“The same thing is happening w/ good Muslim people around the world. And for all good Americans citizens who are Muslim’s, gun rights/2nd amendment advocates, Libertarians, (or anyone who threatens the power structure of the of the horrendously evil & criminal white Anglo-American establishment), your next up to bat.”
-Fred Face 1/31/10
A long-awaited Department of Justice watchdog report that probed whether John Yoo and his former boss Jay Bybee violated professional standards when they provided the Bush White House with legal advice on torture has cleared both men of misconduct, according to Newsweek, citing unnamed sources who have seen the document.
An earlier version of the report, prepared by the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) and completed in December 2008, actually concluded that Yoo, a Berkeley law professor, and Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge on the 9th Circuit, violated professional standards when they drafted an August 2002 legal opinion that authorized CIA officers to use brutal methods when interrogating suspected terrorist detainees.
But as I reported last April, those earlier conclusions were watered down after OPR received responses on the report’s conclusions from Yoo and Bybee, who both worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).
Legal sources familiar with the internal debate about the draft report say OPR is in the process of “watering”- down the criticism of legal opinions by [OLC] lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee in 2002 and 2003 and by [OLC acting head Steven Bradbury], who in 2005 reinstated some of the Yoo-Bybee opinions after they had been withdrawn by Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith when he headed the OLC in 2003 and 2004.
David Margolis, the career prosecutor charged with reviewing the final version of the report, was responsible for “softening” OPR’s earlier finding of professional misconduct and instead determined that Yoo and Bybee “showed poor judgment” when they drafted an August 1, 2002 legal opinion authorizing the CIA to employ methods such as waterboarding against detainees during interrogations.
That means neither Yoo nor Bybee will not be referred to state bar associations where they could have faced disciplinary action. For Bybee, such a referral could have also led to an impeachment inquiry before Congress.
Newsweek noted that the report is still “sharply critical” of the “legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding” and other methods of torture CIA interrogators used against detainees after 9/11.
Moreover, the report, which is still under a declassification review “will provide many new details about how waterboarding was adopted and the role that top White House officials played in the process, say two sources who have read the report but asked for anonymity to describe a sensitive document,” Newsweek reported.
Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo—including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture—were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice’s criminal division, refused the CIA’s request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.
The OPR probe was launched in mid-2004 after a meeting in which Jack Goldsmith, then head of the OLC, got into a tense debate with White House lawyers, including Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington. Goldsmith had withdrawn some of the Yoo-Bybee opinions because he felt they were “legally flawed” and “sloppily written.”
After the meeting, Goldsmith resigned and was subsequently replaced on an acting basis by Bradbury, who restored some of the controversial Yoo-Bybee opinions in May 2005, again granting George W. Bush broad powers to inflict painful interrogations on detainees.
As Truthout previously reported, Attorney General Eric Holder testified before Congress last year that the OPR report was expected be released by end of November. In interviews over the past month, two senior aides to Democratic lawmakers said the report was being held up in lieu of the passage of a health care bill.
But Tracy Schmaler, a DOJ spokeswoman, disputed those claims.
“That is absolutely untrue,” Schmaler said. “One thing has nothing to do with another.”
Schmaler said the review “process is ongoing and we hope to have [the report] complete and released soon.”
Two DOJ officials familiar with details of the report said a delay in releasing it in the time frame Holder had promised was due, in part, to the fact that Margolis was hospitalized in December for pneumonia.
In his testimony last November, Holder said the report had not been released sooner due to “the amount of time we gave to the lawyers who represented the people who are the subject of the report an opportunity to respond. And then [OPR] had to react to those responses.”
http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m62756&hd=&size=1&l=e
by F. William Engdahl
President becomes UN Special Envoy to earthquake-stricken Haiti.
A born-again neo-conservative US business wheeler-dealer preacher claims Haitians are condemned for making a literal ‘pact with the Devil.’
Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organizations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.
Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela.
Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, has the geological fate that it straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another—the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating atop an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.
This vast mass of underwater plates are in constant motion, rubbing against each other along lines analogous to cracks in a broken porcelain vase that has been reglued. The earth’s tectonic plates typically move at a rate 50 to 100 mm annually in relation to one another, and are the origin of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth’s mantle. The geophysics surrounding the convergence of the three plates that run more or less directly beneath Port-au-Prince make the region prone to earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti with devastating ferocity on January 12.
A relevant Texas geological project
Leaving aside the relevant question of how well in advance the Pentagon and US scientists knew the quake was about to occur, and what Pentagon plans were being laid before January 12, another issue emerges around the events in Haiti that might help explain the bizarre behavior to date of the major ‘rescue’ players—the United States, France and Canada. Aside from being prone to violent earthquakes, Haiti also happens to lie in a zone that, due to the unusual geographical intersection of its three tectonic plates, might well be straddling one of the world’s largest unexplored zones of oil and gas, as well as of valuable rare strategic minerals.
The vast oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and of the region from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden are at a similar convergence zone of large tectonic plates, as are such oil-rich zones as Indonesia and the waters off the coast of California. In short, in terms of the physics of the earth, precisely such intersections of tectonic masses as run directly beneath Haiti have a remarkable tendency to be the sites of vast treasures of minerals, as well as oil and gas, throughout the world.
Notably, in 2005, a year after the Bush-Cheney Administration de facto deposed the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Baptiste Aristide, a team of geologists from the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas began an ambitious and thorough two-phase mapping of all geological data of the Caribbean Basins. The project is due to be completed in 2011. Directed by Dr. Paul Mann, it is called “Caribbean Basins, Tectonics and Hydrocarbons.” It is all about determining as precisely as possible the relation between tectonic plates in the Caribbean and the potential for hydrocarbons—oil and gas.
“Heres an example of two paths men can take in life. You can be human or you can be a life sucking wimpy parasite. Salinger chose humanity.”
-F.F.
Webster G. Tarpley
Infowars.com
January 30, 2020
Today the Internet abounds with appreciations and essays on the life and work of a celebrated literary recluse J. D. Salinger, who just passed away in New Hampshire. There is one important aspect of Salinger’s work which most literary critics appear to have missed. Salinger attended northeastern prep schools during the 1930s, and wrote about his experiences, most notably in a short story which he submitted to the New Yorker in 1941. I thought of Salinger in 1991 when I was writing The Unauthorized Biography of George H. W. Bush. It occurred to me that some of the disjointed and cynical monologues delivered by the elder Bush in public sounded very much like the voice of Salinger’s antihero, Holden Caulfield. The following passage from my 1992 Bush biography sums up the case that a character based on the elder Bush actually appears in The Catcher in the Rye.
The leading feature of this … is Bush’s total lack of rigor; his personal idiom is incapable of expressing causality or precision. Already the subject-object relations are blurred, antecedents are a realm of anything goes, and verbal action has dwindled to insignificance. Underneath the avid and enthusiastic persona is a mind that is petulant, bored, and blase about everything that does not touch the interests of the ego. The result is an impression of overwhelming, undifferentiated banality. One is reminded of a narrative voice like the following:
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father.”
The speaker here, Holden Caulfield of J.D. Salinger’sThe Catcher in the Rye, inhabited the world that also belonged to George Bush — the world of the northeast prep schools of the 1940s. Apart from the obvious parallels between George and Holden, there is the interesting question of whether Bush might have a closer relation to this literary personage. In the course of the errant Holden Caulfield’s time in New York City, he takes a girlfriend to a matinee theatre performance; during the intermission the girlfriend, named Sally, spots “some jerk she knew on the other side of the lobby. Some guy in one of those very dark grey flannel suits and one of those checkered vests. Strictly Ivy League. Big deal.” Holden recounts the later conversation between Sally and her friend:
“You should’ve seen him when old Sally asked him how he liked the play. He was the kind of a phony that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody’s question. He stepped back, and stepped right on the lady’s foot behind him. He probably broke every toe in her body. He said the play itself was no masterpiece, but that the Lunts, of course, were absolute angels. Angels. For Chrissake. Angels. That killed me. Then he and Sally started talking about a lot of people they both knew. It was the phoniest conversation you ever heard in your life.”
“The worst part was, the jerk had one of those very phony, Ivy League voices, one of those very tired, snobby voices. He sounded just like a girl. He didn’t hesitate to horn in on my date, the bastard. I even thought for a minute that he was going to get in the goddamn cab with us when the show was over, because he walked about two blocks with us, but he said he had to meet a bunch of phonies for cocktails, he said. I could see them all sitting around in some bar, with their goddamn checkered vests, criticizing shows and books and women in those tired, snobby voices. They kill me, those guys.”
Who was Sally’s friend? “His name was George something – I don’t even remember- and he went to Andover. Big, big deal.” Who was the “phony Andover bastard” who so exasperated Holden Caulfield? Can this be a very early cameo appearance of George Herbert Walker Bush? J.D. Salinger is not known for giving interviews, but George Bush, Big Man on the Andover campus, would have been a figure of some note under the clock in the Biltmore during the early 1940’s, which seems to be the epoch in which this episode is set.
For the full text, see:
http://tarpley.net/online-books/george-bush-the-unauthorized-biography/chapter-25-thyroid-storm/
From healthcare to public debt, pundits are attacking President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address from almost every conceivable angle.
When it comes to Obama transparency, Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy attorney Kurt Opsahl points out that the chief executive told the American public one thing Wednesday night and a federal appeals court another just a few weeks ago.
The issue at hand surrounds lobbying. “It’s time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my administration or Congress,” the president said during his televised address.
But, before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last month, the Justice Department argued that it should not have to disclose the names of telecommunication industry lobbyists. Those companies successfully lobbied Congress and President George W. Bush in 2008 to approve legislation that provided their companies with retroactive immunity to lawsuits accusing them of funneling, without warrants, all domestic electronic communications to the National Security Agency.
That legislation killed the EFF’s case against the telecommunication companies. The EFF then sued the government, seeking the lobbyists’ identities. A California federal judge agreed, and then the Obama administration appealed.
“There is no public interest in the compelled disclosure of the representatives’ identities” (.pdf), the administration told the federal appeals court in San Francisco Dec. 14.
Opsahl points out that there is no national security concern with disclosing the information.
“What they want to hide will not give some advantage to our adversaries,” Opsahl said in a telephone interview. “They want to protect the telecoms and themselves from the embarrassment to be involved in lobbying to deny millions of Americans their day in court.”
It remains to be seen, Opsahl added, “whether the administration will file another paper with the court clarifying that their position has changed.”
In case you forgot, Obama, as a senator from Illinois, voted for the immunity bill that President George W. Bush signed.
Photo: Tim Sloan/AP
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/obama-speaks-transparency-subterfuge/
This is a list of countries and territories by current account balance (CAB), based on the International Monetary Fund data for 2007, obtained from the latest World Economic Outlook database (October 2008).[1] Numbers for 2008 should become available in April 2009. Estimates are highlighted.
“Peanut Butter?”
-F.F.
Commentary by David Reilly
Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — 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 Generaleand 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 SecretaryHenry 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 expressed are his own.)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aaIuE.W8RAuU
By CAROL DRIVER
President Obama is planning to increase spending on America’s nuclear weapons stockpile just days after pledging to try to rid the world of them.
In his budget to be announced on Monday, Mr Obama has allocated £4.3billion to maintain the U.S. arsenal – £370million more than George Bush spent on nuclear weapons in his final year.
The Obama administration also plans to spend a further £3.1billion over the next five years on nuclear security.
The announcement comes despite the American President declaring nuclear weapons were the ‘greatest danger’ to U.S. people during in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.
And it flies in the face of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to him in October for ‘his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’.
The Nobel committee was attacked at the time for bestowing the accolade on a new president whose initiatives are yet to bear fruit – which included reducing the world stock of nuclear arms.
The budget is higher than that allocated by George Bush – who was seen by many as a warmongering president in the wake of the Iraq invasion in 2003 – during his premiership.
During his 70-minute State of the UNion speech on Wednesday, which marked his first year in office, Obama said: ‘I have embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons, and seeks a world without them.’
However, Vice President Joe Biden today supported the increase on nuclear weapons maintenance, saying: ‘Even in a time of tough budget decisions, these are investments we must make for our security.
‘We are committed to working with Congress to ensure these budget increases are approved.’
Biden said the Obama administration had inherited a ‘steady decline’ in support for U.S. nuclear stockpiles and infrastructure.
‘For almost a decade, our laboratories and facilities have been underfunded and undervalued,’ he said.
‘The consequences of this neglect – like the growing shortage of skilled nuclear scientists and engineers and the ageing of critical facilities – have largely escaped public notice.
‘The budget we will submit to Congress on Monday both reverses this decline and enables us to implement the president’s nuclear-security agenda.’
He added: ‘This investment is long overdue. It will strengthen our ability to recruit, train and retain the skilled people we need to maintain our nuclear capabilities.
‘It will support the work of our nuclear labs, a national treasure that we must and will sustain.’
The Obama administration will publish its budget for fiscal year 2011 on Monday.
The proposal will include a budget increase for nuclear issues while paring back other areas in an effort to control record deficits.
Biden said those steps along with others to advance non-proliferation were essential to ‘holding nations like North Korea and Iran accountable when they break the rules, and deterring others from trying to do so’.
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Prison Planet.com
Friday, January 29, 2010
Globalists intent on ushering in a zero-growth post-industrial society are bypassing the federal government’s stuttering efforts to implement the cap and trade scam and going directly to the states in an effort to impose their control freak tax on the very life-giving gas that we all exhale – carbon dioxide.
Even as the foundation of the argument that human emissions of CO2 cause global warming crumbles and collapses amidst scandal after scandal, energy companies and state authorities are still pushing ahead with sinister plans to mandate that individuals and businesses get government allowances and permits to emit carbon dioxide.
KLBJ radio reports that Austin Energy, which powers the city, presented to the Austin City Council “Austin Energy’s Carbon Reduction Plan,” which goes even further than the federal cap and trade bill in calling for CO2 emissions to be reduced by 20% by 2025.
The fact that energy companies are behind this again disproves the flawed notion that oil and electricity companies oppose the global warming movement, when in fact they are its major adherents. The climate change scam is a goldmine for them because effectively licensing CO2 emissions only drives up utility prices – the costs are passed on to the consumer and their profits soar.
Austin Energy head Roger Duncan told the Austin City Council that the program would cost around $2.6 billion, but since the cost such initiatives is routinely underestimated, expect a final figure that is significantly higher. He admitted that the plan would cause energy prices to rise.
This will of course result in much higher energy bills for the general public because they will be forced to buy permits from the government to emit the deadly life-giving gas carbon dioxide.
The program will also include a Energy Conservation Audit and Disclosure Ordinance, which will empower environmental goons to perform energy audits on every house over ten years old when it is put up for sale. The new enforcement would also require “an energy audit/rating for all non-industrial commercial buildings with 5,000 square feet or more and multifamily properties with five or more units, aged 10 years or older.”
A similar system was introduced in 2007 in the UK amidst widespread derision and loathing. Known as Home Information Packs, shortly after they were introduced the British property market crashed assellers refused to pay the fee, which was mandatory for all home sales. The system has since become notorious as nothing more than an odious new tax.
Despite the fact that the carbon trading market, along with “smart meter” programs, have been exposed as slush fund scams owned by the very globalists fearmongering about man-made climate change – namely Al Gore and Maurice Strong – designed to line the pockets of habitual con men who have been caught over and over again lying about the evidence behind global warming, states are now adopting their own version of the scheme so that the trick can be played on an unsuspecting public who still think that cap and trade hasn’t been implemented.
In reality, as Bloomberg News reports, “State government actions are likely to dominate the emerging U.S. carbon market in 2010,” with programs set to expand. “A group of Northeastern states already has a carbon market and two more regional programs in the Midwest and West plan to follow suit,” states the article.
As we have highlighted in the past, the ultimate goal is to reduce carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050, a move that would inflict a new Great Depression, cost millions of jobs, and sink America to near third world status.
The agenda to cut carbon emissions by 80 per cent is a huge leap towards the ultimate goal, expressed by the Carnegie Institute in 2008 and afforded sober credibility by the corporate media – a complete reduction down to zero carbon emissions, which would return mankind to the agrarian age and completely reverse hundreds of years of technological progress.
This is the ultimate tax on life and a dream come true for control freaks and globalist organizations like the Bilderberg Group and the Club of Rome who have openly pushed for a “post-industrial zero-growth society” where our standards of living are drastically reduced.
As internationally bestselling author and Bilderberg expert Daniel Estulin writes in his book The Bilderberg Group, “In a post-industrial period, zero growth will be necessary to destroy vestiges of general prosperity. When there is prosperity, there is progress. Prosperity and progress make it impossible to implement repression, and you need repression if you hope to divide society into owners and slaves. The end of prosperity will bring an end to the production of nuclear-generated electric power (as well as coal-fired plants – ed) and all industrialization (except for the computer and service industries.) The remaining Canadian and American industries would be exported to poor countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Nicaragua, where slave labor is cheap. One of the principal objectives for NAFTA will then be realized.”
http://www.infowars.com/cap-and-trade-scam-to-be-enforced-at-state-level/
“Are people still stupid enough to believed this near comic sitcom style propaganda. What’s the general reading in the American mind set? I don’t know? Are people still buying this kinda stuff. Hopefully not.”
-F.F.
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
January 29, 2010
Not only does the dead and buried Osama hate us for our freedoms, he also hates us because we have not prevented climate change. “Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, blamed the United States and developed countries for not halting climate change and said that the global economy should immediately abandon its reliance on the American dollar, according to an audiotape released Friday by the broadcaster Al Jazeera,” reports The New York Times.
Osama sounds a lot like Al Gore. “Talk about climate change is not an ideological luxury but a reality. All of the industrialized countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis.”
As usual, the authenticity of the tape could not be immediately confirmed, and Al Jazeera did not say how it had obtained the message.
The audio is more evidence the CIA and the Pentagon, with the assistance of the corporate media, are trying to resurrect the Osama and al-Qaeda myth as the government increases its presence in Afghanistan, steps up attacks in Pakistan, and launches a new front in the bogus GWOT in Yemen.
The Osama as tree hugger audio is the second from the dead terror leader and CIA asset in a week. On Sunday, the dead Osama claimed responsibility for the ludicrous Christmas day underwear non-bombing that was obviously a black op. “Mr. bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding in Pakistan near the Afghanistan border and has issued several other audiotaped anti-West invectives, had not put one out in four months before the one about the Detroit attempted bombing,” reported the New York Times.
Osama increasingly sounds like a foundation progressive. In the latest audio he praises Noam Chomsky, gripes about the United States not signing the Kyoto Protocol, complains about globalization and monetary policy, and calls for a worldwide boycott of American goods and the dollar.
“Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the U.S. policies to those of the Mafia,” Al Jazeera quoted the dead terrorist as saying. “They are the true terrorists and therefore we should refrain from dealing in the U.S. dollar and should try to get rid of this currency as early as possible.”
Now establishment editorialists and bloggers have a convenient touchstone for their tirades against “conspiracy theorists” who criticize the Federal Reserve, fiat currency and the banksters. Comparisons between Osama and Ron Paul will likely be forthcoming in the days ahead.
http://www.infowars.com/dead-osama-bin-laden-climate-change-warrior/
“This is all about you being dead… the same conclusions for you as the global warming agenda. If that sounds far fetched to you than your awesome.”
-F.F.
One proposal is for a fleet of ships that would spray seawater into the sky that would leave behind salt crystals to brighten clouds Photo: NASA
A global plan to put man-made particles into the atmosphere to deflect the Sun’s heat would rapidly lower global temperatures until cuts in carbon dioxide emissions took effect, they argued.
They acknowledged concerns about geoengineering but said multi-national experiments should begin soon before it is too late to reverse climate change or in case a rogue state carried out separate measures.
The environmental scientists, David Keith of the University of Calgary in Canada, Edward Parson of the University of Michigan and Granger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon University, were writing an editorial in the journal, Nature.
They called for governments to establish a multimillion-pound fund for research into the simulated volcanoes and other solar-radiation management techniques for shielding the Earth against sunlight.
“The idea of deliberately manipulating Earth’s energy balance to offset human-driven climate change strikes many as dangerous hubris,” they wrote.
“Many scientists have argued against research on solar radiation management, saying that developing the capability to perform such tasks will reduce the political will to lower greenhouse gas emissions. We think that the risks of not doing research outweigh the risks of doing it.”
They said the cost of solar radiation management was 100 times lower than the price tag for cutting emissions to achieve the same effect, raising the risk that small groups of nations or even rogue states could act alone.
They wrote: “It is plausible that, after exhausting other avenues to limit climate risks, such a nation might decide to begin a gradual, well-monitored programme of deployment, even without any international agreement on its regulation.
“In this case, one nation – which need not be a large and rich industrialised country – could seize the initiative on global climate, making it extremely difficult for other powers to restrain it.”
Natural sulphate particles in the upper atmosphere lowered global temperatures by 0.5 degrees Celsius in less than a year following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991.
Among other potential geoengineering solutions is spraying fine droplets of seawater into the air to create low-level clouds that would lower daytime temperatures over the oceans.
Drug companies manipulated the World Health Organisation into downgrading its definition of a pandemic so they could cash in on a swine flu outbreak, it is claimed.
An inquiry heard yesterday that the WHO allegedly softened its criteria for declaring a H1N1 flu pandemic last spring -- just weeks before announcing there was a worldwide outbreak.
Critics said the decision was driven by pharmaceutical companies desperate to recoup the billions of pounds they had invested in researching and developing pandemic vaccines after the bird flu scares in 2006 and 2007.
As a result, millions of people have been vaccinated against a mild illness, and money that could have been used to prevent and treat major killers such as heart disease has been squandered.
The claims, which emerged during the first of several Council of Europe hearings into the handling of the swine flu pandemic, were strongly rejected by the WHO.
Following the organisation’s declaration of a pandemic, the Department of Health warned of 65,000 deaths, set up a special advice line and website, and suspended normal rules so anti-flu drugs could be given without prescription.
But with just 250 or so deaths in Britain and 14,000 worldwide, the WHO is being asked to account for its actions.
The Government is now trying to off-load millions of jabs it ordered at the height of the scare. Sources say it is even considering giving some doses away for free.
Wolfgang Wodarg, former head of health at the Council of Europe, the Strasbourg-based ’senate’
responsible for the European Court of Human Rights, said vaccine contracts were put in place in 2007, when it was feared the more lethal bird flu virus would mutate into human form.
Drug companies, which spent up to £2.5billion developing a vaccine, then pushed their interests within the WHO, leading to the definition of a pandemic being softened and an outbreak declared.
He told the hearing: ‘It was stated in panic- stricken terms that this was a flu that could threaten humanity and a great number of humans could fall ill.
‘This is why billions of dollars of medications were bought.
Dr Wodarg, an expert on the spread of disease, said that the change in definition made it possible for a worldwide pandemic to be declared and for the pharmaceutical companies to cash in.
Also giving evidence, Professor Ulrich Keil, a WHO adviser on heart disease, said the decision had led to a ‘gigantic misallocation’ of health budgets.
‘We know the great killers are hypertension, smoking, high cholesterol, high body mass index, physical inactivity and low fruit and vegetable intake,’ he said.
‘In spite of all these facts, governments instead wasted huge amounts of money by investing in pandemic scenarios whose evidence base is weak.’
But Dr Kieji Fukuda, the WHO’s top flu expert, rejected the allegations. ‘We do not wait until (these global virus outbreaks) have developed and we see that lots of people are dying,’ he said.
‘What we try to do is take preventive actions. Our purpose is to try to provide guidance, to reduce harm.’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1246370/Drug-firms-drove-swine-flu-pandemic-warning-recoup-billions-spent-research.html
t appears that of the roughly 38 Goldman CUSIPs which have data available, there are exactly zero rated A or higher by Moody’s (we ignore the rating from the other rating agency as they apparently have long stopped rating most of these securities). There are 9 CUSIP issued after 2006, 21 between 2005 and 2006, and 8 issued before 2005. As Matt Goldstein points out, of the 25 or so deals that had CDS written on them after January 1, 2006, Goldman accounts for 40% of this late (post 2005) issuance. Goldstein notes: “that’s critical because in December 2007, former AIG Financial Products head Joseph Cassano had said AIG largely got out of the CDS business by the end of 2005.” Some more reasons to finally indict the man who, more so than anyone, cost taxpayers hundreds of billions with horrendous risk management practices.
Another observation is that of Goldman’s roughly $15.7 billion in original issues, the current amount outstanding on the underlying securities is only $11.7 billion as of January 2010, a factor of about 75%. Yet, based on paid down amounts, Goldman had the benefit of having almost the full contractual notional on the CDS: recall per BlackRock the firm had exposure of roughly $14.5 billion. In other words: even though Goldman was on the hook for about $11.7 billion in actual outstandings (as of January 2010, the current amount in November 2008 was likely higher), the amount that it received between collateral and ML III presumed almost an unamortized exposure. We are backing into the data to determine what the actual amount as of November 2008 was: we estimate it was about ~$13 billion, which unless we are misreading the data, means that Goldman likely got the extra benefit of amortization on the underlying, which could have amounted to over $1.5 billion.
Yet the critical question is: since there is not one security rated A, and in fact the median rating is a high C, and since we know that Soc Gen had parked its securities with the Fed in November 2008, just what standards does the Federal Reserve have when accepting securities in the discount window to lend against? And the implication is that Bernanke will allow any toxic crap to be eligible collateral, likely at par.
We will continue analyzing the other firms’ securities as well, and solicit reader input in ideas on how to steer this analysis.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/aig-schedule-released
By DANIEL KOVALIK
This past summer, President Obama announced that he had signed an agreement with Colombia to grant the U.S. military access to 7 military bases in Colombia. As the UK’s Guardian newspaper announced at the time, “[t]he proposed 10-year lease will give the US access to at least seven Colombian bases – three air force, two naval and two army – stretching from the Pacific to the Caribbean.” And, these bases would accommodate up to 800 military and 600 civilian contractors of the United States. As the Guardian explained, this announcement caused outrage in neighboring Latin American nations and “damaged Barack Obama’s attempt to mend relations with the region.”
This announcement also angered human and labor rights advocates in both the U.S. and Colombia as the U.S. was now solidifying a cozier military alliance with by far the worst labor and human rights abuser in the Western Hemisphere. The human rights nightmare in Colombia, fueled by billions of dollars of U.S. military assistance, includes the forced internal displacement of nearly 4 million civilians – the second largest internally displaced population in the world (Sudan holding the number one position); the extraordinary killing of over 2700 union members since 1986 (by far the greatest number in the world), with 35 being killed in 2009 alone; and the extrajudicial killing of around 2,000 civilians by the Colombian military since President Uribe took office in 2002.
As for the extra-judicial killings by the Colombian military, these were carried out as part of the “false positive” scandal – a controversy involving the military murdering civilians and then dressing them up to look like guerillas in order to increase their body count numbers, thereby guaranteeing further U.S. aid. That scandal deepened earlier this month when 31 Colombian soldiers awaiting trial for their role in the killings were released from prison because of the Colombian government’s failure to indict them in a timely fashion.
While the U.S. has claimed for years that it is fighting a drug war in Colombia, though having to sheepishly admit year after year that its ostensible efforts have not yielded any decrease whatsoever in the amount of coca grown in Colombia or cocaine exported to the U.S., the real reason for the war has always been the control of Colombia’s rich oil resources. Indeed, at a Congressional hearing in 2000, entitled “Drugs and Social Policy in Colombia” – a hearing to debate the relative merits of Clinton’s new Plan Colombia, pursuant to which the U.S. has sent billions of dollars of military assistance to Colombia – one of the key witnesses invited to testify in support of this policy was none other than Lawrence Meriage, the Vice-President of Occidental Petroleum. Not surprisingly, Mr. Meriage had nothing to say about drugs or social policy in Colombia, but a lot to say about the need for military assistance to protect his oil pipelines.
Now, according to a January 19, 2010 Bloomberg article, “The Export-Import Bank of the United States [a U.S. government agency] announced Jan. 19 its approval of a $1 billion preliminary commitment to help finance the sale of goods and services from various U.S. exporters to Ecopetrol S.A., Colombia’s national oil company.” It should be noted that Ecopetrol is a business partner with L.A.-based Occidental Petroleum.
Citing an industry expert, the Bloomberg article goes on to explain that “Ecopetrol is being aggressive in exploration and production,” and that, with the help of the financing from the Export-Import Bank, “Ecopetrol will almost double to 1 million barrels daily by 2015 as the company drills more wells in Colombia and neighboring South American nations.”
As a November 12, 2009 press release from the human rights group Amazon Watch explained, Ecopetrol is currently engaged in oil exploration on the sacred land of the U’wa indigenous peoples and against their wishes. A spokesperson for the U’Wa explained that, as is invariably the case, with Ecopetrol’s exploration and drilling comes the Colombian military, as well as paramilitaries, to protect Ecopetrol’s operations.
As Ecopetrol’s own website indicates, it is also involved in oil exploration in Peru and Brazil. As for Peru, Survival International, a UK-based human rights group advocating for the rights of threatened indigenous tribes, warned last year that Ecopetrol’s exploration of the Peruvian Amazon jungle threatens hitherto uncontacted indigenous tribes whose very existence will be jeopardized by these operations. As Survival International explained, these uncontacted tribes are “exceedingly vulnerable to any contact with outsiders because of their lack of immunity to disease.” Prior contacts between companies and uncontacted tribes have resulted in the mortality of 50% of the tribe.
While the current U.S. Administration seems bent on deepening its fatal ties to Colombia in the interest of oil, there is still an opportunity to derail this policy. Pursuant to the statute which created and regulates the U.S. Export-Import Bank, the President of the U.S. (who, by a 1979 Executive Order, delegated such authority to the Secretary of State) may, after consultation with the House and Senate Committees on Banking, determine that an application for credit should be denied by the Bank if the extension of credit “clearly and importantly” impacts U.S. “policy in such areas as international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, environmental protection and human rights.” 12 U.S.C. Sec. 635(2)(b)(1)(B).
Clearly, the prelimimary decision to extend credit to Ecopetrol adversely impacts human rights and the environment and should be overturned as a result. A movement to halt this extension of credit on these grounds would be a worthy effort for the U.S. peace and solidarity groups. Similarly, there is still a chance to impede the U.S.’s decision to access 7 new military bases in Colombia. With the Administration reeling from the election results in Massachusetts last week, now is the time to try to shame it into reversing course on its predictably devastating policy in Colombia and the rest of Latin America.
Daniel Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer working in Pittsburgh, Pa.
http://counterpunch.org/kovalik01272010.html
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s denial that he played any role in the AIG cover-up is contradicted by emails which confirm that both Geithner and the New York Federal Reserve were both intimately involved in keeping details about payments to banks including Goldman Sachs from the public.
Geithner told lawmakers today that he had no involvement in withholding information about the bailout of AIG, much to the chagrin of House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Darrell Issa, who wasn’t buying it for a second.
“He has asserted complete ignorance of the Fed’s efforts to cover up the bailout details,” said Issa, R-Calif. “Many Americans, including members of this Committee, have a hard time believing that Secretary Geithner entered an absolute cone of silence on the day that his nomination was announced.”
John Mica of Florida went further, calling for Geithner to quit as a result of the scandal.
“Why shouldn’t we ask for your resignation?” Mica asked Geithner. “We’re not getting the whole story, we’re getting the blame story. You’re either incompetent on the job or you knew what was taking place and you tried to conceal it, and I think that’s grounds for your review.”
Mica characterized Geithner’s denials as “lame excuses” as the Treasury Secretary became visibly angry.
In November and December 2008, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, headed up by Geithner, instructed the bailed out AIG to hide from the public details regarding payments the insurance giant made to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA.
Using Fed secured taxpayer bailout money, AIG paid several banks 100 percent of the face value of credit-default swaps, as other financial institutions were negotiating deep discounts for the unregulated paper assets that do not have to be backed by cash.
The decision to pay the banks in full may have cost AIG, and therefore taxpayers, at least $13 billion over the odds.
The “backdoor bailout” of the banks, as it has been dubbed was exposed in March 2009 after the SEC challenged AIG’s filing, however, e-mails obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, reignited the situation after they conclusively exposed a collusion between AIG and the Fed to deceive the public.
The e-mails between company and regulator show that The New York Fed crossed out reference to the payments and that AIG also omitted the details when the Securities and Exchange Commission filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008.
The emails, the content of which are highlighted in this Bloomberg News article, also show that the Fed wanted numerous other details about the AIG bailout withheld or delayed from public oversight.
“It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information,” said Issa, adding that taxpayers “deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.”
Geithner’s denial that he, even as President of the New York Fed, had no involvement with the AIG case is contradicted by fresh revelations this week in a new report issued by Issa that show Geithner was “at a minimum, engaged personally in reviewing what information about the AIG bailout would be revealed to Congress and the public.”
On November 6, 2008 Geithner received an email from Sarah Dahlgren, the FRBNY’s lead staff member in AIG’s operations, seeking Geithner’s approval for a proposed statement regarding AIG’s upcoming equity capital raise. The fact that Geithner’s approval had to be obtained merely for putting out statements concerning AIG clearly indicates that he was deeply involved in the matter.
On November 13, Geithner was sent a report on AIG’s restructuring that would be sent to Congress. Sophia Allison, a staff member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, asked that Geithner point out any information that he believed should not be “publicly disclosed”.
In addition, records of who Geithner met with during his tenure as President of the FRBNY “show that he was regularly engaged with top AIG officials and the FRBNY officials directly responsible for AIG’s disclosures to the SEC. Geithner’s schedule shows that he had at least six formal meetings with top FRBNY staff members about AIG-related issues between November 4, 2008, and November 21, 2008.”
Watch the clip from today’s hearings where Mica demands Geithner’s resignation.
http://www.infowars.com/geithner-told-to-quit-after-e-mails-reveal-involvement-in-aig-cover-up/
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The multi-billion dollar global warming fraud is truly beginning to crumble, with even vehement man-made climate change advocates like the BBC acknowledging that the credibility of the IPCC is shot.
“The bloggers are all over the UN IPCC 2007 report, the bible of global warming, which predicted all manner of dire outcomes for our planet unless we got a grip on rising temperatures — and it seems to be crumbling in some pretty significant areas,” writes the BBC’s Andrew Neil in an article entitled ‘The dam is cracking‘.
Climategate was merely the opening salvo in a series of seemingly never-ending scandals that have engulfed the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over the last few weeks.
The first major blow came when the IPCC had to admit that their 2007 forecast that the Himalayan Glaciers would disappear by 2035 was completely wrong. The absurd claim was first made by a little-known Indian scientist in an interview for an online magazine, invoked by the World Wildlife Fund, and then copied into the 2007 IPCC report with no investigation as to its accuracy.
In reality, even if IPCC estimates of global warming are proven correct, which is severely doubtful in light of their recent track record, the glaciers will be around for at least centuries longer.
“In fact, the IPCC’s 2007 report cites WWF documents as “evidence” at least another 15 times,” writes Andrew Bolt.
“Elsewhere it cites a non-scientific, non-peer-reviewed paper from another activist body, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, as its sole proof that global warming could devastate African agriculture.”
It then emerged that the scientist who first made the claim, Syed Hasnain, is now employed by The Energy Research Institute – headed by IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri. Just two weeks ago TERI won up to $500,000 from the Carnegie Corporation to study Hasnain’s bogus claim.
Pachauri, portrayed as an authoritative scientists by some when in fact he is a railway engineer, only made himself look worse by initially attacking climate skeptics as “arrogant” and believers in “voodoo science” when the glaciers issue was highlighted. Pachauri later had to retract his words but still refuses to apologize. Pachauri’s reputation is in tatters and he is under intense pressure to resign.
The credibility of the IPCC was further devastated when it was revealed that their predictions on the Amazon rainforest were also lifted wholesale from WWF propaganda with no independent verification whatsoever.
Amidst all this scandal, new peer-reviewed studies have emerged to confirm the obvious – the world had ice age activity even when levels of greenhouse gases were four times higher than the level of our pre-industrial times.
Global warming is heading to the same dustbin of history as Y2K, SARS and swine flu – another manufactured scare peddled primarily to make vast profits for corrupt elitists at the expense of the general public. The entire fraud is collapsing under the weight of its own lies as new revelations of IPCC deception and bias emerge on an almost daily basis thanks to the sterling work of climate skeptics who have had their convictions vindicated.
http://www.infowars.com/global-warming-fraud-collapses-amidst-deception-and-scandal/
“Brought to you by the same merry pranksters who engineered the first great depression & todays world economic collapse. And piles and piles and piles of dead innocent poor & working people across the globe. You think Hitler was bad… the real face of evil is cowardly hiding in the shadows. Not for long.”
-Fred Face 1/27/09
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
January 26, 2010
Filmmaker Oliver Stone has told The Canadian Press that international bankers “enabled” Hitler and the Nazis. “Adolf Hitler was a psychopath and a monster but rose to power thanks to big business leaders and other supporters who appreciated his vow to destroy communism and control workers, Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone said Monday,” in Bangkok, Thailand, writes Michael Casey.
Stone left out a few important details. Not only did the banksters support and encourage Hitler and the Nazis, they also created from scratch the communism the German dictator vowed to destroy.
Without the support of the German industrial cartel I.G. Farben, Hitler would have remained an obscure historical footnote and millions of people would not have perished during the Second World War.
Farben, however, was not alone in its effort to empower Hitler and the Nazis. “Without the capital supplied by Wall Street, there would have been no I.G. Farben in the first place, and almost certainly no Adolf Hitler and World War II,” writes Antony C. Sutton in Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. “German bankers on the FarbenAufsichsrat (the supervisory Board of Directors) in the late 1920s included the Hamburg banker Max Warburg, whose brother Paul Warburg was a founder of the Federal Reserve System in the United States.” The Farben industrial cartel was created by three Wall Street houses: Dillon, Read & Co., Harris, Forbes & Co., and National City.
In the 1930s, William Dodd, the U.S. Ambassador in Germany, wrote Roosevelt from Berlin and explained the importance of the banksters and American industrialists in this “enabling” process. “The DuPonts have their allies in Germany that are aiding in the armament business. Their chief ally is the I.G. Farben Company,” wrote Dodd.
In addition to the DuPonts, Standard Oil, International Harvester, J.P. Morgan-controlled General Motors Company and Ford facilitated Germany’s rearmament after the First World War. International Telephone and Telegraph, General Electric, International Business Machines, Alcoa and Dow Chemical were also involved. Many of these companies continued their support of Hitler and the Nazis after the United States declared war on Germany.
“Treasury Secretary Morgenthau was deeply disturbed at the implications of this Wall Street monopoly of the fate of Nazi Germany and prepared a memorandum to present to President Roosevelt,” writes Sutton.
Former president George W. Bush’s grandfather, senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
“His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave laborers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy,” The Guardian reported in September, 2004.
The Bush family connection to Hitler and the Nazis and the premeditated murder of millions of people, of course, did not reflect on the election of Bush primarily because the corporate media ignored the story.
“Throughout the Bush family’s decades of public life, the American press has gone out of its way to overlook one historical fact — that through Union Banking Corporation (UBC), Prescott Bush, and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, along with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, financed Adolf Hitler before and during World War II,” writes Toby Rogers.
Not only did the banksters and industrialists create the Frankenstein monster Hitler, they also funded and supported Soviet communism from its inception. In Wall Street and The Bolshevik Revolution, Antony Sutton details this relationship. Sutton draws on State Department files, personal papers of key Wall Street figures, biographies and conventional histories to make the point that bankers and so-called capitalists secretly and illegally supported the Bolsheviks while publicly supporting the anti-Bolshevik movement.
According to Sutton’s research, Morgan banking executives in funneled illegal Bolshevik gold into the U.S., intervened to free Leon Trotsky (who advocated “total revolution”), and transported Lenin across Europe in a “sealed” train (with $5 to $6 million in gold to facilitate the revolution). German bankster Max Warburg was instrumental in financing Lenin and the Russian Revolution.
“Communism is not [and never was] a creation of the masses to overthrow the Banking establishment, but rather a creation of the Banking establishment to overthrow and enslave the people,” explainsAnthony J. Hilder. “The goal of international communism is not to destroy Western international debt capitalism. The goal of international communism is to enslave mankind at the behest of Western international debt capitalism,” R.E. McMaster wrote in The Reaper.
In Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, Sutton used State Department documents to explain how the banksters continued to fund and build the Soviet Union after the revolution. “Sutton shows conclusively that virtually everything the Soviets possess has been acquired from the West. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the U.S.S.R. was made in the U.S.A.,” noted Gary Allenin 1971.
“In the Bolshevik Revolution we have some of the world’s richest and most powerful men financing a movement which claims its very existence is based on the concept of stripping of their wealth men like the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Schiffs, Warburgs, Morgans, Harrimans, and Milners. But obviously these men have no fear of international Communism. It is only logical to assume that if they financed it and do not fear it, it must be because they control it. Can there be any other explanation that makes sense? Remember that for over 150 years it has been standard operating procedure of the Rothschilds and their allies to control both sides of every conflict,” Allen explained.
Both communism and fascism were created as profit generators and more importantly control mechanisms by the international bankster cartel.
It remains to be seen if Oliver Stone’s 10-part documentary on the 20th century titled The Secret History of the United States will cover these pertinent and important details. Short of telling the whole story, Stone’s documentary will be little better than the version of history offered by the establishment and the corporate media and publishers.
http://www.infowars.com/oliver-stone-says-banksters-enabled-hitler-and-the-nazis/
Anthony G. Martin
A new chapter can now be added to the ‘Climategate Scandal.’
We now know beyond reasonable doubt that ‘global warming’ was a hoax perpetrated by dirty scientists who cooked the books to make the temperature readings appear higher than they actually were.
We now know beyond reasonable doubt that ‘global warming’ was a hoax perpetrated by dirty scientists who cooked the books to make the temperature readings appear higher than they actually were.
(Photo: U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) head Rajendra Pachauri, left, and Thirteenth Finance Commission Chairman Vijay Kelkar look on at a press conference in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010. Five glaring errors were discovered in one paragraph of the world’s most authoritative report on global warming, forcing the Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists at the IPCC who wrote it to apologize and promise to be more careful. (AP Photo/Gurinder Osan))
The Climategate Scandal blew the lid on the scheme, proving that the whole dastardly sham was a creation of scientists gone bad who had no other goal than to win more research money and to propagate a Leftist political agenda.
New information has surfaced over the last 48 hours that adds more shame and disgrace to those who perpetrated this grand lie on an unsuspecting public.
In 2007 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) issued a report that included a dire warning concerning the glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains. The report stated that unless drastic changes were made globally to industry and commerce, economic systems, and the common lifestyles of advanced nations, the Himalayan glaciers would be gone completely by 2035.
It turns out that the IPCC scientist who was responsible for that report has now admitted that the data provided in the 2007 report was fake and that the false warning was issued to ‘put political pressure on world leaders.’
The IPCC has now admitted that its claim concerning the Himalayan glaciers was based on ‘junk science.’ This was reported by the British Daily Mail and by NewsBusters. Interestingly, this news has NOT been reported by the American mainstream press.
In fact, when one does an informal scan of local television stations in and around the Columbia, South Carolina area, one can find numerous mentions of ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming,’ and ‘going green.’
One local meteorologist has an ongoing series concerning ‘going green’ in order to ’stem the tide of climate change.’
Yet that particular station has not reported a single story about the Climategate Scandal nor the latest chapter involving shockingly false claims about the melting of the Himalayan glaciers.
Naturally, we have heard nary word about it on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, or CNN to boot.
When we delve further into the mess not only do we find that the bad scientists cooked the books just to put political pressure on world leaders but they engaged in some highly faulty arithmetic as well. According to the Mail:
The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.
Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognizing the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.
Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.
As a late-breaking footnote to this greatly troubling episode, NewsBusters reports that the humiliating admission of error and embarrassment from the WWF is nowhere to be found on its website, but is now ‘inaccessible.’
It seems that the bad scientists and their enablers in certain environmental advocacy groups are frantically attempting to shove their despicable behavior under the rug.
This, it seems, is foolhardy now that the cat is out of the bag.
We’re onto them.
Anthony Gucciardi
Infowars.com
January 25, 2010
It takes a lot of disdain for the human race to use a catastrophic event such as the earthquake in Haiti to peddle people out of their hard earned dollar. Unfortunately, this is what the “Hope for Haiti” telethon is all about. The donations will benefit such foundations as the Clinton Bush Haiti Foundation and UNICEF. Instead of the proceeds going towards a local Haitian organization that would provide the victims with adequate food and water, the millions will be given to a foundation created in part by George W. Bush.
If that does not alarm you, then you have not done your research. Corrupt politicians have no business taking donations for a country in turmoil. There are plenty of organizations that have been operating in Haiti for years, and have therefore proven themselves to be legitimate. The IRC (International Rescue Committee) spends 90% of its funds on beneficial programs, while only using 4% for administrative costs, and 4% on fundraising. Why then, are the proceeds going to a foundation run by two corrupt politicians?
The only decent foundation being donated to is the Yele Haiti Foundation. Despite the mainstream media smear campaign being launched against this foundation, it has been located in Haiti and has proved itself by aiding the country long before the earthquake hit. The foundation also encourages food and clothing donations, as opposed to George W. Bush who is asking you to send only cash. With food and clothing donations it is impossible for any foundation to put the contribution towards administrative costs and other worthless expenses. In sharp contrast, writing the Clinton Bush Haiti Foundation a blank check could result in your donation being used quite illegitimately.
The telethon is loaded with celebrities and popular musicians, begging for you to support the Haitian people. Instead of telling you that your donation may be used to fund other United Nations operations, or that it could be used to pay absurdly high administrative costs, they act as if every cent is going to aid the Haitians. If these foundations were truly concerned about the Haitians, they would accept food and clothing donations. If the foundations were truly honest, they would publicly post every cent that was spent and for what reason. Of course, this is not the case for most of these organizations.
As if the chosen recipients of the donations were not enough to cause some concern, Latin American leaders are now saying that the United States is occupying Haiti militarily. After all, it does seem as if the United States military plans on staying for a while.
“So we’re focused on getting command and control and communications there so that we can really get a better understanding of what’s going on. MINUSTAH [United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti], as their headquarters partially collapsed, lost a lot of their communication, and so we’re looking to robust that communication, also.” Said General Douglas Fraser, commander of U.S. Southern Command.
“We also are looking at a large-deck amphibious ship with an embarked Marine Expeditionary Unit on it that will be a couple of days behind the USS Vinson. ” He went on to say.
(Defense.gov News Transcript: DOD News Briefing with Gen. Fraser from the Pentagon, January 13, 2010)
It seems that the involvement of the United States in such a direct way is causing not only a stir, but a negative impact on an already chaotic nation. Machete-wielding gangs patrol the streets of Haiti, as U.N. “Peacekeepers” fire rubber bullets into innocent Haitian crowds. What were these men doing that provoked the attack ? They were searching for jobs.
Taking advantage of the American people, and ultimately taking advantage of the Haitian people, is something that takes a lot of apathy towards the suffering that the Haitian people endured. The celebrities involved probably believe they are truly benefiting the Haitian people, but the sad truth is that the telethon is forwarding their proceeds to ruthless businessman that will not use “every cent” to help the Haitians. Donate your money to an organization that is based in Haiti and accepts food donations, as it is the only way to ensure that your dollar is actually reaching the country.
http://www.infowars.com/the-hope-for-haiti-telethon-scam/
Dr. David Kelly
By 2080, anyone with a direct interest in learning how Dr. David Kelly died, will themselves be dead.
That’s how an Oxford coroner reacted to a recent ruling ordering the details of the former United Nations weapons inspector’s death locked away for 70 years, according to a Mail Online report.
Kelly’s story, however, was gravely important in 2003, just before he was found dead in the woods behind his home in Oxfordshire, U.K. As the BBC revealed in the wake of his passing, he had been the key source behind a story claiming intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction was “sexed up.”
Hours before his death, he reportedly e-mailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller, warning her of “many dark actors playing games,” according to the BBC.
Lord Hutton, the British judge who led the state’s investigation into Kelly’s death, also ordered his written records pertaining to the case sealed for 30 years, according to UK’s Morning Star Online.
The report added that Hutton’s inquiry “concluded that Dr Kelly had killed himself by cutting an artery in his wrist. But the finding has been challenged by doctors who claim that the weapons inspector’s stated injuries were not serious enough to have killed him.”
A paramedic who responded to the scene was quoted by The Guardian, saying: “There just wasn’t a lot of blood… When somebody cuts an artery, whether accidentally or intentionally, the blood pumps everywhere. I just think it is incredibly unlikely that he died from the wrist wound we saw.”
The claims eventually led a group of six doctors to bring formal demands for an investigation into Kelly’s death. An initial inquiry was headed up by the British Ministry of Defense.
“[Just] how far were the Blair/Bush administrations willing to go in order to fabricate a reason for the Iraq war?” asked RAW STORY’s Investigative News Editor Larisa Alexandrovna in a post to her blog, At Largely. “The Bush administration was at the very least willing to out a covert CIA officer, committing treason in the process. What was Tony Blair willing to do?”
Sadly, with the court’s inquiry ended, the questions seem doomed to persist.
http://rawstory.com/2010/01/details-iraq-whistleblowers-alleged-suicide-sealed-70-years/
A Failure to “Integrate and Understand,” or a Thin Tissue of Lies
by Tom Burghardt
New revelations about the failed Christmas Day attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 continue to emerge as does evidence of a systematic cover-up.
With the White House in crisis mode since the attempted bombing, President Obama met for two hours January 5 with top security and intelligence officials. Obama said that secret state agencies “had sufficient information to uncover the terror plot … but that intelligence officials had ‘failed to connect those dots’,” The New York Times reports.
The latest iteration of the “dot theory” floated by the President, aided and abetted by a compliant media, claims “this was not a failure to collect intelligence” but rather, “a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”
“Mr. Obama’s stark assessment that the government failed to properly analyze and integrate intelligence served as a sharp rebuke of the country’s intelligence agencies,” declared the Times uncritically.
While the President’s remarks may have offered a “sharp [rhetorical] rebuke,” Obama’s statement suggests that no one will be held accountable. Indeed, the President “was standing by his top national security advisers, including those whose agencies failed to communicate with one another.”
While the President may be “standing by” his national security advisers, the question is, are the denizens of America’s secret state standing by him? One well-connected Washington insider, MSNBC pundit Richard Wolffe, isn’t so sure.
Wolffe, the author of a flattering portrait of Obama, Renegade: The Making of a President, when asked on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann January 4 what is the White House “focus here right now?” Wolffe’s startling reply: “Is this conspiracy or cock up? It seems that the president is leaning very much towards thinking this was a systemic failure by individuals who maybe had an alternative agenda.” (emphasis added)
“I will accept that intelligence by its nature is imperfect” the President said, “but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged.”
The question is why? And more pertinently from a parapolitical perspective, what “alternative agenda” is playing out here that would put the lives of nearly 300 air passengers at risk?
“(Or) Fascism we can believe in. Take your pick. It’s all there with the Obama administration.”
-F.F.
By Jacob Hornberger
As President Obama and his cohorts struggle over what to do now with their socialist health-care plan in response to the Democratic defeat in Massachusetts, now would be a good time to point out one of the biggest reasons for the enormous death toll in Haiti — socialism. Yes, I am referring to the economic philosophy of American liberals — the people who purport to love the poor but whose economic policies condemn the poor to destitution and even death.
As George Mason University economics professor Walter Williams points out in his excellent column “Haiti’s Avoidable Death Toll,” Haiti is an extremely poor country in terms of wealth. Thus, when the earthquake hit, the country’s dilapidated buildings quickly crumbled, and people lacked the necessary equipment, machinery, and medical services that could have saved many more lives.
Compare Haiti’s plight to the United States. By and large, buildings here are much more able to withstand earthquakes. Moreover, highly trained personnel with heavy equipment are able to quickly move into the affected area and save more people.
Why? Why is Haiti so poor while the United States is so rich? That’s a critically important question, one that liberals answer incorrectly. They say that people are poor because other people are wealthy. Thus, the key to ending poverty, they claim, is for the government to use its monopoly of force to take from the rich and give the money to the poor.
There is one big problem, however, with this socialist concept: It doesn’t work. Government intervention in economic affairs actually makes society poorer. In fact, it is the root cause of poverty, not the solution to poverty. It is this notion that has ensured that the masses of humanity have remained mired in poverty throughout most of history.
Consider my hometown of Laredo, Texas, compared to its sister city on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, Nuevo Laredo. In actuality, Laredo and Nuevo Laredo constitute one big city that has a river running through it, much like San Antonio or Austin, which have rivers running through them.
Yet, the standards of living of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo are dramatically different. As poor as Laredo is, the people living there have a remarkably higher standard of living than the people living in Nuevo Laredo.
How can this be, given that it’s one big metropolitan area?
The reason is that there has always been significantly more government involvement in economic affairs in Mexico than there has been in the United States. In other words, despite the massive taxation, welfare-statism, and regulation that have afflicted the United States during the past several decades, it is nothing compared to the Mexican government’s socialist, interventionist, and mercantilist economic policies that have afflicted Mexico during its entire existence.
And that’s the problem with Haiti. Like so many other Latin American countries, the government taxes, loots, plunders, and confiscates wealth and regulates and controls economic activity. In doing so, it prevents wealth from accumulating. It keeps people poor.
What is the key to the creation of a wealthy society? Capital. Capital enables people to be more productive. More productivity means higher profits and higher wages. How does capital come into existence? Through savings? When people save a portion of their incomes, they put the money into banks, when are then able to lend it out to businesses that are financing the purchase of equipment, which makes workers more productive. It is a process by which everyone’s interests coincide — those of the employer, the employee, and the consumer.
(See “The Keys to Economic Development: A Speech to the People of Brazil” by Jacob G. Hornberger.
Thus, the key to a wealthier society is precisely the opposite from that advocated by liberals. Socialism is not the solution to poverty, as liberals claim. Socialism destroys wealth and ensures that people will remain mired in poverty.
The creation of wealth depends on economic enterprise being freed from the dead hand of the state. People need to separate the economy and the state just as our American ancestors separated church and state. That’s what a genuine “free market” is all about. That’s the key to a wealthier — and safer — society.
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=551
Related Article:
“A Haiti Disaster Relief Scenario Was Envisaged by the US Military One Day Before the Earthquake”
by Constitutional Activist, Phil Pepin (libertarian) Sunday, January 24, 2010
Scott Brown’s shocking victory is a mixed blessing for the cause of freedom. On one hand it has put a major roadblock in the path towards Obama Care. On the other hand Scott Brown is a big government Republican. So far there are no signs that true reform is taking place in the GOP. The people in control of the party during the worst two consecutive election cycle defeats in GOP history are still in control of the leadership nationally. This is why a Debra Medina victory is a tremendous opportunity to return to the original constitutionally limited government given us by the founders. The obvious question is why is it that important for Medina to win? The answer is because Texas is that important. Texas is the flagship state of the Republican Party. The Texas GOP is the biggest in the Nation. It’s also, heavily controlled by the Bush/McCain wing. The two establishment candidates for governor represent two of the worst examples of compromised career politicians. Both Perry & Hutchson’s record are typical of out of touch elitist. Perry like Obama, repeatedly tried to cram the Trans Texas Corridor & tolling existing roads down the throats of Texans who clearly in poll after poll were against it by huge margins.The same Obama like behavior was exhibited by Senator Hutchinson in voting for TARP even though her phone lines were melted down with overwhelming opposition to TARP. Only a fool would expect either Perry or Hutchinson to be any different then they have been their entire political careers. This country will not survive with two socialist political parties. Like it or not most Republicans are really FDR Democrats. Virtually all of the New Deal is vigorously supported by and even expanded by Republicans.The GOP today is not the same GOP that fought hard to stop the government expansion during the FDR administration. Unfortunately even back then the infiltration of Progressives into the GOP had begun to transform the party. It’s that deep rooted progressive influence that has effectively neutered the Republican Party from being a true small government party. It’s for those reasons among others that underscore the huge advancement towards freedom a Medina victory would usher in. Here are some of the major gains that would occur:
1.The era of the career politician would be in serious jeopardy.The founders envisioned citizen rule not career politicians. Medina’s victory coupled with the very likely Rand Paul victory in the Senate race in Kentucky would be huge political statements in support of non-career politicians.
2. Medina’s strong 10th amendment platform is exactly the type of philosophy needed to help restore State sovereignty.Texas would become the leader in that cause.
3. Medina is a true tax reformer. Her stand on eliminating property tax will serve as a blueprint for the rest of the country to end confiscatory taxing schemes.
4. Medina’s strong 2nd amendment position will help the cause nationally. Recent news reports of Obama’s justice department shutting down Gun Shows in Texas underscores the hypocrisy of Rick Perry who has remained silent about the Federal intrusion.
The benefits of a Medina victory would go beyond those issues I’ve mentioned.The psychological benefits of encouraging frustrated small government conservatives would have a ripple effect across the country. This is why I advocate the nationalization of Debra Medina’s candidacy. Scott Brown received massive amounts of money from out of state. The two establishment candidates in Texas have a combined total of about 24 million dollars in their war chest. Medina depends on small contributions from grassroots support and can’t compete with big corporate donors. She can if grassroots efforts are expanded nationally. Debra Medina has made amazing gains with limited funding and no statewide recognition prior to the first debate. The second debate Jan 29th will very likely give her another big bump in the polls and put her in a legitimate three way race. She is no longer an impossible long shot. Most of the press around Texas has praised her debate performance and acknowledged her elevated status. This is a window of opportunity that rarely presents itself and we as patriots must spread the word about Debra Medina. I know there are important races all across the country that need support and money is tight.The good news is if we can successfully nationalize this campaign small contributions of $5 or $10 coming from across the country would make a huge difference.
http://www.nolanchart.com/article7300.html
“Well it’s good to know that Obama’s little martian advisor has a sense of humor.”
-F.F.
White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett says President Obama has dramatically changed how the U.S. is seen.
Washington (CNN) — The White House rejected criticism Sunday that President Obama has not delivered on his promise of “change” during his first year in office.
White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said the president has brought about “enormous change.”
“I think what we’ve seen is a dramatic difference in terms of how the United States is perceived around the world,” Jarrett told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” on the final Sunday before the president’s State of the Union address.
Obama’s travels have established relationships with world leaders that “lay a foundation for keeping America safe and making us a partner around the world,” she added.
Jarrett also credited the president with having “pulled back the economy from the brink of disaster.”
“That’s an enormous amount of change when you consider where we were a year ago right on the brink,” she said. “And he’s adding discipline in government to try to get control over our fiscal house. So I think that we’ve seen enormous change.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, on the same program, countered that “if you look at the first year of this administration, we haven’t made much progress.” He complained about the deficit in the president’s budget and the health care reform package that Republicans oppose.
But McConnell, R-Kentucky, was also on the defensive about the GOP, which critics have been calling “the party of no.”
Asked to characterize the performance of his own party this year, McConnell said, “What we did is try to operate on principle. The president decided to go hard left. That’s why he doesn’t have many of my members [supporting his agenda]. If he chooses to govern in the middle, he will have broader support.”
Jarrett insisted the president never wavered from his promised bipartisan approach.
Discussing his health care initiative, Jarrett said Obama “has sat down with the leadership and members of the Republican Party, both the House and the Senate. In fact, bills in both the House and the Senate contain provisions that were suggested by the Republican Party — so nothing’s changed about the president’s approach.”
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/24/obama.change/index.html?hpt=T2
TORONTO — A report says the Canadian diplomat praised for sheltering Americans during the Iranian Revolution was a CIA spy.
The Globe and Mail quotes former ambassador Ken Taylor as telling the newspaper that he was made “de facto CIA station chief” in a secret deal between president Jimmy Carter and prime minister Joe Clark.
The report says the move followed the seizure of the U.S. Embassy by Iranian students Nov. 4, 1979, when 63 Americans, including the four-member Central Intelligence Agency contingent, were taken hostage.
The Globe says Taylor, who was ambassador to Iran from 1977 to 1980, actively spied for the Americans and helped them plan an armed incursion into the country.
It says details of Taylor’s role are revealed in a new book being released today, “Our Man in Tehran,” by Trent University historian Robert Wright.
The newspaper says the phrase “de facto CIA station chief” appears in Wright’s book, the manuscript of which Taylor saw and approved in advance of publication. (The Globe and Mail)
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Search/9014938.html
“Freedom of speech under full attack by bottom feeding, scat munching, anti-human, eugenic pushing, globalist piggies.”
-F.F.
Source: Wikileaks
Paypal has as of 23rd of January 2010 frozen WikiLeaks assets. This is the second time that this happens. The last time we struggled for more than half a year to resolve this issue. By working with the respected and recognized German foundation Wau Holland Stiftung we tried to avoid this from happening again — apparently without avail.
We are working on resolving this issue as fast as possible. Please use our bank accounts for direct transfer in the meantime, or contact wl-donations@sunshinepress.org for any further questions.
WikiLeaks is not the only non-profit organization with this problem. This is a regular occurrence, that from our perspective should not be tolerated by the global community using this payment system.
“Very good. Just as the plan was crafted. If you think Obama is really fighting the banks then I got some gut bursting laughs on call for your gullibility.”
-F.F.
‘If these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have’: Obama
On the same day that President Barack Obama announced an ambitious plan to reform the US financial system, bankers at the largest Wall Street institutions indicated that they are already finding ways around the proposed changes.
Sources at three Wall Street banks told BusinessInsider’s John Carney that “they are already finding ways to own, invest in and sponsor hedge funds and private equity funds” despite the proposed restrictions on those activities. One unnamed operative at a major bank said his firm expects the reforms to affect no more than one percent of its business.
President Obama announced two major reforms of the financial system on Thursday. The first would see the US in effect return to the separation of commercial and investment banking that was mandated by law until 1999, when that rule in the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act was abandoned.
Many economists say allowing banks to be both lenders to the public and investors in large hedge funds and other securities contributed to the economic collapse of 2008.
The other rule would limit the size of banks, ostensibly to ensure that no banks are “too big to fail” and require taxpayer bailouts to keep the economy from collapsing.
But Wall Street bankers are pointing to a phrase in the proposed reforms — that banks will be barred “from proprietary trading operations unrelated to serving customers” — as an easy loophole to get around. John Carney reports:
The key phrase is “operations unrelated to serving customers.” The banks plan to claim that much of the business in which it engages is related in one way or another to serving customers….
A still more devious way is to have a bank’s own employees be the customers who are invested in the internal hedge funds. That way trading operations can remain closed to outsiders while the regulatory requirement of relating the trading to customer service is met. Goldman Sachs is rumored to be considering this approach.
TOUGH TALK
In the wake of a slew of criticism accusing the president of weak leadership on the health care issue, particularly in light of the Democrats’ loss of Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat earlier this week, Obama sounded a tougher note on the issue of financial reform than he has been known for in the past.
“If these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have,” Obama said Thursday in announcing the financial reforms.
“While the financial system is far stronger today than it was one year ago, it’s still operating under the same rules that led to its near collapse,” Obama said. “Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail.”
Obama dubbed his plan to separate commercial and investment banking the “Volcker rule,” after former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who is credited by many economists for being the architect of the economic policies that allowed the US economy to thrive during the Reagan era. For much of the past year, Volcker, who is now an economic advisor to Obama, had argued for a return to the Glass-Steagall era that separated commercial and investment banking.
The fact that a former Fed chairman considered to be economically right wing was pushing for these reforms was one major reason that the reforms began to gain traction among commentators and lawmakers.
But news that banks are already easily finding ways around the proposed reforms will likely lead to questions over whether Obama’s proposed fixes are tough enough, or whether any reforms can actually be effective in the current business environment.
“This thing is about showing the public that Obama is standing up to Wall Street,” an unnamed Wall Street insider told BusinessInsider. “So the rhetoric is heated. But the implementation will require far less change than people think right now.”
http://rawstory.com/2010/01/bankers-ways-around-financial-reforms/
“You gotta laugh folks… even with all the bullshit. You deserve a break & it’s healthy.”
-F.F.
MARCH 3, 2009 | ISSUE 45•10
WASHINGTON—In what is being hailed as a breakthrough in the field of historical record-keeping, the National Archives announced Monday that it would immediately begin outfitting Barack Obama’s chest, limbs, and face with an array of motion capture sensors for use in preserving a 3-D account of his time as president.
“The presidency of Mr. Obama is truly a landmark event, and I can think of no better way to honor it than with this $2.5 billion advanced digital-imaging project,” acting archivist Adrienne Thomas told reporters. “Not only will our sensors provide unprecedented moment-to-moment documentation of a sitting U.S. president, but they will also give the American people the breathtaking realism and seamless layer animation they have come to expect.”
According to sources at the National Archives, Obama will spend the next four years in a custom-made, lycra-and-neoprene bodysuit, featuring 238 reflective “marker balls,” which will instantly relay trillions of bytes of information to a central computer in Centennial, CO.
Designers at the motion capture firm Vicon Motion Systems will then use this information to build a lifelike 3-D wire-frame model of the nation’s 44th president, before digitally “painting” over the structure with computer-generated skin, hair, and clothes.
The data will be stored on a hard drive at the National Archives, where curators will employ it as a complete record of Obama’s tenure in office.
“Our 78-person team is committed to capturing each and every nuance of the Obama administration,” Vicon CEO Douglas Reinke said. “Years from now, historians will be able to access high-quality images of what the former president might have looked like while he was, say, meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on April 3, 2009, or tying his shoelaces on the afternoon of June 3, 2011.”
Added Reinke, “It’s like actually watching the presidency unfold.”
Reinke explained that Obama will be required to wear the motion capture device at all times during his presidency, barring a few minutes each day to shower and change into a fresh bodysuit. In addition, the president has been instructed to refrain from performing any activities that might cause the sensors to malfunction, such as running, breathing heavily, or letting his core temperature rise above 99.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
Sources at Vicon also confirmed that members of Obama’s Secret Service detail will have to carry a large green-screen background behind the president at all times.
“We will extend our full cooperation to the people at Vicon in order to make this 3-D record a reality,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs rold reporters Monday. “Nothing is more important to us than preserving this moment in history at 120 frames per second, with perfect surface anatomy, and total texture definition.”
Many scholars have also praised a feature of the motion capture technology that would allow future generations to digitally alter the president’s wire-frame model by retroactively modifying clothing
