Category: Extreme Political Correctness


Saturday, May 18, 2013

Funny Obamas

Dave Hodges
Activist Post

Mark Twain once talked about history not necessarily repeating, but he noted that history sure does rhyme.

Richard Nixon was unable to survive one direct hit upon his administration, namely, the Watergate scandal. Conversely, Obama is facing five scandals which dwarf Watergate in terms of criminality, abuse of power, malfeasance of office and outright treason.

The damage inflicted upon the American people by the criminal syndicate occupying the White House is unparalleled in American history. Yet, Obama is going to survive and this article will describe how Obama is this century’s version of the famous escape artist, Houdini.

The Alternative Media Is Doing Its Job

In Part One of this series, I detailed how various researchers have determined that it only takes 10% of the population to passionately hold to an ideal for the ideal to reach critical mass and go viral. I also described how the knowledge that this country is being run by a criminal syndicate is taking hold and we have likely passed the 10% threshold as evidenced by the fact that America is outraged by (1) Benghazi-Gate; (2) IRS-Gate; (3) AP Spy-Gate; (4) Whistleblower-Gate; and even (5) Fast and Furious is beginning to make a second pass. The alternative media is being so effective that it is forcing the MSM to jump off Obama’s ship and claim they do not support him any longer (e.g. MSNBC Chris Mathews).

The Calm Before the Storm

Even the great fence-sitter, Glenn Beck, is beginning to throw words around like “impeachment” in reference to Obama. And this is coming from a man who cannot decide if he is in the MSM or the alternative media. Remember, according to Beck, 9/11 is exactly as the Bush administration claims it was, an al-Qaeda venture. This is the same al-Qaeda that we are allegedly fighting in Afghanistan while supporting in Syria in our effort to oust Assad.
Regardless of the pedigree of many reporters who are now hinting at the fact that we are witnessing the last days of the Obama administration, the President himself seems unbelievably calm.

Obama is calm because he knows that he is going to survive the largest onslaught of simultaneous scandal exposures in our country’s history. There has never been a time in our history in which a sitting president has been besieged with this much exposed fodder aimed at his removal. If Watergate forced Nixon to resign, Obama should have been crushed by the comparative weight of his scandals and he should have already exited the White House. Why hasn’t this happened?

Sacrificial Lambs Buy Time

It is not likely that the Mafioso inhabitant presently residing in the White House will ever leave office prematurely. In fact, I think it is likely that Obama may not leave the Oval Office in 2016 as well.

If this were 1974, I would be advising Obama to pack his bags and I would also be advising him that he should be begging Joe Biden to grant him a pardon for his criminal acts including the facilitation of the murder of Ambassador Stevens. Make no mistake about it, Obama will survive these crises. However, Holder and possibly even DHS director, Janet Napolitano, may not.

Undoubtedly, Obama will offer up the head of Eric Holder as a sacrificial lamb and he will be gone by Labor day, if not much sooner, and this will buy Obama time to enact his endgame strategies which will negate the five Watergate wolves trying to break through his door.

Holder’s departure will bring celebrations in the alternative media and their followers will be dancing in the streets. We will also smell blood and want more removals. But the head of the president will never be touched despite the fact that all of us will soon be screaming for Obama’s scalp. It will just never happen.

What Will Save This President?

There is one game-changing event which will suddenly and irreversibly negate the momentum that the alternative media has achieved in terms of exposing and removing this criminal administration from power.

In the last eight months, I have repeated the mantra that most of what drives this government today is the preservation of the Petrodollar on behalf of the Federal Reserve. I have also detailed how Iran is selling its oil to Russia, China and India for gold, thus threatening the preeminence of the Petrodollar in which the other countries of the world must first purchase dollars from the Federal Reserve for the “privilege” of purchasing oil. This process provides the only backing that our dollar possesses.

Iran, China, Russia and India are destabilizing the dominance of our currency. Before you cheer the fact that the Federal Reserve is about ready to take a much-deserved bloodbath, please realize that you have a job to go to every Monday morning because of this one-sided arrangement and it is all about to end unless Iran can be toppled.

Why Syria?

Have you yet figured out why Obama will survive these crushing scandals and assume power in this country in a manner only reserved for such despots as Stalin? The road to Obama’s immediate survival runs through Damascus.

On the surface, Syria seems so very insignificant on the global chessboard. However, the key to invading Iran and seizing their oil fields is to first control Syria, because the occupation of Syria is an insurmountable checkmate against Russian ground troops’ intervention.

If the US takes over the Syrian revolution that we started through our al-Qaeda proxy forces, the US will gain a huge tactical advantage in the Middle East. The installation of short- and medium-range missile batteries in Syria will serve as a deterrent and a blocking mechanism for Russian ground troops’ ability to intervene in Iran.

If Russia allows the US to control Syria, Russia will lose any chance of preventing a US/NATO takeover of Iran. Russia and China have heavily vested themselves in gold. If Iran is stopped from selling its oil for gold, China, Russia and India will have wasted an enormous amount of the respective GNP’s in acquiring gold. And the acquisition of gold will be for naught if the US is about to re-establish the dominance of the Petrodollar as the world’s reserve currency through a successful invasion of Iran.

For awhile, it appeared as if Russia did not have the stomach for WWIII and they were going to let us topple Assad without so much as a whimper. I have been shocked as I have watched Russia apparently acquiesce to an impending takeover of Syria by US-led forces. However, recent Russian events make it clear that WWIII is on the horizon.

Read Full Article Here

About these ads

american-empire-2

                                                               American Empire

US Prepares to Overthrow Malaysian Government

 

Key to encircling and containing China, US sets proxies in motion for color revolution in Malaysian streets. 

 

Image: US-proxy Anwar Ibrahim leads a Bersih rally in Malaysia. While Bersih has attempted to claim it is “independent” and simply pursusing “fair and clean elections,” it is clearly a vehicle for returning Anwar Ibrahim back into power. Additionally, Bersih shares the same ties to the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) as its crypto-leader Anwar Ibrahim – representing a dangerous and seditious conflict of interest.

 

….

 

May 15, 2013 (AltThaiNews) – US-funded opposition fronts have vowed to overthrow the Malaysian government via disruptive and potentially violent street protests in the wake of general elections that saw their leader Anwar Ibrahim soundly defeated despite massive support from Western media, NGOs, and direct government intervention. Free Malaysia Today (FMT) reported in their article, “‘BN will be toppled this year’,” that:

Pro-Pakatan Rakyat groups have vowed to overthrow the Barisan Nasional government this year through a massive street rally.

Speakers at a forum held yesterday unanimously agreed that waiting for five years until the next
general election was too long, and vowed to overthrow BN this year through “force”.

FMT also added that:

Electoral watchdog group Bersih 2.0 steering committee member  Hishamuddin Rais pointed out that it was useless to take their unhappiness to the courts as he claimed the justice system was being controlled by the government.

“That is why we must take to the streets. We have to come out. What Najib likes is wrong, and what he doesn’t like is what we have to do,” he said.

“We will mobilise a big group and rally on the streets. This is not a threat, this is a promise,” he stressed.

Bersih, of course, is a US State Department-funded opposition front aimed to bolster US-proxy candidate Anwar Ibrahim, formerly of the IMF and World Bank, and a frequent visitor to the insidious National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Washington D.C. It is in fact, NED that funds Bersih through its subsidiary, the National Democratic Institute (NDI).
The Malaysian Insider reported on June 27, 2011 that Bersih leader Ambiga Sreenevassan:

“…admitted to Bersih receiving some money from two US organisations — the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and Open Society Institute (OSI) — for other projects, which she stressed were unrelated to the July 9 march.”

A visit to the NDI website revealed indeed that funding and training had been provided by the US organization – before NDI took down the information and replaced it with a more benign version purged entirely of any mention of Bersih. For funding Ambiga claims is innocuous, the NDI’s rushed obfuscation of any ties to her organization suggests something far more sinister at play.

Photo: NDI’s website before taking down any mention to Malaysia’s Bersih movement. (click image to enlarge)

….

In addition to Bersih, other faux-electoral monitors are also directly funded by the US government. While the Western media attempts to portray such organizations as “independent,” the Merdeka Center for Opinion Research, for example, is likewise funded directly by the US through NED.

Anwar Ibrahim himself was Chairman of the Development Committee of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1998, held lecturing positions at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, was a consultant to the World Bank, and a panelist at the Neo-Con lined National Endowment for Democracy’s “Democracy Award” and a panelist at a NED donation ceremony – the very same US organization funding and supporting Bersih and so-called “independent” election monitor Merdeka – paints a picture of an opposition running for office in Malaysia, not for the Malaysian people, but clearly for the corporate financier interests of Wall Street and London.

 

Read Full Article Here

Obama calls IRS flap ‘inexcusable,’ announces resignation of acting IRS chief

 

 photo ObamacallsIRSflapinexcusableannouncesresignationofactingIRSchief_zps7151de08.jpg

NBC’s Chuck Todd examines the White House’s attempt to take control of the IRS scandal, saying if the public thinks the government has lost control on the IRS front, then the Obama administration will have more difficulty in implementing new policies.

President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he was “angry” at IRS officials who inappropriately targeted conservative groups for scrutiny, announcing that his administration had sought and accepted Steven Miller’s resignation as interim commissioner of the IRS.

“I’ve reviewed the Treasury Department watchdog’s report, and the misconduct that it uncovered was inexcusable,” Obama said in a statement at the White House. “It’s inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it.”

The president said that he expected the IRS to act with even higher levels of integrity than other government agencies and that, to that end, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had sought and accepted Miller’s resignation — something many Republicans had demanded.

A great deal of what IRS has said regarding the targeting scandal was proven to be incomplete or flat out wrong prompting genuine outrage among both Democrats and Republicans. House Speaker John Boehner is now asking who is going to go to jail over this as the IRS continues to blame targeting of conservatives on a few rogue employees. Now Attorney General Holder has promised an investigation to see if IRS employees broke the law. NBC’s Lisa Myers reports.

Obama also pledged to work with Congress in its emerging investigation into the controversy, pledging his administration would work “hand in hand with Congress” to further its oversight. But the president also cautioned lawmakers to conduct their probe “in a way that doesn’t smack of politics or partisan agendas.”

“If the President is as concerned about this issue as he claims, he’ll work openly and transparently with Congress to get to the bottom of the scandal — no stonewalling, no half-answers, no withholding of witnesses,” the top Republican senator, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, said in a statement.

 

Read Full Article and  Watch Video Here

St. Louis Is Burning

 

Rolling Stone
A bulldozer pushes trash in a landfill.
Sam Hodgson/Bloomberg via Getty Images
May 10, 2013 10:00 AM ET

There’s a fire burning in Bridgeton, Missouri. It’s invisible to area residents, buried deep beneath the ground in a North St. Louis County landfill. But the smoldering waste is an unavoidable presence in town, giving off a putrid odor that clouds the air miles away – an overwhelming stench described by one area woman as “rotten eggs mixed with skunk and fertilizer.” Residents report smelling it at K-12 school buses, a TGI Fridays and even the operating room of a local hospital. “It smells like dead bodies,” observes another local.

On a Saturday morning in March, one mile south of the landfill, several Bridgeton residents have gathered at a small home in a blue-collar subdivision called Spanish Village. Concerned citizens Karen Nickel and Dawn Chapman are here to answer questions posed by four of their neighbors. “How will I ever sell my house?” “Am I going to end up with cancer 20 years down the road?” “Is there even a solution?”

In February, the landfill’s owner, Republic Services, sent glossy fliers to residents within stink radius claiming the noxious odor posed no safety risk. But official reports say otherwise. Temperature probes reveal the fire has already surpassed normal heat levels. Reports from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) indicate dangerously high levels of benzene and hydrogen sulfide in the air. In March, Missouri’s Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) – which has jurisdiction over Bridgeton Landfill – quietly posted an Internet notice cautioning citizens with chronic respiratory diseases to limit time outdoors. A month after Republic distributed its potentially misleading flier, the state attorney general sued the company on eight counts of environmental violations, including pollution and public nuisance. And this week, as part of a settlement set to be announced Tuesday, Republic sent another round of fliers offering to move local families to hotels during a period of increased odor related to remediation efforts.

Nickel and Chapman are stay-at-home moms; Chapman has three special-needs kids. Neither of them wants to spend her time worrying about a damn landfill fire. But until someone higher up the power chain intervenes, they have sworn to call municipal offices, file Sunshine requests and post notices to the community’s Facebook group, no matter how unsettling the facts they uncover. Scariest of all: The Bridgeton landfill fire is burning close to at least 8,700 tons of nuclear weapons wastes. 

“To have somebody call you at 11 P.M., and they’re in tears, concerned for their family, that’s heartbreaking,” Chapman tells Rolling Stone. “We’re doing this because we don’t have a choice. If we don’t come together as a community and fight, no one’s going to do it for us.”

America’s Nuclear Nightmare

West Lake Landfill is an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site that’s home to some of the oldest radioactive wastes in the world. A six-foot chain-link fence surrounds the perimeter, plastered with bright yellow hazard signs that warn of the dangers within. On one corner stands a rusty gas pump. About 1,200 feet south of the radioactive EPA site, the fire at Bridgeton Landfill spreads out like hot barbeque coals. No one knows for sure what happens when an underground inferno meets a pool of atomic waste, but residents aren’t eager to find out.

At a March 15th press conference, Peter Anderson – an economist who has studied landfills for over 20 years – raised the worst-case scenario of a “dirty bomb,” meaning a non-detonated, mass release of floating radioactive particles in metro St. Louis. “Now, to be clear, a dirty bomb is not nuclear fission, it’s not an atomic bomb, it’s not a weapon of mass destruction,” Anderson assured meeting attendants in Bridgeton’s Machinists Union Hall. “But the dispersal of that radioactive material in air that could reach – depending upon weather conditions – as far as 10 miles from the site could make it impossible to have economic activity continue.”

 

Read Full Article Here

 

*****************************************************************************

 

Judge Ponders Plan to Put Out Bridgeton Landfill Fire

May 13, 2013 5:55 PM
Bridgeton Sanitary Landfill, where underground fire has been smoldering since December 2010

Bridgeton Sanitary Landfill, where underground fire has been smoldering since December 2010

ST. LOUIS–(KMOX)–A judge says he’ll decide by morning whether a plan to put out the fire and end the smell at the Bridgeton Sanitary Landfill is workable.

The plan — crafted by the Missouri Attorney General and the landfill owner, Republic Services Inc. — has not yet been made public. It’s now in the hands of Circuit Court Judge Michael Jamison, who met in his chambers with lawyers from both sides on a day he was scheduled to hold a hearing on the Attorney General’s lawsuit against the landfill.

“It’s not exactly a settlement,” Jamison told Bridgeton residents, reporters and environmentalists waiting in his courtroom, “But it’s something that would address the smoldering issue and what the sate may be able to do.”

The lawsuit filed by the state calls for an aggressive plan to put out the fire, which has been smoldering since December 2010 — and for fines upwards of tens-of-thousand a dollars a day for alleged violations of Missouri environmental laws. Koster’s suit claims the burning landfill is billowing benzene and other hazardous chemicals into the air, and leaking a black ooze into ground water.

Koster’s office declined to comment. The Attorney General has scheduled a news conference for 10:30 Tuesday morning in downtown St. Louis to reveal details of the proposed next step.

Already, complaints are rising that the apparent deal was made without input from the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, from area businesses or from Bridgeton residents.

“The community needs to be at the table,” said the coalition’s Kat Logan Smith, “The property owners, the families and businesses here need to be at the table, because they need to decide what the bottom line is.”

 

Read Full Article Here

****************************************************************************

The People vs. Goldman Sachs

A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges

May 11, 2011 9:30 AM ET
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein tesifies before the Senate in April 2010
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein tesifies before the Senate in April 2010
Mark Wilson/Getty Images

They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn’t leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.

The great and powerful Oz of Wall Street was not the only target of Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — “a million fraud cases a year” is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin’s small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street’s aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.

Photo Gallery: How Goldman top dogs defrauded their clients and lied to Congress

To date, there has been only one successful prosecution of a financial big fish from the mortgage bubble, and that was Lee Farkas, a Florida lender who was just convicted on a smorgasbord of fraud charges and now faces life in prison. But Farkas, sadly, is just an exception proving the rule: Like Bernie Madoff, his comically excessive crime spree (which involved such lunacies as kiting checks to his own bank and selling loans that didn’t exist) was almost completely unconnected to the systematic corruption that led to the crisis. What’s more, many of the earlier criminals in the chain of corruption — from subprime lenders like Countrywide, who herded old ladies and ghetto families into bad loans, to rapacious banks like Washington Mutual, who pawned off fraudulent mortgages on investors — wound up going belly up, sunk by their own greed.

Read Full Article Here
******************************************************************************

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix

 

Illustration by Victor Juhasz
April 25, 2013 1:00 PM ET

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia

Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.

“It’s a double conspiracy,” says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. “It’s the height of criminality.”

The bad news didn’t stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. “Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry,” CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.

But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants’ incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.

“A farce,” was one antitrust lawyer’s response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.

“Incredible,” says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.

 

Read Full Article Here

 

*****************************************************************************

 

Secrets and Lies of the Bailout

The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come

January 4, 2013 4:25 PM ET
national affairs secrets of the bailout taibbi
Illustration by Victor Juhasz

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform

But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue. Money wasn’t the only thing the government gave Wall Street – it also conferred the right to hide the truth from the rest of us. And it was all done in the name of helping regular people and creating jobs. “It is,” says former bailout Inspector General Neil Barofsky, “the ultimate bait-and-switch.”

The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout. The only reason investors haven’t run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed. Investors may not actually believe the lie, but they are impressed by how totally committed the government has been, from the very beginning, to selling it.

THEY LIED TO PASS THE BAILOUT

Today what few remember about the bailouts is that we had to approve them. It wasn’t like Paulson could just go out and unilaterally commit trillions of public dollars to rescue Goldman Sachs and Citigroup from their own stupidity and bad management (although the government ended up doing just that, later on). Much as with a declaration of war, a similarly extreme and expensive commitment of public resources, Paulson needed at least a film of congressional approval. And much like the Iraq War resolution, which was only secured after George W. Bush ludicrously warned that Saddam was planning to send drones to spray poison over New York City, the bailouts were pushed through Congress with a series of threats and promises that ranged from the merely ridiculous to the outright deceptive. At one meeting to discuss the original bailout bill – at 11 a.m. on September 18th, 2008 – Paulson actually told members of Congress that $5.5 trillion in wealth would disappear by 2 p.m. that day unless the government took immediate action, and that the world economy would collapse “within 24 hours.”

To be fair, Paulson started out by trying to tell the truth in his own ham-headed, narcissistic way. His first TARP proposal was a three-page absurdity pulled straight from a Beavis and Butt-Head episode – it was basically Paulson saying, “Can you, like, give me some money?” Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, remembers a call with Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. “We need $700 billion,” they told Brown, “and we need it in three days.” What’s more, the plan stipulated, Paulson could spend the money however he pleased, without review “by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

The White House and leaders of both parties actually agreed to this preposterous document, but it died in the House when 95 Democrats lined up against it. For an all-too-rare moment during the Bush administration, something resembling sanity prevailed in Washington.

So Paulson came up with a more convincing lie. On paper, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was simple: Treasury would buy $700 billion of troubled mortgages from the banks and then modify them to help struggling homeowners. Section 109 of the act, in fact, specifically empowered the Treasury secretary to “facilitate loan modifications to prevent avoidable foreclosures.” With that promise on the table, wary Democrats finally approved the bailout on October 3rd, 2008. “That provision,” says Barofsky, “is what got the bill passed.”

But within days of passage, the Fed and the Treasury unilaterally decided to abandon the planned purchase of toxic assets in favor of direct injections of billions in cash into companies like Goldman and Citigroup. Overnight, Section 109 was unceremoniously ditched, and what was pitched as a bailout of both banks and homeowners instantly became a bank-only operation – marking the first in a long series of moves in which bailout officials either casually ignored or openly defied their own promises with regard to TARP.

Congress was furious. “We’ve been lied to,” fumed Rep. David Scott, a Democrat from Georgia. Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, raged at transparently douchey TARP administrator (and Goldman banker) Neel Kashkari, calling him a “chump” for the banks. And the anger was bipartisan: Republican senators David Vitter of Louisiana and James Inhofe of Oklahoma were so mad about the unilateral changes and lack of oversight that they sponsored a bill in January 2009 to cancel the remaining $350 billion of TARP.

So what did bailout officials do? They put together a proposal full of even bigger deceptions to get it past Congress a second time. That process began almost exactly four years ago – on January 12th and 15th, 2009 – when Larry Summers, the senior economic adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, sent a pair of letters to Congress. The pudgy, stubby­fingered former World Bank economist, who had been forced out as Harvard president for suggesting that women lack a natural aptitude for math and science, begged legislators to reject Vitter’s bill and leave TARP alone.

In the letters, Summers laid out a five-point plan in which the bailout was pitched as a kind of giant populist program to help ordinary Americans. Obama, Summers vowed, would use the money to stimulate bank lending to put people back to work. He even went so far as to say that banks would be denied funding unless they agreed to “increase lending above baseline levels.” He promised that “tough and transparent conditions” would be imposed on bailout recipients, who would not be allowed to use bailout funds toward “enriching shareholders or executives.” As in the original TARP bill, he pledged that bailout money would be used to aid homeowners in foreclosure. And lastly, he promised that the bailouts would be temporary – with a “plan for exit of government intervention” implemented “as quickly as possible.”

 

Read Full Article Here

corbettreport corbettreport

Published on May 8, 2013

TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=7341

As investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker has demonstrated, the address for the Congress of Chechen International Organizations just happened to be the home address of Graham E. Fuller, formerly Vice Chairman of the Reagan-era CIA’s National Intelligence Council. The relationship between Ruslan and this former top CIA official was not a loose one. Tsarni married Fuller’s daughter in the mid-1990s and lived in Fuller’s home for some time, basing his terror-supporting operation under Fuller’s own roof.

Obedience Script photo obediencescript_zpsc9ec5663.jpg
*****************************************************************************************************

By Paul Rosenberg, FreemansPerspective.com

We Americans like our movie heroes: Tough, free thinking, adaptive, willing to defy authority to save the people. The problem is, no one ever acts like that in real life. Cheering Arnie or Chuck or Sly is a long, long way from doing something heroic yourself – and the current batch of Americans are not so big on that. (Nor are Europeans, or most others.)

One of the great Roman writers called the Romans a “royal, rebellious race.” Likewise Americans – especially in the West, had a real tradition of unflinching individualism. But, as in Rome, American virtue has been lost, while stories of the virtue remain.

21st Century Westerners obey. They do as they are told. They feel free to complain, but they never stop obeying.

You know the script that people try to follow: Do well in school, rebel a little, wear the new shoes/jeans/accessories, with the popular logos, get a university degree (take student loans to do so), get a job at a big firm with great benefits, buy a house, vote, send your kids to daycare, watch TV, and so on.

The problem is that the “Obedience Script” isn’t working out very well. Please consider these recent reports:

There are many more statistics I could add, including some pretty horrifying stats on obesity, huge percentages of people living on government checks (on both sides of the Atlantic), and astronomical government debts being laid upon generations yet unborn.

The script isn’t working out very well, no matter how much it is shown on TV. You have to wonder how much pain it will take before people will decide to give it up.

(A big hat tip to Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog for a great set of links.)

[Editor's Note: Paul Rosenberg is the author of FreemansPerspective.com, a collection of insights on topics ranging from Internet privacy to economic freedom, the purpose of life to alternative currencies. Join our free e-letter list to receive other articles like this one... and immediately get a report that explains in a unique way how the US Government got into the mess it's in, the dangers that creates for us, and how to protect ourselves from it.]

Published on Apr 23, 2013

SHOW NOTES AND MP3: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=7316

FBI whistleblower and BoilingFrogsPost.com editor Sibel Edmonds joins us to discuss the recent Boston bombing hysteria and the potential geopolitical implications of the American public’s “discovery” of Chechen terror. We discuss Sibel’s work exposing the US/NATO roots of so-called Chechen terrorism, and what the FSB’s involvement in this twisted tale might mean in terms of future Russian-US relations.

Report Finds Afghan Military Shrinking Not Growing

May 02, 2013

  
afghan army march 600x400

A U.S. government watchdog overseeing the Afghanistan reconstruction found the U.S. led effort to recruit, train and field the Afghan National Security Forces is about 20,000 troops below its stated goal of 352,000.

The U.S. led coalition force failed to meet the goal of 352,000 ANSF personnel by October 2012, although the Defense Department reported that it reached the goal of recruiting 352,000 ANSF personnel. These personnel are spread across the Afghan National Army, Afghan National Police, and the Afghan Air Force.

In fact, the ANSF end strength is shrinking, not growing. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that the number of personnel shrunk by about 4,000 troops and policemen between March 2012 and February 2013.

Inspectors noted how the U.S. led coalition has continually moved the date in which it hopes to reach the stated end strength. Defense Department officials have recently told SIGAR officials the goal is now to train, equip and field the personnel in the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police by December 2013, and the Afghan National Air Force by 2017.

Read Full Article Here

**************************************************************************************************

Afghanistan Is Not Ready to Take Over

A special inspector general discloses that as U.S. forces head for the exit, the Pentagon has not met its goal for enlarging the Afghan force left behind.
More

afghan army banner 2930423023498.jpg

An Afghan National Army soldier practices drills at an outpost in Maiwand District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, on January 29, 2013. (Andrew Burton/Reuters)

Since the United States first sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001, a signature goal of the war has been to increase the size of Afghan national security forces and give their members the skills to vanquish domestic terrorist groups and other security threats on their own.

But as the Obama administration prepares to pull 34,000 U.S. troops out of the country by February and most of the remaining troops by the end of 2014, estimates of the size of the Afghan force trained to take over this lead security role have suddenly grown fuzzy and possibly unreliable.

The Afghan National Army “did not yet have the ability to plan and conduct sustained operations without U.S. and Coalition support.”

A new report this week by the government’s top watchdog over U.S. spending in Afghanistan casts doubt on whether the U.S.-led coalition and the Afghan government has met a goal set in 2011 of enlisting and training a total of 352,000 Afghan security personnel by October 2012. Pentagon officials have said that target was meant to strike a balance between what is needed and what America and its allies can deliver in concert with the Afghan government.

The White House declared two months ago, in conjunction with the President’s State of the Union address, that the goal had been attained. Afghan “forces are currently at a surge strength of 352,000, where they will remain for at least three more years, to allow continued progress toward a secure environment in Afghanistan,” it said.

But on Tuesday, Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction John F. Sopko challenged this rosy assessment, which White House officials said was based on data supplied by the Pentagon.

“The goal to ‘train and field’ 352,000 Afghan National Security Forces by last October was not met.” Sopko said in his latest quarterly report. Instead, as of Feb. 18, the number of personnel in the Afghan National Army, National Police and Air Force totaled 332,753, or about 20,000 fewer, according to data he said he collected from the Coalition-led transition command in Kabul.

Sopko said Afghan troop and police strength is actually declining, not rising – belying a longstanding goal of the U.S. intervention. There are now 4,700 fewer personnel than a year ago, he noted, drawing on the same data that the Pentagon routinely uses.

The discrepancy between the force size the White House has claimed and what the Afghans have actually been able to field is not a trivial one, Sopko’s report suggested. “Accurate and reliable accounting for ANSF personnel is necessary to ensure that U.S. funds that support the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] are used for legitimate and eligible costs,” it said.

As a result, the discrepancy has triggered a wider audit by his organization into “the extent to which DOD [the Department of Defense] reviews and validates the information collected” from Afghan officials, Sopko said in the report. It will broadly assess “the reliability and usefulness” of what the Afghans – and the U.S. government – say about the force’s size.

In a statement to the Center for Public Integrity, Sopko explained that “we are not implying that anyone is manipulating data. We are raising a concern that we don’t have the right numbers. We appreciate how difficult it is to get the correct numbers — but we need accurate numbers because we’re using those numbers to pay ANSF salaries, supply equipment and so forth.”

The financial stakes behind the numbers are huge. Sopko’s report says Congress has appropriated more than $51 billion so far “to build, equip, train and sustain the Afghan National Security Forces.”

But U.S. officials and watchdog groups have previously raised alarms about the existence of “ghost” personnel in the Afghan forces, whose salaries are still funded by Western aid but who quit the units to which they are assigned. The annual attrition rate for the Afghan army is nearly 30 percent, according to U.S. military commanders, provoking an enormous churn in the ranks that complicates accurate record-keeping.

Part of the problem, according to Sopko’s report, is that Western officials have allowed “the Afghan forces to report their own personnel strength numbers,” which are based on hand-written ledgers in “decentralized, unlinked and inconsistent systems.” The Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, which oversees the training effort, reported last year “there was no viable method of validating personnel numbers,” the report added.

But U.S. officials have added to the confusion by adopting a new definition of what it means to be a member of the Afghan security force, loosening its terminology in a way that enlarges the ranks to include all those “recruited” rather than those actually trained and field-ready.

For example, the Defense Department’s so-called Section 1230 reports, which track the progress of the war, including efforts to build an effective Afghan security force, said in April 2012 that “the ANSF are ahead of schedule to achieve the October 2012 end-strength of 352,000, including subordinate goals of 195,000 soldiers and 157,000 police.”

Read Full Article Here

****************************************************************************************************

Government auditor challenges White House account of Afghanistan security

A special inspector general discloses that as US forces head for the exit, the Pentagon has not met its goal for enlarging the Afghan force left behind

By Richard H.P. Sia

20 hours, 20 minutes ago Updated: 14 hours, 28 minutes ago

Afghan National Army recruits practice a house clearing during training exercise in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Dar Yasin/AP

Since the United States first sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001, a signature goal of the war has been to increase the size of Afghan national security forces and give their members the skills to vanquish domestic terrorist groups and other security threats on their own.

But as the Obama administration prepares to pull 34,000 U.S. troops out of the country by February and most of the remaining troops by the end of 2014, estimates of the size of the Afghan force trained to take over this lead security role have suddenly grown fuzzy and possibly unreliable.

A new report this week by the government’s top watchdog over U.S. spending in Afghanistan casts doubt on whether the U.S.-led coalition and the Afghan government has met a goal set in 2011 of enlisting and training a total of 352,000 Afghan security personnel by October 2012. Pentagon officials have said that target was meant to strike a balance between what is needed and what America and its allies can deliver in concert with the Afghan government.

The White House declared two months ago, in conjunction with the President’s State of the Union address, that the goal had been attained. Afghan “forces are currently at a surge strength of 352,000, where they will remain for at least three more years, to allow continued progress toward a secure environment in Afghanistan,” it said.

But on Tuesday, Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction John F. Sopko challenged this rosy assessment, which White House officials said was based on data supplied by the Pentagon.

“The goal to ‘train and field’ 352,000 Afghan National Security Forces by last October was not met.” Sopko said in his latest quarterly report. Instead, as of Feb. 18, the number of personnel in the Afghan National Army, National Police and Air Force totaled 332,753, or about 20,000 fewer, according to data he said he collected from the Coalition-led transition command in Kabul.

Sopko said Afghan troop and police strength is actually declining, not rising – belying a longstanding goal of the U.S. intervention. There are now 4,700 fewer personnel than a year ago, he noted, drawing on the same data that the Pentagon routinely uses.

The discrepancy between the force size the White House has claimed and what the Afghans have actually been able to field is not a trivial one, Sopko’s report suggested. ”Accurate and reliable accounting for ANSF personnel is necessary to ensure that U.S. funds that support the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] are used for legitimate and eligible costs,” it said.

As a result, the discrepancy has triggered a wider audit by his organization into “the extent to which DOD [the Department of Defense] reviews and validates the information collected” from Afghan officials, Sopko said in the report. It will broadly assess “the reliability and usefulness” of what the Afghans – and the U.S. government – say about the force’s size.

 

Read Full Article Here

***************************************************************************************************

Ric Bradshaw
Sheriff Ric L. Bradshaw
Palm Beach County
Sheriff’s Office
CJC member since 1997

Palm Beach County sheriff gets $1 million for violence prevention unit amid questions about civil liberties, care for mentally ill

By Dara Kam and Stacey Singer – Palm Beach Post Staff Writers

Florida House and Senate budget leaders have awarded Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw $1 million for a new violence prevention unit aimed at preventing tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., from occurring on his turf.

Bradshaw plans to use the extra $1 million to launch “prevention intervention” units featuring specially trained deputies, mental health professionals and caseworkers. The teams will respond to citizen phone calls to a 24-hour hotline with a knock on the door and a referral to services, if needed.

The goal will be avoiding crime — and making sure law enforcement knows about potential powder kegs before tragedies occur, Bradshaw said. But the earmark, which is a one-time-only funding provision, provoked a debate Monday among mental health advocates and providers about the balance between civil liberties, privacy and protecting the public.

Bradshaw said his proposal is a first-of-its-kind in the nation, and he hopes it will become a model for the rest of the state like his gang prevention and pill-mill units.

“Every single incident, whether it’s Newtown, that movie theater, or the guy who spouts off at work and then goes home and kills his wife and two kids — in every single case, there were people who said they knew ahead of time that there was a problem,” Bradshaw said. “If the neighbor of the mom in Newtown had called somebody, this might have saved 25 kids’ lives.”

Bradshaw is readying a hotline and is planning public service announcements to encourage local citizens to report their neighbors, friends or family members if they fear they could harm themselves or others.

The goal won’t be to arrest troubled people but to get them help before there’s violence, Bradshaw said. As a side benefit, law enforcement will have needed information to keep a close eye on things.

“We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor and he’s gonna shoot him,” Bradshaw said. “What does it hurt to have somebody knock on a door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?’ ”

That’s enough for Senate budget chief Joe Negron, R-Stuart, who helped push through the funding last weekend.

He said he met with Bradshaw about the program and “got assurances from the sheriff that this is going to be done in a way that respects people’s autonomy and privacy, and that he makes sure to protect against people making false claims.”

Mental health advocates, however, worry about a potential new source of stigma, and the potential for erosion of the civil rights of people with mental illnesses.

“How are they possibly going to watch everybody who makes a comment like that? It’s subjective,” said Liz Downey, executive director of the Palm Beach County branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “We don’t want to take away people’s civil liberties just because people aren’t behaving the way we think they should be.”

Bradshaw acknowledged the risk that anyone in a messy divorce or in a dispute with a neighbor could abuse the hotline. But, he said, he’s confident that his trained professionals will know how to sort out fact from fiction.

“We know how to sift through frivolous complaints,” he said.

The proposal still needs the blessing of Gov. Rick Scott, who has line-item veto authority.

 

Read Full Article Here

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 728 other followers