By Alexander Cockburn (March 26, 2000) CounterPunch.
Military personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, have until recently been working in CNN's hq in Atlanta.
CNN is up in arms about our report in the last issue of CounterPunch concerning the findings of the Dutch journalist, Abe de Vries about the presence of US Army personnel at CNN, owned by Time-Warner. We cited an article by de Vries which appeared on February 21 in the reputable Dutch daily newspaper Trouw, originally translated into English and placed on the web by Emperor's Clothes. De Vries reported that a handful of military personnel from the Third Psychological Operations Battalion, part of the airmobile Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, had worked in CNN's hq in Atlanta.
De Vries quoted Major Thomas Collins of the US Army Information Service as having confirmed the presence of these Army psy-ops experts at CNN, saying, "Psy-ops personnel, soldiers and officers, have been working in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta through our program, 'Training with Industry'. They worked as regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of news."
This particular CounterPunch story was the topic of my regular weekly broadcast to AM Live, a program of the South Africa Broadcasting Company in Johannesburg. Among the audience of this broadcast was CNN's bureau in South Africa which lost no time in relaying news of it to CNN hq in Atlanta, and I duly received an angry phone call from Eason Jordan who identified himself as CNN's president of newsgathering and international networks.
Jordan was full of indignation that I had somehow compromised the reputation of CNN. But in the course of our conversation it turned out that yes, CNN had hosted a total of five interns from US army psy-ops, two in television, two in radio and one in satellite operations. Jordan said the program had only recently terminated, I would guess at about the time CNN's higher management read Abe de Vries's stories.
When I reached De Vries in Belgrade, where's he is Trouw's correspondent, and told him about CNN's furious reaction, he stood by his stories and by the quotations given him by Major Collins.For some days CNN wouldn't get back to him with a specific reaction to Collins's confirmation, and when it did, he filed a later story for Trouw, printed on February 25 noting that the military worked at CNN in the period from June 7, (a date confirmed by Eason to me) meaning that during the war a psy-ops person would have been at CNN during the last week.
"The facts are", De Vries told me, " that the US Army, US Special Operations Command and CNN personnel confirmed to me that military personnel have been involved in news production at CNN's newsdesks. I found it simply astonishing. Of course CNN says these psyops personnel didn't decide anything, write news reports, etcetera. What else can they say. Maybe it's true, maybe not. The point is that these kind of close ties with the army are, in my view, completely unacceptable for any serious news organization. Maybe even more astonishing is the complete silence about the story from the big media. To my knowledge, my story was not mentioned by leading American or British newspapers, nor by Reuters or AP."
Here at CounterPunch we agree with Abe de Vries, who told me he'd originally come upon the story through an article in the French newsletter, Intelligence On-line, February 17, which described a military symposium in Arlington, Virginia, held at the beginning of February of this year, discussing use of the press in military operations. Colonel Christopher St John, commander of the US Army's 4th Psyops Group, was quoted by Intelligence On-Line's correspondent, present at the symposium, as having, in the correspondent's words, "called for greater cooperation between the armed forces and media giants. He pointed out that some army PSYOPS personnel had worked for CNN for several weeks and helped in the production of some news stories for the network."
So, however insignificant Eason Jordan and other executives at CNN may now describe the Army psyops tours at CNN as having been, the commanding officer of the Psy-ops group thought them as sufficient significance to mention at a high level Pentagon seminar about propaganda and psychological warfare. It could be that CNN was the target of a psyops penetration and is still too naïve to figure out what was going on.
It's hard not to laugh when CNN execs like Eason Jordan start spouting high-toned stuff about CNN's principles of objectivity and refusal to spout government or Pentagon propaganda. The relationship is most vividly summed up by the fact that Christiane Amanpour, CNN's leading foreign correspondent, and a woman whose reports about the fate of Kosovan refugees did much to fan public appetite for NATO's war, is literally and figuratively in bed with spokesman for the US State Department, and a leading propagandist for NATO during that war, her husband James Rubin.If CNN truly wanted to maintain the appearance of objectivity, it would have taken Amanpour off the story. Amanpour, by the way, is still a passionate advocate for NATO's crusade, most recently on the Charlie Rose show.
In the first two weeks of the war in Kosovo CNN produced thirty articles for the Internet, according to de Vries, who looked them up for his first story. An average CNN article had seven mentions of Tony Blair, NATO spokesmen like Jamie Shea and David Wilby or other NATO officials. Words like refugees, ethnic cleansing, mass killings and expulsions were used nine times on the average. But the so-called Kosovo Liberation Armmy (0.2 mentions) and the Yugoslav civilian victims (0.3 mentions) barely existed for CNN.
During the war on Serbia, as with other recent conflicts involving the US, wars, CNN's screen was filled with an interminable procession of US military officers. On April 27 of last year, Amy Goodman of the Pacifica radio network, put a good question to Frank Sesno, who is CNN's senior vice president for political coverage.
GOODMAN:"If you support the practice of putting ex-military men -generals - on the payroll to share their opinion during a time of war, would you also support putting peace activists on the payroll to give a different opinion during a time of war? To be sitting there with the military generals talking about why they feel that war is not appropriate?"
FRANK SESNO: "We bring the generals in because of their expertise in a particular area. We call them analysts. We don't bring them in as advocates. In fact, we actually talk to them about that - they're not there as advocates."
Exactly a week before Sesno said this, CNN had featured as one of its military analysts, Lt Gen Dan Benton, US Army Retired.
BENTON: "I don't know what our countrymen that are questioning why we're involved in this conflict are thinking about. As I listened to this press conference this morning with reports of rapes burning, villages being burned and this particularly incredible report of blood banks, of blood being harvested from young boys for the use of Yugoslav forces, I just got madder and madder. The United States has a responsibility as the only superpower in the world, and when we learn about these things, somebody has got to stand up and say, that's enough, stop it, we aren't going to put up with this. And so the United States is fulfilling its leadership responsibility with our NATO allies and are trying to stop these incredible atrocities."
Please note what CNN's supposedly non-advocatory analyst Benton was ranting about: a particularly bizarre and preposterous NATO propaganda item about 700 Albanian boys being used as human blood banks for Serb fighters.
"[...] The reasons for Washington’s intervention into Xinjiang affairs seems to have little to do with concerns over alleged human rights abuses by Beijing authorities against Uyghur people. It seems rather to have very much to do with the strategic geopolitical location of Xinjiang on the Eurasian landmass and its strategic importance for China’s future economic and energy cooperation with Russia, Kazakhastan and other Central Asia states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
The major organization internationally calling for protests in front of Chinese embassies around the world is the Washington, D.C.-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC).
The WUC manages to finance a staff, a very fancy website in English, and has a very close relation to the US Congress-funded NED. According to published reports by the NED itself, the World Uyghur Congress receives $215,000.00 annually from the National Endowment for Democracy for “human rights research and advocacy projects.” The president of the WUC is an exile Uyghur who describes herself as a “laundress turned millionaire,” Rebiya Kadeer, who also serves as president of the Washington D.C.-based Uyghur American Association, another Uyghur human rights organization which receives significant funding from the US Government via the National Endowment for Democracy.
The NED was intimately involved in financial support to various organizations behind the Lhasa ”Crimson Revolution“ in March 2008, as well as the Saffron Revolution in Burma/Myanmar and virtually every regime change destabilization in eastern Europe over the past years from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine to Kyrgystan to Teheran in the aftermath of the recent elections.
Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in a published interview in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.
[The Blood For Oil Factor]
As well, Russia and China are discussing major natural gas pipelines from eastern Siberia through Xinjiang into China. Eastern Siberia contains around 135 Trillion cubic feet of proven plus probable natural gas reserves. The Kovykta natural gas field could give China with natural gas in the next decade via a proposed pipeline.
During the current global economic crisis, Kazakhstan received a major credit from China of $10 billion, half of which is for oil and gas sector. The oil pipeline Atasu-Alashankou and the gas pipeline China-Central Asia, are an instrument of strategic 'linkage' of central Asian countries to the economy China. That Eurasian cohesion from Russia to China across Central Asian countries is the geopolitical cohesion Washington most fears. While they would never say so, growing instability in Xinjiang would be an ideal way for Washington to weaken that growing cohesion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization nations". -
Miss Kadeer, 62, has denied the accusations and on Wednesday repeated her claims that 400 Uighurs had been killed in Urumqi and a further 100 in Kashgar, the second-largest Uighur city in Xinjiang.
However her claims appear to conflict directly with witness testimonies and other reports gathered by international media on the ground in Urumqi over the last three days.
In the People's Hospital No.2, the overwhelming number of the 360 casualties were Han Chinese who, according to doctors, had injuries consistent with being beaten with rocks, sticks and other blunt instruments”. -
“[…] The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters. […]Eight teenage boys and girls, the youngest 14 — face tripwire, a thin cloud of poisonous gas and loud shots — BAM! BAM! — fired from behind a flimsy wall. They move quickly, pellet guns drawn and masks affixed.
“United States Border Patrol! Put your hands up!”
[...] “Put him on his face and put a knee in his back,” a Border Patrol agent explained. “I guarantee that he’ll shut up.”
[...] “Before it was more about the basics,” said Johnny Longoria, a Border Patrol agent here. “But now our emphasis is on terrorism, illegal entry, drugs and human smuggling.”
[...] The law enforcement posts are restricted to those ages 14 to 21 who have a C average, but there seems to be some wiggle room. “I will take them at 13 and a half,” Deputy Lowenthal said. […] The law enforcement programs are highly decentralized, and each post is run in a way that reflects the culture of its sponsoring agency and region. Most have weekly meetings in which the children work on their law-enforcement techniques in preparing for competitions.
[...] “I like shooting them,” Cathy said. “I like the sound they make. It gets me EXCITED [Editor: superscript added].”
Are US Americans Being Subject to Government Manipulation into a Guerilla Country?
”[…] The Associated Press reports, "A school safety drill that included police officers in riot gear with weapons has caused concern among some parents who say it was too realistic and frightened some students."
"Students, who were unaware police were conducting a drill, were taken from the classroom into the halls, patted down by officers and asked what they had in their pockets, the newspaper said."
"Some of these kids were so scared, they just about wet their pants," said Marge Bradshaw, a parent with four children in Godfrey-Lee Schools. "I think it's pure wrong that the students and parents were not informed of this."
The students were not told that the drill was about to take place and the teachers were given just a moments notice.
This follows an incident in early October where another Michigan school was locked down for hours after a teenager was seen in the woods wearing a Halloween mask”.
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill.
~~~
US americans, you are being indoctrinated as useful idiots to make up the numbers for the next terrorist attack either in the US or in the UK. That is why False Flag Terrorism is the hotest topic that all US americans must have studied since teens, to thoroughly understand their government, and their political elites....but since the US is a sheep and cow country (aka. ‘If I’m ruled by monsters and I might have to do something about it, I’d rather watch Paris Hilton’), or a country that does not know ‘how to peel the onion’ -this is not likely to happen with the velocity it is needed nowadays. Hence, they have become self-condemned, they believe in "democracy is two wolves discussing with a lamb how to count their votes"...You need your revolution urgently,
“Massive demonstrations, agitations at all levels on all of these basic issues, and more and more pressuring of the mainstream media to expose the kinds of nefarious things that are being perpetrated by the white house, which not only are bad for the country, but as one of your opening reports pointed out, may even jeopardize the very survival of our globe with global warming. I also believe electoral strategy is not irrelevant. Elections do matter. It does matter who gets elected, contrary to what some people on the militant left will say. It does matter who gets elected". Michael Parenti on Democracy Now! (Feb 23 2004) "Michael Parenti On Ancient Rome, the Bush Administration and Nader’s Presidential Bid".
, detailing the vast expansion of the secret armies being massed by [] the Pentagon --came the revelation of Rumsfeld's plan to create "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" that will "bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception"
[…] the "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)" --will carry out secret missions designed to "stimulate reactions" among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to "counterattack" by U.S. forces.
In other words --and let's say this plainly, clearly and soberly, so that no one can mistake the intention of Rumsfeld's plan-- the United States government is planning to use "cover and deception" and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people.
[…] For P2OG is not designed solely to flush out terrorists and bring them to justice […] Once they have sparked terrorists into action […] they can then take measures against the "states/sub-state actors accountable" for "harboring" the Rumsfeld-roused gangs. What kind of measures exactly? Well, the classified Pentagon program puts it this way: "Their sovereignty will be at risk."
[…] The Rumsfeld-Bush plan to employ murder and terrorism for political, financial and ideological gain does have historical roots (besides al Qaeda, the Stern Gang, the SA, the SS, the KGB, the IRA, the UDF, Eta, Hamas, Shining Path and countless other upholders of Bushian morality, decency and freedom). We refer of course to Operation Northwoods, often mentioned in these pages: the plan that America's top military brass presented to President John Kennedy in 1963, calling for a phony terrorist campaign --complete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans-- to provide "justification" for an invasion of Cuba. [Editor: Read the full case of Op. Northwoods at George Washington University, National Security Archives, "Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962"].
Kennedy rejected the plan, and was killed a few months later”. -
Again, in Alternet (Nov 5 2002), "Look Out! Here Comes P2OG": "The Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) --as described in an internal briefing drafted this summer to guide other Pentagon agencies-- would carry out 'secret operations' aimed at 'stimulating reactions' among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction --that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to 'quick-response' attacks by U.S. forces.' Wait a minute --prod terrorists into action?! Hello again, Dr. Strangelove.... And just to make sure that we lose international support altogether, the brief declares the U.S. will hold 'states/sub-state actors accountable' and 'signal to harboring states that their sovereignty will be at risk.' That is sure to play well with the rest of the world". -
Learn from south-americans, learn from Ghandi, and use peaceful and intelligent protests to get back control over your 'deep-state actors' and your destructive "secret government" that has done so much injury and carried so much deception (here, and here) in the world. Now you live trapped in this dialectic hypocrisy in which you are forced to choose between preemptive wars or else, self extermination. How basic and stupid alternatives, how insane and involuted. US america has become a war country (with UK too), exactly as planned since Truman, with plenty of US 'blood-soaked' foreign policies. Be forewarned of your "Leaders"...be forewarned.
Before watching the following videos, remember that the guy Scheuer was in CIA’s Osama bin Laden Department. Then, how can a citizen like him, with sort of a security clearance, come up with this kind of story-telling?
Read more about this incident on Washington’s Blog (
Jul 2 2009),
"The Bigger Story Behind Michael Scheur's Wish for an Attack on America". So, what is the US doing calming the waters in Irak? Probably, every Iraki just loves US America by now, wooha !! Asia Times (Jun 10 2005), " The Roving Eye. Exit strategy: Civil war": “One wonders whether Pentagon black ops are also part of these "forces of evil". In October 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld invented a secret army - one of his pet projects. According to the Pentagon's Defense Science Board, the goal of Rumsfeld's army - the 100-member, US$100 million-a-year Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) - would carry out secret operations designed to "stimulate reactions" among "terrorist groups", thus exposing them to "counter-attack" by the P2OG. The stock in trade of Rumsfeld's army is assassinations, sabotage, deception, the whole arsenal of black ops. Iraq is the perfect lab for it. "Iraqification" means in fact "Salvadorization". No wonder old faces are back in the game. James Steele, leader of a Special Forces team in El Salvador in the early 1980s, is in Iraq. Steve Casteel, a former top official involved in the "drug wars" in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, is also in Iraq. He is a senior adviser in - where else - the Interior Ministry, to which friendly militias are subordinated”. - [Editor: Hence, guerrillas forever, civil war, hatred and terrorism towards US America assured for at least the next 50 years. Bravo US Government!].
“U.S. foreign policy is confused, or stupid, or misinformed, or well-intentioned but it goes awry. I think it's a brilliant policy filled with many brilliant, terrible, horrible victories. And that's what we're describing now. It's systematically undermines any movement, any country, any leadership, any popular group that tries an alternative way of self-defining, self-developing, using the resources, the markets, the labor of their society for their own needs, rather than for a multi-corporate global system, a neo-liberal system, which seems to be the goal of this reactionary clique in office today”. Democracy Now! (Feb 23 2004), "Michael Parenti On Ancient Rome, the Bush Administration and Nader’s Presidential Bid".
”[…] they show a pattern of behavior on the part of the intelligence community and those who control them for fabricating information to justify preemptive wars on sovereign nations for nefarious reasons. We have become the aggressor nation”. Former U.S. Army Special Forces Captain John J. McCarthy, "Treason In Wartime".
"There is no evidence that the Pentagon or the CIA played a direct role in recent terrorist attacks. The latter were undertaken by organizations (or cells of these organizations), which operate quite independently, with a certain degree of autonomy. This independence is in the very nature of a covert intelligence operation. The "intelligence asset" is not in direct contact with its covert sponsors. It is not necessarily cognizant of the role it plays on behalf of its intelligence sponsors.
The fundamental question is who is behind them? Through what sources are they being financed? What is the underlying network of ties?
A recent (2002) classified outbrief drafted to guide the Pentagon calls for the "creation of a so-called Proactive Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG), to launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to 'quick-response' attacks by U.S. forces."
The P2OG initiative is nothing new. It essentially extends an existing apparatus of covert operations. Amply documented, the CIA has supported terrorist groups since the Cold War era. This "prodding of terrorist cells" under covert intelligence operations often requires the infiltration and training of the radical groups linked to Al Qaeda.
“Special Operations units have been active in Pakistan for months and are training military forces in Yemen and Georgia. These missions could provide a cover for conducting any covert raids and other actions against suspected al-Qaeda members in the two countries.
The United States has also placed more than 500 Special Operations troops in the African nation of Djibouti, where they are near potential hot spots such as Yemen and Somalia. The USS Belleau Wood, an amphibious assault ship that carries attack helicopters and a handful of Harrier jump jets, has been stationed off the Horn of Africa for about six weeks, ready to carry those troops and some specialized helicopters.
And, in early October, the Washington Times reported that US commandos hunting Taliban and al-Qaeda guerrillas in Afghanistan gained permission to employ "source operations" - clandestine tactics typically confined to the CIA”. Asia Times (Nov 5 2002), "'P2OG' allows Pentagon to fight dirty".
Covert support by the US military and intelligence apparatus has been channeled to various Islamic terrorist organizations through a complex network of intermediaries and intelligence proxies. Moreover, numerous official statements, intelligence reports confirm recent links (in the post Cold War era) between US military-intelligence units and Al Qaeda operatives, as occurred in Bosnia (mid 1990s), Kosovo (1998-99) and Macedonia (2001). The Republican Party Committee of the US Congress in a 1997 report points to open collaboration between the US military and Al Qaeda operatives in the civil war in Bosnia”. -
To sustain the war agenda, these "fabricated realities", funneled on a day to day basis into the news chain must become indelible truths, which form part of a broad political and media consensus. In this regard, the corporate media –although acting independently of the military-intelligence apparatus, is an instrument of this evolving totalitarian system.
In close liaison with the Pentagon and the CIA, the State Department has also set up its own "soft-sell" (civilian) propaganda unit, headed by Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Charlotte Beers, a powerful figure in the advertising industry. Working in liaison with the Pentagon, Beers was appointed to head the State Department’s propaganda unit in the immediate wake of 9/11. Her mandate is "to counteract anti-Americanism abroad." [Sunday Times, London 5 January 2003] Her office at the State department is to:
"ensure that public diplomacy (engaging, informing, and influencing key international audiences) is practiced in harmony with public affairs (outreach to Americans) and traditional diplomacy to advance U.S. interests and security and to provide the moral basis for U.S. leadership in the world."
The Role of the CIA.
The most powerful component of the Fear and Disinformation Campaign (FDI) rests with the CIA, which, secretly subsidizes authors, journalists and media critics, through a web of private foundations and CIA sponsored front organizations. The CIA also influences the scope and direction of many Hollywood productions. Since 9/11, one third of Hollywood productions are war movies. "Hollywood stars and scriptwriters are rushing to bolster the new message of patriotism, conferring with the CIA and brainstorming with the military about possible real-life terrorist attacks." [Ros Davidson, Stars earn their Stripes, The Sunday Herald (Scotland), 11 November 2001)] "The Sum of All Fears" directed by Phil Alden Robinson, which depicts the scenario of a nuclear war, received the endorsement and support of both the Pentagon and the CIA. [See Samuel Blumenfeld, Le Pentagone et la CIA enrôlent Hollywood, Le Monde, 24 July 2002]
Disinformation is routinely "planted" by CIA operatives in the newsroom of major dailies, magazines and TV channels. Outside public relations firms are often used to create "fake stories" Carefully documented by Chaim Kupferberg in relation to the events of September 11: "A relatively few well-connected correspondents provide the scoops, that get the coverage in the relatively few mainstream news sources, where the parameters of debate are set and the "official reality" is consecrated for the bottom feeders in the news chain." [Chaim Kupferberg, The Propaganda Preparation for 9/11, Global Outlook, No. 3, 2003, p. 19]
Covert disinformation initiatives under CIA auspices are also funneled through various intelligence proxies in other countries. Since 9/11, they have resulted in the day-to-day dissemination of false information concerning alleged "terrorist attacks". In virtually all of the reported cases (Britain, France, Indonesia, India, Philippines, etc.) the « alleged terrorist groups» are said to have «links to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda», without of course acknowledging the fact (amply documented by intelligence reports and official documents) that Al Qaeda is a creation of CIA”. -
There is a “strange coincidence” of government rehearsals of terrorist attacks. First in UK 7/7 2005 bombings related to the involvement with a private company. Humm, did a government rehearsal also take place on during 9/11 2001 in the WTC (NORAD)?…..of course it happened !!
There is something you don’t see between this coincidence…and that is where ‘real power’ may be. Who is joking and who is…obeying to turn around just for the photo.
What Politicians and World Elites Know That You Don’t Even Imagine.
In the late decades, after deep research from universities and the military into the sociological influences of marketing and propaganda, it has become more than easy to manage public opinion and influence it through the media, and fear. World political and economic elites know this very well, but they don’t tell you.
"It turns out that, because it is impossible to know everything there is to know, humans use cognitive shortcuts when necessary to help them make a lot of life's decisions".
There are some interesting reading you can do to see more clearly this rather disappeared topic from our civic education. Certainly in the coming decades, we the people must brake this inertia, and change the way we have acted and thought, to defend our chance of making of democracy more of a reality in representation, rather than that one of a facade --the fabrication from powerful propaganda of financial-economic political-elites. This new 'reformed democracy' may have a more socialist face within a capitalistic economic structure, but again, we need to figure that out about later. First we have to loose some chains.
The following articles will crack you out of "comfort zone" and put you in front of what reality takes place under a democratic election. I hope this will permit you to question the relevance of your so called 'own opinion' and teach your families and kids accordingly.
"Though it is impossible to know for sure whether people actually vote along party lines, for example, many psychological studies have shown that political affiliation plays a large role, not just in the voting booth, but when people must decide how they feel about political issues, as well. Emory University political psychologist Drew Westen and his colleagues previously published a study in which they correctly predicted people's views on political issues based solely on their emotions.
[...] Westen said in his book, The Political Brain, that only when asked about the economy did people sway from their opinions. "There we found some connection to reality, but it was still swamped by their feeling about the incumbent party and whether that party was theirs," he says. What's more, Westen believes that we become even more partisan as we age because we are faced with partisan decisions again and again.
The researchers also used neuroimaging to look at the neural responses of individuals who described themselves as partisan. They showed the participants one of three groups of slides: one group about their party's candidate, one about the other party's candidate, or one about a neutral control subject. In each group, the first slide revealed a position the politician had taken, and the second depicted a contradiction — something the candidate had done or said that seemed to be contrary to what the first slide was saying. Not only were the participants unable to see the contradiction for their own candidate, but the neuroimaging showed that they were regulating their emotional response.
The psychologists specifically saw large areas of activation in the prefrontal cortex, which indicated emotional influence on reasoning, and in the posterior cingulated cortex, associated with forgivability. Essentially, participants detected the contradiction in their reasoning, but they weren't allowing it to affect their opinion. Westen describes this as "motivated reasoning."
[...W]hat's known as "terror management theory," [...] holds that people use ideology to protect themselves psychologically from paralyzing fears of dying.
Terror Management 101. “[…] There are Americans who are so terrified of their lives being taken by terrorists that they are hoping the US government will use nuclear weapons to destroy “the Muslim enemy.” The justifications concocted for the use of nuclear bombs against Japanese civilian populations have had their effect. There are millions of Americans who wish “their” government would kill everyone that “their” government has demonized”. Paul Craig Roberts, Countercurrents (Jun 13 2009), "Fear Rules".
Terror Management 102. Keith Olbermann at MSNBC has been paying attention too. “Secaucus - Last Thursday on Countdown, I referred to the latest terror threat - the reported bomb plot against the New York City subway system - in terms of its timing. President Bush’s speech about the war on terror had come earlier the same day, as had the breaking news of the possible indictment of Karl Rove in the CIA leak investigation.
I suggested that in the last three years there had been about 13 similar coincidences - a political downturn for the administration, followed by a “terror event” - a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning.
We figured we’d better put that list of coincidences on the public record. We did so this evening on the television program, with ten of these examples. The other three are listed at the end of the main list, out of chronological order. The contraction was made purely for the sake of television timing considerations, and permitted us to get the live reaction of the former Undersecretary of Homeland Security, Asa Hutchinson.
We bring you these coincidences, reminding you, and ourselves here, that perhaps the simplest piece of wisdom in the world is called “the logical fallacy.” Just because Event “A” occurs, and then Event “B” occurs, that does not automatically mean that Event “A” caused Event “B.”
But one set of comments from an informed observer seems particularly relevant as we examine these coincidences.
On May 10th of this year, after his resignation, former Secretary of Homeland Security Ridge looked back on the terror alert level changes, issued on his watch.
Mr. Ridge said: “More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it. Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don’t necessarily put the country on (alert)… there were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said ‘for that?’”
Please, judge for yourself.
FREE VIDEO
Nexus of politics and terror Oct. 12: Keith Olbermann focuses on terror alerts over the past several years. Keith pulls together the political climate at the time of the alerts and allows viewers to determine for themselves if there is a political connection.
MSNBC
FREE VIDEO
Coincidence? Oct. 12: Keith Olbermann talks with the former Under-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Asa Hutchison about the connection between politics and the terror alerts over the past several years. MSNBC.
Number One:
May 18th, 2002. The first details of the President’s Daily Briefing of August 6th, 2001, are revealed, including its title - “Bin Laden Determined To Strike In U.S.” The same day another memo is discovered - revealing the FBI knew of men with links to Al Qaeda training at an Arizona flight school. The memo was never acted upon. Questions about 9/11 Intelligence failures are swirling.
May 20th, 2002. Two days later, FBI Director Mueller declares another terrorist attack “inevitable.” The next day, the Department of Homeland Security issues warnings of attacks against railroads nationwide, and against New York City landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty.
Number Two:
June 6th, 2002. Colleen Rowley, the FBI agent who tried to alert her superiors to the specialized flight training taken by Zacarias Moussaoui, whose information suggests the government missed a chance to break up the 9/11 plot, testifies before Congress. Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Graham says Rowley’s testimony has inspired similar pre-9/11 whistle-blowers.
June 10th, 2002. Four days later, speaking from Russia, Attorney General John Ashcroft reveals that an American named Jose Padilla is under arrest, accused of plotting a radiation bomb attack in this country. Padilla had, by this time, already been detained for more than a month.
Number Three:
February 5th, 2003. Secretary of State Powell tells the United Nations Security Council of Iraq’s concealment of weapons, including 18 mobile biological weapons laboratories, justifying a U.N. or U.S. first strike. Many in the UN are doubtful. Months later, much of the information proves untrue.
February 7th, 2003. Two days later, as anti-war demonstrations continue to take place around the globe, Homeland Security Secretary Ridge cites “credible threats” by Al Qaeda, and raises the terror alert level to orange. Three days after that, Fire Administrator David Paulison - who would become the acting head of FEMA after the Hurricane Katrina disaster - advises Americans to stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape to protect themselves against radiological or biological attack.
Number Four:
July 23rd, 2003: The White House admits the CIA -- months before the President's State of the Union Address -- expressed "strong doubts" about the claim that Iraq had attempted to buy uranium from Niger. On the 24th, the Congressional report on the 9/11 attacks is issued; it criticizes government at all levels; it reveals an FBI informant had been living with two of the future hijackers; and it concludes that Iraq had no link to Al-Qaeda. 28 pages of the report are redacted. On the 26th, American troops are accused of beating Iraqi prisoners.
July 29th, 2003. Three days later, amid all of those negative headlines, Homeland Security issues warnings of further terrorist attempts to use airplanes for suicide attacks.
Number Five:
December 17th, 2003. 9/11 Commission Co-Chair Thomas Kean says the attacks were preventable. The next day, a Federal Appeals Court says the government cannot detain suspected radiation-bomber Jose Padilla indefinitely without charges, and the chief U.S. Weapons inspector in Iraq, Dr. David Kay, who has previously announced he has found no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, announces he will resign his post.
December 21st, 2003. Three days later, just before Christmas, Homeland Security again raises the threat level to Orange, claiming “credible intelligence” of further plots to crash airliners into U.S. cities. Subsequently, six international flights into this country are cancelled after some passenger names purportedly produce matches on government no-fly lists. The French later identify those matched names: one belongs to an insurance salesman from Wales, another to an elderly Chinese woman, a third to a five-year old boy.
Number Six:
March 30th, 2004. The new chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Charles Duelfer tells Congress we have still not found any WMD there. And, after weeks of refusing to appear before the 9/11 Commission, Condoleezza Rice finally relents and agrees to testify. On the 31st: Four Blackwater-USA contractors working in Iraq are murdered, their mutilated bodies dragged through the streets and left on public display in Fallujah. The role of civilian contractors in Iraq is widely questioned.
April 2nd, 2004. Homeland Security issues a bulletin warning that terrorists may try to blow up buses and trains, using fertilizer and fuel bombs - like the one detonated in Oklahoma City - stuffed into satchels or duffel bags.
Number Seven:
May 16th, 2004. Secretary of State Powell appears on “Meet The Press.” Moderator Tim Russert closes by asking him about the “enormous personal credibility” Powell had placed before the U.N. in laying out a case against Saddam Hussein. An aide to Powell interrupts the question, saying the interview is over. Powell finishes his answer, admitting that much of the information he had been given about Weapons of Mass Destruction was “inaccurate and wrong, and, in some cases, deliberately misleading.”
May 21st, 2004, new photos showing mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison are released. On the 24th - Associated Press video from Iraq confirms U.S. forces mistakenly bombed a wedding party - killing more than 40.
Wednesday the 26th. Two days later, Attorney General Ashcroft and FBI Director Mueller warn that intelligence from multiple sources, in Ashcroft’s words, “indicates Al-Qaeda’s specific intention to hit the United States hard,” and that “90 percent of the arrangements for an attack on the United States were complete.” The color-coded warning system is not raised, and Homeland Security Secretary Ridge does not attend the announcement.
Number Eight:
July 6th, 2004. Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry selects Senator John Edwards as his vice presidential running mate, producing a small bump in the election opinion polls, and a huge swing in media attention towards the Democratic campaign.
July 8th, 2004. Two days later, Homeland Secretary Ridge warns of information about Al-Qaeda attacks during the summer or autumn. Four days after that, the head of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, DeForest B. Soaries, Junior, confirms he has written to Ridge about the prospect of postponing the upcoming Presidential election in the event it is interrupted by terrorist acts.
Number Nine:
July 29th, 2004. At their party convention in Boston, the Democrats formally nominate John Kerry as their candidate for President. As in the wake of any convention, the Democrats dominate the media attention over the ensuing weekend.
Monday, August 1st, 2004. The Department of Homeland Security raises the alert status for financial centers in New York, New Jersey, and Washington to orange. The evidence supporting the warning - reconnaissance data, left in a home in Iraq - later proves to be roughly four years old and largely out-of-date.
Number Ten:
Last Thursday. At 10 AM Eastern Time, the President addresses the National Endowment for Democracy, once again emphasizing the importance of the war on terror and insisting his government has broken up at least 10 terrorist plots since 9/11.
At 3 PM Eastern Time, five hours after the President’s speech has begun, the Associated Press reports that Karl Rove will testify again to the CIA Leak Grand Jury, and that Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald has told Rove he cannot guarantee that he will not be indicted.
At 5:17 PM Eastern Time, seven hours after the President’s speech has begun, New York officials disclose a bomb threat to the city’s subway system - based on information supplied by the Federal Government. A Homeland Security spokesman says the intelligence upon which the disclosure is based is “of doubtful credibility.” And it later proves that New York City had known of the threat for at least three days, and had increased police presence in the subways long before making the announcement at that particular time. Local New York television station, WNBC, reports it had the story of the threat days in advance, but was asked by "high ranking federal officials" in New York and Washington to hold off its story.
Less than four days after revealing the threat, Mayor Michael Bloomberg says "Since the period of the threat now seems to be passing, I think over the immediate future, we'll slowly be winding down the enhanced security."
While news organizations ranging from the New York Post to NBC News quote sources who say there was reason to believe that informant who triggered the warning simply ‘made it up’, a Senior U.S. Counter-terrorism official tells the New York Times: "There was no there, there."
The list of three additional examples follows.
Number Eleven:
October 22nd, 2004. After weeks of Administration insistence that there are terrorist plans to disrupt the elections, FBI, Law Enforcement, and other U.S. Intelligence agencies report they have found no direct evidence of any plot. More over, they say, a key CIA source who had claimed knowledge of the plot, has been discredited.
October 29, 2004. Seven days later - four days before the Presidential election - the first supposedly new, datable tape of Osama Bin Laden since December 2001 is aired on the Al-Jazeera Network. A Bush-Cheney campaign official anonymously tells the New York Daily News that from his campaign’s point of view, the tape is quote “a little gift.”
Number Twelve:
May 5th, 2005. 88 members of the United States House of Representatives send a letter to President Bush demanding an investigation of the so-called “Downing Street Memo” - a British document which describes purported American desire dating to 2002 to "fix" the evidence to fit the charges against Iraq. In Iraq over the following weekend, car bombings escalate. On the 11th, more than 75 Iraqis are killed in one.
May 11th, 2005. Later that day, an instructor and student pilot violate restricted airspace in Washington D.C. It is an event that happens hundreds of times a year, but this time the plane gets to within three miles of the White House. The Capitol is evacuated; Vice President Cheney, the First Lady, and Nancy Reagan are all rushed to secure locations. The President, biking through woods, is not immediately notified.
Number Thirteen:
June 26th, 2005. A Gallup poll suggests that 61 percent of the American public believes the President does not have a plan in Iraq. On the 28th, Mr. Bush speaks to the nation from Fort Bragg: "We fight today because terrorists want to attack our country and kill our citizens, and Iraq is where they are making their stand. So we'll fight them there, we'll fight them across the world, and we will stay in the fight until the fight is won."
June 29th 2005. The next day, another private pilot veers into restricted airspace, the Capitol is again evacuated, and this time, so is the President.
--
To summarize, coincidences are coincidences.
We could probably construct a similar time line of terror events and warnings, and their relationship to - the opening of new Walmarts around the country.
Are these coincidences signs that the government’s approach has worked because none of the announced threats ever materialized? Are they signs that the government has not yet mastered how and when to inform the public?
Is there, in addition to the "fog of war" a simple, benign, "fog of intelligence”?
But, if merely a reasonable case can be made that any of these juxtapositions of events are more than just coincidences, it underscores the need for questions to be asked in this country - questions about what is prudence, and what is fear-mongering; questions about which is the threat of death by terror, and which is the terror of threat”.
Whether or not terror management theory is the cause, general elections are actually won by courting the independents — the one-third of the population that votes based on the options presented them each year. How do these people decide? A lot of them use shortcuts too. Some will obviously look at the issues, the economy, and the current state of the country and make an educated decision. But again, some people just don't have the time. These people turn to their guts — or at least a more automatic part of their brain.
Research has shown again and again that people prefer that which is familiar to them". -
[…P]olitical legitimacy can have quite diverse bases. This concept was elaborated by Max Weber whose analysis of ‘legitimate rule’ (legitime Herrschaft) pointed to tradition, charisma, and legal-rational procedure as potential sources of legitimate authority. These different bases of legitimacy all deserve some elaboration. The idea of traditional legitimacy has significant value in explaining the existence of political authority in social units in which institutions are informal, or in which social learning substantially accounts for the loyalty which power holders may receive. It is tempting to follow Weber in seeing existence since time immemorial as a key constituent of traditional legitimacy. However, more recent work on tradition has emphasised its malleability, and in some cases even its ‘invented’ quality, with rituals being deliberately constructed to bolster the authority of those in a position of dominance.
[…] Charisma is a somewhat different source of authority, and focuses on the personality of an authority figure and the relationship of that figure with networks of followers. The classic example is a figure such as Hitler, capable of swaying crowds with poisonous oratory, but there are many more benign examples; charisma can have a saintly as well as satanic dimension. [] It is also worth noting that a regime can attempt to create an artificial charisma around a figure whose personal relationship with the mass population of a state may be remote. Here, two striking examples from the 20th century were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. Stalin was an ethnic Georgian whose spoken Russian was imperfect, and he rarely addressed the public directly; nonetheless, a monstrous cult of personality was constructed around him that compensated for the weaknesses of institutions in the Soviet system. Mao, similarly, spoke Chinese with a strong Hunanese accent, and relied on media of communication to synthesise the charisma on which his dominant position was based, especially during the so-called ‘Cultural Revolution’.
[…] Legal-rational legitimacy is process-based. Here, the source of authority is the process by which individuals are elevated to perform particular roles. Weber saw this as the most highly-rational form of legitimacy, and associated it with modern bureaucratic systems of domination. There is no doubt that where political systems are highly institutionalised, this form of legitimacy provides a considerable degree of robustness. In the United States, for example, a number of presidents have ruled effectively after being selected by the US Electoral College even though they failed to win a majority of the popular vote; this happened most recently with the election of George W. Bush in 2000, and his authority was in no way compromised by what some might have seen as a significant deficit in substantive authority. Rather, it was the legality of the process that brought him to office that provided him with authority.
[…] Beyond these bases of legitimacy identified by Weber, a number of others have been put forward by subsequent analysts. One is what has been called social-eudaemonic legitimacy. This grounds legitimacy in the actual performance of power holders, in their ability to meet key demands of a population. What these demands might actually be will vary from case to case, but their distinctive feature is their substantive rather than procedural character. [] Jones points out that when the state is incapable of controlling its own territory and ensuring security this weakness creates opportunities for other groups to fill the vacuum. Dalton emphasises the importance of government performance in sustaining public confidence in democracy. Finally Ruparelia and Rennie highlight the importance of government performance in delivering the priority development needs identified by [Editor: the population] as one of the core issues for establishing effective governance [].
Another form of legitimacy is what has been called goal-rational legitimacy, where the authority of rulers derives from the desirability of the goals that they are pursuing. T.H. Rigby elaborated this concept in order to account for the legitimation strategies of mono-organisational Marxist-Leninist systems, but it is potentially relevant also to political systems grounded in religious values, such as an ‘Islamic state’. Finally, the activation of communitarian nationalism can be a powerful mechanism of legitimation, as Slobodan Milosevic demonstrated in the Balkans in the 1990s.
Several further points are worth emphasising. First, Weber argued that “organized domination requires control of the personal executive staff and the material implements of administration”.10 Some have argued on this basis that legitimacy is much more a matter of elite relations than of relations between rulers and subjects. However, while this may be largely true in environments where the public for whatever reason is largely disengaged from political life, it is more plausible that, in a democratic system, relations of both sorts can impact upon political authority.
Second, legitimacy may exist to different degrees at different levels of a political system. The legitimacy of a particular government may come under question without the state in its entirety being at risk.
Third, it is rarely the case that legitimacy is wholly grounded in just one of the bases that scholars have identified. It is entirely to be expected that in many cases, multiple strategies of legitimation might be pursued by rulers, and multiple grounds of legitimacy activated. In many cases these will effectively reinforce each other, although in some cases there may be tensions between them; a charismatic leader, for example, might appear to threaten the legal-rational foundations of the exercise of power.
Fourth, interpretation of evidence relating to legitimacy may be a difficult task. When legitimacy has completely collapsed, leading to the obliteration of a regime, it will be obvious with the benefit of hindsight that legitimacy problems had built up to a crisis. The 1979 Iranian Revolution and the overthow of the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1986 provide clear examples, as did the collapse of the Afghan communist regime in 1992. However, in many cases, the manifestations of a decline in legitimacy may be less dramatic: a regime may survive, but with constrained capacity to achieve objectives that require high levels of voluntary popular cooperation.
Fifth, and importantly, a regime may survive without much legitimacy, for as every autocrat knows, there are forms of non-legitimate domination that may be quite effective for lengthy periods of time. These include direct coercion of a population (through instruments of totalitarian control), or more subtly, the securing of its compliance on the basis of prudential relations of exchange where the loyalty of key social groups is purchased by the transfer of resources to them by the state. It was largely on such bases that the Afghan communist regime survived between February 1989 and April 1992. [Editor: could this purchases being taken place already in the US America under loosed Greenspan-Bernanke monetary policy and its eventual bubbles
What Can We Do To Walk Off and Owe Back Ourselves Again?
Neurosociety and Resisting Social Manipulation "This new insight into the malleability of normal human memory has had an impact in many fields other than neuroscience and psychology []. Restak discusses the impact of brain research on society as a whole in his 2006 book The Naked Brain from Harmony Publishing, coining the word “neurosociety” to describe how advertisers, politicians, economists, the legal system and others are using the latest data to evaluate our behavior and influence our habits.
Should we be concerned that what we remember can be unreliable or manipulated to influence us at an unconscious level? Restak calls for healthy skepticism whenever confronted with something we think or are told is without a doubt “the way it happened” and an increased awareness that by learning what we can about the emerging social applications of brain science we can resist being manipulated by irresponsible marketing, political spin or media and instead use the information to further our personal and collective freedoms". -
An Example of 'Media Manipulation' in a National Press Club Press Conference. What "they say it happened" or "what they say it is" is what you read --after stopping/censoring a true investigative journalist and muscling out critical thinking, what you get is a "curved and manipulated picture of reality" in the news (aka. in bed with the propaganda and marketing of 'interested' politics and foreign affairs)...Multiply this for 365 days, each year...and you got your own national 'customized reality' of politics and foreign affairs. Awesome.
What is happening to investigative journalists? Are we loosing them? Are we gonna loose the in-depth views of what’s going on? Are newspaper for getting information to people, or for influencing public opinion?
"When I started work in Washington in 1973, it was axiomatic that a newspaper reporter talked to many sources for any story. The story, in turn, reflected a number of viewpoints and perspectives. No reporter worth his bourbon would have dreamed of just printing some press release put out by the government. But that is now what they all seem to do, especially in covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.". William S. Lind.
"While former Vice President Dick Cheney has been front and center in the media debate over the current White House's national security policies, he's not the only one trying to challenge the White House's message. The New York Times published a front-page article ("Later Terror Link Cited for 1 in 7 Freed Detainees", 5/21/09) that bolstered the notion that former Guantánamo prisoners "return" to terrorist activity.
The remarkably credulous Times story, under the headline "1 in 7 Freed Detainees Rejoins Fight, Report Finds," was based on a Pentagon report leaked to the paper before its release yesterday evening. The article emphasized the notion that former prisoners "returned to terrorism or militant activity"--without adequately explaining the definition of either term, or examining whether those former detainees were ever "terrorists" in the first place”. –
"The New York Times’ “Week in Review” has now offered two panels of opinion on the Iraq War—one on March 16 pondering the fifth anniversary of the invasion, the other on May 4 commemorating George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech—that completely excluded the views of those who opposed the war in 2003. […] New York Times op-ed page editor David Shipley (7/31/05) has described the op-ed page as “a venue for people with a wide range of perspectives, experiences and talents,” writing that he aims for “a lively page of clashing opinions, one where as many people as possible have the opportunity to make the best arguments they can.” It’s hard to see how Shipley can argue that his assembly of pro-war voices looking back on the war’s milestones merits that description”. -
Newspaper denounce wrong at the same time…
Then you make it look that sources and their lack of editors challenge towards journalists is enough of an excuse, however the work to curb public opinion has already been done…PR at its peak.
“[…] But the article on which he based that statement was seriously flawed and greatly overplayed. It demonstrated again the dangers when editors run with exclusive leaked material in politically charged circumstances and fail to push back skeptically. The lapse is especially unfortunate at The Times, given its history in covering the run-up to the Iraq war.
The article seemed to adopt the Pentagon’s contention that freed prisoners had “returned” to terrorism, ignoring independent reporting by The Times and others that some of them may not have been involved in terrorism before but were radicalized at Guantánamo. It failed to distinguish between former prisoners suspected of new acts of terrorism — more than half the cases — and those supposedly confirmed to have rejoined jihad against the West. Had only confirmed cases been considered, one in seven would have changed to one in 20
“[…W]e have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged ? or failed to emerge. […] Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. […] We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight”. -
Newspaper also redeem portray itself as the ‘good and honest guy’…
But wait, after PR and Propaganda work is done, there is more. After some months, media transform itself --redeemed by itself in a ‘look to jesus moment’-- intoa fair self-hating politically correct news media? Nice strategy. I prefer accuracy from the beginning. Making it look that corporate media is part of the ‘good guys’, or the nowadays so much needed police of accuracy in the media is epistemologically wrong. [Editors Announcement. By the way, and above the mistakes of The New York Times, I give my strong congratulations to journalist David Barstow for his 'Pentagon Pundits' Pulitzer Price article in the NYT (following excerpt). Read a review and interview to David Barstow form DemocracyNow!].
”[…] To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose longservice has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found. The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air”.
"Israel was born out of Jewish Terrorism" Tzipi Livni’s father was a Terrorist" Astonishing claims in the House of Parliament. SIR Gerald Kaufman, the veteran Labour MP, yesterday compared the actions of Israeli troops in Gaza to the Nazis who forced his family to flee Poland.
During a Commons debate on the fighting in Gaza, he urged the government to impose an arms embargo on Israel…
Sir Gerald, who was brought up as an orthodox Jew and Zionist, said: "My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town a German soldier shot her dead in her bed.
"My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians."
He said the claim that many of the Palestinian victims were militants "was the reply of the Nazi" and added: "I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants."
He accused the Israeli government of seeking "conquest" and added: "
They are not simply war criminals, they are fools."
There was an article in CNN about this debate in The House of Commons, however, see how easily the media ‘disinforms’ us by confusing and mixing accurate information, with wrong/inaccurate information in the same report, article or TV report. In CNN’s article, the journalist failed pointing who initiated the attack into Gaza on late 2008. We have covered this issue already in The Contingency Monitor (HEADLINE: WHO STARTED THIS ONSLAUGHT WAR? THE FACTS SAY ISRAEL DID) where you can address that on November 4th 2008, “Israeli troops killed six Hamas gunmen in a raid into the territory, what represented the most serious break in a ceasefire agreed in mid-June”. Hence, clearly Israel started the attacks, Israel wanted the war.
Since Google has at last effectively merged with FeedBurner --the well known provider of consolidated feed subscriptions (ATOM and RSS). You should now move/change your FeedBurner subscription address for The Contingency Monitor to the new Google Feedburner address for a smooth subscription performance, only then you will see in your The Contingency Monitor feed subscription, all the new articles (8 articles as of June 10 2009) I have written since this merger has become more operative. Currently Google FeedBurner does support feeds up until 512 Kb, so I had to limit to 20 posts, which was the maximun I could get.
All in all, we instead reccomend you better follow the next subscription step:
Sherlock-Holmes Step:
Which is the best feed to be subscribed to The Contingency Monitor (TCM)?
As of today June 10 2009 I have tested all feed formats (FeedBurner (Old), Google FeedBuner (New), Blogger.com ATOM and Blogger.com RSS) and the best one in performance for TCM is the ‘Blogger.com RSS Feed’. So this is what I strongly recommend for you all to use in the first place with your current Feed Reader provider. Hence, if you have subscribed in the first place to the Blogger.com feed-address in RSS, then you “should not” have this problem of 'loosing updates of the latest published articles'.
Update June 18th 2009 (Ethnic cleansing in Israel, reboking citizenship to israeli arabs) Update June 10th 2009 (Hezbollah's Electoral Analysis, Related Articles)
Jihad is commonly described in the West as “holy war”. But holy war in Arabic would be ‘Harb al-Muqadassah’.
~~~
Today we analyze some of the fundamentals of the Islamic Revolution, generally exemplified by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. What westerners need to come clear about, and out of historical fairness and intelligent interpretation of language and a higher and 'noble' purpose, is that what the Arab Revolution is not interested in is “whipping Israel off the map”, what a rant this propaganda is ! --as popular ignorant media portrays and bla bla your brains, you will be deceived again and again !
Rather, as the correct (language) farsi translation of what President Ahmadinejad has said about this topic in the interest of the Arab Revolution is “to take the ‘Zionist regime’ out of existence”. This then is the real and ultimate drift in a will be revolution-regime in Israel, something that will take place for sure at some point in future history, and which must be the responsibility of all just and democratic people. If this could be attained in Israel in the future –-as is the position of the Tajamu Party, the palestinian nationalist platform of the Knesset chamber who´s project is to ‘
reform Israel from a Jewish state into a “state of all its citizens”, a programme now advocated by all the Arab parties’. T
hen within 50-90 years of cultural mixture, israeli and Jerusalem people may become again a multicultural race cocoon, within a one-state democratic country --this as a result of cross marriages, and hence of the cultural mixture resulting from them-- with palestinians and israeli alike, living under the same land without apartheid and racial discrimination, this will be a cultural base for peace. Hence, the Arab revolution integrates different people instead of marginalizing and demonizing other nations and people as Israel does continually.
So, Israel --a country with more than 200 nuclear bombs that has not signed the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) (see also here) —bring up the false ‘propagandistic allegation’ that “Iran is a nuclear threat to Israel, the Middle East, and the World”. The thing is that we all know Iran is not a nuclear threat to anyone, a country that has not attacked other countries in more-less 200 years should have a record in this respect ! Besides, nuclear weapons are now used as deterrence strategy not for direct attacks or preemptive attacks. So, it becomes easy to understand that the only correct way to de-nuclearize the Middle East is to first force Israel to sign in the NPT treaty, and after that, force Iran, India and Pakistan to do the same. The IAEA, International Atomic Energy Agency (Feb 19 2009), clearly said in the "Report by the Director General": that it was "not in a position to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran".
Using all the media tools at hand of ‘public relations’, ‘propaganda’ and ‘information operations’ through the media, Israel with its allies cultivates fear and a negative categorizations of Iran and the muslim world, as in confrontation of western civilization. Hence, we can see an acute ‘political propaganda’ from the US-UK-Israel cartel against Iran and muslims in general. This, in time, curbs and manipulate your emotions, and then your perception and opinion of the ‘external culture’, of the circumstances and facts, curtailing reality from your thoughts and clear analysis, bringing in the possibility of an easy manipulation based on simplistic propaganda categorization, that can justify any war or any preemptive attacks (as it happened in Irak and Gaza).
Be forewarned, not recognizing now that Israel has become a Rogue State, and a Terrorist Nazi State is a worldwide fault that could cost us all a III World Wide War.
“[…] In terms of logic and morality, if bombing raids on civilian sites, based frequently on unverified rumor and dubious sources, regularly kill large numbers of civilians, the fact that the individual victims were not targeted doesn't make the deaths inadvertent and undeliberate—they occurred with a high probability value, which makes them intended in logic and also in the law. As Michael Mandel points out in his excellent discussion of the collateral damage apologetic for killings, the law—even in the state of Texas—has long found that killing a third party while intending to kill somebody else does not exempt the killer from being guilty of murder ( How America Gets Away With Murder, Pluto, 2004). But in the Western media and for Western establishment intellectuals killings under the rubric collateral damage are treated differently than those of retail terrorists, giving an aura of innocence if not virtue to the state terrorist's slaughter of large numbers of "inadvertent" victims". Said Edward S. Herman in ZMagazine (Feb 2006), "On the Preeminence of State Terrorism Globalizing".
Hence, covertly, hiding facts from the news, not showing you its truly bloody hand, Israel deceives you again and again, hiding the truth of their apartheid regime, it’s racism and classism, and their war crimes and atrocities. Certainly, you can see completely clear their racism,ethnic cleansing and discrimination towards their israeli-palestinian peaceful citizens...
“The Israeli case is completely different. In the present state of Israel, the oppressor majority is Jewish and its oppression has been primarily based on expelling the original Arab inhabitants. In this sense, the only revolutionary attitude is to recognize the complete and unconditional right of the Palestinian Arabs to self determination, that is, their right to return to all the territories from which they have been expelled and to live free of all national oppression. The exercise of this right presupposes the destruction of the Zionist state [as a system of course], which rests on racist foundations [the construct ideology of the Zionist system] incompatible with such a perspective. Only after the achievement of this necessary historical task of the Arab revolution, will it be possible to deal concretely and correctly with the question of the rights of the Jewish national minority in Palestine. The liquidation of Zionist relationships - of the colonial type —between Jews and Arabs presents Israeli revolutionaries with the considerable task of breaking the Jewish masses from Zionism.
[…] In the Arab region, the national factor — above all the language — gives rise to a close interdependence of the Arab countries, which since the middle of this century has been demonstrated by the creation of the Arab League, the holding of summit conferences of the heads of Arab states, as well as the work of the various organs of inter-Arab cooperation in different fields, to say nothing of attempts at Arab unification. This interdependence cannot fail to have its repercussions on the revolutionary struggles that are already running up against joint repression by the Arab ruling classes and will do so increasingly in the future”.-
What US America Confronts is a Revolution, not Terrorism
“When those growth rates go down, my gut tells me that there are going to be problems coming out of that, and we’re looking for that,” he said. He referred to “statistical modeling” showing that “economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period”. New director of national intelligence, retired Adm. Dennis Blair, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Truthdig (Feb 16 2009), "Bad News From America’s Top Spy"
From Paul Craig Roberts at LewRockwell (Dec 5 2008),
Is Pakistan responsible for the Mumbai attack in India? No. Is India’s repression of its Muslim minority responsible? No. Is the United States government responsible? Yes.
”The attack on Mumbai required radicalized Muslims. Radicalized Muslims resulted from the US overthrowing the elected government in Iran and imposing the Shah; from the US stationing troops in Saudi Arabia; from the US invading and attempting to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, bombing weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games; from the US violating international and US law by torturing its Muslim victims; from the US enlisting Pakistan in its war against the Taliban; from the US violating Pakistan’s sovereignty by conducting military operations on Pakistani territory, killing Pakistani civilians; from the US government supporting a half century of Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands, towns and villages; from the assault of American culture on Muslim values; from the US purchasing the government of Egypt to act as its puppet; from US arrogance that America is the supreme arbiter of morality.
"In a government of law, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."
~ Justice Louis Brandeis
As Justice Brandeis said, crime is contagious. Government teaches by example, andAmerica’s example is lawlessness. America’s brutal crimes against the Muslim world have invited every Muslim to become a law unto himself – a revolutionary. It is not terror that Washington confronts but revolution". -
"Alastair Crooke, director and founder of “Conflicts Forum”, traces the essence und spirit of the Islamist revolution from its origins in Egypt, via the Iranian Revolution to Hamas and Hezbollah. Having talked to many Islamists, he states “that the conflict between Islam and the West is at core a religious one”, even if the policies pursued by the West are secular.
“Resistance” tells the story of how the Muslim world embarked upon a journey to discover new confidence and self-esteem; to find a solution to Muslims’ feelings of victimhood and to end the humiliation brought upon by continuous contempt and demonization. Islam has nothing to do with terror or suicide bombings, says Crooke, but with the daily fight for justice, for human respect and compassion. Islamists dispute the essential claim that Western modernity offers real human welfare. They reject the process of instrumental Western thinking and the abuses of power to which it has given rise, says Crooke.
"He distinguishes also between the “emancipatory resistance of movements such as Hamas or Hezbollah and the ´burn-the-system-to-build-anew` philosophy of al-Qaeda and the eschatological leanings of some Salafi groups”. The failure of the West to make this distinction empowers the more extreme movements at the expense of the mainstream, so Crooke. The demonization of Islamism is not the result of poor understanding by the West, but rather a “deliberate ideological operation” in order to weaken liberalism and to strengthen America’s scope to take “decisive action” like the interventions in the Middle East in pursuit of the neo-liberal agenda...".
"The author states further that armed Islamist resistance is not, as misconstrued by Western media, reactionary violence directed against modernity against which Islamists resist or which they are unable to assimilate. The purpose of Islamist resistance is not to kill Westerners, as the crusaders did to Muslims, but “to force the West to change its behavior”. One main object of the book is to try to explain the essence of the Islamist revolution and the quest for the essence of Islamism and its message..."
"Hezbollah is a surprisingly efficient organization, despite the fact that it is many things at once. It is the dominant Shiite political party and a strong opposition voice inside and outside parliament. It also acts as an army: resisting Israeli occupation from 1982 to 2000 and fighting Israel to a draw in 2006; receiving arms, training, and financing from Iran; and serving as a military proxy for Iran and Syria. Additionally, it is an Islamist movement that adheres to the principles of the Iranian Revolution (though it has accepted that those principles cannot be implemented in Lebanon). It provides hospitals, schools, and social services in Shiite areas of the country. In many ways, Hezbollah acts as a state-within-a-state -- sharing power with other groups in the government, but maintaining its own army, finances, and foreign policy". -
“[…] Islamism broadly defined encompasses many dozens of different forms of nationalist, local, religious, charitable, social, economic, military resistance-based, and the occasional terror movements. It is also controversial, misrepresented and misunderstood.
[…] A critical common element for all Islamist movements, heavily sparked by the Iranian Revolution, is the sense of empowerment and action, as well as the refusal to acquiesce to others who enjoy superior power or who claim superior rights over other human beings. Resistance changes the balance of power and the terms of debate among parties that had suffered severe power and rights disparities.
[…] We are fortunate in this respect to have available a new book that provides, in my view, one of the most comprehensive, accurate and useful analyses of the core philosophy and motivating political principles of political Islamism that is available to English-speaking readers. The book is titled “Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution“, by Alastair Crooke. It cuts through much of the ideological venom, post-9/11 vengefulness, neo-Orientalist stereotyping, or mere nonsense that characterizes much of what is said and written about Islamist movements in much of the Western world and Islamic societies alike”.
"Crooke mentions numerous parallels between Islamist political and philosophical thinking on one side and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School on the other. […] Western instrumental rationality had tipped the balance of Western thinking, allowing knowledge derived in this manner to claim a false unassailability. Like the Shiite clerics, adepts of the Critical Theory claimed that the reification of scientific (or rational) thought had become so radical that it had become a means of dominance and control of the environment, nature and of Man himself. In the end, this development would lead to a de-politicization of politics. Although culture survived, it became a privatized modus, a lifestyle, and not a public network of norms and rules....". -
Hezbollah, No Better Electoral Election Could Have Been
Truthdig (Jul 27 2006), "Arab Support Swings to Hezbollah": "Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have all started sounding off about Israeli aggression. And even Al Qaeda, which is normally hostile to all Shiite groups, has thrown its support behind the militants fighting against the vaunted Israeli military".
The best strategy is to maintain resistance as a ‘hidden card’. Outside the general political system where so called 'democratic actors' can address the national agenda, this is exactly what just happened in Lebanon. Lebanon is in no position, as of now, to eradicate the only army that has defeated Israel in the last years. When the time is right, non state actors such as Hezbollah’s army can militarily respond to Israel and curb, slash, and defeat the outcome of Israeli Zionism and of any US’s sponsored colonialism threat. This provides for Lebanon the best leverage over any covert operation coming from Israel or USA, and provides the insurance over their future development as a truly independent and stable democracy of its own --by non aligning with Zionism, or either slowly growing an imperceptible friendship (puppets disease, or ‘client state’ disease) with US American empire. This will prove as the best geopolitical strategy for dealing with the current ‘nervous girls’ in political Israel that want to bomb Iran (Lieberman-Netanyahu), and to deal with the Oil agenda of the pipeline projects that US empire wants to secure for the coming 100 years. In the end, it will also prove to be a base from where to build further away of the propaganda of who is a ‘Terrorist State’ anytime in the future Hezbollah naturally marry with the ordinary political systems of Lebanon. These, are the prospect of the best development of state actors that could eventually lead the way to conform the first Pan-Arab Coalition that must force Israel into a fruitful peace process that can attain regional peace in the form of an international 'peace treaty' into its pre 1967 borders; and must force US and NATO ‘engagement policy’ to ask all nation-states (specially Israel) to conform to 'international law' as a backup of this treaty. Much further in time and in history, this Pan-Arab Coalition may mutate to give birth to the first Economic Arab Union (a la European Union or a la Mercosur), which of course is the end-game of all this moves --if you have brains.
There will be no Islamic Republic of Lebanon. Nor will there be a pro-Western Lebanese republic. There will, after yesterday's vote – for the Hezbollah-Christian coalition and for the secular Sunni-Christian alliance – be a government of "national salvation" in Beirut, run by an ex-army general-president with ever-increasing powers.
[…] The electoral system – a crazed mixture of sectarianism, proportional representation and "list" fixing – means that no one ever really "wins" elections in Lebanon, and yesterday was no different. The "anti-Syrian" parties – the Sunnis, the Druze, half of the Christian community – made sure that their votes prevented a Hezbollah takeover, while the huge Shia vote – for Hezbollah and the Amal party and the Christians who follow the lead of the raving Christian ex-general Michael Aoun – made certain there would be no clear win for America's friends in the country.
[…] The Lebanese, a very shrewd people, have been reading the foreign press and listening to the BBC, Al-Jazeera, even Fox News. They knew that for foreigners – the ajnabi – there was only one story: Lebanon becomes a finger of Iran or Syria – or it remains in America's hands. More dangerously, the Israelis would be able to claim it was a "terrorist" state if Hezbollah won. But then the Israelis would claim it was a "terrorist" state if even one minister was a member of Hezbollah. They will have their way.
[…] To be a modern state, Lebanon must de-confessionalise. Its president – currently the ex-general Michel Sleiman – should be elected on merit rather than religion. Its prime minister, who must be a Sunni Muslim, should be elected on merit. But the moment you take away these privileges, Lebanon will cease to be Lebanon – because its very identity is sectarian.
Lebanon is a tiny country, just over 4,000 square miles in size, and it is very definitely Muslim (60 per cent of its four million population are Muslim), but it has 18 religious sects which include the descendants of the poor Armenian Christians who, naked and beaten, dragged themselves here after their genocide at the hands of the Turks in 1915. The Assyrians came this way. So did the Persians, Romans, Crusaders, Mamlukes, Arabs and Ottomans. And the Americans, of course, And the Israelis.
Yesterday's election will probably have "united" the poor old Lebanese yet again. In what cauldron, we can only wait to find out”.
“It should be said that Saad Hariri himself – not to mention the Americans and the French – feared that Hezbollah and its allies would win a clear mandate, allowing the Israelis to declare Lebanon a "terrorist state". They may do that anyway, once the President invites Hezbollah into the cabinet – there will, in the end, have to be a coalition – but, reflecting on the election, many Lebanese put the blame for Hezbollah's failure squarely on its chairman, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah.
Nasrallah it was who just a couple of weeks ago declared last year's armed takeover of west Beirut a "glorious day" – "yom majid", in Arabic – and this frightened many Lebanese. Dozens of men – along with the usual clutch of women and children – were killed in this awful 24-hour period and voters wanted to make sure they didn't have to endure any more such "glorious days". This – rather than the eloquence of Hariri (sadly lacking, one might add) – probably maintained the "pro-Western" majority in parliament”. -
“Washington would have preferred that Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated ex-prime minister, came out with a clear win. But out of the shadows will come the same crippled, un-healable Lebanon; delightful, unworkable, poor old Lebanon, corrupt, beautiful, vanity-prone, intelligent, democratic – yes, definitely, democratic – and absolutely outside our powers to reform”. Robert Fisk.
See also this video program analysis from AlJazeera (Jun 8 2009),
Hezbollah, ‘The Honor of Lebanon’ Defeats Israel. by Norman Finkelstein
Norman G. Finkelstein received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. For many years he taught political theory and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is currently an independent scholar. Finkelstein is the author of five books which have been translated into more than 40 foreign editions: Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (University of California Press, 2005; expanded paperback edition, 2008) The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering (Verso, 2000; expanded paperback edition, 2003) Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995; expanded paperback edition, 2003) A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen thesis and historical truth (with Ruth Bettina Birn) (Henry Holt, 1998) The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A personal account of the intifada years (University of Minnesota, 1996) He has just completed a new book entitled A Farewell to Israel: The coming break-up of American Zionism, to be published in 2009.
You can follow on and read the thorough articles series in Asia Times,“How Hezbollah Achieved Victory over Israel” by Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry.
Ghost Wars: How Reagan Armed the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan [Original article at Democracy Now !]
Steve Coll, Puliter Prize-winning journalist and managing editor of the Washington Post. He is the author several books, his latest is Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
June 10, 2004
During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We take a look at America’s role in Afghanistan that led to the rise of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda with Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.
The body of former president Ronald Reagan arrived in Washington yesterday for America’s first state funeral in three decades. After landing at Andrews Air Force base, Reagan’s flag-draped coffin was taken on a final parade through Washington to the Capitol Rotunda. As many as 150,000 people are expected to view his casket before being returned to California tomorrow’s state funeral. Vice President Dick Cheney opened the 34-hour period of Reagan’s lying in state by saying, “It was the vision and the will of Ronald Reagan that gave hope to the oppressed, shamed the oppressors and ended the evil empire.”
What Cheney along with the corporate media failed to mention yesterday was the Reagan administration’s role in financing, arming and training what was destined to become America’s worst enemy in the Middle East and Asia.
During most of the 1980’s, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to Afghanistan to support the mujahedeen–or holy warriors–against the Soviet Union, which had invaded in 1979.
The U.S.-supported jihad succeeded in driving out the Soviets but the Afghan factions allied to the US gave rise to the oppressive Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
Today we take a look at America’s role in Afghanistan and the roots of 9/11 with Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Steve Coll. He is the managing editor of the Washington Post and the author of “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.” Steve Coll joins us on the phone from his home in Washington.
AMY GOODMAN: Steve Coll joins us on the line from Washington, DC. Welcome to Democracy Now!.
STEVE COLL: Thank you, Amy. Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: Very good to have you with us. You write that the CIA, the KGB, Pakistan’s ISI and Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department all operated directly and secretly in Afghanistan. They primed Afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, funded propaganda and manipulated politics. In the midst of the struggles, Bin Laden conceived and built his global organization. Can you give us a thumbnail sketch of this history which you to say the least, very comprehensively deal with in “Ghost Wars?”
STEVE COLL: Well, it of course begins in 1979 when the Soviets invaded during the Carter administration, and it really swelled between 1981 and 1985. Essentially, under Bill Casey, the CIA created a three-part intelligence alliance to fund and arm the Mujahadeen, initially to harass Soviet occupation forces and eventually they embraced the goal of driving them out. The three-way alliance in each of the parties had a distinct role to play. The Saudi, their intelligence service primarily provided cash. Each year the congress would secretly allocate a certain amount of money to support the CIA’s program. After that allocation was complete, the US Intelligence liaison would fly to Riyadh and the Saudis would write a matching check. The US role was to provide logistics and technological support as well as money. The Saudis collaborated with Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI, to really run the war on the front lines. It was the Pakistani army, in particular the ISI, that picked the political winners and losers in the jihad, and who favored radical Islamist factions because it suited the Pakistan’s army goal of pacifying Afghanistan, a long-time unruly neighbor to the west, whose ethnic Pashtun nationalism the army feared. The army saw Islam not only as a motivating force in the anti-Soviet jihad, but as an instrument of Pakistan’s regional policy to control Afghanistan. The US acquiesced with all of this in part because they thought that the only purpose that brought them to the region was to drive the Soviets out, and they didn’t really care about local politics. But also because after Vietnam, the generation of CIA officers involved in this program were scarred by their experiences in Southeast Asia, and they essentially operated under a mantra of no more hearts and minds for us. We’re not good at picking winners and losers in a developing world. Let’s let the Pakistanis decide who carries this jihad forward. That’s how the favoritism of the radical Islamic factions was born and nurtured.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Steve, at what point in this process did the Mujahadeen basically turn their guns around, and was the United States aware at the point in which their allies had become now—had begun to target them for their next jihad?
STEVE COLL: Yeah. That’s a good question. It happened gradually in the late 1980’s. Certainly, there were people in the early 1980’s involved in the program who were aware that many of America’s favorite clients were fundamentally anti-American in their outlook. But it was only in the late 1980’s as the amounts of money and guns and really the success of the jihad began to swell that clients such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Sayyaf, who were two of the most vehemently anti-American leaders of the jihad began to explicitly turn their propaganda pamphlets, at least their rhetorical efforts, against the United States as well as against the Soviet Union. As that began to happen, to the second part of your question, there were individuals inside the US bureaucracy, at the state department, elsewhere, who began to warn that the United States needed to change its political approach to this covert action program, that they needed now to start getting involved in the messy business of Afghan politics and to start to promote more centrist factions and to negotiate compromise with the Soviet-backed communist government in Kabul to prevent Islamist extremists from coming to power as the Soviets withdrew. These warnings, when you look at them with the benefit of hindsight, are quite prescient and certainly were strongly given, but they languished in the middle of the bureaucracy and were largely ignored by both second term Reagan administration and the first Bush administration, Bush 41.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Steve Coll. He is managing editor of the Washington Post, and he has written a book, Ghost wars—The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Can you talk about the role of Kashmir in all of this as the conflict in Kashmir? STEVE COLL: After the Soviets withdrew in 1988, the Pakistan army and intelligence service interpreted this victory as essentially providing them a model for combating their neighbor to the east, India, a country with much larger standing army, much greater industrial potential and a much larger population base, but threatened, at least in the Pakistan army’s view, Pakistan’s national existence. As a spontaneous indigenous rebellion against corrupt Indian rule began in Kashmir in 1989, the Pakistan army and intelligence service began to pour in support for Islamism factions using not only the model of the anti-soviet jihad in Afghanistan, but also many of the training camp facilities that had been built up to support the Afghanistan war. They also used same Muslim Brotherhood influence networks to essentially take over the Kashmir rebellion and try to turn it into an instrument of Pakistan’s national policy, an effort in which they were partially successful by the mid 1990’s. So, what it means as a practical matter, looking at al-Qaeda, is that as Bin Laden began to use the sanctuary of Afghanistan to develop his global ambitions and his global organization, he found indirect and sometimes direct support from the Pakistan army which sought to use his infrastructure to run their own jihad in Kashmir. The Pakistan army’s purpose in Kashmir was to support what they viewed as the liberation of an occupied territory, but sometimes more cynically, they thought to tie down the Indian army in Kashmir, and they succeeded. They tied down 600,000 Indian troops by running the cross-border Islamist jihad they rehearsed, in effect, in Afghanistan.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Steve, I’d like to ask you, to what degree was the US policy in supporting the Mujahadeen, or its policy in Pakistan an aberration and to what degree was it a continuation of policy in the Middle East. I don’t know if you have read the book by Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms where he posits that this has been a historical pattern in the Middle East, that the British and United States have supported right wing or religious or—or organizations and groups covertly or sometimes overtly to stop modernist governments such as Nasser in Egypt or Gandhi in India as well as a leftist oriented governments in the region. Has this been a historical pattern?
STEVE COLL: Yes. I think there is a pattern of that kind. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s certainly prevalent through the history that you refer to. In the Cold War period, I think there was a real belief, certainly by Bill Casey, who was a devout catholic and by the Saudi royal family, that the support of religious networks and organizations against soviet supported either communist or leftist governments was not only good tactics, but it was also righteous. It was the battle of the faithful against the godless was really, I think, at some personal level, how Casey and some of the Saudis saw it. As you say, that wasn’t spontaneous idea. It was rooted in approaches that governments had taken, the British and the United States, when secular socialist governments had risen in the Middle East earlier. The British certainly supported the Muslim Brotherhood as an instrument of challenge against Nasser once they were concerned about Nasser’s ambitions. At the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood had been born as an anti-colonial, anti-British force, so the pendulum swung both ways. During the 1980’s, it’s generally agreed now, though a lot of the details are not available, that the Israelis supported Hamas covertly as an instrument of sort of a covert program to create a rival movement within the Palestinian community against the PLO. Now presumably they regret that strategy as well.
AMY GOODMAN: How did the Reagan administration—how did President Reagan describe what was happening in Afghanistan during the time? What awareness did Americans have of what was going on in the 1980’s in Afghanistan and the US support for the Mujahadeen?
STEVE COLL: It’s interesting to go back and look at the public discourse about this. During the Reagan years in particular, it was a very superficial, certainly, Reagan often used the terminology of his, you know of freedom. These were freedom fighters. These were noble freedom fighters. I don’t want to overstate this, but the Afghans were regarded with some distance almost as noble savages in some sort of a state of purity fighting for an abstract idea of freedom. The idea that Afghanistan was a messy place filled with complexity and ethnicity and tribal structures and all of the rest of what we now understand about Afghanistan was it was generally not part of American public discourse. By contrast, the covert wars in Central America were much richer controversies in the United States, and they were often discussed in much greater detail and nuance in Congress and elsewhere. Of course, the support for the Contras became a raging controversy by the second term of the Reagan administration. Afghanistan never became such a program. It attracted bipartisan support and a general quietude throughout. In part because it was so far away, in part because the war was one between an occupied people and the soviet army. This is not a—this is not proxies on both side. This is a direct invasion that was generally regarded at unjust across the developing world. Also, the United States didn’t play a very direct role on the front lines of the jihad. There were not Americans in tennis shoes generally standing up on the paths getting shot or creating episodes. This was a war in which the United States acted as quartermaster and let the Pakistani intelligence service run things on the front lines.
AMY GOODMAN: Steve Coll, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Steve Coll is the author of Ghost Wars—The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. He’s the managing editor of the Washington Post.
Rush Transcript.
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University of California Television Series: "Conversations with History" [5/2005] [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 9513]. Conversations Host Harry Kreisler welcomes Steve Coll, Pulitzer prize winning author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden for a discussion of how the superpower conflict in the last stages of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy before and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the political dynamics of South Asia created the setting in which Islamic terrorism took root and flourished.
Related Articles from Independent/Corporate Media PBS, Interview Steve Coll (Jun 20 2006).
In Ghost Wars, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Steve Coll tells the secret history of the CIA's role in Afghanistan, including its covert program against Soviet troops from 1979 to 1989. He examines the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of Bin Laden, and the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill Bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998. His book answers the questions so many have asked since 9/11: To what extent did America's best intelligence analysts grasp the rising threat of Islamist radicalism? Who tried to stop Bin Laden and why did they fail? World Affairs Council Web.
Update June 18th (Human Rights Watch Report, Seymour Hersh on U.S Executive Assassination Squad, Civilian War Deaths and US Private Subcontracts of Mercenary Army)
WARNING! brutal/death pictures at the end. Strictly for 18+, otherwise, Parent Advisory Recommended.
"It's impossible to say to yourself how did we get there? Who are we? Who are these people that sent us there?". Seymour Hersh.
~~~
Reality Collage. Liberty Statue Transvestited…symbol of liberty and justice (not anymore).
Never to Forgive....Never to Forget.
“A series of pigment based digital daguerreotypes, documents a selection of toys from the devil’s hands. The series immortalizes the consumer objects of a terrorist state (U.S.A) that were so quickly discarded and forgotten. In addition to transforming the forgotten into highly fetishized objects, the work references the daguerreotype, a medium that was once often used for postmortem photography of children. The original daguerreotype process itself is highly toxic; however, authentic daguerreotypes continue to be widely collected today by all terrorist nations…”
U.S America Abuse and Torture Accounts
U.S. Abuse and Torture in Abu Ghraib. “The [Daily] Telegraph quoted retired U.S. Army Major General Antonio Taguba as saying the pictures showed "torture, abuse, rape and every indecency." Taguba conducted an investigation in 2004 into abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. […] Photographs of abuse at the prison outside Baghdad were published in 2004 and caused deep resentment in the Muslim world, damaging the image of the United States as it fought against insurgents in Iraq”. Reuters (May 28 2009),
Of course !!!…the only important thing is not to be “damaging the IMAGE of the United States”…nothing else !!!
Accounts of former abused prisoners: “Sammarrai, a senior Foreign Ministry official under Saddam Hussein, said he was stripped naked, had cold water thrown over him in winter and was repeatedly beaten and electrocuted.
He says there are still pits in his elbows and knees where the electrodes were attached.
"Iraqis at times are trapped between wanting to forget and wanting to remember," he told Reuters by phone from Sweden, where he fled after being released. He found it hard to describe what had happened to him.
"They want to forget so they can move on, but at the same time they don't want to forget because it was such a scandal.
"But deciding to cover the photos up in order to manipulate world opinion ... I believe this is another crime against the Iraqi people and humanity in general."
Mohammed Ali, 23, is another person who says he was abused by U.S. military. Speaking from Falluja in Anbar province, he recalled hearing U.S. soldiers take photos while he was beaten, a bag shoved over his head. He needed two operations to repair damage to his stomach, he said”.
“Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay?” said Hersh. “Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”
Human Rights Watch (HRW) revealed in a special report,
some accounts of what have happened in these years
:
“U.S. forces have now been deployed in Iraq for over three years. During this time, tens of thousands of Iraqis have been arrested, detained, and interrogated by U.S. personnel. Many of the detainees-held at Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) or at central detention centers such as Abu Ghraib prison, CampCropper, and CampBucca-have been interrogated by personnel from U.S. Military Intelligence (MI) or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). While some detainees have been insurgents, others have been innocent civilians caught up in U.S. military operations, in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is mounting evidence to show that many detainees have been abused. The Abu Ghraib scandal, which broke in April 2004, brought the issue of detainee abuse to the world's attention, but it is now clear that the scope of the problem is far broader than was known at the time. Since 2003, Human Rights Watch has reviewed hundreds of credible allegations of serious mistreatment and torture of detainees in U.S. custody.
This report is based largely on firsthand accounts by U.S. military personnel stationed in Iraq, and describes abuses that took place in three separate locations in Iraq in 2003-2005. Many of the accounts are from soldiers who witnessed and in some cases participated in the abuses. First, the report discusses incidents involving a special military and CIA task force based at CampNama, near Baghdad, in 2003-2004, and near Balad in 2004-2005. Second, the report describes abuses in 2003-2004 at a Forward Operating Base on the Syrian border, called FOB Tiger. Third, the report details abuses in 2004 at detention facilities at the Mosul airport. The military's own investigations and reports by journalists and other observers support many of the accounts, and provide further details from soldiers about abuses at these facilities, including abuses in 2005.
In all three locations, soldiers witnessed seriously abusive treatment and interrogation of detainees, including beatings, psychological torture of varying kinds, and other physical torture and mistreatment. At CampNama, for instance, detainees were regularly stripped naked, subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme cold, placed in painful stress positions, and beaten. At FOB Tiger, they were held without food or water for over 24 hours at a time, in temperatures sometimes exceeding 135 degrees Fahrenheit, and then taken into interrogations where they were beaten and subjected to threats. At Mosul, detainees were regularly subject to extreme sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme cold, forced exercises, and were threatened with military guard dogs.
In all three locations, the abuses appear to have been part of a regularized process of detainee abuse-"standard operating procedure," in the words of some of the soldiers”. -
“Sergeant Jeff Perry (a pseudonym he requested to avoid recrimination) was a Camp Nama special interrogator during the first half of 2004. He said task force members were military special forces and CIA personnel, none of whom revealed ranks or last names to maintain secrecy. Five interrogation rooms were used, the harshest called the “black room” where everything was black with speakers in the corners and on the ceiling.
Detainees were stripped naked and subjected to stress standing, sleep deprivation, loud noise, strobe lights, beatings, dousing with cold water, and other abuses.
Treatment authorization in writing or by computer came from the camp’s command structure – signed by “whoever was in charge at the time” reporting to McChrystal or one of his subordinates.
Sergeant Perry saw him visit Camp Nama several times, and said its commanding officer told interrogators that the White House or Donald Rumsfeld were briefed on the information they obtained. He also learned that the facility was “completely closed off” and secret, and that ICRC, other investigators, and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (CID) were forbidden access to it
”. -
Pentagon’s ‘Special Operation Forces’ and ‘Executive-Assassination Squad’
CIA and Defense have long relied on contractors, and black-ops are no exception. Contractors have run the CIA's extradition programs, tortured prisoners for them, smuggled drugs and weapons for them, laundered money for them --and those are just a few things that have trickled out into the light over the years. Stories have been coming out about covert Pentagon assassination squads for the last several years. In 2003, Seymour Hersh reported for The New Yorker on Task Force 121, which operated chiefly out of the Joint Special Operations Command. Others stories spoke of a proposed Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group.
"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.
"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.
"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people”.
“Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a ‘Finding’, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference.”
(“Finding” refers to a special document that a president must issue, although not make public, to authorize covert CIA actions), said Hersh in The New Yorker (Jul 7 2009),
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Joint Special Operations Command is and what oversight Congress has of it.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it’s a special unit. We have something called the Special Operations Command that operates out of Florida, and it involves a lot of wings. And one of the units that work under the umbrella of the Special Operations Command is known as Joint Special Op—JSOC. It’s a special unit. What makes it so special, it’s a group of elite people that include Navy Seals, some Navy Seals, Delta Force, our—what we call our black units, the commando units. “Commando” is a word they don’t like, but that’s what we, most of us, refer to them as. And they promote from within. It’s a unit that has its own promotion structure. And one of the elements, I must tell you, about getting ahead in promotion is the number of kills you have. Of course. Because it’s basically devised—it’s been transmogrified, if you will, into this unit that goes after high-value targets.
And where Cheney comes in and the idea of an assassination ring—I actually said “wing,” but of an assassination wing—that reports to Cheney was simply that they clear lists through the Vice President’s office. He’s not sitting around picking targets. They clear the lists. And he’s certainly deeply involved, less and less as time went on, of course, but in the beginning very closely involved. And this is the elite unit. I think they do three-month tours. And last summer, I wrote a long article in The New Yorker, last July, about how the JSOC operation is simply not available, and there’s no information provided by the executive to Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: What countries, Sy Hersh—what countries are they operating in?
SEYMOUR HERSH: A lot of countries.
AMY GOODMAN: Name some.
SEYMOUR HERSH: No, because I haven’t written about it, Amy. And I will tell you, as I say, in Central America, it’s far more than just the areas that Mr. Hannah talked about—Afghanistan, Iraq. [The President has authorized these kinds of actions in the Middle East and also in Latin America, I will tell you, Central America, some countries. They’ve been—our boys have been told they can go and take the kind of executive action they need, and that’s simply—there’s no legal basis for it]. You can understand an operation like this in the heat of battle in Iraq, killing—I mean, taking out enemy. That’s war. But when you go into other countries—let’s say Yemen, let’s say Peru, let’s say Colombia, let’s say Eritrea, let’s say Madagascar, let’s say Kenya, countries like that—and kill people who are believed on a list to be al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-linked or anti-American, you’re violating most of the tenets". -
“American commanders in Afghanistan rely on the commando units to carry out some of the most delicate operations against militant leaders, and the missions of the Army’s Delta Force and classified Navy Seals units are never publicly acknowledged. But the units sometimes carry out dozens of operations each week, so any decision to halt their missions is a sign of just how worried military officials are that the fallout from civilian casualties is putting in peril the overall American mission in Afghanistan, including an effort to drain the Taliban of popular support.
A United Nations report released last month specifically blamed clandestine missions by commando units for contributing to a surge in civilian deaths in Afghanistan in 2008. The report concluded that the number of civilian casualties rose nearly 40 percent compared with 2007, although it found that suicide bombings and other Taliban attacks were the primary cause.
[…] At least two Special Operations ground raids in December helped fuel the tensions between the American military and Mr. Karzai. In one case, American troops raided a compound in Khost Province in an attempt to capture a Qaeda suspect. The suspect was taken into custody, but several civilians were killed and a 4-year-old boy was bitten by an attack dog used in the operation.
During another December raid, American troops killed six Afghan police officers and one civilian in Zabul Province in southern Afghanistan. An American military spokesman called the killings a “tragic case of mistaken identity”. -
US War Subcontractors’ Mercenary Army Massacre in the Middle East
”Private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater USA) has fallen on hard times. Iraq has yanked its license, forcing Blackwater out of one of its former operations centers. Last December, five Blackwater employees were indicted on fourteen manslaughter charges and allegations they used automatic weapons in the commission of a crime. A sixth Blackwater agent pleaded guilty to two charges as part of an agreement to testify against his colleagues. Now the company faces more bad news. Bill Sizemore of the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot reports that charges are being brought based on obstruction of justice”. -
“Paravant LLC [a subsidiary of Xe] was set up to subcontract to Raytheon Co. on a large U.S. Army training contract, according to a person familiar with the situation. Raytheon referred questions to U.S. Central Command, which runs the military effort in Afghanistan.
Large defense contractors typically rely heavily on specialized subcontractors when operating in hot spots such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Raytheon's use of Paravant is for a program called Warfighter Focus, a sweeping U.S. Army training effort valued at more than $11 billion over a 10-year period”. -
“In Iraq, the Baghdad contract of the private military firm once known as Blackwater has officially expired. The company, now calling itself Xe, will continue to work elsewhere in Iraq. The firm Triple Canopy is taking over for Blackwater in Baghdad and is widely expected to rehire many of its guards. The Iraqi government refused to renew Blackwater’s license following the 2007 mass killing of seventeen Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square. Five Blackwater guards face charges for the attack. In a new development in that case, two government informants are claiming Blackwater operatives gave their weapons to another contractor now charged with smuggling them out of Iraq. The informants say the Blackwater guards wanted to get rid of the weapons before they were investigated for the Nisoor massacre”.
“President Obama’s new mercenary firm of choice, Triple Canopy, will be officially taking over the job of protecting US occupation officials in Iraq from President Bush’s favorite hired guns, Blackwater, on May 7. But, as has been clear for some time, Obama may be changing the name, but the bloody game and its players are bound to remain virtually the same.
The New York Times is now confirming that “many if not most of [Blackwater’s] private security guards will be back on the job in Iraq. The same individuals will just be wearing new uniforms, working for Triple Canopy”.
US American Torture at Irak’s Abu Ghraib (Pinochet's SS = Bush's SS?)
[Matthew Alexander was the senior military interrogator for the task force that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and, at the time, a higher priority target than Osama bin Laden. Mr. Alexander has personally conducted hundreds of interrogations and supervised over a thousand of them. "Torture does not save lives. Torture costs us lives"].
You cannot tell the difference anymore, CIA interrogation manuals have taught the “whole world” about torture techniques.
"A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib.
[...] Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing: Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
[...] Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men, Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained. “Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other—it’s all a form of torture,” Haykel said.
One military involved [called 'Wisdom'] testified: I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right . . .
[...] General Taguba saved his harshest words for the military-intelligence officers and private contractors. He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander of one of the M.I. brigades, be reprimanded and receive non-judicial punishment, and that Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, be relieved of duty and reprimanded. He further urged that a civilian contractor, Steven Stephanowicz, of CACI International, be fired from his Army job, reprimanded, and denied his security clearances for lying to the investigating team and allowing or ordering military policemen “who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations by ‘setting conditions’ which were neither authorized” nor in accordance with Army regulations. “He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse,” Taguba wrote. He also recommended disciplinary action against a second CACI employee, John Israel. (A spokeswoman for CACI said that the company had “received no formal communication” from the Army about the matter.)
“I suspect,” Taguba concluded, that Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz, and Israel “were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib,” and strongly recommended immediate disciplinary action". -
North American Anti-Terrorist-Democratic-War Shame Torture Album
T
There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.
Or as they say: “After a member of the Police Hugging Squad was detained for filming outside the USA Embassy in London earlier this month, the Undercover Anti-Terror Squad returned to spread the message of peace and love in order to prevent the end of the world by self-fulfilling prophecies of fear. We manage to hypnotise a young Policeman, perform a couple of songs, and find out how easy it is to get people to prove they are not terrorists”.
AP - North Korea threatened military action Wednesday against U.S. and South Korean warships plying the waters near the Koreas' disputed maritime border, raising the specter of a naval clash just days after the…
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(click image to enlarge)
Americans ! Welcome to your quagmire, do you see it coming? do you feel it? do you CARE?...soon, you will all be involved in a third war in the middle east with Iran. That is for sure, since it is impossible and nuts to ask a country (any) to stop its peaceful energy development and military development (or would you give up your nuclear facilities first?…better ask Israel to sign into the Non Proliferation Treaty, but no, don’t raise your girlfriend skirt ! Your nation did it all wrong again (Vietnam, Hiroshima, Irak) –-perhaps your government wants it to go all wrong? but again…do you CARE?.
This last historical fault with Iran, in your foreign policy, transpires while the political establishment involves, step by step, all Europe’s moderate sides as a dead-end ally into a pan-continent war with the middle east. This will be extremely easy to achieve, by pressuring --after U.S and Israel will sabotage all peace negotiations processes with Iran, Palestine, Afghanistan and Pakistan-- either by themselves unilaterally, by some excuse in the conditions, or by a false flag terrorist attack to Europe, U.S (independent or combined).
"The foundation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process for years has been the assumption that there would be a two-state solution. Such a solution has not materialized for a host of reasons. First, at present there are two Palestinian entities, Gaza and the West Bank, which are hostile to each other. Second, the geography and economy of any Palestinian state would be so reliant on Israel that independence would be meaningless; geography simply makes the two-state proposal almost impossible to implement. Third, no Palestinian government would have the power to guarantee that rogue elements would not launch rockets at Israel, potentially striking at the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor, Israel's heartland. And fourth, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis have the domestic political coherence to allow any negotiator to operate from a position of confidence. Whatever the two sides negotiated would be revised and destroyed by their political opponents, and even their friends.
For this reason, the entire peace process — including the two-state solution — is a chimera. Neither side can live with what the other can offer. But if it is a fiction, it is a fiction that serves U.S. purposes. The United States has interests that go well beyond Israeli interests and sometimes go in a different direction altogether. Like Israel, the United States understands that one of the major obstacles to any serious evolution toward a two-state solution is Arab hostility to such an outcome.
[...] The Political Theater. The various Israeli-Palestinian peace processes have thus served U.S. and Arab interests quite well. They provide the illusion of activity, with high-level visits breathlessly reported in the media, succeeded by talks and concessions — all followed by stalemate and new rounds of violence, thus beginning the cycle all over again.
Obama is likely hearing through diplomatic channels from the Arab countries that they do not want to participate directly in the Palestinian peace process. And the United States really does not want them there, either. The peace process normally ends in a train wreck anyway, and Obama is in no hurry to see the wreckage. He will want to insulate other allies from the fallout, putting off the denouement of the peace process as long as possible.
[...] So the peace process will continue, no one will expect anything from it, the Palestinians will remain isolated and wars regularly will break out. The only advantage of this situation from the U.S. point of view it is that it is preferable to all other available realities.
Is Israel a Strong Nation? [...] It isn't. It is a nation that is strong partly because it lives in a pretty weak neighborhood, and partly because it has very strong friends. Many Israelis don't want to be told that, and Netanyahu came to office playing on the sense of Israeli national power".
This will ignite you again, and give your apathy and passivity what it always wanted, its self-proclaimed prophecy, the third world war imbued in blind anger, then the party begins with its nuclear fireworks, its chemical dressings and its biological sexiness. Oh! you will feel it….that is for sure.
You are all thirsty of it, you want it even as it is the sadomasochist redemption of your (catholic) God. It is his heaven promise that you cannot gain by yourself after all, only after Armageddon it would be possible as your story says. Now, when you start to feel the suffering by yourselves of all this, maybe, your ignorance will cry out in desperation for true understanding of what it really means democracy, of what really means to build a world political system and a world order that insures peace and nations sobereingty --of course, not exactly what you are commonly spoon-fed to think, to export the 'american dream' was never a solution but a problem. It overide cultures at the bottom...at the top, it will kill civilians (i.e. Irak, Japan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Vietnam).
Do you see it already? Obama cannot undo your Bush’s walk...it was meant to be like that. The appropriate succession of events for you to believe that a chance was being worked out is already in place. Fools !… Fools !…‘Deceive’ is now what you "feel" as patriotism….
”Bombing Iran would create a "Terrorist Superhighway" with agitated networks of terrorists and insurgents angry at the U.S. linking Iran, Iraq and Syria -- right up to the border of Israel.
As much as Iran is blamed (with reason) for fueling Hezbollah and the militant wing of Hamas, the kind of terror activity that might rush out of Iran in this Superhighway of Terrorists would overwhelm anything we have yet seen”. -- Steve Clemons
Al-Qaeda's number two leader snubbed US Republican Senator John McCain for claiming that Iran is working with the terrorist organization.
During a new online Q&A session, Ayman al-Zawahiri said al-Qaeda wants to see the destruction of Iran - a Shiite nation battling the terrorists.
"We hope that war 'saps' both Washington and Tehran," he said according to a press tv report. "The dispute between America and Iran is a genuine struggle, and the possibility of the US striking Iran is real," al-Zawahiri said. "Whichever country that emerges victorious will find itself in an intensified and fierce battle [with al-Qaeda]," he continued.
...Would you will pay the price americans? I would hope you would have evolved as a nation, but it seems you will pay the price of your self-indulgence, and sheep-walkings.
: “In April I testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to attempt to explain what was really happening in Iraq, where I have spent most of the last five years, so that they could better challenge General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker during their Senate testimony. But it made little difference.
As always, little interest was shown in the Iraqi people, and the fact that they were enduring a brutal foreign military occupation. Those who opposed the war did so because it was too expensive for American taxpayers, not even because American men and women were dying for absolutely nothing, and certainly not because anybody cares about Iraqis. But one of the main themes I heard repeated by the General and the Ambassador and by the senators who questioned them, was that Iran was the bad guy in Iraq these days. They accused Iran of supporting "Shiite extremists" and said that Muqtada al Sadr was one such extremist. They even managed to blame Iran for the Iran-Iraq war, which Iraq had initiated with US backing. Iran was the bad guy and the US was fighting a proxy war against it.
There has never been any evidence of this, save the accusations of a US regime that still hopes it can score a last minute war against Iran, but lack of evidence did not stop the Washington Post editorial page from declaring war against Iran on April 13th”. -
Juan Cole, Informed Comment (Feb 21 2009), "Iran cannot construct nuclear bombs with uranium enriched only to less than 4%", (source article): “It needs to be enriched to something like 90% to make a bomb. Iran is not known even to have that capability, and no it cannot be done in 2 months (try a decade), assuming they were trying to do it, which our $40 bn. a year intelligence agencies say they are not. So all the silly articles on friday about how Iran now has enough enriched uranium to make a bomb are just illiterate. Moreover, the report in question actually says that Iran is slowing its enrichment activities”. -
Stratfor (May 18 2009), "An Israeli Prime Minister Comes to Washington Again": "In reality, Israel would have a great deal of difficulty attacking Iranian facilities with non-nuclear forces. A multitarget campaign 1,000 miles away against an enemy with some air defenses could be a long and complex operation. Such a raid would require a long trip through U.S.-controlled airspace for the fairly small Israeli air force. Israel could use cruise missiles, but the tonnage of high explosive delivered by a cruise missile cannot penetrate even moderately hardened structures; the same is true for ICBMs carrying conventional warheads.
Israel would have to notify the United States of its intentions because it would be passing through Iraqi airspace — and because U.S. technical intelligence would know what it was up to before Israeli aircraft even took off. The idea that Israel might consider attacking Iran without informing Washington is therefore absurd on the surface. Even so, the story has surfaced yet again in an Israeli newspaper in a virtual carbon copy of stories published more than a year ago"". -
Updated May 16th 2009 (Leonardo Boff quotation, Related Article)
“This is strictly contradictory because capitalism is not this, it is emphatically not this. And this is what I find most dangerous, this contradictory desire. Do we have a name for the system, for a social system that tries to accomplish precisely this? Capitalism and organic unity at the same time: this is the most elementary definition of fascism. Fascism means precisely this. For examples in Argentina, what was Peron's promise? That you would have capitalism, but at the same time solidarity I think this contradictory desire was a protofascist desire. It may sound very harsh, but what most people spontaneously craved in Eastern Europe was not socialism with a human face, but rather fascism with a human face. This is very dangerous”. Slavoj Zizek.
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Sadly nowadays, people in general, we are confronted to extreme dead end choices, whether we give up ourselves into the insane oblivion of the millennium old inertia of hooking ourselves completely into state's politicaly-marketing strategies and operations,
“It is more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The “Obama brand” has been named “Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008”, easily beating Apple computers”. John Pilger (Apr 30 2009), "Obama's 100 days - the mad men did well".
born from our ignorant desperation and intellectual degeneration, with the hope to get rid of chaos, of previous bad presidents (i.e Bush), to get rid of economic turmoils and bad luck, wars, and uncertainty levels of confidence; whether we follow this inertia to come to believe that actually a new political alternative, or a new color or party (such as a new formula), i.e a charismatic president can deliver our ideal, secure and just world.
Or instead, we can choose to fight back with the revolutionary social construct of democracy, and arise in massive peacefully insurgent protests around the world, to regain the liberty handed down centuries ago by the founding fathers of decent cultured societies, and to further demand common values and mature political conclusions on foreign policy, which ought to be, bigger than states, and bigger than governments, and of course, with emphasis on a world wide peace project. This will prove to be the direct way to regain those original liberties, coupled of course, with true sovereignty, and I may say, this is the dream by which J.F. Kennedy was killed. It may be the time, either now or in the foreseeable future, when all americans may have to finish Kennedy's job.
This former social construction movement that redefines democracy within chaotic social demonstrations, has already happened, and has already taught americans how to do it successfully. Is the foreseeable alternative to the tyranny we now will confront along the world in the coming four decades. This social massive international movement that can shape democracy, has recent examples within the last two years, “Close to one million French demonstrators on March 19 2009 protested the government's handling of the economic crisis, and thousands blocked London streets on April 1 2009 during a G-20 meeting, events that dwarfed any protests in the U.S”. Remember the greeks in their national protests this 2009, the venezuelans massive national movement to regain a socialist and democratic president against a coup d'état, also with the movement of bolivians to regain their rights to access drinking water in fair trade and fair prices, etc. All these movements are the continuous teaching that americans can see from others, but are too chicken to consider and to express for themselves.
Even the chinese in Tiananmen taught americans about being brave at even the possibility of a change, even the refusenik jews (those against war over palestinians) which are against the israeli occupation of Palestine, and against the state terrorism israel advocates, these refusenik had done it without fear standing against their governments.
But, instead, all that americans can do is to go gather with mics and shouting their complains in ‘tea parties’, then go home, pay their taxes, watch their TV, and have their artificial mc’donalds waiting until something happens in the news, however, the worst for them seen, goes like living in a carpark or a tent city. Self-indulgence at the peak.
Some say the key to success is to endure. Not to win, but to endure, this must be the path to achieve success, through a social construction of democracy, through massive world wide peaceful protests that will remain as a world wide tool and power, to force any country within the G-20 to do as we 'the people' consider just and ethical.
Well then, americans have clearly become an artificial and numb society, totally ruled and controlled like cows by marketing strategies of political emotionalisms, marketing strategies of antagonisms and falce moral divergencies, bringing all cultural life into a show-biz. Their own ignorance of the supra structures of the world government systems, aka. their own government supra structures such as the lobby organizations (i.e jewish AIPAC's), and the international factions as the UN, NATO, Bank of International Settlements, IMF, World Bank, and etc., gave them the illusion of becoming a great country with the ‘american dream’ promise at hand, whereas it may not be. As Slavoj Zizek puts it: “There still is the symbolic in play, but again, the basic feature of today's ideology, in correspondence with this Spinozist universality of the signifier, is not a kind of fundamentalism, but a mixture of nostalgia and cynicism: cynical distance, nostalgia, etc. We, as theoreticians from a long-term political perspective, cannot accept this as the ultimate stage and say to it "Okay, now humanity will just float in the bliss of the universal signifier to the end." This is not the ultimate horizon; I cannot accept this”. It is like that, the price for being a naive and sugar-free nation, is to succumb further into a cyclical bailout of oligarchy class, and to get as a consequence, into a super taxed, and monetary monopolized, consumerist economy, entrenched with a loss of civilian freedoms (i.e such as free speech), back into alienated private life perversely enjoyed with the fatality of fragile ‘national security’ and excess work.
The problem with americans is that since the industrial revolution, they don´t perceive changes, they don´t understand their political supra-structures, and they don’t understand themselves, they live permanently in self-deception of the mythical other, like civil primates. Even like a cow, they chew and chew their grass, never expecting that one day they are going to be slaughtered. That is why it is so easy to govern them, it is so easy to bring them ‘as fat as possible’ and collect from them billion of dollars of taxes, used after for an agenda that they even don’t understand, an agenda out of their consciousness and manipulated by powerful elites, but certainly not democracies. Welcome to the fantasy of Liberal Democracy, of Change and of Pseudo-Capitalism, the 'opium' you were injected with.
Using the mask of economic prosperity, the ‘amercian cow’ lives it life in comfort, but ultimately in chains. As is evidently, their cultural expectation of ‘winners and loosers’ binds them to project a dialectic ocean of political reality, summed up under the product label of conservatism or either liberalism, both postures by the way are certified to always get presidents elected, –or a
s Leonardo Boff caricaturized this mechanical swing of the political dialectics history, “We are inspired by a school of Biblical historians known as the Deuteronomic School, derived from the book of Deuteronomy, […] It follows a pattern, I would say almost a mechanical one: people break the alliance, God punishes; people learn the lesson and rediscover the correct path; God blesses and causes wise government leaders to appear”-
so then, if any intellectual fraction -or covert political alliance between dominant men- may infiltrate the nature of this dialectic, at that very moment that alliance will become like a political god, or the one that is always elected per se. However as Slavoj Zizek said talking about the foreign policy of USA, “America always achieve exactly the opposite of its aim”. Then, we can venture, that imperialistic (USA's, Israel, UK, EU) policies, and further attempt for world governance will be popularly ridiculed and rejected at some historical point, this by the intellectual community, and later by every common citizen, as part of a general knowledge.
Under this facade of changes within the superficial dialectics, changes are administered slowly into a society, and into their systems, taking decades to pile into something more evident to the average population, hence by changing one law at time in a 40 year horizon plan, this can bring the country into whatever you want, ultimately following a particular agenda of geopolitical interests, that may settle the record for a global USA-ISR-UK-EU governance, with the aim to conform further an explicit, or either a covert, global government. This is what the informed and thoughtful citizen understands as what is known to be The New World Order.
Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana and at the European Graduate School EGS who uses popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and the theory of Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture. He was born in 1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia where he lives to this day but he has lectured at universities around the world. He was analysed by Jacques Alain Miller, Jacques Lacan's son in law, and is probably the most successful and prolific post-Lacanian having published over fifty books including translations into a dozen languages. He is a leftist and, aside from Lacan he was strongly influenced by Marx, Hegel and Schelling. In temperament, he resembles a revolutionist more than a theoretician. He was politically active in Slovenia during the 80s, a candidate for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia in 1990; most of his works are moral and political rather than purely theoretical. He has considerable energy and charisma and is a spellbinding lecturer in the tradition of Lacan and Kojeve.
Why would someone not perceive changes? One reason would be because that someone is amused with other things, or is tired, or is self-indulgent and has lost any decency and taste, as to care for the wellbeing of others, or of future generations, such is the individualism that has corroded USA, a country that cannot even get up to fight back against Wall Street oligarchs, a country that feels powerless, because it seems to them that the problem with Wall Street is more complex than what they can chew, simple as that. Nevertheless, their ultimate instance is the american heart, it may be as naive as always, and because of this, valuable to portray one of these social revolution reconstructions, if they have the fortune to meet their true infallible leader....which is non other than themselves, each of one of them.
See the following documentary, and think further for yourselves, away from main stream media for a moment, away from the vacuum that they cultivate as representatives of the the ‘real world’, may our perspectives evolve in full knowledge of these vacuum; and decide for yourselves. You don't have to advocate totally for the cheap labeled 'conspiracy theory' but at the least acknowledge in sanity, which part is true to you; and diagnose accordingly, where your nation is heading for the next 5, 10, 20 and 50 years? What would you do then ?
The Obama Deception is a hard-hitting film that completely destroys the myth that Barack Obama is working for the best interests of the American people.
The Obama phenomenon is a hoax carefully crafted by the captains of the New World Order. He is being pushed as savior in an attempt to con the American people into accepting global slavery.
We have reached a critical juncture in the New World Order's plans. It's not about Left or Right: it's about a One World Government. The international banks plan to loot the people of the United States and turn them into slaves on a Global Plantation.
Covered in this film: who Obama works for, what lies he has told, and his real agenda. If you want to know the facts and cut through all the hype, this is the film for you.
Watch the ‘Obama Deception’ and learn how:
- Obama is continuing the process of transforming America into something that resembles Nazi Germany, with forced National Service, domestic civilian spies, warrantless wiretaps, the destruction of the Second Amendment, FEMA camps and Martial Law. - Obama's handlers are openly announcing the creation of a new Bank of the World that will dominate every nation on earth through carbon taxes and military force. - International bankers purposefully engineered the worldwide financial meltdown to bankrupt the nations of the planet and bring in World Government. - Obama plans to loot the middle class, destroy pensions and federalize the states so that the population is completely dependent on the Central Government. - The Elite are using Obama to pacify the public so they can usher in the North American Union by stealth, launch a new Cold War and continue the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Updated April 29th (Related Articles) Updated April 30th (Epidemiological Dynamics in Section 9) Updated May 2nd (Medical Consultant Video Interview) Updated June 15th (Human-error origins in Section 1, & HIV to H1N1 mutation in Section 9) Updated June 19th (Symptoms, Self-Diagnosis, When to Go for Medical Care and WHO Antiviral Drugs Efficiency and Q&A in Exec. Summary 1 & Section 8; About eating meat in Exec. Summary 2; More US Army's Fort Detrix Evidence of Leaked Mortal Viruses in Section 1)
“’This is what we call a reassortment between two currently circulating pig flu viruses,’ said Andrew Rambaut, a University of Edinburgh viral geneticist. ‘Why it’s emerged in humans is anyone’s guess. It hasn’t been seen before in pigs as far as I know.’ ’The new neuraminidase gene that came in from Eurasian swine is one we’ve never before seen circulating in humans,’ said Rambaut. ‘That’s one of the reasons it’s spreading rapidly. Very few people will have any immunity to this particular combination, which is what gives the concern that this will be a pandemic rather than just a normal seasonal flu outbreak. It remains to be seen how much and to what extent there is existing immunity’. In medical terms, the genetic origins of the virus may not matter. Whether it come solely from pigs rather than a mix of pigs, birds and humans doesn’t change its immunological novelty”. Wired (Science),
Like humans, pigs get the flu. Four different type A swine flu strains commonly circulate among pigs. Most recent swine flu viruses have belonged to the H1N1 and H3N2 subtypes. Pigs typically get sick but usually don't die from swine flu. The new swine flu virus infecting humans is very unusual. It's somehow acquired genes from swine, bird, and human flu bugs. And it's also got genes from Eurasian swine flu viruses that aren't supposed to be in North America.
The strain that appeared in California, NZ, Mexico, Texas, Israel, etc is of the H1N1 swine flu strain, is very different from the H1N1 human flu strain included in the seasonal flu vaccine (available as of Apr 2009). It's not known whether previous vaccination immunity to A H1N1 flu might provide partial protection against the type A H1N1 swine flu that is unfolding in the current 2009 outbreak.
Is There a Treatment for Swine Flu?
Yes. While the swine flu bug is resistant to older flu medicines, it remains sensitive to Oseltamivir (i.e. Tamiflu-Roche) and to Zanamivir (i.e. Relenza-GlaxoSmithKline).
[Editor Update 1: NOTICE ! This answer points out "SENSITIVITY" and not "FULL TREATMENT” and “FULL RECOVERY", hence this information must be covering older strains of Swine Flu leaving 2009’s without 100% of drug treatment efficiency. Also be aware and consider the following article about a resistance of the virus towards Tamiflu, and a current development of a vaccine -not yet ready: "Japan's Daiichi Sankyo Co (4568.T) plans to launch as early as 2011 a new influenza preventive drug that could be effective against a strain unresponsive to widely used Tamiflu of Roche, the Nikkei business daily said". Reuters, Daiichi Sankyo to launch flu preventive drug-Nikkei].
[Editor Update 2 (Jun 19 2009): WHO (May 21 2009), “There are two classes of antiviral drugs for influenza: inhibitors of neuraminidase such as Oseltamivir (Tamiflu-Roche) and Zanamivir (i.e. Relenza-GlaxoSmithKline); and adamantanes, such as amantadine and rimantadine. Tests on viruses obtained from patients in Mexico and the United States have indicated that current new H1N1 viruses are sensitive to neuraminidase inhibitors, but that the viruses are resistant to the other class, the adamantanes. […] Where antiviral drugs are available for treatment, clinicians should make decisions based on assessment of the individual patient's risk. Risks versus benefits should also be evaluated on a case by case basis”].
What Are the Symptoms of Swine Flu?
Swine flu symptoms are similar to regular flu symptoms and include cough, sore throat, fever, chills, headache, and fatigue. Some patients have also reported nausea and diarrhea. There is no easy way to distinguish swine flu from other types of flu or other germs. It takes a lab test to tell whether it's swine flu.
[Editor Update 2 (Jun 19 2009): WHO (May 21 2009), "So far most people who have contracted the new A (H1N1) virus have experienced influenza-like symptoms (such as sore throat, cough, runny nose, fever, malaise, headache, joint/muscle pain) and recovered without antiviral treatment"].
[Editor Update 3 (Jun 19 2009): Please address this fact sheet from State of North Carolina, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Public Health. Where you can clarify about symptoms, what to do if you have them, and how to prevent contagion].
Editor Update 4 (Jun 19 2009): WHO (May 21 2009), “When should someone seek medical care? A person should seek medical care if they experience shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, or if a fever continues more than three days [72 hours]. For parents with a young child who is ill, seek medical care if a child has fast or labored breathing, continuing fever or convulsions (seizures).
Supportive care at home - resting, drinking plenty of fluids and using a pain reliever for aches - is adequate for recovery in most cases. (A non-aspirin pain reliever should be used by children and young adults because of the risk of Reye's syndrome)”. -
Editor Commentary (Jun 19 2009): However, due to the efficiency so far, of the antiviral drugs, a more prudent ‘rule of thumb’ that is being used by health authorities in Chile is that if the suspect has influenza symptoms, and additionally has been with fever over or equal to 38,0°C for more than 24 hours, this person ‘must immediately’ go to a public hospital or private clinic for a laboratory test of the A-H1N1 influenza variant. One of the reasons is of course, that antiviral drugs used, “are most effective when taken within 48 hours of the start of flu symptoms".
Can Swine Flu Spread From Person to Person?
The U.S. residents infected with swine flu virus had no direct contact with pigs. The CDC says it's likely that the infections represent widely separated cycles of human-to-human infections.
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Have There Been Previous Swine Flu Outbreaks?
If swine flu sounds familiar to you, it's probably because you remember or have read about the 1976 swine flu outbreak at Fort Dix, N.J., among military recruits. It lasted about a month and then went away as mysteriously as it appeared. As many as 240 people were infected; one died. The swine flu that spread at Fort Dix was the H1N1 strain. That's the same flu strain that caused the disastrous SWINE FLU pandemic of 1918-1919, resulting in tens of millions of deaths. [At that time] concerns that a new H1N1 pandemic might return with winter, led to a crash program to create a vaccine and vaccinate all Americans against swine flu. That vaccine program ran into all kinds of problems -- not the least of which was public perception that the vaccine caused excessive rates of dangerous reactions. After more than 40 million people were vaccinated, the effort was abandoned.
As it turned out, there was no swine flu epidemic.
People usually get swine influenza from infected pigs, however, some human cases lack contact history with pigs or environments where pigs have been located. Human-to-human transmission has occurred in some instances but was limited to close contacts and closed groups of people.
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What Are the Symptoms of Swine Flu?
Generally clinical symptoms are similar to seasonal influenza but reported clinical presentation ranges broadly from asymptomatic infection to severe pneumonia resulting in death.
Is it safe to eat pork meat and pork products?
Yes. Swine influenza has not been shown to be transmissible to people through eating properly handled and prepared pork (pig meat) or other products derived from pigs. The swine influenza virus is killed by cooking temperatures of 160°F/70°C, corresponding to the general guidance for the preparation of pork and other meat.
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Editor Update 1: Preferably DON’T EAT PORK or CHICKEN for the meantime].
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Editor Update 2 (Jun 19 2009): It is ‘Ok’ to eat any kind of meat if you are not vegetarian, eating meat does not transmit the virus of influenza A-H1N1].
Medical Consultants Fielding Questions on H1N1 Virus.
(a) Independent-Unconventional Media Reports WARNING: There is a possibility that the current 'Swine [Spanish] Flue' may have some DNA "strings" of a US military-modified biological-weapon(aka. “synthetic biological agents for germ warfare“) built from samples of the 1918's first virus outbreak. 1918 was the first time humanity historically accounted (though unnoticed) the Type "A" Influenza H1N1 kind".
"Despite the very dangerous nature of the 1918 virus, efforts to reconstruct it began in the mid-1990s, when Dr Jeffrey Taubenberger from the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology succeeded in recovering and sequencing fragments of the viral RNA from preserved tissues of 1918 victims. After partially unravelling the genetic sequence of the virus, the scientists went a step further and succeeded in creating a live virus containing two 1918 genes that proved to be very lethal in animal experiments. A resuscitation of the Spanish flu is neither necessary nor warranted from a public health point of view. Allegedly, the recent experiments sought to test the efficacy of existing antiviral drugs on the 1918 construct. But there is would be no need for antiviral drugs against the 1918 strain if it was not recreated in the first place. “It simply does not make any scientific sense to create a new threat just to develop new countermeasures against it”, said Jan van Aken, a biologist with the anti-biological weapon group, the Sunshine Project. “This particularly dangerous eradicated strain could wreak havoc if released, deliberately or accidentally. [...] “This kind of research is creating a vicious circle and could prompt a race by bio-defence scientists to genetically engineer unthinkable diseases”, said Edward Hammond from the Sunshine Project. “If Taubenberger worked in a Chinese, Russian or Iranian laboratory, his work might well be seen as the `smoking gun' of an offensive bio-warfare program”, noted van Aken". Green Left Weekly,United States: Military resurrects deadly flu virus.
"Recently the virus has been reconstructed from the tissue of a dead soldier [from 1918 Swine Flu's first outbrake] and was being genetically characterized at The Molecular Pathology Division of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP). "We have now identified three cases: [...] that represent the only known sources of genetic material of the 1918 influenza virus," said Jeffery K.Taubenberger, MD, PhD, chief of the institute's molecular pathology division and principal investigator on the project". PBS, Latest Findings.
"Well, there are other groups who have been interested in recovering virus. One group is interested in recovering virus from miners who are frozen in the permafrost in Spitzburg and in Norway. It's possible that there will be a case that has the genetic material of the virus. It would even be conceivably possible there would be a body that would have live virus in it", said Taubenberger on PBS, Revisiting The 1918 Flu. "Once the tissues are extracted, portions of each sample will be sealed in separate vials and shipped to laboratories in Norway, Canada, Britain and the United States. The most sensitive investigations will be conducted at the United States Army's infectious disease research laboratory in Fort Detrick, Md. and the National Institute of Medical Research in London, which are equipped to maintain the highest levels of biological containment of unknown organisms". NYT, In the Norwegian Permafrost, a New Hunt for the Deadly 1918 Flu Virus.
A US-Japan joint study, "generated Spanish flu viruses from genetic material extracted from preserved lung tissue of three of the pandemic's
victims, thanks to Jeffrey Taubenberger's work at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Taubenberger was able to isolate the eight genes of the 1918 virus by the technique of inverse genetics. Kawaoka's team blended genetic elements from the 1918 flu virus with those of current flu pathogens, generating viruses that carried different genetical combinations". MED India, US-Japanese Study Finds Genes for 1918 'Spanish Flu' Pandemic.
HUMAN ERROR? “Adrian Gibbs, 75, who collaborated on research that led to the development of Roche Holding AG’s Tamiflu drug, said in an interview that he intends to publish a report suggesting the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drugmakers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus’s origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint.
"Viral sequence data now suggest that the entire 1918 virus was novel to humans in, or shortly before, 1918, and that it thus was not a reassortant virus produced from old existing strains that acquired 1 or more new genes, such as those causing the 1957 and 1968 pandemics. On the contrary, the 1918 virus appears to be an avianlike influenza virus derived in toto from an unknown source (17,19), as its 8 genome segments are substantially different from contemporary avian influenza genes. Influenza virus gene sequences from a number of fixed specimens of wild birds collected circa 1918 show little difference from avian viruses isolated today, indicating that avian viruses likely undergo little antigenic change in their natural hosts even over long periods (24,25)". CDC, 1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemics.
"Under a later string (in early 1976) of this same virus, "the novel A/New Jersey/76 (Hsw1N1) influenza virus caused severe respiratory illness in 13 soldiers with 1 death at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Since A/New Jersey was similar to the 1918–1919 pandemic virus, rapid outbreak assessment and enhanced surveillance were initiated. A/New Jersey virus was detected only from January 19 to February 9 and did not spread beyond Fort Dix. A/Victoria/75 (H3N2) spread simultaneously, also caused illness, and persisted until March. Up to 230 soldiers were infected with the A/New Jersey virus. [...] Despite efforts to define the events at Fort Dix, many questions remain unanswered, including the following: Where did A/New Jersey come from? Why did transmission stop?" CDC, Swine Influenza A Outbreak, Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1976.
"The Army's Criminal Investigation Command agents have been visiting Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, to investigate the disappearance of [virus] vials. Christopher Grey, spokesman for the command, said this latest investigation has found "no evidence of criminal activity. [However, “The institute [in Fort Detrick] has been under pressure to tighten security in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks, which killed five people and sickened 17. […] FBI investigators say they think the anthrax strain used in the attacks originated at the Army lab, and its prime suspect, Bruce E. Ivins, researched anthrax there. Ivins committed suicide last year during an investigation into his activities”, reported The Washington Post]. The [disappeared] vials contained samples of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis, a virus that sickens horses and can be spread to humans by mosquitoes. In 97 percent of cases, humans with the virus suffer flu-like symptoms, but it can be deadly in about 1 out of 100 cases, according to Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman for the Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. There is an effective vaccine for the disease and there hasn't been an outbreak in the United States since 1971". CNN, Army: 3 vials of virus samples missing from Maryland facility.
[Update June 19th: “After four months of searching about 335 freezers and refrigerators at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, investigators found 9,220 samples that hadn't been included in a database of about 66,000 items listed as of February, said Col. Mark Kortepeter, the institute's deputy commander. […] Still, the overstock and the previous inaccuracy of the database raised the possibility that someone could have taken a sample outside the lab with no way for officials to know something was missing. […] Sam Edwin, the institute's inventory control officer, said most of the samples found were vials with tiny amounts of pathogens that would thaw quickly and die once they were taken out of a freezer, making smuggling something off the base difficult. […] But some scientists are skeptical. Unlike uranium or chemical weapons, pathogens are living materials that can replicate and die. A small amount can easily be turned into a large amount. They said the strict inventories slow their work without guaranteeing security. […]
"Nine thousand, two hundred undocumented samples is an extraordinarily serious breach," said Richard H. Ebright, a professor at Rutgers University who follows biosecurity. "A small number would be a concern; 9,200 . . . at an institution that has been the focus of intense scrutiny on this issue, that's deeply worrisome. Unacceptable", reported The Washington Post].
[Editor: If this samples-vials were in a freezer full of other biological samples "that several years ago [...] broke down and all the samples had to be safely destroyed. And additionally a complete inventory of what was in the freezer [curiousely] was not done before the samples were destroyed", then these so called 'high levels of biological containment' have been already irresponsibly overridden. Hence, these new viruses may possibly and likely, been leaked into the civilian population from that USA's Army laboratories, and not from pigs or poultry !!].
Look at this ! Outstanding Human Errors! New Scientist,
“Last December (2008), the Austrian branch of US vaccine company Baxter sent a batch of ordinary human H3N2 flu, altered so it couldn't replicate, to Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, also in Austria. In February (2009), a lab in the Czech Republic working for Avir alerted Baxter that, unexpectedly, ferrets inoculated with the sample had died. It turned out the sample contained live H5N1 bird flu by accident, which Baxter uses to make vaccine. The two seem to have been mixed in error. […] As well as the risk of it escaping into the wild, the H5N1 got mixed with a human strain, which might have spawned a hybrid that could unleash a pandemic”.
Finally, to put a reality note on the interest of these viruses as a source for a biological virus-weapon, read also the scam in which Australian and US governments have been implicated in robbing H5N1 virus samples from the Indonesian government. ABC,
US involved in bird flu conspiracy: Indonesia. Indonesia’s Health Minister Dr Siti Fadilah Supari, effectively accused Australia of stealing Indonesia’s strain of H5N1 to make bird flu vaccines. “I never, I never give permission to send sample, […] send a specimen of the virus to Australia” Supari said.
"Developed countries become richer", she writes in her book "It’s Time for the World to Change", "because they have the capability to develop the vaccine and control the world". Dr Supari expresses alarm at WHO laboratories sharing bird flu virus data with the United States national laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where nuclear weapons are developed. "Whether they use is it to make vaccine or develop chemical weapons, would depend on the need and interest of the US Government. It is indeed a very dangerous situation for the destiny of humanity", she writes and goes on to say ".. it is a matter of choice whether to use the material for vaccines or biological weapon development".
(b) Corporate-Conventional Media Reports. "Ann Reid, a molecular biologist with the AFIP and the main author of the study was quoted by the Associated Press as saying the gene probably "was adapting in humans or in swine for maybe several years before it broke out as a pandemic virus." Reid added, "We can't tell whether it went from pigs into humans or from humans into pigs." Reid and her team were studying lung tissue preserved from the autopsies of two soldiers and an Alaskan woman who died from influenza. One of the soldiers had been stationed at Fort Jackson, South Carolina and the other at Camp Upton, New York. Through this investigation, Reid was able to map a gene called the hemagglutinin, which is key to allowing the influenza virus to take hold. Reid reported that the hemagglutinin closely resembles mammal genes. Reid's report indicates that the 1918 virus apparently evolved in mammals, either humans or pigs, over a period of years before it matured into a virus strong enough to kill millions. The study speculates that the virus may have percolated in humans from as early as 1900. One question left unanswered by the study is whether humans passed the virus to pigs, or vice-versa". PBS, Latest Findings.
"The historical origins of the deadly flu disease were unknown but widely speculated upon. Some of the allies thought of the epidemic as a biological warfare tool of the Germans. Many thought it was a result of the trench warfare, the use of mustard gases and the generated "smoke and fumes" of the war. A national campaign began using the ready rhetoric of war to fight the new enemy of microscopic proportions. A study attempted to reason why the disease had been so devastating in certain localized regions, looking at the climate, the weather and the racial composition of cities. They found humidity to be linked with more severe epidemics as it "fosters the dissemination of the bacteria," (Committee on Atmosphere and Man, 1923)". Stanford University, The Influenza Pandemic of 1918. "Sometimes pigs can be infected with more than one virus type at a time, which can allow the genes from these viruses to mix. This can result in an influenza virus containing genes from a number of sources, called a "reassortant" virus. Although swine influenza viruses are normally species specific and only infect pigs, they do sometimes cross the species barrier to cause disease in humans". WHO, Swine influenza frequently asked questions. See also, PBS 1918 Influenza Time Line.
2. Causes of the 1918 H1N1 Swine Flu.
"No known mutations correlated with high pathogenicity in other human or animal influenza viruses have been found in the 1918 genome, but ongoing studies to map virulence factors are yielding interesting results. The 1918 sequence data, however, leave unanswered questions about the origin of the virus (19) and about the epidemiology of the pandemic. Regression analyses of human and swine influenza sequences obtained from 1930 to the present place the initial circulation of the 1918 precursor virus in humans at approximately 1915–1918 (20). Thus, the precursor was probably not circulating widely in humans until shortly before 1918, nor did it appear to have jumped directly from any species of bird studied to date (19). In summary, its origin remains puzzling". CDC, 1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemics.
"The origins of this influenza variant is not precisely known. It is thought to have originated in China in a rare genetic shift of the influenza virus. The recombination of its surface proteins created a virus novel to almost everyone and a loss of herd immunity. The name of 'Spanish Flu' came from the early affliction and large mortalities in Spain (BMJ,10/19/1918) where it allegedly killed 8 million in May (BMJ, 7/13/1918). However, a first wave of influenza appeared early in the spring of 1918 in Kansas and in military camps throughout the US. Few noticed the epidemic in the midst of the war (WWI). Pres. Woodrow Wilson had just given his 14 point address. There was virtually no response or acknowledgment to the epidemics in March and April in the military camps. It was unfortunate that no steps were taken to prepare for the usual recrudescence of the virulent influenza strain in the winter. The lack of action was later criticized when the epidemic could not be ignored in the winter of 1918 (BMJ, 1918). These first epidemics at training camps were a sign of what was coming in greater magnitude in the fall and winter of 1918 to the entire world. The war brought the virus back into the US for the second wave of the epidemic. It first arrived in Boston in September of 1918 through the port busy with war shipments of machinery and supplies. The war also enabled the virus to spread and diffuse. Men across the nation were mobilizing to join the military and the cause. As they came together, they brought the virus with them and to those they contacted". Stanford University, The Influenza Pandemic of 1918.
Other article says,
"Fort Riley, Kansas, was a sprawling establishment housing 26,000 men and encompassing an entire camp, Camp Funston, within its 20,000 acre boundaries. Soldiers often complained about the inhospitable weather to be found at the site: bone-chilling winters and sweltering summers. And sandwiched in between these two extremes were the blinding dust storms. Within the camp were thousands of horses and mules that produced a stifling nine tons of manure each month. The accepted method of disposing of the manure was to burn it, an unpleasant task made more so by a driving wind. Shortly before breakfast on Monday, March 11 1918, the first domino would fall signaling the commencement of the first wave of the 1918 influenza. Company cook Albert Gitchell reported to the camp infirmary with complaints of a "bad cold." Right behind him came Corporal Lee W. Drake voicing similar complaints. By noon, camp surgeon Edward R. Schreiner had over 100 sick men on his hands, all apparently suffering from the same malady.
Any evidence of an influenza epidemic in the spring of 1918 was furnished by those institutions that kept a close eye on those under their watch: the military and prisons. In April and May over 500 prisoners at San Quentin in California came down with the same condition that had struck soldiers at camp Riley, as well as camps Hancock, Lewis, Sherman, Fremont, and several others. Influenza spreading amongst men living in close quarters did not particularly alarm the public health officials of the day. Little data existed at the time to indicate a sizable spread among the civilian population. Besides, the nation had bigger matters on its mind. There was a war to win.
In the spring of 1918, it appeared that America's involvement in the fight against Germany was beginning to make a difference. In March 84,000 American "dough-boys" set out for Europe; they were followed by another 118,000 the next month. Little did they know they were carrying with them a virus that would prove to be more deadly then the rifles they carried". PBS, The First Wave.
3. How Does It Goes From Animals To Humans? Gene Swapping.
"Science doesn't quite understand how a nonhuman flu virus adapts and becomes a human flu, and why more, in fact, don't. But they do suspect that it is a process of gene swapping. If an avian [swane] flu infects a person who, coincidentally, suffers from a human flu, the two bugs might exchange genetic material. The resulting virus could be essentially avian [swane], but possessing genetic components of the human flu that would allow it to be easily transmitted from person to person". NYT, (H5N1) The Flu Hunters.
"We found small fragments of the viral RNA, the genetic material, in this case. The tissue is--the genetic material is quite degraded in this sample, and so we can only look at very small pieces at a time and, in a sense, put them together like a puzzle. But what we find is that it's a virus that does not match any strain of influenza virus isolated since, but it is most related to the kind of influenzas that infect swine, suggesting that this influenza entered the human population after being passaged through pigs". PBS, Revisiting The 1918 Flu.
4. The 1918 Swine Flue (Influenza A H1N1) Outbrake Was Uncontrollable.
As Dr. J Taubenberger (chief of molecular pathology at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology) said: "This was clearly one of the worst, if not "the" worst infectious disease outbreak in all human history". PBS, Revisiting The 1918 Flu. "Total deaths were estimated at ≈50 million (5–7) and were arguably as high as 100 million (7), [where] an estimated one third of the world's population (or ≈500 million persons) were infected and had clinically apparent illnesses (1,2) during the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic". CDC, 1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemics
"The physicians of the time were helpless against this powerful agent of influenza". Stanford University, The Influenza Pandemic of 1918.
"Even with modern antiviral and antibacterial drugs, vaccines, and prevention knowledge, the return of a pandemic virus equivalent in pathogenicity to the virus of 1918 would likely kill >100 million people worldwide. A pandemic virus with the (alleged) pathogenic potential of some recent H5N1 outbreaks could cause substantially more deaths". CDC,1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemics.
5. What Does H# and N# Means?
"The ''H'' is for hemagglutinin, a spiky protein on the surface of the influenza molecule. In human flu viruses, the spikes of hemagglutinin connect, with matching receptors on the outside of healthy respiratory-system cells. The virus then melds with the healthy cell and begins replicating. Neuraminidase, the ''N'' in the flu name, another protein, uncouples the virus from its host, tearing the cell membrane and allowing the progeny to escape, killing the cell. Loosed, they start repeating the process deeper and deeper into the respiratory tract". NYT, (H5N1) The Flu Hunters.
6. Other Historical Outbrakes of this A H1N1 Swine Flu Type. (by Geographical Outbrakes)
First outbrake, 1918 (Kansas, Fort Riley).
Second outbrake,
1976 (New Jersey, Fort Dix). "The virus surfaced in February at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where 19-year-old Pvt. David Lewis told his drill instructor that he felt tired and weak, although not sick enough to skip a training hike. Lewis was dead with 24 hours.
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[Editor: Same virus, same militar environment, different year! CDC, Swine Influenza A Outbreak, Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1976. "A/New Jersey/76 (Hsw1N1) was likely introduced into Fort Dix early in 1976, after the holidays (15). The virus caused disease with radiologic evidence of pneumonia in at least 4 soldiers and 1 death; all of these patients had previously been healthy (7,15). The virus was transmitted to close contacts in the unique basic training environment, with limited transmission outside the basic training group. A/New Jersey probably circulated for a month and disappeared. The source of the virus, the exact time of its introduction into Fort Dix, and factors limiting its spread and duration are unknown (15). The Fort Dix outbreak may have been a zoonotic anomaly caused by introduction of an animal virus into a stressed population in close contact in crowded facilities during a cold winter. However, the impact of A/New Jersey virus on this healthy young population was severe in terms of estimated infections, hospitalizations, and duration of the outbreak"].
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Third
outbrake, 1977 (Russian).
7. How you die?
"In the two years that this scourge ravaged the earth, a fifth of the world's population was infected. One anectode shared of 1918 was of four women playing bridge together late into the night. Overnight, three of the women died from influenza (Hoagg). Others told stories of people on their way to work suddenly developing the flu and dying within hours (Henig). One physician writes that patients with seemingly ordinary influenza would rapidly "develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen" and later when cyanosis appeared in the patients, "it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate," (Grist, 1979). Another physician recalls that the influenza patients "died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth," (Starr, 1976)". Stanford University, The Influenza Pandemic of 1918.
"A subset of patients died extremely quickly, within two or three or four days of symptoms. And one of the problems was an accumulation of massive amounts of fluid in the lungs, pulmonary edema, and these patients in a sense literally drowned. Other people died of secondary infections with bacterial pneumonia. Antibiotics were not known to exist in 1918, and there was no way to treat those secondary infections". PBS, Revisiting The 1918 Flu.
""The 1918 virus replicates in the upper respiratory tract, but also in the lungs," causing primary pneumonia among its victims," Kawaoka said. "We wanted to know why the 1918 flu caused severe pneumonia," he added. Autopsies of Spanish flu victims often revealed fluid-filled lungs severely damaged by massive hemorrhaging". MED India, US-Japanese Study Finds Genes for 1918 'Spanish Flu' Pandemic.
8. Is There Today Any 100% Effective Vaccine or Drug for Treatment? No.
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From WHO, Weekly epidemiological record (Feb 27 2009): "Antigenic and genetic characteristics of recent isolates. A combination of antigenic and genetic analyses is used to identify emergent antigenic variants of potential future epidemic importance and for consideration of their inclusion in vaccines. Influenza A(H1N1) viruses In HI tests with postinfection ferret sera, the majority of infl uenza A(H1N1) viruses were closely related to the 2008–2009 vaccine strain A/Brisbane/59/2007. Phylogenetically, the HAs of recent viruses belonged to 2 distinct clades represented by A/Brisbane/59/2007 and A/Hong Kong/2652/2006. Viruses within the former clade predominated among isolates from most parts of the world, while those within the A/Hong Kong/2652/2006 clade were predominant in China. The HAs of these 2 clades were antigenically indistinguishable. [...] Resistance to influenza antiviral drugs Neuraminidase inhibitors H1N1 viruses that were resistant to the NAs inhibitor oseltamivir were predominant in most regions of the world. Resistance was associated with the H275Y mutation in the neuraminidase gene within the A/Brisbane/59/2007 clade.
M2 inhibitors. Most influenza A(H3N2) viruses were resistant to amantadine and rimantadine. The majority of A(H1N1) viruses of the A/Hong Kong/2652/2006 clade were resistant, [...] Resistance in both subtypes was still predominantly associated with a serine to asparagine change in residue 31 of the M2 ion channel protein". -
Also be aware and consider the following article about a resistance of the virus towards Tamiflu, and a current development of a vaccine -not yet ready: "Japan's Daiichi Sankyo Co (4568.T) plans to launch as early as 2011 a new influenza preventive drug that could be effective against a strain unresponsive to widely used Tamiflu of Roche, the Nikkei business daily said". Reuters, Daiichi Sankyo to launch flu preventive drug-Nikkei.
[Editor Update 2 (Jun 19 2009): WHO (May 21 2009), “There are two classes of antiviral drugs for influenza: inhibitors of neuraminidase such as Oseltamivir (Tamiflu-Roche) and Zanamivir (i.e. Relenza-GlaxoSmithKline); and adamantanes, such as amantadine and rimantadine. Tests on viruses obtained from patients in Mexico and the United States have indicated that current new H1N1 viruses are sensitive to neuraminidase inhibitors, but that the viruses are resistant to the other class, the adamantanes. […] Where antiviral drugs are available for treatment, clinicians should make decisions based on assessment of the individual patient's risk. Risks versus benefits should also be evaluated on a case by case basis”].
From NYT, U.S. Declares Public Health Emergency Over Swine Flu: "Flu experts would also like to know whether current flu shots give any protection because it will be months before a new vaccine can be made. There is an H1N1 human strain in this year’s shot, and all H1N1 flus are descendants of the 1918 pandemic strain. But flus pick up many mutations, and there will be no proof of protection until the C.D.C. can test stored blood serum containing flu shot antibodies against the new virus. Those tests are under way, said an expert who sent the C.D.C. his blood samples". -
"The genes could also lead to a new class of antiviral drugs, which is urgently needed as vaccines are unlikely to be produced fast enough at the outset of a pandemic to blunt its spread, he added". MED India, US-Japanese Study Finds Genes for 1918 'Spanish Flu' Pandemic.
9. The Genomic and Epidemiological Dynamics of Human Influenza-A Virus.
Rambaut A, Pybus OG, Nelson MI, Viboud C, Taubenberger JK & Holmes EC.
“The evolutionary interaction between influenza A virus and the human immune system, manifest as 'antigenic drift' of the viral haemagglutinin, is one of the best described patterns in molecular evolution. However, little is known about the genome-scale evolutionary dynamics of this important pathogen. Similarly, how genomic processes relate to global influenza epidemiology, in which the A/H3N2 and A/H1N1 subtypes co-circulate, is poorly understood. Through an analysis of 1302 complete viral genomes sampled from temperate populations in both hemispheres, we show that the genomic evolution of influenza A virus is characterized by a complex interplay between frequent reassortment and periodic selective sweeps. The A/H3N2 and A/H1N1 subtypes exhibit strikingly different evolutionary dynamics, with diverse lineages circulating in A/H1N1, indicative of weaker antigenic drift. These results suggest a sink-source model of viral ecology in which new lineages are seeded from a persistent influenza reservoir, which we hypothesize to be located in the tropics, to sink populations in temperate regions”.-
“Swine flu’s potential to reconfigure its genetic material and become more deadly is a “major concern,” said Anne Schuchat, a scientist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The prospect of what is called reassortment is keeping Schuchat and health officials worldwide on the alert […] “If pigs are infected with this new virus, and some of the swine influenza viruses that are already circulating, there could be additional reassortments of them,” she said. “Likewise if a human were co-infected with one of the seasonal influenza viruses, and this new H1N1 virus, we could have a virus reassortment which emerged that has slightly different properties than either of the two parental viruses”. Bloomberg, Swine Flu May Merge With Other Flu Viruses, CDC Says (Update2).
“Experts believe that the virus mutated into its current form in the bodies of pigs. Health authorities are particularly worried that the capability to mutate already exhibited by the virus could eventually let it combine with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. That could cause a lethally dangerous global health problem on a comparable scale to the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic that eventually infected more than 500 million people -- more than one-quarter of the human race -- and killed 10 percent of them. That death toll of 50 million was more than five times the total fatalities of World War I. The epidemic killed more Americans than died in World War I and World II combined”. UPI, Swine flu-HIV could devastate human race.
“HIV and the new flu strain could also mix together in a dangerous way, as has occurred with HIV and tuberculosis, the WHO said in guidance for health workers on its website. "Although there are inadequate data to predict the impact of a possible human influenza pandemic on HIV-affected populations, interactions between HIV/AIDS and A(H1N1) influenza could be significant," it said”. Alertnet, HIV patients at higher risk from flu, WHO says.
10. Prior Vaccination Campaigns.
"The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses. [...] The contamination incident, which is being investigated by the four European countries, came to light when the subcontractor in the Czech Republic inoculated ferrets with the product and they died. Ferrets shouldn’t die from exposure to human H3N2 flu viruses. [...] While H5N1 doesn’t easily infect people, H3N2 viruses do. If someone exposed to a mixture of the two had been simultaneously infected with both strains, he or she could have served as an incubator for a hybrid virus able to transmit easily to and among people. That mixing process, called reassortment, is one of two ways pandemic viruses are created. Toronto Sun, Baxter: Product contained live bird flu virus.
"It's a tale only the best conspiracy theorist could dream up. Eleven microbiologists mysteriously dead over the span of just five months. Some of them world leaders in developing weapons-grade biological plagues. Others the best in figuring out how to stop millions from dying because of biological weapons. Still others, experts in the theory of bioterrorism". CommonDreams, Scientists' Deaths Are Under the Microscope. (Original Article from the Globe and Mail, Scientists' deaths are under the microscope).
On Feb 9th 2009 Bloomberg reported well in advance- that, "Panasonic Corp. has instructed Japanese workers assigned to parts of Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and South America to send family members back to Japan because of the risk of outbreaks of new influenza strains, Nikkei English News said, without citing anyone. The Osaka-based electronics maker has asked workers' families to return home by the end of September, the report said, adding it was not known how many people were affected by the decision". Bloomberg, Panasonic Sends Workers' Families Home on Flu Risk, Nikkei Says
About Serious Vaccine Health Risks. "PUBLIC health experts warn that the world might be close to a repeat of the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed millions. But could it instead be close to a reprise of the 1976 pandemic that never happened? That is the year President Gerald R. Ford announced a crash program to ''inoculate every man, woman and child in the United States'' against swine flu. But the virus never became a killer, and vaccinations were halted two months after they began after reports that 500 people who received the shot developed a paralyzing nerve disease and more than 30 of them died. [...] There are lessons from 1976 that might be applied to today's preparations. A 2004 draft of a government plan for a pandemic listed some.[...] Dr. Fineberg said another lesson is that Congress should provide liability protection for vaccine makers now, rather than waiting until the crisis occurs". NYT, Lessons From a Plague That Wasn't. "Mass vaccinations started in October, but within weeks reports started coming in of people developing Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disease, right after taking the shot. Within two months, 500 people were affected, and more than 30 died. Amid a rising uproar and growing public reluctance to risk the shot, federal officials abruptly canceled the program Dec. 16". Wired, March 24, 1976: Ford Orders Swine-Flu Shots for All. (Also from NYT, Swine Flu Program is Halted in 9 States as 3 Die After Shots; Deaths occur in Pitsburgh).
11. Pharmaceutical & Corporate Irresponsibility and Profiteering.
Rolling Stone, Deadly Immunity. Where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. investigates the government cover-up of a mercury/autism vaccines scandal. "In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Georgia. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session -- only private invitations to fifty-two attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly "embargoed." There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left. The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children". (YouTube Inteview on CNBC and Rolling Stone editorial post). See also this controversy about
Editor’s Finale: Reflect thoroughly if you or your family would like to receive a shot from a 'new generation vaccine' -for Influenza A H1N1 after reading and pondering all this].
First of all it is important to understand where we are standing in relation to this scheme. Then after doubts are cleared, we may understand what is at stake for the tax payers in relation to their securitization insurance (aka. the government lender of last resort) towards the richest and wealthiest banking elites/cartels (i.e families) of the world. Then we may venture how the hell can we have faith in the US financial system as it is, and how the hell we may believe further in a ‘day-dreaming coca-cola spot commercial recovery fiction’ that everything is going to work alright –when banks purse is flooding with trillions of dollars that were not even generated by them. What the heck the banks with the politicians are doing? Why the ignorant american masses of people don’t go out to protest? Who are all these people, what the heck they are doing to the world !? JD.
“The Treasury and Fed are trying to clean up junk mathematics gambles with by printing up new government bonds and making “cash for trash” swaps. The government is trying to keep a financial fiction alive – the fiction underlying the ideology that the “real” economy won’t work if the financial sector is not made solvent on its losses”,
If this understanding does not start a revolution with peaceful protests in USA, we can conjecture with certainty, that USA is destined to be the 'spoon-feed cow-people's' country. We are not in the 30’s !!! wake up north americans !
“The Geithner-And-Summers Plan (GASP) to buy toxic assets from the banks is rightly scorned as an unnecessary give-away by virtually every independent economist who has looked at it. Its only friends are the Wall Street firms it is designed to bail out. [...] The Geithner-and-Summers Plan should be scrapped”. Laurence J Kotlikoff and Jeffrey Sachs.
“If you are going to rob the government, I suppose the best strategy is simply to brazen it out. To listen to the mass media, there seemed no alternative but for Congress to ram the plan through just as Wall Street lobbyists had written, to “save the market from imminent meltdown,” refusing to hold hearings or take testimony from critics or listen to the hundreds of economists who have denounced the giveaway.
Homeowners will pay interest in place of property taxes – and will have to make up the tax shortfall as well! So debt deflation and fiscal deflation will go hand in hand.
All these parts of the U.S. economy are being plunged into a real economic emergency in order to benefit Wall Street. Yet its losses and gains are extraneous to the “real” economy, except that it uses its financial inflows to lend out and indebt the economy further. This financial wrap-around of the “real” economy is being saved, but not the contents – the work force and tangible means of production. This “flesh and bone” is being sacrificed in order to protect the “fat.” The result is a toxic form of financial and fiscal pollution – debt pollution and the tax policies to preserve the “magic of compound interest” as an exponential trend. It is stifling life and growth by shifting the economic surplus out of the real economy”. Prof. Michael Hudson.
"Geithner and Summers have now announced their plan to raid the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Federal Reserve (Fed) to subsidize investors to buy toxic assets from the banks at inflated prices. If carried out, the result will be a massive transfer of wealth -- of perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars -- to bank shareholders from the taxpayers (who will absorb losses at the FDIC and Fed)"; “The Geithner-Summers plan, officially called the public/private investment programme, is a thinly veiled attempt to transfer up to hundreds of billions of dollars of US taxpayer funds to the commercial banks, by buying toxic assets from the banks at far above their market value. It is dressed up as a market transaction but that is a fig-leaf, since the government will put in 90 per cent or more of the funds and the “price discovery” process is not genuine”. Prof. Jeffrey Sachs.
“Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support. The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming is thatthe finance industry has effectively captured our government”. Simon Johnson.
"The United States currently faces economic turmoil related directly to a loss of confidence in our largest financial institutions because policymakers accepted the idea that some firms are just 'too big to fail.' I do not". "Yes, these institutions are systemically important, but we all know that in a market system, insolvent firms must be allowed to fail regardless of their size, market position or the complexity of operations. In the rush to find stability, no clear process was used to allocate TARP funds among the largest firms. This created further uncertainty and is impeding recovery". Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Thomas Hoenig.
"The Geithner-Summers plans for the FDIC are not the only off-budget transfers to bank shareholders taking place. Other parts of the plan support subsidized loans from the Treasury and, even more, from the Fed. The Fed is already buying up hundreds of billions of dollars of toxic assets with little if any oversight or offsetting appropriations. Since the Federal Reserve profits and losses eventually show up on the budget, the Fed's purchases of toxic assets also should fall under the Federal Credit Reform Act and should be explicitly budgeted". Prof. Jeffrey Sachs.
At least would US government learn from Europeans how to handle financial banking crisis with a bit of dignity in accord with the XXI century and its social reality:
”European executives who steered their banks into the debt iceberg have been fired. England wiped out shareholders in Northern Rock last summer, and more recently Bradford and Bingley. But in America the culprits get to stay on. No bank stockholders are being wiped out here, despite the negative equity into which the worst risk-taking banks have fallen or the prosecutions brought against them for predatory lending, consumer fraud and related wrongdoing”. -
Public-Private Investment Partnership/Fund (PPIP/F) Overview. Please take your time to review this enlightening and didactic long video [1:16:36]made by hindu Salman Khan, at his Khan Academy site.
Note: For a short numerical example under a simple perspective, please read Jeffrey Sachs’ article at Financial Times (Mar 25 2009),
Bloomberg (Mar 31 2009), "Financial Rescue Nears GDP as Pledges Top $12.8 Trillion (Update1)": “The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s. […] The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.
Your Banking Checking and Savings Accounts FDIC "Coca-Cola" Insurance Will Vaporize If The Case.
[…] FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair warned that the insurance fund to protect customer deposits at U.S. banks could dry up because of bank failures”. -
“’The FDIC is running dry of funds, there are already 20 banks that have failed this year, last year it was 25 for the whole year, the whole of 2007 it was just three, so the FDIC is getting dry - they need new money - they will have to print up increasing quantities’, said M. Hennecke at CNBC (Mar 22 2009), "Fed's Plans are Worsening Financial Crisis".
Actual Situation of the Banking Insolvency as of April 2009.
. The OCC’s Report asses that US Banking Derivative Exposure is way up. U.S. commercial banks now have a massive $200 trillion in derivatives exposure, which is 14x U.S. GDP. "The notional value of derivatives held by U.S. commercial banks increased $24.5 trillion in the fourth quarter, or 14%, to a total of $200.4 trillion, due to the migration of investment bank derivatives business into the commercial banking system. Derivatives activity in the U.S. banking system is dominated by a small group of large financial institutions. Five large commercial banks represent 96% of the total industry notional amount and 81% of industry net current credit exposure". - Following is the Table that shows the five large commercial banks (As of Dec 31 2008 in $USD Millions).
1) Of the top nineteen (19) banks in the nation, sixteen (16) are already technically insolvent. (Based upon the “alternative more adverse” scenario which had a 3.3 percent contraction of the U.S. Economy in 2009, accompanied by 8.9 percent unemployment, followed by 0.5 percent growth of the U.S. Economy but a 10.3 percent jobless in 2010.)
2) Of the 16 banks that are already technically insolvent, not even one can withstand any disruption of cash flow at all or any further deterioration in non-paying loans. (Without further government injections of cash) 3) If any two of the 16 insolvent banks go under, they will totally wipe out all remaining FDIC insurance funding. 4) Of the top 19 banks in the nation, the top five (5) largest banks are under capitalized so dangerously, there is serious doubt about their ability to continue as ongoing businesses. 5) Five large U.S. banks have credit exposure related to their derivatives trading that exceeds their capital, with four in particular - JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, HSBC Bank America and Citibank - taking especially large risks. 6) Bank of America`s total credit exposure to derivatives was 179 percent of its risk-based capital; Citibank`s was 278 percent; JPMorgan Chase`s, 382 percent; and HSBC America`s, 550 percent. It gets even worse: Goldman Sachs began reporting as a commercial bank, revealing an alarming total credit exposure of 1,056 percent, or more than ten times its capital! (HSBC is NOT in the top 19 banks undergoing a stress test, but is mentioned in the report as an aside because of its risk capital exposure to derivatives) 7) Not only are there serious questions about whether or not JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs,Citibank, Wells Fargo, Sun Trust Bank, HSBC Bank USA, can continue in business, more than 1,800 regional and smaller institutions are at risk of failure despite government bailouts! The debt crisis is much greater than the government has reported. The FDIC`s "Problem List" of troubled banks includes 252 institutions with assets of $159 billion. 1,816 banks and thrifts are at risk of failure, with total assets of $4.67 trillion, compared to 1,568 institutions, with $2.32 trillion in total assets in prior quarter.
Unless and until Chairman Bernanke and the other regulator are willing to tame the CDS tiger, there will be no success in bringing stability to the US banking system or foreign banking markets. And the longer Bernanke & Co refuse to say an emphatic "no" to Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS), JPMorganChase (NYSE:JPM) and the other CDS dealers, the financial crisis affecting global banking institutions will continue to worsen.
“As we've noted before, CDS contacts are high-beta risk, that is, highly correlated with the broad financial markets. Unlike natural disasters and other low-beat risks, where the frequency of events is relatively low and uncorrelated to the financial markets, in CDS the high degree of market correlation ensures that most or all of a portfolio of single-name CDS contracts will deteriorate when economic conditions turn negative. There is no way to hedge such risk because it is entirely correlated to the broad market -- unless you happen to be a conservative P&C underwriter! The yield spread on a bond represents the current cost of renting money for a year, but it does not begin to describe the cost of refunding the entire security upon default! […] As corporate defaults rise and recovery rates fall, the net funding required to perform on single name CDS must approach 100% of par. In such an event, the exercise of extant CDS contracts could theoretically consume all of the capital in the global banking system, several times over. How is this good public policy? Indeed, viewed from an actuarial perspective, the world of CDS makes no sense at all”. -
“In an article last month, one of us (Sachs, FT, March 23) described the systematic overbidding entailed by the proposal. Others have since made similar calculations, including Joseph Stiglitz (NYT, April 1) and Peyton Young (FT, April 1). The situation is even worse that it looks, however, since the GASP can be gamed by the banks that own the toxic assets to boost the purchase prices for their bad assets even higher than has been suggested to date”. -
The Obama Administration insists it wants to "partner" with private investors for its new toxic-asset purchase plan. But the more details that emerge, the more it seems Treasury wants to work with only a select few companies. This is no way to conduct a bank clean-up.
The investment community was already suspicious last week when Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled his plan, announcing that Treasury would select four or five companies as "fund managers" to purchase toxic securities. […] We have no idea if Treasury is playing favorites, but it certainly doesn't look good. All the more so given that some of these big players may have consulted informally with the Obama Administration as it was writing the plan. […] There is also the worry that Treasury is creating a new set of problems by concentrating these sold-off toxic securities into funds run by few entities. If this program is a roaring success, Treasury is guaranteeing that a select group of hand-picked firms are set to reap enormous profits, via a program that was largely underwritten by taxpayers
“As Paulson explained on Monday: “Government owning a stake in any private U.S. company is objectionable to most Americans – me included.” So the government’s shares are not even real stock, but a special “non-voting” issue. The public stock investment will not even have voting power! So the government gets the worst of both worlds: Its “preferred stock” issue lacks the voting power that common stock has, while also lacking the standing for repayment in case of bankruptcy that bondholders enjoy. Instead of leading to more public oversight and regulation, the crisis thus has the opposite effect here: a capitulation to Wall Street, along lines that pave the ground for a much deeper debt crisis to come as the banks “earn their way out of debt” at the expense of the rest of the economy, which is receiving no debt relief!”. -
[…] It’s easy to show that a risk-neutral and arms-length Public Private Investment Fund (PPIF) will bid $636m, financed with an Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation loan of $545m, Treasury equity of $45m and private equity of $45m. (The expected profit to the private investor is one-half of 20 per cent of $1bn minus $545m, or $45m. The private investor therefore has a net expected profit of zero.) The PPIF overpays by $276m, which equals the expected loss to the Treasury. The ultimate beneficiaries are Citibank’s shareholders and bondholders, whose net worth rises by $276m at the taxpayers’ expense. [Where all in all] The real icing on the cake is that Citibank still ends up owning the toxic assets even after the assets are “auctioned,” but this time in an off-balance-sheet structured investment vehicle called the CPPIF. The toxic assets revert to the FDIC when the CPPIF goes bankrupt”. -
Prof. Michael Hudson (Dec 2008), "A Tax Program for U.S. Economic Recovery": “[B]efore Paulson intervened to stop market forces from writing down loan values. Junk mortgages and CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) were selling for 22 cents on the dollar at the time Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. The government could have stood aside and let the market settle at this level. If it had let the market price of these mortgages and CDOs fall, their new buyers would have been in a position where they wouldn’t lose if the mortgage debts owed by homeowners were written down proportionally. This would have brought debts in line with the realistic ability to pay. So the free market actually was solving the problem until Bush and Paulson – with the support of both presidential candidates – came in and said, “No, we’ve got to bail out the creditors so they don’t take a loss.” Instead of letting their big campaign contributors take a realistic loss and then writing down the debts, the Democrats overruled Republican opposition and bailed out the creditors, taking some $7.7 trillion of government guarantees and new “cash for trash” transactions onto the Treasury’s and Federal Reserve’s books, as the recent Bloomberg report has documented.
These bad loans have been added onto the government’s balance sheet, but the underlying debts themselves have not been written down. They still can’t be paid. This leaves the government in the position of having to either go out, foreclose and empty out the houses, or absorb the bad-loan loss, making “fictitious debt claims” real as far as the irresponsible lenders and investors are concerned. Either way, it is a giveaway to save creditors from taking losses on what in many cases were outright fraudulent junk loans packaged into junk CDOs by fraudulent Wall Street firms and guaranteed by A.I.G. and investment banks using junk-mathematics models.
[…] It also doesn’t address the problem of bank losses on derivatives and the losing side of hedge trades – “casino finance capitalism” over and above the real estate bubble. […] But the two sectors [Wall Street, Insurance and Real Estate Economy v/s the Real Economy] are decoupled, as I’ve been arguing. I think it’s crazy to plunge economic reality into debt deflation to bail out creditors as if their fictitious computerized balance sheets reflected some underlying economic reality, if only we can wait long enough and let the economy grow by enough to carry the debt overhead with which it’s been loaded down. The debt overhead is what is shrinking the economy. That was the problem that the 1930s dealt with, and which most crashes solved by wiping out “bad savings” along with bad debts to create a kind of clean slate. That’s not happening today”. -
: “A generation ago, for instance, Hyman Minsky gained a following by describing what he aptly called the Ponzi stage of the business cycle. It was the phase in which debtors no longer were able to pay off their loans out of current income (as in Stage #1, where they earned enough to cover their interest and amortization charges), and indeed did not even earn enough to pay the interest charges (as in Stage #2), but had to borrow the money to pay the interest owed to their bankers and other creditors. In this Stage #3 the interest was simply added onto the debt, growing at a compound rate. It ends in a crash.
[…]
By increasing America’s national debt from $5 trillion earlier this year to $13 trillion in almost a single swoop by taking on junk loans and other bad investments rather than letting them to under as traditionally has occurred in the “cleansing” culmination of business crashes (“cleansing” in the sense of clean slates for debts that cannot reasonably be paid), Paulson’s bailout actions increase the interest payments that the government must pay out of taxes or by borrowing (ore printing) yet more money. Someone must pay for bad debts and junk loans that are not wiped off the books. The government is now to take on the roll of debt collector to “make a profit for taxpayers” by going around and kneecapping the economy – which of course is comprised primarily of the “taxpayers” ostensibly being helped.
It is a con game. Financial gains have soared since 1980, but banks and institutional investors have not used them to finance tangible capital formation. They simply have recycled their receipt of interest (and credit-card fees and penalties that often amount to as much as interest) into yet new loans, extracting yet more interest and so on. This financial extraction leaves less personal and business income to spend on consumer goods, capital goods and services. Sales shrink, causing defaults as the economy is less able to pay its stipulated interest charges”. -
“Potential Impact on Banks and Insurers. Plan could lead to considerable write-downs of assets particularly for those banks and financial institutions who have been conservative in their write-downs in case the securities price determined is considerably less than current valuations. This is most likely where Geithner is planning to plug in the stress testing and the forced capital injection program from the TARP. I believe that many of the insurers, asset managers and regional banks covered in BoomBustBlog have a ways to go in writing down their assets
Impact on Lending.
The program's aim to ensure that banks kick start lending is most likely overly optimistic. The program's core premise that the banks are reluctant to lend due to a overhang of legacy assets is based on a false assumption. The many reasons banks are unwilling to lend - not withstanding a dearth of capital - include fast deteriorating economic conditions, poor credit quality of borrowers, increased risk aversion, and the tumbling prices of underlying assets.
Impact on Liquidity. […] Even with the government program maxed out to the fullest, we are still touching only 50% of the asset pool, as the underlyings to these assets are still in rapid descent that will probably not cease for some time
Possible loopholes.
The plan specifically provides for the exclusion of SIVs (off balance sheet Structured Investment Vehicles of banks) from investing in the bank's legacy assets through PPIP by excluding affiliates of banks participating in distressed assets .So technically a bank cannot set up an SIV with a more than 10% stake and overbid for those assets.
However there is no such mechanism as such to prevent private investors to engage in collusion and overbid for securities, risking tax payers' money since both the parties stand to gain in such an event (out of this three party affair).
The Implied 14x Leverage Effect.
There are 2 parts of the plan - the Legacy Loan Program and the Legacy Securities Program.
The Legacy Loan Program would purchase legacy loans through the Fed Guaranty (limited to leverage of 6:1) and the balance would be contributed equally between Treasury and Private Investor.
As a result under the assumption of maximum leverage (6:1 D/E) the effective Debt/Equity for the participant is 13:1, or leverage of 14.0x [!!!]”. -
Alternatives of Financially-Efficient and Socially-Ethic Solutions to Bank Insolvency and Funding.
1) For The CDS’s (Credit Default Swaps) Market. From IRA (Jan 21 2009), "To Stabilize Global Banks, First Tame Credit Default Swaps": “So what is the solution? So us, the Fed and Treasury must immediately force the CDS market onto exchanges and go back to the pre-Delphi bankruptcy model to require physical delivery of the underlying bonds in order for purchasers of protection to collect their insurance payments. The Fed should also reinstate higher margin requirement for all securities and include CDS in a newly reformed margin regime. On single name CDS, the margin requirements for sellers of protection should approximate roughly 50% of the amount of the net exposure, roughly half the estimated recovery value less par. By imposing this Draconian requirement, the doubts as to funding of CDS and the related market fear, will disappear. Admittedly, these changes will have the effect of driving most or all of the speculative players out of the CDS market and make it a hedge-only market, but frankly there are many more liquid alternatives for traders, including exchange traded futures and options, to use to support volatility strategies, including short-sales of bank stocks. Allowing cash settlement CDS contracts to continue to exist and trade in their current form seems to be contrary to all of the efforts currently underway to stabilize the global financial system”. -
2) For the Household Taxpayers and their Employment Stimulus. From CommonDreams (Mar 18 2009),
“Addressing the Meltdown at the Household Level, Without Adding Debt.
The corresponding policy regarding households should be to directly engage the problem of negative equity by acknowledging the disparity between the real value of the house and the size of the mortgage. This means writing down the mortgages to correspond to the real value of the house and the ability of the homeowner to pay. These mortgages would then be purchased by government at their depreciated market value and returned to the homeowner when the house is paid for.
This would be far cheaper than the astronomical cost of the current succession of bailouts.
And this plan has a real-world precedent, the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation (HLC), created by FDR as a government credit agency for homeowners hit by the Great Depression. The HLC did exactly what is described in the preceding paragraph, with great success. Roosevelt conceived the HLC as a workable alternative to Herbert Hoover’s failed Reconstruction Finance Company, which, like the Bush-Obama bailout, stuffed the banks’ coffers with public money. Less than three years later, almost all the recipient banks had gone under.
After Nationalization: A Stimulus Program Based on Historical Precedent Addressing the housing crisis is not enough. It needs to be coupled with a stimulus plan directly aimed at providing employment to working people seeking a living wage in a de-industrialized economy with an employment problem that has been mounting since the late 1960s. Since then the unemployment rate has displayed a gradual but steady upward trend.
An effective stimulus would provide funding directly to working people for education, small business starts and, as noted, housing purchases and starts. There is much to learn from the most extensive social program in American history, the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, the “G.I. Bill.” In 1947 40 percent of housing starts were funded by the G.I. Bill’s loan guarantee. The Bill’s fruits were ongoing: between 1945 and 1956 16 million veterans used the Bill’s funding to put themselves through college and trade schools, and for on job training in factories and on farms.
This social program was running when the deficit was four times its 1997 size, exceeding the GDP by 125 percent.
A 1988 U.S. Senate study reviewed the G.I. Bill and estimated that it had provided the greatest return on investment, in both the private and public sectors, in the country’s history”. -
3) For the ‘Banksters’ Corporation-Cartel. Two great and out-of-the-box thinkers of our time give their views on Press TV, Fine Print. Rodney Shakespeare is a UK tutor, binary economist and Visiting Professor at Trisakti University, Jakarta, Indonesia.
He is a
Cambridge MA and qualified UK Barrister of the Middle Temple. Rodney Shakespeare has presented major papers at Islamic conferences regarding the connection between the money supply and the real economy. Rodney Shakespeare is not a Muslim. However, he believes that because Islam is opposed to riba (interest), it can, and must, find a new, distinctive way forward to give an intellectual, material and moral lead to the rest of the world. Rodney Shakespeare represents the Christian Council for Monetary Justice and the London Global Table.
Max Keiser is a TV presenter, radio host, entrepeneur, broadcaster and journalist.
Nodding to anger among ordinary Americans over multi-billion dollar bailouts for rich bankers, Hoenig said some of these firms were simply too complicated, and too well-connected in Washington, for the good of the country.
"These "too big to fail" institutions are not only too big, they are too complex and too politically influential to supervise on a sustained basis without a clear set of rules constraining their actions. When the recession ends, old habits will reemerge," he said. […]
U.S. anti-trust rules should be used to break up the biggest banks to safeguard the economy, said Johnson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He added the costs of the financial crisis already dwarf the damage done by industrial monopolies in the last century.
"The use of anti-trust (laws) to break up the largest banks will be essential," he said. "This is a very serious, imminent danger that needs to be addressed."
Stiglitz made a similar point, arguing that the American people had not received anything like sufficient benefits from allowing such large financial firms to grow, versus with the costs of the crisis.
"They should be broken up unless a compelling case can be made not to that," Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor, told the committee”. -
"Over time, we should consider more fundamental reforms, including the idea of establishing Limited Purpose Banking, in which the liquidity services provided by banks are undertaken by institutions with 100 per cent reserve requirements, and which, therefore, are immune from runs, panics, and reckless gambles. It would be absurd and self-defeating to bear the enormous social costs of the current financial crisis only to return to the same kind of flawed banking institutions that got us into this mess", said Laurence J Kotlikoff and Jeffrey Sachs.
Republican Congressional Leader Boehner made some very good suggestions. He suggested instead of the bailout the government use the money to set up a bank insurance fund of say anywhere from $250 billion to the $700 billion that was mentioned.
The insurance fund would lend money to banks in exchange for their preferred stock. This fund would be financed by levying an insurance charge on the entire US banking system, just like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation levies insurance rates on the banks. And the rates that would be levied, under the Republication proposal, would have reflected the actual risks involved. So that if the banks got together and lobbied politicians and supported the political campaigns of politicians who wanted to deregulate the industry that’s’ fair enough but let them pay the risks. Let them pay 1% or 2% or even 3% of their deposits for this because that’s what it would take the government to bail out policies that Alan Greenspan and others have supported.
[…]
The government would have set up a fund and the fund’s money would have been provided to banks on the term that Warren Buffet earlier that week had made--a $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs. It would have leant money to banks on the condition that number one, it wipes out the stockholders--if any bank would have borrowed from the insurance fund that meant it was doing so as a life or death matter and either it would have sacrificed its common stock or it would have made its common stock subordinate to repaying the government for the risk. The government would have charged a high rate of interest and a high fee for making the insurance payment (as any insurance company would have done).
And instead of printing new treasury bonds to give away in exchange for these bad mortgages it would have established simply a line of credit which at first would have been the same thing but the credit would have been repaid not only by the banks that borrowed but by all the banks in the country paying insurance—essentially bank insurance. Instead of being an insurance fund for depositors like the FDIC is, it would have been an insurance fund for the bank owners themselves. The banks have been acting almost as a financial gang in pressing not only to support the Federal Reserve chairman who is a deregulator (and the Federal Reserve is supposed to essentially represent the interests of the commercial banking system), but the banks also now have supplied the Treasury Secretary and the Treasury Secretary is not supposed to represent the banks.
The Treasury Secretary is supposed to represent the public interests. And instead, Mr. Paulson is representing the banking interests, Wall Street, not the public interest and so there is an inherent conflict of interest and the system of checks and balances that are supposed to prevent a giveaway like this have been broken
”. -
Prof. Amar Bhide at the Columbia University Forum, 'Capitalism and Society', explains a very assertive view where commercial banks should drop the fundamentals of mathematical models where probabilities manage risk features under statistical behaviours that collapse in certain circumstances and events. This, according to Bhide is entitled only to particular institutions as investment banks and hedge funds where the business model can handle this risks not compromising commercial creditors (public's deposits).
Further, Bhide proposes to separate commercial banks from hedge funds and investment banks, where investment banks and hedge funds would not get any credit, neither counterparty risk holdings, with the banking system. They wouldn’t be entitled to bailouts neither…and of course.
“Dutch economics professor, Dirk Bezemer, wrote: […] ‘The actual solution is to separate the Ponzi from the non-Ponzi economy and let the pain be suffered in the first part so as to salvage what we can from the second. This means bailing out homeowners but not investment banks, etc. The qualification to this general approach is that those Ponzi game players whose demise is a real ‘system threat’ need support, but only with punitive conditionalities attached. And just like Third World countries, they won’t have a choice’”. -
“There are countless preferable and more transparent courses of action. The toxic assets could be sold at market prices, not inflated prices, making the bank shareholders bear the costs of the losses of the toxic assets. If the banks then need more capital, the government could invest directly into bank shares. This would bail out the banking system without bailing out the bank shareholders. The process would be much fairer, less costly, and more transparent to the taxpayer.
Banks that are already insolvent should be intervened directly by the FDIC, that is, temporarily taken into receivership. The shareholder value would be wiped out, except perhaps for some residual claims in the event that the toxic assets vastly outperform their current market expectations. As I've written before, the allocation of bank shares between the taxpayers and the current bank shareholders could be make contingent on the eventual value of the toxic assets ("A Proposal on How to Clean Up the Banks"), ensuring fairness between the shareholders and the taxpayers”. -
[I strongly recommend to read the former article from Sachs].
Even the US Government’s Congressional Oversight Panel (Apr 7 2009),
Option A: Liquidation: Receivership and Breakup or Sale of Distressed Banks. Rather than subsidizing large distressed banks as going concerns through government investment under the TARP, critically undercapitalized banks could be selected for effective liquidation by being placed into the receivership of the FDIC. Then the FDIC would help resolve the failure, as it has done more than a dozen times already this year.
Option B: Receivership. As an alternative to a windup, the government could place a distressed bank into conservatorship. As conservator, the FDIC would try to restore the bank’s safe and sound condition (leaving insured and hopefully other deposit holders in place) and carry on the bank’s business in the meantime. This approach is similar to the steps that were taken in countries with crises in relatively concentrated banking sectors in the recent past, including the United Kingdom currently. It is The preservation of the interests of existing shareholders is not a constraint on the FDIC’s exercise of its authority.
Option C: Subsidization of Distressed Banks. A third option is that, as the crisis spreads and financial institutions are at risk of becoming insolvent, the government can provide financial resources to keep those institutions afloat (which some may view as “subsidization”).
Government financial support may be in the form of a loan, a guarantee, or a direct infusion of capital, all of which are among the tools available to Treasury as part of its authority under the TARP. In addition, asset purchases from banks arranged with government involvement and guarantees can be vehicles for government subsidies. In each case, this assistance means transferring value from the taxpayer to the financial institution. Such transfer may be temporary (i.e., when the subsidy must be repaid) or permanent. Subsidization might be provided to all banks that request it or just the banks that threaten systemic risk. The amounts and kinds of subsidization are open-ended.
“All successful efforts to address bank crises have involved the combination of moving aside failed management and getting control of the process of valuing bank balance sheets. There are two models for the independent balance sheet valuation: mark to market (Sweden, RTC), and independent administrative pricing overseen by new management (RFC, ultimately Japan). Reorganization and subsidization without effective assessment of asset values does not work, as it can easily lead to the perpetuation of banks in a weakened condition or to significant government subsidies to private parties. The prospect of conservatorships at large U.S. banks raises issues of government capacity to manage such processes at one or more systemically significant financial institutions.
Taxpayer Exposure and Exit Strategy.
Subsidization, liquidation, and reorganization all require upfront outlays by the government, and the greater the desire to protect one or another class of otherwise uninsured investors, the greater that initial outlay will be.
Under any of the three strategies, the cost to the taxpayer depends not only on which classes of capital policymakers want to support, but also on precisely how insolvent the applicable institutions may be. In the case of liquidation or reorganization, the cost to the taxpayer is minimal where assets are adequate to cover deposits and, as necessary, guaranteed debt. The total cost of each of these strategies also depends on their effectiveness at thawing credit markets and restoring economic growth. An ineffective strategy is likely to prolong the crisis and require further investment of taxpayer funds.
a) With regard to subsidization, capital infusions generally come to mean equity (or “common stock”) investments that increase the cost to the taxpayer if banks fail or produce gains if the market recovers. Of course, that assumes that the government is focused on capturing upside opportunities through equity ownership. In the case of the transactions with shaky financial firms under TARP to date, with the exception of AIG, Treasury has taken only small amounts of equity upside in relation to the large risks Treasury has assumed through its preferred stock investments and asset guarantees.
b) In the case of asset purchases, the bad assets could fail to increase in value, leaving the taxpayers with similar, if not larger, losses. On the other hand, a very successful government asset purchase program would provide the government with 100 percent of the upside in those assets. These assets could gain in value as the market turns around, producing gains to the government upon ultimate disposition. While Swedish authorities were aided by the rapid recovery of the economy both nationally and globally as they sought to dispose assets, such economic recovery is uncertain today, as it was uncertain ex ante in Sweden.
c) [W]ith regard to liquidation and reorganization, the disposal of assets in the current environment may require steep discounts and thus greater taxpayer cost, depending on whether the government, as opposed to the FDIC, is guaranteeing any particular class of investors in the firm. […]
Liquidation is less likely to be open-ended and stretch over years, as subsidization did in Japan. Thus, while liquidation can offer a clear exit strategy
FDIC’s experience […] suggests that reorganization may not offer quite such a clear ending if the government is committed both to minimizing the expenditure of government funds and to making all creditors whole. Unable to find an acquirer, unwilling to pay bondholders less than the value of the bond, and either unwilling or unable to infuse sufficient capital to bring [the bank] back to life, the government [would be] forced to own and operate the bank for a prolonged period, retaining an equity stake in that institution for [several] years.
Finally, liquidation raises concerns related to enterprise value. Liquidation typically breaks up the firm. In some cases, that could involve significant destruction of going concern value. A large multinational institution’s franchise value created by the web of consumer, corporate, and international banking relationships may be lost as a result of government seizure and reorganization, a cost that is not imposed on the economy under open bank assistance. But liquidation forms are not so limited. Liquidation can mean a sale of the whole entity to a buyer capable of absorbing and benefiting from the business as a whole. Going concern sales occur with some frequency outside the banking world, even among very complex institutions.
[All in all], enterprise value might be more easily preserved in a conservatorship. By restructuring their balance sheets, writing down liabilities, and eliminating old equity, such firms might continue in operation and attract significant new capital. It may be true that some firms are systemically significant, but that does not mean every slice of their capital structure is systemically significant. In fact, it may be that a restructuring represents the best way to bring the franchise value back to full life.
While the total cost of the various options is open to doubt, liquidation provides clarity relatively quickly. In that sense, allowing institutions to fail in a structured manner supervised by appropriate regulators offers a clearer exit strategy than allowing those institutions to drift into government control piecemeal”. -
The `too-big-to-fail` doctrine has failed," concludes Weiss [in his white paper research, "Dangerous Unintended Consequences"]. In its place, he recommends the following steps to build a firmer foundation for a future recovery:
* Abandon the unrealistic goal of saving all failing financial institutions, focusing instead on the goal of rebuilding the economy’s foundation in preparation for an eventual recovery. * Pro-actively downsize or shut down the weakest institutions no matter how large they may be; provide opportunities for borderline institutions to rehabilitate themselves under a strict regulatory regime; and give well-capitalized, liquid and prudently-managed institutions better opportunities to gain market share. * Seriously consider breaking up the weak megabanks, following the model of the Ma Bell breakup in 1984. * Build confidence in the banking system with better disclosure and transparency, including the public release of the confidential official ratings on all banks called CAMELS (Capital adequacy, Asset quality, Management, Earnings, Liquidity and Sensitivity to market risk). * Switch priorities from the battles we can`t win to the war we can’t afford to lose, such as emergency assistance for the millions most severely victimized by a depression.
Due to the nation’s solid infrastructure and knowledge base, Weiss is optimistic
the U.S. can survive a broader banking crisis and even a second great
depression, with good prospects for an eventual recovery, provided we make the
right choices”.
-
Related Banking Collapse Articles at The Contingency Monitor.
THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS ARTICLE...ALTHOUGH, I CONSIDER IT WORTHY AS OF NOW (AND PART OF MY DUTY) TO SHARE IT PROMPTLY WITH ALL MY READERS WORLD WIDE.
SHOULD YOU ALL TAKE A TIMELY SHELTER RIGHT NOW, FROM THE NAIVETY OF SHOOTING THE STOCK MARKETS TIMELY AND BECOMING YOUNG MILLIONAIRES. TAKE CARE AND PROTECT YOUR WEALTH. JD.
“Companies use advertising to induce consumers to want things they never dreamed they needed, easy credit leads to financial catastrophe”. J.K. Galbraith. (Iconoclastic economist, diplomat and adviser to Democrat leaders from John F. Kennedy on). Certainly…the illusion of bailing out real economy by covering the zombie value of toxic assets engineered by the super-rich financial cartels, entrench a chain of socialization of income transfers from tax payers money, among “banksters”, insurance companies, mortgage institutions, private equity firms and the wealthiest super rich investors in the whole world…’Globalization’ was never a good idea.
~~~
(1) WHAT IS LIKE A MODERN FINANCIAL-ECONOMIC DEPRESSION? It is a sequence of distress-selling, falling asset prices, rising real interest rates, more distress-selling, falling [monetary] velocity, declining net worth, rising bankruptcies, bank runs, curtailment of credit, dumping of assets by banks, growing distrust and hoarding.
The Economist (Dec 30 2008), "Diagnosing Depression": “Distinguishing a depression from a recession: a decline in real GDP that exceeds 10%, or one that lasts more than three years. America’s Great Depression qualifies on both counts, with GDP falling by around 30% between 1929 and 1933. Output also fell by 13% during 1937 and 1938. The Great Depression was America’s deepest economic slump (excluding those related to wars), but at 43 months it was not the longest: that dubious honor goes to the one in 1873-79, which lasted 65 months.
[…] But a recent analysis by Saul Eslake, chief economist at ANZ bank, concludes that the difference between a recession and a depression is more than simply one of size or duration. The cause of the downturn also matters. A standard recession usually follows a period of tight monetary policy, but a depression is the result of a bursting asset and credit bubble, a contraction in credit, and a decline in the general price level. In the Great Depression average prices in America fell by one-quarter, and nominal GDP ended up shrinking by almost half. America’s worst recessions before the second world war were all associated with financial panics and falling prices: in both 1893-94 and 1907-08 real GDP declined by almost 10%; in 1919-21, it fell by 13%.
The economic slumps that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and those during the Asian crisis were not really depressions, argues Mr. Eslake, because inflation increased sharply. On the other hand, Japan’s experience in the late 1990s, when nominal GDP shrank for several years, may qualify. A depression, suggests Mr. Eslake, does not have to be “Great” in the 1930s sense. On his definition, depressions, like recessions, can be mild or severe”.
- A more categorized definition is given by Peter Morici, a former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission and
Professor of the University of Maryland, also one of the best forecasters in the business.
Morici, has become one of the first senior economists to admit that the U.S. is facing a 1930’s style depression.
Holding an interesting definition of the difference between recession and depression:
“Recessions, he maintains, are self-correcting, "like stock market corrections that eventually rebound without government intervention. Federal Reserve interest rate cuts and stimulus tax rebates and spending have shortened the lives and eased the impact of post-World War II recessions, but those policies did not end them. The economy self-corrected."
By contrast, he argues, "A depression is not self-correcting. Roosevelt administration stimulus packages -- huge deficit spending -- eased the pain but failed to end the Great Depression. Similarly, President-elect Obama's massive stimulus package, alone, won't fix the U.S. economy […] Morici identifies three structural problems of the current crisis that are not self-correcting and will require robust government intervention. The first is bad management practices at the large money center banks. The second is the huge foreign trade deficit, and the third is part of the second: the dependence on imported energy". – UPI (Jan 12 2009), "Walker's World: Depression looms".
“Former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, said the term refers to a significant contraction that lasts around five years. Under that definition, he said, Japan during the 1990s could have been classified as having been trapped in a depression”.- Finally, often, Depressions are marked by balance sheet compression and deleveraging: debt elimination, asset liquidation inside a deflationary pricing environment, and rising (relative) savings rates. -
• "Recessions in the advanced economies over the past two decades have become less frequent and milder, whereas expansions have become longer, reflecting in part the “Great Moderation” of advanced economies’ business cycles.
• Recessions associated with financial crises have been more severe and longer lasting than recessions associated with other shocks. Recoveries from such recessions have been typically slower, associated with weak domestic demand and tight credit conditions.
• Recessions that are highly synchronized across countries have been longer and deeper than those confined to one region. Recoveries from these recessions have typically been weak, with exports playing a much more limited role than in less synchronized recessions.
The implications of these findings for the current situation are sobering. The current downturn is highly synchronized and is associated with a deep financial crisis, a rare combination in the postwar period. Accordingly, the downturn is likely to be unusually severe, and the recovery is expected to be sluggish. It is not surprising, therefore, that many commentators looking for historical parallels for the current episode focus on the Great Depression of the 1930s, by far the deepest and longest recession in the history of most advanced economies. […] Finally, the current recessions are also highly synchronized, further dampening prospects for a normal recovery. In particular, the rapid drop in consumption in the United States represents a large decline in external demand for many other economies”. -
IMF Survey Magazine (Apr 16 2009), "Global Recession to Be Long, Deep with Slow Recovery": "Some recessions, however, are severe, with peak-to-trough declines in output exceeding 10 percent. These episodes are often called depressions. Since 1960, there have been six depression episodes in the advanced economies; the latest was observed in Finland in the early 1990s". -
“Among other factors, Morici noted 2.6 million payroll jobs have been lost since December 2007, the dollar is falling value and the nation has a big trade deficit with China.
"The economy contracted at about a 5 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter. This looks worse than a recession
to me," he said.
[…]
"The economy will not recover without fundamental changes in banking and trade policy. A large stimulus package, though necessary, will only give the economy a temporary lift, but then unemployment will rise again and continue at unacceptable levels indefinitely without successively larger stimulus packages and huge federal budget deficits. The economy is in a depression, not a recession” he said. -
"A 20% hole driven into the household balance sheet. We estimate that the cumulative loss of household net worth as of the end of 2008 was $13 trillion. In other words, a 20% hole has been driven into the household balance sheet, which has not happened since the 1930s. So far, the loss of wealth in the household sector has been half as much in the Great Depression, but if we are anywhere near the ballpark on our 660 call on the S&P 500 and a further 15% downside to home prices, then by the end of 2009 the total hit to net worth will approximate $20 trillion, or 40% from the 2007 peak, which indeed would rival the severe hit to household balance sheet incurred in the 1930s.
[…] Global rebalancing to occur during a deep global recession. So as we gaze into the future, we see the US consumer spending/GDP share going from 70% back down to its long-run norm of 64%; and we look for the 13% share of GDP that is made up of exports, to move in the opposite direction and pick up the slack (unfortunately, so will government spending)". -
: “Many, including the IMF, expect total global credit losses to approach $4,000bn as the economic slowdown means that more traditional forms of lending become toxic. Assuming banks account for three quarters of losses, and they have already torched $915bn, according to Bloomberg, that equates to 14-odd years of revenues (other things, such as capital ratios, being equal)”. -
In the context of world economy and in a ‘graphical comparison’ to the Great Depression, in VOX (Apr 6 2009),
, we read that “Often cited comparisons – which look only at the US – find that today’s crisis is milder than the Great Depression. […]
To sum up, globally we are tracking or doing even worse than the Great Depression, whether the metric is industrial production, exports or equity valuations. Focusing on the US causes one to minimize this alarming fact. The “Great Recession” label may turn out to be too optimistic. This is a Depression-sized event.
That said, we are only one year into the current crisis, whereas after 1929 the world economy continued to shrink for three successive years. What matters now is that policy makers arrest the decline. We therefore turn to the policy response
“International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said the world's advanced economies -- the U.S., Western Europe and Japan -- are "already in depression," and that the IMF could slash its global growth forecasts further. The "worst cannot be ruled out," he said”. -
“Consumers are being hit by a triple whammy: rising unemployment, which could rise from 7% to 10% of the workforce by the end of the year; restricted access to credit; and falling asset values.
The fall in stock markets and house prices has reduced household wealth by 20%, from the middle of 2007. This alone has reduced consumption by around 1%, some economists estimate.
It may make sense for consumers to save instead of spend, but in an economy as reliant on consumer spending as the US, this does add to recessionary pressures […] There is now $2.2 trillion of toxic bank debt worldwide, the IMF says, $500bn more than it estimated a few months ago”. -
(2) AMERICA’S FISCAL/NATIONAL DEFICIT. BANKRUPTCY EITHER ONE WAY OR ANOTHER FxStreet (Mar 10 2009), "Depression Investing – Which Currencies to Hide in?": "The world’s a mess and in our eyes policy makers are inadvertently doing their best to worsen a bad situation. Let’s assume you’ve had it and want to hide somewhere safe to ride out the storm. Unfortunately there appears to be no such thing as a safe asset anymore. Therefore you may want to consider taking a diversified approach to something as mundane as cash. Sure, U.S. Treasury Bills are the one “safe” asset – at least by regulation. But will Treasury Bills retain their purchasing power as the U.S. government raises almost $3 trillion in the debt markets this year? As the debt to be raised is going to be in the range of 12% - 15% of GDP (some estimates the Treasury Department take seriously go as high as 18% of GDP), increased U.S. savings simply won’t be enough to fund the shortfall. [...] The Federal Reserve could print the money and buy up Treasury Bonds. This may keep the cost of borrowing low, but likely weaken the U.S. dollar substantially. In our view, this is the Fed’s preferred scenario; in his testimony to Congress, Fed Chairman Bernanke reiterated his view that the most important steps to get out of the Great Depression were guarantees on bank deposits and the devaluation of the dollar. The banking system has been guaranteed this time around, but the dollar has not yet devalued. [...] While we believe that inflation will ultimately haunt the U.S., we are presently in a phase of inefficient government policy with the threat of deflation outweighing the threat of inflation. Moreover, we are in a period where a depression, if not a long and drawn-out recession, is a very realistic probability". -
David Walker, controller general of the U.S., totaled up our government's income, liabilities and future obligations. He concluded the numbers don’t add up. He has been busy telling this to the american general public since Sept 2005 in the Fiscal Wake-up Tour.
"What’s going on right now is we’re spending more money than we make…we’re charging it to credit card…and expecting our grandchildren to pay for it. And that’s absolutely outrageous," he told the editorial board of the Seattle Post Intelligencer. […] To illustrate their impact, he uses a power point presentation, [US Government Accountability Office (Jan 14 2008), “Saving Our Future Requires Tough Choices Today”] to show what would happen in 30 years if the U.S. maintains its current course and fulfills all of the promises politicians have made to the public on things like Social Security and Medicare.
What would happen in 2040 if nothing changes? "If nothing changes, the federal government's not gonna be able to do much more than pay interest on the mounting debt and some entitlement benefits. It won't have money left for anything else – national defense, homeland security, education, you name it," Walker warns.
So where's that money going to come from? "Well it's gonna come from additional taxes, or it's gonna come from restructuring these promises, or it's gonna come from cutting other spending," Walker says. […] We're gonna have to dramatically and fundamentally reform our health care system in installments over the next 20 years,"
And if we don't? "And if we don't, it could bankrupt America," Walker argues”. -
From US Government Accountability Office (Jan 23 2007),
: “Long-term fiscal simulations by GAO, CBO, and others all show that we face large and growing structural deficits driven primarily by rising health care costs and known demographic trends. […]
despite improvement in both the fiscal year 2006 reported net operating cost and the cash-based budget deficit, the U.S. government’s major reported liabilities, social insurance commitments, and other fiscal exposures continue to grow. They now total approximately $50 trillion—about four times the nation’s total output (GDP) in fiscal year 2006—up from about $20 trillion, or two times GDP in fiscal year 2000.
Clearly, despite recent progress on our short-term deficits, we have been moving in the wrong direction in connection with our long-range imbalance in recent years. Our long-range imbalance is growing daily due to continuing deficits, known demographic trends, rising health care costs, and compounding interest expense.
[...] There is no easy way out of the challenge we face. Economic growth is essential, but we will not be able to simply grow our way out of the problem. The numbers speak loudly: our projected fiscal gap is simply too great. To “grow our way out” of the current long-term fiscal gap would require sustained economic growth far beyond that experienced in U.S. economic history since World War II.
[...] The American people know—or sense—that there is something wrong; that these deficits are a problem. If they understand that there truly is no magic bullet—if they understand that: • we cannot grow our way out of this problem; • eliminating earmarks will not solve the problem; • wiping out fraud, waste, and abuse will not solve the problem; • ending the war or cutting way back on defense will not solve the problem; • restraining discretionary spending will not solve the problem; and • letting the recent tax cuts expire will not solve this problem;
then the American people can engage with you in a discussion about what government should do and how”. -
“According to Stephen Roach, the head economist of Morgan Stanley, US deficits are growing so large that by the end of the year America’s indebtedness to other countries will reach 28% of GDP. That would bring the US indebtedness to a level of 300% of exports. Argentina and Brazil were at 400% right before they collapsed in the 1990’s…”. – Tyche Group, November 2004.
Since the trillion dollars TARP programs goes directly also to the business counterparties of zombie (overvalued) contracts across US, UK and the Eurozone we will see stressed demand/subscription from financial actors over treasury bonds (also government bonds and short term fixed income assets) as they all work positions into the last safest asset class.
However, anytime the serviceable national debt has not been financed but instead nationalized with debt monetization (more debt and zero interest rate policy –aka. quantitative easing- which locks a disequilibrium in inflation), then the velocity of monetary supply will continue to increase breaking up previous price equilibriums though inflation. “The Treasury and Federal Reserve are also providing some relief by providing liquidity to parts of the financial market. Unfortunately, only Treasuries and high grade paper are being bought, but it is still providing some relief”. – Said Wachovia Monthly Outlook (Mar 11 2009), "U.S. Outlook".
Needless to say those bonds are over exposed to intense fiscal-deficit countries (some even coupled through stressful current account trade deficits) that hence incorporate in full the systemic and class-asset default risk of the underwriter government that is at the brink near bankrupt, which by logic, is further reflected overtime in their sovereign credit ratings as a composite of translating operational risks into weak fiscal accounts stability, which ultimately stresses the future fiscal tax revenues (income-energy-transactions-sales) and financings, rebalancing to a curtailed GDP, or else.
Further, it is known that any time the ratio of fiscal deficit to GDP of a country has expanded considerably, the yield of long-term Government bonds (i.e Treasuries) has had a downward trend (i.e. US and Japan). Hence, another important point to consider in the future subscription of government bonds waves in the future. All in all, in the midst of economic turmoil and with financial meltdown likelihood in the brink of becoming a reality, treasuries only will become the ultimate safety against one thing: Volatility. This comes for the first time as a paradox, since now absence of Volatility is not securing the absence of systemic risk as a base, which is the foundation of the Asset Pricing Model of our epoch. This provides the sense and baseline for a “treasury bubble” mixed with increased debt default risks from US credit institutions (being public or private). Credit ratings for US are more likely to be downsized in the coming years.
Bloomberg (Feb 19 2009) "Five Easy Pieces Plan Flies Over Cuckoo’s Nest": “As a political matter, the rule risks friction with China. With the U.S. needing trillions of dollars in new borrowing this year, “Buy America” may mean “Sell America” where China is concerned. China is the largest holder of U.S. Treasury securities, with $696.2 billion in December 2008, according to the Treasury. China’s portfolio of Treasuries stood at $477.6 billion a year earlier”.-
(3) BANKING RESCUE SCHEME, AN INCOME TRANSFER FROM TAXPAYERS TO BANKSTERS Wachovia Monthly Outlook (Mar 11 2009), "U.S. Outlook": “Even the federal government’s efforts to support the economy are somewhat suspect because they do not include as much spending for infrastructure as many would like and is a bit heavier on income transfers”. -
Analysis and Discussion with Amar Bhide of Columbia Business School. Transcript: "Treasury secretary Tim Geithner says the government will lend money to private investors to buy distressed assets from banks, as part of the treasury's latest plan to get the assets off bank's balance sheet so they can start lending again. our next guest says the strategy will not work.
Bhide: "This is a naughty plan, conceptually impractical. Let me try to make it simple, we have a big, ugly bank, Citigroup. It has a bunch of rubbish in it where the values of the rubish is less than the value of the claims on it. The claims are from stockholders, bondholders, and the largest and ultimately claims are from the depositors. The scheme propose we will somehow pump up the value of this rubbish by creating a market that pays a higher price for the assets than the current market value, and hence take things from this part and move it into six different parts.
They will lend money to people who create the small parts, not making equity investment and give them leverage 3 to 1. So we are “inventing a market” for this assets. What is this? make the rest of wall street bridge scheme, or what? your previous guest talked about increasing the gap between the rich and poor, as far as I can see, and this is a scheme to make a small number of private equity guys rich to temporarily pump up the prices of these assets.
Incerpt: ”Diversification offered CEOs the opportunity to take ever larger bets--and earn staggering personal returns without much personal risk. CEO Richard Fuld's Lehman stocks may now be worthless --but he gets to keep the $500 million he took out in previous years. James Cayne may have fallen off the Forbes 400 list, but he isn't in the poor house. Sandy Weil has laughed all the way away from Citibank, which he turned into a hodgepodge of investment banking, trading, retail brokerage, commercial banking and insurance”. Said Bhide on Forbes (Sept 24 2008), "Insiders And Outsiders".-
“Banks’ CEOs were not on top of things either. Freed of both stockholder and depositor restraints, banks (and their financial next of kin) became sprawling ‘Too Complex to Manage’ enterprises whose balance sheets and trading books were but wishful guesses. CEOs famously frolicked on golf courses and at bridge tournaments while their businesses imploded because they didn’t know any better. Moreover, turning a blind eye to reckless bets was not a bad policy for executives with limited personal downside. CEO Richard Fuld’s Lehman stock may now be worthless —but he gets to keep the $500 million he took out in previous years. Sandy Weil has laughed all the way away from Citibank, which he turned into a hodgepodge of investment banking, trading, retail brokerage, commercial banking and insurance. Hank Paulson sold $500 million of Goldman’s stock —at twice its current price, and without paying capital gains taxes —when he become treasury secretary in 2006 (On MarketWatch, Jun 30 2006, "Paulson files to sell $500 million of Goldman stock")
. —His predecessor at Goldman and Treasury, Robert Rubin, received $115 million according to the Wall Street Journal for providing direction and counsel at Citigroup while its stock lost 70 percent of its value (On
Q: Why are you convinced it will be at the price above what is determined as a market price? will they determine some kind of floor so that maybe this completely dead market can have some of the security start trading?
Bhide: If there's no market now, there's a reason for it. There is a market for these assets now. The problem is is that the market takes the assets to a price below the claims of these assets. Tuners these banks back to health, you essentially have to bump up the price of these assets. The way they're going to do that is to -- these other guys, because of the subsidies they receive, will pay higher prices.
Q: Tim Geithner preparing for the G20 finance ministers meeting in London saying that the actions are critical to restore confidence, restore market functioning, etc. Do you think that the treasury secretary, himself, has taken steps to do that?
Bhide: I think the scheme a week process is undermining confidence. If there was any likelihood of the market bottoming in these bad assets, it will take months, if not a year to get going. In the meantime, who wants to play in the game that you do not know the rules? We have the FDIC. we have a model with the way that we dispose that assets. why not stick with tried and true, rather than try to create these new mechanisms? i cannot put up my hand and say i want to buy these assets. perhaps this will create new opportunities for Tom Daschle and the likes of Rahm Emanuel, who served as intermediaries. The more uncertain the process, the longer it will take to produce results".-
The power and economic grab from the super rich oligarchs is a reality. From Bloomberg (Apr 15 2009), "Depression Lurks Unless There’s More Stimulus: Robert Shiller": “Compensation practices in the U.S. need to be made fairer. Vast earnings shouldn’t go virtually untaxed, while the middle class is paying a sizable fraction of each extra dollar in taxes. Only then will the government have the mandate to restore our banking and securities institutions to their proper strong role in our economy”. -
The income transfers from ordinary people (working folks) to the super rich (oligarchs) would take place, “with debt monetization, [where] government debt disappears and inflation takes its place. While the public moans at the Fed over high inflation; fiscal authorities -because the debt is monetized- are absolved of responsibility”, Economist’s View (Sept 29 2005), "What is Debt Monetization? When is it Automatic? Is it a Risk?".
The Atlantic (May 2009), "The Quiet Coup": “If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform”. When the crisis first began the government was slow to react and then did so with a lack of transparency, and an unwillingness to upset the financial sector. The response so far is perhaps best described as “policy by deal” in that when a major financial institution got into trouble, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve engineered a one-of bailout and then announced that everything is fine without stating what combination of interests were being served, and how. This was late-night, backroom dealing, pure and simple.
[…] With credit unavailable, economic paralysis ensues, and conditions just get worse and worse. The government is forced to draw down its foreign-currency reserves to pay for imports, service debt, and cover private losses. But these reserves will eventually run out. If the country cannot right itself before that happens, it will default on its sovereign debt and become an economic pariah. The government, in its race to stop the bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national champions—now hemorrhaging cash—and usually restructure a banking system that’s gone badly out of balance. It will, in other words, need to squeeze at least some of its oligarchs.
Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large”. -
(4) THE BOTTOM LINE, BACK TO FUNDAMENTAL VALUATION After assets bubble bursts and given the interest rate of the the long term bond markets are defined ultimately by the markets and not the federal reserves, the outcome of a future inflationary pressure will boost variable-floating-interest debt-denominated mortgages and loans, along all economies subject to quantitative easing and ZIRP (zero interest rate policy). This means that it is not a good business to finance anything, neither real state buyouts with debt in the present conditions, less today that economic recovery is becoming a ‘sleep walking’ vision into the future -a naive guess of the new potentiality of the economy- certainly not with the same resilience of the last 20 years that better coupled into potential growth and increased price trends over the financial markets asset-valuation capitulaion.
Khazin: Yes, the U.S. did create a very high standard of living by stimulating consumer demand. Generations lived without having to experience poverty. But it's impossible to live forever in debt. Household debt has now surpassed the national economy — more than $14 trillion. Now it's time to pay up. Of course, Wall Street tried to postpone this collapse. I won't go into detail about derivatives and other such financial assets, but this was just a gasp for air before an inevitable death.
Another problem in the U.S. is that powerful industries were built around this growing demand. Whatever decision Wall Street takes right now, the demand is going to fall. What will happen to these industries? In 2000, we estimated that 25 percent of the U.S. economy would disappear. Today, we think the number is closest to one-third — if not more.
KP: That's a lot!
Khazin: That's an incredible amount! But what exactly does this mean — the destruction of one-fourth of the U.S. economy? It means an uncontrollable increase in unemployment, a horrible depression, a sharp increase i
weekly broadcast to AM Live, a program of the South Africa Broadcasting Company in Johannesburg. Among the audience of this broadcast was CNN's bureau in South Africa which lost no time in relaying news of it to CNN hq in Atlanta, and I duly received an angry phone call from Eason Jordan who identified himself as CNN's president of newsgathering and international networks.
FARS News Agency (Abr 5 2008), 
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