Covering Syria: The Information War

The narrative that has been constructed by the Western mainstream media on Syria may seem to be self-evident from the scenes presented on television, but it is a narrative duplicitously promoted and coordinated so as to conceal and facilitate the regime-change project that is part of the war on Iran.

What we are seeing is a new stage of information war intentionally constructed and cast as a simplistic narrative of a struggle for human rights and democracy so as deliberately to exclude other interpretations and any geo-strategic motivation.

The narrative, as CNN puts it, is in essence this: “The vast majority of reports from the ground indicate that government forces are killing citizens in an attempt to wipe out civilians seeking [President Bashar] al-Assad’s ouster” – the aim being precisely to elicit a heart-wrenching emotional response in Western audiences that trumps all other considerations and makes the call for Western/Gulf intervention to effect regime change.

But it is a narrative based on distortion, manipulation, lies and videotape.

In the first months, the narrative was of unarmed protesters being shot by Syrian forces. This then evolved into one of armed insurgents reluctantly “being provoked into taking up arms”, as US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton explained, to defend peaceful protesters.

It was also a narrative that from the outset, according to a recent report in Time magazine, that the US has facilitated by providing training, support and equipment to Syrian opposition “cyber-warriors”.

Reports confirmed by leading Syrian opposition leaders in April 2011 reveal that in addition to cyber-training, weapons and money from Syrian exiles, as well as from a “major Arab Gulf country” and a Lebanese political party, were being distributed to “young demonstrators”. The former head of Russian intelligence, Yevgeny Primakov, similarly noted that the Syrian conflict “started with armed revolts against the authorities, not peaceful demonstrations”.

Ironically, one of the most accurate descriptions of the sectarian conflict we are witnessing in Syria comes from an assessment by the neoconservative Brookings Institute in its March 2012 report “Assessing Options for Regime Change in Syria”, one option being for “the United States [to] fight a “clean” war … and leave the dirty work on the ground to the FSA [Free Syrian Army], perhaps even obviating a massive commitment to Iraq-style nation-building”.

“Let the Arabs do it,” echoed Israeli President Shimon Peres. “Do it yourself and the UN will support you.” This point was not lost on one leading Turkish commentator, who noted that US Senator John McCain “said that there would be no American boots on the ground in Syria. That means we Turks will have to spill our precious blood to get what McCain and others want in the States.”

In the wake of the failures at state-building in Afghanistan and Iraq, direct intervention, with all the responsibilities this would entail, would not go down well in cash-strapped Western nations. Better to get others to do the “dirty work” – pursue “regime change by civil war”.

“The United States, Europe and the Gulf states … are starving the regime in Damascus and feeding the opposition. They have sanctioned Syria … and are busy shoveling money and helping arms supplied by the Gulf get to the rebels,” Joshua Landis, director of the Center of Middle Eastern Studies, wrote in Foreign Policy in June.

With regional allies prepared to do the “dirty work” of providing increasingly sophisticated weapons clearly geared for purposes other than “self-defense”, and the FSA and its jihadist allies doing the “dirty work” within Syria (their salaries paid by Saudi Arabia), the US and European nations can proffer their clean hands by limiting support to communications equipment, intelligence and humanitarian aid, and of course to providing the moral posturing required to topple the Syrian system and implant a regime hostile to Iran and friendly to Israel. Having “clean hands” enables the US, France and Britain to pose as abiding by UN standards, while at the same time flouting the UN Charter by promoting an attack on a member state.

Time magazine reported last month that the administration of US President Barack Obama “has tiptoed across an invisible line. [It] said it will not actively support the Syrian opposition in its bid to oust Assad … [but] as US officials have revealed, the administration has been providing media-technology training and support to Syrian dissidents by way of small non-profits like the Institute for War & Peace Reporting and Freedom House.

“Viral videos of alleged atrocities,” noted Time, “have made Assad one of the most reviled men on the planet, helping turn the Arab League against him and embarrassing his few remaining allies almost daily.”

It is a position that reeks of hypocrisy: as US columnist Barbara Slavin notes, “Without a UN Security Council mandate, the prospects for US military intervention in Syria are minimal … the provision of communications gear frees up others to provide weapons.”

A US official quoted by Associated Press was more frank: Washington’s equipment and medical supplies to the opposition “can now be easily augmented with weapons from other donors. Smuggling lines are smuggling lines. We use the same donkeys,” he said, pointing out that routes are in essence the same for bandages as they are for bullets.

And while various Western governments are helping “document crimes” committed by Syrian forces, these same governments have refused to investigate their own killings of civilians in attacks by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Libya. NATO “created its own definition for ‘confirmed’ deaths: only a death that NATO itself investigated and corroborated could be called confirmed”, enabling the alliance to conclude: “We have no confirmed reports of civilian casualties.”

Britain was the only country involved in the bombings to conduct its own inquiry. Its report accepted “that coalition forces did their best to prevent and minimize civilian casualties … We commend them for this approach.”

For every tragic story like journalist Marie Colvin’s final dispatch before she was killed while embedded for British media with the FSA (“In Babr Amr. Sickening. Cannot understand how the world can stand by. Watched a baby die today. Shrapnel: doctors could do nothing. His little tummy just heaved and heaved until he stopped. Feeling Helpless”), there are other similar tragedies, committed by the insurgents, that are rarely reported in the mainstream Western press.

You won’t read in the mainstream press of foreign jihadists increasingly pouring into Syria to fight their holy war; you won’t read that some ultraconservative Salafi sheikhs in Saudi Arabia are running their own military network inside Syria; you won’t read how Assad’s support during the 14-month crisis has if anything increased in light of the insecurity gripping the country; you won’t read comments like those of the Lebanese Christian Maronite patriarch who said that while “Syria, like other countries, needs reforms which the people are demanding … the closest thing to democracy [in the Arab world] is Syria”.

You won’t read how the head of the opposition in Turkey, a former ambassador to Washington, Faruk Logoglu, has said that what Turkey is doing hosting armed FSA fighters and allowing them to carry out attacks in Syria is “is against all international norms; against all neighborly relations … It is a basic rule that countries must respect the sovereignty of others.”

You won’t read how armed insurgents used the Arab League observer mission’s ceasefire to “reinforce themselves and bring supplies from Lebanon, knowing the regime would be limited in its ability to obstruct them at that time”, or how they have used the Kofi Annan plan to prepare for larger attacks.

While we have seen extensive demonization of Assad, his wife and family, with the president depicted recently in the British press bathing in blood, you won’t read articles demonizing the Saudi or Qatari regimes, or highlighting the hundreds of millions of dollars they have poured into political parties and groups, particularly Salafists, across the region in their “counter-revolution” against change; or the recent declaration by the official Saudi Mufti for all churches in the Arabian Peninsula to be demolished (which was not covered by a single Western mainstream news outlet); or as a senior Sunni political figure told me recently, the more than 23,000 detainees in Saudi prisons, a majority of whom (a recent report notes 90%) have degrees (to be fair, Chatham House did comment on this in a recent report that this “is indicative of the prevalence of a university education”).

You won’t read how Saudi Arabia and Qatar have bullied satellite hosting channels in the region to stop broadcasting “pro-regime” public and private Syrian television channels; or that the Syrian opposition has set up 10 satellite channels, all with an Islamist orientation and which take a strong sectarian line – calling on the FSA to “kill Iran’s mice” and “the rats of the Lebanese devil’s party” (Hezbollah); or how Russia has been attempting to facilitate a political process of reconciliation with the internal opposition since the onset of the crisis.

There is clear duplicity in the deliberate unwillingness of the Western mainstream media to acknowledge the nature of those who are the West’s allies in the regime-change project – particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar – and the danger they pose in the region through their arming and firing up of jihadist Salafist groups in Syria and across the region. Rare are articles in the mainstream Western press that highlight this hypocrisy.

A critical piece in the British press by Peter Oborne, The Daily Telegraph’s chief political correspondent, was an exception: “Washington never ceases to complain about the connection between the Pakistani intelligence services and the Taliban. But we never hear a whisper of concern about the connection between Saudi intelligence and Salafi movements across the Middle East, of which al-Qaeda is the best-known offshoot.”

The essential components of what we do see daily in the Western press have changed little during the conflict: in effect, all violence and terror are apportioned to one side only – the Syrian government and its purported “ghostly shadowy” shabiha forces.

Any violence committed by the “peaceful protesters” and the Free Syrian Army is purely for defensive purposes – all of which comes straight out of the color-revolution/regime-change text book; daily figures for those killed are based almost exclusively on “reports by activists and YouTube footage” (unverifiable, it is claimed, because the Syrian government does not allow free movement of journalists) and are described simply as “people” – dead insurgents do not appear; Al-Qaeda-type jihadist groups are played down (reports in leading media outlets like The Guardian continue to question whether they exist at all); and any weapons or equipment supplied to the “opposition” is, according to Saudi leaders, to help Syrians “defend themselves”.

Embedding journalists on their side is an asset that the FSA, activists and their Western and regional partners have clearly learned from the experience of the US Army in the wake of its attacks on Fallujah in 2004. A US Army intelligence analysis leaked by WikiLeaks revealed that “in the military’s opinion, the Western press are part of the US’s propaganda operation. This process was facilitated by the embedding of Western reporters in US military units”. In their second attack on Fallujah in November 2004, the US Army “got many reporters … to embed with US troops, so that they could act, as the intelligence report calls for, as the propaganda arm of US forces”.

The fundamental pillar of this Western narrative relies almost exclusively on claims and “evidence” provided by “activists” and opposition-affiliated groups, particularly the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Are we seriously to believe that this outfit, reportedly run from Coventry by a man who, according to Reuters, part-time runs a clothes shop with his wife, then “sits with a laptop and phones and pieces together accounts of conflict and rights abuses before uploading news to the Internet”, is the primary source of daily casualty statistics on the 14-month Syrian conflict – the key geo-strategic conflict of the time?

It is clearly the front office of a large-scale (dis)information project – when Russian diplomats asked to meet with the organization, they were refused. Senior political figures in the region have told me, as other reports indicate, that the Observatory is in fact funded from a Dubai-based slush fund and is a key component of the regime-change project.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov noted that it was in the opposition’s interest “to provoke a humanitarian catastrophe, to get a pretext to demand external interference”, so it is not surprising that analysis of the Observatory’s figures, including claims of “massacres”, consistently show a significant inflation in numbers of casualties, sometimes wildly so.

As Al-Jazeera journalist Nir Rosen, who spent some months embedded with the Free Syria Army, explained: “Every day the opposition gives a death toll, usually without any explanation of the cause of the deaths. Many … reported killed are in fact dead opposition fighters, but the cause of their death is hidden and they are described … as innocent civilians killed by security forces, as if they were all merely protesting or sitting in their homes.”

Analysis I did of what was reported to be the “deadliest day of the nine-month uprising” (December 20, 2011), with the “organized massacre” of a “mass defection” of army deserters widely reported by the international press, and opposition Syrian National Council claims of areas “exposed to large-scale genocide”, showed that figures differed so significantly (between 10 and 163 armed insurgents, nine to 111 unarmed civilians and zero to 97 government forces), that the “truth” was impossible to establish. Similarly, analysis of The Guardian’s data blog on casualties as of December 2011, based solely on press reports largely from opposition sources, contained basic inaccuracies and made no reference to any killings of armed insurgents during the entire 10-month period.

So the Observatory and “activists” provide doctored figures, the Western media report these figures uncritically, and the UN provides reports on the basis of opposition and activist sources alone. The December 2011 UN Human Rights Commissioner’s report was based solely on interviews with 233 alleged “army defectors”; similarly, the first UN report to accuse the Syrian government of crimes against humanity was based on 369 interviews with “victims and witnesses”. The spokesman for the UN Office of the High Commission for Human Rights explained that while “getting evidence from victims and defectors – some who corroborated specific names”, the UN “is not in a position to cross-check names and will never be in a position to do that … The lists are clear – the question is whether we can fully endorse their accuracy.”

British public-service broadcaster Channel 4 has championed the cause of Syrian “video journalists” who it claims are leading a “Syrian media revolution”. The channel’s foreign-affairs correspondent Jonathan Miller wrote: “Each report is datelined; exact location and date, [which] doesn’t in itself necessarily authenticate the report, but combined with other reports from other districts of the same attack filmed from a different location, the reports have the effect of corroborating each other.” The channel even made a documentary of activists exaggerating the “truth” – “even if it means embellishing events”.

During the early months of the Syrian conflict, activists like the now-notorious Danny and Khaled Abou Salah were regularly interviewed in the Western media – that is until footage found by the Syrian army in Homs after the attack on insurgents showed them, among other things, preparing child “victims” for interviews and until their “witness statements” lost all credibility. The New York Times’ Neil MacFarquhar, reporting from Beirut, almost exclusively bases his reports on “activists speaking by Skype” and “video posted on YouTube”.

Described as “the most horrific video” yet by Britain’s Daily Mail, a YouTube clip of an opposition member being “buried alive” was found most likely to be fake. Perhaps more telling than the use of the actual photo by the British Broadcasting Corp of hundreds of body bags from Iraq in 2003 that was used for the story of the al-Houla massacre three weeks ago was the caption beneath the photo: “Photo from Activist. This image – which cannot be independently verified – is believed to show bodies of children in Houla awaiting funeral.”

Nevertheless, activist-supplied videos and statements continue to provide the basis for unquestioned reports in the mainstream press: in the wake of the Houla massacre, for example, The Guardian ran a front-page story – “among the most important of the testimonies” from an army defector reportedly on leave at the time. From his house 300 meters away, the man saw and heard the massacre, despite there being persistent shelling at the time. He claimed to have seen men “he knew to be shabiha “riding into Taldous village in cars, motorbikes and army trucks, shouting: ‘Shabiha forever, for your eyes, Assad.'”

This is not to argue that Syrian security forces and some supporters of the Syrian government have not committed abuses and killings; they have admitted this to be the case. “Don’t put me in a position of defending brutality and knifing people,” former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said about Syria recently. “Frankly that is not the issue. We do know these things happened, and they are horrible. They also happened on a much larger scale in many other countries in which we have not intervened.”

What we are witnessing is a new generation of warfare – an information war where, by using what is in effect propaganda, the aim is to construct a consensual consciousness to provide overwhelming public support for regime change.

Not to be outdone by Senator McCain (described by a leading US foreign-policy magazine as one of the “three amigos … who have rarely found a country they didn’t want to bomb or invade”), The Guardian itself noted in March: “If you think Guardian readers are a peace-loving bunch, think again. In an online poll, more than 83% [13,200 votes] have so far backed John McCain’s call to launch air strikes against Syria.”

While The Guardian describes the so-called shabihain what appears to be a piece of pure propaganda – “according to demonstrators” it interviewed – as “large lines of plain-clothed or khaki-clad men and boys armed with submachine-guns” who appear “awaiting an excuse to intervene” and who fire on protesters, a senior European diplomat based in the region told me that it is not in fact clear who the shabiha are, or whether they actually exist.

The diplomat told me of an instance when the UN monitors were filmed by activists as they were inspecting an insurgent-blocked subsidiary road; they later saw footage of themselves at the same ditch on the international news spliced in such a way as to make it appear that there had been bodies in an excavated area and that the UN monitors were watching bodies being removed, whereas in fact it was no more than a ditch across a road that they had been filming.

Human rights are a fundamental component of this information war that is a cover for regime change. By in effect taking a one-sided approach to events in Syria, leading human-rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are, willingly or unwillingly, being used as an integral part of this information war on Syria.

Despite publishing the odd report on abuses, torture and killings perpetrated by the insurgents, they cast the conflict in Syria as a simple one-sided case of aggressors and victims, lamenting, along the lines of John Bolton and McCain, “Why is the world doing nothing?” Amnesty International’s Eyes on Syria site, for example, exclusively documents “the scale of torture and ill-treatment by security forces, army and pro-government armed gangs”, harassment of “pro-reform” Syrians, and deaths in government custody.

A notable exception has been the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has continually criticized the militarization of humanitarian assistance. When former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for the creation of “humanitarian corridors”, the ICRC publicly criticized a move that would inevitably involve the deployment of armed forces to enforce the zones.

The use of propaganda as a tool in war is an old one. During World War I, in the wake of British propaganda of “babies [with] their hands cut off … impaled on bayonets … loudly spoken of in buses and public places … paraded, not as an isolated instance of an atrocity, but as … a common practice”, a member of Parliament wrote: “In Parliament there was the usual evasion … the only evidence given was ‘seen by witnesses’.”

What we see now in coverage of Syria has echoes of 2003 – Western governments and the Western media accept at face value the claims of exiles living in the West. Paul Pillar, a former official of the US Central Intelligence Agency now at Georgetown University in Washington, notes that the neocon case for arming the Syrian opposition “is a continuation of the same patterns of neoconservative thinking that led to [president George W] Bush’s war [on Iraq]. There is the same wishful thinking substituting for careful analysis about consequences.”

Charged with defining the future of warfare, the US deputy chief of staff for intelligence in 1997 defined this “conflict between information masters and information victims … We are already masters of information warfare … we write the script,” he wrote. “Societies that … cannot manage the flow of information simply will not be competitive … Emotions, rather than strategy, will set the terms of struggles.” Against such an onslaught, there is little the Syrian government can do to defend itself – Assad has already said that Syria cannot win the media war with the West.

As Syria tips into the next more violent stage of sectarian war, with the SNC/FSA and their foreign backers increasing the ante with possible supplies if heavy weapons by the US, leading to more violent attacks, and the Syrian government (with its Republican Guard and the Syrian Army’s powerful 4th Division still held in reserve) cracking down on “all armed groups”, we should expect to see the “crusaders” in the mainstream media follow suit with their onslaught on Syrian government “atrocities” – massacres, use of children as human shields, claims of the imminent collapse of the Syrian government, etc.

But we would do well to acknowledge that there are two competing narratives out there. The BBC acknowledged recently that while “video filed by the opposition … may provide some insight into the story on the ground … stories are never black and white – [they are] often shades of grey”, and Channel 4’s Alex Thomson’s near escape after being set up by the Free Syria Army prompted him to say: “Do not for one moment believe that my experience with the rebels in al-Qusair was a one-off.” It makes you wonder, he wrote, “who else has had this experience when attempting to find out what is going on in rebel-held Syria”. The narrative, however, complete with myths, has established a virtual reality that is now set in stone.

Sixteen months into the conflict, it is too little, too late to acknowledge that there are “shades of grey” at play in the Syrian context: for 16 months, The Guardian, Channel 4, the BBC and others have presented the conflict, using largely spurious “evidence”, in exactly the black-and-white terms that increasingly people are now questioning. Peter Oborne, writing some months ago in The Daily Telegraph, warned that by presenting the conflict as a struggle between the regime and “the people”, British Prime Minister David Cameron is either “poorly briefed or he is coming dangerously close to a calculated deception of the British public”.
The Takfiri jihadists and their backers have been allowed to define and dominate the crisis. The crisis is now symbolized by car bombings, assassinations, mutilations and atrocities. This empowering of the extreme end of the opposition spectrum – albeit a minority – has in effect silenced and pushed to the sidelines the middle ground – that is, most of the internal opposition. One key internal opposition leader recently told Conflicts Forum that, like other leaders, he has had close relatives assassinated by the Salafists. The internal opposition has acknowledged the stark choice between two undesirables – either a dialogue that currently is not realizable, or the downfall of Syria, as Al-Akhbar, one of the leading independent newspapers in the region, recently reported.

With weapons of war, words and ideology, the self-appointed “Friends of Syria” have done everything they can to tiptoe around the UNSC and to undercut all attempts at an intra-Syrian political dialogue and a negotiated end to the conflict, of which the Annan mission is the latest attempt. The West/Saudi/Qatari “dirty war” on Syria applies as much to its (dis)information campaign as it does to getting others to fight and kill for them.

As was no doubt the intention, Clinton’s “spin” that Russia was supplying attack helicopters to Syria went a long way – the US Congress, the British government and the mainstream media all fell into line calling for action. A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee wrote to the US defense secretary calling the Russian state arms firm “an enabler of mass murder in Syria”, and Cobra, the British government’s emergency security committee, met several times.

It turned out, however, that what the New York Times described as “the Obama administration’s sharpest criticism yet of Russia’s support for the Syrian government” was, according to a senior Defense Department official, “a little spin” put on the story by Clinton so as “to put the Russians in a difficult position”. It was three helicopters of “marginal use militarily”, explained the Times, returning from routine servicing in Russia.

For their part, the mainstream media bear some responsibility for the slide toward sectarian war in Syria, the victims of which, as always, are civilians. The media’s conceptualization of victims and oppressors has in effect eliminated the space for negotiation. Lavrov has warned: “Either we gather everyone with influence at the negotiating table or once again we depart into ideology, where it is declared shamelessly that everything is the fault of the regime, while everyone else are angels and therefore the regime should be changed.

“The way the Syrian crisis is resolved”, he advised, “will play an important role in the world tomorrow; whether the world will be based on the UN Charter, or a place where might makes right.”

Aisling Byrne is projects coordinator with Conflicts Forum and is based in Beirut.

Source: Asia Times

America In Decline

The Soul Crushing Despair of Lowered Expectations…

All over America tonight there are people that believe that their lives are over.  When you do everything that you know how to do to get a job and you still can’t get one it can be absolutely soul crushing.  If you have ever been unemployed for an extended period of time you know exactly what I am talking about.  When you have been unemployed for month after month it can be very tempting to totally cut yourself off from society.  Those that are kind will look at you with pity and those that are cruel will treat you as though you are a total loser.  It doesn’t matter that America is in decline and that our economy is not producing nearly enough jobs for everyone anymore.  In our society, one of the primary things that defines our lives is what we do for a living.  Just think about it.  When you are out in a social situation, what is one of the very first things that people ask?  They want to know what you “do”.  Well, if you don’t “do” anything, then you are not part of the club.  But the worst part of being unemployed for many Americans is the relentless pressure from family and friends.  Often they have no idea how hard it is to find a job in this economy – especially if they still have jobs.  Sometimes the pressure becomes too great.  Sadly, we are seeing unemployment break up a lot of marriages in America today.  Things are really hard out there right now.  A very large number of highly educated Americans have taken very low paying service jobs in recent years just so that they can have some money coming in even as they “look for something else”.  Unfortunately, in many cases that “something else” never materializes.  In the past, America was “the land of opportunity” where anything was possible.  But today America has become “the land of lowered expectations” and the worst is yet to come.

We live during a time when “the American Dream” is literally being redefined.  In the old days, just about anyone could get a good job that would pay enough to make it possible to buy a house, buy a nice car and raise a family.

Unfortunately, those days are long gone.  The following is from a recent NPR article….

The town of Lorain, Ohio, used to embody this dream. It was a place where you could get a good job, raise a family and comfortably retire.

“Now you can see what it is. Nothing,” says John Beribak. “The shipyards are gone, the Ford plant is gone, the steel plant is gone.” His voice cracks as he describes the town he’s lived in his whole life.

“I mean, I grew up across the street from the steel plant when there was 15,000 people working there,” he says. “My dad worked there. I worked there when I got out of the Air Force. It’s just sad.”

We live in an economy that is in serious decline.  In this environment no job is safe.  In fact, even Goldman Sachs is laying off workers these days.

Millions of Americans are suffering from deep depression because they can’t find jobs.  Many of them are sitting at home right now blankly starting at their television screens as they wonder why nobody wants to hire them.  Some have been unemployed for years and have sent out thousands upon thousands of resumes.  The following is from a recent article by J.D. Hicks….

I have a brilliant cousin with a $180K Syracuse education working part-time at a department store. She has literally sent out 38,000 resumes in the span of a year to no avail. I have another very bright friend with the kindest heart who is so desperate he has applied for dishwashing jobs and didn’t get them, sending him deeper into depression. I’m sure we all know people like this, or perhaps have even been there ourselves.

Society has trained us to believe that we are worthless without a job. Indeed, we feel worthless when we are unemployed with few prospects of making money. Family, friends, and peers constantly remind us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that we “need” a job.

Have you ever been unemployed?

How did it make you feel?

How were you treated by your family and friends?

In the old days, a college education was almost a guaranteed ticket to the middle class.

But these days, a college education guarantees you absolutely nothing.

As a recent article by Jed Graham detailed, most young unemployed workers in America today have at least some college education….

For the first time in history, the number of jobless workers age 25 and up who have attended some college now exceeds the ranks of those who settled for a high school diploma or less.

Out of 9 million unemployed in April, 4.7 million had gone to college or graduated and 4.3 million had not, seasonally adjusted Labor Department data show.

Overall, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed last year.

It is tough to tell young college graduates with their whole lives ahead of them that they need to lower their expectations because America is in decline.

So where did all the jobs go?

Well, one place they went is overseas.  Over the past couple of decades, millions upon millions of good jobs have left the United States and have gone over to the other side of the world.

That is why you see gleaming new factories going up all over China even while our once great manufacturing cities are turning into crime-infested warzones.

But as a recent WND article reported, the WTO has a solution.  They plan to replace “Made in China” labels with “Made in the World” labels so that we don’t feel so bad about losing our jobs and our economic infrastructure…

The World Trade Organization is moving closer to eliminating country-of-origin labels and replacing them with “Made in the World” initiative labels because they say we need to “reduce public opposition to free trade” and “re-engineer global governance.”

As the number of middle class jobs has steadily declined in recent years, the number of low paying service jobs has increased.

In a previous article, I discussed how approximately one out of every four U.S. workers now makes $10 an hour or less.

Could your family survive on 10 dollars an hour?

Today, you can find hordes of very smart, very talented Americans flipping burgers, waiting tables and welcoming people to Wal-Mart.

Sadly, the United States now has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.

Perhaps we should applaud our leaders for doing such a great job of destroying the American Dream.

Because so many Americans are working crappy jobs, a very large percentage of them have absolutely no savings to speak of.

According to one survey, 42 percent of all American workers live paycheck to paycheck.

I am constantly encouraging people to save up an “emergency fund” that will enable them to pay their bills for at least 6 months if they suddenly become unemployed.

Unfortunately, for many Americans that is simply not possible.  Way too many families are just barely scraping by from month to month.

Another area of the economy where Americans are facing lowered expectations is in housing.

In the old days, most Americans dreamed of owning their own homes.

But today we are being told that things have changed.  For example, a recent USA Today article was entitled “Home rentals — the new American Dream?“….

Steve and Jodi Jacobson bought their Phoenix-area “dream home” in 2005. They built flagstone steps to the front door. They tiled the kitchen and bathroom. They entertained often, enjoying their mountain views.

“We put our soul into that house,” says Steve Jacobson, 37.

Then, home prices tanked more than 50%. Steve, a software quality assurance engineer, suffered pay cuts. In 2010, foreclosure claimed the home and their $100,000 down payment.

The Jacobsons didn’t lose their desire to live in a single-family home, however. They now rent one, like many other former homeowners displaced by foreclosure.

Is that what we are supposed to tell future generations of Americans?

“Listen Johnny and Suzie, if you work really, really hard at your minimum wage jobs perhaps someday you will be able to rent a home that has been foreclosed by a big, greedy bank”.

It is so sad to watch what is happening to this country.

These days many Americans are scratching and clawing and doing everything that they can to make it, but they still find themselves short on money at the end of the month.

Many are turning to debt in an attempt to bridge the gap.  According to CNN, 40 percent of “low- and middle-income households” are using credit cards to pay for basic living expenses.

Overall, U.S. consumers have more than 11 trillion dollars in debt right now.

That is an incredible number.

As the economy has declined, a lot of families have completely given up trying to make it on their own and have turned to the U.S. government for financial help.  Today, an astounding 49.1 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives government benefits.

Just think about that number for a while.  It is one of the clearest signs that America is in deep, deep decline.

Unfortunately, things are about to get even worse.  The next wave of the financial crisis is unfolding in Europe and we will all be talking about another “major global recession” very soon.

That means that unemployment in the United States is going to get a lot worse.

For the millions upon millions of Americans that are already suffering through the horror of unemployment, that is really bad news.

Posted below is a trailer for a new HBO documentary entitled “Hard Times: Lost on Long Island”.  Please take a few minutes to watch , because I think it does a good job of showing the soul crushing despair that many unemployed Americans are going through right now.

Source: The Economic Collapse

Poor America – Video

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.

P a n o r a m a [B B C] – Video Documentary

CDC Calls Morgellons’ Nanoworms a Delusion, Protects DARPA

Imagine having the mental prowess to be able to create living filaments heretofore unknown, that can reproduce themselves, some of which come with identifying letters embossed on them, and then to make them extrude from beneath your skin, all against your conscious will.

Sound like science fiction? It’s not, says the US Centers for Disease Control.

Despite having spent four years and $600,000, and using the world’s largest forensic database, the premier health agency reports it is unable to identify the source of the fibers emanating from those suffering with Morgellons. [1]

The CDC suggests that four out of a hundred thousand people, the rate of infection in Northern California, are imagining these filaments into existence.

Comprising an array of physical and mental symptoms [2], Morgellons is distinguished by novel fibers that protrude from the skin, causing lesions and sores that do not heal, or that heal very slowly. Though clustered in California, Florida and Texas, it is found in every state and around the planet.

“We conducted an investigation of this unexplained dermopathy to characterize the clinical and epidemiologic features and explore potential etiologies,” the paper explains. The only potential etiology suggested was that the patients were delusional:

“No common underlying medical condition or infectious source was identified, similar to more commonly recognized conditions such as delusional infestation.”

The CDC provided more information in its press releases [3] hyping the study than it did in the 300-word study published last week. Its Unexplained Dermopathy webpage goes beyond what was reported in the actual study, saying there is “no evidence of an environmental link,” and promised to do no further studies. [4]

“People who suffer from Morgellons disease are NOT delusional no matter what the CDC or the mainstream press would have you believe,” says Jan Smith of MorgellonsExposed.com. She’s suffered with Morgellons for over 13 years.

The image above is on her home page. “Ponder why a person with Morgellons disease would have tissue coming out of their body with embossed letters on it. This photo is real and the sample has not been altered in any way. It is available for research and DNA testing.” [5]

The CDC study reported, “Most materials collected from participants’ skin were composed of cellulose, likely of cotton origin.”

One of the specimens extruded from Smith’s body was found to be composed of cellulose and GNA, the synthetic form of DNA. [6] Glycol nucleic acid does not occur naturally; it is used to create synthetic life forms. [7]

But why would the CDC not know exactly the origin of the cellulose, instead saying it’s likely from cotton? And what about the rest that was not cellulose? The study provided no details.

The CDC sent the cellulose and unnatural fibers to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, reports the Associated Press. [8] AFIP has been collecting fiber samples and other forensic material for 150 years. [9] Its 2011 budget was $65 million. [10] Surely, if these novel fibers are natural or lab-created, the AFIP would know. Apparently not.

AFIP is the same group that collected all the forensic evidence of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and at the Pennsylvania crash site, under code name Operation Noble Eagle. [11] Forensic evidence and a generous dose of imagination led National Geographic to produce a documentary asserting that the plane that supposedly hit the Pentagon disintegrated on impact. Talk about delusion.

Please support my work by reading the full piece at Activist Post. Thanks!

Plan B – How To Loot Nations And Their Banks Legally

Is there a plan B? That question is usually asked of governments regarding their attempts to ‘save’ the banks domiciled in their country. But has anyone asked if the banks have a plan B?

Does anyone think that if our governments fail to keep to their austerity targets and fail to keep bailing out the banking sector, that the banks will just shrug and say, “Well, thanks for trying” and accept their fate? Or do you think the banks might have a Plan B of their own?

First let’s be clear about Plan A. That plan is to enforce an era of long-term austerity cuts to public services, in part to cut public expenditure so as to free up money for spending on the banks, but perhaps more importantly to further atrophy public services so that private providers can take over. A privatization of services which will bring great profits and cash flow to the private sector and to the banks who finance them, and a further general victory for those who feel that private debts rather than public taxes should be what underpins our national life and social contract.

Plan A therefore requires that governments convince their populace that private debts should be taken on to the public purse and that once taken on, the contracts signed by governments on behalf of the tax payers/citizens, are then sacrosanct and above any democratic change of mind. If governments can hold their peoples to this,then the banks are ‘saved’ with the added bonus that democracy and the ‘Rights’ it once guaranteed will all have been redefined as subordinate to finance and its contracts, and our citizenship will have become second to one’s contractual place in a web of private debts. Debts to the private lenders will become more important than taxes to the public exchequer. And as they do the State will wither away, leaving free-market believers and extreme libertarians exactly where they have always wanted to be – in charge – by dint of being rich. It is, in my view, a bleak future which I once described as A Toxic Debt Wasteland.

BUT it does all depend on governments being able to suppress discontent and to outlaw opposition in the sense of saying to people you  may disagree but we have now declared these debts and their repayment to be outside democratic control and immune to any attempt to rescind or repudiate the agreed debt contracts. As the severity of the austerity cuts to social services (health, education, pensions etc)  becomes painfully clearer  to people and the ‘necessity’ for them is ‘regretfully’ extended year after year, it will become harder and harder to justify, let alone impose, such suffering. We will enter an era of vicious sectarian blame. We are already in it, but it will get much darker.

The banks and those whose wealth and power is tied to them, would obviously prefer Plan A to succeed. It makes governments do all the dirty work and it would profit the banks far more in the long run. If you want to bleed a man – kill him and you get about 5 litres/quarts. But strap him to a gurney with a catheter in his arm and a drip feed in his nose, and he will bleed for you for as long as his system can stand it. That is Plan A. But what if it fails?

I cannot believe the banks, with everything at stake, have not thought it prudent to have a plan B. So here are my thoughts on what that plan could be.  Let me say now, I do not think this plan was a long term conspiracy. I do not think the end game was in mind when the first elements were put in place. It has, I think, been constructed opportunistically.  But the end result is no less dark and threatening.

What I offer from here on is thinking out loud. I obvioulsy have no proof at all that there is a plan B. All I can hope to do is show you the elements which I think could make a Plan B for the banks. Then my argument is that if the mechanism I describe could work, if I have not simply misunderstood something, then I think the banks will surely have thought of it before me. And so it either already exists or it will. I think there are scraps of information that suggest it does exist and the collapse of MF Global might even be the first example of Plan B in action. The MF Global case certainly contains all the clues.

MF Global imploded when it could not get the short term funding it needed. There were two kinds of funding MF Global relied upon for its liquidity/cash flow: repo and hypothecation. For those not familiar, Repo is when a bank or brokerage ‘sells’ an asset for cash but with the agreement that it will re-purchase – hence ‘repo’ – the asset at an agreed date for an agreed price. It is not really a sale but a loan. Repo is the oxygen the financial world breathes. Repo is a $10 Trillion market.

The other main source of the essential short term funding was Hypothecation. This is when a bank or brokerage pledges an asset to a ‘lender’ in return for cash but the asset remains in the possession of the borrower. What the ‘lender’ gets is hypothetical control of the asset. Although the asset never actually changes hands, the new ‘owner’s’ hypothetical control of the asset allows her  to do what she wishes with the asset. Including re-hypothecating the asset to another bank or brokerage. If she does so then the hypothetical control passes to yet another ‘owner’. Even though physically it remain where it started.

Like repo – hypothecation and re-hypothecation are truely massive parts of modern debt-based banking. So the first thing the MF Global case tells us is that what happened is not due to some peripheral, parochial rogue trader-esque, isolated problem. What happened was as a result of a mechanism right at the very heart of the financial system.

In the MF Global collapse what ZeroHedge, and following them, I and others wrote about, was the way in which not only did MF Global go bankrupt, but so also did some of their clients when they found the money they thought MF Global was holding for them, went unaccountably missing. Client’s money went missing because it was ‘mingled’ with the brokerage’s money when it should not have been. Brokers should keep them separate. But it seems in the ‘re-hypothecation’ of assets it was mingled. Former CEO of MF Global, Mr Corzine has sworn under oath he knew nothing about his co-mingling nor the irregularities with his company’s re-hypothecation.  It has been rumoured the client’s money may now be, possibly, in the hands of JP Morgan.

This hint of illegality has grabbed everyone’s attention. But I think it is actually the legal part of the story not the possibly illegal part which is by far the more important.

In my opinion the key to the bank’s Plan B is in understanding why any money/assets were taken from MF Global after it had gone bankrupt and how exactly it went under in the first place. We all know MF Global had huge holdings of dicey European sovereign debt. But those debts have not become worthless so what caused MF to collapse? .

The answer to all these questions  lie in a change to Bankruptcy laws that happened around the world between 2002 and 05. This might seem like a detour into nerd city but it is not. It is the key.

When a company declares bankruptcy there is what the Americans call an ‘automatic stay’, which means all the assets left in a company at the moment it goes bankrupt are protected from the rush of creditor’s demands until appointed auditors can sort out who should get what. The automatic stay prevents a first come first served disorderly looting where those with the most muscle getting everything and everyone else getting nothing. As we are all painfully aware now, there is a legal pecking order to who gets paid before who, with Senior bond holders at the top. But, in America culminating in 2005 with the passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) the order was changed. And that change is the crucial event.

At the time the law was being passed few were aware of this change and even fewer were aware of how important it would become. At the  time the furore was all about changes to personal bankruptcy. The Credit Card industry (AKA Banks) had spent more than a decade and its rumoured as much as $100 million lobbying to make bankruptcy much harder and more punitive for ordinary debtors.

An article from 2005 in the Boston Globe quoting a very senior Republican Senator, gives a flavour of what was then being said about ordinary people who fell into debt.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has said that millions of Americans are bankrupt or near-bankrupt because “they run up huge bills and then expect society to pay for them.”

After 4 years of bailing out banks who did exactly that the irony is enough to gag on.

But what was not talked about was an amendment which was put into the bill and, as far as I know little debated. Don’t let the word ‘amendment’ mislead you. Amendments are generally not there as refinements and improvements on the original idea. Whenever a bill goes through Congress every lobby group and industry with something it wants done, gets their tamed/owned/ political friends to tack on the change in the law that suits them in return for supporting the original bill. The bill emerges from this process festooned with ‘amendments’ to other vaguely related laws. Amendments are the price of getting the original bill passed.  They are often little understood, written by and for the benefit of the sponsoring lobby group and can be far more influential than the bill they are smuggled in on. This is certainly the case here.

According to a,

“the provisions [in the amendment] were derived from recommendations from the President’s Working Group and revisions espoused by the financial industry”

The President at the time was Bush and one of the most vociferous sponsors of the amendment was none other than Senator Leach whose other claim to fame was the Gram-Leech-Bliley Act which repealed most of the Glass Steagal Act of 1933 whose repeal virtually assured that the present debt crisis would happen. When bankers play pocket billiards, Senator Leach is what they prod their balls with. Ribaldry aside Senator Leach can certainly be described as one of the principle architects of our present global misery. But I digress.

What was this ammendment? The ammendment exempted repos (and hypothecated and re-hypothecated assets) and a whole range of derivatives from the automatic stay. It also allowed lower quality assets to qualify for the exemptions.

Which means,

The special bankruptcy treatment given repos and derivatives means that repo lenders and parties to derivative contracts can keep the collateral if their trading partner becomes insolvent. This exempts them from the “automatic stay”  rule in bankruptcy, which prohibits most creditors from trying to collect ahead of others.

Or as the official report from the US Financial Crisis Inquirey Commission said,

under a 2005 amendment to the bankruptcy laws, derivatives counterparties were given the advantage over other creditors of being able to immediately terminate their contracts and seize collateral at the time of bankruptcy. (p. 48)

So when a bank goes bankrupt, BEFORE even the most senior bond holders, the repo lenders and derivatives traders can remove, or keep all the assets pledged to them.

This amendment which was touted as necessary to reduce systemic risk in financial bankruptcies also allowed a whole range of far riskier assets to be used, making them too immune from the automatic stay in the event of bankruptcy. Which meant traders flocked to a market where risky assets would be traded and used as collateral without apparent risk to the lender. The size of the repo market hugely increased and riskier assets were gladly accepted as collateral because traders saw that if the person they had lent to went down they could get your money back before anyone else and no one could stop them.

It also did one other thing. Because the repo and derivatives traders ran no risk – they could get their money out of a failing bank before anyone else, it meant they had no reason at all to try to stop a bank from going under. Quite the opposite.

All other creditors – bond holders – risk losing some of their money in a bankruptcy. So they have a reason to want to avoid bankruptcy of a trading partner. Not so the repo and derivatives partners. They would now be best served by looting the company – perfectly legally – as soon as trouble seemed likely. In fact the repo and derivatives traders could push a bank that owed them money over into bankruptcy when it most suited them as creditors. When, for example, they might be in need of a bit of cash themselves to meet a few pressing creditors of their own.

The collapse of both Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG were all directly because repo and derivatives partners of those instituions suddenly stoppped trading and ‘looted’ them instead.

According to Enrico Perotti, professor of international finance at Amsterdam Business School  speaking at the London Conference on The Future of Bank Funding, held in June of this year, 2011,

The financial crisis happened when repo lenders and derivative parties lost confidence in the mortgage-backed securities they’d accepted as collateral for repo loans and credit default swaps. They demanded to be paid, forcing their troubled trading partners into fire sales of their holdings to raise cash. They were  unconcerned that they might drive their trading partners into bankruptcy, because they were exempt from the automatic stay.

Professor Perotti went on to say,

As often in financial regulation, this leads to unintended consequences. As a default leads to repossession of collateral for all safe harbor claims, repossession accelerates fire sales, resulting in a disorderly resolution, with a rush to sell collateral ahead of others, creating a downward spiral in valuations. The timing of the jumps in risk spreads on Lehman, two days after the default, demonstrates this effect, as does AIG.

Should the bankers and their political fluffers like Mr Leach have known? Well they were warned at the time. In 2005 a paper entitled “Derivatives and the Bankruptcy Code: Why the Special Treatment?” by Franklin R. Edwards and Edward R. Morrison, in the Yale Journal of Regulation
http://www1.gsb.columbia.edu/mygsb/faculty/research/pubfiles/1666/Morrison%20%26%20Edwards%20Yale%20Rev

VI. Conclusion
… the Code’s special treatment of derivatives contracts cannot be justified by a fear of systemic risk…. Indeed, exempting derivatives counterparties from the automatic stay may make matters worse by increasing systemic risk….Our analysis, however, should worry members of Congress and legislators in other countries. They have been lobbied heavily by special interest groups (such as ISDA) to expand the special treatment of derivatives on grounds that such legislation is necessary to prevent a systemic meltdown in OTC derivatives markets should a derivatives counterparty suffer financial distress.

Our analysis casts serious doubt on this proposition. Systemic risk may be a real threat, but bankruptcy law has no role to play in addressing it.”

The same changes to the bankruptcy laws were also adopted in the UK and throughout Europe. In fact they may well have preceded them. I simply have not done that research yet. And the changes in the UK and Europe were also lobbied for and sponsored  by the banks via among others the ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association). Most of the Big banks are ISDA members.

OK all of that was the back-ground to show you how we got here and that it is all ‘legal’. On the basis of laws sponsored by the banks  of course. Now lets come to the present.

MF Global is where I started. There was something about its collapse which did not seem right to me. Mr Corzine’s claim that he ‘didn’t know’ where his clients’ money had gone might be true, but I was and am still, left with the feeling that there is a deeper story here.When I wrote about MF Global and the renewed crisis of bank lending, I came across the fact that in the six months to June 2011 the global trade in Derivatives increased by 18% to an astonishing $707 trillion in nominal value (the face value of all the contracts). And remember the Repo market is $10 trillion.

Somehow MF Global’s collapse and the huge increase in derivatives trading felt related. For me it was not the huge exposure to risky European bonds which MF Global had deliberately amassed, it was the nature of its demise, the trigger, and what happened to its assets afterwards, which were key. MF Global collapsed because it could not get short term funding. It could not get other financial institutions to accept its assets as collateral for Repo agreements nor hypothecate tham any longer.

When MF Global went down it did so because its repo, derivaitve and hypothecation partners essentially foreclosed on it. And when they did so they then ‘looted’ the company. And because of the co-mingling of clients money in the hypothecation deals the ‘looters’ also seized clients money as well. The co-mingling story is what brought the whole thing into the light but also provided a wonderful distraction.

The important point is that the change in the Bankruptcy laws. The change, as illustrated by Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG has made the markets more not less systemically unstable. Yet the banks have defeated all attempts to reform these unwise laws. The Dodd Frank financial reform act in eth US did nothing to address them AT ALL.  Mr Dodd was lobbied very hard to make sure of this.

Why?

Here, finally, is my answer.

Let us say you are a bank or broker that has bought up a lot of European bank and sovereign bonds from Italy, Spain and Greece for example. You would be very exposed to great losses should those countries or their banks default. You are relying on the politicians forcing their tax payers to bail out you and the other banks you trade with. What if they don’t?

One solution would be to sell as many of those bonds as you could accepting the inevitable losses as being better than a much larger loss if the banks or nations or both, defaulted.  The other solution, counter-intuitively, would be to do more business with them. But make sure it is repo lending and derivative trading. Specifically offer the banks in troubled nations CDS insurance on their own bad debts and currency swaps. How would this help?

First, lets keep in mind that the trade in both these types of derivatives did increase by 18% in the first 6 months of 2011 precisely as the Euro crisis has worsened.

If a bank or nation was to default on you as a mere bond holder, you would have to wait in a the queue of creditors to see what you were going to be given back. And some ‘hair cut’ would be likely. But if you had done rather a lot of derivatives trading (CDS insurance and currency swaps are both derivative trades) then you would not have to wait. You would seize all the collateral the bank had pledged to you for repo lending or derivative trading and walk away. Now you will say that if  you had done CDS insurance then you might well have to pay back out the money you had seized. Except that possession is nine tenths of the law. While lawyers set about arguing about what you owe, the critical fact is that in the mean time, in the height of the crisis you HAVE the money. JP Morgan allegedly has MF Global money while other people’s lawyers can only argue about it.

This will also be true if you have also rather wisely been on the right side of lots of re-hypothecation deals and repo deals with the collapsed bank. In both cases if the collapsed bank had pledged to you assets for Repo or hypothecation then you get to keep all those assets in the case of the bank going bankrupt.  We have the clear proof of this already. As Zerohedge reported some days ago, “HSBC Sues MF Global Over Disputed Ownership Of Physical Gold”. It seems HSBC’s gold may have been hypothecated or re-hypothecated. Someone else, some other bank, has their gold and all they have are lots of lawyers charging them fat fees.

So what we have, courtesy of the change in the bankruptcy laws is the means for banks to loot each other. Simply become a major short term funder via repo or hypothecation or a major counterpary in derivatives deals with the ailing bank and in both cases should the bank you are lending to go bankrupt, you will keep all  the assets it pledged to you before any other creditor get a chance.

If I am right then MF Global was the first hint of Plan B in action. The bankruptcy laws allow a mechanism for banks to disembowel each other. The strongest lend to the weaker and loot them when the moment of crisis approaches. The plan allows the biggest banks, those who happen to be burdened with massive holdings of dodgy euro area bonds, to leap out of the bond crisis and instead profit from a bankruptcy which might otherwise have killed them. All that is required is to know the import of the bankruptcy law and do as much repo, hypothecation and derivative trading with the weaker banks as you can. To me, this gives a possible answer to why there has been such a surge in derivatives trading.

If I am right about all this, I think this means that some of the biggest banks, themselves, have already constructed and greatly enlarged a now truly massive trip wired auto-destruct on the banking system. If they have and they have explained any of this to our politicians then it would explain why our governments have been so abjectly willing to bail out any and all of the biggest banks and sacrifice anything else in the process. Any hint of relucatnace and the banks can make veiled reference to the extreme ‘risk’ of systemic ‘panic’ and forced liquidations. None of which is really a panic, since they have engineered it.

Are the banks threatening us? No, no, good lord no! Just pointing out the reality of the state of the system. There just happens to be a gun pointed at our head and the banks just happen to find their finger on the trigger. All they ask is that we do nothing to make them feel that their best interests are served by pulling it. And all we have to do to avoid that is stick to plan A. Simple.

But now I come to the really ugly part.

For the last four years who has been putting money in to the banks? And who has become a massive bond holder in all the banks? We have. First via our national banks and now via the Fed, ECB and various tax payer funded bail out funds. We are the bond holders who would be shafted by the Plan B looting. We would be the people waiting in line for the money the banks would have already made off with.

It is the money we have been putting in to bail out the biggest banks which they have then been using as collateral for offering weaker banks in weaker nations, repo loans or hypothecation. And the money or government bonds the weaker banks are using to pledge as assets and collateral for those loans or in  derivative deals with the bigger banks is also from us. We have and are funding both sides of the deal.

The result is that the assets which the big banks would be legally allowed to seize and keep in the event of the failing bank actually going under would be ours.

To give a concrete example. Spain or Greece puts its tax payer money in to one of its insolvent banks.That bank then uses that money to get a short term repo or hypothecated it for loan. Or it uses it to hedge its currency problems via a currency swap or buys CDS insurance on assets it is deeply worried about. If the weak bank then goes down all those assets are seized by the big bank who was lending or was the counter-party to the derivative deals. The tax payer gets zero. And there is no redress. It was legally done. And the money the Big bank would have used to get themselves into this position would be the bail out money we had earlier given to the mega banks. They would have used that money against us – again.

The largest banks, those with the greatest exposure to bank and sovereign bonds from the most indebted euro nations, have the most to gain from doing derivative. repo and hypothecation deals with the troubled euro area banks and nations. The more assets the weak banks and nations have pledged in deals with teh Big banks, the more theBig banks will walk away with in the event of a crash.  I suggest this is why, even as this crisis has worsened, the Big banks have been increasing by 18% their trade in derivatives and why Repo and hypothecation is as large or larger than even before the crash.

I am sorry this has been such a long piece but I wanted you to see exactly how I came to this because I hope you can show me how I am wrong. Please do so politely and I will go downstairs and celebrate my stupidity with a cup of tea, before apologizing to you all.  I would very much like to be wrong.

But if I am not wrong, then the banks have created a financial Armageddon looting machine. Their Plan B is a mechanism to loot not just the more vulnerable banks in weaker nations, but those nations themselves. And the looting will not take months not even days. It could happen in hours if not minutes. Our leaders would have only a few hours to decide who they would side with: the banks or us. The past four years give me no faith they would chose us.

David Malone is author of the ““. David has a career spanning nearly twenty years producing and directing documentaries for both the BBC and Channel4. His series Testing God was shortlisted for the Royal Television Society best documentary series and was described by The Times as “moving and startling – as close to poetry as television gets.” For the last three years David has focused considerable attention on the financial system. His BBC documentary High Anxieties- The Mathematics of Chaos, first broadcast in September 2008, was one of the first films to be made about the financial crisis accurately anticipating the problems that were to unfold in the economy. The Debt Generation was published in November 2010.

Anatomy of a NATO War Crime

Sorman, Libya…

It was a warm early Monday morning along the Libyan coast on June 20, 2011.

At approximately 0200 GMT the next day in NATO Headquarters in Brussels and 30 minutes later in its media center in Naples, staffers finished tabulating NATO’s 92nd day of aerial attacks on Libya and began to post the data on its website ().

Twenty four hours earlier an Atlantic Alliance command unit, located approximately 30 miles off the Libyan coast, in a direct line with Malta, and NATO’s targeting unit had signed off on 49 bombing missions for June 20^th, the last day of spring and the last day of NATO’s original UN bombing mandate.

The authority for NATO’s  bombing, which far exceeded  earlier estimates ,killing or wounding of between 90,000-120,000 Libyans and foreigners, and the displacement of more than two million Libyans and foreign workers was claimed from the hastily adopted UN Security Council Resolutions 1970 and UNSCR 1973.   UN resolutions 1970 & 1973 gave NATO UN Chapter 7 authority to enforce a no-fly zone over Libyan airspace, initially for 90 days which ironically ended the day before its bombing at Sorman.

The two UN Security  Council Resolutions were insisted upon by their main sponsors, France, the UK, Italy and the US who claimed  that ”a limited  no-fly zone would  protect Libya’s civilian population from  the wrath of the government of Libya’s leader, Muammar Kaddafi.” NATO requested and was granted two additional 90 days extensions to continue its Libyan mission which gave its air force until the end of 2011 to continue Operation Unified Protector.

It was early Monday morning, June 20, 2011.

Sorman Libya.  A quiet and peaceful Libyan town, Sorman is located 45 miles west of Tripoli, near the Mediterranean coast, in the Zawiya District of the Tripolitania region in northwestern Libya. Many of the town’s children grew up exploring the 3^rd Century truly magnificent Roman Ruins at nearby Sabratha. Some archaeologists consider Sabratha, located almost in direct line with Rome across the Mediterranean, and built on a high cliff above the sea, as the most complete extant Roman architecture with only a small part of this large Roman city having been excavated. This observer has visited Sabratha a few times since the mid-1980’s and each visit presents more awe. Families from Sorman and nearby villages regularly visit and picnic there.

In the early hours of June 20, 2011 it was dark in Sorman except for some muted half-moon light. A few dim street lights and some partially illumined homes provided some light asresidents began to rise and prepare for the Al Fajr (“Dawn”) prayers.

At the homestead of Khaled K. El-Hamedi, the 37 year old President of the International Organization for Peace, Care & Relief (IOPCR), one of Libya’s most active social service organizations everyone was asleep following a rambunctious birthday party for his three year old son. The Hamedi family members included Khaled’s three year old son Khweldi, five year old daughter Khaleda, his beautiful pregnant wife Safa, his aunt Najia, and his six year old niece Salam, among others.

At NATO’s Control and Command Center, the 49 bombing missions planned for early morning of June 20, included a target at Sorman, which would push the number of NATO reconnaissance sorties over Libya to 11,930. This number would become 26,500 by midnight on October 31, when NATO would end its air campaign. The days bombing sorties would also bring the tally of rocket and bombing targets to 4,521. This figure would increase to more than 11,781 by late fall, when NATO was instructed to end OUP (Operation Unified Protector).

NATO’s prepares to bomb Dorman’s “command and control center”

Before the bombs were fired at Khaled K. al-Hamedi compound, NATO staff conducted a six step process the first of which was surveillance using the MQ-9 Reaper UAV, which sometimes is also used to fire missiles.  Also above Sorman was the Predator drone with full-motion video. During June 19 and the early hours of June 20,  the drones  locked on the Hamedi  homestead target and relayed updated information to NATO’s command center.

The Hamedi home was not what NATO labels a “time-critical target” so there was plenty of time for its staff to transmit information about the site from unmanned reconnaissance aircraft to intelligence analysts. Almost certainly, according to a source at Jane’s Weekly, NATO UAV’s watched the Hamedi compound over a period of days and presumably observed part of the birthday party being held for three old Huweldi, the day before the order to bomb was issued.

NATO Rules of Engagement for  Operation United Protector, constitute a set of classified documents which present specific and detailed instructions about what is a legitimate target and who can approve the target, whether pre-planned or “on the fly” when a pilot happens upon a target of opportunity.

The Sorman attack on the Hamedi home was planned as part of what NATO calls its “Joint Air Tasking Cycle (JATC).  A target development team put the Hamedi home on the June20^th daily list of targets. The team used a report from NATO intelligence analysts who determined that retired officer Khaled al Huweldi, Hamedi, one of the original members of the Gadhafi led 1969 coup against King Idris in 1969, and a former member of the Al Fatah Revolution’s Revolutionary Command Council was living on the property.  His assassination had been ordered by NATO because they hoped to weaken the regime in some way even though the senior Hamedi was retired and had no decision making role in Libya.

On June 19, the day before the bombing attack on the Hamedi family at Sorman, NATO was obliged by its own regulations and by the international law of armed conflict to conduct a “potential for collateral damage review” of this mission.

There is no evidence that this was ever done.

A requested US Congressional NATO Liaison Office review of the Sorman bombing, initially requested from Libya on August 2, was completed in early September 2011 and found no documentary evidence or other indication that Bouchard or anyone in NATO’s Target Selection Unit, evaluated, discussed, or even considered the subject of potential civilian casualties at the Hamedi home  in  Sorman.

Following Bouchard’s green light to bomb the Hamedi home, the coordinates were fixed at32°45′24″N 12°34′18″E . Specific aim points on the Hamedi property were chosen and eight bombs and missiles were readied and attached to the strike aircraft.

At Sorman, NATO used a variety of bombs and missiles including the “bunker busting” BLU-109 (Bomb Live Unit) which is designed to penetrate 18 feet of concrete. NATO also used the American MK series of 500 lb, (MK 81) 1000 lb, (MK-82) and the 2000 lb (MK-84) that Israel used so widely during its 2006 invasion of Lebanon. The MK series and the BLU-109 are reportedly being stockpiled in Israel in preparation for both countries anticipated next war in this region.

Following the infernal at Sorman, NATO denied responsibility but the next day NATO admitted carrying out an air strike somewhere in Sorman but denied that there were civiliandeaths even as its drones filmed the scene close up. NATO’s media office in Naples issued a statement claiming “A precision air strike was launched against a high-level command and control node in the Sorman area without collateral damage.”  NATO spokespersons also told Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that “the facility was a legitimate military target and that all necessary precautions were taken before conducting the strike which minimized any potential risk of causing unnecessary casualties”.

The official NATO record of its bombing of Libya for June 20, 2011 reads as follows and remains unchanged:

“Allied Joint Force Command  NAPLES, SHAPE, NATO HQ.

Over the past 24 hours, NATO has conducted the following activities associated with Operation UNIFIED PROTECTOR:

Air Operations Sorties conducted 20 JUNE: 149

Strike sorties conducted 20 JUNE: 52

Key Hits

20 JUNE: In the vicinity of Tripoli: 1 Command & Control Node, 8 Surface-To-Air Missile Launchers,

1 Surface-To-Air Missile Transport Vehicle.  In the vicinity of Misratah: 3 Truck-Mounted Guns, 2 Self-

Propelled Anti-Aircraft Guns, 1 Tank. In the vicinity of Tarhunah: 1 Military Equipment Storage Facility. In the vicinity of Al-Khums: 1 Military Vehicle Storage Facility. In the vicinity of Zintan: 1 Rocket Launcher.”

Oddly, NATO records for June 20^th as well as subsequent reports of bombing attacks listed for June 20^th and June 21st in its daily logs have never included the bombing attack onSorman or the attack on the Al-Hamedi residence which indisputably killed 15 civilians.

Just before the bombs hit, eye witnesses,  reported seeing red specks in the sky and then flashes of intense light, immediately followed by thunderous ear splitting blasts as eight American bombs and rockets pulverized their neighbors homestead.

In an instant Khaled El-Hamedi’s family was dead. The children were crushed, blown apart or shredded into pieces, along with friends and extended family members who had slept overnight.

Khaled was working late, attending meetings with displaced Libyans driven from their homes and urgently in need of IOPCR help. As he returned home, Khaled saw from his car window the sky light up and heard exploding bombs. He was frozen in horror as entered his property and observed rescue workers frantically digging and futilely trying to move the thick concrete slabs of his home hoping against hope that they would miraculously find survivors.

Libyan government spokesman Mousa Ibrahim announced the death of 15 people, including three children, were killed at Sorman. He slammed the NATO bombing as a “cowardly terrorist act which cannot be justified.”  Investigators, who visited Sabratha hospital 10 kilometers from Sorman, saw nine bodies, including three young children. They also saw body parts including a child’s head.

For those who visited the Al-Hamidi family compound back in June following the NATO bombings, as this observer did less than a week after the crime as part of an international delegation, the scene was one of total devastation.

Collapsed and blown apart concrete and tiled homes, small body parts, and bits of family belongings and memorabilia, trees, some blown over, others bending and nearly denuded of their foliage, dead, terrified and dying petting zoo animals, including exotic birds, Ostrich, Deer, small animals and large moose killed or left near death and most in a blind stupor staring blankly from what remained of their shelters while dying of wounds and from trauma.

Outside one of the bombed houses I noticed crushed cartons of spaghetti pasta and cans of tomato sauce, stockpiled for distribution to the needy as part of the work of IOPCR during the summer and in preparation for the coming Holy month of Ramadan observances whichincluded doing and performing charitable works and individual humanitarian acts.

Under growing pressure from the international community including NATO member states, NATO HQ claimed equipment malfunction, missed target, poor intelligence and pilot errors.  Finally US Defense secretaries Gates and his replacement, Leon Panetta admitted that NATO lacked effective intelligence on the ground to identify military targets with certainty. Former Defense Secretary Gates, in criticizing NATO’s operation in Libya implied that NATO used a bomb first ask questions later paradigm in Libya.  And this appears to have been the case. These excuses in no way absolve NATO and its 28 NATO member states of responsibility.

Canadian Lieutenant General Charles Bouchard insists to this day that only Libya’s military was targeted: “This important strike will greatly degrade Gadhafi regime forces’ ability to carry on their barbaric assault against the Libyan people,” he told the media from his office in Brussels.  The civilian deaths at Sorman came just hours after NATO acknowledged that one of its missiles had gone astray early on Sunday, hitting a residential neighborhood of Tripoli.

At the request of Khaled al-Hamedi, himself being sought by Libya’s new government, and aware that I was going to return to Sorman, I felt honored as I made my way to his loved ones gravesites on the family homestead where he and I first met, in order to deliver a message from him to his loved ones.

Picking my way through debris in the dark, under the cold and suspicious eyes of a couple of  local militiamen, I stood at the same spot, where on June 27^th his family’s freshly dug graves bore witness to what Khaled was describing to our shocked delegation  concerning the details of the horror and hellfire that NATO unleashed upon his family.

Back in June I had moved to the rear of our group as Khaled spoke to us about the loss of his babies, his beauties and his precious pregnant wife. I was embarrassed because for some reason, uncontrollable tears would not stop streaming down my face and, despite averting my eyes, I saw that Khaled noticed.  I was touched when this young man, to whom I was a total stranger, came to me and put his arm around my shoulder in comfort. Clearly he understood that each of us can feel the pain of others, even of strangers, as well as connect them with our own losses of loved ones in life.

Later, as I learned more about Khaled’s family and saw their most expressive and revealing photos, I came to believe that with respect to the wanton criminal aggression that caused thousands of needless deaths of innocents over the period of nearly nine months against this simple, gentle society, that Najia, Safa, Salam, Khaleda, and Khweldi, and the others slaughtered at Sorman, are forever iconic representatives of all the innocent civilians who were slaughtered in Libya since March 2011.

During my recent visit to Sorman, I stood at the same location as last June. I surveyed the area and then approached the graves of Najia, Safa, Salam, Khaleda, and Khweldi.  In the cold darkness, and the piles of rubble still in place,it was eerie

I knelt close, felt a strange source of warmth and looked over my shoulder.

I whispered in the silent night that I had a message from your loving Husband, Father, Uncle and Nephew that he asked me to deliver to you.

I read to them the message entrusted to me. And I left a copy in Arabic, pinned to a bouquet of flowers:

The message read:

“Please say a very big hello to them and tell them I am coming.

Please tell them “I won’t leave you alone

And I miss each of you so very much.”

And please write them each a note.

Najia, Safa, Salam, Khaleda, and Khweldi.

Franklin, Tell them, “You are my life.

You are my love.

I miss you very, very much.

Life without you is so painful, so hard and completely empty.

I won’t stay and live away from you. I promise.

I’ll return and be close to you. Baba will be back.

I love you.

As I made my way back to the main road in search of a taxi, a militiaman stopped me and interrogated me about why I was there, confiscated my camera and ordered me to leave the area at once.

I paused for a moment and looked back toward what had been a loving family home, a petting zoo and bird sanctuary that had delighted the children in this neighborhood.

A little boy and girl, perhaps siblings, maybe six or seven years old, approached me with their Ethiopian nanny and asked: “Wien, (where is) Khaleda? Wien Khweldi? mettayargeoun ila Al Bayt (when will  they come home?)

“When will they come home?”

Unable to speak, I kissed and patted their sweet heads and continued on my way.

Khaled K. Al-Hamedi is strong, deeply religious, and fatalistic. He has pledged to family and friends around the world that he will continue his work with the International Organization for Peace, Care & Relief in spite of the life shattering loss of his loved ones.

An honorable family, a peaceful and welcoming town, a devastated country, and a shocked and angry international community demand justice from those who sent ‘Unified Protector’ and NATO’s no-fly zone to destroy Libya in order to “protect the civilian population.”

The Feds Knew: 50 years of Fracking-Induced Earthquakes

Washington’s Blog posted some info last August confirming that the US federal government has long known of the link between fracking and earthquakes, as well as the link between deep well fluids contaminating shallow drinking wells. As more info keeps coming out, this collection should serve as a handy resource for those confronting (or occupying) well sites or state regulatory agencies.

At a recent oil & gas conference, frackers urged colleagues to engage in psyops to con Americans into accepting carcinogenic drinking water and earthquakes as the price to pay for oil and gas. The Oil & Gas Accountability Project taped the speakers and turned it over to CNBC which posted the audio.

Business Insider recently posted 10 Counterinsurgency And ‘Psy-Ops’ Tactics Companies Use Against Protesters, based on the recommended Army’s counterinsurgency manual.

In Fracking May Have Caused 50 Earthquakes in Oklahoma, Brian Merchant writes:

In a surprising turn of events, Cuadrilla Resources, a British energy company, recently admitted that its hydraulic fracturing operations “likely” caused an earthquake in England….

Right on the heels of Cuadrilla’s announcement, news is spreading that theUnited States Geological Survey has released a report (pdf) that links a series of earthquakes in Oklahoma last January to a fracking operation underway there….

The U.S.G.S. determined that “from the character of the seismic recordings indicate that they are both shallow and unique.”

From the report:

Our analysis showed that shortly after hydraulic fracturing began small earthquakes started occurring, and more than 50 were identified, of which 43 were large enough to be located. Most of these earthquakes occurred within a 24 hour period after hydraulic fracturing operations had ceased. There have been previous cases where seismologists have suggested a link between hydraulic fracturing and earthquakes, but data was limited, so drawing a definitive conclusion was not possible for these cases.

The report is still under peer-review, and even then, the correlation between fracking and the quakes is inconclusive. The U.S.G.S. notes that region has historically been seismically active, though the summary states that the “strong correlation in time and space as well as a reasonable fit to a physical model suggest that there is a possibility these earthquakes were induced by hydraulic fracturing.”

While Merchant tiptoes around the issue, it’s clear to many that fracking is more than correlated; it’s causative.

The US Geological Survey confirms that “the link between fracking fluid injection and the earlier series of earthquakes was established” in 1990 at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal by Craig Nicholson and R.I. Wesson in “Earthquake Hazard Associated with Deep Well Injection” (1990).

In 2001, the EPA also confirmed the link between deep injection fluids and toxic contamination of shallow water wells near Boulder, Colorado. (See Underground Injection Control Regulations 2001.)

Fracking in the New Madrid Fault zone has generated hundreds of earthquakes each year, far exceeding the previous annual earthquake history prior to the advent of mass drilling. (SeeFracking the life out of Arkansas and beyond.)

On Jan. 31, 1986, I stood in my office on the 13th floor in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, when we experienced a 30-second earthquake measuring 5.0 on the Richter Scale. () The quake rumbled 11 states and Ontario, Canada. Researchers Nicholson and Wesson questioned if the quake was induced by fracking, writing in 1988:

“Three deep waste disposal wells are currently operating within 15 km of the epicentral region and have been responsible for the injection of nearly 1.2 billion liters of fluid at pressures reaching 112 bars above ambient at a nominal depth of 1.8 km. Estimates of stress inferred from commercial hydrofracturing measurements suggest that the state of stress in northeastern Ohio is close to the theoretical threshold for failure along favorably oriented, preexisting fractures.”

Daneen Peterson collected the following videos and reports:

Fracking Hell: The Untold Story (17:53)
This video is an original investigative report by Earth Focus and UK’s Ecologist Film Unit looks at the risks of natural gas development in the Marcellus Shale deposits. It covers the introduction of toxic chemicals that end up in the drinking water, the unregulated interstate dumping of radioactive waste and that the wells leak radioactive radium.

The following video reveals that a “Halliburton loophole [in a] 2005 energy bill completely exempted natural gas industry and gas fracking from any regulation under the Safe Water Act.” That fact is PROOF, like the vaccine exemptions given, that “they” know full well that what they are doing is extremely harmful.

If that ONE ‘loophole’ were eliminated . . . the OVERWHELMING revelations would KILL ALL FUTURE FRACKING!

60 Minutes Video Piece on Dangers of Natural Gas Fracking

Pittsburgh’s drinking water is radioactive, thanks to fracking. Only question is, how much?

Residents of Pittsburgh — as well as potentially tens of millions of other everyday citizens in the Northeast corridor who rely on their taps to deliver safe water — are consuming unknown and potentially dangerous amounts of radium in every glass of water. That’s the buried lede in the Sunday New York Times‘ massive exposé on fracking, the relatively new process for extracting natural gas from the massive shale formation that stretches from Virginia to New York state.

Even frackers admit that the Marcellus Shale formation “is mildly radioactive since it contains a small amount of uranium and produces gamma radiation from decaying organic matter.” But, of course, it denies that any “significant amount of this radioactivity is released in the natural gas produced from the shale.”

Gasland‘s reach and Oscar nomination brought enough attention to the issue to warrant apparent censorship of industry concessions that the documentary got things right:

“We have to stop blaming documentaries and take a look in the mirror,” Matt Pitzarella, a spokesman for gas producer Range Resources Corp., was quoted as saying in [The Wall Street Journal].

However, if you go to the article, you won’t find Pitzarella’s statement because within the hour the quote disappeared, say citizen journalists, whoscreen captured it and posted it on Twitter.

Toxic Contamination From Natural Gas Wells
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/27/us/natural-gas-map.html?ref=us
This shows an interactive map of the types and areas that are contaminated in Pennsylvania.

Water Problems From Drilling Are More Frequent Than PA Officials Said
http://www.propublica.org/article/water-problems-from-drilling-are-more-frequent-than-officials-said-731

When methane began bubbling out of kitchen taps near a gas drilling site in Pennsylvania last winter, a state regulator described the problem as “an anomaly.” But at the time he made that statement to ProPublica, that same official was investigating a similar case affecting more than a dozen homes near gas wells halfway across the state.

In fact, methane related to the natural gas industry has contaminated water wells in at least seven Pennsylvania counties since 2004 and is common enough that the state hired a full-time inspector dedicated to the issue in 2006. In one case, methane was detected in water sampled over 15 square miles.

In another, a methane leak led to an explosion that killed a couple and their 17-month-old grandson.

The Tyee: Fracking and Quaking: They’re Linked

The number of mini-quakes in highly drilled Alberta alone has increased so demonstrably in recent decades (from 60 to more than 200 a decade) that the government launched a project “to document and understand their relationship to oil and gas production.” Concluded researchers in the Canadian Journal of Exploration Geophysics in 1994: “there do appear to be spatial and temporal correlations between the earthquakes and oil production in the Eagle West and Eagle fields [in Fort St. John, B.C. ]. Fluid injection in particular must be considered as a possible cause.”

Honoring 9-11: Time To Audit The CIA’s Incestuous Relationship With Al-Qaeda

According to BBC News, “…Bin Laden left Saudi Arabia in 1979 to fight against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  The Afghan jihad was backed with American dollars and had the blessing of the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.  [bin Laden] received security training from the CIA itself.”  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/155236.stm.  And apparently Bin Laden received approximately three billion dollars in venture capital start-up funds from the CIA.

How come the CIA never gave three billion dollars to me?  Ain’t I more deserving and lovable than OBL?  Humph.

Is it really true that there was NO al-Qaeda in Iraq until good old Shock and Awe gave birth to it — as a deadly branch off the CIA-created al-Qaeda tree?  Or is that just another urban legend?

According to Reuters, the CIA recently stated that as of June 2011 there are currently still 1,000 al-Qaeda operatives now in Iraq — even after eight long years of deadly warfare, possibly a million people killed and over a trillion dollars spent.

But how many al-Qaeda operatives were there in Iraq before Shock and Awe and the CIA and Paul Bremer worked their magic?  There were ZERO al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq before 2003, according to recent Pentagon reports released to CNN.  Zero, zilch, nada.    We spent over a trillion dollars to put al-Qaeda into Iraq?  Why that’s approximately three million per operative!  Good job, CIA.

Then last spring Americans started hearing rumors that the “rebels” in Libya were not only CIA-created but also comprised of Al-Qaeda-connected operatives as well.  Or is that just another urban legend too?

According to a recent article in Global Research, “Some 1500 jihadists from Afghanistan trained by the CIA were dispatched to fight with the ‘pro-democracy’ rebels under the helm of ‘former’ Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) Commander  Abdel Hakim  Belhadj.”

According to Pepe Escobar of the , Abdel Hakim  Belhadj is a known al-Qaeda asset.

And now we are getting intimations that the CIA and al-Qaeda are working together in Syria too.  According to Global Research, ibid., “The Libyan model of rebel forces integrated by the Islamic brigades together with NATO special forces is slated to be applied in Syria, where Islamist fighters supported by Western and Israeli intelligence have already been deployed.”  The CIA and al-Qaeda are now bonding in Syria too?  Or perhaps that is just another urban legend?

We have also been told that al-Qaeda was responsible for the the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  Or is that another urban legend as well.

According to an FBI wanted poster, OBL has never been sought in connection with the bombing of the World Trade Center.  And Osama himself denied any connection to this terrible disaster until four years after the fact, perhaps hoping to buzz up his sagging terrorist image in the press?  So that he wouldn’t have to just sit all alone in his lonely hidey-hole in Abbottabad, watching past promo triumphs of himself from back in the day.

According to an interview with al-Qaeda’s top guy dated September 28, 2001, OBL had stated, “I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States.  As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie.  I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act.”

Are we actually supposed to believe Osama?  Hell no.  But that’s what he said.  And if al-Qaeda really was responsible for 9-11, you would at least expect them to be doing a chicken dance.  And you would definitely expect an apology from the CIA for being a parent to these nasty kids.

But let’s assume that al-Qaeda was responsible for 9-11 (and not Dick Cheney — who actually did have means, motive and opportunity).  If so, then the CIA is still on the hook.

According to an article from ThinkProgress.org, “Former Clinton and Bush White House top counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke alleges in an interview for a radio documentary commemorating the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that then-CIA director George Tenet and other top CIA officials withheld intelligence on two al Qaeda operatives living in the United States that ended up taking part in the attacks.”

We have been told again and again and again that al-Qaeda members are the BAD GUYS.  Yet here, apparently, is America’s own CIA, intimately linked and tied to these Bad Guys again and again and again.  And some fairly cogent proof has been offered again and again and again that these rumors are true.  And yet NO ONE in America seems to questioning what is going on here?  Huh?

In honor of the sad tenth anniversary of 9-11, as patriotic America citizens who love our country and resent like Hell having had it attacked — in light of these circumstances, do we not OWE it to ourselves and our fallen fellow citizens to freaking investigate and AUDIT the CIA — and its alleged incestuous relations with al-Qaeda, aka The Bad Guys?

Isn’t that the least we can do?

Or was 9-11 just another urban legend as well?

And what would be the CIA’s motivation for lying down with dogs and getting up with fleas all these times (at the cost of millions of lives, including many of our own)?  Here are two clues:

Today’s quote from my Franklin Planner sez, “There’s enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”  Greed.  Greed appears to be the top motivator for the CIA — not love of country.

And here’s a headline from an article by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges that pretty much spells out the CIA’s “modus operandi” in black and white (or at least in pixels):  “America to the World:  We want Everything — If You Stand in the Way we’ll Kill You.”

Actually it’s not we Americans who are saying that.  99.9% of us don’t in any way benefit from any of this pillaging and killing.  Only corporatists benefit — corporatists and their enforcer, the CIA.  The rest of us appear to be merely zombies, cats-paws, victims and suckers.

Inside Job – Full Documentary Film

“It’s a powerhouse of a documentary that will leave you both thunderstruck and boiling with rage. This film lays out in exceptional, but always understandable detail the argument that the meltdown of 2008 was “not an accident”. Because of his personal and professional background, his intelligence and his inclinations, Ferguson is especially well-suited to creating knockout documentaries that cogently and carefully lay out all the particulars of a significant situation.” – Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES

“A masterpiece of investigative non-fiction moviemaking — a scathing, outrageous depressing, comical, horrifying walk through what brought on the crisis. Scarier than anything Wes Craven and John Carpenter have ever made…treats the enormity of its subject with the gravity it deserves.- Wesley Morris, THE BOSTON GLOBE

American Workers Unite!

When there are zero jobs available, any job will do. This fact has been exploited by corporations now re-labeling themselves “job creators,” since being a job creator in a time of depression brings a religious status similar to a rain god during a drought. Democrats and Republicans have lavished eternal praise on the “job creators” and in consequence have created a political atmosphere that is rabidly pro-corporate “job creators” and anti-everything else.

In practice this means that ANY new law or regulation that hinders the power or profits of “job creating” corporations is instantly attacked as a “job killer.” This type of logic is good for bumper stickers and Tea Parties but bad for those who suffer under the giant power of corporations, including working people, the unemployed, the self-employed, and the environment.

For example, in Oregon a statewide measure was passed to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy to deal with the state’s budget deficit. The tax money was to be used to save social services and prevent layoffs. Before it became law the measure was attacked viciously by a newborn, well-funded group calling itself “Oregonians Against Job-Killing Taxes.” The message was simple: if you tax the wealthy and corporations, they will punish you by leaving the state and taking their jobs with them; better to simply accept their absolute power and sing their praises while reducing their taxes and destroying environmental regulations that impede their profits.

Obama recently surrendered to this philosophy when he reneged on a promise to adopt stricter air quality standards around ozone pollution (against the recommendations of scientists from his own Environmental Protection Agency). Less ground-level smog would prevent thousands of deaths while reducing lung and health issues in general, cutting health care costs by billions. But the interests of the corporate “job creators” won out in the end. The Huffington Post reports:

“The White House has been under heavy pressure from GOP lawmakers and major industries, which have slammed the stricter standard as an unnecessary jobs killer…Obama said his decision was made in part to reduce regulatory burdens [on corporations] and uncertainty [for corporations] at a time of rampant questions about the strength of the U.S. economy.”

How did corporate America react?

“Thomas Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce [a giant corporate lobby group] said the move was “an enormous victory for America’s job creators, the right decision by the president and one that will help reduce the uncertainty facing businesses.” (September 2nd, 2011).

This dynamic is now the new normal. The same logic was used after the Gulf Coast BP disaster, when Obama temporarily banned offshore drilling in response. But this practical and necessary measure was instantly attacked as a “job killer” and Obama quickly changed his tune and ended the ban. Dangerous deep-sea drilling continues and politicians and the media alike have hushed-over the issues until the next disaster occurs. The incredible shock and outrage that working people voiced over the BP oil spill has been ignored in favor of the interests of the “Job Creators.”

Not only was the BP disaster ignored, but some corporations used it to their benefit. Since deep sea drilling was dangerous, some corporations admitted, better to focus on the ever-expanding realm of land drilling for natural gas. As the excellent documentary Gasland shows, drilling for natural gas (also called Liquefied natural gas, or LNG) is causing catastrophic environmental damage while the Obama administration has repeatedly encouraged its expansion as an alternative to “foreign oil.” The Environmental Protection Agency has virtually ignored this now-gigantic industry as corporations like Halliburton pump hundreds of poisonous chemicals into the ground and air for their personal profit.

Corporations also won out when it came to environmentally-sane logging strategies in the Pacific Northwest and the horrifically-destructive act of Mountain Removal for the mining industries. Yet another recent victim was the Canadian Tar Sands pipeline that Obama agreed to, which will run from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, carrying oil that was especially destructive to mine. In all these cases the corporate “Job Creators” attacked the so-called “Job Killers” for wanting to impose regulations that would help prevent environmental disasters.

In addition, corporations quietly sidelined Obama’s campaign promise to set the first-ever limits on the specific pollution blamed for global warming. At a time when most working people are educated and deathly afraid of the near-term effects of global warming, the President has simply stopped talking about the issue. Any respectable climate scientist will tell you that unless massive environmental changes are made very soon there will be unstoppable climate change that will have dire consequences for all humans, not just the ones most immediately effected in areas devastated by droughts, flooding, and other extreme weather patterns.

All working people have an interest in ensuring that their children and grandchildren can live a life without such carnage. Some, however, are tricked into thinking that the immediate need for jobs overrules any consideration for the environment, since not eating today is more important than a global environmental crisis that will strike tomorrow. In reality there is no such contradiction. Now is actually the perfect time to brush this corporate-created myth aside and demand what is sorely over-due for both working people and the environment.

It should be painfully clear to even the most reality-blind politicians that the private sector has no interest in creating jobs; they are quite content sitting on their mountains of cash until wages fall low enough — due to massive unemployment — for them to hire more labor. Working people cannot afford the patience or the low wages. The jobs’ crisis demands that governments on the city, state, and federal level create jobs’ programs similar to the programs enacted during the last great depression. But not just any jobs will do.

Given that our society is facing an energy crisis and a related environmental crisis, only a green job program will do. This means not only fixing dilapidated bridges and roads, but investing massive amounts of money in alternative energy — solar, wind, hydro, etc. — while improving and expanding alternative forms of transportation — high speed trains, buses, electric cars, etc. It also means massive investments in home and building weatherization, recycling infrastructure, public education campaigns, research and development for alternative energy, and a variety of other measures that will help fundamentally change our culture’s relation to the environment, all of which will create massive amounts of jobs.

Obama’s stubborn refusal to do anything of substance for labor, the unemployed, and environmentalists creates an opportunity for these groups to work closely together for a better world. Because politicians are refusing to respond to society’s most pressing needs, new tactics need to be employed. Lobbying politicians and organizing small rallies cannot have the same effects they once did.

Only a sustained campaign with massive mobilizations has the possibility of achieving the united goals of the labor and environmental movements. The demand for a federal jobs program that builds an alternative energy infrastructure and other green public works has the ability to inspire millions of people to act. To fund such a program demands must be made to drastically increase taxes on the wealthy and corporations, since they now have all the money, thanks to the expanding tax breaks for the rich and corporations over the past thirty years. The era of issue-based activism has come to a disappointing end. To properly address either the jobs or environmental crisis all working people must unite in huge numbers with inspiring demands.

Million Dollars Not Enough For Brutal Police Slaying of Kelly Thomas, Says Family

The surviving family members of Kelly Thomas, who was brutally murdered by Fullerton Police (Orange County, California) in July, rejected an offer of $900,000 not to pursue civil action.

[Image: said to be Kelly Thomas when alive.]

On July 5, 2011, closed circuit TV caught six Fullerton cops brutally murdering a homeless, mentally ill man.  Kelly Thomas, age 37, died after being taken off life-support five days later.

A whistleblower who viewed the unreleased city-owned video of the event says an officer crushed Thomas’ windpipe by “drop-kneeing” him twice.

His last words are heard on  video where he’s screaming, “Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!”

Witnesses to the vicious beating were caught on a  describing the event immediately afterwards:

City officials deny police intended to kill Thomas and are “trying to determine if officers used excessive force in his death,” reports NBC.  Ya think?

The FBI is also involved in the investigation.

Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Thomas often slept near the bus depot where the beating occurred. The Thomas family has hired Garo Mardirossian to represent them in a case against the Fullerton Police Dept.  He filed a “claim” last week which is prerequisite to filing a civil suit.

Here’s  of the victim’s father, Ron Thomas, at a public meeting on the incident, (which aired Aug. 2, 2011):

Tony Bushala has been following the events on his blog, Fullerton’s Future.  One of his writers, Travis Kiger, posted the names of those officers they believe are involved:

Officer Kenton Hampton [image];

Officer Jay Cicinelli;
Officer Manny Ramos;
Officer Joe Wolfe;
Officer James Blatney; and

An as-yet-unidentified sergeant who would have been called because of the use of tasers.

On the July 29 John and Ken Show (KFI AM 640), Kelly’s father, Ron Thomas, revealed that the city offered him $900,000 not to file a civil action. He rejected the offer.

[Image]

A friend of several Fullerton police officers also called the  (July 28) to describe the city-owned video of the beating, which has not yet been released to the public.  The dispatcher on duty apparently zoomed the camera when the beating began.

“One of the officers is actually observed on the video actually drop – what they call ‘drop-kneeing’ a suspect, where the officer comes down with his knee full force and that is actually what hits the suspect in the nose area and throat area …

“I believe at that point that’s where his, part of his throat was crushed. And it’s not just one time that he drop knees him.”

The whistleblower does not believe that police chief Michael Sellers is interested in prosecuting the six cops. They’ve all since been put on administrative leave, however.

.

Chief Sellers went on “medical leave” on August 10, “after two City Council members called for him to resign over his handling of an investigation into the in-custody death of a homeless schizophrenic man,” reports Los Alamitos Patch. Though the specific medical condition was not revealed, we can be reasonably certain he was sweating bullets. Capt. Kevin Hamilton is now acting police chief in Fullerton.

Mayor F. Richard Jones has refused to resign, despite public outcry over his handling of the investigation.  Ron Thomas promised that he will continue to apply pressure until the mayor steps down.

Hundreds of protesters staged events at least twice since the murder, and the Thomases filed a claim against the city, after rejecting the $900,000 offer to settle the matter.

On August 4, the ACLU called for an independent investigation given that of 50 police-involved deaths over a five-year period, not one cop was prosecuted. The Orange County District Attorney is “incapable of [a] fair investigation,” the press release said.

On August 16, the Fullerton City Council voted to hire independent investigators.

Kelly’s mother, Cathy Thomas, describes her son as a “gentle soul” who never became violent.  Kelly started showing symptoms of mental illness when he was 17.   Fullerton Stories posted a lengthy interview describing the history and published several pictures. (NOTE: According to sources, the family denies that the 2009 booking photo at that website, provided by Fullerton police, is of Kelly Thomas. The FPD must be incapable of honesty.)

In a related matter, Veth Mam also retained Attorney Mardirossian in his case against the Fullerton cops for beating him for video taping the cops during an arrest made last October. This  made its way to Youtube after the Kelly Thomas murder scandal.

Cops threatened witnesses to the beating with arrest if they didn’t vacate the scene, and lied under oath and on the arrest report. Veth Nam was cleared of all charges only after the cell phone video surfaced revealing the truth.

Officer Kenton Hampton was involved in both the Thomas murder and Mam beating.

On August 19, Mardirossian filed a civil complaint on Mam’s behalf alleging civil rights violations, conspiracy and cover-up.

Hat tip Brasscheck TV.

Related:

 by ZTV Productions

 (HBO trailer)

Capitalism Is The Crisis (Video)

“We Don’t Live in a Functioning Democracy”

Capitalism Is The Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity examines the ideological roots of the “austerity” agenda and proposes revolutionary paths out of the current crisis.

The film features original interviews with Chris Hedges, Derrick Jensen, Michael Hardt, Peter Gelderloos, Leo Panitch, David McNally, Richard J.F. Day, Imre Szeman, Wayne Price, and many more!

The 2008 “financial crisis” in the United States was a systemic fraud in which the wealthy finance capitalists stole trillions of public dollars. No one was jailed for this crime, the largest theft of public money in history.

Instead, the rich forced working people across the globe to pay for their “crisis” through punitive “austerity” programs that gutted public services and repealed workers’ rights.

Austerity was named “Word of the Year” for 2010.

This documentary explains the nature of capitalist crisis, visits the protests against austerity measures, and recommends revolutionary paths for the future.

Special attention is devoted to the crisis in Greece, the 2010 G20 Summit protest in Toronto, Canada, and the remarkable surge of solidarity in Madison, Wisconsin.

It may be their crisis, but it’s our problem.

How Murdoch Ran Britain – Video

Must Watch – Dispatches – Channel 4 Documentary

Dispatches investigates the world of the Rupert Murdoch and the influence and political power he holds in the UK

 

See also – Rupert Murdoch given $27M no-bid contract from state Department of Education: More than a dozen private firms wanted to work on a project like the one the state Education Department is set to award to a Rupert Murdoch-owned company in a $27 million no-bid contract.

Quartzsite Arizona – 9 Whistleblower Cops Suspended

Governor Jan Brewer continues to ignore the international attention paid to Quartzsite, Arizona over $5 million in corruption charges, while the Chief of Police suspended nine of the city’s 14 police officers with pay, ordering them not to leave their homes between the hours of 8 am and 5 pm.

All of the suspended officers blew the whistle on the chief, calling for an independent investigation into several serious charges, including false arrests and violating federal medical privacy laws.

Freedom Watch :

In response to citizen demands for action, Brewer’s office wrote:

“As you may know, the Governor does not have the authority to intervene in local law enforcement matters.  Nor does this office have the authority to investigate misconduct by the police, county jails, federal prisons, and/or judges.”

Well, she may not have the “authority,” but she certainly has the power to pressure Chief of Police Jeff Gilbert into a leave of absence while he is being investigated.

The Quartzsite Arizona blogspot posted a copy of the Notice of Investigation served on the officers for possibly violating “Personnel Policy” by reporting crimes allegedly committed by Chief Gilbert. Hardly a crime worth being suspended over, especially when compared to the charges leveled against Gilbert, who has not been suspended.

Assistant Town Manager Al Jognson is conducting the investigation. Jognson is part of the gang holding secret City Council meetings, and refusing to explain the $5 million in secret payments, in violation of state laws. But they don’t care, according to statements made toArizona Republic:

“In interviews, [Councilmen Jose] Lizarraga and [Jerry] Lukkasson said they do not care if some council meetings are deemed unlawful or if public-records laws are broken.”

These people swore an oath to uphold the laws and don’t care they’re breaking them?  That’s ground for recall. Ironically, Lizarraga resigned last month to run for office in the upcoming Mayoral recall election.

Hemet Productions is currently making a documentary about Quartzsite and seeks interviewees. That’s because the current controversy stems from political battles going back years. Arizona Republic reports:

“In the past three years alone, Quartzsite has been through five mayors and a trio of recall elections. (Foster, who has been mayor since 2010, is facing a recall vote next month.) The municipal government is buried in costly lawsuits.”

Voicing disagreement with the Police Chief or City Council results in arrest and criminal charges. City Attorney Matt Newman, who refused to abuse the law in this way and dismissed all charges against several people, was fired “without explanation.”

In his place, Martin Brannan was appointed, though he was recently reprimanded by the State Bar Association for prosecutorial misconduct in a murder case.  Brannan ordered officers to contact the defendant without giving prior notice to his attorney. The detectives made several threats if he did not waive his legal rights.  Their actions resulted in a dismissal of all charges against the defendant, though that dismissal is being appealed.

How’s that for abuse of process? But it parallels Chief Gilbert’s false arrest of anyone who criticizes him or the City Council. Though state and federal laws are being openly violated, the state has yet to stop any of it.

Of course, this is the state where its Chief Federal Judge, John Roll, was killed (along with five others) and Member of Congress Gabriel Giffords was shot in the head this past January when a “lone gunman” staged a shooting spree, hitting 19 people.  Giffords was released from the hospital last month, though she will undergo daily physical therapy, possibly for years.

Incidentally, the shooting occurred after President Obama claimed the power to order extra-judicial killings.

After discussing the shooting spree, Chief Gilbert  the Council in an open meeting on January 11 that the same level of anti-government rhetoric exists in Quartzsite (starting at about 6:24), which he characterized as warning signs similar to those exhibited by Jared Lee Loughner, Roll’s assassin:

Can’t wait for the movie.

The Green, Green Arab Summer: I

In the U.S. mainstream media the developments that have followed the misnamed “Arab Spring” have been curiously under-reported. The reason seems clear: In recent weeks those developments have taken a clear turn away from Western-style democracy, pluralism, tolerance, respect for human rights, etc. (as we’ve warned,  repeatedly, that they would). The turmoil has undermined the region’s authoritarian secularists to the benefit of far more authoritarian Islamists.

In Tunisia, Reuters reported on July 7, “religious tension is rising as Islamists challenge the dominance of liberals in what was once a citadel of Arab secularism.” Last week an Allahu-akbar chanting mob attacked a cinema in Tunis that had shown  (“No Allah, No Master”), adocumentary film by Tunisian-French director Nadia El-Fani, an outspoken secularist. The police were slow to respond to the calls for help from the cinema, having previously advised that the screening be cancelled. According to Reuters,

Police later arrested 26 men, but Salafists—a purist trend within political Islam advocating a return to the ways of early Muslims—gathered outside the justice ministry two days later to demand their release, leading to scuffles… Secular media and intellectuals have reacted with alarm, warning that freedoms in Tunisia—a bastion of secularism under 23 years of tough police rule by Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali—are in danger of being lost if Islamists… are not stopped.

“Have we replaced one dictatorship for another,” asked Taieb Zahar, chief editor of the French-language monthluRealites. “This is a foretaste of what is in store if firm measures are not taken against these sorcerer’s apprentices.” Tunisians are Muslims with an Islamic mentality and secularists are “victims of a system that is the agent of colonialism,” responds Abdelmajid Habibi, a leader in the Salafist Tahrir party which was behind the attack on the cinema. To him Fani’s documentary, which advocates the preservation of secularism in post-Ben Ali Tunisia, was “like a declaration of war, and people wanted to say that they were against it.”

The attack on the cinema is only the latest indicator that “after the overthrow of President Zine al-Abedin Ben Ali radicals have dramatically intensified their activities.” The are emboldened by the clear signs that the Islamist party,Al-Nahda (Renaissance) will score a victory in the upcoming elections for the constituent assembly scheduled for October 23. Its leader, Sheikh Rashid Al-Ghannoushi, returned from exile in London after the “Jasmine Revolution” and has rapidly become the most important figure in Tunisian politics.

If victorious, Al-Ghannoushi and his movement will use the tools of “democratic process” to transform Tunisia into an Islamic state, Sharia, veils, and all the rest of the package included. The Rebirthers predictably reject such allegations. As Muqtedar Khan notes in Al Ahram Weekly, they say they are just another political party, albeit one that emphasizes Tunisia’s Muslim character and the potential contribution of Islamic values to political governance:

The success of Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey has given hopes to secularists that Islamist parties elsewhere can thrive in a democratic context without undermining or endangering democracy. It has also given Islamist parties a roadmap to legitimacy… Al-Ghannoushi says one thing when the secularists and the West are listening and another to his followers.

In other words, he practices taqiyya, the art of , as it has been practiced by Muhammad and his faithful emulators for the past 14 centuries. When he shows his true face—as he surely will if the elections are allowed proceed on an already delayed schedule—it will be too late.

Al-Ghannoushi and his Egyptian and Syrian counterparts know what they are doing. “Islamists have not been the leaders of the uprising,” Bassam Tibi correctly points out in the latest issue of Telos. “[O]n the contrary, like cautious Leninists, they are hoping to take over, eventually with the help of the exceptional sophisticated organizations of their movements.” Indeed they are, as evidenced in Teheran in 1979. Unlike the hard-core jihadists, the “moderate Islamists” disguise their agenda of pursuing a Sharia state and eliminate it from discussion, Tibi says, but only civic non-Islamists offer hope for a better Middle East:

This is the hard choice facing the West: will it work with the civic Muslims, liberal democrats who oppose Islamism? Or will it prefer to work with moderate Islamists, treating them as alternatives to the jihadists, but at the price of selling out the Muslim liberals. Lynch in Foreign Affairsunfortunately upgrades the Islamist movement to a worthy partner for the West, and the U.S. State Department has invited him to speak and to consult. Yet his defense of moderate Islamism is deeply misplaced; we need to encourage a civic Islam, appropriate for a democratic society, not to promote Islamism, of any stripe.

The U.S. State Department has indicated its preferences, since Tibi’s article was written, by legitimizing the Muslim Brotherhood, which is not even a “moderate Islamist” group by any stretch of imagination. Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius. [Next: Egypt]

Inside Job

This is the final part of a four-part series…

A popular documentary, Inside Job, captured kudos at the 2010 Academy Awards. Its hard-hitting analysis marked a milestone among filmmakers for shining light in the dark corners of Wall Street. Writer, producer and director Charles Ferguson provided a public service by exposing key perpetrators.

Laudable yet incomplete, Ferguson’s popular film left unaddressed the all-important “how.” The storyline left moviegoers with the impression that the film’s featured insiders operated virtually alone in perpetrating history’s greatest heist. In truth, the real “inside job” is far more sinister and remains ongoing.

The latest Wall Street mega-fraud required that “the mark” (the public) first be induced to embrace a mindset that grants financial signals not just deference but outright dominance. The pre-staging of that perspective required education to internalize a shared consensus that then worked its way into policymaking and law.

To suggest that those portrayed could commit a crime of such enormity without broad-based acquiescence leaves a defrauded public looking for culprits in the wrong places. While those Ferguson featured should be indicted and prosecuted, their conviction alone would leave untouched the internalization of a consensus mindset fully capable of enabling the next fraud.

To preclude the next swindle requires that a long-deceived public grasp the common source of this deceit. While it’s true that those featured are masterful manipulators of Wall Street conditions, those conditions are “downstream” of a widely shared viewpoint.

This fraud-enabling perspective first gained traction in the US as the “Chicago model” with careful nurturing by proponents at the University of Chicago and other top universities. This money myopic world view soon matured into the “law and economics” movement that gradually embedded this shared belief in the US law and then re-branded this mindset worldwide as the US-discrediting “Washington consensus.”
Those portrayed in Inside Job are problematic. But they alone are not the perpetrators. Incarcerate or execute those portrayed and the problem remains.

The real perpetrator is a false “generally accepted truth.” The culprit in this ongoing fraud is a finance-fixated mindset-firmly embedded in academia — that induces us to believe that financial signals should determine our course, both personally and even geopolitically.

Over decades, that mental framework worked its way into the law of the land. Pension plans, for example, are required by law to pursue the best risk-rated returns with little regard for the non-financial impact of their investments.

Pension fiduciaries dare not concern themselves with issues outside the narrow framework of the money-myopic consensus mindset. To do so risks a lawsuit by pension beneficiaries and the federal law was written to ensure that noncompliant fiduciaries lose.

As funds under management in the US surged from $800 billion in 1980 to $16.6 trillion by April 2007, the impact of this “Chicago” mindset grew apace. Retirement funds, in turn, provided a ready market for those selling subprime mortgages that were certified as safe by corrupt securities’ ratings from Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s and Fitch.

Wall Street analysts liken the subprime swindle to a financial heart attack from which recovery is destined to be long and labored. Yet not a word has been muttered about the mindset that enabled this latest mega-fraud and will, if not changed, ensure the next con.

The power of shared beliefs is a force easily underestimated. A similar displacement of facts with consensus beliefs induced the US invasion of Iraq. We now know that the intelligence on which the US relied was manipulated around a preset agenda. The duplicity that undermined US national security mirrors the deceit that ravaged Baby Boomer retirement security.

These parallel frauds dramatically weakened the US financially, militarily and diplomatically. If such deception is not treason, what is?

Recovery from this ongoing fraud requires that we recognize the internalized nature of this duplicity. Even now, we Americans are still being induced to freely embrace the very forces that jeopardize our freedom.
US national security lies as much in our financial strength as in our military capabilities. To restore that strength requires a sensible and sustainable path forward. At present, we grant deference to a mindset that, by law, displaces those values not calculable in money. To survive and thrive, both democracies and markets require better signals.

Over several decades, we were induced to view the pursuit of financial returns as a proxy for our pursuit of happiness. Today’s outcomes became predictable once we could be seduced to embrace that false equivalence and embed its flawed metrics in law.

Inside Job revealed the most visible perpetrators. Though that’s a good start, the real inside job continues to jeopardize our security, both national and financial. The most troublesome culprit remains securely embedded inside a shared mindset patiently awaiting the next opportunity.

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