't need to lose any sleep about assembling his new team of commissioners (even if they don't formally start work until January, a few months later than originally expected).

Theoretically, it's still possible that MEPs will cause him difficulties as they did in 2004, when they objected to the nomination of Rocco Buttiglione as justice commissioner because the Italian equated homosexuality with sin. The signals from the European parliament have been that if it wanted to embarrass Barroso this time around, it would take issue with the grotesque gender imbalance in the EU executive. However, the probability of this happening has lessened in the past few days as the final composition of his 27-strong team emerged. It features nine women – one more than the outgoing commission.

Like many men, I feel slightly ill-at-ease addressing gender issues. Yet it strikes me that anyone who believes in equality should applaud the campaign being run by the European Women's Lobby for more females to be appointed to top jobs. Not only would I be in favour of rules stipulating that there should be an equal representation of men and women in EU institutions, I feel that all the obstacles preventing a greater female participation in politics should be removed.

During the 1990s, I worked as a press officer for an Irish MEP who married and had a child following her election; when she inquired about the parliament's provisions for maternity leave, she was informed that it had none. I'm sure that steps have been taken to rectify this omission since then but the way that EU bodies operate in general (with debates continuing until midnight, for example) can hardly be considered as welcoming to people with young families.

That said, if there's one thing more important than having more women in politics, it's ensuring that policies are implemented that genuinely benefit women. And because most politicians of both genders can't be trusted, there's no guarantee that female leaders will introduce such policies.

Catherine Ashton, the new EU foreign minister, has held the trade portfolio until now. She has used this to forward an aggressive trade liberalisation programme drawn up by her predecessor, Peter Mandelson. This has involved pressurising a range of poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to open their markets to European goods and companies in a way that shows scant regards for the interests of small-scale farmers and industrial workers, many of them female. Ashton has been particularly adamant that "technical barriers" to trade should be scrapped; these "barriers" are frequently social and environmental laws that multinational firms regard as too onerous. And Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the external relations commissioner, has promoted closer relations with Israel, even as it subjected Palestinian women and children to an increasingly cruel occupation.

To a large degree, the hearings in the European parliament which Barroso's new team is required to undergo will amount to a tedious charade. The real power in Europe isn't wielded by MEPs or by unelected officials but by male-dominated corporations. If you don't believe me, here's an exercise I recommend. Click on the website of BusinessEurope, the umbrella group for major companies, and read a few of their policy papers. Then check the European commission's statements on the same subjects; if you can spot any substantial difference, you deserve a higher reward than I can afford to give you.

This week Barroso issued a "consultation paper", ostensibly designed to kick off a debate on what the EU's strategic goals should be for the coming decade. The top two priorities it identified were to improve the "knowledge-base" of the European economy and to ensure that its labour markets become more "flexible". Can it be a coincidence that Jürgen Thumann, the president of BusinessEurope, urged that the EU set exactly the same two priorities in a speech earlier this month?

Both Barroso and Thumann want lower wages (though not for themselves, of course) and measures that curb the influence of trade unions. The former seeks reforms on labour relations to make Europe more competitive, the latter indicates that it's necessary to "contain wage pressures" to stimulate exports. Despite their claims to the contrary, it seems that they wish to start a process whereby Europe's welfare states begin to implode, condemning millions of men, women and children to greater hardship. The commission's recent calls on many EU governments to cut public expenditure suggest, too, that this is its agenda.

Without doubt, Barroso will make some efforts on the public relations front to persuade us that he cares deeply about social and environmental issues. The expected appointment of a commissioner for climate change is one such ploy. Nobody should be fooled by these efforts, however. Barroso may be adept at smiling for the cameras but that's exactly what you'd expect from an actor reading a script written by the captains of industry.

The wrong arm of the law

2009-11-19T15:19:00.001-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/17/silverglate-three-felonies-book/print

The wrong arm of the law
A new book reveals how US federal prosecutors twist the law to criminalise legal activities, with connivence from the media
Dan Kennedy
November 2009 19.30 GMT

Sharp-elbowed business executives and grasping politicians may not be especially popular figures within the American iconography. But membership in either of those classes is not a federal crime.

Except when it is.

In an important new book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, Boston civil-rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate argues that over the past several decades the federal government, relying on vague, dangerously elastic statutes, has criminalised a whole range of activities. The result, Silverglate contends, is that people are regularly sent to prison for crimes they hadn't even known they'd committed.

"Wrongful prosecution of innocent conduct that is twisted into a felony charge has wrecked many an innocent life and career. Whole families have been devastated, as have myriad relationships and entire companies," writes Silverglate, a friend as well as an occasional collaborator.

Skeptical? Consider three prominent cases ripped from recent headlines:

• Jurors in a federal courthouse in Brooklyn, New York, took just nine hours to acquit Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin of conspiracy and fraud charges related to the collapse of two hedge funds, a disaster that wiped out $1.6 billion in assets. It seems there was a problem: "It wasn't clear that there was a crime," Peter Henning, a professor at Wayne State University Law School, told Bloomberg. Oh, that. Well, never mind, and double jeopardy be damned. Prosecutors now say they'll bring a wire-fraud charge against the two.

• The latest poster boy for financial shenanigans is Raj Rajaratnam, who manages a hedge fund called Galleon Group and who's been charged with insider trading. Rajaratnam actually lost money on those trades, which makes him either comically inept or innocent. The latter might be a good bet. As the New York Times put it: "Mr Rajaratnam and Galleon trade assets rapidly, gather information rapaciously and focus on short-term gains. But those tactics are not illegal."

• Sal DiMasi, a former speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, is fighting a federal indictment related to political favors he received on the grounds that the federal "honest services fraud" law he's accused of violating is "unconstitutionally vague", according to the Boston Globe. (Silverglate notes that no less an authority than supreme-court justice Antonin Scalia has worried that the "honest services" law could be used to criminalise just about anything, right down to "a mayor's attempt to use the prestige of his office to obtain a restaurant table without a reservation.") First, though, DiMasi must hang on to his lawyer: the feds have reportedly tried to deny DiMasi the counsel of his choice through a dubious conflict-of-interest charge and by attempting to persuade state officials to strip DiMasi of his pension.

According to Silverglate, such aggressive prosecutorial conduct – or, rather, misconduct – is nothing new. Indeed, DiMasi is the third consecutive Massachusetts House speaker to be targeted by the feds. His immediate predecessor, Tom Finneran, Silverglate writes, was convicted of a charge related to his testimony in a civil suit involving redistricting, in which an inconsequential bit of witness-stand gamesmanship was transformed into something akin to perjury. Finneran is now a radio talk-show host, and not a very good one.

Silverglate traces these practices back a half-century, to a time when federal prosecutors began departing from the common-law tradition that you can't convict someone of a crime unless there is criminal intent. The danger, warned supreme-court justice Robert Jackson in 1952, was that prosecutors would target a person and then try to find a law he may have broken – not a difficult task, he noted, given the "great assortment of crimes" on the books.

Such targeting is compounded, Silverglate argues, by the practice of pressuring lesser targets to plead guilty and rat out higher-ups, knowing full well that the more florid the tale of wrongdoing, the more likely they are to receive a lesser sentence. He quotes his friend Alan Dershowitz, a well-known Harvard Law School professor, as saying that such witnesses are taught not only to "sing" but also to "compose".

Silverglate's victims range from doctors to artists. Mainly, though, his cavalcade of the wrongly prosecuted are unsympathetic characters from the world of business – Reagan-era financial wizard Michael Milken, Enron major domos Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, and Silicon Valley investment banker Frank Quattrone among them. By the time Silverglate is through, you are convinced that not only did they commit no crimes, but that their bad-boy images are largely a creation of the media, which eagerly passed along leaks from federal prosecutors.

In fact, Silverglate makes a powerful argument that journalists, far from acting as an independent check on government, all too often are virtual collaborators in abusive law enforcement.

"Reporters are too willing to sit down with their prosecutorial sources to learn about the evil-doers in the dock, without doing the hard work of understanding why and how the government claims their conduct broke the law, or even why and how they are supposedly bad people," Silverglate writes.

The real cause of Wall Street's collapse wasn't conduct that was illegal, but, rather, conduct that was legal. With the financial markets rebounding even as unemployment continues to rise, and with Congress shying away from even the timid reforms proposed by the Obama administration, the public is demanding the legal equivalent of blood.

Silverglate's cautionary tale is a worthwhile counterweight to that justifiable but misplaced anger.

CLASS WAR 101: MEET THE REPTILES (WHO ARE MAKING MEAT OUT OF YOU)

2009-11-19T14:52:00.000-08:00

http://exiledonline.com/class-war-101-meet-the-reptiles-who-are-making-meat-out-of-you/

MARCH 31, 2009
CLASS WAR 101: MEET THE REPTILES (WHO ARE MAKING MEAT OUT OF YOU)
By Mark Ames

(This article was first published last week on Playboy.com)

America is now in a state of bloodlust, following the shocking realization that there are bad people at the top of our economic food chain. We knew there were some bad apples out there, but AIG’s $450 million bonus swindle simply defies everything we assumed about the American character, particularly the character of our best and brightest, our All-Star Success Stories.

It was one thing to bail out their banks and insurance companies—at least our tax dollars weren’t being wired directly to specific people with names and faces, but rather to “institutions,” which makes it a little more palatable. But now, with the AIG scandal, there are real people stuffing their pockets with money looted from us. It suggests that they have no conscience. That they learned nothing. That, in fact, they didn’t give a fuck about our bailout on any emotional grounds, except as it presented a new feeding opportunity. Despite how it works in the movies, we haven’t been brought closer together—we, the common folk taxpayers, and they, the super-wealthy villains we bailed out. And this is what’s so enraging and humiliating: We were denied that cinematic transformation of character that Americans have been brainwashed to expect from our billionaire CEOs with their hardened hearts-of-gold—think Oscar Schindler’s climactic anti-greed speech, or Mister Magoo throwing coins out the window in the cartoon version of A Christmas Carol.

The shock we’re feeling today is like the shock and rage a wife feels after her husband is arrested on 152 counts of child molestation spanning three decades. How could we not know, when it’s been going on every day, every year, right in front of us?

If we’d cared to look around us at any time since the Reagan Revolution, we’d realize that the CEOs, billionaires and finance stars are behaving no differently today than they have been for nearly three decades. When we look back, what will pain us most is the way we admired the billionaires even as they brought about our ruin, turning them into TV celebrities and magazine-cover heroes, worshipping them like rock stars right up to the end.

A perfect example of the kind of person who benefited from the Reagan Revolution is Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap, a corporate superstar during the peak Clinton years, when Reaganomics accelerated under the guiding hands of Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin. It was during Clinton’s centrist pro-business presidency that innovations like the like mass-layoff (rebranded as “downsizing”) became a regular feature of economicbooms, rather than of economic busts, as they had been in the past. Layoffs expanded right with the economy for the simple reason that each mass firing freed up millions or billions of dollars that had gone to workers, but now could be divided up between executives and major shareholders. The problem was finding people cold-blooded enough to do the job—which is to say, there was no problem whatsoever. As Dunlap himself boasted in a 1998 interview with Fortune magazine, “Mickey Mouse could do the cost cutting.”

By that time, he was already a celebrity with a nine-figure net worth. It all started back in 1994, when Al Dunlap was named CEO of Scott Paper. His first move was to fire nearly one-third of the workforce, or 11,200 workers. This cheered investors, who piled in, driving Scott Paper’s stock up by 225 percent. By reclaiming the sum total of whatever 11,200 workers earned and redistributing it to the shareholders and executives, Dunlap earned himself a $100 million payout for 19 months of “Mickey Mouse” chainsaw duty.

Mutual fund billionaire Michael Price was so impressed that in 1996 he brought Dunlap in to “restructure” one of his portfolio investments, the ailing Sunbeam Enterprises. The mere announcement that Dunlap would take his chainsaw onto Sunbeam’s factory floor and massacre all those payroll-sucking employees caused Sunbeam’s stock to rise 60 percent as portfolio investors rushed to get a chunk of the promised loot. And Chainsaw Al didn’t disappoint: as soon as he had an office, he fired 6,000 Sunbeam employees, or half the work force. Investors roared in approval, driving the stock straight up for four months.

But in a now-familiar plot-twist that has repeated itself over the past 30 years, it turned out that Dunlap wasn’t the great Rand-inspired corporate innovator that he and the media made him out to be. Instead, his “success” looks to have from the oldest trick in town: cooking the books. When the shit hit the fan, he was fired, and sued. According to an SEC lawsuit filed against Dunlap, he led a team that:

“employed a laundry list of fraudulent techniques to falsely give the picture of a successful turnaround, falsely raising results, in an attempt to sell the company at an inflated price.”

Sunbeam filed for bankruptcy and shareholders lost $4.4 billion in value. Even though Dunlap was fired from the company he destroyed, he still walked away with at least $16 million. The SEC looked at all this destruction, and decided to punish him with a $500,000 fine. When you consider that he’d already netted at least $116 million in the span of a few years, a half-million dollar “punishment” for all that destruction wasn’t even so much as a slap on the wrist. Moreover, the settlement allowed Dunlap to avoid having to admit wrongdoing.

This same arc has been repeated all over the American economy—what we once thought were isolated cases turned out to be a pattern, and the pattern repeated so much up down corporate America that it finally became clear: These things are the rule. No wonder the SEC never came down hard on anyone: it would have meant shutting down the entire economy and starting from scratch.

In the past, when downsizings and payouts happened, they were seen as a necessary evil in the overall march to a free-market utopia. Now we understand that what really happened wasn’t as complicated or theoretical as it was made out to be. It was a straight-forward transfer of wealth out of the pockets of, say, 11,200 employees at Scott Paper into the pockets of Wall Street bankers and their CEO henchmen. No matter how many words like “efficiency” and “restructuring” you gloss it with, it’s still taking money that formerly went into one group’s pocket, and giving to another, much smaller group.

What’s so strange, looking back, isn’t just the blatant, shameless plundering of thousands of American families for a few individual’s excessive profit, but the way we all adored them while they were in mid-plunder. Just look again at Al Dunlap: he didn’t even try to pretend he was likeable or even human, but still we were licking his boots. As Chainsaw Al himself boasted to the New York Daily News back in 1996, when asked about how he could pocket so much money while destroying so many employees’ lives,

“Did I earn it? Damn right I did!… I’m a superstar in my field, much like Michael Jordan in basketball and Bruce Springsteen . . . “

Looking back, the Daily News’ question to Dunlap is absurd. It’s like asking a crocodile how he could possibly eat a baby wildebeest when its mother is right there on the riverbank watching. “I earned it! Damn right!” is exactly what the croc would answer.

And Dunlap was right, too: we made him a superstar. He didn’t just get away with it, he was a hero for doing what none of us had the guts (or conscience) to do. As the Daily News itself noted, “When he fires thousands of workers, he boasts about it.” You might expect someone who caused as much destruction as Al Dunlap would want to keep a low profile, if not out of a guilty conscience then at least out of a fear that a destroyed worker might hunt him down and get some payback. In the old days that’s what they did. What held those workers back from going to a Dunlap book signing and exacting some revenge? Why didn’t a single person ever attack him?

Dunlap at one of his book signings, not even pretending to worry that one of his adoring fans might be out to get him.

It just wasn’t considered. Not until two weeks ago, when AIG’s Financial Products division received so many death threats and hate emails that they hired armed security guards to protect them from potential revenge attacks.

And yet, there’s a silver lining: The government is finally being forced to act on the taxpayer’s behalf, and make a serious attempt to recover the millions in bonus money from the AIG looters.

This is a class war, in case you didn’t know. On one side are the reptiles like Dunlap, AIG, and so on; on the other side, the humans, us. We’re at a huge disadvantage because, like in Starship Troopers, we’re saddled with a conscience and with fear, and the reptile-plutocrats aren’t. They’re not afraid of shame or fines; but they want to live, as all life forms do. That’s why death threats are bringing real results: Death threats work when you’re dealing with reptiles like AIG’s financial products division. To see what I mean, let’s go back again to the example of Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap:

In 1967, unions were much stronger, income disparities were much narrower, and Americans didn’t culture-hump their bosses. Back then, Al Dunlap tried to apply his “chainsaw” to a company called Sterling Pulp & Paper. He proposed mass firings of its unionized workforce to bring down costs and boost the owners’ share. But Sterling’s 1967 workers weren’t like Sunbeam’s or Scott Paper’s in the 1990s. They didn’t roll over and accept the downsizing with a sullen grumble. Instead, to quote from Dunlap’s own book, “There were also physical threats of violence. We received anonymous calls and letters from nuts who said they were going to blow up my car or shoot me in the parking lot.” It worked: Dunlap caved in to the “nuts,” the workers weren’t downsized, and Dunlap eventually was forced to retreat. (A biographical note: according to the book Testosterone, Inc., Dunlap’s first wife divorced him on grounds of “extreme cruelty” after he allegedly took a knife to her and said, “I’ve always wondered what human flesh tastes like.”)

But America was a different country back then. We weren’t in awe of the CEO class, and they were kept in check. In 1978, American CEOs made more than 30 times the average salary of their company’s employees; by the early 2000s, CEOs made more than 500 times the average salary of their employees. Workers weren’t losing just a portion of the wealth, but also their pensions, health care, vacation time and job security.

Over the past few months, with the repetition of scandals and villains—whose names are different but whose machinations are all roughly the same—we’re starting to understand that people like Al Dunlap weren’t the aberrations we hoped they were. We see a similar modus operandi at work with Lehman’s Dick Fuld, with Merrill Lynch’s John Thain, with the Countrywide execs (who’ve bounced back recently with a new scheme to profit off the misery of Americans), with Washington Mutual’s ex-CEO Kerry Killinger, with Bernie Madoff, and now with AIG’s derivatives traders. They may not be as crude and boastful as Dunlap, but they were far more successful at plunder than he was. The really scary thing is that pretty much everywhere you see a “success story” in corporate America or Wall Street, you’ll find a variation on the “Chainsaw” Dunlap story: plunder, looting, destruction—the reptiles versus the humanoids.

A couple of weeks ago, while researching for an article on the shooting spree in southern Alabama that left 11 people dead, I came across a variation of the Dunlap Plunder in an unlikely place: Pilgrim’s Pride chicken, the largest chicken processor in the world. I looked into Pilgrim’s Pride because the company was high on the shooter’s alleged “hit list.” At the top of his grievances: he and his mother had both filed lawsuits against Pilgrim’s Pride in 2006 claiming they’d been cheated out of their wages. They weren’t the only ones: A class-action lawsuit filed by over 10,000 employees charged the Pilgrim’s Pride with denying payment for overtime work, and the U.S. Labor department agreed. In 2007, the US Labor Department slapped a paltry $3 million fine on Pilgrim’s Pride for illegally undercounting work hours.

It gets worse: Pilgrim’s Pride’s founder Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim overleveraged the company in 2006, the year everyone was overleveraging, in order to acquire rivals and overtake Tyson as the world’s number one chicken producer. He achieved his goal, and assured shareholders it was a wise move; but that’s when the company started getting sued for shaving employees’ salaries, which is another way of saying transferring money from the workers to the owners. Last year, shareholders filed suit against Pilgrim’s Pride, charging securities fraud. By December, the company declared bankruptcy, thereby protecting the billionaire Pilgrim family from its creditors and aggrieved workers and shareholders.

In short: wealth transferred from the pockets of local fireman, police, teachers and utilities into the pockets of the Pilgrim family.

But supposedly there’s nothing we can do. Like AIG, Pilgrim’s Pride is holding a proverbial gun to the American government’s head: if it goes into Chapter 7 and collapses, then as bad as things are now, it could get much worse, with its 50,000 employees facing layoffs and dozens of factories facing closure. As a result, the USDA announced that we, the taxpayers, will spend tens of millions to buy Pilgrim’s Pride chicken. Meanwhile, Pilgrim’s Pride responded by shutting down three plants anyway, and the bankruptcy judge has allowed former executives of Pilgrim to be rehired as “consultants” on company retainer.

Amid all of this, the man who went on his shooting rampage a couple weeks ago, Michael McLendon, appears to have been set off by a decision by Pilgrim’s Pride to suspend his 53-year-old mother from her factory job due to a dispute over how she counted her work hours—the same dispute that Pilgrim has been fighting and losing the past few years. You would think they wouldn’t do something as brash as suspend an employee over a work-time related dispute, not during a lawsuit, not during bankruptcy, not now with Obama in power. Right? But they did.

The new Florida State University “Albert Dunlap Student Success Center” was inaugurated last September, when the financial crisis hit. Dunlap put up $5 million, and the state put up the other $8.5 million or so. Dunlap was awarded an honorary degree in human dissection, before slithering back into his swamp-lair in the Everglades.

Which brings me back to the original point of this article, which is to say that we’ve finally learned our bitter Brady Bunch lesson: The economic elite of this country is made up of people whose exterior features look human, but whose brains are reptilian.

That’s why AIG’s behavior, and all the rest of them, makes so much sense—both their bottomless appetite for plunder in the face of no resistance, and the way they have released the loot from their jaws and scrambled away to the muddy river bottom at the first sign of serious threats from the humans they’ve been feeding on. They’ll retreat for awhile, but in the end, a croc’s got to eat, and his idea of eating isn’t our idea of eating.

Things in this country could get very strange and very hardcore. Stay tuned.

While the Economy Crashes and Burns, Bush Loyalists Are Making a Killing

2009-11-12T10:43:00.001-08:00

While the Economy Crashes and Burns, Bush Loyalists Are Making a Killing
By Nick Turse, Tomdispatch.com
June 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140762/

In May, the U.S. economy lost 345,000 nonfarm jobs, pushing the unemployment rate from 8.9% to 9.4%. According to official statistics, 14.5 million Americans are now looking for work and, as a recent headline at Time.com put it, "The jobs aren't coming back anytime soon." In fact, a team of economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank recently reported that "the level of labor market slack could be higher by the end of 2009 than at any other time in the post-World War Two period."

The news, however, is not altogether grim. While times are especially tough for teenagers (22.7% jobless rate) and blacks (14.9% jobless rate), one group is doing remarkably well. I'm talking about former members of the Bush administration who are taking up prestigious academic posts, inking lucrative book deals, signing up with speakers bureaus, joining big-time law firms and top public relations agencies, and grabbing spots on corporate boards of directors. While their high-priced wars, ruinous economic policies, and shredding of economic safety nets have proved disastrous for so many, for them the economic outlook remains bright and jobs are seemingly plentiful. In fact, many of them have performed the eye-opening feat of securing two or more potentially lucrative revenue streams at once during these tough financial times.

While it would likely take a small book to catalogue the fates of all former "loyal Bushies," a look at just a few of these fortunate folks indicates that not everybody was harmed by the Bush era.

The Memoirists

Many of the top figures of the Bush years are joining the ranks of (or reaffirming their credentials as) men and women of letters. Following in the footsteps of 2003-2006 White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who wrote the tell-some exposé, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, is former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (2001-2006). Now penning his life story for Sentinel, a conservative imprint of the Penguin Group, he has announced that he is forgoing an advance and donating all proceeds to charity. Similarly, 2006-2009 Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is reportedly donating the "author's profits" from his forthcoming "insider's account of [his] experiences as Treasury Secretary." Many other former colleagues are, however, apparently intent on cashing in on their public service.

Last month, the New York Times reported that Rumsfeld's long-time pal, former Vice President Dick Cheney, "is actively shopping a memoir about his life in politics and service in four presidential administrations" and seeking multi-millions. In the same way, back in 2007, Bush's right-hand man Karl Rove, aka his "brain," agreed, for a reported seven figures, to write a memoir for Simon & Schuster's conservative imprint Threshold. Earlier this year, Bush's first term National Security Advisor and second term Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, signed a gaudy three-book deal, reportedly worth at least $2.5 million, with Random House's Crown imprint.

Following her to Crown (also the publisher of Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope) was former President Bush himself. His book, tentatively titled Decision Points, will reportedly recount "a dozen of the most interesting and important decisions in the former President's personal and political life" for a cool $7 million. Former First Lady Laura Bush has already inked a book deal with Scribner reportedly worth $3.5-5 million.

Only one prominent Bush loyalist who cared to try appears to have been unable to cash-in. In late 2008, the Wall Street Journal's Evan Perez reported that Alberto Gonzales, former White House counsel (2001-2005) and attorney general (2005-2007), "said he is writing a book to set the record straight about his controversial tenure as a senior official in the Bush administration," but could interest no publisher in the manuscript. This followed an earlier report in the New York Times that Gonzales had been "unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster..."

Law and Orders

One Bush administration lawyer who did land a job with a law firm was Gonzales's successor, Attorney General Michael Mukasey (2007-2009), who became a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, a firm "offering sophisticated legal services" which "places the highest value on collaboration and interdisciplinary cooperation in order to provide clients with seamless representation across practice areas and across continents."

Tommy Thompson, Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2001-2005, is now a partner with Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld where he "focuses on developing solutions for clients in the health care industry, as well as for companies doing business in the public sector." Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security from 2005-2009, is serving as "senior of counsel," and a "member of the White Collar Defense and Investigations practice group" at the firm of Covington & Burling.

Meanwhile, Harriet Miers, who served Bush from 2001-2007 as Staff Secretary, Deputy Chief of Staff, and Counsel to the President -- and whose Supreme Court bid crashed and burned in 2005 -- returned to Locke, Lord, Bissell & Liddell in May 2007 to serve as a member of the law firm's "Litigation and Public Policy sections." That firm is also home to Karin Torgerson, a partner who served as Special Assistant to President George W. Bush, one of several White House positions she held from 2003-2005.

Speak Easy

In addition to his book-writing duties, former President Bush recently signed on with the Washington Speakers Bureau, which already represents his wife. The Bureau is to arrange lucrative speeches for him worldwide. In fact, just last month, the New York Times reported that the former president had "earned more than an estimated $150,000" to "discuss national and international policy" alongside fellow former President Bill Clinton at the Metro Toronto Convention Center.

Together the Bushes joined a speakers' roster of former administration heavyweights, including Richard Armitage (Deputy Secretary of State, 2001-2005), John Bolton (U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-2006), Andrew Card (White House Chief of Staff, 2001-2006), Ari Fleischer (White House Press Secretary, 2001-2003), Michael Mukasey, Colin Powell (Secretary of State, 2001-2005), Condoleezza Rice, Tom Ridge (Secretary of Homeland Security, 2003-2005), Donald Rumsfeld, and John Snow (Secretary of the Treasury, 2003-2006), as well as Bush family consigliere James Baker III.

Meanwhile, at Leading Authorities, another top-of-the-line speakers bureau, the list of ex-Bush loyalists includes Dan Bartlett (Counselor to the President, 2002-2007), Christopher Cox (Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, 2005-2009), Ed Gillespie (Counselor to the President, 2007-2009), Porter Goss (Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 2005-2006), Stephen Hadley (National Security Advisor, 2005-2009), Michael Hayden (Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 2006-2009), Keith Hennessey (Director of the National Economic Council, 2007-2009), Dana Perino (White House Press Secretary, 2007-2009), and Margaret Spellings (Secretary of Education, 2005-2009).

A third lecturers' stable, the Leigh Bureau, boasts John Negroponte who served Bush as Ambassador to the United Nations, Ambassador to Iraq, Director of National Intelligence, and Deputy Secretary of State.

Talking Heads and Lobbyists

Some Bush loyalists have nabbed other sorts of speaking gigs. Karl Rove, for one, took a job as an analyst for Fox News. (He also writes a weekly op-ed for the Wall Street Journal and, in 2007, signed a two-year deal to be a columnist for Newsweek magazine.)

Ari Fleischer was hired as a media consultant to the Green Bay Packers in 2008 and serves as the president of Ari Fleischer Communications, Inc., which bills itself as a "unique media training and consultancy company [that] brings to the world of sports the lessons of how to successfully handle the toughest situations with the most aggressive reporters." (Clients reportedly include Major League Baseball, the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, and "several other leading sports figures.")

Many more Bush loyalists, however, are involved in another lucrative form of communication. For example, Michael Chertoff quickly launched the Chertoff Group, a consulting firm that "will advise clients on a range of security concerns, including cyber security, terrorism, fraud, border protection and supply-chain security." Tom Ridge, when not serving as a keynote-speaker-for-hire (as he did recently at the 2009 CoBank Energy Directors Conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado) is now a security and crisis-management consultant for his own firm, Ridge Global, whose self-professed "expertise encompasses risk management and global trade security, leadership guidance and strategic business generation, event security, crisis management and communications, campus security, technology innovation and integration and more."

In fact, a recent analysis by USA TODAY found that "more than one in four members of President George W. Bush's Cabinet have landed jobs with consulting or lobbying firms in which they can help clients navigate the departments they once oversaw." And it's not just heads of executive departments like Homeland Security who are cashing in.

John Ashcroft (Attorney General, 2001-2005) co-founded the Ashcroft Group, a strategic consulting firm that advises and invests "in companies in the security and law enforcement marketplaces." Not surprisingly, the firm has become a home for Bush loyalists like Juleanna Glover, who served on the senior staffs of then President-elect George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and was then "the registered U.S. government affairs advisor for Iraq's first post-Saddam Hussein ambassador to the United States."

Recently, according to the Quad City Times, Jim Nussle, Bush's director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (2007-2009) "formed a company that will offer consulting, government relations and lobbying services." The Nussle Group, its website proclaims, "specializes in recruiting a talented team and developing creative solutions to assist clients in navigating the complicated and challenging intersections of public policy, government relations, public relations, international relations and politics."

According to his company bio, the senior policy director at lobbying powerhouse Dutko Worldwide, Gene Hickok, "joined the George W. Bush Administration as Under Secretary of Education. He became Deputy Secretary in 2003 [and] was an architect of the No Child Left Behind Act." And he isn't alone. Kent Sholars, a Senior Associate at Dutko, "was a political appointee during both terms of the administration of George W. Bush, serving as the Confidential Assistant to the Controller for the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in Washington, DC," while Karen Yeager, a Dutko vice president, "serve[d] in the White House for President Bush in 2001."

Spin-Mistresses

Karen Hughes helped George W. Bush get elected in 2000 and, for the first two years of his first term, served him as a "counselor." In 2002, she left the White House to spend more time with her family in Texas. In 2004, however, she was back at work on Bush's campaign and then, in 2005, signed on as an undersecretary of state. In 2007, she left again, the White House said, "to spend more time with her family." Nonetheless, in 2008, she was in an office yet again, this time as Global Vice Chair at public relations giant Burson-Marsteller. In 2009, she was joined there by former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, who now serves as Chief Issues Counselor for the company in the U.S.

Here, too, Michael Chertoff has gotten into the act. The announcement of the formation of the Chertoff Group, wrote the Wall Street Journal, "was made by the communications firm Burson-Marsteller, which said it formed an alliance with Mr. Chertoff."

Board to Death

Bush Administration officials have also been popping up on various boards of directors. Richard Armitage is perhaps typical. He sits on the board at military-corporate complex member ManTech International. He also serves on the boards of oil giant ConocoPhillips, "pharmaceutical and cosmeceutical" company Transcu Ltd., and his own firm, Armitage International, which, according to its website, provides "multinational clients with critical support in the areas of international business development, strategic planning, and problem-solving."

In April, chemical giant DuPont announced that Samuel Bodman, Secretary of Energy from 2005-2009 (and before that, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, 2004-2005, and Deputy Secretary of the Department of Commerce, 2001-2004) had been elected to its board of directors.

That same month, former CIA chief Michael Hayden became a member of the Board of Directors of the National Interest Security Company, an "information technology, information management, and management technology consulting services" provider serving the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Energy. There, Hayden joined fellow former administration cronies Henry A. Crumpton (Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the State Department, 2005-2007) and Donald Kerr (Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, 2007-2009).

Meanwhile, Andrew Card not only serves on the board of directors of railroad giant Union Pacific, but has also turned up on the board of directors of the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation.

In the Tank

If you can't get a gig at a law firm, a PR agency, or on a corporate board of directors, there are always the nation's think-tanks to fall back into -- and they've become a shelter for more than a few Bush administration refugees in the Obama era. For example, after serving as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser in the Bush administration, Elliott Abrams has now joined the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies.

Alongside Abrams at CFR are a number of officials who served during the Bush years, including Evan Feigenbaum, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the Maldives; Paul Lettow, former senior adviser to the Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs and the Senior Director for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the National Security Council staff; and Dan Senor, an administration foreign policy advisor and senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the conservative Heritage Foundation is not surprisingly housing a large contingent of Bush loyalists, including Becky Norton Dunlop, who served as the chairperson of the Federal Services Impasse Panel (which handles disputes between government agencies and labor unions); Kim R. Holmes, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs; Terry Miller, ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council; Peter Brookes, Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary for Asian and Pacific Affairs; and Mike Gonzalez who, in 2005, left the Wall Street Journal to join the Bush administration where, according to his Heritage Foundation bio, he "wrote speeches for Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, then moved to the State Department in 2006 as communications adviser and speechwriter on European and Eurasian affairs" and even "helped craft an op-ed column… which appeared throughout Europe under the bylines of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates."

Ivory Tower Power

While Gates stayed on to work for President Barack Obama, Rice is pursuing many different career paths. In addition to the lucrative book contracts and the speakers bureau gigs, she inked a deal for the William Morris Agency to represent her for "business initiatives in media, sports and communications." Rice also returned, as a professor of political science, to her old stomping grounds at Stanford University, where she had long taught and also, from 1993-1999, served as provost. Presumably in her spare time, she serves as the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at Stanford's conservative Hoover Institution.

Rice is actually following in the footsteps of Rumsfeld who served a stint, beginning in 2007, as "a distinguished visiting fellow" at the Hoover Institution. But Stanford is hardly the only academic bastion of former Bush-ites. For example, this year, John Negroponte headed back to his old alma mater, Yale University, to become the "Brady-Johnson Distinguished Senior Research Fellow in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in International Affairs at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies."

"Torture memo" author John Yoo, who served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice from 2001-2003, is, of course, a professor of law at the School of Law of that bastion of leftist radicalism, the University of California at Berkeley. (As Liliana Segura of AlterNet recently reported, he also just landed a gig as a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

Hope on the Horizon

Last year, for many Americans, Barack Obama became synonymous with hope. (And last year, Obama's The Audacity of Hope as well as his Dreams from My Father earned him an eye-popping $2.4 million in royalties.) This year, for struggling job-hunters nationwide, it's former Bush administration officials who offer a glimmer of hope in tough economic times. Their ease in finding gainful employment suggests that, even if your prior work has been judged ruinous by many and been roundly repudiated, there's still hope for you on the job front.

Even former Vice President Cheney, a man about whom 55% of Americans hold an unfavorable opinion, has realistic prospects of receiving a multimillion dollar book deal. After all, his former boss is viewed unfavorably by 57% of Americans and look how he's done.

Since most jobless Americans don't have nearly the unfavorable polling numbers of Bush or Cheney, nor do they face the distant threat of possible war crimes prosecutions like John Yoo, they should perk up. Maybe the problem is that none of them have signed up with the right speakers bureau to discuss their disastrous life circumstances. Maybe they haven't had that extra little bit of help tweaking their book proposals for their proposed tell-littles and tell-nones. Maybe they hadn't thought to check with Burson-Marsteller, just in case a few top slots with grandiose titles are still open. Maybe the Hoover Institution will now extend distinguished visiting fellowships to a few of the residents of modern-day Hoovervilles.

With only former Attorney General Gonzales still out of work, grant the men and women of the Bush administration one thing: the best unemployment rate in the land. In but a few short months, they've managed to prove that, no matter how spectacularly you fail, those inside-the-Beltway never have to tighten a belt. In our world, they will always fail upwards -- generally in lucrative, prestigious, and glamorous ways.

Virtuous Bankers? Really!?!

2009-11-11T13:10:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/opinion/11dowd.html?em=&pagewanted=print

November 11, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Virtuous Bankers? Really!?!
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

The Great Vampire Squid has gotten religion.

In an interview with The Sunday Times of London, the cocky chief of Goldman Sachs said he understands that a lot of people are “mad and bent out of shape” at blood-sucking banks.

“I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer,” Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O., told the reporter John Arlidge.

But the little people who are boiling simply don’t understand. And Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who unforgettably labeled Goldman “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” doesn’t understand.

Banks, Blankfein explained, are really serving the greater good.

“We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital,” he said. “Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle. We have a social purpose.”

When Arlidge asked whether it’s possible to make too much money, whether Goldman will ignore the people howling at the moon with rage and go on raking it in, getting richer than God, Blankfein grinned impishly and said he was “doing God’s work.”

Whether he knows it, he’s referring back to The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism — except, of course, the Calvinists would have been outraged by the banks’ vicious — not virtuous — cycle of greed and concupiscence.

Blankfein’s trickle-down catechism isn’t working. Now we have two economies. We have recovering banks while we have 10-plus percent unemployment and 17.5 percent underemployment. The gross thing about the Wall Street of the last decade is how much its success was not shared with society.

Goldmine Sachs, as it’s known, is out for Goldmine Sachs.

As many Americans continue to struggle, Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, banks that took government bailout money after throwing the entire world into crisis, have said they will dish out $30 billion in bonuses — up 60 percent from last year.

The saying used to be, whatever happens, the lawyers win. Now, it’s whatever happens, the bankers win.

Under pressure from regulators, who were trying to ensure that long-term performance was rewarded, the banks agreed to award more in stock, deferring cash payments.

But as The Times reported this week, the Goldman executives who got stock options instead of bonuses last year, at market lows, got a windfall — so it had nothing to do with bank employees’ performance.

“The company gave its general counsel, for example, 104,868 stock options and 14,117 shares in December, when the bank’s stock was around $78,” Louise Story wrote for The Times. “Now the bank’s shares have more than doubled in value, making that stock and option award worth nearly $12 million.”

As one former Goldman banker told Arlidge, the culture there is “completely money-obsessed. ... There’s always room — need — for more. If you are not getting a bigger house or a bigger boat, you’re falling behind. It’s an addiction.”

It’s an addiction that Washington has done little to quell. President Obama has not been strong on the issue, and Timothy Geithner coddles the wanton bankers whenever they freak out that they might not be able to put in their new pools next summer.

The bankers try to dismiss calls for regulation as populist ravings, but the insane inequity of it cannot be dismissed.

No sooner had the Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd announced his plan to overhaul financial regulation Tuesday than compensation experts declared it toothless.

The banks and their lobbyists wheedled concession after concession out of Washington and knocked down proposed inhibition after inhibition. Now the banks are laughing all the way to the bank.

“Saturday Night Live” was tougher on Goldman Sachs than the government, giving the firm flak about commandeering 200 doses of the swine flu vaccine — the same amount as Lenox Hill Hospital got — while so many at-risk Americans wait.

“Can you not read how mad people are at you?” demanded Amy Poehler. “When most people saw the headline ‘Goldman Sachs Gets Swine Flu Vaccine’ they were superhappy until they saw the word ‘vaccine.’ ”

Seth Meyers chimed in: “Also, Centers for Disease Control, you sent the vaccine to Wall Street before schools and hospitals? Really!?! Were you worried the swine flu might spread to the Hamptons and St. Barts? These are the least contagious people in the world. They don’t even touch their own car-door handles.”

And as far as doing God’s work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.

Nearly Half of Congress Millionaires While Only Earning 6 Figures

2009-11-11T12:26:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Nearly-Half-of-Congress-Mi-by-Grant-Lawrence-091107-574.html

November 10, 2009
Nearly Half of Congress Millionaires While Only Earning 6 Figures
By Grant Lawrence

....Among the highlights: Two-hundred-and-thirty-seven members of Congress are millionaires. That's 44 percent of the body – compared to about 1 percent of Americans overall....Source: Politico.com

Strange how the politicos can have 2 separate residences with families living a fine life style and yet they are able to sock away millions while earning just 6 figures. Must be good money management. Now if they could manage the country as well as they do their own finances.

But in reality the Legislators are bankrupting the country so that they can benefit their corporate benefactors.

Let's be honest corporate welfare doesn't come cheap.

But did you ever wonder why someone would want a job that pays 6 figures when they are worth 200 or so million?

Maybe they just want to serve their friends in corporate America.

Congress Is Teeming With Millionaires

2009-11-09T13:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.sphere.com/2009/11/06/44-percent-of-congress-are-millionaires/

(Nov. 6) -- Apparently, times aren't so tough all over.

According to a new study compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, 237 members of the U.S. Congress, or 44 percent, are millionaires.

"What's easy to see is that the economic reality of our elected officials is not reflective of the general population," said Dave Levinthal, who helped compile the study's findings.

Nationwide, only 1 percent of U.S. citizens qualify as millionaires.

An inquiry into financial data reveals that 44 percent of the U.S. Congress are millionaires.

Among the wealthiest members of Congress are Darrell Issa, R-Calif., whose net worth is estimated at $251 million, and Jane Harman, D-Calif., who boasts a net worth of around $244.7 million.

A slight majority of those elected to Congress are not millionaires. And some of the least well-off members include Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., and Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., both of whose net worth is less than zero, according to the RCP database.

By compiling financial disclosure statements and public tax records, the Center for Responsive Politics was also able to examine the investment holdings of elected officials.

In 2008, the same year that the federal government bailed out several U.S. banks, the second most commonly held stock among members of Congress was Bank of America, the data showed. Other popular bank stocks included Wells Fargo, Citi Group and Goldman Sachs, all of which received congressionally approved funds.

And as Congress continues to work on the issue of health care reform, Levinthal noted that industry-related stocks were also commonly held by many on Capitol Hill.

"Pfizer was the sixth most commonly held stock in 2008, for instance," Levinthal said. "Oftentimes, members of Congress are heavily invested in companies who will be affected by decisions the federal government makes."

Surprisingly, in a year in which the economy ravaged the retirement savings and overall net worth of so many Americans, some members of Congress experienced just the opposite. In the Senate, Richard Shelby, R-Ala., saw his net worth increase by $2.8 million. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, earned $2.6 million, and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's earnings rose by $9.2 million.

237 millionaires in Congress

2009-11-08T09:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29235.html

Report: 237 millionaires in Congress
Erika Lovely
Politico
Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:38 EST

Talk about bad timing.

As Washington reels from the news of 10.2 percent unemployment, the Center for Responsive Politics is out with a new report describing the wealth of members of Congress.

Among the highlights: Two-hundred-and-thirty-seven members of Congress are millionaires. That's 44 percent of the body - compared to about 1 percent of Americans overall.

CRP says California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa is the richest lawmaker on Capitol Hill, with a net worth estimated at about $251 million. Next in line: Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), worth about $244.7 million; Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), worth about $214.5 million; Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), worth about $209.7 million; and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), worth about $208.8 million.

All told, at least seven lawmakers have net worths greater than $100 million, according to the Center's 2008 figures.

"Many Americans probably have a sense that members of Congress aren't hurting, even if their government salary alone is in the six figures, much more than most Americans make," said CRP spokesman Dave Levinthal. "What we see through these figures is that many of them have riches well beyond that salary, supplemented with securities, stock holdings, property and other investments."

The CRP numbers are somewhat rough estimates - lawmakers are required to report their financial information in broad ranges of figures, so it's impossible to pin down their dollars with precision. The CRP uses the mid-point in the ranges to build its estimates.

Senators' estimated median reportable worth sunk to about $1.79 million from $2.27 million in 2007. The House's median income was significantly lower and also sank, bottoming out at $622,254 from $724,258 in 2007.

But CRP's analysis suggests that some lawmakers did well for themselves between 2007 and 2008, even as many Americans lost jobs and saw their savings and their home values plummet.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) gained about $9.2 million. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) gained about $3 million, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) had an estimated $2.6 million gain, and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) gained about $2.8 million.

Some lawmakers have profited from investments in companies that have received federal bailouts; dozens of lawmakers are invested in Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.

Among executive branch officials, CRP says the richest is Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary L. Schapiro, with a net worth estimated at $26 million.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is next, worth an estimated $21 million. President Barack Obama is the sixth-wealthiest, worth about an estimated $4 million. Vice President Joe Biden has often tagged himself as an original blue collar man. The CRP backs him up, putting his net worth at just $27,000.

He's hardly the worst off.

Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), freshman Rep. Harry Teague (D-N.M.), Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.), Rep. John Salazar (D-Colo.) and Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) each a net worth of less than zero, CRP says.

One caveat on those numbers: Federal financial disclosure laws don't require members to list the value of their personal residences. That information could alter the net worth picture for many lawmakers.

Even so, Levinthal said, "It is clear that some members are struggling financially.

"Over a calendar year, one's wealth can change drastically. Many peoples' investments took a nose dive over night in the last year," he said.

A number of lawmakers are estimated to have suffered double-digit percentage lossed in their net worth from 2007 to 2008. The biggest losers include Kerry, who lost a whopping $127.4 million; Warner lost about $28.1 million; Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) lost about $11.8 million; and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) lost about $10.1 million.

Empire Puppet Masters

2009-11-08T09:47:00.000-08:00

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts11062009.html

The Evil Empire
Paul Craig Roberts
Republic of Fools
Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:42 EST

The US government is now so totally under the thumbs of organized interest groups that "our" government can no longer respond to the concerns of the American people who elect the president and the members of the House and Senate. Voters will vent their frustrations over their impotence on the president, which implies a future of one-term presidents. Soon our presidents will be as ineffective as Roman emperors in the final days of that empire.

Obama is already set on the course to a one-term presidency. He promised change, but has delivered none. His health care bill is held hostage by the private insurance companies seeking greater profits. The most likely outcome will be cuts in Medicare and Medicaid in order to help fund wars that enrich the military/security complex and the many companies created by privatizing services that the military once provided for itself at far lower costs. It would be interesting to know the percentage of the $700+ billion "defense" spending that goes to private companies. In American "capitalism," an amazing amount of taxpayers' earnings go to private firms via the government. Yet, Republicans scream about "socializing" health care.

Republicans and Democrats saw opportunities to create new sources of campaign contributions by privatizing as many military functions as possible. There are now a large number of private companies that have never made a dollar in the market, feeding instead at the public trough that drains taxpayers of dollars while loading Americans with debt service obligations.

Obama inherited an excellent opportunity to bring US soldiers home from the Bush regime's illegal wars of aggression. In its final days, the Bush regime realized that it could "win" in Iraq by putting the Sunni insurgents on the US military payroll. Once Bush had 80,000 insurgents collecting US military pay, violence, although still high, dropped in half. All Obama had to do was to declare victory and bring our boys home, thanking Bush for winning the war. It would have shut up the Republicans.

But this sensible course would have impaired the profits and share prices of those firms that comprise the military/security complex. So instead of doing what Obama said he would do and what the voters elected him to do, Obama restarted the war in Afghanistan and launched a new one in Pakistan. Soon Obama was echoing Bush and Cheney's threats to attack Iran.

In place of health care for Americans, there will be more profits for private insurance companies.

In place of peace there will be more war.

Voters are already recognizing the writing on the wall and are falling away from Obama and the Democrats. Independents who gave Obama his comfortable victory have now swung against him, recently electing Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia to succeed Democrats. This is a protest vote, not a confidence vote in Republicans.

Obama's credibility is shot. And so is Congress's, assuming it ever had any. The US House of Representatives has just voted to show the entire world that the US House of Representatives is nothing but the servile, venal, puppet of the Israel Lobby. The House of Representatives of the American "superpower" did the bidding of its master, AIPAC, and voted 344 to 36 to condemn the Goldstone Report.

In case you don't know, the Goldstone Report is the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. The "Gaza Conflict" is the Israeli military attack on the Gaza ghetto, where 1.5 million dispossessed Palestinians, whose lands, villages, and homes were stolen by Israel, are housed. The attack was on civilians and civilian infrastructure. It was without any doubt a war crime under the Nuremberg standard that the US established in order to execute Nazis.

Goldstone is not only a very distinguished Jewish jurist who has given his life to bringing people to accountability for their crimes against humanity, but also a Zionist. However, the Israelis have demonized him as a "self-hating Jew" because he wrote the truth instead of Israeli propaganda.

US Representative Dennis Kucinich, who is now without a doubt a marked man on AIPAC's political extermination list, asked the House if the members had any realization of the shame that the vote condemning Goldstone would bring on the House and the US government. The entire rest of the world accepts the Goldstone report.

The House answered with its lopsided vote that the rest of the world doesn't count as it doesn't give campaign contributions to members of Congress.

This shameful, servile act of "the world's greatest democracy" occurred the very week that a court in Italy convicted 23 US CIA officers for kidnapping a person in Italy. The CIA agents are now considered "fugitives from justice" in Italy, and indeed they are.

The kidnapped person was renditioned to the American puppet state of Egypt, where the victim was held for years and repeatedly tortured. The case against him was so absurd that even an Egyptian judge ordered his release.

One of the convicted CIA operatives, Sabrina deSousa, an attractive young woman, says that the US broke the law by kidnapping a person and sending him to another country to be tortured in order to manufacture another "terrorist" in order to keep the terrorist hoax going at home. Without the terrorist hoax, America's wars for special interest reasons would become transparent even to Fox "News" junkies.

Ms. deSousa says that "everything I did was approved back in Washington," yet the government, which continually berates us to "support the troops," did nothing to protect her when she carried out the Bush regime's illegal orders.

Clearly, this means that the crime that Bush, Cheney, the Pentagon, and the CIA ordered is too heinous and beyond the pale to be justified, even by memos from the despicable John Yoo and the Republican Federalist Society.

Ms. deSousa is clearly worried about herself. But where is her concern for the innocent person that she sent into an Egyptian hell to be tortured until death or admission of being a terrorist? The remorse deSousa expresses is only for herself. She did her evil government's bidding and her evil government that she so faithfully served turned its back on her. She has no remorse for the evil she committed against an innocent person.

Perhaps deSousa and her 22 colleagues grew up on video games. It was great fun to plot to kidnap a real person and fly him on a CIA plane to Egypt. Was it like a fisherman catching a fish or a deer hunter killing a beautiful 8-point buck? Clearly, they got their jollies at the expense of their renditioned victim.

The finding of the Italian court, and keep in mind that Italy is a bought-and-paid-for US puppet state, indicates that even our bought puppets are finding the US too much to stomach.

Moving from the tip of the iceberg down, we have Ambassador Craig Murray, rector of the University of Dundee and until 2004 the UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, which he describes as a Stalinist totalitarian state courted and supported by the Americans.

As ambassador, Murray saw the MI5 intelligence reports from the CIA that described the most horrible torture procedures. "People were raped with broken bottles, children were tortured in front of their parents until they [the parents] signed a confession, people were boiled alive."

"Intelligence" from these torture sessions was passed on by the CIA to MI5 and to Washington as proof of the vast al Qaeda conspiracy.

Amb. Murray reports that the people delivered by CIA flights to Uzbekistan's torture prisons "were told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they'd been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes."

"I was absolutely stunned," says the British ambassador, who thought that he served a moral country that, along with its American ally, had moral integrity. The great Anglo-American bastion of democracy and human rights, the homes of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the great moral democracies that defeated Nazism and stood up to Stalin's gulags, were prepared to commit any crime in order to maximize profits.

Amb. Murray learned too much and was fired when he vomited it all up. He saw the documents that proved that the motivation for US and UK military aggression in Afghanistan had to do with the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Americans wanted a pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan. To insure this, an invasion was necessary. The idiot American public could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to save them from "terrorism," and the utter fools would believe the lie.

"If you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It's what it's about. It's about money, its about energy, it's not about democracy."

Guess who the consultant was who arranged with then Texas governor George W. Bush the agreements that would give to Enron the rights to Uzbekistan's and Turkmenistan's natural gas deposits and to Unocal to develop the trans-Afghanistan pipeline. It was Karzai, the US-imposed "president" of Afghanistan, who has no support in the country except for American bayonets.

Amb. Murray was dismissed from the UK Foreign Service for his revelations. No doubt on orders from Washington to our British puppet.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Why Powerful People Overestimate Themselves

2009-11-04T13:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1883658,00.html

Tuesday, Mar. 10, 2009
Why Powerful People Overestimate Themselves
By Jeffrey Kluger

President Barack Obama isn't as great as he thinks he is. To be fair, neither were Presidents Bush or Clinton — or Washington or Lincoln, for that matter. The same can be said for every general who ever commanded an army or every boss who ever ran an office. The fact is, if there's one thing that defines people in powerful positions, it's that they overestimate what they can do with that power.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a study published in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science. And while you may have always suspected that the folks who run the world aren't all they're cracked up to be, don't take too much satisfaction from the fact. It's the rest of us who wind up paying for their overreaching. (See pictures of how Presidents age in office.)

Having a lot of faith in yourself can be a very good thing. Decades of psychological studies have found that people who believe they have some control of their lives and circumstances are more optimistic and proactive and have higher levels of self-esteem than others. People who believe events control them are likelier to be depressed and pessimistic and to avoid challenging situations. But what happens when your sense of control spins out of control? Try to cross the ocean with nothing but a rowboat and muscle, and you're not going to get very far. (See TIME's list of the 100 most influential people of 2008.)

To explore how we come by our illusory sense of power, a team led by business professors Nathanael Fast and Deborah Gruenfeld of Stanford University devised a series of experiments. In the first, they recruited 38 students and divided them into three groups. They asked one group to write about an experience in which they felt they had control over other people, and another group to write about a time they felt out of control. The third group wrote nothing. All of the students were then given dice and told that if they correctly guessed the number they rolled, they would win $5. They were also given the choice of rolling the dice themselves or having someone else roll for them.

The results were striking. One hundred percent of the students who had written about being in charge rolled the dice themselves, compared with only 58% of the students who had written about someone else having power over them. Sixty-nine percent of the control group chose to roll. There may be nothing quite as random as a roll of the dice, but the students on a power high appeared to believe they could do it better. (Read "Does Power Corrupt? Absolutely Not.")

"Choosing to roll the die represents an illusory sense of control," the researchers write. "[But] the outcomes were uncontrollable."

In a second test, 30 volunteers were paired off for a role-playing game in which one partner was assigned the part of the superior and the other the part of the subordinate. All of the volunteers were then asked to read a scenario about a fictional marketing agency and rate how likely they would be to improve the agency's profitability next year. The people who had been designated superiors in the role-playing game consistently believed they would do better at the helm of the agency than the people who had been designated subordinates. In the third study, 79 volunteers again wrote about a time they had either been in control or under another's control, and then completed a questionnaire designed to measure their self-esteem, initiative and perceived ability to influence their world. Across the board, the people who had written about being in charge scored higher. That's good — but not if it goes too far.

"By producing an illusion of personal control," the authors write, "power may cause people to lose touch with reality in ways that lead to overconfident decision-making." (Read "Gut Decisions May Not Be Smart.")

With stock markets collapsing around the world, nobody needs an illustration of where that kind of hubris can lead. Ordinary folks with bills to pay may smell something funny in fiscal instruments with names like "credit-default swaps," but when you work on Wall Street and people call you a "master of the universe," you think you can make the things pay off. Even nonpartisans would agree that George W. Bush waded into the Iraq mess with more certainty than strategy. And Bill and Hillary Clinton might actually have achieved health-care reform if they had tried negotiating with the opposition instead of steamrolling it. (See George W. Bush's biggest economic mistakes.)

"One way people in power can guard against this is to place themselves into a deliberative mind-set, focusing on the pros and cons," says Fast. "This takes a great deal of discipline, however, as the tendency after taking power is to move straight to action."

None of this is to say that all cockiness leads to ruin — sometimes it's what's needed for a leader seeking greatness. During his brief presidency, John F. Kennedy had the preposterous idea that the CIA could topple the government of Cuba and the equally foolish notion that the U.S. could put a man on the moon before 1970. One plan led to the Bay of Pigs, the other to the Sea of Tranquility.

"It is likely," says Fast, "that some of history's most tragic failures and inspiring successes were orchestrated by power holders who overestimated their abilities to control future outcomes." Here's hoping that the leaders we've got now are guessing right.

Report slams bank links to clusterbomb production

2009-11-02T09:48:00.003-08:00

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE59S4DL20091029?sp=true

Report slams bank links to clusterbomb production
Olesya Dmitracova
Reuters
Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:26 EDT

London - Leading banks have funded arms manufacturers, whose products include cluster bombs, to the tune of $5 billion in the past two years, despite an international accord to ban such weapons, a study said Thursday.

The report by Profundo consultancy and several NGOs said the banks loaned money to companies whose products include cluster bombs or their components.

It did not say the funds went directly to make cluster bombs. The manufacturers could use the money for any of their production lines.

The top five loan providers were Bank of America, Citigroup , JP Morgan, Barclays and Goldman Sachs, the study said.

The researchers used publicly available information, such as that supplied by stock exchanges and financial databases, to produce their study.

According to the research, the banks have provided financing for diversified manufacturer Textron, aerospace and defense group Alliant Techsystems and defense contractor Lockheed Martin , all based in the United States.

Barclays said in a statement it provided financial services to arms makers within a specific policy framework, taking into account the likely use of the equipment.

"Our policy ... explicitly prohibits financing trade in landmines, cluster bombs or any equipment designed to be used as an instrument of torture," Barclays said.

Asked to clarify, a Barclays' spokeswoman declined further comment.

Bank of America and JP Morgan declined to comment while Citigroup and Goldman Sachs also had no immediate reaction.

Cluster bombs, which open in mid-air and scatter a multitude of bomblets over a wide area, have killed and maimed tens of thousands of civilians, campaigners say.

Nations agreed to outlaw cluster bombs in May 2008. The resulting convention will come into force when 30 countries have ratified it -- 23 have already done so.

Neither the United States nor Britain, where the top five loan providers are based, have yet ratified the treaty.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions includes a ban on assisting anyone to make the bombs.

"We feel very strongly that assistance in production means investment. If you invest in a company, you're considered to assist the production of these (bombs)," Roos Boer, one of the report's authors, said at the launch of the study.

The report said: "Financial institutions should develop policies that exclude all financial links with companies involved in producing cluster munitions."

It added: "Policies should not be narrowed to refusing project financing for cluster munitions."

The report also called on governments to draw up clear legislation to prohibit investment in cluster bombs and to provide guidelines for financial institutions.

Report slams bank links to clusterbomb production

2009-11-02T09:48:00.001-08:00

Pickens says U.S. firms 'entitled' to Iraqi oil

2009-10-22T16:44:00.000-07:00

Imperialists believe they are entitled to the treasures of other countries.

http://in.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idINN2149238420091021

Pickens says U.S. firms 'entitled' to Iraqi oil

Tom Doggett
Reuters
Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:07 EDT

Washington - Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are "entitled" to some of Iraq's crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq.

Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq's vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.

"They're opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world ... We're entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq's oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."

President Barack Obama has pledged to withdraw U.S. troops in Iraq.

"We leave there with the Chinese getting the oil," Pickens said.

Iraq's Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani told a Washington conference on Wednesday that his government was happy with the energy auction it held earlier this year. The auction was the first chance for foreign oil firms to compete for Iraqi oil since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

"We're pleased with scale and participation of the IOC (International Oil Companies) and the transparent and public competition," Shahristani said at a U.S.-Iraq business and investment conference.

BP and the Chinese oil company CNPC were the only firms to win a contract in Iraq's bid round this summer, the first chance for foreign oil firms to compete for Iraqi oil since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Seven other oil and gas fields failed to attract bidders on the terms Iraq offered.

But a consortium headed by Italy's ENI (ENI.MI: Quote, Profile, Research) said last week it signed a deal to develop the giant Zubair field for a remuneration fee of $2 a barrel. At Iraq's oilfield auction in June, the consortium refused to go below $4.40 a barrel.

Two consortiums are still competing for a deal to develop the even larger West Quran oilfield. They are Russia's LUKOIL (LKOH.MM: Quote, Profile, Research) and ConocoPhillips (COP.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and another consortium headed by Exxon Mobil (XOM.N: Quote, Profile, Research).

Failed State By Design

2009-10-22T09:23:00.001-07:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/US-Joins-Ranks-of-Failed-S-by-Paul-Craig-Roberts-091020-828.html

October 20, 2009
US Joins Ranks of Failed States
By Paul Craig Roberts

The US has every characteristic of a failed state.

The US government's current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation.

Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the US relies on terrorism and military aggression. See here and here.

Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. For example, war at all cost, which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war's financing, takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to US troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400.

“It is a number that we were not aware of and it is worrisome,” said Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the subcommittee.

According to reports, the US Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way.

While the US government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor third world peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks. America's cities, towns, and states are suffering from the costs of economic dislocations and the reduction in tax revenues from the economy's decline Yet, Obama has sent more troops to Afghanistan, a country half way around the world that is not a threat to America.

It costs $750,000 per year for each soldier we have in Afghanistan. The soldiers, who are at risk of life and limb, are paid a pittance, but all of the privatized services to the military are rolling in excess profits. One of the great frauds perpetuated on the American people was the privatization of services that the US military traditionally performed for itself. “Our” elected leaders could not resist any opportunity to create at taxpayers' expense private wealth that could be recycled to politicians in campaign contributions.

Republicans and Democrats on the take from the private insurance companies maintain that the US cannot afford to provide Americans with health care and that cuts must be made even in Social Security and Medicare. So how can the US afford bankrupting wars, much less totally pointless wars that serve no American interest?

The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington's wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of third world countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar's value reduces the purchasing power of Americans' already declining incomes.

Despite the lowest level of housing starts in 64 years, the US housing market is flooded with unsold homes, and financial institutions have a huge and rising inventory of foreclosed homes not yet on the market.

Industrial production has collapsed to the level of 1999, wiping out a decade of growth in industrial output.

The enormous bank reserves created by the Federal Reserve are not finding their way into the economy. Instead, the banks are hoarding the reserves as insurance against the fraudulent derivatives that they purchased from the gangster Wall Street investment banks.

The regulatory agencies have been corrupted by private interests. Frontline reports that Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers blocked Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating derivatives. President Obama rewarded Larry Summers for his idiocy by appointing him Director of the National Economic Council. What this means is that profits for Wall Street will continue to be leeched from the diminishing blood supply of the American economy.

An unmistakable sign of third world despotism is a police force that sees the pubic as the enemy. Thanks to the federal government, our local police forces are now militarized and imbued with hostile attitudes toward the public. SWAT teams have proliferated, and even small towns now have police forces with the firepower of US Special Forces. Summons are increasingly delivered by SWAT teams that tyrannize citizens with broken down doors, a $400 or $500 repair born by the tyrannized resident. Recently a mayor and his family were the recipients of incompetence by the town's local SWAT team, which mistakenly wrecked the mayor's home, terrorized his family, and killed the family's two friendly Labrador dogs.

If a town's mayor can be treated in this way, what do you think is the fate of the poor white or black? Or the idealistic student who protests his government's inhumanity?

In any failed state, the greatest threat to the population comes from the government and the police. That is certainly the situation today in the USA. Americans have no greater enemy than their own government. Washington is controlled by interest groups that enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.

The one percent that comprise the super rich are laughing as they say, “let them eat cake.”

Was the Bailout Itself a Scam?

2009-10-21T16:00:00.001-07:00

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/090318_bailout.htm

March 18, 2009
Was the Bailout Itself a Scam?
By Paul Craig Roberts

Professor Michael Hudson (CounterPunch, March 18) is correct that the orchestrated outrage over the $165 million AIG bonuses is a diversion from the thousand times greater theft from taxpayers of the approximately $200 billion "bailout" of AIG.

Nevertheless, it is a diversion that serves an important purpose. It has taught an inattentive American public that the elites run the government in their own private interests.

Americans are angry that AIG executives are paying themselves millions of dollars in bonuses after having cost the taxpayers an exorbitant sum. Senator Charles Grassley put a proper face on the anger when he suggested that the AIG executives "follow the Japanese example" and "resign or go commit suicide."

Yet, Obama’s White House economist, Larry Summers, on whose watch as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration financial deregulation got out of control, invoked the "sanctity of contracts" in defense of the AIG bonuses.

But the Obama administration does not regard other contracts as sacred. Specifically: labor unions had to agree to give-backs in order for the auto companies to obtain federal help; CNN reports that "Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday [March 10] that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance" ; the Washington Post reports that the Obama team has set its sights on downsizing Social Security and Medicare.

According to the Post, Obama said that "it is impossible to separate the country’s financial ills from the long-term need to rein in health-care costs, stabilize Social Security and prevent the Medicare program from bankrupting the government."

After Washington’s trillion dollar bank bailouts and trillion dollar gratuitous wars for the sake of the military industry’s profits and Israeli territorial expansion, there is no money for Social Security and Medicare.

The US government breaks its contracts with US citizens on a daily basis, but AIG’s bonus contracts are sacrosanct. The Social Security contract was broken when the government decided to tax 85% of the benefits. It was broken again when the Clinton administration rigged the inflation measure in order to beat retirees out of their cost-of-living adjustments. To have any real Medicare coverage, a person has to give up part of his Social Security check to pay Medicare Part B premium and then take out a private supplemental policy. The true cost of Medicare to beneficiaries is about $6,000 annually in premiums, plus deductibles and the Medicare tax if the person is still earning.

Treasury Secretary Geithner, the fox in charge of the hen house, has resolved the problem for us. He is going to withhold $165 million (the amount of the AIG bonuses) from the next taxpayer payment to AIG of $30,000 million. If someone handed you $30,000 dollars, would you mind if they held back $165?

PR flaks have rechristened the bonus payments "retention payments" necessary if AIG is to retain crucial employees. This lie was shot down by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who informed the House Committee on Financial Services that the payments went to members of AIG’s Financial Products subsidiary, "the unit of AIG that was principally responsible for the firm’s meltdown." As for retention, Cuomo pointed out that "numerous individuals who received large ‘retention’ bonuses are no longer at the firm."

Eliot Spitzer, the former New York Governor who was set-up in a sex scandal to prevent him investigating Wall Street’s financial gangsterism, pointed out on March 17 that the real scandal is the billions of taxpayer dollars paid to the counter-parties of AIG’s financial deals. These payments, Spitzer writes, are "a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already."

Goldman Sachs, for example, had already received a taxpayer cash infusion of $25 billion and was sitting on more than $100 billion in cash when the Wall Street firm received another $13 billion via the AIG bailout.

Moreover, in my opinion, most of the billions of dollars in AIG counter-party payments were unnecessary. They represent gravy paid to firms that had made risk-free bets, the non-payment of which constituted no threat to financial solvency.

Spitzer identifies a conflict of interest that could possibly be criminal self-dealing. According to reports, the AIG bailout decision involved Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, formerly of Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner, former New York Federal Reserve president and currently Secretary of the Treasury. No doubt the incestuous relationships are the reason the original bailout deal had no oversight or transparency.

The Bush/Obama bailouts require serious investigation. Were these bailouts necessary, or were they a scam, like "weapons of mass destruction," used to advance a private agenda behind a wall of fear? Recently I heard Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, a member of a congressional bailout oversight panel, say on NPR that the US has far too many banks. Out of the financial crisis, she said, should come consolidation with the financial sector consisting of a few mega-banks. Was the whole point of the bailout to supply taxpayer money for a program of financial concentration?

The Gasser

2009-10-19T08:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Gasser-by-Nancy-Tobi-091018-526.html

October 18, 2009
The Gasser
By Nancy Tobi
(A personal story)

When I first entered the democracy wars, I didn't know a lot about American history outside of what most American citizens know. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Inalienable rights. Consent of the governed. If they mean to have a war, let it begin here.

Random catch phrases out of history that were embedded in my being as much as the desert democracy that I carry within my tribal DNA as a descendant of Aaron, brother of Moses our Teacher, giver of Holy Law.

I am an American girl, born and raised in the little town of Lexington, where the Revolutionary Battles were fought. The Birthplace, as they say, of American Liberty.

It was with these nominal credentials that I walked into the Halls of Power, the New Hampshire State House, the Governor's office, and the Congressional Office Buildings.

At the Office of the New Hampshire Secretary of State, I met old Yankee blue bloods; pedigreed politicos whose genealogies extended back into New England history, whose flat “a's” and cool demeanor marked them as much Yankees as my olive skin and brash discourse marked me the child of first generation American Jews.

I began to understand that my Jewish blood was as steeped in the battles for freedom as any Yankee's. Mine ran red, theirs ran blue, but I staked my claim on freedom and liberty with as much merit as they may have staked theirs.

I got to know the inner workings of state government from those who, at its highest levels, cranked its gears, oiled its wheels, and kept its machinery running. I was tutored in Yankee history, tradition, and law. I studied and became indoctrinated in the founding laws and principles of our nation, which had been planted and nourished and which blossomed here in the New England soil as they had not in any other place in this nation of ours.

I soaked up all of this Yankee fare like a thirsty sponge. Freedom at all costs. Live free or die.

And then I met the Insider. The Insider was an odd but intriguing politician who skittered around the edges of my inquiries like someone accomplished in the act of invisibility. The Insider remained quietly off to the side, hiding behind round owlish glasses and a humble voice, rarely speaking unless spoken to, and never publicly offering a personal opinion that might differ from the party line of the Insider's political station.

The Insider was the perfect Political Operative.

All I wanted to do was to take back our elections from the corporate interests and their computerized voting systems, from their concealed vote counts that they alone programmed, serviced, and controlled.

I had gone to the State Capital first to make inquiries, and then to make demands. But the powers that be kept directed me to The Insider. I was the outside agitator, the citizen watchdog, the Activist. And it seemed as though The Insider had been given the job of “handling” me.

That was okay with me; I wanted information and the Insider had it. I had information and the Insider wanted it. The flow of information on both sides was intentional and controlled.

But over time, The Insider began to reveal very specific information to me. Not so much about the politics of my own state, which information was carefully tucked away from view.

The Insider wanted me to know more about what was happening on the national level, leading me to information that was not so much classified as hidden from public view. Hidden, of course, in plain sight.

These conversations with the Insider uncovered a quiet and brilliant conspiracy taking place among the clean and tidy bureaucrats in Washington.

A conspiracy that would change the very structure, the very balance of power and the very form of government in our nation.

We talked, discussed, analyzed, and dissected every implication of everything we uncovered. Intended and unintended consequences to our nation, all falling within the fine lines of law, all falling below, above, and between those fine lines of law.

When the Insider suggested I go around the country, to meetings where the men and women from Washington were hatching their plots, I asked why I should go. The Insider just said, “To be a witness. There is never anyone from the public at these meetings. And the nation needs a witness. The nation needs to know.”

Well, the last letter of the first and last words of the Shema, the holiest prayer for Jews, spell the word “witness” in Hebrew. We take this to mean that we are witnesses to the power and the law of Gd.

So when I was asked to be a witness, I went.

On my first witness trip I was overwhelmed by what I saw. Everything I had been reading about, talking about with The Insider, writing about, came to life before my eyes. It was like confronting the monster you've been describing in terrifying campfire tales. And I was not prepared at all for this. It was like a sucker punch; it left me breathless.

There, in their clean little rooms, in their clean suits and pressed white shirts, these seemingly benign bureaucrats used PowerPoint presentations and white boards to sketch out their plans to permanently subvert America's free and open democratic elections.

There is no spy thriller that can compete with the very real, very dangerous, very scary, and extraordinarily treasonous plotting and planning to which - at the time - I alone – the Outsider - bore witness.

I ran from the meetings and locked myself in my cheap hotel room with a cheap bottle of wine.

I witnessed, I listened, I studied, I researched, I learned, and I wrote about it.

Afterwards, I said to The Insider, “Watching these meetings makes me think of Germany in the 1930's. I'm sure there were clean-shirted and suited-up bureaucrats sitting around talking quietly and confidently with scientists and industrialists, proposing and discussing specifications for the exact motor power needed to push the gas through the vents of their showers.”

All very civilized. All very legal. And all very lethal.

Some condemn me for making this comparison here in our America.

But when a small group of unknown and invisible people control the outcome of America's elections, bad things do happen. Things like war, torture, attrition.

I said to The Insider, “I have a pretty low bar for judging people, to know if I should trust them or not. I ask myself, ‘what would they do if they came for the Jews?'”

It's a deceptively simple question.

To answer it, you have to reach deep into your soul and ask to what depths you would go to prevent evil from happening.

How solid are your principles, your values, your morality.

The Insider's response to me was not so simple. “I'd like to think that I would do the right thing,” said The Insider, “but then again, I might just end up being the one turning on the gas.”

For so long in my role as the witness, I had always believed that I had a true ally in The Insider. When I felt alone, threatened by known and unknown adversaries, marginalized in the movement, bewildered by what I saw, confused about what I should do about it all, I always had The Insider. The Insider alone knew everything that I knew. The Insider alone understood the implications. The Insider alone stood silently with me.

But somehow, even with all this, I was not completely surprised when The Insider confessed to being on the edge of becoming a Gasser. Because I knew, but usually chose to ignore, that The Insider had a certain moral malleability. This allowed The Insider to go about doing the daily job that supported the very evil we were supposed to be fighting together.

This moral malleability allowed The Insider to use me as the public messenger girl even while The Insider remained hidden, untouched, and anonymous.

This moral malleability allowed The Insider to remain...

...The Insider.

And so The Insider could, of course, as easily as not turn on the gas, open the vents, and just walk away.

Author's Website: www.democracyfornewhampshire.com

Understanding the US economy and politics as suffering from parasites: two professional perspectives

2009-10-19T06:21:00.000-07:00

There you go: It is parasitical, demonic people pulling the strings of the emerald curtains!

http://www.examiner.com/x-18425-LA-County-Nonpartisan-Examiner~y2009m10d13-Understanding-US-economics-politics-as-suffering-from-parasites-two-professional-perspectives#

Understanding the US economy and politics as suffering from parasites: two professional perspectives
October 13
Carl Herman

Successful parasites exploit their hosts. They often maneuver to remain undetected, and influence its host to believe the parasites’ needs are its own. Two professionals offering this context to view US politics and economics are Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and President of Solari, and Vladimir Yuri, author of one of the most comprehensive and insightful economics papers I’ve read, “Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism: A Scientific, Mathematical & Historical Expose, Critique, and Manifesto.”

Ms. Fitts was a Wall Street insider as Managing Director and Board member of Dillon, Read & Co. Inc, as well as being a government insider. She observes in “The American Tapeworm:”

The tapeworm -- a parasite that over time eats its host ---can more accurately describe the demonic patterns of stripping places of intellectual capital that come with American imperial conquest. The “dumbing down” so often complained about within America’s borders is a phenomenon that our military appears to be implementing globally. We seem intent on removing spiritual power and intellectual IQ as we depopulate globally, moving out the honest and competent and putting the corrupt and bureaucratic in charge.

She lists examples of global gorging for the sake of the parasite, and concludes this causes a “negative rate of return” in domestic and international influence. This pattern will precipitate humanity eventually discovering the parasite and reinventing government and finance, or the continued weakening of humanity with disastrous consequences. This economic and political parasitism includes the endless “wars on terror:”

This tapeworm operates globally. It has been winning at economic warfare because those opposed to it cannot see it clearly and are not yet networked globally to move people, places and capital out of its reach. My pastor, Bishop Alfred Owens, says, “If we can face it, God can fix it.” Indeed, divine authority is hamstrung-- waiting for the necessary global networks to align around a common map of the real deal about global consolidation of economic and political power --- and the resulting liquidation of wealth.

Ms. Fitts documents $4 trillion missing from the US Department of Defense accounting books, as I have also documented. Below is a 3-minute video of the CBS report of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitting this “missing” money. To put this amount in perspective, if a government project claimed to be “missing” one million dollars, this statement would scream for investigation of criminal embezzlement. To have $4 trillion unaccountable would be to lose one million dollars on four million separate occasions.

Please be outraged over the theft of our money, the criminal negligence and complicity to allow it to go uninvestigated, and the parasitic complicity of the mainstream media to allow this story to fade.

Following that video is the hilariously accurate comedy sketch showing economic parasitism in action from the award-winning "Long Johns."

Vladimir Nuri’s “Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism: A Scientific, Mathematical & Historical Expose, Critique, and Manifesto” blends physics, biology and economics into understanding that fractional reserve banking both feeds the parasitic banking system while destroying value of our existing money through inflation. I have no information on Mr. Yuri; the name may be a pseudonym to protect other academic work from being de-funded.

The paper gives an overview of monetary history, application of mathematics and physics to understand the benefits of fractional reserve lending to the lenders and not to the public, how the banking system creates credit out of nothing and then enslaves humanity to endless debt by design in this monetary system, how capitalistic language masks our detection of the parasitism, examples of biological parasites and their methods, the possibility that we’re entering into a “cancerous stage” whereby the parasite destroys the host, including by economic warfare, failed past attempts to rid humanity of the parasite, and possible solutions if humanity can recognize its grave condition in time.

As always, please share this article with all who say they are responsible citizens. If you appreciate my work, please subscribe by clicking under the article title (it’s free). Please peruse my library of work here for your use.

Inside the Financial Coup

2009-10-19T05:22:00.000-07:00

http://ampedstatus.com/news-reports-from-inside-the-financial-coup

News Reports from Inside the Financial Coup
Posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009

By David DeGraw, AmpedStatus Report 10/13 - 10/16

The past few days have been very revealing when it comes to the financial coup that has occurred here in the US. When we say financial coup, we’re not giving you hyperbole. We’re telling you the technical term for what has occurred.

Don’t take our word for it, investigate it for yourself. Here’s a special report we have compiled which features the most recent information available concerning the takeover:

Introduction

#1) Memo to Financial Investigators: Dig Deep

When the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission opened for business on September 17, it was a nonevent for the media. Leading newspapers brushed aside chairman Phil Angelides, the former California state treasurer, and his declaration of purpose–”uncovering the facts and providing an unbiased historical accounting of what brought our financial system and our economy to its knees.”

As Angelides put it, “The fuses for that cataclysm were undoubtedly lit years before. It is our job to diligently and doggedly follow those fuses to their origins.”

The press has moved on. Financial crisis was last year’s story. Didn’t the Treasury and Federal Reserve announce they have already turned things around? Hasn’t the president proposed a bunch of complicated reforms (boring!) for Congress to enact? Yes, but that is the problem. How can Washington reform the financial system when we still don’t know what happened?

We may know the broad outlines, but the landscape remains littered with unanswered questions and informed suspicions about who did what to produce the breakdown. The relevant facts are still buried in the files of Wall Street firms and the regulatory agencies that utterly failed as watchdogs.

The Angelides commission has the subpoena power to dig out secrets–from e-mails and private memos, and through testimony under oath–that can disclose political deal-making and ruinous financial strategies. Given the rush of events, the commission may be the public’s last, best chance to get at the truth of the matter.

Let’s “get at the truth of the matter”

#2) The Wall Street Coup D’Etat

The most revealing political quote of the last year came… from the second-highest ranking Democratic Senator, Dick Durbin, who told a local radio station in April: “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

The best Congressional floor speech of the last year on the financial crisis was this extraordinarily piercing five-minute revelation from Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio on the Wall Street bailout and how the Congress is subservient to their dictates. And the single most insightful article on the financial crisis was written by former IMF Chief Economist and current MIT Professor Simon Johnson in the May, 2009 issue of The Atlantic, when he argued that “the finance industry has effectively captured our government” and detailed how the U.S. has become very similar to failed emerging-market nations in both its political and economic culture.

#3) Heated Press Debate Over $83 billion For Health Care, But Silence On At Least 20 Times That Amount Gone to Wall Street

There is an odd disconnect between the furious public debate over health care reform, with its emphasis on the cost of an increased government role, and the nonexistent discussion about the far more expensive and largely secretive government program to bail out Wall Street. Why the agitation over the government spending $83 billion a year on health care when at least 20 times that amount has been thrown at the creators of the ongoing financial crisis without any serious public accountability? On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that employees of the financial industry that we taxpayers saved are slated to be paid a record $140 billion this year.

If you want to know who actually runs this country, just look at the phone logs, released by court order last week, revealing Geithner’s nearly constant calls to solicit the advice of the fat cats who caused the banking implosion. It’s the same as when he was chair of the Federal Reserve in New York, before Obama appointed him to his current job. Only back then, as he blithely ignored the impending financial meltdown, it was easier to have lunch with the bankers as well as to chat by phone.

In an earlier Freedom of Information exposé, The New York Times reported in April: “An examination of Mr. Geithner’s five years as president of the New York Fed, an era of unbridled and ultimately disastrous risk-taking by the financial industry, shows that he forged unusually close relationships with executives of Wall Street’s giant financial institutions. His actions, as a regulator and later a bailout king, often aligned with the industry’s interests and desires, according to interviews with financiers, regulators and analysts and a review of Federal Reserve records.”

Nothing has changed since then.

#4) Geithner’s All Ears for Debt Cartel

“Months ago, a former chief economist at the IMF called it mind control. Talking to Simon Johnson of the Atlantic Monthly, he explained that one of the most alarming truths laid bare by the economic crash was that the finance industry had effectively captured the thinking of government.

“That’s going too far,” said reasonable people. “This is no Banana Republic run by crony cartels.”

That was before we read Tim Geithner’s phone records.

Thursday’s AP report shows executives at a handful of companies — Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs — had not just the ear, but both ears of the Treasury Secretary to the exclusion of other even bigger and more troubled banks, and legislators.

As AP points out, Geithner had more contacts with Citigroup than he did with Barney Frank, D-Mass., the lawmaker leading the effort to approve Geithner’s financial overhaul plan. And Geithner’s contacts with Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and CEO at Goldman, way outnumber his contacts with Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

After the week this May when GM almost went bankrupt and the government was considering a federal takeover, the treasury secretary called Blankfein, then Jamie Dimon, the boss at JPMorgan. Then Obama called and as soon as they hung up, Geithner was back on the phone with Dimon. Poor California Democrat Xavier Becerra — who handles silly stuff like taxes and budgets. He had to leave a voice-mail message. And Geithner wasn’t talking to all bankers — mostly with people he served on nonprofit boards with, and hung out with socially.

So. . . where others have drug cartels, we have a debt cartel? It’d be clear by now if Geithner was just listening to his friends to hone his arguments against greater bank consolidation, debt securitization and finance over industry but Geithner has yet to show any sign of breaking with his Wall Street pushers.

In a Banana Republic we’d pay out protection money. Oh, but I forgot, we did that already.”

#5) Paulson’s Revealing Phone Records

While the economy was crashing last year, exclusively analyzed telephone records reveal the ex-Treasury secretary [Hank Paulson] was talking far more to Obama and Geithner than Bush and McCain.

Timothy Geithner’s just-released phone records caused quite a stir last week—specifically, the absurdly small Wall Street circle Obama’s Treasury secretary has consulted during one of the most critical economic periods in U.S. history. Yet as Winston Churchill once said, “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” Understanding the situation we’re now facing requires an examination of how things went down among him, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and the most influential financial titans on the planet, during the bailout and bank landscape carve-out period….

The information doesn’t come in ready-made easy-to-digest classifications, but combing the logs reveals four interesting facts:

a) Paulson and Geithner Were Tight.
Sure, you’d expect close contact during a crisis, but we’re talking really tight. During those seven months, the two chatted 416 times compared to the 268 times Paulson spoke with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who had final approval on all the mergers and bank holding company designations.

Even the nature of the Paulson-Geithner records indicates just who Paulson’s “go-to” guy really was: Bush’s Treasury secretary made almost twice as many outgoing calls to his eventual successor (279) as to Bernanke (150). With Geithner at the helm of the New York Fed, it extended $4 trillion, or 76 percent of the $5.3 trillion of Fed facilities, cheap loans, and other monies made available to the banking industry at the height of the fall crisis. While the Fed refuses to disclose the exact nature of collateral and recipients of that aid, we now know that there were almost no calls to smaller bank leaders during the crisis.

b) Obama Was Fully Engaged With Paulson During the 2008 Campaign
That the meltdown dovetailed with a presidential general election was extraordinary; equally extraordinary was how much both candidates, then-Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, were interacting directly with Paulson, in comparison with his boss, President George W. Bush. And between the former pair, it was the candidate from the opposition party, Obama, who was far more plugged-in, engaging in 26 direct calls with Paulson, compared with 14 for McCain. (For comparison, Bush logged in 24 direct calls, plus 27 conference calls or meetings). Paulson placed more than twice as many individual outgoing calls to Obama (14) as to President Bush (6).

After Obama was elected, his conversations with Paulson dropped off dramatically. Clearly, he was then engaging with his own team.

c) Paulson’s Big Three: Goldman, Morgan Stanley, BofA
As bank monikers and sizes were changing, Paulson gave the most access to the trio of Lloyd Blankfein, who succeeded him as Goldman Sachs CEO, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack and Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis. Not shocking given the frenzied, desperate times; Blankfein and Mack were trying to transform their investment banks into bank holding companies, to gain greater access to federal capital. Lewis, of course, was dealing with the whole Merrill Lynch merger issue. (With that out of the way, Geithner’s calls to Lewis dropped considerably.)

But, the four-day period of greatest call concentration is particularly striking. This was after Lehman tanked and Bank of America got stuck with Merrill. Between September 18 and 21 (when advantageous bank holding company status was approved for Goldman and Morgan Stanley), Blankfein far outpaced Mack in terms of calls with Paulson. He put in 11 and received eight outgoing (19 in total), whereas Mack only placed four calls to Paulson and received five (nine in total). This indicates the level at which Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley coordinated their bank holding company push—with the world crumbling, these former competitors united as friends—but also the extent to which Goldman was the main driver. During those four days, Paulson and Geithner kept up their pattern of firm contact. Paulson called Geithner 28 times, whereas he only called Bernanke 11 times, even though bank holding company approval came from Bernanke.

Other bankers were looped in, too. But again, these were mostly megabank officials, including Citigroup’s senior counselor, Robert Rubin, and its CEO, Vikram Pandit (34 between them); Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain (24); JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon (21); followed more distantly by Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf (three).

d) Robert Rubin Was Paulson’s Guy at Citigroup
Pandit may have been the CEO, but it was Robert Rubin who was Paulson’s preferred Citigroup contact, engaging in 26 calls versus just eight for Pandit. No surprise: Paulson and Rubin had both been Goldman Sachs CEOs and Treasury secretaries. That’s the most exclusive club out there.

Frankly, this whole group forms a little club. The New York Fed and Wall Street are historically tight. Goldman Sachs, the New York Fed, Treasury, and the White House (Goldman was Obama’s second-largest campaign source of contributions) are recently tight. The day after Citigroup got a massive $301 billion federal government guarantee, plus an additional $20 billion from one TARP program, and $25 billion from another, Obama selected New York Fed Chief Geithner as his Treasury secretary, and appointed former Treasury Secretary (and Rubin mentee) Larry Summers to lead his National Council of Economic advisers. The baton had been passed. Paulson effectively groomed Geithner, just as Rubin had groomed Summers and pioneered the path between the top spot at Goldman and Treasury for Paulson.

Whenever you have too much power concentrated in the hands of a few men, things don’t turn out so well for everyone else. That’s strikingly evident by the fallout from the crisis, and the selective bailout and favoritism of the firms in control of the access and money flow. As the FDIC comes close to shutting down its 100th small bank, Goldman and JPM Chase are getting set to announce another set of stellar quarterly results and gearing up for record bonuses. Bank of America and Citigroup are hoping to post some great numbers of their own, floated on public capital and federal aid.

What’s wrong with this picture? Absolutely everything.

#6) Geithner Aides Reaped Millions Working for Banks, Hedge Funds

Some of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s closest aides, none of whom faced Senate confirmation, earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and other Wall Street firms, according to financial disclosure forms. The advisers include Gene Sperling, who last year took in $887,727 from Goldman Sachs and $158,000 for speeches mostly to financial companies, including the firm run by accused Ponzi scheme mastermind R. Allen Stanford.

Another top aide, Lee Sachs, reported more than $3 million in salary and partnership income from Mariner Investment Group, a New York hedge fund. As part of Geithner’s kitchen cabinet, Sperling and Sachs wield influence behind the scenes at the Treasury Department, where they help oversee the $700 billion banking rescue and craft executive pay rules and the revamp of financial regulations.

Yet they haven’t faced the public scrutiny given to Senate-confirmed appointees, nor are they compelled to testify in Congress to defend or explain the Treasury’s policies.

And to the Coup Leaders Go the Spoils

#7) Goldman Tops $3B in Profit, Blows By Estimates

Goldman Sachs is even more golden than we’d thought. The top firm on Wall Street posted a record third-quarter profit of $3.19 billion, a billion dollars higher than expected, thanks to returns on advising on takeovers and more aggressive investing. That quarterly result more than triples the $845 million it posted this time last year. As for the big question of compensation, the bank said $5.35 billion was going to salaries and the year-end bonus pool, up from last year. “Their biggest challenge and the thing that seems to get the most press is how much they put aside for comp expense,” one financial analyst tells Bloomberg. “A year ago we were talking about whether they would survive and now they just have too much damn money.”

#8) JPMorgan Posts $3.6 Billion Profit

JPMorgan, the first of the big banks to report earnings for the July-September period, reported a $3.59 billion profit but also said it roughly doubled the amount of money it set aside for failed home and credit card loans in the quarter. The bank’s earnings cheered investors, who sent JPMorgan stock and the overall market higher. Still, the bank’s performance shouldn’t be taken as a forecast for how well other banks did. Many financial companies don’t have such big investment banking operations, which includes trading of stocks and bonds and allowed JPMorgan to overcome its loan losses.

#9) $140 billion! Record Payday for Wall Street

Workers at major Wall Street firms will make as much as $140 billion this year, and the reaction from the public and Congress can already be predicted. According to an exclusive report in The Wall Street Journal, “Workers at 23 top investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers and stock and commodities exchanges can expect to earn even more than they did the peak year of 2007.” Wall Street executives will make the case that many firms like Goldman Sachs (GS) will produce record annual profit results for their shareholders, and that their stock prices have handily outperformed the market. But the board of directors approving the pay might have been better off delaying some of the payouts for a year, or reducing them in the name of self-preservation.

Nothing is more likely to anger Congress and the Administration than headlines announcing that the average Goldman employee will make $700,000, which means its executives will make many times that.

#10) $23 billion! Goldman Sachs 2009 bonuses could buy insurance for 1.7 million families

It’s enough to pay the health insurance premium for the average American family ($13,375) 1.7 million times…. Or, apparently, it’s enough to reward the employees of Goldman Sachs for a bonanza trading year, at a firm where average employee compensation was recently $622,000 — and likely to be greater this year.

The $23 billion figure could leave some American taxpayers woozy — the US government bailed out Goldman Sachs with a multi-billion payment last year, which the firm has since repaid. But while Goldman is likely to pay its biggest bonuses ever to employees, the firm pays very little in taxes worldwide. In 2008, the company was said to have paid just $14 million in taxes worldwide, and paid $6 billion in 2007. The firm’s corporate tax rate? About 1 percent. According a prominent tax lawyer, “They have taken steps to ensure that a lot of their income is earned in lower-tax jurisdictions.”

#11) A Hidden $34 Billion Bank Subsidy? Study Exposes How Taxpayers Are Subsidizing Large Banks

“One of the key terms to come out of the nation’s economic meltdown has been “too big to fail.” The government has funneled billions of dollars to large financial firms by arguing that their collapse would deal an irreparable blow to economic recovery. A new study has calculated the tab of the “too big to fail” approach, and it amounts to a far larger taxpayer-funded subsidy than previously thought. The Center for Economic and Policy Research says the bailout has allowed “too big to fail” banks to pay significantly lower interest rates than those paid by smaller banks. According to one estimate, that’s meant a subsidy for the nation’s eighteen largest bank holding companies of $34.1 billion a year. That amount represents nearly half these companies’ combined annual profits.

Maintaining Their Grip: No Accountability - Lack of Reform - Payoffs

#12) Top Financial Services Committee Members Rely Heavily On Finance Campaign Contributions

One year after the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression, Congress is still debating new financial regulations to protect consumers and prevent risk-taking in the financial sector.

The House Committee on Financial Services is currently undertaking the important first step of writing, amending and voting on some of the pieces of the long-proposed financial regulatory reform. While debating these issues top committee members have been the recipients of disproportionate campaign contributions from the very industry that they are tasked with regulating.

Twenty-seven committee members have so far received over one-quarter of their contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector. This includes Chair Barney Frank, Ranking Member Spencer Bachus, four subcommittee chairs and four subcommittee ranking members. Of the twenty-seven, twelve committee members received over 35% of their contributions in 2009 from the FIRE sector. Ranking Member Bachus, a crucial decision maker on the committee, received 71% of his campaign contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector so far this year. (These numbers run from January 1-June 30.)

For his career, the Alabama congressman receives 45% of his contributions from the FIRE sector. Bachus leads the committee in his reliance on FIRE sector campaign contributions. Bachus has taking a position in opposition to most of the regulatory reforms. Bachus recently stated in a hearing, “this is absolutely the wrong time to be creating a new government agency empowered not only to ration credit, but to design the financial products offered to consumers.”

#13) The Fight for Financial Reform

“These next few months are a time of reckoning. Every so often in American political history, a window for change opens, and the combination of crisis, leadership, and political movement makes big, positive reforms possible. That window is open now–but barely–and if we don’t act quickly the protectors of the status quo (aka lobbyists, Republicans, and so-called moderate Democrats) will succeed in slamming it shut again….

When it comes to making crucial financial reforms, we face a determined, well-heeled opposition that will wage a fierce battle every step of the way. As Alan Blinder describes in a recent New York Times op-ed, “The money at stake is mind-boggling, and one financial industry after another will go to the mat to fight any provision that might hurt it.”

The Devastation Down Below - The Ground War: Seizing Land, Assets, Property - Foreclosures, Unemployment, Underemployment, Pay Cuts - Coup Casualties

#14) Foreclosures: ‘Worst three months of all time’

Despite concerted government-led and lender-supported efforts to prevent foreclosures, the number of filings hit a record high in the third quarter, according to a report issued Thursday. “They were the worst three months of all time,” said Rick Sharga, spokesman for RealtyTrac, an online marketer of foreclosed homes. During that time, 937,840 homes received a foreclosure letter — whether a default notice, auction notice or bank repossession, the RealtyTrac report said. That means one in every 136 U.S. homes were in foreclosure, which is a 5% increase from the second quarter and a 23% jump over the third quarter of 2008.

#15) Good News on Wall Street Means… What Exactly?

It’s literally amazing to me that our press corps hasn’t yet managed to draw a distinction between good news on Wall Street for companies like Goldman, and good news in reality.

I watched carefully the reporting of the Dow breaking 10,000 the other day and not anywhere did I see a major news organization include a paragraph of the “On the other hand, so fucking what?” sort, one that might point out that unemployment is still at a staggering high, foreclosures are racing along at a terrifying clip, and real people are struggling more than ever. In fact the dichotomy between the economic health of ordinary people and the traditional “market indicators” is not merely a non-story, it is a sort of taboo — unmentionable in major news coverage.

#16) U.S. unemployment rate closes in on 10%

Sept. job losses exceed forecasts as recession’s toll hits 7.6M. The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent in September… The “underemployment” rate, which also counts discouraged workers and those stuck in part-time jobs who would prefer full-time work, rose to 17 percent from 16.8 percent….

The U.S. economy has lost 7.6 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, the most since the Great Depression, the Labor Department said. The unemployment rate has doubled.

#17) Still on the Job, but at Half the Pay

In recent decades, layoffs were the standard procedure for shrinking labor costs. Reducing the wages of those who remained on the job was considered demoralizing and risky: the best workers would jump to another employer. But now pay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression….

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track pay cuts, but it suggests they are reflected in the steep decline of another statistic: total weekly pay for production workers, pilots among them, representing 80 percent of the work force. That index has fallen for nine consecutive months, an unprecedented string over the 44 years the bureau has calculated weekly pay, capturing the large number of people out of work, those working fewer hours and those whose wages have been cut…

“What this means,” said Thomas J. Nardone, an assistant commissioner at the bureau, “is that the amount of money people are paid has taken a big hit; not just those who have lost their jobs, but those who are still employed.”

#18) Bill Moyers: Wall Street Rescue Report

One year after the near-collapse of the U.S. financial system, the crisis seems to be over for the banks. No one expects any of the remaining huge banks to collapse, and a few large firms — JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group and Wells Fargo — are expected to post another quarter of billion dollar profits. But according to guests on BILL MOYERS JOURNAL, ordinary Americans have little reason to celebrate the better fortunes on Wall Street. Simon Johnson, professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), explain to Bill Moyers that the outlook for the rest of America isn’t so rosy.

Not only are many Americans still suffering the collapse of the housing market, they say, but Congress and the president haven’t made the changes needed to prevent a much worse catastrophe sometime in the future. To highlight the disparity between bailing out the banks and helping homeowners, Rep. Kaptur points to her district, where she sees one of the now-profitable banks not doing enough to help struggling borrowers: “Let me give you a reality from ground zero in Toledo, Ohio. Our foreclosures have gone up 94 percent. A few months ago, I met with our realtors. And I said, “What should I know?” They said, “Well, first of all, you should know the worst companies that are doing this to us.” “Well, give me the top one.” They said, “JPMorgan Chase.”

Johnson adds that even bailed-out banks have little incentive to help homeowners: “I’m afraid that it’s pretty obvious, and it’s very tragic, that they have no interest in helping the homeowners. They make money with what they’re doing. They expected a lot of these mortgages they made to default, okay? It was in their models. A high default rate. Now, they didn’t expect house prices to come down so much. That’s where they got their losses. But they absolutely made these loans expecting they would have to foreclose on people. And figuring they would make money on that.“

Insurgency Fights Back

#19) To Hell With Wall Street! Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur’s Fight Club

Even the dimmest Americans know they’re getting screwed by Wall Street fat cats, and nothing could have made that reality clearer than the bailouts: $1 trillion dollars of taxpayer money that went to line the pockets of the guys and gals who crashed the economy. And if that wasn’t bad enough, once the fat cats and credit card companies’ armies of Repo Men were through collecting the contents of the houses, they came back for the houses themselves.

The banks tried to sell the old, familiar lie that “irresponsible people” i.e. “black people” went and got themselves into a mess they couldn’t dig themselves out of, which was almost always a lie. Subprime lenders issued mortgages in a predatory fashion, frequently lied, and used creative math to convince people they could afford mortgages with hidden, adjustable interest rates. Those that can afford to play Capitalism: The Game prosper, while the rest of society suffers. Of course, those of us who don’t work for the Big 4 banks in the Too Big To Fail gang, wither and die.

Today, The New York Times announced the 100th small bank failure of 2009. Don’t expect any mourning. The bank isn’t named “JPMorgan Chase.” It’s projected that by 2012, there will be eight million home foreclosures in the United States. Lots of politicians are siding with the banks during the foreclosure epidemic, but a few brave souls are standing up to the Wall Street criminals….

In other words, Kaptur started a peaceful Project Mayhem, a revolution where the wronged refuse to happily play their parts in a fixed game concocted by Wall Street and the government, who work hand-in-hand to protect a tiny coterie of wealthy people, while average Americans unwittingly pick up the bill in a Corporate Socialism system that should really be called the United States of Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs.

Kaptur knows the business world operates on precariously narrow tightropes of paper trails. Without the records of transactions, it’s difficult for large banks and businesses to prove homeowners and customers are in debt.

“Produce the note,” says Kaptur. She means that the banks must produce the mortgage they claim to own. The beauty of this system is that most mortgages were flipped, chopped up, and sold to other lenders and servicers during the lending boom feeding frenzy. As a result, many of the new lenders don’t have the proper paperwork to show they own the mortgage.

And without that proof of mortgage, the banks cannot legally kick people out of their homes. Not only that, but this puts a homeowner in an excellent position to renegotiate a mortgage.

#20) Publicly-Owned Banks Can Help States and Residents

State and local leaders are considering creating publicly owned banks that can funnel credit to where it is needed most: directly into the local economy.

The credit crunch is getting worse on Main Street, despite a Wall Street bailout now in the trillions of dollars. The Federal Reserve’s charts show that “base money” is rapidly expanding—meaning coins, paper money, and commercial banks’ reserves with the central bank. But the money isn’t getting where it needs to go to stimulate economic growth: into the bank accounts of American businesses and consumers. The Fed has been pumping out money to the banks, and their reserves have been growing at unprecedented rates, but the money supply in the real economy has been declining.

According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writing last month in the UK Telegraph, U.S. bank credit and M3 (the broadest measure of the money supply) contracted over the summer at rates comparable to the onset of the Great Depression. In the summer quarter, U.S. bank loans fell at an annual pace of almost 14 percent. “There has been nothing like this in the USA since the 1930s,” said Professor Tim Congdon of International Monetary Research. “The rapid destruction of money balances is madness.”…

Local Government to the Rescue?

The Fed may have played all its cards, but state and local governments still hold a few aces. Some local politicians are looking into the feasibility of opening their own publicly-owned banks, providing them with their own credit machines. A new publicly owned bank would have a clean set of books, untainted by the Wall Street addiction to gambling in complex derivatives; and its profits would go back to the local government and community, rather than being siphoned off in exorbitant salaries, bonuses, and dividends. A publicly-owned bank could funnel credit where it is needed most, directly into the local economy.

Congressional Hit Job: Defunding Insurgency Organization ACORN

#21) Entrapping ACORN

ACORN, an umbrella organization of community groups that serves poor people in major cities across the country through housing, legal advocacy, family services, and higher wages, has lost all federal funding, after decades of working for low-income, disadvantaged Americans.

That the House of Representatives has moved swiftly on anything is stunning in and of itself. More stunning, this is in response to a single independent report by conservative activists, with no follow-up investigation, no hearings…

#22) The ACORN Standard

ACORN, like all organizations receiving federal dollars, should be subject to Congressional scrutiny. But ACORN was clearly singled out for political reasons. Those Democrats who voted for the “defund ACORN” bill should be required to explain their reasoning to their constituents, particularly when so few of them have taken substantive actions to apply the ACORN standard to corporate criminals with real rap sheets.

What YOU Can Do To Fight Back:

#23) Take America Back From the Banks - Showdown in Chicago

Reining in the financial industry’s power and greed will be a long, hard-fought war. But it is one that must be fought. The elites hate to acknowledge it, but when large numbers of ordinary people are moved to action, it changes the narrow political world where the elites call the shots.

Inside accounts reveal the extent to which Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon’s conduct of the Vietnam war was constrained by the huge anti-war movement. It was the civil rights movement, not compelling arguments, that convinced members of the US Congress to end legal racial discrimination. More recently, the town hall meetings dominated by people opposed to healthcare reform have been a serious roadblock for those pushing reform. Those disgusted by the bank bailouts, and the bankers who brought us this recession, will have a chance to make their views known when the American Bankers Association has its annual meeting in Chicago this month. A large coalition of labour, community and consumer organisations are organising a protest at this “Showdown in Chicago”….

To summarise: the bankers wrecked the economy with their greed, ran off with taxpayer dollars in a massive bailout and now plan to raise taxes for the rest of us. If that picture doesn’t sound quite right, then go to Chicago….

The policies that will rein in the banks: reform of the Federal Reserve Board to make it democratically accountable, a tax on financial speculation to pay for the bankers’ mess and restrictions on the bank abuses of consumers that caused the carnage have support from people on both the left and right.
A bill that would require the Fed to disclose what it did with more than $2tn in loans to banks and other financial institutions was originally co-sponsored by Ron Paul and Alan Grayson, one of the most conservative and one of the most progressive members of Congress. Due to public pressure, it now has more than 270 co-sponsors.

This is exactly the sort of alliance that gets the elite worried. Reining in the power of the financial industry will be a long, hard-fought war, but it is one that must be fought. President and Nobel peace prize winner Barack Obama may not have been able to bring the Olympics to Chicago, but everyone who wants to retake our country from the banks can bring their backside there on 25 October.

Masters Of Finance
Come you masters of economics
You that build all the markets
You that build the debt plans
You that build the big banks
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks…

#24) Unmask The Federal Reserve Campaign - Send a Message to Your Senator

Where’s Our Money? Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, is up for confirmation to his second term, but he has still refused to disclose where he sent $2 trillion in taxpayers’ money. Send a message to your Senators and ask them to make Bernanke come clean before his confirmation moves forward!

P.S.

The Day People Come to Realize how much money has been stolen from them, and be assured, that day of reckoning is coming, and when it comes history will look back on this cartel of bankers as the modern world looks back at Nazi Germany. Their greed has inflicted immense human suffering the world over. Their greed has brought humanity to a breaking point.

Once again, we’re not giving you hyperbole, we are just telling you the facts.

~ David DeGraw, AmpedStatus Report