Cherchez la Verite

EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD READ THIS, BECAUSE THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA FEEDS US LIES ABOUT THE "NEED" FOR U.S. WARS OF AGGRESSION THAT INVITE A NUCLEAR WW III.

2012-02-20T08:28:00.000-07:00

Silencing The Critics

February 20, 2012 | Original Here

In 2010 the FBI invaded the homes of peace activists in several states and seized personal possessions in what the FBI–the lead orchestrator of fake “terrorist plots”–called an investigation of “activities concerning the material support of terrorism.”

Subpoenas were issued to compel antiwar protestors to testify before grand juries as prosecutors set about building their case that opposing Washington’s wars of aggression constitutes giving aid and comfort to terrorists. The purpose of the raids and grand jury subpoenas was to chill the anti-war movement into inaction.

Last week in one fell swoop the last two remaining critics of Washington/Tel Aviv imperialism were removed from the mainstream media. Judge Napolitano’s popular program, Freedom Watch, was cancelled by Fox TV, and Pat Buchanan was fired by MSNBC. Both pundits had wide followings and were appreciated for speaking frankly.

Many suspect that the Israel Lobby used its clout with TV advertisers to silence critics of the Israeli government’s efforts to lead Washington to war with Iran. Regardless, the point before us is that the voice of the mainstream media is now uniform. Americans hear one voice, one message, and the message is propaganda. Dissent is tolerated only on such issues as to whether employer-paid health benefits should pay for contraceptive devices. Constitutional rights have been replaced with rights to free condoms.

The western media demonizes those at whom Washington points a finger. The lies pour forth to justify Washington’s naked aggression: the Taliban are conflated with al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, Gaddafi is a terrorist and, even worse, fortified his troops with Viagra in order to commit mass rape against Libyan women.

President Obama and members of Congress along with Tel Aviv continue to assert that Iran is making a nuclear weapon despite public contradiction by the US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate. According to news reports, Pentagon chief Leon Panetta told members of the House of Representatives on February 16 that “Tehran has not made a decision to proceed with developing a nuclear weapon.” http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_19978801?source=rss However, in Washington facts don’t count. Only the material interests of powerful interest groups matter.

At the moment the american Ministry of Truth is splitting its time between lying about Iran and lying about Syria. Recently, there were some explosions in far away Thailand, and the explosions were blamed on Iran. Last October the FBI announced that the bureau had uncovered an Iranian plot to pay a used car salesman to hire a Mexican drug gang to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the US. The White House idiot professed to believe the unbelievable plot and declared that he had “strong evidence,” but no evidence was ever released. The purpose for announcing the non-existent plot was to justify Obama’s sanctions, which amount to an embargo–an act of war–against Iran for developing nuclear energy.

As a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy. IAEA inspectors are permanently in Iran and report no diversion of nuclear material to a weapons program.

In other words, according to the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the US National Intelligence Estimate, and the current Secretary of Defense, there is no evidence that Iran has nukes or is making nukes. Yet, Obama has placed illegal sanctions on Iran and continues to threaten Iran with military attack on the basis of an accusation that is contradicted by all known evidence.

How can such a thing happen? It can happen because there is no Helen Thomas, who also was eliminated by the Israel Lobby, to question, as a member of the White House press, President Obama why he placed war-like sanctions on Iran when his own CIA and his own Secretary of Defense, along with the IAEA, report that there is no basis for the sanctions.

The idea that the US is a democracy when it most definitely does not have a free watchdog press is laughable. But the media is not laughing. It is lying. Just like the government, every time the US mainstream media opens its mouth or writes one word, it is lying. Indeed, its corporate masters pay its employees to tell lies. That is their job. Tell the truth, and you are history like Buchanan and Napolitano and Helen Thomas.

What the Ministry of Truth calls “peaceful protesters brutalized by Assad’s military” are in fact rebels armed and financed by Washington. Washington has fomented a civil war. Washington claims its intention is to rescue the oppressed and abused Syrian people from Assad, just as Washington rescued the oppressed and abused Libyan people from Gaddafi. Today “liberated” Libya is a shell of its former self terrorized by clashing militias. Thanks to Obama, another country has been destroyed.

Reports of atrocities committed against Syrian civilians by the military could be true, but the reports come from the rebels who desire Western intervention to put them into power. Moreover, how would these civilian casualties differ from the ones inflicted on Bahraini civilians by the US supported Bahraini government, the military of which was fortified by Saudi Arabian troops? There is no outcry in the western press about Washington’s blind eye to civilian atrocities committed by its puppet states.

How do the Syrian atrocities, if they are real, differ from Washington’s atrocities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo prison, and secret CIA prison sites? Why is the american Ministry of Truth silent about these massive, unprecedented, violations of human rights?

Remember also the reports of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo that Washington and Germany used to justify NATO and US bombing of Serbian civilians, including the Chinese consulate, dismissed as another collateral damage. Now 13 years later, a prominent German TV program has revealed that the photographs that ignited the atrocity campaign were grossly misrepresented and were not photographs of atrocities committed by Serbs, but of Albanian separatists killed in a firefight between armed Albanians and Serbians. Serbian casualties were not shown. http://www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2012-02-19.html

The problem that truth faces is that the western media continually lies. On the rare instances when the lies are corrected, it is always long after the event and, therefore, the crimes enabled by the media have been accomplished.

Washington set its puppet Arab League upon Syria in order to establish Syria’s isolation among its own kind, the better to attack Syria. Assad forestalled Washington’s set-up of Syria for destruction by calling a nationwide referendum on February 26 to establish a new constitution that would extend the prospect of rule beyond the Ba’athists (Assad’s party).

One might think that, if Washington and its Ministry of Truth really wanted democracy in Syria, Washington would get behind this gesture of good will by the ruling party and endorse the referendum. But Washington does not want a democratic Syrian government. Washington wants a puppet state. Washington’s response is that the dastardly Assad has outwitted Washington by taking steps toward Syrian democracy before Washington can obliterate Syria and install a puppet.

Here is Obama’s response to Assad’s move toward democracy: “It’s actually quite laughable–it makes a mockery of the Syrian revolution,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One.

Obama, the neoconservatives, and Tel Aviv are really pissed. If Washington and Tel Aviv can figure out how to get around Russia and China and overthrow Assad, Washington and Tel Aviv will put Assad on trial as a war criminal for proposing a democratic referendum.

Assad was an eye doctor in England until his father died, and he was called back to head the troubled government. Washington and Tel Aviv have demonized Assad for refusing to be their puppet. Another sore point is the Russian naval base at Tartus. Washington is desperate to evict the Russians from their only Mediterranean base in order to make the Mediterranean an american lake. Washington, inculcated with neocon visions of world empire, wants its own mare nostrum.

If the Soviet Union were still extant, Washington’s designs on Tartus would be suicidal. However, Russia is politically and militarily weaker than the Soviet Union. Washington has infiltrated Russia with NGOs that work against Russia’s interests and will disrupt the upcoming elections. Moreover, Washington-funded “color revolutions” have turned former constituent parts of the Soviet Union into Washington’s puppet states. Shorn of communist ideology, Washington does not expect Russia to push the nuclear button. Thus, Russia is there for the taking.

China is a more difficult problem. Washington’s plan is to cut China off from independent sources of energy. China’s oil investment in eastern Libya is the reason Gaddafi was overthrown, and oil is one of the main reasons that Washington has targeted Iran. China has large oil investments in Iran and gets 20% of its oil from Iran. Closing down Iran, or converting it into Washington’s puppet state, closes down 20% of the Chinese economy.

Russia and China are slow learners. However, when Washington and its NATO puppets abused the “no-fly” UN resolution concerning Libya and violated the UN resolution by turning it into armed military aggression against Libya’s armed forces, which had every right to put down a CIA sponsored rebellion, Russia and China finally got the message that Washington could not be trusted.

This time Russia and China did not fall into Washington’s trap. They vetoed the UN Security Council’s set-up of Syria for military attack. Now Washington and Tel Aviv (it is not always clear which is the puppet and which is the puppet master) have to decide whether to proceed in the face of Russian and Chinese opposition.

The risks for Washington have multiplied. If Washington proceeds, the information that is conveyed to Russia and China is that they are next in line after Iran. Therefore, Russia and China, both being well-armed with nuclear weapons, are likely to put their foot down more firmly at the line drawn over Iran. If the crazed warmongers in Washington and Tel Aviv, with veins running strong with hubris and arrogance, again override Russian and Chinese opposition, the risk of a dangerous confrontation rises.

Why isn’t the american media raising questions about these risks? Is it worth blowing up the world in order to stop Iran from having a nuclear energy program or even a nuclear weapon? Does Washington think China is unaware that Washington is taking aim at its energy supply? Does Washington think Russia is unaware that it is being encircled by hostile military bases?

Whose interests are being served by Washington’s endless and multi-trillion dollar wars? Certainly not the interests of the 50 million americans with no access to health care, nor by the 1,500,000 american children who are homeless, living in cars, rundown motel rooms, tent cities, and the storm sewers under Las Vegas, while huge amounts of public funds are used to bail out banks and squandered in wars of hegemony. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suJCvkazrTc

Blogger's Note: The preceding link provided by PCR is to the video that I have posted below this article.

The US has no independent print and TV media. It has presstitutes who are paid for the lies that they tell. The US government in its pursuit of its immoral aims has attained the status of the most corrupt government in human history. Yet Obama speaks as if Washington is the font of human morality.

The US government does not represent americans. It represents a few special interests and a foreign power. US citizens simply don’t count, and certainly Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Somalians, Yemenis, and Pakistanis don’t count. Washington regards truth, justice, and mercy as laughable values. Money, power, hegemony are all that count for Washington, the city upon the hill, the light unto nations, the example for the world.

YOU WILL NEVER SEE ANYTHING LIKE THIS IN THE U.S. MAINSTREAM MEDIA: A WINDOW ON THE TRUE EXTENT OF POVERTY IN AMERICA

2012-02-20T08:04:00.000-07:00

Poor America - P a n o r a m a [B B C] - Broadcast Date: 13th February 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suJCvkazrTc

Uploaded by leenicklen on Feb 13, 2012

POOR AMERICA

With one and a half million (1.5 million) American children now homeless, reporter Hilary Andersson meets the school pupils who go hungry in the richest country on Earth. From those living in the storm drains under Las Vegas to the tent cities now springing up around the United States, P a n o r a m a finds out how the poor are surviving in America and asks whatever happened to the supposed 'government' and the Real People in charge - those who you 'don't see' pulling on the strings; and their vision and welfare for the country.

Could this be a form of 'Social cleansing' without the need of war or disease inflicted by the orchestrators - simply a controlled bout of poverty? Or is this the forced education that only condition children to know only a certain amount of knowledge that can only ever see them progress in working environments such as confined offices within the 'Human Zoo' qualities within the desperately overcrowded cities.

Why are our children not educated properly - to be able to survive communally with real craft and building skills? Is the social mobility (as in other 'rich countries' such as the UK) only fairing the rich; the wealthy and the 'clever elite'; the white collar criminal, as per usual?

Broadcast Date: 13th February 2012

TOO-BIG-TO-FAIL BANKS ABOVE THE LAW: JOHN CORZINE, FORMER CEO OF GOLDMAN SACHS, FORMER U.S. SENATOR, FORMER NEW JERSEY GOVERNOR STILL NOT CHARGED FOR THE PILLAGING OF $1.6 BILLION OF CUSTOMER ACCOUNTS DURING HIS WATCH AT MF GLOBAL

2012-02-19T08:49:00.000-07:00

Industry Veteran on MF Global: "someone would be in jail right now if this were not Jon Corzine!!"

http://youtu.be/-pKci93SHFs

Uploaded by CapitalAccount on Feb 16, 2012

TOO-BIG-TO-FAIL BANKS ABOVE THE LAW: "OVER THE COURSE OF A DECADE, A BUNCH OF CHEATS, THIEVES, AND SUITED MOUNTEBANKS STOLE MOST OF THE NATIONAL ECONOMY AND THEN WRECKED WHATEVER WAS LEFT OF IT."

2012-02-19T08:31:00.000-07:00

Livin' in a Bankster's Paradise

By Charles P. Pierce

at 12:45PM

Of all the things for which I have little patience — Willard Romney, lottery machines in convenience stores, and the current state of the Montreal Canadiens, to name only three — the notion that the best way to deal with things is to "look forward, not back" is right at the top of the list. This is especially true as regards the undeniable fact that, over the course of a decade, a bunch of cheats, thieves, and suited mountebanks stole most of the national economy and then wrecked whatever was left of it. But what's most extraordinary about the whole thing is that, after they swindled their swindles and heisted their heists, and got paid off by the rest of us for having looted our naional economy, they all kept doing the same things they were doing before. These included extravagant bonuses and, of course, continued crimes of capital that ought to be capital crimes.

This is extraordinary. All this Citigroup fraud and thuggery took place after the events of the great meltdown had taken place. This whisteblower's co-workers, instead of checking for fraud or making reports about underwriting defects to the FHA as required, argued with her over the soundness of the loans, she said. Employees who acted as "gatekeepers" applied "what they describe as 'brute force' to pressure Citi's quality control managers" into downplaying defects, according to the government's complaint.

Some colleagues had pay incentives tied to reducing the number of reported problems, and they spent hours trying to get her to relax her warnings, including those about the most basic deficiencies, Hunt said. "They started beating us up over the quality-control reports," she said. Last year, she said, she became convinced she was being asked to look the other way on serious flaws. That's when she decided to become a whistle-blower.

Last year. The more I think about it, the more I believe that we, as a society, gave up on the pillory too soon. And $158.3 million is tip money for CitiGroup.

This is what happens when real punishment for real crimes is considered to be too inconvenient, or too difficult, or too traumatic for the nation, which is made up completely of candyglass children incapable of existing with the knowledge that their financial lords of the universe are really no different from stick-up kids in a bodega. This is what happens when nobody goes to jail. This is what happens today.

ELECTRONIC ELECTION RIGGING IN THE U.S.A. COMMITTED BY AND FOR THE 1%: EXHIBIT A

2012-02-18T08:28:00.002-07:00

Ben Swann Reality Check: Vote tampering in Maine GOP caucus? Rigged for Romney?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ktJ3LDt6jQ

Uploaded by jeffr0xicity on Feb 14, 2012

Telecast of Ben Swann's Reality Check from WXIX in Cincinnati on 2-14-2012. The citizens in Maine are in an uproar as allegations of vote fraud by GOP officials come to light. Votes cast weren't counted. Vote tallies were changed in caucuses where Ron Paul won, to reflect a win by Romney. Caucuses were cancelled by official due to possible "bad weather," then told the make up vote on the next weekend would not count.
^^I do not own the rights to this video. It has been uploaded merely for reference of discussion and dissemination of news.

ELECTRONIC ELECTION RIGGING IN THE U.S.A. COMMITTED BY AND FOR THE 1%: EXHIBIT B

2012-02-18T08:20:00.001-07:00

Internet Voting: Will Democracy or Hackers Win?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgZewQYZK7w

Uploaded by PBSNewsHour on Feb 16, 2012

While it seems like everything can be done online these days, that's not actually the case when it comes to elections. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien explores the security, logistical and secrecy challenges of Internet voting.

ELECTRONIC ELECTION RIGGING IN THE U.S.A. COMMITTED BY AND FOR THE 1%: A TIMELY HISTORY WITH LINKS TO THE MULTITUDINOUS EVIDENCE

2012-02-18T08:14:00.001-07:00

IN HONOR OF THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE WISCONSIN UPRISING, February 11, 2011, WISCONSIN: THE NEW FLORIDA AND OHIO?

Written by Sheila Parks World News Feb 17, 2012 Original here .

IN HONOR OF THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE WISCONSIN UPRISING

February 11, 2011

WISCONSIN: THE NEW FLORIDA AND OHIO?

Sheila Parks, Ed.D.

In the 2000 presidential election, Florida needed Katherine Harris (then Florida Secretary of State), Jeb Bush, the Supreme Court Justices – and the connections between them – to put George W. Bush in the White House. See John Nichols, Jews For Buchanan

The optical scan machines in Volusia County, product of Diebold Corporation, were also key in this election. Alastair Thompson wrote a detailed analysis of the election fraud that went on in Volusia Country on optical scans. His account relies heavily on the original work of Bev Harris in Chapter 13, Security Breaches, in her book BLACK BOX VOTING: Ballot-tampering in the 21^st century. Read the entire book online. The Emmy nominated documentary Hacking Democracy (The film will come on after the 2 ads or the 2 messages saying that ads could not be loaded.) shows Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti hacking the same kind of machines as those used in Volusia County. Harris, who arranged the hacks, stars in the film, as does Kathleen Wynne, one of the first people in the country to call for publicly observed secure hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB) elections.

The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) put out a warning in December 2011 about ES&S DS200 IntElect optical scan electronic voting machines errors during voting. These machines were used in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and New York. Read more details here and here. Nevertheless, the machines will not be decertified. Said Brian Hancock of the EAC: “Our goal is not to decertify systems. We never want to be in a situation of putting counties in a position where they cannot run an election.”

***

In the 2004 presidential election, George W. Bush needed Kenneth Blackwell (then Ohio Secretary of State and also honorary co-chair of the Committee to Re-elect George W. Bush) to stay in the White House. John Conyers (Democratic Representative from Michigan) in Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, had scathing comments about Blackwell’s role, stating that many of the problems in Ohio involved “intentional misconduct and illegal behavior,” with Blackwell playing a major role. Read the Conyers Report here. What Went Wrong In Ohio can be purchased at Academy Chicago Publishers. Wally O’Dell, president, chair and CEO of Diebold Corporation at the time and also huge fund-raiser for the re-election of Bush, said he would help deliver Ohio’s votes to Bush. Although no Diebold touchscreens were used in Ohio in the 2004 general election, other corporations’ touchscreens were: the paperless ES&S iVotronic and Infinity DRE from MicroVote, also paperless. Huge thanks to the generosity and knowledge of Wisconsinite John Washburn, historian and computer expert, for his help about DRE’s in Ohio in 2004.

***

Here is a Who’s Who guide of public figures and organizations to watch among ultra right-wing conservatives, who are (trying) to manipulate the electoral process in both state and federal government in Wisconsin and elsewhere. The question remains:

Are any of these players the new Harris and/or Blackwell?

Jocelyn Webster is a protégé of Karl Rove and is the new Director of Communications at Wisconsin Department of Administration (DOA). Take a look at her appointment letter and resume and more about her shenanigans here and here. Some questions remain:

How and why did she get this job?
Did Rove or the Koch Brothers or one of their emissaries tell, oops, ask Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, now on recall with over one million signatures gathered, to appoint her?

Karl Rove is known as The Architect of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004. Bush’s nicknames for Rove are Boy Genius and Turd Blossom – a flower that grows out of dung. The question remains:

Besides Jocelyn Webster, what tentacles of Rove are in Wisconsin now?

The Koch Brothers, ultra right-wing businessmen, starring especially in oil, recently convened a “super secret meeting” of billionaires to discuss the 2012 elections. In the 2010 gubernatorial elections, the brothers gave $43,000 (p.18) to ultra right Republican Scott Walker and $87,000 (p. 18) to Democrat Andrew Cuomo (now governor of New York). See the Koch Brothers’ top policy issues in which they outline strategies for repealing health reform, denying climate change, fighting Wall Street reform, dismantling collective bargaining rights, fighting reductions in carbon emissions, keeping corporate money in elections, fighting Internet neutrality (p.2). The questions remain:

What kind of relationship do Mayor Bloomberg of New York City (who ordered police to evict Occupy Wall [OWS] Street from Zuccotti Park) and Andrew Cuomo have?
Does Bloomberg also have a relationship with the Koch Brothers?

Scott Walker must be watched also, to put it mildly. Many of his top aides have been charged in a John Doe investigation and one of them, Darlene Wink, is going to spill the beans. How many remains to be seen. Here is the criminal complaint against Wink. The timing of a Walker email in the “secret email system” might be suspicious, and he himself is “willingly”, he says, talking with the investigators. Attorney Mike Pampatonio, host of Ring of Fire radio show, thinks it is extremely risky for him [Walker] to go in there and act like he is going to hustle them …” Oh, now Walker says he “voluntarily” agreed to talk with the investigation when asked to do so. Ernest Canning on bradblog has written a detailed account of all the goings on. Mary Bottari of the Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch writes about Walker and his relationships with realtors. The questions remain:

What is Walker’s relationship with the Koch Brothers?
Who is Walker taking orders from?

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), founded by the Koch Brothers, advocates for limited government, free markets and federalism. On its Task and Policy task force web page, ALEC says, “A recent survey of members indicated that tax policy was their top concern. In the most recent legislative session, over 500 bills to lower the tax burden and curb excessive government spending were introduced by ALEC members.” ALEC writes boiler plate legislation that states adopt. The questions remain:

Has Wisconsin adopted, under Scott Walker, any of ALEC’s boiler plate legislation?
And if so, which ones?

Kathy Nickolaus is the Waukesha county clerk who was investigated for her activities around the Supreme Court election and recount in Wisconsin, but she was not prosecuted. See BRADBLOG and Wisconsin Government Accountability Board GAB. The questions remain:

What role will Nickolaus play in the Scott Walker recall?
What role will Nickolaus play in the 2012 General Election?

During 2011, Minnesota-based Command Central first offered to sell EDGE reconditioned touchscreens (with VVPAT, voter-verified paper audit trail) and INSIGHT optical scan machines to municipalities in Wisconsin. No payment was due until January, 2012. Then, when perhaps Command Central did not have enough takers, the company offered to trade two touchscreens for free in exchange for having the municipality returning to Command Central one optical scan machine that they already owned.

Here is a Customer Database from Command Central that lists their electronic voting machines transactions in Wisconsin in 2011. I obtained this database through a request to Ross Hein and Kevin Kennedy of the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB). Hein, Campaign Finance and Elections Supervisor at the GAB, sent me the chart. In a phone conversation with him on February 16, 2012, Hein told me that the GAB had requested this information from Command Central. I learned a lot from Hein: The information Command Central sent appears to be incomplete. Very worthy of note and not necessarily obvious in the chart, Hein said that Command Central sold to other municipalities the same INSIGHT optical scan machines that were returned to them by some municipalities in exchange for two free EDGE touchscreens. These machines would be about five to seven years old. The Won Eagle machines are from the nineties. “HMA” after “Won Eagle” stands for hardware maintenance agreement. Imagine the money Command Central will be making from maintaining these old machines. According to John Washburn, electronic voting machines companies make most of their money in maintaining the machines, not in selling them.

Optical scan machines are bad enough. These machines lull people into thinking that because there is a paper trail, the paper ballots can always be counted by hand if something is suspect about the machine count of the election. But with many touchscreens, there is no paper trail at all, and therefore no way ever to count the votes again. And often the paper trail that the touchscreens have is worthless and small and fades.

Wisconsin law statutes require a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) Â§5.91 (18), “If the device consists of an electronic voting machine, it generates a complete, permanent paper record showing all votes cast by each elector, that is verifiable by the elector, by either visual or nonvisual means as appropriate, before the elector leaves the voting area, and that enables a manual count or recount of each vote cast by the elector.” Some questions remain:

Why and when did Command Central approach Wisconsin?
Did Command Central also approach other states?
If so, what other states and when?
Were the offers the same as those given to Wisconsin municipalities?
How did they decide which municipalities in Wisconsin to approach?
When and why did they change from offering touchscreens to sell to offering a free exchange?
What are the municipalities who paid saying about their neighbors who paid nothing?

JUDGE NAPOLITANO FIRED BY FOX, BUT NOT BEFORE GIVING US A LESSON IN AMERICAN HISTORY: "WHEN THE PEOPLE FEAR THE GOVERNMENT THERE IS TYRANY; WHEN THE GOVERNMENT FEARS THE PEOPLE THERE IS LIBERTY"

2012-02-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

http://youtu.be/nQolgjRoHW4
Judge Napolitano's Last Freedom Watch 2/13/2012

Uploaded by littletammy20 on Feb 14, 2012
I will miss him I hope another network picks him up Did you notice when he said so long america

http://youtu.be/fOaCemmsnNk

Judge Napolitano.How to get fired in under 5 mins

Uploaded by littletammy20 on Feb 12, 2012
The Judge said on his facebook page the final show is Feb 13th 8:00 PM This video is allowed under DMCA Fair Use Act Look in video responce for the last freedom watch. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act Of 1976 Allowance is made for fair use to inform ,educate ,non profit

http://youtu.be/OW6mwMYhSPs

JUDGE NAPOLITANO FIRED AFTER THIS BROADCAST OF FREEDOM WATCH

Uploaded by peyotecactus on Feb 4, 2012

Blogger's Note: If you play this last video to the end and want to know the origin of the second part, go here, click "Show more" and read the rest of the uploader's explanation.

2012-02-16T21:34:00.000-07:00

300,000 Organic Farmers Sue Monsanto in Federal Court: Decision on March 31st to Go to Trial

Original here

Little did Willie Nelson know when he recorded “Crazy” years ago just how crazy it would become for our cherished family farmers in America. Nelson, President of Farm Aid, has recently called for the national Occupy movement to declare an “Occupy the Food System” action.

Nelson states, “Corporate control of our food system has led to the loss of millions of family farmers, destruction of our soil…”

Hundreds of citizens, (even including NYC chefs in their white chef hats) joined Occupy the Food System groups, ie Food Democracy Now, gathered outside the Federal Courts in Manhattan on January 31st, to support organic family farmers in their landmark lawsuit against Big Agribusiness giant Monsanto. (Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association v. Monsanto) Oral arguments were heard that day concerning the lawsuit by 83 plaintiffs representing over 300,000 organic farmers, organic seed growers, and organic seed businesses.

The lawsuit addresses the bizarre and shocking issue of Monsanto harassing and threatening organic farmers with lawsuits of “patent infringement” if any organic farmer ends up with any trace amount of GM seeds on their organic farmland.

Judge Naomi Buckwald heard the oral arguments on Monsanto’s Motion to Dismiss, and the legal team from Public Patent Foundation represented the rights of American organic farmers against Monsanto, maker of GM seeds, [and additionally, Agent Orange, dioxin, etc.]

After hearing the arguments, Judge Buckwald stated that on March 31st she will hand down her decision on whether the lawsuit will move forward to trial.

Not only does this lawsuit debate the issue of Monsanto potentially ruining the organic farmers’ pure seeds and crops with the introduction of Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) seeds anywhere near the organic farms, but additionally any nearby GM fields can withstand Monsanto’s Roundup herbicides, thus possibly further contaminating the organic farms nearby if Roundup is used.

Of course, the organic farmers don’t want anything to do with that ole contaminated GM seed in the first place. In fact, that is why they are certified organic farmers. Hello? But now they have to worry about getting sued by the very monster they abhor, and even have to spend extra money and land (for buffers which only sometimes deter the contaminated seed from being swept by the wind into their crop land). At this point, they are even having to resort to not growing at all the following organic plants: soybeans, corn, cotton, sugar beets, and canola, …just to protect themselves from having any (unwanted) plant that Monsanto could possibly sue them over.

“Crazy, crazy for feeling so…..”

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The farmers are suffering the threat of possible loss of Right Livelihood. They are creating good jobs for Americans, and supplying our purest foods. These organic farmers are bringing Americans healthy food so we can be a healthy Nation, instead of the undernourished and obese kids and adults that President Obama worries so much about us becoming.

So what was President Obama doing when he appointed Michael Taylor, a former VP of Monsanto, as Sr. Advisor to the Commissioner at the FDA? The FDA is responsible for “label requirements” and recently ruled under Michael Taylor’s time as FDA Food Czar that GMO products did not need to be labeled as such, even though national consumer groups loudly professed the public’s right to know what is genetically modified in the food system. Sadly to remember: President Obama promised in campaign speeches that he would “let folks know what foods are genetically modified.” These are the conflict of interests that lead to the 99% movement standing up for the family farmers.

Just look at the confusing headlines lately that revealed that mid-western farms of GM corn will be sprayed with 2,4-D toxins found in the deadly Agent Orange. Just refer to the previous lawsuits taken all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court by U.S. Veterans who tried to argue the dangers of Monsanto’s Agent Orange, and high rates of cancers in our soldiers who had to suffer the side effects from their wartime exposures in Vietnam.

In 1980 alone, when all this mess started with corporations wiping out the livelihoods of family farmers, the National Farm Medicine Center reported that 900 male farmers in the Upper Midwest committed suicide. That was nearly double the national average for white men. Even sadder is the fact that some of the farmers’ children also committed suicide. Studies show that when one generation of family farmers lose their farms, then the next generation usually can’t revive the family business and traditions later.

Jim Gerritsen, President of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, has pointed out that there are 5th and 6th generation family farmers being pushed off their farms today, and because of a “climate of fear” (from possible lawsuits from Monsanto), they can’t grow some of the food they want to grow.

These farmers are the ones who have been able to survive the changes over the past twenty years by choosing to go into the budding niche of organic farming. Now look at what they have to deal with while trying to grow successful businesses: Monsanto’s threats.

Even organic dairy farmers have had to suffer lawsuits ( from Monsanto) when they labeled their organic milk “non-BGH” referring to Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone used by conventional dairies.

Consumers want organic food, and they want America’s pure food source to stay protected in America. Made in America, organically, is the way of the future, and family farmers and seed businesses should be free to maintain their high standards for organic foods. They deserve protection from Big Agribusiness’ dangerous seeds trespassing on their croplands, not to mention the use of pesticides and herbicides on GM crops. The organic industry has an “organic seal” which is also important to the success of family businesses, and even that stamp of quality is threatened by the spread of Monsanto’s GM seed contaminating their pure seed banks.

The Banking industry is also partly to blame. Years before the mortgages and home fiasco we have now, the farmers were the first to feel the squeeze. I interviewed Willie Nelson in the 1980’s, and he mentioned even then the high rates of farmer suicides, and that Farm Aid was receiving letters from family farmers saying the banks had “called in their loans”, even though “we had never missed a payment”. Was this just a veiled land grab for fertile lands, or to intentionally bankrupt independent family farmers?

It was so inspiring years ago when Michelle Obama planted an organic garden at the White House. It was a great precedent for the future, but what happened? It was ruined when they discovered sewer sludge from previous Administrations had contaminated their beautiful soil where the organic vegetables were planted.

Just one small upset but it was remedied for future plantings. What about our whole country’s organic food supply being contaminated by previous Adminstrations’ bad choices? Why did they ever allow Monsanto to introduce genetically engineered seeds into our pure, organic, and heirloom stockpiles across America in the first place?

Recently, the Obama Administration, in an effort to boost food exports, signed joint agreements with agricultural biotechnology industry giants, including Monsanto, to remove the last barriers for the spread of more genetically modified crops.

But in this recent lawsuit filed by the Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, it was argued that a previous contamination of a “genetically engineered variety of rice”, named Liberty Link 601, in 2006, before it was approved for human consumption, “extensively contaminated the commercial rice supply, resulting in multiple countries banning the import of U.S. rice.” The worldwide economic loss was “upward to $1.285 billion dollars” due to the presence of GMOs…

What are everyday Americans going to do to turn it around, to get rid of Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds and its dangerous threat to America’s heirloom and organic seed caches?

There is high rate of cancer in America, and eating healthier, especially organic foods, has been shown to have great benefits in beating cancer and other diseases. When we have Agribusiness threatening independent family farmers, which leads to the farmers feeling so scared that they don’t even plant their organic crops that Americans need, then perhaps we can all see what the 99% Occupy Movement is trying to say about their conflict of interest and seemingly abuse of powers.

Willie Nelson just released a new poem on You Tube: “We stand with Humanity, against the Insanity, We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for… We’re the Seeds and we’re the Core, We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for; We’re the ones with the 99%.”

Monsanto’s practices are a clear example of the wrong direction that the 99% want our country to go in. How about shining some light on Monsanto, and before it is too late, realize the dangers of genetically modified seeds which are contaminating the world’s food supply.

“Crazy, crazy for feeling so…… 99% .

2012-02-16T21:10:00.000-07:00

Set the Record Straight on Monsanto

Monsanto’s marketing efforts would have you believe that its product line—centered around genetically engineered (GE) seeds and the chemicals used to grow them—is a silver bullet to addressing the world’s food and agricultural challenges. And this sales pitch has been extremely effective—so effective, in fact, that even well-educated elected officials, anti-hunger advocates, and everyday people often assume that such an approach is the only option to prevent hunger, reduce pollution, and adapt to climate change. These misconceptions in turn drive important policy decisions, including research priorities and allocation of taxpayer dollars.

The Union of Concerned Scientists’ “Eight Ways Monsanto Fails at Sustainable Agriculture” rebuts these myths and demonstrates that the company’s practices are actually holding back the development and expansion of better, cheaper, science-based ways of achieving results for farmers, consumers, and the environment.

But we don’t have $120 million to spend on lobbying and PR efforts like Monsanto does to help us get attention to this critical issue—and that’s where YOU come in! We need your help to set the record straight on Monsanto and its products’ shortcomings, and give sustainable agriculture a fighting chance. Help change the conventional wisdom, one tweet or Facebook post at a time! And if you're not on Twitter or Facebook, you can help spread the word here.

Eight ways Monsanto fails at sustainable agriculture… what’s your “favorite”?

1. Promoting Resistance

Monsanto's RoundupReady and Bt technologies lead to resistant weeds and insects that can make farming harder and reduce sustainability.

	1 of 8 ways Monsanto fails @ sustainable ag: Its GE tech creates pesticide-resistant weeds & insects #MonsantoFail http://j.mp/xmLcj2
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2. Increasing Herbicide Use

Roundup resistance has led to greater use of herbicides, with troubling implications for biodiversity, sustainability, and human health.

	1 of 8 ways Monsanto fails @ sustainable ag: Herbicide-resistant weeds = >use of these harmful chemicals #MonsantoFail http://j.mp/yn1mOH
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3. Spreading Gene Contamination

Engineered genes have a bad habit of turning up in non-GE crops. And when this happens, sustainable farmers—and their customers—pay a high price.

	1 of 8 ways Monsanto fails @ sustainable ag: Engineered genes can contaminate organic & other nonGE crops #MonsantoFail http://j.mp/xuW3cl
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4. Expanding Monoculture

Monsanto's emphasis on limited varieties of a few commodity crops contributes to reduced biodiversity and, as a consequence, to increased pesticide use and fertilizer pollution.

	1 of 8 ways Monsanto fails @ sustainable ag: Tight focus on few GE crops cuts biodiversity/ups pesticides #MonsantoFail http://j.mp/xykXj0
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5. Marginalizing Alternatives

Monsanto's single-minded emphasis on GE fixes for farming challenges may come at the expense of cheaper, more effective solutions.

	1 of 8 ways Monsanto fails @ sustainable ag: GE focus undermines simpler, cheaper, more efficient fixes #MonsantoFail http://j.mp/yqa8qV
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6. Lobbying and Advertising

Monsanto outspends all other agribusinesses on efforts to persuade Congress and the public to maintain the industrial agriculture status quo.

	1 of 8 ways Monsanto fails @ sustainable ag: Huge lobbying/ad $$ keep industrial ag on top #MonsantoFail http://j.mp/xA4Q1v
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7. Suppressing Research

By creating obstacles to independent research on its products, Monsanto makes it harder for farmers and policy makers to make informed decisions that can lead to more sustainable agriculture.

	1 of 8 ways Monsanto fails @ sustainable ag: Blocking independent research prevents informed policies #MonsantoFail http://j.mp/zHS2gS
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8. Falling Short on Feeding the World

Monsanto contributes little to helping the world feed itself, and has failed to endorse science-backed solutions that don't give its products a central role.

	1 of 8 ways Monsanto fails @ sustainable ag: Rejects world hunger solutions not involving its products #MonsantoFail http://j.mp/ApcKGV
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Got other ideas for how Monsanto fails at sustainable agriculture? Tweet your response with the hashtag #MonsantoFail.

Last Revised: 02/06/12

AN EXCELLENT ACCOUNT OF THE APPALLING PRESENT-DAY GREEK TRAGEDY AND WHAT THE SOLUTION FOR IT MUST BE

2012-02-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

theREALnews Permalink

February 16, 2012

Austerity Policy Destroying Greek Society

Dimitri Lascaris: Heart wrenching personal stories show that Greece should reject austerity deal and pull out of Eurozone

More at The Real News

More Info

The following is a letter from Dimitri's sister in Greece:

"Friends of ours have died of heart attacks, stressed to the limit by debt, or worse, the loss of their cars and homes"

Dimitri...the decline in our income and therefore in many facets of our
lives began in the fall of 2009. In our family carpentry business, we
began to go without work intermittently, but for longer and longer
stretches as time progressed. Customers who owed us large amounts of
money couldn't pay even 5% of the balance owing on their account. Our
customers of course gave priority to the payment of bank loans they had
incurred as first-time homeowners or for the expansion of their
businesses, or worse, they gave priority to the payment of credit card
debts they had incurred in order to maintain the quality of their life,
or simply to secure the basic necessities...rent, water, electricity,
health insurance and food. Slowly, cash has became more and more scarce
for our customers, and therefore for us.

In Greece, the baby boomer generation has placed tremendous emphasis on
education. In a very competitive job market, Greek parents sought to
equip their children to secure a job as a civil servant. For that
purpose, Greek parents commonly employed 'frontistiria' (or
supplementary education through tutoring) as early as the onset of
elementary school. The need to eliminate the financial burden of tutors
was one of the first signs that people were struggling to survive.

Now, in 2012, whether in a city or a village, all you see strolling the
streets is a succession of empty storefronts with rent signs and often a
deluge of unopened mail just inside the door. The few businesses that
have managed to stay open have gigantic banners proclaiming 50-70%
reductions, hoping to catch the eye of the few potential customers out
there. Walking through what used to be crowded and bustling markets now
feel like a Sunday stroll through deserted urban centers.

Going to take care of business at The National Bank of Greece was once
an all-day affair...most often now, you can zip in and out in less than
5 minutes. On the other hand, the line-ups to make payments at the
Greek electrical company have become longer and longer. There you find
very volatile crowds of people fighting with employees to defer payments
through payment plans, or to have their electricity reconnected after
having had it cut off as a result of the "haratsi," which is a
government property tax incorporated into the electrical bill, often
quoted by legal experts as one of the many unconstitutional acts this
government has committed. What right does the electrical company have to
assume the role of a tax collector, and to deprive us of electricity
when we become unable to pay the arbitrary taxes issued at the drop of a
hat to generate more money for the EU and IMF?

Suicides, drug abuse, prostitution and crime have infiltrated village
life. In our village, which has slightly more than 1000 inhabitants, I
was a victim of theft by a drug addict just outside my front door. I
have been to the funerals of two friends who were murdered here in the
village by their assailants when they were unable to produce money on
demand. Other friends of ours have died of heart attacks, stressed to
the limit by debt, or worse, the loss of their cars and homes.

We, as well as many people we know, are experiencing a strained home
environment as a result of financial difficulties. Now we call our
customers to beg them on a regular basis to pay something, anything,
toward the debts they owe us, because food or heat in the dead of winter
has become an issue for us. We now rely on help from family members.
People we know go to retirees in their families to ask for contributions
from their meager pensions. We are all now at the mercy of anyone with
money at hand to help our family survive, let alone aspire to a better
life.

At almost 52, when your stamina and endurance have started to wither
away, life feels like a chore. However, children have a way of making
you 'plug' back into life, even if it's only to focus on just one more
day.

Bio

Dimitri Lascaris is a lawyer called to practice in the State of New York and the Province of Ontario, Canada, where he is a Securities Class Action Lawyer. Dimitri was a securities lawyer for a major Wall Street law firm in their New York and Paris offices. He represented the underwriting syndicate in what was, at the time,the largest initial public offering of common stock in United States history. He also acted on behalf of the Republic of France in the privatization of state industries, and the government of Greece and the German development bank in numerous cross-border securities offerings.

CLASS WAR IMPOSED ON GREECE: RIGGED FOR THE RICH 1% TO WIN AND THE STRUGGLING 99% TO LOOSE

2012-02-15T09:56:00.000-07:00

theREALnews Permalink

February 14, 2012

The Greek Experiment

Michael Hudson: Greek crisis used to find out how far finance can drive down wages and privatize

More at The Real News

Bio

Michael Hudson is a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971).

CLASS WAR IMPOSED ON CHICAGO: RIGGED FOR THE (MOSTLY WHITE) 1% TO WIN AND THE (MOSTLY BLACK) 99% TO LOOSE

2012-02-15T09:46:00.001-07:00

theREALnews Permalink

February 14, 2012

Shills and Cruel Jokes

Labor Beat: Parents and teachers protest "show trial" hearings they say are being used close their Chicago schools
Watch full multipart Students Demanding Justice

More at The Real News

More Info

During January and February of 2012 the Chicago Public Schools, pressured by recent state law to do so, held open hearings on the question of whether to close or turn-around targeted schools in minority and low-income areas of the city. But, as George Schmidt (Substancenews.net) points out, "the hearings are basically show trials...in a way [they] are a cruel joke played upon the people from the community." Adding to the fact that CPS has already secretly made their decisions before the 'hearings', another underhanded scheme has been exposed. Paid 'protesters' were bussed in to support the school board's view that the schools should be closed or turned around. The rent-a-protester ploy was originally unearthed by Substancenews.net in September of 2011, and then in January, 2012 it was picked up by Chicago's corporate media, as the scandal could no longer be ignored.

We present dramatic footage exposing the rent-a-protesters, along with scenes from the hearings and demonstrations defending public education. Interviews and speeches include: George Schmidt, reporter for Substancenews.net; Karen Lewis, President of Chicago Teachers Union; Marcy Hardaloupas, teacher at Marquette School; Chris Beauford, Generation Y/Southwest Youth Collaborative Center for Change; Katrina Richard, teacher at Dyett H.S.; Rico Gutstein, Prof. in Curriculum and Instruction at University of Illinois-Chicago; Martin Ritter, organizer, Chicago Teachers Union; Mark Carter, community activist.

CLASS WAR IMPOSED BY WASHINGTON: MURDER MUSLIMS ABROAD AND REPRESS THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF THE 99% AT HOME AS WELL AS ABROAD

2012-02-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

Washington’s Insouciance Has No Rival

February 15, 2012 | Original here

Is Obama a hypocrite or merely insouciant? Or is he an idiot?

According to news reports Obama’s White House meeting on Valentine’s day with China’s Vice President, Xi Jinping, provided an opportunity for Obama to raise “a sensitive human rights issue with the Chinese leader-in-waiting.” The brave and forthright Obama didn’t let etiquette or decorum get in his way. Afterwards, Obama declared that Washington would “continue to emphasize what we believe is the importance of realizing the aspirations and rights of all people.”

Think about that for a minute. Washington is now in the second decade of murdering Muslim men, women, and children in six countries. Washington is so concerned with human rights that it drops bombs on schools, hospitals, weddings and funerals, all in order to uphold the human rights of Muslim people. You see, bombing liberates Muslim women from having to wear the burka and from male domination.

One hundred thousand, or one million, dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, a country with destroyed infrastructure, and entire cities, such as Fallujah, bombed and burnt with white phosphorus into cinders is the proper way to show concern for human rights.

Ditto for Afghanistan. And Libya.

In Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia Washington’s drones bring human rights to the people.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and secret CIA prison sites are other places to which Washington brings human rights. Obama, who has the power to murder American citizens without due process of law, is too powerless to close Guantanamo Prison.

He is powerless to prevent himself from supplying Israel with weapons with which to murder Palestinians and Lebanese citizens to whom Obama brings human rights by vetoing every UN resolution passed against Israel for its crimes against humanity.

Instead of following Washington’s human rights lead, the evil Chinese invest in other countries, buy things from them, and sell them goods.

Has any foreign dignitary ever raised “a sensitive human rights issue” with Obama or his predecessor? How is the world so deranged that Washington can murder innocents for years on end and still profess to be the world’s defender of human rights?

How many people has China bombed, droned, and sanctioned into non-existence in the 21st century?

Will Syria and Iran be the next victims of Washington’s concern for human rights?

Nothing better illustrates the total unreality of life in the West than the fact that the entire Western world did not break out in riotous laughter over Obama’s expression of his human rights concern over China’s behavior.

Washington’s concern with human rights does not extend as far as airport security where little girls and grandmothers are sexually groped. Antiwar activists have their homes invaded, their personal possessions carried off, and a grand jury is summoned to frame them up on some terrorist charge. US soldier Bradley Manning is held for two years in violation of the US Constitution while the human rights government concocts fabricated charges to punish him for revealing a US war crime. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is harassed endlessly with the goal of bringing him into the human rights clutches of Washington. Critics of Washington’s inhumane policies are monitored and spied upon.

Washington is the worst violator of human rights in our era, and Washington has only begun.

Who will liberate Americans from Washington’s clutches?

2012-02-14T16:24:00.000-07:00

Is Western Democracy Real or a Facade?

February 14, 2012 | Original here

The United States government and its NATO puppets have been killing Muslim men, women and children for a decade in the name of bringing them democracy. But is the West itself a democracy?

Skeptics point out that President George W. Bush was put in office by the Supreme Court and that a number of other elections have been decided by electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail. Others note that elected officials represent the special interests that fund their campaigns and not the voters. The bailout of the banks arranged by Bush’s Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs chairman, Henry Paulson, and Washington’s failure to indict any banksters for the fraud that contributed to the financial crisis, are evidence in support of the view that the US government represents money and not the voters.

Recent events in Greece and Italy have created more skepticism of the West’s claim to be democratic. Two elected European prime ministers, George Papandreou of Greece and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, were forced to resign over the sovereign debt issue. Not even Berlusconi, a billionaire who continues to lead the largest Italian political party, could stand up to the pressure brought by private bankers and unelected European Union officials.

Papandreou lasted only 10 days after announcing on October 31, 2011, that he would let the Greek voters decide in a referendum whether or not to accept the austerity being imposed on the Greek people from the outside. Austerity is the price charged by the EU for lending the Greek government the money to pay to the banks. In other words, the question was austerity or default. However, the question was decided without the participation of the Greek people.

Consequently, Greeks have taken to the streets. The conditions accompanying the latest tranche of the bailout have again brought large numbers of Greeks into the streets of Athens and other cities. Citizens are protesting a 20% cut both in the minimum wage and in pensions larger than 12,000 euros ($15,800) annually and more cuts in public sector jobs. Greek taxes were raised 2.3 billion euros last year and are scheduled to rise another 3.4 billion euros in 2013. The austerity is being imposed despite Greece’s unemployment rate of 21% overall and 48% for those under the age of 25.

One interpretation is that the banks, which were careless in their loans to governments, are forcing the people to save the banks from the consequences of their bad decisions.

Another interpretation is that the European Union is using the sovereign debt crisis to extend its power and control over the individual member states of the EU.

Some say that the EU is using the banks for the EU’s agenda, and others say the banks are using the EU for the banks’ agenda.

Indeed, they may be using each other. Regardless, democracy is not part of the process.

Greece’s appointed–not elected–prime minister is Lucas Papademos, He is a former governor of the Bank of Greece, a member of Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, and former vice president of the European Central Bank. In other words, he is a banker appointed to represent the banks.

On February 12 the appointed prime minister, whose job is to deliver Greece to the banks or to Brussels, failed to see the irony in his statement that “violence has no place in a democracy.” Neither did he see any irony in the fact that 40 elected representatives in the Greek parliament who rejected the bailout terms were expelled by the ruling coalition parties. Violence begets violence. Violence in the streets is a response to the economic violence being committed against the Greek people.

Italy has formed a second democratic government devoid of democracy. The appointed prime minister, Mario Monti, doesn’t have to face an election until April 2013. Moreover, according to news reports, his “technocratic cabinet” does not include a single elected politician. The banks are taking no chances: Monti is both prime minister and minister of economics and finance.

Monti’s background indicates that he represents both the EU and the banks. He is former European advisor to Goldman Sachs, European chairman of the Trilateral Commission, a member of the Bilderberg Group, a former EU Commissioner, and a founding member of the Spinelli Group, an organization launched in September 2010 to facilitate integration within the EU, that is, to advance central power over the member states.

There is little doubt that European governments, like Washington, have been financially improvident, living beyond their means and building up debt burdens on citizens. Something needed to be done. However, what is being done is extra-democratic. This is an indication that Western elites – the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg Group, the EU, transnational corporations, oversized banks, and the mega-rich – no longer believe in democracy.

Perhaps future historians will conclude that democracy once served the interests of money in order to break free of the power of kings, aristocracy, and government predations, but as money established control over governments, democracy became a liability. Historians will speak of the transition from the divine right of kings to the divine right of money.

WHY AMERICAN JOBS ARE OFF-SHORED AND WHY THEY'LL NEVER COME BACK UNTIL FOREIGN EMPLOYERS ARE FORCED TO STOP CHEATING THEIR EMPLOYEES

2012-02-13T14:37:00.001-07:00

theREALnews Permalink

February 13, 2012

What to do about Apple and Fraud Friendly Manufacturing in China?

Bill Black: We need to ban imports produced while breaking laws of China

Watch full multipart What to do about Apple and Fraud Friendly Manufacturing in China?

More at The Real News

Bio

William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" -- frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

THE HALF-TIME MESSAGE WE DIDN'T HEAR, BUT SHOULD HAVE

2012-02-13T08:54:00.000-07:00

Halftime in America: Remy Chrysler Ad Parody

http://youtu.be/-j_8qCbHsUA

ONE SAVVY VETERAN'S BEAUTIFULLY DESCRIBED ODYSSEY FROM BAGHDAD TO WALL STREET TO OWS

2012-02-13T08:36:00.001-07:00

An Iraq Vet's Journey From Wall Street to OWS

Derek McGee

January 25, 2012 | This article appeared in the February 13, 2012 edition of The Nation.

An American flag flies over the empty Occupy Wall Street Encampment at Zuccotti Park as dawn breaks, Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011 in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

In late September 2001, I was living in a tent in Lower Manhattan with the 2nd Battalion, 25th Marines, a reserve unit just outside the city. We were occupying Battery Park, which at the time served as the National Guard's headquarters. "Guarding the guard," we called it.

Exploring the city on my one afternoon off, I stumbled upon the Wall Street Bull. The smooth metal sculpture is stunning, always on the verge of some wild movement—a lunge or a charge, at the least, a bellow with a head toss. Too tarnished to be gold, too big to be a calf, it's revered nonetheless. I would come fairly close to worshiping it myself years later. But for now, I just had my picture taken on top of it. From where I stood, the whole world seemed to feel empathy. It was one of the only times in my life that I felt like I was exactly where I needed to be.

[Click to Listen]

Another time was when I was living under a bridge along the Euphrates River. A nearly ceaseless convoy rolled overhead. I wasn't particularly keen on the invasion of Iraq, but if we had to have one, I knew I needed to be there with my fellow marines. A Subaru filled with reporters pulled up and offered us cigarettes to hasten our search of their car. "They're just outside Baghdad," they told us. The whole world is watching, I thought.

But the last time I knew without a doubt that I was where I should be was on November 17, standing in the center of Zuccotti Park. We were corralled and outnumbered, with helicopters overhead and riot cops, tourists, media and disdainful bankers looking on. Yet for all the chaos, it felt like the whole world was suddenly awake—not just watching but thinking.

In the decade between my occupation of Battery Park and Occupy Wall Street, I saw the country descend into fear and apathy. We became so afraid of Osama bin Laden and Muslims that we borrowed a trillion dollars to wage an unneeded war in Iraq (then forgot about it halfway through). I returned from Falluja in 2006 haunted by the sense that our country had made things worse, not better, for Iraqis. Meanwhile, at home, we'd let an invasive domestic intelligence apparatus go silently to work all around us. And as money dominated politics and bipartisanship degenerated into an impotent ruckus, we let our banks more or less start regulating themselves.

It was this last bit that brought me back to Lower Manhattan. After Iraq I'd gone to work at Merrill Lynch, then worked doing corporate security for a firm on Wall Street. I knew enough to be critical of the financial industry. Yet when the first Occupiers converged downtown, I was dismissive. I didn't have anything in common with those people, I thought. Then I saw a newspaper photo of someone holding a sign that read, Reinstate Glass-Steagall. Thank you, I thought. I'd been saying that since taking my stockbroker's certification exam in 2007. Nobody had ever listened. I went down to Zuccotti Park.

* * *

Wall Street denizens like to think they contribute more to society than those who earn less because they pay more dollars in taxes. But where do their earnings come from? Of the myriad ways they extract money from the rest of us, not all are underhanded—but none are noble. The industry that vehemently opposes a financial transactions tax charges exorbitant financial transaction fees. Its members cobble together structured products—ordinary investments cloaked in opaque complexity—and market them as new and valuable. They alchemize derivatives (investments on investments) and use supercomputers to run algorithms that give their proprietary trading desks an incremental advantage, compounded many times a second, over smaller investors (including their own clients). They collect large fees for taking concentrated risk, chopping it up and hiding the pieces in many different places, creating the illusion that it has disappeared (this is how toxic mortgage-based assets ended up in pension funds). They charge municipalities hefty fees to borrow money every time they need a new sewer, school or firehouse.

Of course, as those on Wall Street like to point out, in a hostage-taking fashion, they also keep financial markets running smoothly—a feat that could probably be accomplished by a few months' worth of open-source software and a room full of servers. And then, of course, they give advice, which I like to say is fairly useful, because it's what I did.

As a financial adviser for Merrill Lynch, I was proud to enter the elite realm of wealth management. We didn't invent, produce or grow anything, but we helped people preserve and perpetuate their wealth. Oh, what a club.

In training, I was taught how to spot wealthy in a crowd, how to approach family and friends about their financial planning. I would listen to heroes of the business tell how they made it. They would boast that they didn't take one day off the first four years, that they worked every weekend, never saw their families and made 500 cold calls a day. It inspired and motivated me. They became rich fast—what could be more American than that? I wanted the suits, the watches, the cars. I wanted to start collecting digits on my gross income, like someone might collect stamps or Hummel figurines.

I had a glass globe that would glow green when the Dow was up and red when it was down. It was also a good indicator of my mood, for a while. In the office we talked about golf or our pet charity or pet dog to show that there was substance to us, but really what we thought about most of the time was money.

Unlike in the military, there's no loyalty in finance. People left the firm suddenly if they were offered a better deal and thought their clients were loyal enough to stay with them. In emergency meetings, those clients' names were divided up, and we scrambled to persuade them to stay. When I got laid off, two years after I started, my box was already packed under my desk. (You are expected to leave the building immediately.) I had no plans to take files. I had no plans to work in finance again.

* * *

Between work and school I didn't have much time for Occupy, but when I could I marched, and when something was on my mind I made a sign. I was late to the protest on November 17, a "day of action," arriving shortly after the opening bell. I was immediately underwhelmed. A few signs were held aloft and what looked like thousands of police officers milled about smartly; I squinted to make sure the ones in the distance weren't just blue streaks painted on backdrops like the buffalo herds in old westerns. Toward Wall Street a line of people waited to get past some barriers, where police were checking people's identification. I ducked into the subway, whose network of tunnels was familiar from my corporate security days, and emerged inside what I'd dubbed the Green Zone. (The Green Zone in Baghdad is a large, heavily secured area, too.)

At the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway were two young women holding signs above their heads, mostly topless, totally harmless, obstructing neither sidewalk nor street. Yet they were forcibly removed by a swarm of police officers. A melee broke out; people shoved and hollered, the media tried to get pictures, passers-by were caught in the middle, protesters ended up cuffed on the ground and a policeman had an unknown substance thrown at his face. No one asked why the women should be denied the right to free speech.

Further down the street, a line of cops fidgeted in riot gear. They looked uncomfortable, tugging at straps and twisting about. I knew how they felt. I was trained in nonlethal riot control. It's dreadful. Hours of choreography, getting the steps right—you have to move as one to keep gaps from opening. I learned to throw stun grenades, how to restrain and zip-tie troublemakers. I practiced using fire extinguisher–sized canisters of pepper spray—and was pepper-sprayed myself. (It's important to appreciate the effects of such weapons, lest one be tempted to deploy them casually. I ran a good way through an obstacle course thinking pepper spray isn't so bad, then pow!: a dozen elves were ripping the freckles off my face with belt sanders.)

I remembered trying to control a mob in Nasiriya, Iraq. After the invasion, the United States had foolishly dismantled the Iraqi army, promising to pay soldiers a severance if they brought their papers to designated locations. For days, hundreds of former military lined up at the local bank, waited all day and eventually left, with just a dozen or so people getting paid. A rumor spread that the bankers were keeping the money for themselves, and the crowd surged forth to take their payments. I might have done the same.

But when you're part of a unit sent to "restore order," whether you're facing former soldiers throwing bricks or university students publicly expressing an opinion, you go in with one mentality: crush the other side. At no point are you considering whether you are on the right side. Empathy has no place. If your boss ordered you to clear pregnant diabetic women from outside the grand opening of a new InsulinMart, for reasons that are hard to explain, you go in angry. That's why putting people in riot gear where there is no riot is reckless and provocative.

Of course, if my goal was to crush free speech, I might use a little misdirection too. As in any war, I would dehumanize the enemy: make sure the protesters aren't perceived as ordinary people with legitimate concerns but rather as hippies and anarchists who force police to work overtime on the taxpayer dime. Then I would send far more police than necessary, pre-emptively ordering some troops into riot gear, to stir tension and make escalation inevitable. The singular focus thus becomes the "clashes": police and protesters absorb one another's frustrations, and I've successfully contained the problem by pitting the 99 percent against itself, while eclipsing the issues that led to the protests in the first place.

Leaving behind the tackled women and the giddy police, I headed down Broadway, passing the bull, which was now in a pickle similar to the one confronting folks up at Zuccotti Park: penned in with those ubiquitous cattle barriers. Around the bull was a ring of police; they seemed to have the situation contained. I caught a glimpse of Battery Park.

How did I get here? Ten years ago I was standing in military fatigues checking IDs, and now I was walking around with a legion of malcontents carrying signs with messages like Police—I Forgive You. I had gone down to Zuccotti to call for Wall Street to be reformed and held accountable, but the more I listened to protesters discussing other issues, the more my skepticism gave way to an impulse to go home and do my own research. I realized that much of what they said was true. Corporations are legally people? Does anybody know about this? I thought naïvely. We imprison people at twelve times the rate of Japan? And none of the people who defrauded the country and caused this crisis are in prison? Why isn't anybody saying anything?

Everyone in the Occupy movement has a different set of grievances. I personally believe that we must spend less on offensive wars and more on education—I'm going back to school on the GI Bill, and its value is immeasurable.

But more fundamentally, if Occupy has taught me anything it is that we must live up to our own values. There is nothing you could write on a sign that could offend me more than seeing police take away someone's right to free speech. What we do as soldiers is meaningless if our government takes away those freedoms while we are sent to supposedly defend them. Americans applaud protest throughout the world as a legitimate way for people to express their thirst for democracy. Is it really possible that everyone has a point except those who protest here?

Derek McGee

January 25, 2012 | This article appeared in the February 13, 2012 edition of The Nation.

IS THE GOVERNMENT BANK MORTGAGE DEAL GOOD OR BAD FOR THOSE BEING FORECLOSED UPON? AND IS IT GOOD OR BAD FOR THE BIG BANKS WHO CREATED THE CRISIS? THE FOLLOWING TWO VIDEOS AND ARTICLE ARE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER (THE FIRST ONE IS THE EARLIEST, BUT PERHAPS STILL THE BEST ONE TO VISIT IF YOU ONLY DO ONE)

2012-02-11T16:28:00.002-07:00

theREALnews Permalink

February 9, 2012

Will Government Bank Mortgage Deal Help or Hinder Prosecutions?

Yves Smith: How can Obama Admin. settle before they have fully investigated the fraud

More at The Real News

Bio

Yves Smith has written the popular and trenchant financial blog "Naked Capitalism" since 2006. Yves has spent more than 25 years in the financial services industry and currently heads Aurora Advisors, a New York-based management consulting firm specializing in corporate finance advisory and financial services. Prior experience includes Goldman Sachs (in corporate finance), McKinsey & Co., and Sumitomo Bank (as head of mergers and acquisitions). Yves has written for publications in the United States and Australia, including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Slate, The Conference Board Review, Institutional Investor, The Daily Deal and the Australian Financial Review. Yves is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School.

2012-02-11T08:56:00.000-07:00

February 10, 2012

50-State, $25B Mortgage Settlement: Relief for Struggling Homeowners or Bailout for Big Banks?

The U.S. Justice Department has unveiled a record mortgage settlement with the nation’s five largest banks to resolve claims over faulty foreclosures and mortgage practices that have indebted and displaced homeowners and sunk the nation’s economy. While the deal is being described as a $25 billion settlement, the banks will only have to pay out a total of $5 billion in cash between them. We speak to one of the settlement’s most prominent critics, Yves Smith, a longtime financial analyst who runs the popular finance website, "Naked Capitalism." "The settlement, on the surface, does look like it’s helping homeowners," Smith says. "But, in fact, the bigger part that most people don’t recognize is the way it actually helps the banks with mortgages on their own books... The real problem is that this deal is just not going to give that much relief." [Original includes rush transcript]

Bloggers Note: For the gory details of this story, read the following post by Yves Smith. 

2012-02-11T08:19:00.003-07:00

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2012 -- YVES SMITH

Mortgage Settlement as Attorney General Sellout: Deal is Not Done, and Final Version Guaranteed to be Worse Than Advertised

You know it’s bad when banks are the most truthful guys in the room.

Remember that historical mortgage settlement deal that was the lead news story on Thursday? It has been widely depicted as a done deal. The various AGs who had been holdouts said their concerns had been satisfied.

But in fact, Bank of America’s press release said that the deal was “agreements in principle” as opposed to a final agreement. The Charlotte bank had to be more precise than politicians because it is subject to SEC regulations about the accuracy of its disclosures. And if you read the template for the AG press release carefully, you can see how it finesses where the pact stands. And today, American Banker confirmed that the settlement pact is far from done, and the details will be kept from the public as long as possible, until it is filed in Federal court (because it includes injunctive relief, a judge must bless the agreement).

This may not sound all that important to laypeople, but most negotiators and attorneys will react viscerally to how negligent the behavior of the AGs has been. The most common reaction among lawyers I know who been with white shoe firms (including former partners) is “shocking”. Let me explain why.

Negotiating of large, complex deals (or even little deals) does not happen in one fell swoop. Even when the two sides have outlined the major terms, and in sone cases hammered out the really important ones in some detail, there is still a great deal of negotiating that takes place in finalizing the text of the contract. The negotiation over the definitive agreement makes a great deal of difference on how fair the pact turns out to be. For instance, one of the sayings of transaction lawyers is “He who controls the document controls the deal.” The party that writes up the initial version of the contract has undue influence because that becomes the default and the other side has to negotiate back from that language.

As attorney Max Gardner said via e-mail (boldface ours):

I would never tell a client that I had settled a case or claim against a creditor until the ink was on the final written settlement agreement. I would of course advise the client of the verbal offer and secure the client’s acceptance but would always say something like “don’t spend any of the money because as Yogi might say it ain’t over until we have the signed agreement and their check has cleared my trust account.” An attorney would be guilty of serious ethical violations if he or she told a client we have a settlement with BoA and it is final before the deal was closed out by written agreement and in my bankruptcy practice the agreement was approved by the court. The AGs have said this agreement must be approved by a Federal District Court Judge so really why would you make such public announcements before at the least a written agreement signed and inked by ALL of the parties.

Why is it deeply troubling that the attorneys general have gone along with the Administration’s messaging and have all fallen in line with the “biggest Federal-state settlement ever” when no such settlement in fact exists? This isn’t just acceding to the Administration’s pet wish to build on its State of the Union PR. They’ve completely abandoned their negotiating leverage at a critical stage.

Let’s look at this equation. The Administration and the banks both want a pro-bank deal (the only minor point of difference is how much in populist gestures the banks have to submit to in order to get the much more valuable bennies they want). The only parties that cared to any degree about ordinary citizens were the dissident AGs. But they now have now given up any bargaining leverage over how this deal turns out.

The only power any party has in a negotiation is his threat to leave the bargaining table. The AGs can no longer do that. They’ve taken star turns, made ringing pronouncements of how great this pact is. They can’t possibly reverse themselves mere weeks down the road and say, whoops, this deal isn’t go great after all.

The AGs had to have known what they were doing in capitulating. Delaware’s Beau Biden was one of the most outspoken AGs after the Schneiderman destabilized the opposition by putting himself on the sidelines, making it clear he had not signed on when most other AGs remained silent. Yet in an interview with Dylan Ratigan early last week, he sounded as if the fight had been beaten out of him, that he was resigned to signing on to the agreement if he could preserve the MERS suit he had filed and add bank names to it later if the facts warranted. What sort of veiled or not so veiled threats did the Democratic party operatives make to get him to fall into line?

I hate using Biden as an example because he resisted down to the end. I don’t see how any seasoned attorney could possibly have misunderstood what he was giving up. Maybe the last holdouts felt even en bloc that they had no sway and even if they all stood aside, it would hurt them with little upside for their constituents. But agreeing to a pig in the poke would never be acceptable in the private sector, and the AGs can’t pretend not to know how outside the pale their conduct was.

We’ve seen an analogous process at work in the Dodd Frank bill. It was widely described as a “bill to come up with a bill,” with a lot of provisions either subjected to studies or kicked over to regulatory rulemaking to come up with a final version of the provision. The result has been that it has given the banks another go at the bill, and various media reports indicate that they’ve done a very good job in blunting the impact of many provisions.

Now some readers might argue that this analogy is unfair, that the mortgage settlement is much further along that Dodd Frank was. That might seem to be true. However, the attorneys general are not experts in securitization, and benign-sounding language can have implication that they don’t appreciate. And some of the responses from AG offices to simple questions suggest they are over their heads on this deal.

And the American Banker article indicates that the deal has a lot more points still open that the Administration’s victory lap would lead you to believe:

…a fully authorized, legally binding deal has not been inked yet….A representative for the North Carolina attorney general downplayed the significance of the document’s non-final status, saying that the terms were already fixed…
Other sources who spoke with American Banker raised doubts that everything is yet in place. A person familiar with the mortgage servicing pact says that a settlement term sheet does not yet exist. Instead, there are a series of nearly-complete documents that will be attached to a consent judgment eventually filed with the court. That truly final version will include things such as servicing standards, consumer relief options, legal releases, and enforcement terms. There will likely be separate state and a federal versions of the release…
Whatever the reason for the document’s continued non-appearance, the lack of a public final settlement is already the cause for disgruntlement among those who closely follow the banking industry. Quite simply, the actual terms of a settlement matter.
“The devil’s in the details,” says Ron Glancz, chairman of law firm Venable LLP’s Financial Services Group. “Until you see the document you’re never quite sure what your rights are.”…
And there is plenty more still to be worked out under all circumstances.
“Even once we get to the final terms, the servicers we’re told are going to be allowed to develop their own plans,” says NCLC’s Thompson. “They’re going to have three months to develop those from when the settlement is approved by the court. We are a long way in lots of ways from being able to kick the tires.

Now why the rush to get a photo op? I don’t buy that this was driven by election timing. A lot of studies show undecided voters make up their minds in the last month or at most two before the election. Big news is more effective closer to the election.

Maybe the Administration believes its own PR and thinks this measley program will help the housing market, or more important, secure the fealty of banks. But my guess is that the fact that 15 AGs concerned about the negotiations had met is what pushed the Administration into high gear. They did not want a meaningful, cohesive opposition forming. In addition, I am certain some evil genius in the Administration understood full well the value of destroying the AGs’ bargaining leverage before the final phase of negotiations.

Oh, and what about the other bombshell in the American Banker story:

American Banker asked The Department of Justice, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the offices of Attorneys General in Iowa, North Carolina and Colorado for a copy of the settlement last night. Only Iowa, North Carolina and the Department of Justice have responded, saying that the document would not be available until it is filed with the court on a yet-undetermined date.

Diane Thompson, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, said it was “unusual” that a settlement agreement had not been released. But the officialdom has gone further than that, and has said they won’t release the document until it has to be made public, via a Federal court filing.
Why would they choose to delay publicizing such important information? The most logical reason is they want it to be public the bare minimum amount of time possible prior to court approval, so as to give opponents (read aggrieved investors) the tightest window possible for filing motions opposing the pact. This deal was done within a very small group, and the two parties most affected, homeowners and investors, were and continue to be kept as far away from the process as possible.
And there are signs that AGs were really over their heads on this one, independent of the Administration’s gamesmanship. This was from reader LucyLulu:

Spoke yesterday with an associate of my attorney general yesterday and had a most frustrating conversation….
One of the many interesting tidbits she did share however (and I am unsure how reliable her info was) was that no investor owned modifications of loans would occur without first obtaining consent of the investors…I tried to nail down how this consent would be obtained, she was reluctant to provide details, just to say how consents from shareholders are normally obtained.

Now this may simply be an out-of-the loop staffer making things up, but another correspondent heard pretty much the same “we’ll get approvals” palaver from another AG’s office. I have to tell you, they most certainly WON’T obtain consents as they do in shareholder land (as in preparing and sending out proxies and soliciting votes on contested matters). Moreover, the standards for what level of approval is required varies by deal: some it’s a simple majority (presumably by par value), some require majority approval of each tranche, some require a supermajority (2/3 or even 75%). The Administration is likely to be taking the position that they don’t need consent in most deals if the mod is NPV positive. And given that they can pick the parameters that are most flattering (loan level v. portfolio level, discretion over time horizon chosen for measurement), I’d suspect that investor consent will not be obtained (unless investors start making serious noises, which seems less likely than it did last weekend).

Reader Mikent was correct when he called this deal a robosettlement. Just like its namesake, it’s more about getting it done than doing it right.

ELECTION FRAUD: HERE IS A MAN HISTORICALLY INDIFFERENT TO CONSPIRACY THEORIES FREAKED OUT BY STRONG EVIDENCE HE RECENTLY STUMBLED UPON. MORAL: "THE PRICE GOOD MEN PAY FOR INDIFFERENCE TO PUBLIC AFFAIRS IS TO BE RULED BY EVIL MEN." -- PLATO

2012-02-09T08:50:00.001-07:00

Nevada Election Result Likely Fraudulent, Ron Paul Votes Seemingly Discarded

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Gekko

by Daniel aka ‘Vision Victory’, Future Money Trends:

Something Is WRONG with the Nevada Election Results.

FutureMoneyTrends.com normally doesn’t comment on politics, but we have to mention this as there is definitely something wrong with the Nevada election results. First off, this was a very small election, so getting the results should have been easy. Yet for some reason, the Nevada State Republican party took 3 days to give us a final count of only 32,894 votes.

***No matter who you support, anytime we have something wrong with an election, it effects all of us, so we should all be concerned. Did Ron Paul Really Come in 3rd?

One clear trend in this 2012 election is that Ron Paul’s support is much larger than it was in 2008. For example, when you compare 2008 to 2012 vote totals, Ron Paul has increased his support in each state, significantly.

Ron Paul Vote Increase in 2012 VS. 2008:

* Iowa UP 119%

* New Hampshire UP 210%

* South Carolina UP 385%

* Florida UP 86% (He didn’t even campaign in Florida)

Click Here To Sign A Petition Demanding A Visible Recount

Now here is the part that makes no sense at all: Ron Paul who took second in Nevada in 2008 with 6,087 votes, only increased his support by 1.4% to just 6,175 in the 2012 results, despite all of the excitement, all the money spent, which was a lot more. In fact, the Paul campaign had brochures and volunteers almost knock on every door in Nevada this time around. Nevada is also very fertile ground for a candidate like Ron Paul, many people in Nevada just want to be left alone by the government, Ron Paul opposes taxing tips, seeing that they are not really income, but gifts, you would think this would go over real well in Las Vegas.

On January 31st, a FutureMoneyTrends.com staff member and his family were in Henderson, Nevada, at a rally. At this rally over 1,200 people showed up. Let’s say that out of that 1,200, only 1,000 were from Nevada, that would mean out of the entire state of Nevada, at just one of his many rallies over 3 days, 17% of his supporters showed up. If we assume that most of the 1,200 were from Nevada, then that would bring that number up to 20%.

Are we the only ones that are looking at this and scratching our heads?

Sometimes a picture can help put things into perspective. Regardless of who you are voting for, if we can’t trust the vote counters or the media to hold them accountable, then what is the point of even having an election.

The one caucus that was on live TV that was held special for Jews and Seventh Day Adventist was covered by CNN. Ron Paul won this one in a landslide, again we find this interesting because if Ron Paul is winning very religious people over in a landslide, we are willing to make a Las Vegas bet that he won the non-religious Las Vegas residents by even more. For people who just want to mind their own business and do their own thing, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else, Ron Paul is really their only option.

You can go through all of the articles we have written, videos produced, and emails sent out, we are not a conspiracy site at all, 99.9% of our content is about future trends and economy.

So, here is what we are asking our members to do. If this Nevada election result bothers you, forward this article. Maybe this article will eventually get forwarded to the right person who does have the authority and integrity to look into this further

Click Here To Sign A Petition Demanding A Visible Recount

Source

"THOSE WHO CANNOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT." -- GEORGE SANTAYANA. FOR AMERICANS WHO CANNOT REMEMBER THE PAST (AND THAT MEANS VIRTUALLY ALL OF US), PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS PRESENTS A VITAL HISTORY LESSON.

2012-02-08T14:33:00.000-07:00

Will Iran Be Attacked?

February 8, 2012 | Original here

Washington has made tremendous preparations for a military assault on Iran. There is speculation that Washington has called off its two longest running wars–Iraq and Afghanistan–in order to deploy forces against Iran. Two of Washington’s fleets have been assigned to the Persian Gulf along with NATO warships. Missiles have been spread amongst Washington’s Oil Emirate and Middle Eastern puppet states. US troops have been deployed in Israel and Kuwait.

Washington has presented Israel a gift from the hard-pressed American taxpayers of an expensive missile defense system, money spent for Israel when millions of unassisted Americans have lost their homes. As no one expects Iran to attack Israel, except in retaliation for an Israeli attack on Iran, the purpose of the missile defense system is to protect Israel from an Iranian response to Israeli aggression against Iran.

Juan Cole has posted on his blog a map showing 44 US military bases surrounding Iran.

In addition to the massive military preparations, there is the propaganda war against Iran that has been ongoing since 1979 when Washington’s puppet, the Shah of Iran, was overthrown by the Iranian revolution. Iran is surrounded, but Washington and Israeli propaganda portray Iran as a threatening aggressor nation. In fact, the aggressors are the Washington and Tel Aviv governments which constantly threaten Iran with military attack.

Neocon warmongers, such as David Goldman, compare the Iranian president to Hitler and declare that only war can stop him.

Washington’s top military officials have created the impression that an act of Israeli aggression against Iran is a done deal. On February 2 the Washington Post reported that Pentagon chief Leon Panetta believes that Israel is likely to attack Iran in two to four months.

Also on February 2, Gareth Porter reported that General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed the Israeli government that the US would not join Israel’s aggression against Iran unless Washington had given prior approval for the attack.

Porter interprets Dempsey’s warning as a strong move by President Obama to deter an attack that would involve Washington in a regional conflagration with Iran. A different way to read Dempsey’s warning is that Obama wants to hold off on attacking Iran until polls show him losing the presidential election. It has generally been the case that the patriotic electorate does not turn out a president who is at war.

On February 5, President Obama canceled Dempsey’s warning to Israel when Obama declared that he was in “lockstep” with the Israeli government. Obama is in lockstep with Israel despite the fact that Obama told NBC that “we don’t see any evidence that they [Iran] have those intentions [attacks on the US] or capabilities.” By being in lockstep with Israel and simultaneously calling for a “diplomatic solution,” Obama appeased both the Israel Lobby and Democratic peace groups, thus upping his vote.

As I wrote previously, this spring is a prime time for attacking Iran, because there is a good chance that Russia will be in turmoil because of its March election. The Russian opposition to Putin is financed by Washington and encouraged by Washington’s statements, especially those of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Whether Putin wins or there is an indecisive result and a run-off election, Washington’s money will put tens of thousands of Russians into the streets, just as Washington’s money created the “Green Revolution” in Iran to protest the presidential elections there.

On February 4 the former left-wing British newspaper, The Guardian, reported a pre-election protest by 120,000 anti-Putin demonstrators marching in Moscow and demanding “fair elections.” In other words, Washington already has its minions declaring that a win by Putin in March can only signify a stolen election. The problem for Obama is that this spring is too early to tell whether his re-election is threatened by a Republican candidate. Going to war prematurely, especially if the result is a stiff rise in oil prices, is not an aid to re-election.

The willingness of peoples around the world to be Washington’s puppets instead of loyal citizens of their own countries is why the West has been able to dominate the world during the modern era. There seems to be an infinite supply of foreign leaders who prefer Washington’s money and favor to loyalty to their own countries’ interests.

As Karl Marx said, money turns everything into a commodity that can be bought and sold. All other values are defeated–honor, integrity, truth, justice, loyalty, even blood kin. Nothing remains but filthy lucre. Money certainly turned UK prime minister Tony Blair into a political commodity.

The power of money was brought home to me many years ago. My Ph.D. dissertation chairman found himself in the Nixon administration as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security affairs. He asked if I would go to Vietnam to administer the aid programs. I was flattered that he thought I had the strength of character to stand up to the corruption that usually defeats the purpose of aid programs, but I declined the assignment.

The conversation was one I will never forget. Warren Nutter was an intelligent person of integrity. He thought regardless of whether the war was necessary that we had been led into it by deception. He thought democracy could not live with deception, and he objected to government officials who were not honest with the American people. Nutter’s position was that a democratic government had to rely on persuasion, not on trickery. Otherwise, the outcomes were not democratic.

As Nutter saw it, we were in a war, and we had involved the South Vietnamese. Therefore, we had obligations to them. If we proved to be feckless, the consequence would be to undermine commitments we had made to other countries in our effort to contain the Soviet Empire. The Soviet Union, unlike the “terrorist threat” had the potential of being a real threat. People who have come of age after the collapse of the Soviet Union don’t understand the cold war era.

In the course of the conversation I asked how Washington got so many other governments to do its bidding. He answered, “Money.”

I asked, “You mean foreign aid?”

He said, “No, bags of money. We buy the leaders.”

He didn’t approve of it, but there was nothing he could do about it.

Purchasing the leadership of their enemies or of potential threats was the Roman way. Timothy H. Parsons in his book, The Rule of Empires, describes the Romans as “deft practitioners of soft power.” Rome preferred to rule the conquered and the potentially hostile through “semiautonomous client kings which the Senate euphemistically termed ‘friends of the Roman people.’ Romans helped cooperative monarchs remain in power with direct payments of coins and material goods. Acceptance of these subsidies signified that an ally deferred to imperial authority, and the Romans interpreted any defiance of their will as an overt revolt. They also intervened freely in local succession disputes to replace unsuitable clients.”

This is the way Washington rules. Washington’s way of ruling other countries is why there is no “Egyptian Spring,” but a military dictatorship as a replacement for Washington’s discarded puppet Hosni Mubarak, and why European puppet states are fighting Washington’s wars of hegemony in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.

Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy funds non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. It is through the operations of NGOs that Washington added the former Soviet Republic of Georgia to Washington’s empire, along with the Baltic States, and Eastern European countries.

Because of the hostility of many Russians to their Soviet past, Russia is vulnerable to Washington’s machinations.

As long as the dollar rules, Washington’s power will rule.

As Rome debased its silver denarius into lead, Rome’s power to purchase compliance faded away. If “Helicopter Ben” Bernanke inflates away the purchasing power of the dollar, Washington’s power will melt away also.

2012-02-07T17:41:00.000-07:00

Why the AGs Must Not Settle: Robo-signing Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Ellen Brown

Original here

A foreclosure settlement between five major banks guilty of “robo-signing” and the attorneys general of the 50 states is pending for Monday, February 6^th; but it is still not clear if all the AGs will sign. California was to get over half of the $25 billion in settlement money, and California AG Kamala Harris has withstood pressure to settle.

That is good. She and the other AGs should not sign until a thorough investigation has been conducted. The evidence to date suggests that “robo-signing” was not a mere technical default or sloppy business practice but was part and parcel of a much larger fraud, the fraud that brought down the whole economy in 2008. It is not just distressed homeowners but the entire economy that has paid the price, resulting in massive unemployment and a shrunken tax base, throwing state and local governments into insolvency and forcing austerity measures and cutbacks in government services across the nation.

The details of the robo-signing scam were spelled out in my last article, here. The robo-signing fraud and its implications are expanded on below.

Why All the Robo-signing?

Over half the homes in the country are now held in the name of an electronic database called MERS—Mortgage Electronic Registration Services. MERS is a smokescreen behind which these mortgages were sold to trusts that sold them to investors. The mortgages were chopped into pieces and sold as “mortgage-backed securities” (MBS), which traded in a supposedly liquid market. That meant the investors could sell them in the money market at any time on a day’s notice. Yale economist Gary Gorton gives this example:

Suppose the institutional investor is Fidelity, and Fidelity has $500 million in cash that will be used to buy securities, but not right now. Right now Fidelity wants a safe place to earn interest, but such that the money is available in case the opportunity for buying securities arises. Fidelity goes to Bear Stearns and “deposits” the $500 million overnight for interest. What makes this deposit safe? The safety comes from the collateral that Bear Stearns provides. Bear Stearns holds some asset‐backed securities [with] a market value of $500 millions. These bonds are provided to Fidelity as collateral. Fidelity takes physical possession of these bonds. Since the transaction is overnight, Fidelity can get its money back the next morning, or it can agree to “roll” the trade. Fidelity earns, say, 3 percent.

That is where the robo-signing came in. Foreclosure defense attorneys armed with the tools of discovery have discovered that robo-signing — involving falsified signatures assigning mortgages back to the trusts allegedly owning them — occurred not just occasionally or randomly but in virtually every case. Why? Because the mortgages had to be left free to be bought and sold on a daily basis in the money market by investors. The investors are not interested in making 30 year loans. They want something short-term with immediate rights of withdrawal like a deposit account.

The Hazards of Borrowing Short to Lend Long

The problem is that when panicked investors all exercise that right at once, there is no cheap funding available to back the 30 year mortgage loans, rendering the banks insolvent. And that is what happened on September 15, 2008, when Lehman Brothers, a major investment bank like Bear Stearns, went bankrupt.

According to Representative Paul Kanjorski, speaking on C-SPAN in January 2009, the collapse of Lehman Brothers precipitated a $550 billion run on the money market funds. A report by the Joint Economic Committee pointed to the fact that the $62 billion Reserve Primary Fund had “broken the buck” (fallen below a stable $1 per share) due to its Lehman investments. The massive bank run that followed was the dire news that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson presented to Congress behind closed doors, prompting Congressional approval of Paulson’s $700 billion bank bailout despite deep misgivings.

The sleight of hand that brought the banking system down was that the mortgages backing the money market were supposedly held by trusts that had lent money to homeowners for 15 years or 30 years. It was the classic “borrowing short to lend long,” a shell game in which banks have engaged for hundreds of years, routinely precipitating bank panics and bank runs when the depositors or the investors all pull their short-term money out at the same time.

The Shadow Banking System Is Still Unregulated

Periodic bank panics were averted in the conventional banking system only when the government agreed to insure the deposits of individual depositors in 1933. But FDIC insurance covered only $100,000 (now $250,000), and large institutional investors had far more than that to invest. The shadow banking system, in which deposits were “insured” with mortgage-backed securities, developed in response. But the shadow banking system is unregulated and is just as prone to another collapse today as it was in 2008. The Dodd-Frank banking “reforms” barely touched it. As noted in an article titled “Risky Debt Use on Repo Market Hits 2008 Levels” in today’s Financial Times:

In the repo market, banks pledge their securities as collateral for short-term loans from money managers and other investors. The market played a key role in the build-up to the 2008 financial crisis. Banks used toxic assets, such as repackaged subprime loans, to secure trillions of dollars worth of cheap funding.

When the US housing bubble burst, the banks’ trading partners refused to accept such securities as collateral and the repo market rapidly contracted.

However, a study by Fitch Ratings says the proportion of bundled debt being used as security in repo transactions has returned to pre-crisis levels.

Using the repackaged loans can increase risk in the repo market, the rating agency says. This is because the securities may be prone to sudden pullbacks such as the one experienced in 2008.

We could be looking at another banking collapse at any time; and to fix the problem, we first need to know what is going on. The AGs should not agree to drop the curtain on the robo-signing scandal until all the evidence is on the table. It is not just a matter of punishing the guilty; it is a matter of a banking scheme based on fraud, one that ultimately does not work and has jeopardized the homes, savings and investments of the public not just recently but for hundreds of years.

The Way Out

There is another way to design a banking system. The deposits of large institutional investors do not need to be backed by sliced and diced pieces of our homes to be “safe” (something that has proven not to be safe at all). The large institutional investors seeking safety are largely “us” – the pension funds and mutual funds in which we have stored our savings and on which we rely for support when we can no longer work. Hundreds of years of history have demonstrated that the only reliable guarantor is the government itself.

Our pension funds and mutual funds need a government guarantee just as much as our individual deposits do. But we don’t want to be guaranteeing the gambling and derivatives schemes of too-big-to-fail, for-profit Wall Street banks playing fast and loose with our money. Banking and credit need to be public utilities, operated for the benefit of the public in plain sight of the public.

___________________

Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, http://PublicBankingInstitute.org. In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are http://WebofDebt.com and http://EllenBrown.com.

THERE IS A HUE AND CRY TO BOMB IRAN BEFORE THEY NUKE US. BUT IRAN IS FAR FROM MAKING A SINGLE WARHEAD. BY CONTRAST, PAKISTAN HAS MANY NUCLEAR WARHEADS. WHAT DO WE DO? SEND DRONES TO KILL 2,400 INNOCENT PAKISTANIS IN ORDER TO KNOCK OFF 68 SUSPECTED TERRORISTS. IT'S LIKE POKING A NEST OF WASPS. WITH A FOREIGN POLICY LIKE THIS, THEY SURELY WON'T HATE US FOR OUR "FREEDOM"...

2012-02-06T09:07:00.000-07:00

theREALnews Permalink

US Drone Strikes Destabilize Pakistan

Fred Branfman: US policy should be to help develop Pakistan

More at The Real News

Bio

Fred Branfman is an American anti-war activist and author of a number of books about the Indochina War. Once working as the Director of Project Air War in 1969, he wrote about the U.S. bombing in Indochina. He also worked as a policy advisor for former California governors Jerry Brown, Gary Hart and Tom Hayden. He currently writes for TrulyALive.org, a web based community about death awareness. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper's and the New Republic.

2012-02-06T08:27:00.000-07:00

The January Jobs Are Statistical Artifacts

February 6, 2012 | Original here

Last Friday the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the first month of this new year 243,000 jobs were created and the unemployment rate (U.3) fell to 8.3 percent. This good news is a mirage. It is due to faulty seasonal adjustments and to the BLS birth/death model. In a prolonged downturn, seasonal adjustments and the birth/death model produce nonexistent employment.

The unadjusted data show a rise in the unemployment rate. The birth/death model, which estimates the net effect of jobs lost from business failures and jobs created by new start-ups was designed for a normal growing economy, not for a prolonged downturn four years old. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that the BLS adds 48,000 new jobs per month to the payroll employment report based on the birth/death model even though the economy has not come out of the deep recession. In other words, over the course of a year, the birth/death model adds about 580,000 jobs to the reported jobs numbers. End of year benchmark revisions quietly take the nonexistent jobs out of the totals, but these revisions do not receive headlines and pass largely unnoticed.

The reported January jobs gains are contradicted by other official reports. For example, the January payroll jobs report shows 50,000 new jobs in manufacturing, but according to the recently released 4th quarter GDP, 81% of the reported growth consisted of undesired inventory accumulation. Normally, companies produce for sales not for inventories. Why would manufacturers be hiring people to produce goods for undesired inventories?

Most of the new reported January jobs are in services. The January jobs report has 24,500 new jobs in wholesale and retail trade and 13,100 in transportation and warehousing. However the data shows that inflation-corrected real retail sales are down. Why does it take more people to sell fewer goods?

The other remaining sizable components of the January jobs number are: professional and technical services (30,000), administrative and waste services (36,700), health care and social assistance (29,700), and leisure and hospitality (44,000) of which the largest component is food services and drinking places (32,800).

The leisure, waitresses and bartender employment numbers seen high for January. Perhaps it was an excellent ski month in the US. However, accommodation (hotels) does not support this conclusion as accommodation lost 3,900 jobs.

The BLS reports 21,000 new jobs in construction. However, the housing report says that housing starts dropped more than forecast in December, falling 4.1 percent. Why does it take more construction workers to produce fewer houses? Building permits, a proxy for future construction, were little changed.

As the adjusted data produce phantom jobs and employment, the BLS should headline the raw unadjusted data. With so many discouraged workers unable to find jobs, dropping discouraged workers out of the measure of unemployment seriously understates the true magnitude of the unemployment problem. If Americans were aware of the double-digit unemployment rate, would they be as tolerant of Washington’s multi-trillion dollar wars? Would Obama be facing a tougher re-election campaign? Would Republicans be pushing to reduce the federal budget deficit at the expense of the social safety net?

The phony data serve many interests, but not those of the American people.

A VIDEO PREAMBLE TO THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE. WHAT DOES HAPPEN WHEN BANKS CONTROL THE ECOMOMY?

2012-02-04T16:44:00.002-07:00

Michael Hudson's Blog

Hudson giving an overview of current affairs with a fired up Lauren Lyster fresh back from Davos.

http://youtu.be/oJUr64yPztI

A LONG AND CHALLENGING ARTICLE BUT WELL WORTH THE READ IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND THE FRAGILE STATE OF THE WORLD'S ECONOMY AND HOW IT CAME TO THIS

2012-02-04T16:35:00.002-07:00

Michael Hudson's blog / By Michael Hudson

Doomsday Scenario: What Happens When Banks Control the Economy?

Banks weren't meant to be in control of our economy and our governments. How did it get like this and how can we restore sanity to our banking system?

February 1, 2012 | In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding – capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles.

Yet the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States. Joseph Stiglitz characterizes the Obama administration’s vast transfer of money and pubic debt to the banks as a “privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a ‘partnership’ in which one partner robs the other.” Professor Bill Black describes banks as becoming criminogenic and innovating “control fraud.” High finance has corrupted regulatory agencies, falsified account-keeping by “mark to model” trickery, and financed the campaigns of its supporters to disable public oversight. The effect is to leave banks in control of how the economy’s allocates its credit and resources.

If there is any silver lining to today’s debt crisis, it is that the present situation and trends cannot continue. So this is not only an opportunity to restructure banking; we have little choice. The urgent issue is who will control the economy: governments, or the financial sector and monopolies with which it has made an alliance.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to re-invent the wheel. Already a century ago the outlines of a productive industrial banking system were well understood. But recent bank lobbying has been remarkably successful in distracting attention away from classical analyses of how to shape the financial and tax system to best promote economic growth – by public checks on bank privileges.

How banks broke the social compact, promoting their own special interests

People used to know what banks did. Bankers took deposits and lent them out, paying short-term depositors less than they charged for risky or less liquid loans. The risk was borne by bankers, not depositors or the government. But today, bank loans are made increasingly to speculators in recklessly large amounts for quick in-and-out trading. Financial crashes have become deeper and affect a wider swath of the population as debt pyramiding has soared and credit quality plunged into the toxic category of “liars’ loans.”

The first step toward today’s mutual interdependence between high finance and government was for central banks to act as lenders of last resort to mitigate the liquidity crises that periodically resulted from the banks’ privilege of credit creation. In due course governments also provided public deposit insurance, recognizing the need to mobilize and recycle savings into capital investment as the industrial revolution gained momentum. In exchange for this support, they regulated banks as public utilities.

Over time, banks have sought to disable this regulatory oversight, even to the point of decriminalizing fraud. Sponsoring an ideological attack on government, they accuse public bureaucracies of “distorting” free markets (by which they mean markets free for predatory behavior). The financial sector is now making its move to concentrate planning in its own hands.

The problem is that the financial time frame is notoriously short-term and often self-destructive. And inasmuch as the banking system’s product is debt, its business plan tends to be extractive and predatory, leaving economies high-cost. This is why checks and balances are needed, along with regulatory oversight to ensure fair dealing. Dismantling public attempts to steer banking to promote economic growth (rather than merely to make bankers rich) has permitted banks to turn into something nobody anticipated. Their major customers are other financial institutions, insurance and real estate – the FIRE sector, not industrial firms. Debt leveraging by real estate and monopolies, arbitrage speculators, hedge funds and corporate raiders inflates asset prices on credit. The effect of creating “balance sheet wealth” in this way is to load down the “real” production-and-consumption economy with debt and related rentier charges, adding more to the cost of living and doing business than rising productivity reduces production costs.

Since 2008, public bailouts have taken bad loans off the banks’ balance sheet at enormous taxpayer expense – some $13 trillion in the United States, and proportionally higher in Ireland and other economies now being subjected to austerity to pay for “free market” deregulation. Bankers are holding economies hostage, threatening a monetary crash if they do not get more bailouts and nearly free central bank credit, and more mortgage and other loan guarantees for their casino-like game. The resulting “too big to fail” policy means making governments too weak to fight back.

The process that began with central bank support thus has turned into broad government guarantees against bank insolvency. The largest banks have made so many reckless loans that they have become wards of the state. Yet they have become powerful enough to capture lawmakers to act as their facilitators. The popular media and even academic economic theorists have been mobilized to pose as experts in an attempt to convince the public that financial policy is best left to technocrats – of the banks’ own choosing, as if there is no alternative policy but for governments to subsidize a financial free lunch and crown bankers as society’s rulers.

The Bubble Economy and its austerity aftermath could not have occurred without the banking sector’s success in weakening public regulation, capturing national treasuries and even disabling law enforcement. Must governments surrender to this power grab? If not, who should bear the losses run up by a financial system that has become dysfunctional? If taxpayers have to pay, their economy will become high-cost and uncompetitive – and a financial oligarchy will rule.

The present debt quandary

The endgame in times past was to write down bad debts. That meant losses for banks and investors. But today’s debt overhead is being kept in place – shifting bad loans off bank balance sheets to become public debts owed by taxpayers to save banks and their creditors from loss. Governments have given banks newly minted bonds or central bank credit in exchange for junk mortgages and bad gambles – without re-structuring the financial system to create a more stable, less debt-ridden economy. The pretense is that these bailouts will enable banks to lend enough to revive the economy by enough to pay its debts.

Seeing the handwriting on the wall, bankers are taking as much bailout money as they can get, and running, using the money to buy as much tangible property and ownership rights as they can while their lobbyists keep the public subsidy faucet running.

The pretense is that debt-strapped economies can resume business-as-usual growth by borrowing their way out of debt. But a quarter of U.S. real estate already is in negative equity – worth less than the mortgages attached to it – and the property market is still shrinking, so banks are not lending except with public Federal Housing Administration guarantees to cover whatever losses they may suffer. In any event, it already is mathematically impossible to carry today’s debt overhead without imposing austerity, debt deflation and depression.

This is not how banking was supposed to evolve. If governments are to underwrite bank loans, they may as well be doing the lending in the first place – and receiving the gains. Indeed, since 2008 the over-indebted economy’s crash led governments to become the major shareholders of the largest and most troubled banks – Citibank in the United States, Anglo-Irish Bank in Ireland, and Britain’s Royal Bank of Scotland. Yet rather than taking this opportunity to run these banks as public utilities and lower their charges for credit-card services – or most important of all, to stop their lending to speculators and gamblers – governments left these banks operating as part of the “casino capitalism” that has become their business plan.

There is no natural reason for matters to be like this. Relations between banks and government used to be the reverse. In 1307, France’s Philip IV (“The Fair”) set the tone by seizing the Knights Templars’ wealth, arresting them and putting many to death – not on financial charges, but on the accusation of devil-worshipping and satanic sexual practices. In 1344 the Peruzzi bank went broke, followed by the Bardi by making unsecured loans to Edward III of England and other monarchs who died or defaulted. Many subsequent banks had to suffer losses on loans gone bad to real estate or financial speculators.

By contrast, now the U.S., British, Irish and Latvian governments have taken bad bank loans onto their national balance sheets, imposing a heavy burden on taxpayers – while letting bankers cash out with immense wealth. These “cash for trash” swaps have turned the mortgage crisis and general debt collapse into a fiscal problem. Shifting the new public bailout debts onto the non-financial economy threaten to increase the cost of living and doing business. This is the result of the economy’s failure to distinguish productive from unproductive loans and debts. It helps explain why nations now are facing financial austerity and debt peonage instead of the leisure economy promised so eagerly by technological optimists a century ago.

So we are brought back to the question of what the proper role of banks should be. This issue was discussed exhaustively prior to World War I. It is even more urgent today.

How classical economists hoped to modernize banks as agents of industrial capitalism

Britain was the home of the Industrial Revolution, but there was little long-term lending to finance investment in factories or other means of production. British and Dutch merchant banking was to extend short-term credit on the basis of collateral such as real property or sales contracts for merchandise shipped (“receivables”). Buoyed by this trade financing, merchant bankers were successful enough to maintain long-established short-term funding practices. This meant that James Watt and other innovators were obliged to raise investment money from their families and friends rather than from banks.

It was the French and Germans who moved banking into the industrial stage to help their nations catch up. In France, the Saint-Simonians described the need to create an industrial credit system aimed at funding means of production. In effect, the Saint-Simonians proposed to restructure banks along lines akin to a mutual fund. A start was made with the Crédit Mobilier, founded by the Péreire Brothers in 1852. Their aim was to shift the banking and financial system away from debt financing at interest toward equity lending, taking returns in the form of dividends that would rise or decline in keeping with the debtor’s business fortunes. By giving businesses leeway to cut back dividends when sales and profits decline, profit-sharing agreements avoid the problem that interest must be paid willy-nilly. If an interest payment is missed, the debtor may be forced into bankruptcy and creditors can foreclose. It was to avoid this favoritism for creditors regardless of the debtor’s ability to pay that prompted Mohammed to ban interest under Islamic law.

Attracting reformers ranging from socialists to investment bankers, the Saint-Simonians won government backing for their policies under France’s Third Empire. Their approach inspired Marx as well as industrialists in Germany and protectionists in the United States and England. The common denominator of this broad spectrum was recognition that an efficient banking system was needed to finance the industry on which a strong national state and military power depended.

Germany develops an industrial banking system

It was above all in Germany that long-term financing found its expression in the Reichsbank and other large industrial banks as part of the “holy trinity” of banking, industry and government planning under Bismarck’s “state socialism.” German banks made a virtue of necessity. British banks “derived the greater part of their funds from the depositors,” and steered these savings and business deposits into mercantile trade financing. This forced domestic firms to finance most new investment out of their own earnings. By contrast, Germany’s “lack of capital … forced industry to turn to the banks for assistance,” noted the financial historian George Edwards. “A considerable proportion of the funds of the German banks came not from the deposits of customers but from the capital subscribed by the proprietors themselves. As a result, German banks “stressed investment operations and were formed not so much for receiving deposits and granting loans but rather for supplying the investment requirements of industry.”

When the Great War broke out in 1914, Germany’s rapid victories were widely viewed as reflecting the superior efficiency of its financial system. To some observers the war appeared as a struggle between rival forms of financial organization. At issue was not only who would rule Europe, but whether the continent would have laissez faire or a more state-socialist economy.

In 1915, shortly after fighting broke out, the Christian Socialist priest-politician Friedrich Naumann published 'Mitteleuropa,' describing how Germany recognized more than any other nation that industrial technology needed long‑term financing and government support. His book inspired Prof. H. S. Foxwell in England to draw on his arguments in two remarkable essays published in the Economic Journal in September and December 1917: “The Nature of the Industrial Struggle,” and “The Financing of Industry and Trade.” He endorsed Naumann’s contention that “the old individualistic capitalism, of what he calls the English type, is giving way to the new, more impersonal, group form; to the disciplined scientific capitalism he claims as German.”

This was necessarily a group undertaking, with the emerging tripartite integration of industry, banking and government, with finance being “undoubtedly the main cause of the success of modern German enterprise,” Foxwell concluded (p. 514). German bank staffs included industrial experts who were forging industrial policy into a science. And in America, Thorstein Veblen’s 'The Engineers and the Price System' (1921) voiced the new industrial philosophy calling for bankers and government planners to become engineers in shaping credit markets.

Foxwell warned that British steel, automotive, capital equipment and other heavy industry was becoming obsolete largely because its bankers failed to perceive the need to promote equity investment and extend long‑term credit. They based their loan decisions not on the new production and revenue their lending might create, but simply on what collateral they could liquidate in the event of default: inventories of unsold goods, real estate, and money due on bills for goods sold and awaiting payment from customers. And rather than investing in the shares of the companies that their loans supposedly were building up, they paid out most of their earnings as dividends – and urged companies to do the same. This short time horizon forced business to remain liquid rather than having leeway to pursue long‑term strategy.

German banks, by contrast, paid out dividends (and expected such dividends from their clients) at only half the rate of British banks, choosing to retain earnings as capital reserves and invest them largely in the stocks of their industrial clients. Viewing these companies as allies rather than merely as customers from whom to make as large a profit as quickly as possible, German bank officials sat on their boards, and helped expand their business by extending loans to foreign governments on condition that their clients be named the chief suppliers in major public investments. Germany viewed the laws of history as favoring national planning to organize the financing of heavy industry, and gave its bankers a voice in formulating international diplomacy, making them “the principal instrument in the extension of her foreign trade and political power.”

A similar contrast existed in the stock market. British brokers were no more up to the task of financing manufacturing in its early stages than were its banks. The nation had taken an early lead by forming Crown corporations such as the East India Company, the Bank of England and even the South Sea Company. Despite the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, the run-up of share prices from 1715 to 1720 in these joint-stock monopolies established London’s stock market as a popular investment vehicle, for Dutch and other foreigners as well as for British investors. But the market was dominated by railroads, canals and large public utilities. Industrial firms were not major issuers of stock.

In any case, after earning their commissions on one issue, British stockbrokers were notorious for moving on to the next without much concern for what happened to the investors who had bought the earlier securities. “As soon as he has contrived to get his issue quoted at a premium and his underwriters have unloaded at a profit,” complained Foxwell, “his enterprise ceases. ‘To him,’ as the Times says, ‘a successful flotation is of more importance than a sound venture.’”

Much the same was true in the United States. Its merchant heroes were individualistic traders and political insiders often operating on the edge of the law to gain their fortunes by stock-market manipulation, railroad politicking for land giveaways, and insurance companies, mining and natural resource extraction. America’s wealth-seeking spirit found its epitome in Thomas Edison’s hit-or-miss method of invention, coupled with a high degree of litigiousness to obtain patent and monopoly rights.

In sum, neither British nor American banking or stock markets planned for the future. Their time frame was short, and they preferred rent-extracting projects to industrial innovation. Most banks favored large real estate borrowers, railroads and public utilities whose income streams easily could be forecast. Only after manufacturing companies grew fairly large did they obtain significant bank and stock market credit.

What is remarkable is that this is the tradition of banking and high finance that has emerged victorious throughout the world. The explanation is primarily the military victory of the United States, Britain and their Allies in the Great War and a generation later, in World War II.

The regression toward burdensome unproductive debts after World War I

The development of industrial credit led economists to distinguish between productive and unproductive lending. A productive loan provides borrowers with resources to trade or invest at a profit sufficient to pay back the loan and its interest charge. An unproductive loan must be paid out of income earned elsewhere. Governments must pay war loans out of tax revenues. Consumers must pay loans out of income they earn at a job – or by selling assets. These debt payments divert revenue away from being spent on consumption and investment, so the economy shrinks. This traditionally has led to crises that wipe out debts, above all those that are unproductive.

In the aftermath of World War I the economies of Europe’s victorious and defeated nations alike were dominated by postwar arms and reparations debts. These inter-governmental debts were to pay for weapons (by the Allies when the United States unexpectedly demanded that they pay for the arms they had bought before America’s entry into the war), and for the destruction of property (by the Central Powers), not new means of production. Yet to the extent that they were inter-governmental, these debts were more intractable than debts to private bankers and bondholders. Despite the fact that governments in principle are sovereign and hence can annul debts owed to private creditors, the defeated Central Power governments were in no position to do this.

And among the Allies, Britain led the capitulation to U.S. arms billing, captive to the creditor ideology that “a debt is a debt” and must be paid regardless of what this entails in practice or even whether the debt in fact can be paid. Confronted with America’s demand for payment, the Allies turned to Germany to make them whole. After taking its liquid assets and major natural resources, they insisted that it squeeze out payments by taxing its economy. No attempt was made to calculate just how Germany was to do this – or most important, how it was to convert this domestic revenue (the “budgetary problem”) into hard currency or gold. Despite the fact that banking had focused on international credit and currency transfers since the 12th century, there was a broad denial of what John Maynard Keynes identified as a foreign exchange transfer problem.

Never before had there been an obligation of such enormous magnitude. Nevertheless, all of Germany’s political parties and government agencies sought to devise ways to tax the economy to raise the sums being demanded. Taxes, however, are levied in a nation’s own currency. The only way to pay the Allies was for the Reichsbank to take this fiscal revenue and throw it onto the foreign exchange markets to obtain the sterling and other hard currency to pay. Britain, France and the other recipients then paid this money on their Inter-Ally debts to the United States.

Adam Smith pointed out that no government ever had paid down its public debt. But creditors always have been reluctant to acknowledge that debtors are unable to pay. Ever since David Ricardo’s lobbying for their perspective in Britain’s Bullion debates, creditors have found it their self-interest to promote a doctrinaire blind spot, insisting that debts of any magnitude can and should be paid. They resist acknowledging a distinction between raising funds domestically (by running a budget surplus) and obtaining the foreign exchange to pay foreign-currency debt. Furthermore, despite the evident fact that austerity cutbacks on consumption and investment can only be extractive, creditor-oriented economists refused to recognize that debts cannot be paid by shrinking the economy. Or that foreign debts and other international payments cannot be paid in domestic currency without lowering the exchange rate.

The more domestic currency Germany sought to convert, the further its exchange rate was driven down against the dollar and other gold-based currencies. This obliged Germans to pay much more for imports. The collapse of the exchange rate was the source of hyperinflation, not an increase in domestic money creation as today’s creditor-sponsored monetarist economists insist. In vain Keynes pointed to the specific structure of Germany’s balance of payments and asked creditors to specify just how many German exports they were willing to take, and to explain how domestic currency could be converted into foreign exchange without collapsing the exchange rate and causing price inflation.

Tragically, Ricardian tunnel vision won Allied government backing. Bertil Ohlin and Jacques Rueff claimed that economies receiving German payments would recycle their inflows to Germany and other debt-paying countries by buying their imports. If income adjustments did not keep exchange rates and prices stable, then Germany’s falling exchange rate would make its exports sufficiently more attractive to enable it to earn the revenue to pay.

This is the logic that the International Monetary Fund followed half a century later in insisting that Third World countries remit foreign earnings and even permit flight capital as well as pay their foreign debts. It is the neoliberal stance now demanding austerity for Greece, Ireland, Italy and other Eurozone economies.

Bank lobbyists claim that the European Central Bank will risk spurring domestic wage and price inflation if it does what central banks were founded to do: finance budget deficits. Europe’s financial institutions are given a monopoly right to perform this electronic task – and to receive interest for what a real central bank could create on its own computer keyboard.

But why it is less inflationary for commercial banks to finance budget deficits than for central banks to do this? The bank lending that has inflated a global financial bubble since the 1980s has left as its legacy a debt overhead that can no more be supported today than Germany was able to carry its reparations debt in the 1920s. Would government credit have so recklessly inflated asset prices?

How debt creation has fueled asset-price inflation since the 1980s

Banking in recent decades has not followed the productive lines that early economic futurists expected. As noted above, instead of financing tangible investment to expand production and innovation, most loans are made against collateral, with interest to be paid out of what borrowers can make elsewhere. Despite being unproductive in the classical sense, it was remunerative for debtors from 1980 until 2008 – not by investing the loan proceeds to expand economic activity, but by riding the wave of asset-price inflation. Mortgage credit enabled borrowers to bid up property prices, drawing speculators and new customers into the market in the expectation that prices would continue to rise. But hothouse credit infusions meant additional debt service, which ended up shrinking the market for goods and services.

Under normal conditions the effect would have been for rents to decline, with property prices following suit, leading to mortgage defaults. But banks postponed the collapse into negative equity by lowering their lending standards, providing enough new credit to keep on inflating prices. This averted a collapse of their speculative mortgage and stock market lending. It was inflationary – but it was inflating asset prices, not commodity prices or wages. Two decades of asset price inflation enabled speculators, homeowners and commercial investors to borrow the interest falling due and still make a capital gain.

This hope for a price gain made winning bidders willing to pay lenders all the current income – making banks the ultimate and major rentier income recipients. The process of inflating asset prices by easing credit terms and lowering the interest rate was self-feeding. But it also was self-terminating, because raising the multiple by which a given real estate rent or business income can be “capitalized” into bank loans increased the economy’s debt overhead.

Securities markets became part of this problem. Rising stock and bond prices made pension funds pay more to purchase a retirement income – so “pension fund capitalism” was coming undone. So was the industrial economy itself. Instead of raising new equity financing for companies, the stock market became a vehicle for corporate buyouts. Raiders borrowed to buy out stockholders, loading down companies with debt. The most successful looters left them bankrupt shells. And when creditors turned their economic gains from this process into political power to shift the tax burden onto wage earners and industry, this raised the cost of living and doing business – by more than technology was able to lower prices.

The EU rejects central bank money creation, leaving deficit financing to the banks

Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty forbids the ECB or other central banks to lend to government. But central banks were created specifically – to finance government deficits. The EU has rolled back history to the way things were three hundred years ago, before the Bank of England was created. Reserving the task of credit creation for commercial banks, it leaves governments without a central bank to finance the public spending needed to avert depression and widespread financial collapse.

So the plan has backfired. When “hard money” policy makers limited central bank power, they assumed that public debts would be risk-free. Obliging budget deficits to be financed by private creditors seemed to offer a bonanza: being able to collect interest for creating electronic credit that governments can create themselves. But now, European governments need credit to balance their budget or face default. So banks now want a central bank to create the money to bail them out for the bad loans they have made.

For starters, the ECB’s €489 billion in three-year loans at 1% interest gives banks a free lunch arbitrage opportunity (the “carry trade”) to buy Greek and Spanish bonds yielding a higher rate. The policy of buying government bonds in the open market – after banks first have bought them at a lower issue price – gives the banks a quick and easy trading gain.

How are these giveaways less inflationary than for central banks to directly finance budget deficits and roll over government debts? Is the aim of giving banks easy gains simply to provide them with resources to resume the Bubble Economy lending that led to today’s debt overhead in the first place?

Conclusion

Governments can create new credit electronically on their own computer keyboards as easily as commercial banks can. And unlike banks, their spending is expected to serve a broad social purpose, to be determined democratically. When commercial banks gain policy control over governments and central banks, they tend to support their own remunerative policy of creating asset-inflationary credit – leaving the clean-up costs to be solved by a post-bubble austerity. This makes the debt overhead even harder to pay – indeed, impossible.

So we are brought back to the policy issue of how public money creation to finance budget deficits differs from issuing government bonds for banks to buy. Is not the latter option a convoluted way to finance such deficits – at a needless interest charge? When governments monetize their budget deficits, they do not have to pay bondholders.

I have heard bankers argue that governments need an honest broker to decide whether a loan or public spending policy is responsible. To date their advice has not promoted productive credit. Yet they now are attempting to compensate for the financial crisis by telling debtor governments to sell off property in their public domain. This “solution” relies on the myth that privatization is more efficient and will lower the cost of basic infrastructure services. Yet it involves paying interest to the buyers of rent-extraction rights, higher executive salaries, stock options and other financial fees.

Most cost savings are achieved by shifting to non-unionized labor, and typically end up being paid to the privatizers, their bankers and bondholders, not passed on to the public. And bankers back price deregulation, enabling privatizers to raise access charges. This makes the economy higher cost and hence less competitive – just the opposite of what is promised.

Banking has moved so far away from funding industrial growth and economic development that it now benefits primarily at the economy’s expense in a predator and extractive way, not by making productive loans. This is now the great problem confronting our time. Banks now lend mainly to other financial institutions, hedge funds, corporate raiders, insurance companies and real estate, and engage in their own speculation in foreign currency, interest-rate arbitrage, and computer-driven trading programs. Industrial firms bypass the banking system by financing new capital investment out of their own retained earnings, and meet their liquidity needs by issuing their own commercial paper directly. Yet to keep the bank casino winning, global bankers now want governments not only to bail them out but to enable them to renew their failed business plan – and to keep the present debts in place so that creditors will not have to take a loss.

This wish means that society should lose, and even suffer depression. We are dealing here not only with greed, but with outright antisocial behavior and hostility.

Europe thus has reached a critical point in having to decide whose interest to put first: that of banks, or the “real” economy. History provides a wealth of examples illustrating the dangers of capitulating to bankers, and also for how to restructure banking along more productive lines. The underlying questions are clear enough:

* Have banks outlived their historical role, or can they be restructured to finance productive capital investment rather than simply inflate asset prices?

* Would a public option provide less costly and better directed credit?

* Why not promote economic recovery by writing down debts to reflect the ability to pay, rather than relinquishing more wealth to an increasingly aggressive creditor class?

Solving the Eurozone’s financial problem can be made much easier by the tax reforms that classical economists advocated to complement their financial reforms. To free consumers and employers from taxation, they proposed to levy the burden on the “unearned increment” of land and natural resource rent, monopoly rent and financial privilege. The guiding principle was that property rights in the earth, monopolies and other ownership privileges have no direct cost of production, and hence can be taxed without reducing their supply or raising their price, which is set in the market. Removing the tax deductibility for interest is the other key reform that is needed.

A rent tax holds down housing prices and those of basic infrastructure services, whose untaxed revenue tends to be capitalized into bank loans and paid out in the form of interest charges. Additionally, land and natural resource rents – along with interest – are the easiest to tax, because they are highly visible and their value is easy to assess.

Pressure to narrow existing budget deficits offers a timely opportunity to rationalize the tax systems of Greece and other PIIGS countries in which the wealthy avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The political problem blocking this classical fiscal policy is that it “interferes” with the rent-extracting free lunches that banks seek to lend against. So they act as lobbyists for untaxing real estate and monopolies (and themselves as well). Despite the financial sector’s desire to see governments remain sufficiently solvent to pay bondholders, it has subsidized an enormous public relations apparatus and academic junk economics to oppose the tax policies that can close the fiscal gap in the fairest way.

It is too early to forecast whether banks or governments will emerge victorious from today’s crisis. As economies polarize between debtors and creditors, planning is shifting out of public hands into those of bankers. The easiest way for them to keep this power is to block a true central bank or strong public sector from interfering with their monopoly of credit creation. The counter is for central banks and governments to act as they were intended to, by providing a public option for credit creation.

*This article also appeared in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung.

Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971).

2012-02-03T17:40:00.000-07:00

Original here

Has Tucson School District Become Little Rock, Arkansas 1954? New Court Suit on Segregation Violations Over Mexican American Studies Crackdown

Posted: 02/ 3/2012 1:35 pm

Nearly six decades after President Dwight Eisenhower overruled the "leadership of demagogic extremists" and sent federal troops to protect desegregation efforts in Little Rock, Arkansas, Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild has more than one reason to be concerned about his city's negative image.

Amid national teach-ins on Tucson's banished Mexican American Studies program and denouncements by virtually every major education and literary organization on Tucson's harrowing censorship and book removals, plaintiffs represented by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed an extraordinary suit in District Court yesterday and called for outside intervention in Tucson's spiraling school crisis.

The suit charges that the Tucson Unified School District openly "flaunted" the authority of a District Court and Special Master oversight on desegregation orders in violation of a court-approved Post Unitary Status Plan:

TUSD's "suspension" of these courses follows years of neglect of its obligations to the District's Latino students under the PUSP including its obligations to address academic performance gaps as they impact Hispanic students. Mendoza Plaintiffs request that the Special Master and District Court enforce the PUSP and reinstate Mexican American Studies courses and teaching activities in accordance with the mandates of the Plan and direct the District to implement and regularly monitor in good faith all provisions of the Action Plan for Mexican American Studies as set forth in the PUSP.

The suit comes on the heels of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus' appeal to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Education and Department of Justice to investigate the Arizona state Department of Education for civil rights violations in their unabashed witch hunt on Tucson's Mexican American Studies program. Reminiscent of Eisenhower's warning of "demagogic extremists," Arizona state education chief John Huppenthal has referred to Mexican American Studies participants as Hitler Jugend, while Attorney General Tom Horne championed the bloody violence of Carthage in his calls for the acclaimed education program to "be destroyed." TUSD school board member Mark Stegemen referred to the Mexican American Studies program, which an independent audit praised last year for its diversity and inclusive approaches and higher graduation rates, as "cult-like."

Two years ago, Daily Show host Jon Stewart referred to Arizona's Tea Party-led legislature as the "meth lab of democracy" for its anti-immigrant and state's rights agenda. In 2012, saddled with an embarrassing and disgraceful desegregation order, Tucson and its largest school district under the leadership of Superintendent John Pedicone -- whose stunning arrest orders of elderly Mexican American women and scholars at a May school board meeting shattered community trust -- have become a modern-day version of Little Rock, Arkansas 1954.

While former Mexican American Studies teachers and community advocates work daily to assist students and sponsor community dialogue, the latest cringe-worthy acts of retribution and openly racist comments by Tucson Unified School District administrators and erratic board members are glaring reminders of Eisenhower's admonition that Little Rock's similar defiance of federal court orders had damaged "the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety, of our nation and the world."

While thousands of nationally acclaimed books remain detained in locked storage bins -- with only a handful of copies in a few libraries -- TUSD administrators have cracked down on any student and faculty dissent through detention orders and suspension, issued conflicting mandates and called for the deeply rooted Tucson students to "go to Mexico" to learn their Mexican American history. In a notably offensive remark in a local radio interview yesterday, one board member compared the mentoring of suspended TUSD students by University of Arizona's Mexican American Studies faculty to the Penn State sex abuse scandal.

The questions beg: How much lower and blatantly racist will Tucson school officials go? Will Tucson community leaders, like Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, stand by and watch the reckless measures of "demagogic extremists"?

Or is Tucson simply waiting for a Little Rock, Arkansas intervention?

WHY HAS THE RIGHT WING BEEN ABLE TO DESTROY THE MIDDLE CLASS IN WISCONSIN, MICHIGAN, INDIANA, AND NOW ARIZONA? HERE IS AN EXCERPT OF A SCHOLARLY WORK WRITTEN UP AS THOUGH A BEST-SELLING NOVEL. THE TALE IS AS ENTHRALLING AS IT IS ENLIGHTENING!

2012-02-03T10:08:00.002-07:00

Original here .

Picador Press / By Thomas Frank

Why We Got Ayn Rand Instead of FDR: Thomas Frank on How Tea Party 'Populism' Derailed a New New Deal

After a brutal recession was brought on by Wall Street greed, it looked for a moment like we'd rejected the Right's economic mythology. Then the "Tea Party" came along.

February 2, 2012 | Editor's note: In late 2007 and early 2008, the house of cards came crashing down around us, and all of the economic doctrine we'd been fed by the pundits and politicians of both parties over the past few decades was laid bare for all to see. The deregulated cowboy capitalism that was supposed to release unbridled prosperity had led instead to widespread economic pain – hardship that would spread globally and remain with us to this day.

It was a moment ripe for a populist uprising. Many observers expected the pendulum to swing back from the rightward lurch authored during the “Reagan Revolution” – perhaps a new New Deal would emerge as America elected its first black president in a dramatic rejection of George W. Bush's business-friendly ideology.

But something happened on the way to this much-anticipated swing back to the left. Instead of FDR, we got Ayn Rand. Rather than calling for programs that might alleviate some of working America's suffering, we saw the emergence of the Tea Parties, which demanded that ordinary Americans feel every bit of pain they had coming to them – and also that we leave the Wall Street hustlers who had precipitated the crash alone.

It was an ahistoric reaction to a recession caused by Big Finance, and it captured the imagination of author and columnist Thomas Frank. In 2005, Frank wrote the now-classic book, What's the Matter With Kansas? in which he detailed how the “Backlash Right” used social issues to hoodwink many Americans into voting against their economic interests. It was a classic bait-and-switch – they voted for politicians who promised to overturn Roe v. Wade, and got tax breaks for the ultra-rich, deregulation for Wall Street and trade deals that took down barriers to corporate offshoring.

In the aftermath of the crash, Frank returns to the topic to discover that the “New New Right” had once again offered Americans a bait-and-switch, but of a different kind. The result is Frank's new book, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Come-Back of the Right. AlterNet is proud to bring you this excerpt from the book.

*****

An appropriate metaphor for the conservative revival is the classic switcheroo, with one fear replacing another, theoretical emergencies substituting for authentic ones, and a new villain shuffling onstage to absorb the brickbats meant for another. The conservative renaissance rewrites history according to the political demands of the moment, generates thick smokescreens of deliberate bewilderment, grabs for itself the nobility of the common toiler, and projects onto its rivals the arrogance of the aristocrat. Nor is this constant redirection of public ire a characteristic the movement developed as it went along; it was present at the creation. Indeed, redirection was the creation.

Drawer of Water, Hewer of Bullshit

The call that awakened the rebellion came not from some itinerant IWW organizer but from a TV “rant” delivered on February 19, 2009, by one Rick Santelli, a business reporter standing on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade— a reporter ranting, let us be clear, not against the traders who surrounded him but on their behalf. In retrospect, there would be few better examples of the spirit of inversion that drives the conservative revival.

Rick Santelli had criticized many aspects of the bank bailouts over the preceding months, but on that day in February when he had the ear of the nation, the part of the TARP that drew his disgust was, significantly, the element designed to help homeowners modify the terms of certain underwater mortgages, making payments more affordable and thus preventing foreclosures. It was the only part of TARP that was intended to directly benefit individual borrowers rather than institutional players, and thus it was supposed to help make the program popular. Instead, it brought down the wrath of this man Santelli, who found it inconceivable that such an initiative was even under consideration. “This is America!” he yelled, working himself into a rage.

And in Santelli’s trading-floor “America,” such a program was “promoting bad behavior,” “subsidiz[ing] the losers’ mortgages” with public money that, were it directed to society’s winners, would presumably be spent on better, shinier things. Santelli’s outrage at these “losers” was inexhaustible, incandescent. They “drink the water” while others “carry the water.” Raising his arms and turning to his friends, the Chicago traders, he asked, “How many people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?

Boo, went the traders: Down with neighbors! To hell with their extra bathrooms, their arrogant water-drinking, their hard luck.

The next step, should government proceed along the mortgage-modifying paths of tyranny, the reporter reported, would be communist Cuba. But before Big Brother clapped us in statist irons, he’d have to deal with Rick Santelli, friend of the trader and scourge of the thirsty. Santelli was going to defy the Obama administration with a “Chicago Tea Party,” and he invited “all you capitalists.”

Over the following days, the question that seemed to transfix commentators was whether or not Santelli’s instantly famous tirade had been scripted or sincerely felt. But what interested me was the elephantine perversity of the moment. The country was then teetering on the edge of economic disaster; one reason it so teetered was due to the bonus-driven doings of people like the traders who cheered for Santelli. And one reason so many of us teetered along with it was that business-news outlets like CNBC had almost entirely failed to warn us about the mounting problems in investment banking and mortgage lending. But this CNBC host and his trader friends weren’t the villains; they were the guys with a grievance.

One point remained. Who were these disgruntled traders, the body politic for whom Rick Santelli was the eloquent voice?

Well, he told a CNBC colleague, they were “pretty straightforward...a pretty good statistical cross-section of America, the silent majority.”

Of all the capsized reasoning Rick Santelli used on that fateful February day, this was the most perverse. Traders may come in different shades and prefer different foods, but by definition they represent only one walk of life: they are people who buy and sell abstract commodities. They make nothing. They move nothing (except prices). They are the financial industry distilled down to its grasping essence. And if we are to judge by Trader Monthly, traders are a “cross-section of America” only if “America” is a place where truculence and bullying are the great national virtues and financial legerdemain is considered the noblest way of earning a living.

To others, however, the equation of traders with America, with We-the-People, was the wisest thing to pass Rick Santelli’s lips that morning. By sheer force of assertion, Santelli erased the stigma that had marked financiers ever since the start of the downturn. Now we could see, as one Tea Party organizer wrote later, that those traders were “simply working people who wanted the freedom to continue working and to enjoy the fruits of their labor in a fair way.”

As for Santelli himself, his oneness with the common man had been established even before his great moment in February. According to a Washington Post profile of the TV personality that was published in November of 2008, Santelli “is usually perched in a lower corner of the TV screen and is filmed from above, shouting up from a trading pit at the Chicago Board of Trade. It gives his rants a classic plain-speaking-little-man-against-the-system feel.”

And so the inversion was complete. The business reporter who speaks for the “working people” of the derivatives pits was a “little man” standing up to “the system” in classic '30s fashion.

Santelli’s rant caught the insurrectionary spirit of the times. Public choler at the powerful was blowing out the stops in those first few months of 2009, and the reporter’s outburst was an immediate sensation, replayed millions of times by the angry YouTubing multitude. The instant comparison was to Howard Beale, the populist anchorman character in the 1976 movie Network, raging against the system while the cameras rolled.

That the broadcaster was, in point of fact, speaking on behalf of the system and against the claims of the average people who were its victims was a subtlety Americans found easy to overlook. It was a time of confusion, and just about wherever you looked, the frustrated expressions of the powerful were being characterized as spontaneous eruptions of the American everyman, taking matters into his own hands.

Conditions were right for grand-scale perplexity of this kind. Who knew, for example, what a credit default swap was? And who could explain the process by which such an instrument had brought the mightiest economy on earth to a standstill?

Amid the tides of bewilderment, though, one piece of deviltry stood solid and unmoving, a sort of Gibraltar of populist outrage: the TARP bailout bill. Now, here was a villainy people could understand. It would be costlier, Americans were told, than the entire Vietnam War, or the Louisiana Purchase, or just about anything else. And it was unmistakably bad: the bailouts were the avenues by which our government obligingly moved the financial industry’s losings over to the taxpayers.

In different times, TARP might have become the rallying point of a revitalized Left. After all, the bailouts were clearly of a piece with the misbehavior that had come before: the deregulation of the banks, the bonus culture, the wrecking of the supervisory state. Business-friendly conservatives had been behind each of these, and then business-friendly conservatives had knitted together the TARP for the same rotten reason: to give the bankers what ever they wanted. Reformers might have depicted the TARP as the final chapter in the great book of fraud, the episode in which Wall Street used the captured state to transfer its debts to the public.

But it was the Right that grabbed the opportunity to define the debate, using bailouts to shift the burden of villainy from Wall Street to government. For them, the TARP was the only part of the crisis story that mattered— not the derivatives or the deregulation— and its conservative-Republican parentage made no difference. (That congressional Democrats voted for it, on the other hand, was deeply meaningful.) They were the sole rightful opponents of the TARP, conservatives insisted, because they opposed federal interventions in the market, and bailouts violated strict laissez-faire orthodoxy—their orthodoxy. Bailouts allowed government to decide who won and lost; they replaced the forces of competition with those of administrative fiat; and they puffed up the deficit, to boot. And so the Right staked its claim, making the TARP into the outrage that lifted a thousand snake flags.

“Let the Failures Fail”

The first of those snake flags was hoisted at a Tea Party rally in Washington eight days after the Santelli broadcast, and it was as perfect an example as any of the Right’s ability to capitalize on public confusion. That original Tea Party rally sure didn’t look spontaneous or grassroots to me when I showed up. In fact, it had every appearance of being one of those staged protests that happen all the time in Washington, in which a handful of people from a pressure group pose with signs for the media. I had heard about the plans for the gathering not from some radical handbill picked up on a street corner, but in an online message from an editor at the American Spectator, a sturdy pillar of right-wing Washington. The rally was to be held at the park across the street from the White House, the traditional staging ground for phony right-wing protest going back (at least) to the days when Jack Abramoff ran the College Republicans.

This was no act of defiance by the little man. It was astroturf of the most ersatz kind; plastic grass with extra vinyl content. The event was swarming with well-known conservative movement personnel. The blogger Michelle Malkin took a turn with the megaphone, as did Joe the Plumber, the itinerant proletarian, who was there to show working-class America’s faith in the cynical idealism of billionaire America. Lots of people were in suits, and some were wearing name tags from the Conservative Political Action Conference, which was going on a few subway stops away.

The protestors denounced deficit spending and bailouts and the item that had triggered Santelli’s explosion: the possibility that government might help people modify their mortgages. Where communities once used to rally to help out a foreclosed-upon neighbor, the prototypical populists now wanted to see that uppity neighbor get evicted from the oversized home the rascal had no business buying in the first place.

The symbols, costumes, and confusion that the nation would soon come to know so well were all pretty much present at that first gathering: the snake flags, the three- cornered hats, the Constitution worship, even the epidemic of spelling errors. And, of course, the small-minded vindictiveness that for years now has masqueraded as brave back-talk to arrogant authority. Photographing Tea Party protest signs would soon become something of a cliché, but on that first occasion, a woman proudly held up for my camera a homemade declaration of befuddled outrage that read as follows:

Can anyone on
Capital Hill read?
If so read the
Constitution
As Americans
we do not have the right:
To a house
To a car
To an education
Americans have a right
to persue happiness
not to have it given to
them!

There was talk about the conflict of “freedom versus tyranny,” as though the real danger Americans faced was not economic collapse but some bid to crack down on personal liberty. And there was a slogan, a cry of existential anxiety from the bitter '70s— or, rather, a confused homage to Rick Santelli— as speakers began one after another to repeat a famous line from Network: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

“Anymore”? Barack Obama had been in the White House for a little over a month at that point, and yet already their suffering at his hands was more than they could bear. “They’re” not going to “take this”? For decades, politicians had catered to every short- fused demand that economic conservatives raised. This was a group that had been singularly well served by the political system; they had received exactly the deregulated world they now said they wanted.

But “mad as hell”? Oh, that note rang true. Even I could be roped into that sentiment. And for everyone who was livid about the financial crisis and the bailouts, those first-generation Tea Partiers had a simple proposal: “Let the Failures Fail.” That was the slogan I saw on one protest sign, and I have probably heard some echo of it hundreds of times since then. “Let the failures fail.”

Here, in one sentence, was a key to the amazing success the Right would shortly enjoy. They had an answer to the bailout outrage, and it was not modulated by lawyerly subtleties or votes-taken-with-nose-held, like the House Democrats who had voted for the TARP. “Let the failures fail”: it was a line that would allow the revived Right to depict itself as an enemy of big business, rooting for the collapse of the megabanks. The Tea Partiers may have looked ridiculous in their costumes, but their central demand was anything but.

The Bad Neighbor Doctrine

Not all “failure” is the same, however. What the newest Right has in mind is something philosophical, something both personal and sweeping. It demands liquidation across the board, a sort of deserved doomsday for the borrowing-based way of life. But in the great die-off it delights in imagining, the real culprits of 2008 have a way of disappearing from view.

If we watch closely, we can see the cards being switched. Whenever our tea-partying friends warm to the subject of letting-the-failures-fail—and they do so often—sooner or later they inevitably turn from the bailed-out banks to those spendthrift “neighbors” identified by Santelli, those dissolute people down the street who borrowed in order to live above their station. These are the failures who need to be made to fail. It is always personal. Here are conservative warriors Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, in a chapter of their “Tea Party Manifesto” called “Bailout.”

Many of us knew instinctually the bailout was wrong. We understood that in order for capitalism to work we need to be able to not only keep the potential gains from the risks we take but also accept the losses that may come. With profit comes the potential of loss. Many of us had a neighbor or heard about someone who had been living too high on the hog for too long and were wondering why we were now supposed to pay for it.

At other times, the failure they long to see is cosmic failure, a “day of reckoning,” as Senator Rand Paul likes to say: failure as nature’s response to the hubris of big government, failure as our richly deserved punishment for our bad values. According to the former Fox News personality Glenn Beck, failure is a way of atoning for American materialism. Failure is a morally necessary and even a healthful thing, he wrote in a 2009 bestseller, “a necessary step in achieving success— a step that safety nets and bailouts attempt to take a shortcut around.” These bailouts are, in fact, an offense against nature and Republican virtue itself, an extension of the same selfishness that saw consumers go into debt and “politicians and the media” assure “us that America is about having the most stuff, the nicest cars, and the biggest homes.”

So let a thousand failures fail. Let all the losers go down. Government that handed out the bailouts, banks that received them, greedy neighbors that took out mortgages, and everybody in between: Let them all fall flat. Let the jobless go without unemployment benefits. Let the farmers go without subsidies. Let depositors in failed banks walk away empty-handed. Let the dollar fail, too, and let those who didn’t hoard gold coins for retirement in their own private hidey-hole suffer the consequences.

For decades, goes the sweet, scolding refrain, we’ve been living beyond our means. We thought we could waft to riches on flowery beds of ease, but now the bill has come due. The country is “broke,” as Glenn Beck and countless other conservatives love to remind us; we can no longer defy the “Laws of Nature.” The thrifty and productive can no longer support the profligate. Only those who sow get to reap. Life is harsh, and Americans need to get used to it. A few years down the road, this dogma would lead the rejuvenated Right to attempt actually to bring catastrophe down on the nation, via the federal debt-ceiling showdown.

But in the meantime, it was an attractive moral doctrine; a sweeping condemnation of a society that has lost its way, that worships false gods, that has become besotted with affluence. But the cult of failure appealed for another, subtler reason. It allowed the resurgent Right to shuffle the bitter mood of the moment and generate an outcome that was more to its liking— to deflect public anger from the obvious targets.

HOW I LOVE GRAPHS. EDUCATED REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS WITHOUT ULTERIOR MOTIVES READ THEM IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY. THIS PROGRESSIVE BLOGGER IS ON THE SAME PAGE AS THIS REAGAN REPUBLICAN. IT'S NOT THE OTHER PARTY THAT'S THE VILLAIN. ITS MEMBERS OF BOTH PARTIES THAT RUN THE GOVERNMENT FOR THEIR OWN GAIN TO THE DETRIMENT OF THE 99%.

2012-02-02T22:39:00.000-07:00

The Real Economic Picture

February 2, 2012 | Original here

If you have any money and you want to understand the lies that “your” government tells you with statistics, subscribe to John Williams shadowstats.com.

John Williams is the best and utterly truthful statistician that we the people have.

The charts below come from John Williams Hyperinflation Report, January 25, 2012. The commentary is supplied by me.

Here is the chart of real average weekly earnings deflated by the US government’s own measure of inflation, which as I pointed out in my recent column, Economics Lesson 1, understates true inflation.

This chart (below) shows the behavior of inflation as measured by “our” government’s official measure, CPI-U (bottom line) and John Williams measure which uses the official methodology of when I was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. The gap between the top and bottom lines represents the amount of money that was due to Social Security recipients and others whose income was indexed to inflation that was diverted by the government to wars, police state, and bankers’ bailouts.

This next chart shows the gains that gold and the Swiss franc have made against the US dollar. The Swiss franc is the top line and gold is the bottom. When gold and the Swiss franc rise, the dollar is falling. Notice that during President Reagan’s first term, when I was in the Treasury, gold and the Swiss franc dropped, that is, the dollar rose in purchasing power. Obviously, the supply-side policy that Reagan implemented strengthened the US dollar. It was only with the advent of the Bush policy of endless trillion dollar wars, reaffirmed by Obama, that the US dollar and economy collapsed relative to gold and hard currencies.

The recent drop in the Swiss franc is due to the Swiss government announcing that the country’s exports could not tolerate any further run up in the franc’s value, and that the Swiss central bank would print new francs to accommodate future inflows of dollars and euros. In other words, Switzerland was forced to import US inflation in order to protect its exports.

Here is nonfarm payroll employment. As you can see, the US economy has been in recession for four years despite the easiest monetary policy and largest government deficits in US history.

Here is consumer confidence. Do you see a recovery despite all the recovery hype from politicians and the financial media?

Here is housing starts. Do you see a recovery?

Here is real GDP deflated according to the methodology used when I was in the US Treasury.

Here is real retail sales deflated by the traditional, as contrasted with the current, substitution-based, measure of inflation.

These graphs courtesy of John Williams make it completely clear that there is no economic recovery. In place of recovery, we have hype from politicians, Wall Street, and the presstitute media. The “recovery” is no more real than Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” or Iranian “nukes” or the Obama regime’s phony story of assassinating last year an undefended Osama bin Laden, allegedly the mastermind of Islamic terrorism, left by al Qaeda to the mercy of a US Seal team, a man who was widely reported to have died from renal failure in December 2001, a man who denied any responsibility for 9/11.

A government and media that will deceive you about simple things such as inflation, unemployment, and GDP growth, will lie to you about everything.

BREAKING NEWS: ARIZONA ABOUT TO BECOME "THE MOST ANTI-UNION STATE IN THE COUNTRY"

2012-02-02T09:08:00.002-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

GREEY BASTARDS!

2012-02-01T22:29:00.002-07:00

Auction 2012: How The Bank Lobby Owns Washington

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

paulblumenthal@huffingtonpost.com

THE US ECONOMY HAS HAD NO RECOVERY AND HAS BEEN IN DEEP RECESSION FOR FOUR YEARS DESPITE PROCLAMATION BY THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH OF A RECOVERY BASED ON RIGGED OFFICIAL NUMBERS." -- PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

2012-02-01T18:13:00.000-07:00

Economics Lesson 1

January 31, 2012 |

Last Friday (January 27) the US Bureau of Economic Analysis announced its advance estimate that in the last quarter of 2011 the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8% in real inflation-adjusted terms, an increase from the annual rate of growth in the third quarter.

Good news, right?

Wrong. If you want to know what is really happening, you must turn to John Williams at shadowstats.com.

What the presstitute media did not tell us is that almost the entire gain In GDP growth was due to “involuntary inventory build-up,” that is, more goods were produced than were sold.

Net of the unsold goods, the annualized real growth rate was eight-tenths of one percent.

And even that tiny growth rate is an exaggeration, because it is deflated with a measure of inflation that understates inflation. The US government’s measure of inflation no longer measures a constant standard of living. Instead, the government’s inflation measure relies on substitution of cheaper goods for those that rise in price. In other words, the government holds the measure of inflation down by measuring a declining standard of living. This permits our rulers to divert cost-of-living-adjustments that should be paid to Social Security recipients to wars of aggression, police state, and banker bailouts.

When the methodology that measures a constant standard of living is used to deflate nominal GDP, the result is a shrinking US economy. It becomes clear that the US economy has had no recovery and has now been in deep recession for four years despite the proclamation by the National Bureau of Economic Research of a recovery based on the rigged official numbers.

A government can always produce the illusion of economic growth by underestimating the rate of inflation. There is no question that a substitution-based measure of inflation understates the inflation that people experience. More proof that there has been no economic recovery is available from those data series that are unaffected by inflation. If the economy were in fact recovering, these date series would be picking up. Instead, they are flat or declining, as John Williams demonstrates.

For example, according to the government’s own data, payroll employment in December 2011 is less than in 2001. Meanwhile, there has been a decade of population growth. The presstitute media calls the alleged economic recovery a “jobless recovery,” which is a contradiction in terms. There can be no recovery without a growth in employment and consumer income.

Real average weekly earnings (deflated by the government’s CPI-W) have never recovered their 1973 peak. Real median household income (deflated by the government’s CPI-U) has not recovered its 2001 peak and is below the 1969 level. If earnings were deflated by the original methodology instead of by the new substitution-based methodology, the picture would be bleaker.

Consumer confidence shows no recovery and is far below the level of a decade ago.

How does an economy recover without a recovery in consumer confidence?

Housing starts have remained flat since 2009 and are below their previous peak.

Retail sales are below the index level of January 2000.

Industrial production remains below the index level of January 2000.

To repeat, the only indicator of economic recovery is the GDP deflated with an understated measure of inflation.

The US economy cannot recover, because the US economy depends on consumer expenditures for more than 70% of its activity. The offshoring of middle class jobs has stopped the rise in middle class income and caused a drop in consumer spending power.

The Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan compensated for the absence of US consumer income growth with a policy of easy credit and a policy of driving up home prices with low interest rates. This policy allowed people to refinance their homes and to spend the inflated equity in their homes that Greenspan’s policy created.

In other words, an increase in consumer indebtedness and dissavings drove the economy in the place of the missing growth in consumer incomes.

Today, consumers are too indebted to borrow, and banks are too insolvent to lend. Therefore, there is no possibility of further debt expansion as a substitute for real income growth. An offshored economy is a dead and exhausted economy.

The consequences of a dead economy when the government is wasting trillions of dollars in wars of naked aggression and in bailouts of fraudulent financial institutions is a government budget that can only be financed by printing money.

The consequence of printing money when jobs have been moved offshore is an inflationary depression. This catastrophe could begin to unfold this year or in 2013. If Europe’s problems worsen, flight into dollars could delay sharp rises in US inflation until 2014.

The emperor has no clothes, and sooner or later this will be recognized.