From the blog Socialist Banner
No. 3 on the top 25 censored media stories:
3 AFRICOM US Military Control of Africa’s Resources
Source: MoonofAlabama.org 2/21/2007
Title: “Understanding AFRICOM”
Day: September 17, 2007
Sen. Mike Gravel at the DNC Unity Summit (video)
Sen. Gravel speaks to Nevada Democrats at the DNC Unity conference, primarily about the National Initiative for Democracy.
http://www.gravel2008.us
http://www.ni4d.us
Produced by Youtube User DirectingLegend:
http://www.youtube.com/directinglegend
Sally Fields: There’d Be No God Damn War In The First Place (video; censorship)
09.14.07 Uncensored News Reports From Across The Middle East (video; over 18 only)
Warning
This video contains images depicting the reality and horror of war and should only be viewed by a mature audience.
Selected Episode
Sept. 14, 2007
“Lebanese Debate Rules for Presidential Elections,” Dubai TV, UAE
“Israel Destroys Homes in the Village of Anata,” Palestine TV, Ramallah
“Hamas Cracks Down on Drug Dealers,” Al Aqsa, Gaza
“Israeli Violation of Syrian Airspace Shrouded with Mystery & Speculations,” Al Arabiya TV, UAE
“Palestinian Worshipers Prevented from Reaching Jerusalem,” Al Jazeera English, Qatar
“Iran Airs Holocaust TV Series,” IBA TV, Israel
“MIR: Who Killed the Sheikh?” Link TV, USA
Produced for Link TV by Jamal Dajani
Student Tasered For Asking Sen Kerry About Voter Suppression (video)
SEPTEMBER 17, 2007 MSNBC TUCKER
see:
Student Tasered for Armed Madhouse Question to Kerry by Greg Palast
It is the death of history by Robert Fisk
Dandelion Salad
Special investigation by Robert Fisk
ICH
09/17/07 “The Independent”
2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia to strip them of their artefacts and wealth. The near total destruction of Iraq’s historic past – the very cradle of human civilisation – has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation.
Evidence amassed by archaeologists shows that even those Iraqis who trained as archaeological workers in Saddam Hussein’s regime are now using their knowledge to join the looters in digging through the ancient cities, destroying thousands of priceless jars, bottles and other artefacts in their search for gold and other treasures.
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, armies of looters moved in on the desert cities of southern Iraq and at least 13 Iraqi museums were plundered. Today, almost every archaeological site in southern Iraq is under the control of looters.
In a long and devastating appraisal to be published in December, Lebanese archaeologist Joanne Farchakh says that armies of looters have not spared “one metre of these Sumerian capitals that have been buried under the sand for thousands of years.
“They systematically destroyed the remains of this civilisation in their tireless search for sellable artefacts: ancient cities, covering an estimated surface area of 20 square kilometres, which – if properly excavated – could have provided extensive new information concerning the development of the human race.
“Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet or a sculpture or piece of jewellery that the dealer buys and pays for in cash in a country devastated by war. Humankind is losing its history for the pleasure of private collectors living safely in their luxurious houses and ordering specific objects for their collection.”
Ms Farchakh, who helped with the original investigation into stolen treasures from the Baghdad Archaeological Museum in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, says Iraq may soon end up with no history.
“There are 10,000 archaeological sites in the country. In the Nassariyah area alone, there are about 840 Sumerian sites; they have all been systematically looted. Even when Alexander the Great destroyed a city, he would always build another. But now the robbers are destroying everything because they are going down to bedrock. What’s new is that the looters are becoming more and more organised with, apparently, lots of money.
“Quite apart from this, military operations are damaging these sites forever. There’s been a US base in Ur for five years and the walls are cracking because of the weight of military vehicles. It’s like putting an archaeological site under a continuous earthquake.”
Of all the ancient cities of present-day Iraq, Ur is regarded as the most important in the history of man-kind. Mentioned in the Old Testament – and believed by many to be the home of the Prophet Abraham – it also features in the works of Arab historians and geographers where its name is Qamirnah, The City of the Moon.
Founded in about 4,000 BC, its Sumerian people established the principles of irrigation, developed agriculture and metal-working. Fifteen hundred years later – in what has become known as “the age of the deluge” – Ur produced some of the first examples of writing, seal inscriptions and construction. In neighbouring Larsa, baked clay bricks were used as money orders – the world’s first cheques – the depth of finger indentations in the clay marking the amount of money to be transferred. The royal tombs of Ur contained jewellery, daggers, gold, azurite cylindrical seals and sometimes the remains of slaves.
US officers have repeatedly said a large American base built at Babylon was to protect the site but Iraqi archaeologist Zainab Bah-rani, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, says this “beggars belief”. In an analysis of the city, she says: “The damage done to Babylon is both extensive and irreparable, and even if US forces had wanted to protect it, placing guards round the site would have been far more sensible than bulldozing it and setting up the largest coalition military headquarters in the region.”
Air strikes in 2003 left historical monuments undamaged, but Professor Bahrani, says: “The occupation has resulted in a tremendous destruction of history well beyond the museums and libraries looted and destroyed at the fall of Baghdad. At least seven historical sites have been used in this way by US and coalition forces since April 2003, one of them being the historical heart of Samarra, where the Askari shrine built by Nasr al Din Shah was bombed in 2006.”
The use of heritage sites as military bases is a breach of the Hague Convention and Protocol of 1954 (chapter 1, article 5) which covers periods of occupation; although the US did not ratify the Convention, Italy, Poland, Australia and Holland, all of whom sent forces to Iraq, are contracting parties.
Ms Farchakh notes that as religious parties gain influence in all the Iraqi pro-vinces, archaeological sites are also falling under their control. She tells of Abdulamir Hamdani, the director of antiquities for Di Qar province in the south who desperately – but vainly – tried to prevent the destruction of the buried cities during the occupation. Dr Hamdani himself wrote that he can do little to prevent “the disaster we are all witnessing and observing”.
In 2006, he says: “We recruited 200 police officers because we were trying to stop the looting by patrolling the sites as often as possible. Our equipment was not enough for this mission because we only had eight cars, some guns and other weapons and a few radio transmitters for the entire province where 800 archaeological sites have been inventoried.
“Of course, this is not enough but we were trying to establish some order until money restrictions within the government meant that we could no longer pay for the fuel to patrol the sites. So we ended up in our offices trying to fight the looting, but that was also before the religious parties took over southern Iraq.”
Last year, Dr Hamdani’s antiquities department received notice from the local authorities, approving the creation of mud-brick factories in areas surrounding Sumerian archaeological sites. But it quickly became apparent that the factory owners intended to buy the land from the Iraqi government because it covered several Sumerian capitals and other archaeological sites. The new landlord would “dig” the archaeological site, dissolve the “old mud brick” to form the new one for the market and sell the unearthed finds to antiquity traders.
Dr Hamdani bravely refused to sign the dossier. Ms Farchakh says: “His rejection had rapid consequences. The religious parties controlling Nassariyah sent the police to see him with orders to jail him on corruption charges. He was imprisoned for three months, awaiting trial. The State Board of Antiquities and Heritage defended him during his trial, as did his powerful tribe. He was released and regained his position. The mud-brick factories are ‘frozen projects’, but reports have surfaced of a similar strategy being employed in other cities and in nearby archaeological sites such as the Aqarakouf Ziggarat near Baghdad. For how long can Iraqi archaeologists maintain order? This is a question only Iraqi politicians affiliated to the different religious parties can answer, since they approve these projects.”
Police efforts to break the power of the looters, now with a well-organised support structure helped by tribal leaders, have proved lethal. In 2005, the Iraqi customs arrested – with the help of Western troops – several antiquities dealers in the town of Al Fajr, near Nasseriyah. They seized hundreds of artefacts and decided to take them to the museum in Baghdad. It was a fatal mistake.
The convoy was stopped a few miles from Baghdad, eight of the customs agents were murdered, and their bodies burnt and left to rot in the desert. The artefacts disappeared. “It was a clear message from the antiquities dealers to the world,” Ms Farchakh says.
The legions of antiquities looters work within a smooth mass-smuggling organisation. Trucks, cars, planes and boats take Iraq’s historical plunder to Europe, the US, to the United Arab Emirates and to Japan. The archaeologists say an ever-growing number of internet websites offer Mesopotamian artefacts, objects anywhere up to 7,000 years old.
The farmers of southern Iraq are now professional looters, knowing how to outline the walls of buried buildings and able to break directly into rooms and tombs. The archaeologists’ report says: “They have been trained in how to rob the world of its past and they have been making significant profit from it. They know the value of each object and it is difficult to see why they would stop looting.”
After the 1991 Gulf War, archaeologists hired the previous looters as workers and promised them government salaries. This system worked as long as the archaeologists remained on the sites, but it was one of the main reasons for the later destruction; people now knew how to excavate and what they could find.
Ms Farchakh adds: “The longer Iraq finds itself in a state of war, the more the cradle of civilisation is threatened. It may not even last for our grandchildren to learn from.”
A land with fields of ancient pottery
By Joanne Farchakh, archaeologist
Iraq’s rural societies are very different to our own. Their concept of ancient civilisations and heritage does not match the standards set by our own scholars. History is limited to the stories and glories of your direct ancestors and your tribe. So for them, the “cradle of civilisation” is nothing more than desert land with “fields” of pottery that they have the right to take advantage of because, after all, they are the lords of the land and, as a result, the owners of its possessions. In the same way, if they had been able, these people would not have hesitated to take control of the oil fields, because this is “their land”. Because life in the desert is hard and because they have been “forgotten” by all the governments, their “revenge” for this reality is to monitor, and take, every single money-making opportunity. A cylinder seal, a sculpture or a cuneiform tablet earns $50 (£25) and that’s half the monthly salary of an average government employee in Iraq. The looters have been told by the traders that if an object is worth anything at all, it must have an inscription on it. In Iraq, the farmers consider their “looting” activities to be part of a normal working day.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.
The Triumph of Structured Finance – Failing banks, toxic bonds and mortgage laundering By Mike Whitney
By Mike Whitney
09/17/07 “ICH
“The entire global financial structure is becoming uncontrollable in crucial ways that its nominal leaders never expected, and instability is its hallmark. The scope and operation of international financial markets, their “architecture”, as establishment experts describe it, has evolved haphazardly and its regulation is inefficient — indeed, almost nonexistent. Banks do not understand the chain of exposure and who owns what: senior financial regulators and bankers now admit this.” Gabriel Kolko “An Economy of Buccaneers and Fantacists”
“Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, is like a man who, after spending a lifetime playing with train sets, finally gets to drive the real thing – only to find it hurtling towards the edge of a cliff.” U.K. Observer
By now, you’ve probably seen the photos of the angry customers queued up outside of Northern Rock Bank waiting to withdraw their money. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6998507.stm The pictures are headline news in the UK but have been stuck on the back pages of US newspapers. The reason for this is obvious—the same Force 5 economic-hurricane that just touched ground in Great Britain is headed for America and gaining strength on the way.
This is what a good old fashioned bank run looks like—the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression. And, just like 1929, the bank owners are frantically trying to calm down their customers by reassuring them that their money is safe. But—human nature being what it is—people are not so easily pacified when they think their hard-earned savings are at risk. The bottom line is this: The people want their money—not excuses.
But Northern Rock doesn’t have their money and, surprisingly, it is not because the bank was dabbling in risky subprime loans. Rather, NR had unwisely adopted the model of “borrowing short to go long” in financing their mortgages just like many of the major banks in the US. In other words, they depended on wholesale financing of their mortgages from eager investors in the market, instead of the traditional method of maintaining sufficient capital to back up the loans on their books.
It seemed like a nifty idea at the time and most of the big banks in the US were doing the same thing. It was a great way to avoid bothersome reserve requirements and the loan origination fees were profitable as well. Northern Rock’s business soared. Now they carry a mortgage book totaling $200 billion dollars.
$200 billion! So why can’t they pay out a paltry $4 or $5 billion to their customers without a government bailout?
It’s because they don’t have the reserves—and, because the bank’s business model is hopelessly flawed and no longer viable. Their assets are illiquid and (presumably) “marked to model”—which means they have no discernible market value. They might as well have been “marked to fantasy”—it amounts to the same thing. Investors don’t want them. So Northern Rock is stuck with a $200 billion albatross that’s dragging them under.
A more powerful fiscal-tsunami is about to descend on the United States where many of the banks have been engaged in the same practices and are using the same business-model as Northern Rock. Investors are no longer buying CDOs, MBSs, or anything else related to real estate. No one wants them whether they’re subprime or not. That means that US banks will soon undergo the same type of economic gale that is battering the UK right now. The only difference is that the US economy is already listing from the downturn in housing and an increasingly-jittery stock market.
That’s why Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson rushed off to England yesterday to see if he could figure out a way to keep the contagion from spreading.
Good luck, Hank.
It would interesting to know if Paulson still believes that “This is far and away the strongest global economy I’ve seen in my business lifetime”, or if he has adjusted his thinking as troubles in subprime, commercial paper, private equity, and credit continue to mount?
SECURITIZATION: Is it really just Mortgage laundering?
For weeks we’ve been saying that the banks are in trouble and do not have the reserves to cover their losses. This notion was originally pooh-poohed by nearly everyone. But it’s becoming more and more apparent that it is true. We expect to see many bank failures in the months to come. Prepare yourself. The banking system is mired in fraud and chicanery. Now the schemes and swindles are unwinding and the bodies will soon be floating to the surface.
“Structured finance” is touted as the “new architecture of financial markets”. It is designed to distribute capital more efficiently by allowing other market participants to fill a role which used to be left exclusively to the banks. In practice, however, structured finance is a hoax; and undoubtedly the most expensive hoax of all time. The transformation of liabilities (dodgy mortgage loans) into assets (securities) through the magic of securitization is the biggest boondoggle of all time. It is the moral equivalent of mortgage laundering. The system relies on the variable support of investors to provide the funding for pools of mortgage loans that are chopped-up into tranches and duct-taped together as CDOs (collateralized debt obligations). Its madness; but no one seemed to realize how crazy it was until Bear Stearns blew up and they couldn’t find bidders for their remaining CDOs. It’s been downhill ever since.
Structured Finance: The new market plumbing springs a leak
The problems with structured finance are not simply the result of shabby lending and low interest rates. The model itself is defective.
John R. Ing provides a great synopsis of structured finance in his article, “Gold: The Collapse of the Vanities”:
“The origin of the debt crisis lies with the evolution of America’s financial markets using financial engineering and leverage to finance the credit expansion…. Financial institutions created a Frankenstein with the change from simply lending money and taking fees to securitizing and selling trillions of loans in every market from Iowa to Germany. Credit risk was replaced by the “slicing and dicing” of risk, enabling the banks to act as principals, spreading that risk among various financial institutions….. Securitization allowed a vast array of long term liabilities once parked away with collateral to be resold along side more traditional forms of short term assets. Wall Street created an illusion that risk was somehow disseminated among the masses. Private equity too used piles of this debt to launch ever bigger buyouts. And, awash in liquidity and very sophisticated algorithms, investment bankers found willing hedge funds around the world seeking higher yielding assets. Risk was piled upon risk. We believe that the subprime crisis is not a “one off” event but the beginning of a significant sea change in the modern-day financial markets.” (John R. Ing “Gold: The Collapse of the Vanities”)
The investment sharks who conjured up “structured finance” knew exactly what they were doing. They were hyping dog-pelts as fine mink and selling off them to anyone foolish enough to buy them. They were in bed with the ratings agencies—-off-loading trillions of dollars of garbage-bonds to pension funds, hedge funds, insurance companies and foreign financial giants. It’s a swindle of epic proportions and it never would have taken place in a sufficiently regulated market.
MAKING THE CASE FOR ECONOMIC PREEMPTION
The Bush administration needs to come to grips with the “systemic” problems of the current market-model and act fast. When crowds of angry people are huddled outside the banks to get their money; the system is in real peril. Credibility must be restored quickly. This is no time for Bush’s “free market” nostrums or Paulson’s soothing bromides (We think the problem is “contained”) or Bernanke’s feeble rate cuts. This requires real leadership.
The first thing to do is take charge—-alert the public to what is going on and get Congress to work on substantive changes to the system. Concrete steps must be taken to build public confidence in the markets. And there must be a presidential announcement that all bank deposits will be fully covered by government insurance.
The lights should be blinking red at all the related government agencies including the Fed, the SEC, and the Treasury Dept. They need to get ahead of the curve and stop thinking they can minimize a potential catastrophe with their usual public relations mumbo jumbo.
U.S. BANKS: Waiting for the storm-surge
Last week, an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, “Banks Flock to Discount Window”. (9-14-07) The article chronicled the sudden up-tick in borrowing by the struggling banks via the Fed’s emergency bailout program, the “Discount Window”.
WSJ:
“Discount borrowing under the Fed’s primary credit program for banks surged to more than $7.1 billion outstanding as of Wednesday, up from $1 billion a week before.”
Again we see the same pattern developing; the banks borrowing money from the Fed because they cannot meet their minimum reserve requirements.
WSJ: “The Fed in its weekly release said average daily borrowing through Wednesday rose to $2.93 billion.”
$3 billion.
Traditionally, the “Discount Window” has only been used by banks in distress, but the Fed is trying to convince people that it’s really not a sign of distress at all. It’s “a sign of strength”.
Baloney. Banks don’t borrow $3 billion unless they need it. They don’t have the reserves. Period.
The real condition of the banks will be revealed sometime in the next few weeks when they report earnings and account for their massive losses in “down-graded” CDOs and MBSs.
Market analyst, Jon Markman offered these words of advice to the financial giants:
“Before they (the financial industry) take down the entire market this fall by shocking Wall Street with unexpected losses, I suggest that they brush aside their attorneys and media handlers and come clean. They need to tell the world about the reality of their home lending and loan securitization teams’ failures of the past four years — and the truth about the toxic paper that they’ve flushed into the world economic system, or stuffed into Enron-like off-balance sheet entities — before the markets make them walk the plank.”….” Since government regulators and Congress have flinched from their responsibility to administer “tough love” with rules forcing financial institutions to detail the creation, securitization and disposition of every ill-conceived subprime loan, off-balance sheet “structured investment vehicle,” secretive money-market “conduit” and commercial-paper-financing vehicle, the market will do it with a vengeance” (Jon Markman, “What the big banks aren’t telling you – yet”)
Good advice. We’ll have to wait and see if anyone is listening. The investment banks may be waiting until Tuesday hoping that Fed-chief Ken Bernanke announces a cut to the Fed’s fund rate that could send the stock market roaring back into positive territory.
But interest rate cuts do not address the underlying problems of insolvency among homeowners, mortgage lenders, hedge funds and (potentially) banks. As market-analyst John R. Ing said, “A cut in rates will not solve the problem. This crisis was caused by excess liquidity and a deterioration of credit standards….A cut in the Fed Fund rate is simply heroin for credit junkies.”
Well put.
The cuts merely add more cheap credit to a market that that is already over-inflated from the ocean of liquidity produced by former-Fed chief Alan Greenspan. The housing bubble and the massive credit bubble are largely the result of Greenspan’s misguided monetary policies. (For which he now blames Bush!)The Fed’s job is to ensure price stability and the smooth operation of the markets—not to reflate equity bubbles and reward over-exposed market participants.
It’s better to let cash-strapped borrowers default than slash interest rates and trigger a global run on the dollar. Financial analyst Richard Bove says that lower interest rates will do nothing to bring money back into the markets. Instead, lower interest rates will send the dollar into a tailspin and wreak havoc on the job market.
“There is no liquidity problem, but a serious crisis of confidence,” Bove said. “In a financial system where there is ample liquidity and a desire for higher rates to compensate for risk, the solution is not to create more liquidity and lower the rates that are available to compensate for risk. … (The Fed) cannot reduce fear by stimulating inflation.”
“It is illogical to assume that holders of cash will have a strong desire to lend money at low rates in a currency that is declining in value when they can take these same funds and lend them at high rates in a currency that is gaining in value,” he said. “By lowering interest rates the Federal Reserve will not stimulate economic growth or create jobs. It will crash the currency, stimulate inflation, and weaken the economy and the job markets.” CNN Money)
Bove is right. The people and businesses that cannot repay their debts should be allowed to fail. Further weakening the dollar only adds to our collective risk by feeding inflation and increasing the likelihood of capital flight from American markets. If that happens; we’re toast.
SPIRALLING INFLATION
Consider this: In 2000, when Bush took office, gold was $273 per ounce, oil was $22 per barrel and the euro was worth $.87 per dollar. Currently, gold is over $700 per ounce, oil is over $80 per barrel, and the euro is nearly $1.40 per dollar. If Bernanke cuts rates, we’re likely to see oil at $125 per barrel by next spring.
Inflation is soaring. The government statistics are thoroughly bogus. Gold, oil and the euro don’t lie. According to economist Martin Feldstein, “The falling dollar and rising food prices caused market-based consumer prices to rise by 4.6% in the most recent quarter.” (WSJ)
That’s 18.4% per year—and yet, Bernanke is still considering cutting interest rates and further fueling inflation?!?
It’s crazy!
What about the American worker whose wages have stagnated for the last 6 years? Inflation is the same as a pay-cut for him. And how about the pensioner on a fixed income? Same thing. Inflation is just a hidden tax progressively eroding his standard of living. .
Bernanke’s rate cut may be boon to the “cheap credit” addicts on Wall Street, but it’s the death-knell for the average worker who is already struggling just to make ends meet.
No bailouts. No rate cuts. Let the banks and hedge funds sink or swim like everyone else. The message to Bernanke is simple: “It’s time to take away the punch bowl”.
The inflation in the stock market is just as evident as it is in the price of gold, oil or real estate. Economist and author Henry Liu demonstrates this in his article “Liquidity Boom and the Looming Crisis”:
“The conventional value paradigm is unable to explain why the market capitalization of all US stocks grew from $5.3 trillion at the end of 1994 to $17.7 trillion at the end of 1999 to $35 trillion at the end of 2006, generating a geometric increase in price earnings ratios and the like. Liquidity analysis provides a ready answer.” (Asia Times)
“Market capitalization zoomed from $5.3 trillion to $35 trillion in 12 years?!?
Why?
Was it due to growth in market-share, business expansion or productivity?
No. It was because there were more dollars chasing the same number of securities; hence, inflation.
If that is the case, then we can expect the stock market to fall sharply before it reaches a sustainable level. As Liu says, “It is not possible to preserve the abnormal market prices of assets driven up by a liquidity boom if normal liquidity is to be restored.” Eventually, stock prices will return to a normal range.
Bernanke should not even be contemplating a rate cut. The market needs more discipline not less. And workers need a stable dollar so they can live within their means. Besides, another rate cut would further jeopardize the greenback’s position as the world’s “reserve currency”. That could destabilize the global economy by rapidly unwinding the US massive current account deficit.
The International Herald Tribune summed up the dollar’s problems in a recent article,” Dollar’s Retreat Raises Fear of Collapse”:
“Finance ministers and central bankers have long fretted that at some point, the rest of the world would lose its willingness to finance the United States’ proclivity to consume far more than it produces – and that a potentially disastrous free-fall in the dollar’s value would result.
The latest turmoil in mortgage markets has, in a single stroke, shaken faith in the resilience of American finance to a greater degree than even the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000 or the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, analysts said. It has also raised prospect of a recession in the wider economy.
This is all pointing to a greatly increased risk of a fast unwinding of the U.S. current account deficit and a serious decline of the dollar.”
Other experts and currency traders have expressed similar sentiments. The dollar is at historic lows in relation to the basket of currencies against which it is weighted. Bernanke can’t take a chance that his effort to rescue the markets will cause a sudden sell-off of the dollar.
The Fed chief’s hands are tied. Bernanke simply doesn’t have the tools to fix the problems before him. Insolvency cannot be fixed with liquidity injections nor can the deeply-rooted “systemic” problems in “structured finance” be corrected by slashing interest rates. These require fiscal solutions, congressional involvement, and fundamental economic policy changes.
Rate cuts won’t help to rekindle the spending spree in the housing market either. That charade is over. The banks have already tightened lending standards and inventory is larger than anytime since they began keeping records. The slowdown in housing is irreversible as is the steady decline in real estate prices. Trillions in market capitalization will be wiped out. (thanks to Greenspan) Home equity is already shrinking as is consumer spending connected to home-equity withdrawals.
The bubble has popped regardless of what Bernanke does. The same is true in the clogged Commercial Paper market where hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term debt is due to expire in the next few weeks. The banks and corporate borrowers are expected to struggle to refinance their debts but, of course, much of the debt will not roll over. There will be substantial losses and, very likely, more defaults.
BERNANKE’S LEGACY: Was he a man or a mouse?
Bernanke can either be a statesman—and tell the country the truth about our dysfunctional financial system which is breaking down from years of corruption, deregulation and manipulation—or he can take the cowards-route and “buy some time” by flooding the system with liquidity, stimulating more destructive consumerism, and condemning the nation to an avoidable cycle of double-digit inflation.
We’ll know his decision on Tuesday.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.
Bush’s Fake Sheik Whacked: The Surge and the Al Qaeda Bunny by Greg Palast
A special investigative report from inside Iraq
by Greg Palast
Published September 17th, 2007
Monday, September 17, 2007- Did you see George all choked up? In his surreal TV talk on Thursday, he got all emotional over the killing by Al Qaeda of Sheik Abu Risha, the leader of the new Sunni alliance with the US against the insurgents in Anbar Province, Iraq.
Bush shook Abu Risha’s hand two weeks ago for the cameras. Bush can shake his hand again, but not the rest of him: Abu Risha was blown away just hours before Bush was to go on the air to praise his new friend.
Here’s what you need to know that NPR won’t tell you.
1. Sheik Abu Risha wasn’t a sheik.
2. He wasn’t killed by Al Qaeda.
3. The new alliance with former insurgents in Anbar is as fake as the sheik – and a murderous deceit.
How do I know this? You can see the film – of “Sheik” Abu Risha, of the guys who likely whacked him and of their other victims.
Just in case you think I’ve lost my mind and put my butt in insane danger to get this footage, don’t worry. I was safe and dry in Budapest. It was my brilliant new cameraman, Rick Rowley, who went to Iraq to get the story on his own.
Rick’s “the future of TV news,” says BBC. He’s also completely out of control. Despite our pleas, Rick and his partner Dave Enders went to Anbar and filmed where no cameraman had dared tread.
Why was “sheik” Abu Risha so important? As the New York Times put it this morning, “Abu Risha had become a charismatic symbol of the security gains in Sunni areas that have become a cornerstone of American plans to keep large numbers of troops in Iraq though much of next year.”
In other words, Abu Risha was the PR hook used to sell the “success” of the surge.
The sheik wasn’t a sheik. He was a fake. While proclaiming to Rick that he was “the leader of all the Iraqi tribes,” Abu lead no one. But for a reported sum in the millions in cash for so-called, “reconstruction contracts,” Abu Risha was willing to say he was Napoleon and Julius Caesar and do the hand-shakie thing with Bush on camera.
Notably, Rowley and his camera caught up with Abu Risha on his way to a “business trip” to Dubai, money laundering capital of the Middle East.
There are some real sheiks in Anbar, like Ali Hathem of the dominant Dulaimi tribe, who told Rick Abu Risha was a con man. Where was his tribe, this tribal leader? “The Americans like to create characters like Disney cartoon heros.” Then Ali Hathem added, “Abu Risha is no longer welcome” in Anbar.
“Not welcome” from a sheik in Anbar is roughly the same as a kiss on both cheeks from the capo di capi. Within days, when Abu Risha returned from Dubai to Dulaimi turf in Ramadi, Bush’s hand-sheik was whacked.
On Thursday, Bush said Abu Risha was killed, “fighting Al Qaeda” – and the White House issued a statement that the sheik was “killed by al Qaeda.”
Bullshit.
There ain’t no Easter Bunny and “Al Qaeda” ain’t in Iraq, Mr. Bush. It was very cute, on the week of the September 11 memorials, to tie the death of your Anbar toy-boy to bin Laden’s Saudi hijackers. But it’s a lie. Yes, there is a group of berserkers who call themselves “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” But they have as much to do with the real Qaeda of bin Laden as a Rolling Stones “tribute” band has to do with Mick Jagger.
Who got Abu Risha? Nothing – NOTHING – moves in Ramadi without the approval of the REAL tribal sheiks. They were none-too-happy, as Hathem, noted, about the millions the US handed to Risha. The sheiks either ordered the hit – or simply gave the bomber free passage to do the deed.
So who are these guys, the sheiks who lead the Sunni tribes of Anbar – the potentates of the Tamimi, Fallaji, Obeidi, Zobal and Jumaili tribes? Think of them as the Sopranos of Arabia. They are also members of the so-called “Awakening Council” – getting their slice of the millions handed out – which they had no interest in sharing with Risha.
But creepy and deadly or not, these capi of the desert were effective in eliminating “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” Indeed, as US military so proudly pointed out to Rick, the moment the sheiks declared their opposition to Al Qaeda – i.e. got the payments from the US taxpayers – Al Qaeda instantly diappeared.
This miraculous military change, where the enemy just evaporates, has one explanation: the sheiks ARE al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Just like the Sopranos extract “protection” payments from New Jersey businesses, the mobsters of Anbar joined our side when we laid down the loot.
What’s wrong with that? After all, I’d rather send a check than send our kids from Columbus to fight them.
But there’s something deeply, horribly wrong with dealing with these killers. They still kill. With new US protection, weapons and cash, they have turned on the Shia of Anbar. Fifteen thousand Shia families from a single district were forced at gunpoint to leave Anbar. Those moving too slowly were shot. Kids and moms too.
Do the Americans know about the ethnic cleansing of Anbar by our erstwhile “allies”? Rick’s film shows US commanders placing their headquarters in the homes abandoned by terrorized Shia.
Rick’s craziest move was to go and find these Shia refugees from Anbar. They were dumped, over a hundred thousand of them, in a cinder block slum with no running water in Baghdad. They are under the “protection” of the Mahdi Army, another group of cutthroats. But at least these are Shia cutthroats.
So the great “success” of the surge is our arming and providing cover for ethnic cleansing in Anbar. Nice, Mr. Bush. And with the US press “embedded,” we won’t get the real story. Even Democrats are buying into the Anbar “awakening” fairy tale.
An Iraqi government official frets that giving guns and cover to the Anbar gang is like adopting a baby crocodile. “A crocodile is not a pet,” he told Rick. It will soon grow to devour you. But what could the puppet do but complain about his strings?
This Iraqi got it right: the surge is a crock.
********
Greg Palast is the author of “Armed Madhouse: from Baghdad to New Orleans – Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild.” See Palast’s reports for BBC Television’s Newsnight, now filmed by Rick Rowley and partners, at www.GregPalast.com
On his departure from Iraq, Al Jazeera’s English language network agreed to broadcast the Rowley/Enders film. I urge you to see it: Mosaic Intelligence Report: Who Killed the Sheikh? + Al Jazeera: People and Power: al-Anbar progress? (videos)
Palast will update the report today on Air America’s Randi Rhodes show.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.
see:
09.13.07 Uncensored News Reports From Across The Middle East (video; over 18 only)
09.13.07 Uncensored News Reports From Across The Middle East (video; over 18 only)
Warning
This video contains images depicting the reality and horror of war and should only be viewed by a mature audience.
Selected Episode
Sept. 13, 2007
US Sunni Ally Killed in Al Anbar,” Al Jazeera English, Qatar
Anbar Tribes Celebrate before the Killing od Abu Reesha,” Al Arabiya TV, UAE
Taliban Intensifies Attacks on Afghan Police,” Al Jazeera TV, Qatar
Iran Opens Prisons to Press,” Al Alam TV, Iran
Ramadan in Gaza,” Dubai TV, UAE
Petra Chosen Second in the New Wonders of the World,” NBN TV, Lebanon
Lebanese Celebrate Ramadan,” Future TV, Lebanon
Produced for Link TV by Jamal Dajani.
Is the “Terrorist Threat” Another Bush-Cheney Fabrication by Sherwood Ross
by Sherwood Ross
Global Research, September 16, 2007
In the most massive racial profiling since Japanese-Americans were herded into detention camps in World War II, the Bush administration after 9/11 required 80,000 Arab and Muslim foreign nationals living here to be photographed, fingerprinted and subjected to “special registration,” The Nation magazine said. The publication reports an additional 8,000 foreign nationals were sought out by the FBI for interviews and more than 5,000 foreign nationals were put in “preventive detention” — a total of 93,000 people made to register, subjected to interview, or jailed.
“Yet as of September, 2007, not one of these people stands convicted of a terrorist crime,” says an article titled, “Why We’re Losing The War on Terror.” Reading the data it presents, though, and examining other reliable sources, raises the question of whether the “terrorist threat” to USA isn’t wildly exaggerated or an outright fabrication. Here’s why:
he above-cited pattern of dragnet arrests without trials or convictions is being repeated across the Middle East with like results. The Bush regime is literally framing thousands of innocent men and boys to make it appear they constitute a “terrorist” threat to America. Yes, boys, some as young as eight.
According to Nation magazine co-authors David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, and Jules Lobel, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, the Bush regime has little to show in the way of convictions of those it imprisoned in Guantanamo, which ex-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld trumpeted housed “the worst of the worst.”
“The Pentagon’s Combatant Status Review Tribunals’ own findings categorized only 8 percent of some 500 detainees held there in 2006 as fighters for Al Qaeda or the Taliban. More than half of the 775 Guantanamo detainees have now been released,” Cole and Lobel write. Americans needs to ask, since Bush boasted as far back as 2003 the U.S. had arrested 3,000 terrorist suspects, “Why didn’t the government try them?” As Jane Mayer reported in the July 3, 2006, The New Yorker, “Only ten of the more than 700 men who have been imprisoned at Guantanamo have been formally charged with any wrong-doing.”
Mayer also wrote, when the Pentagon planned to screen the suspects via “Article 5” hearings on the battlefields of Afghanistan, “the White House cancelled the hearings, which had been standard protocol during the previous fifty years, including in the first Gulf War.” Why? Could it be the Pentagon just wanted live, warm bodies, and innocence be damned?
Former President Jimmy Carter wrote in “Our Endangered Values” (Simon & Schuster), after visiting six of the 25 U.S. prisons, the Red Cross found “107 detainees under eighteen, some as young as eight years old.” Eight-year-old terrorists? And investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reported there were 800-900 Pakistani boys in custody aged 13 to 15. Never mind that the Red Cross, Pentagon, and Amnesty International “have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, confirmed by soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse,” according to Carter. Apparently, the Bush regime is tearing elementary school children away from their parents to build up its “terrorist” arrest data.
The British Guardian newspaper on March 15, 2005, carried a disturbing interview with Dr. Rafiullah Bidar, regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, of Gardez — an entity funded by the U.S. Congress to investigate warlord abuses, and supposedly an American asset.
“All I do nowadays is chart complaints against the US military,” Bidar lamented. “Many thousands of people have been rounded up and detained by them. Those who have been freed say that they were held alongside foreign detainees who’ve been brought to this country to be processed. No one is charged. No one is identified. No international monitors are allowed into the US jails.” He pulled out a handful of files: “People who have been arrested say they’ve been brutalised – the tactics used are beyond belief.” Again, mass roundups, followed by no charges, and harsh confinement with torture.
The Guardian said terror suspects are being housed in about 25 prisons across Afghanistan, the hub of the U.S. prison network, and in dozens of facilities in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Egypt, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the British island of Diego Garcia.
Military officials estimate more than 60,000 Iraqis have been arrested and detained since the U.S. invasion and returned GI’s interviewed by The Nation (July 30) said “the majority of detainees they encountered were either innocent or guilty of only minor infractions.” Army Reserve Specialist Aidan Delgado, 25, of Sarasota, Fla., of the 320th Military Police Company, said, “I read these rap sheets on all the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and what they were there for. I look down this roster and see petty theft, public drunkenness, forged coalition documents.” Delgado added, “These aren’t terrorists. These aren’t our enemies. They’re just ordinary people, and we’re treating them harshly.” Even U.S. intelligence officers admitted to the Red Cross 70 to 90 percent of Abu Ghraib detainees are being held by mistake. Again, the same pattern of criminal conduct by the Bush regime.
As for domestic terrorists, the FBI admitted in 2005 that it had yet to identify a single Al Qaeda sleeper cell in the entire U.S. “And it hasn’t found any since,” write Cole and Lobel, “unless you count the Florida group arrested in 2006 whose principal step toward an alleged plot to blow up the Sears Tower was to order combat boots and whose only Al Qaeda ‘connection’ was to a federal informant pretending to be Al Qaeda.” In its most ballyhooed “terrorist” case against a U.S. citizen, Jose Padilla was convicted only for attending an Al Qaeda training camp and conspiring to support Muslim rebels in Chechnya and Bosnia before 9/11, not for any of the heinous crimes he was initially charged with planning.
Significantly, Cole and Lobel note in December, 2005, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission gave the Administration “failing or near-failing grades on many of the most basic domestic security measures, including assessing critical infrastructure vulnerabilities, securing weapons of mass destruction, screening airline passengers and cargo, sharing information between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, insuring that first responders have adequate communications,” etc.
Is this just more incompetence or is the White House deliberately lax because it knows the terrorist threat is one it has largely fabricated? In sum, the American people need to demand to know, “Why so few trials?” Are there virtually no trials because, in fact, there are no terrorists? Is the case against the thousands rotting in prisons no stronger than the phony case Bush made against “terrorist” Saddam Hussein with his WMD? Consider this final point: The last “terrorist” strike on U.S. soil was the anthrax attack on Congress in October, 2001 that killed five people — and the anthrax used was traced back to U.S. military facilities, George W. Bush, commander-in-chief.
Sherwood Ross is a Miami, FL-based publicist who has worked as a newspaper reporter, wire service columnist and radio talk show host at WOL, Washington, D.C.
Sherwood Ross is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Sherwood Ross
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Conservatism Isn’t What It Used To Be By Paul Craig Roberts
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 16, 2007
When I was in the Reagan administration, America had a lively press that never hesitated to take us to task. Even the “Teflon President” received more brickbats than Bush and Cheney.
The lively press disappeared along with its independence in the media concentration engineered during the Clinton administration. Shortly thereafter all the liberal news anchors disappeared as well. Today the US media serves as propaganda ministry for the government’s wars and police state. Yet, some conservatives continue to rant on about “the liberal media.”
That other conservative bugaboo, liberal academia, has also been crushed. Universities once controlled their appointments, but no more. Recently, the political science faculty at DePaul, a Catholic university, voted to give tenure to the courageous scholar and teacher Norman Finkelstein. The department was unable to make its tenure decision stick over the objections of the Israel Lobby and their conservative allies, who were able to reach in over the heads of the political science department and the College Personnel Committee and force DePaul’s president to block Finkelstein’s tenure. Finkelstein, a Jew, had angered the Israel Lobby with his criticisms of Israel’s misuse of the holocaust sufferings of Jews to oppress the Palestinians and to silence critics.
On September 14, 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that the appointment of the distinguished legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as the Dean of a new law school at the University of California at Irvine had been withdrawn by the university’s chancellor, Michael V. Drake, who gave in to the demands of conservatives outside the university. Conservatives are outraged at Chemerinsky because he criticized Attorney General Gonzales. In withdrawing Chemerinsky’s appointment, Drake told him: “I didn’t realize there would be conservatives out to get you.” [Furor disrupts plans for UCI school of law, By Garrett Therolf, Rebecca Trounson and Richard C. Paddock, September 14, 2007]
Gonzales is the attorney general who wrote memos justifying torture and denying that the Bush administration was bound by the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales told a stunned Senate Judiciary Committee that the US Constitution did not provide habeas corpus protection to American citizens.
To experience an attorney general of the US fiercely attacking the US Constitution, rending its every provision, is the most frightening experience of my lifetime. That the head of the legal branch of the executive, sworn to uphold the Constitution, would turn against it in order to enhance unaccountable executive power is a clear impeachable offense. If anyone anywhere in the world deserved criticism, Gonzales did. But when Chemerinsky unbraided the despicable Gonzales, conservatives rushed to Gonzales’ defense, not to the defense of the American Constitution.
It seems only yesterday that conservatives were complaining about the liberties that liberals took with the Constitution. Liberals were expanding rights, fancifully perhaps. But today conservatives are curtailing long established rights, such as habeas corpus and protection against self-incrimination. Conservatives abandoned “original intent” and all of their constitutional scruples once they had a chance to cram more power into the presidency.
In my conservative days as an academic, I experienced some liberal blackballs. But liberals did not attack academic freedom per se. The new conservatives despise academic freedom and have created organizations to monitor departments of Middle East studies in order to lower the boom on scholars who follow the truth instead of neoconservative ideology or Israeli policy. Today academic freedom has disappeared just like the independent media. No one but powerful organized interest groups has a voice. In the media truth can only emerge on comic shows like The Colbert Report and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.
In years past, conservatives were often shouted down on university campuses by left-wing students. But today speakers disapproved by powerful interest groups are simply disinvited in advance. Even Harvard University has fallen to the new censorship. On September 14, 2007, the Harvard Crimson reported that the Israel Lobby was able to force Harvard University to disinvite three speakers, an Oxford University professor, a DePaul professor, and a Rutgers professor, because they had criticized Israeli policy.
In America today, speaking your mind in the media or in academia is a thing of the past. A country that has no voices independent of powerful interests is a country in which freedom is dead.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.
Al Jazeera: Israel’s Syria raid (videos)
Inside Story looks at the mysterious Israeli air raid in Syria and the theories as to its purpose – was it a rehearsal for a strike on targets in Iran? Or an attack, as some are claiming, on a joint nuclear venture between North Korea and Syria?
see:
Bush Administration War Plans directed against Iran by Michel Chossudovsky
British academics warn US is preparing “shock and awe” attack on Iran by Peter Symonds
Current TV: Syria 101, Parts 1 & 2 (videos)
Davis Fleetwood: Sept 15 Die-In: re-thinking strategy for future actions (video)
I think Davis makes good points in his suggestion for the Die-In participants to have stayed longer, perhaps even to Monday morning (although that may be more difficult since this was on a Sat. not a Sun.) I do know that without those crossing the barricades and risking arrest (196 were arrested), the MSM wouldn’t have mentioned this huge rally. Their coverage already was sparse to say the least and seemed to downplay the total numbers of people in the March while giving attention to the pro-war counter protesters. ~ Lo
see:
From the March to the Cell: Washington, D.C. 9/15/07 by Guinea: The 1930’s Smut Peddler
Ralph Nader: How Many Impeachable Offenses Do The Spineless Dems Need? (video)
Zaman: Fog El Nakhal (music video)
Ron Paul: Constitutional talk @ Seattle Univ. 9/14/07 (videos)
There’s a saying about how one can judge a society/nation by the way it treats the least among them. I so disagree with Ron Paul’s stance on domestic issues. At least he brings up the corporate welfare that our govt is sponsoring. ~ Lo
On Sept 14, 2007, Pres. Candidate Ron Paul visited Seattle Univ. to talk on the topic of the Constitution. This video started just a couple minutes late.
Dandelion Salad 