US shanty towns spread like wildfire

Encampments and shanty towns are increasing across the US with more people losing jobs and shelters on the back of a deepening recession.

“They just popped up about 18 months ago,” said homeless advocate Paul Stack, according to a New York Times article released on Thursday. “One day it was empty. The next day, there were people living there.”

While Americans residing in big cities like Los Angeles and New York are already familiar with tent cities, the number of homeless is spreading like wildfire across the US.

“These are able-bodied folks that did day labor, at minimum wage or better, who were previously able to house themselves based on their income,” said Michael Stoops, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless — an advocacy group based in Washington.

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Money like a drug to the brain

So let me get this straight; if to some people money is not just a means to an end but an actual drug than it follows that those who make their livelihood making more money than the can ever spend addicts.

Well, that explains a lot. Like for example the behaviour of rich people. The keep their dosh to themselves and that includes those who purport to do some charity with said dosh. It’s a bit like a junky who gives a little bit of his heroine to someone who wants to try it in order to make himself feel good while making damn sure he doesn’t run our of his precious drug.

And now after a 25 year earning spree with dizzying amounts of endorphine releasing money in their bank accounts, their habits grown out of all proportions and their lying about how addicted they really are becoming obvious to all who have seen them growing high on their drug of choice just a bit too often and too obvious are running scared because their ponzy schemes are falling apart.

The Wall street bankers junkies are approaching rock bottom.

Their lies are old and predictable and in their angst to finally have to face the piper they are pulling all of us who actually see money as a means to and end, as a way to be able to acquire articles we might need and in order to compensate our fellow human beings for effort they make on our behalf, with them.

And the new Zealand population in their MSM induced comatose ignorance elected a Wall street junky whose main adrenaline rush was to earn mega bucks gambling with huge amounts of money and with a $ 50 million habit to guard the hen house dealers stash.

And what does he propose to do in order to get us through the coming economic meltdown brought on by his Wall street junky palls? Borrow $ 40 billion more of that wonderful endorphin releasing drug to gamble our futures away with while giving his other junky mates wads of cash in tax cuts. It’s a junky’s paradise . Brilliant, New Zealand well done.

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Money works like a drug on the human brain – and even just the thought of earning a higher salary gives us a physical buzz, a study has found.

Scientists have discovered that thinking about cash stimulates the reward centres involved in pleasure and the higher the salary – even if it is just imagined – the greater the pleasure generated in the brain.

This may be no great surprise, but the most intriguing aspect of the research is that the findings hold true even if what we want to buy costs more, for example in times of high inflation, and our actual spending power drops.

The results of the study suggest that the human brain is innately susceptible to the illusion of wealth that money can bring. This is known in economics as “money illusion” – when people get fixated on the nominal value of money rather than on its actual purchasing power.

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Israel defends use of flesh-eating weapon

What defence is there for the use of white phosphor on civilians? None absolutely no excuse whatsoever.

Tel Aviv hits back at a humanitarian report that suggests the Israeli army had ‘illegally’ shelled Gazans with white phosphorus shells.

The New York-headquartered Human Rights Watch said in a recent report that Israel’s indiscriminate and deliberate use of white phosphorus against Palestinian civilians amounts to war crimes.

“The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) repeatedly exploded white phosphorus munitions in the air over populated areas, killing and injuring civilians, and damaging civilian structures,” read the report.

According to Human Rights Watch, the Israeli officialdom had violated the international laws of warfare by using the controversial weapon — which burns flesh to the bone.

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Commander confirms Netanyahu war plans

Israel is preparing for all-out war on multiple fronts that include Iran, Syria and Lebanon, a senior military commander claims.

Israeli army Home Front Command Major General Yair Golan said Sunday that Tel Aviv is preparing for “all possible scenarios”, indicating that one such scenario would be to fight a simultaneous war against Iran, Syria and Lebanon.

The confirmation comes as US President Barack Obama seeks “new beginnings” with its arch-rival Iran. The US offer has been met with world praise but with fury in Tel Aviv.

Israeli media outlets late on Sunday began propagating wild scenarios that Iran is using the Lebanese Hezbollah to recruit Palestinian fighters to carry out terror attacks on Israel.

Citing anonymous sources, the reports began to surface after Tel Aviv countered an alleged bombing attempt outside a shopping mall in the northern city of Haifa.

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USA has two options to save its economy: declare default or trigger off war

The United States is the largest borrower in the world. The US national debt has already exceeded the level of 11 trillion dollars as of the beginning of 2009 and continues to grow like an avalanche. Experts say that the USA has only two ways to solve the problem: to either declare default or trigger off a war.

According to experts’ estimates, the probability of default on US treasury bonds is very high at the moment. The rumors are not new at all. Moreover, experts say that the USA has already started to work on an opportunity to refuse from the dollar in order to avoid debt payments.

Dmitry Abzalov, an expert with the Center for Russia ‘s Political Conjuncture, said that governments currently take on the debts of corporations. “The corporate debts crisis thus becomes the crisis of governmental debts. The US debt in the beginning of 2009 amounted to $10.6 trillion. Taking into consideration the current deficit budget of the United States , as well as the prospects for the deficit of the budget during the current year, it becomes clear that the US Treasury bond market is based on no alternative whatsoever. There is no other way for investors to invest their funds with treasury bonds being the only option,” the expert told Bigness.ru.

When the world economy recovers, investors will realize that there are plenty of other opportunities for investments, the European bonds, for example (if the European economy recovers from the crisis too, of course), or the bonds of developing countries.

“The pyramid of US bonds will collapse in this case. The debt percentage grows every day, which makes the USA borrow more and more on a daily basis. America will have no chances to pay off the debt,” the expert said.

Inga Foksha, an analyst with Aton Investment Company, agrees that the US default is quite possible, although she is certain that it will not happen unless the world finds an alternative to the US dollar. The dollar will collapse immediately in case of default, which is absolutely unacceptable, because 63 percent of world reserves are saved in dollars. Their collapse will trigger the global economic collapse.

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Finance crisis ‘could lead to war’, IMF warns

Ah, the good old fashioned fear factor but also very true. WWII comes to mind as the outcome of the Great Depression. Made a lot of money incidentally for the selfsame assholes causing this recession.
In case you didn’t know about the Money Masters now would be a good time to watch the video.

The global financial crisis could lead to social unrest and even war, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned yesterday.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that the billions already pumped into the world economy risked disappearing into thin air unless there is massive reform of the financial sector.

And he dealt a severe blow to Gordon Brown’s plans for another debt-funded Budget giveaway by warning that the money might melt ‘like snow in the sun’.

At a meeting of the International Labour Organisation, Mr Strauss-Kahn warned that the global economic crisis is ‘dire’ with the threat of millions being pushed into poverty.

The managing director of the global financial watchdog went on to warn governments against ploughing yet more fiscal stimulus into their ailing economies. He said: ‘You can put in as much stimulus as you want.

‘It will just melt in the sun as snow if at the same time you are not able to have a generally smaller financial sector than before but a healthy financial sector at work.’

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How big a deal is the loss of the dollar’s reserve status?

As the dollar loses its reserves status, at least half of the world’s $5,385 billion dollar reserves will be sold off and replaced with other currencies (yuan, euro, khaleeji, gold, rand, etc…). The US, with its $71 foreign reserves, will not be able to do anything to counteract this mass exodus from the dollar. With outflows of this magnitude, the dollar’s value will collapse to a fraction of where it is now.

How about the total collapse of the US. Economic Armageddon, food riots, starvation and crime waves. How about the same for China, Japan, India and Europe. And that’s just for starters.

We may not have a lot here but we have a good distance from the helter skelter coming and we can grow our own food. Not bad.

In the last week we have learned that:

1) Fed is planning 15-fold increase in us monetary base
2) U.N. panel says world should ditch dollar
3) Zimbabwe has ditched the US dollar in favor of the rand
4) China and Russia rethinking the dollar’s status as world’s reserve currency

With the US monetary base expanding at a breathtaking pace and nations around the world worrying about the value of their US holdings, the dollar looks virtually guaranteed to lose its status as the international reserve currency. This begs the question: how big a deal is the loss of the dollar’s reserve status?

To answer this question, lets first calculate just how large are the dollar holdings of foreign governments. From the CIA’s world Factbook, below is a ranking of countries by reserves of foreign exchange.

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Chinese central bank backs Russian idea for new reserve currency

Uh OOh. What will it mean for the world if the US $ looses it’s reserve status?

The chairman of the People’s Bank of China has spoken out in support of Russia’s proposal to create a new global reserve currency as an alternative to the U.S. dollar, Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday.

Zhou Xiaochuan wrote in an essay posted on the bank’s website that the goal of the international monetary system is to “create an international reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies.”

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Rainbow Warrior bombing agent dies in French plane crash

Good riddens. Fernando Pereira who died in the attack lived in my neighbourhood in Amsterdam and was part of a much appreciated small Dutch Portugese community. That community which I knew was devastated after his death. I had friends in that community and I can only say good riddens to bad trash.

A member of the French Secret Service team that carried out the Rainbow Warrior bombing in 1985 has been killed in a plane crash in the French Alps.

Xavier Maniguet, 62, was one of four men aboard the yacht Ouvea that smuggled explosives used in “Operation Satanic”, which sank the Greenpeace flagship in a bid to stall protests against French nuclear tests in the South Pacific.

Maniguet, a flying instructor, died with a 76-year-old pupil on Monday.

They had just dropped off a skier on the 3400-metre-high Etendard glacier near the resort of Saint-Sorlin-d’Arves, and were taking off again when a gust of wind hit their craft. Maniguet had been at the controls of the single-engine Jodel aeroplane when the accident happened.

China Offers No Fix for Global Slump

Just in case you were hoping that China was going to stop New Zealand from going into depression.

Any prospect that China could be the growth engine to pull the world economy out of deep recession has been laid to rest by the latest World Bank forecast.

At the recently completed annual National Peoples Congress (NPC), Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao promised the regime’s policies would ensure 8 percent growth in 2009. The World Bank, however, cut its projection for this year to 6.5 percent, down from the previous 7.5 percent.

With the US, Europe and Japan all in recession, 6.5 percent sounds very positive. Reflecting the generally upbeat tone of the bank’s outlook, World Bank country director David Dollar, described China as “a relative bright spot in an otherwise gloomy global economy”.

The real situation and the scale of the economic slowdown in China, however, are underscored by the fact that 4.9 percentage points of the estimated growth will come from a massive government stimulus package. In other words, without the stimulus measures, the predicted growth rate would be just 1.6 percent—compared to 13 percent in 2007.

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The U.K. wants your Twitter chatter under surveillance

Not happy with pushing the EU Data Retention Directive which would make ISPs store communication data for 12 months Vernon Coaker, the U.K. Home Office security minister, now wants all social networking sites and IM messaging service monitored as well. The Interception Monderisation Programme (IMP) is the government proposal for legislation to use mass monitoring of traffic data as an antiterrorism tool.

The IMP has two objectives; that the government use deep packet inspection to monitor the Web communications of all U.K. citizens; and that all of the traffic data relating to those communications are stored in a centralized government database. The problem is that social networking sites aren’t covered by the directive

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Stasi HQ UK… where details of all your journeys are secretly logged and kept for a decade

And this is not all.

This anonymous office building on a business park near Heathrow Airport is where the Government has begun monitoring millions of British holidaymakers using its controversial new ‘terrorist detector’ database.

The top-secret computer system – tied into the airlines’ ticketing network – makes judgments about travel habits and passengers’ friends and family to decide if they are a security risk.

Like something from a science-fiction film, the Home Office has designed it to spot a ‘criminal’ or terrorist before they have done anything wrong.

Snoop centre: The ‘Status Park 4′ building near Heathrow monitors travellers

The building’s address is, some might say sinisterly, called Status Park 4.

But the intrusiveness of the system at the heart of Government’s so-called ‘e-Borders’ scheme has provoked such fury among civil liberties campaigners that some consider it akin to a modern-day Stasi headquarters.

All the information passengers give to travel agents, including home addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, passport details and the names of family members, is shared with an unknown number of Government agencies for ‘analysis’ and stored for up to ten years.

But even as the ‘profiling’ system goes live, its reliability is being called into question.

An internal Home Office document obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveals that during testing one ‘potential suspect’ turned out to be an airline passenger with a spinal injury flying into Britain with his nurse.

‘Suspect’ requests likely to cause innocent holidaymakers to get ‘red flags’ as potential terrorists include ordering a vegetarian meal, asking for an over-wing seat and travelling with a foreign-born husband or wife.

The system will also ‘red flag’ passengers buying a one-way ticket and making a last-minute reservation and those with a history of booking tickets and not showing up for the flights.

A previous history of travel to the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iran will also trigger an alarm, as will those with a record of sponsoring an immigrant from any of these countries.

Starting during the Easter holiday rush, millions of people will be checked by the new National Border Targeting Centre (NBTC).

By the end of the year the NBTC, which is recruiting 250 staff, will have been relocated to another office near Manchester Airport and will be analysing the movements of 120million UK travellers.

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Why Key’s national bike track could be paved with gold

Brilliant. John Key shows real leadership here.

Fewer than two of every 100 visitors to New Zealand might use the Prime Minister’s proposed national cycleway – but the ones that do are likely to be among tourism’s bigger spenders.

Tourism Ministry figures show fewer than 2 per cent of visitors take part in cycling, but they stay more than twice as long as the average tourist and spend 1.6 times as much.

The proposed $50 million cycleway could attract international tourists but the benefits to local communities are unpredictable, one report suggests.

The cycleway was among ideas to emerge from the Government’s Jobs Summit three weeks ago and has been backed strongly by John Key, who is also the Tourism Minister.

It is hoped the 3000km cycleway will create jobs for up to 4000 people.

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“Perp Walks Instead of Bonuses”: Veteran Journalist Robert Scheer on AIG Bonuses, the “Backdoor Bailout” and Why Obama Should Fire Geithner, Summers

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Stewart to Cheney: Drink a cup of ‘Shut the f**k up’

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Hyperinflation and US bankruptcy when will the dollar finally being dumped as the reserve currency?

“The implication is that authorities must be selling their dollar reserves in order to stabilise the USD-CNY exchange rate,” Gruenwald, a former International Monetary Fund official about the Chinese central bank.

According to Puru Saxena, CEO of Puru Saxena Wealth Management the US is already bankrupt.
His argument is that the GDP is US$ 14 trillion and the total debt is US $55 trillion and if their creditors wanted their money now that would be the end of the US. Makes sense to me.

He also adds that with our current fiat money system printing money is a legal way of getting out of debt. So rather than default the Federal reserve will print that money and give it to whoever is foolish enough to accept it (They will have enough toilet paper to last them a while though). That will cause a massive hyperinflation or devaluation of the dollar.

It is no surprise therefore that the UN is advising to dump the US dollar in favour of a basket of different currencies. All fiat of course and inevitably prone to the same form of fraudulent overproduction.

In any case it should come as no surprise that the Chinese as America’s biggest creditor is getting mighty anxious about their trillions in US dollars and is trying to get rid of them without panicking the rest of us into dumping the dollar en mass.

House Passes Mandatory National Service Bill

In the period preceding WWII in fact from 1925 until the end of the war in 1945 the Nazi party had a really good idea. The idea was to organise their young man and women and to instill in them a firy passion for service to their country. Voluntary at first but convulsive from December 1936 every boy and girl was enlisted to do service for their country and the Nazi party. They were called the Hitler Jugend.
Now it is of course recognised as the  paramilitary unit it was intended to be but at the time every German parent was proud to have their child serve the Fuhrer and the Fatherland.

Now Obama has a brilliant idea: Mandatory service for every young woman and man in the USA. Ladies and gentlemen I give you the Obama Jugend.

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The House passed a bill yesterday which includes disturbing language indicating young people will be forced to undertake mandatory national service programs as fears about President Barack Obama’s promised “civilian national security force” intensify.

The Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act, known as the GIVE Act, was passed yesterday by a 321-105 margin and now goes to the Senate.

Under section 6104 of the bill, entitled “Duties,” in subsection B6, the legislation states that a commission will be set up to investigate, “Whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.”

Section 120 of the bill also discusses the “Youth Engagement Zone Program” and states that “service learning” will be “a mandatory part of the curriculum in all of the secondary schools served by the local educational agency.”

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A Program of Financial Concentration: Was the Bailout Itself a Scam?

While the scamsters at the top of AIG pay themselves bonusses it pays  to remember that the amount of money they paid themselves is just mere fraction of the amount they received.

The lump sum of the bail out goes to the banksters who insured their dodgy bets with AIG. yep you got it in one. The banksters betted the shop and insured those bets with AIG.

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Professor Michael Hudson (CounterPunch, March 18) is correct that the orchestrated outrage over the $165 million AIG bonuses is a diversion from the thousand times greater theft from taxpayers of the approximately $200 billion “bailout” of AIG. Nevertheless, it is a diversion that serves an important purpose. It has taught an inattentive American public that the elites run the government in their own private interests.

Americans are angry that AIG executives are paying themselves millions of dollars in bonuses after having cost the taxpayers an exorbitant sum. Senator Charles Grassley put a proper face on the anger when he suggested that the AIG executives “follow the Japanese example and resign or go commit suicide.”

Yet, Obama’s White House economist, Larry Summers, on whose watch as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration financial deregulation got out of control, invoked the “sanctity of contracts” in defense of the AIG bonuses.

But the Obama administration does not regard other contracts as sacred. Specifically: labor unions had to agree to give-backs in order for the auto companies to obtain federal help; CNN reports that “Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday [March 10] that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance”; the Washington Post reports that the Obama team has set its sights on downsizing Social Security and Medicare.

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Preparing for Civil Unrest in America

Nothing will fix America. Humpty Dumpty has broken and can’t be put back together again. The financial elite knows this and are preparing for the next phase: The clampdown on dissent.

After they have killed of what was left of the US economy and that of the rest of the world I might add and that includes New Zealand and the general populus wakes up in the nightmare that is left. In tent cities, empty neighbourhoods, bankrupt malls and lacking food, healtcare and jobs to keep their families clothed and fed the once proud American people will huddle like animals and they will become angry. Angry hungry people with nothing to loose.

Enter the concentration camps. Welcome to Mad Max, the real version.

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The Economic and Social Crisis.

The financial meltdown has unleashed a latent and emergent social crisis across the United States.

What is at stake is the fraudulent confiscation of lifelong savings and pension funds, the appropriation of tax revenues to finance the trillion dollar “bank bailouts”, which ultimately serve to line the pockets of the richest people in America.

This economic crisis is in large part the result of financial manipulation and outright fraud to the detriment of entire populations, leading to a renewed wave of corporate bankruptcies, mass unemployment and poverty.

The criminalization of the global financial system, characterised by a “Shadow Banking” network has resulted in the centralization of bank power and an unprecedented concentration of private wealth.

Obama’s “economic stimulus” package and budget proposals contribute to a further process of concentration and centralisation of bank power, the cumulative effects of which will eventually result in large scale corporate, bankruptcies, a new wave of foreclosures not to mention fiscal collapse and the downfall of State social programs. (For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, America’s Fiscal Collapse, Global Research, March 2, 2009).

The cumulative decline of real economic activity backlashes on employment and wages, which in turn leads to a collapse in purchasing power. The proposed “solution” under the Obama administration contributes to exacerbating rather than alleviating social inequalities and the process of wealth concentration.

The Protest Movement

When people across America, whose lives have been shattered and destroyed, come to realize the true face of the global “free market” system, the legitimacy of  Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the US administration will be challenged.

A latent protest movement directed against the seat of economic and political power is unfolding.

How this process will occur is hard to predict. All sectors of American society are potentially affected: wage earners, small, medium and even large businesses, farmers, professionals, federal, State and municipal employees, students, teachers, health workers, and unemployed. Protests will initially emerge from these various sectors. There is, however, at this stage, no organized national resistance movement directed against the administration’s economic and financial agenda.

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Wall Street’s and the City’s Attempt to Destabilize the EU Banking System and the Euro

I would have thought that John Key being so knowledgeable on banking and governing would have volunteered his expertise to the G20.

According to LEAP/E2020, there are only two options left for the G20 leaders who gather next April 2nd in London: either they rebuild a new international monetary system, creating the conditions for a new global system that involves all the main global players, and reducing the crisis to a maximum of 3 to 5 years; or they strive to prolong the current system, thrusting the world into a decade long tragic crisis starting at the end of 2009.

In this 33rd edition of the GEAB, we wish to describe the two ways forward that remain open until summer 2009. Beyond that, our team estimates that the “short-term crisis” option will be obsolete and that the world will be on the path towards global geopolitical dislocation (1), and a deep and decade-long crisis.

For this reason, due to the urgency, LEAP/E2020 has decided to publish next March 24th on a global scale an open letter to all the leaders of the G20. This will be our team’s attempt to divert the system from the long and tragic crisis option.

The situation appears all the more worrying in that tensions are growing on the eve of the April 2nd summit. Indeed a number of thinly disguised threats on the part of some G20 leaders, as well as various attempts to manipulate public opinion on the part of others are to be observed.

We shall come back in detail on these aspects in this GEAB N°33 where the LEAP/E2020 team has also decided to engage in an exercise intended for all those (including the US where 20 percent of LEAP/E2020’s readers come from) who are exasperated by the illusion fed by Western media about the state of the US as a cornerstone of our current system: anticipating the social and economic state of the United States in one year from now, in Spring 2010. Strong trends are already visible enough to enable this kind of forecast. Of course, a similar exercise will be conducted about the European Union, Russia and China in the following editions of the GEAB.

Synthetic graphic of US collective sentiment (in blue: sense of impending doom; in green: purchasing power sentiment; in pink: job concerns) – Source : Chart of Doom, 02/2009

In line with their concern for reliable information, the LEAP/E2020 team (which warned about housing risks in Central and eastern Europe as early as December 2007 in GEAB N°20 decided to study carefully in the present public announcement the reality of this so-called “Eastern European banking bomb” which has invaded the media in the last month.

If we found this a relevant theme, it is because it represents in our opinion a deliberate attempt on the part of Wall Street and the City (2) to make the world believe in some rupture within the EU and to instil the idea that some « deadly » risk is weighing on the Eurozone, by endlessly conveying phony news on a “banking risk coming from Eastern Europe” and by stigmatizing a “cold-feeted” Eurozone as opposed to the “voluntarist” actions initiated by the Americans and the Bristish. One aim is also to divert the attention from the increasing financial problems encountered in New York and London, and to weaken the Europe position on the eve of the G20 summit.

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What does one TRILLION dollars look like?

All this talk about “stimulus packages” and “bailouts”…

A billion dollars…

A hundred billion dollars…

Eight hundred billion dollars…

One TRILLION dollars…

What does that look like? I mean, these various numbers are tossed around like so many doggie treats, so I thought I’d take Google Sketchup out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion dollars looks like.

We’ll start with a $100 dollar bill. Currently the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation. Most everyone has seen them, slighty fewer have owned them. Guaranteed to make friends wherever they go.

A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2″ thick and contains $10,000. Fits in your pocket easily and is more than enough for week or two of shamefully decadent fun.

Believe it or not, this next little pile is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000). You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it.

While a measly $1 million looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable. It fits neatly on a standard pallet…

And $1 BILLION dollars… now we’re really getting somewhere…

Click here if you want to know what a trillion looks like

Cheney’s Mission Accomplished

March 17, 2009 “Information Clearing House” — -Dick Cheney: “I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we’ve accomplished nearly everything we set out to do….”

What has Dick Cheney really accomplished in Iraq?

An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes, that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria. Cheney’s war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes.

It is controversial how many Iraqis died as a result of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath. But it seems to me that a million extra dead, beyond what you would have expected from a year 2000 baseline, is entirely plausible. The toll is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Cheney did not kill them all. The Lancet study suggested that the US was directly responsible for a third of all violent deaths since 2003. That would be as much as 300,000 that we killed. The rest, we only set in train their deaths by our invasion.

Baghdad has been turned from a mixed city, about half of its population Shiite and the other half Sunni in 2003, into a Shiite city where the Sunni population may be as little as ten to fifteen percent. From a Sunni point of view, Cheney’s war has resulted in a Shiite (and Iranian) take-over of the Iraqi capital, long a symbol of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism.

In the Iraqi elections, Shiite fundamentalist parties closely allied with Iran came to power. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the leading party in parliament, was formed by Iraqi expatriates at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982 in Tehran. The Islamic Mission (Da’wa) Party is the oldest ideological Shiite party working for an Islamic state. It helped form Hizbullah in Beirut in the early 1980s. It has supplied both prime ministers elected since 2005. Fundamentalist Shiites shaped the constitution, which forbids the civil legislature to pass legislation that contravenes Islamic law. Dissidents have accused the new Iraqi government of being an Iranian puppet.

Arab-Kurdish violence is spiking in the north, endangering the Obama withdrawal plan and, indeed, the whole of Iraq, not to mention Syria, Turkey and Iran.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women have been widowed by the war and its effects, leaving most without a means of support. Iraqi widows often lack access to clean water and electricity. Aljazeera English has video.

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Harawira comments on alleged Key assault

Hallelujah, at least one of the Maori leadership has found his balls back.

Maori MP Hone Harawira is being accused of defending an alleged assault against Prime Minister John Key.

In a newspaper column Mr Harawira said he went to Kaitaia Courthouse to support nephews John Junior Popata, 33, and Wikatana Popata, 19.

The pair pleaded not guilty to the alleged assault on Waitangi Day.

Mr Harawira said the men were not angels “but then who is?”.

The pair were involved in their marae and Maori community and were passionate, he said.

“Sure, sometimes that passion spills over, and sometimes that leads to actions that society might frown upon, but with my record, who am I to criticise?”

Mr Harawira said he did not regret past actions that got him into trouble and was proud of his involvement in the foreshore and seabed hikoi (march), “and I note that that was conducted largely outside the law as well”.

He concludes his column saying that while he did not know what the court would decide, he hoped common sense would prevail.

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9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey: It Might Take “A Permanent 9/11 Commission” to End the Remaining Mysteries of September 11

Some of us have been writing for years (see this and this) that the 9/11 Commission Report was unreliable because most of the information was based on the statements of tortured detainees. As I wrote in March 2007:

In fact, the 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on a third-hand account of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees.

I have also previously written that Senator Leahy’s desire to base a torture investigation on the 9/11 Commission was problematic.

Now, Newsweek is running an essay by Philip Shenon saying the same thing:

The commission appears to have ignored obvious clues throughout 2003 and 2004 that its account of the 9/11 plot and Al Qaeda’s history relied heavily on information obtained from detainees who had been subjected to torture, or something not far from it.

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Wall Street’s Fall Guy: “Fast Track Justice” for Bernie Madoff

Let me ask you this: If you were a judge in the Madoff case and Mr. Madoff, suspected of a US $50 billion  Ponzi scheme asks to be released into house arrest with access to his computer, bank accounts and with a wife who has been his accountant for the better part of his fraudulent existence would you let him return home so he can spend the next three months  getting rid of evidence and letting him hide his dosh somewhere were you can’t find it?

No I didn’t think so. SO either the judge was a Moron of titanic proportions or Madoff had protectors in very high places.

A few comments about last Thursday’s hearing before Judge Chin on the Madoff matter may be warranted.

Reading the transcript with a lawyer’s eye, it seems evident that Judge Chin had made up his mind as to what he was going to do before he walked into the courtroom.  Giving people a right to speak was form, not substance.  The transcript shows that it plainly affected nothing.  The judge took no account of people’s comments or logic when rendering his decisions.  Sic semper transcriptus.

For judges to walk into courtrooms with their minds already made up, so that whatever is then said to them is of no moment, is hardly unusual.  If anything, the reverse.  Allowing lawyers or, as here, others to speak is often just a pro forma way of fooling people into thinking courts are open minded and objective.  To doubters, to the naïve, all I can say is “Sorry, but those are often the facts.”  So too they plainly seem the facts here, notwithstanding that there were those who came thousands of miles to speak.

One of the judge’s decisions was to deny bail and have “Madmanoff” locked up.  Nobody but Madoff’s lawyers objects to that.  But it is curious that little has changed since another judge previously granted bail, and let Madoff stay in his penthouse, with access to his computer — and to who knows how much or what information — so that he could work for three months on keeping his money hidden, on keeping it beyond the reach of the feds (as by transfers and attempted transfers of money and property (remember the jewels?) to his wife and family.)

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Lingering mystery: Congressman calls for probe into 2001 anthrax attacks

More than seven years after the first bio-terror attack on the United States, Congress is considering creating a commission to probe the government’s response to the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people.

Representative Rush Holt, a Democrat, has submitted a bill that would create a bipartisan commission to investigate the government’s handling of the 2001 attacks, which also exposed 17 people to the powdery anthrax spores.

“Myriad questions remain about the anthrax attacks and the government’s bungled response to the attacks,” Holt said in a statement.

Holt said in a statement that the commission would review an investigation conducted by the FBI, which for years pursued the wrong suspect before turning its attention to a government anthrax researcher who committed suicide before he could be charged.

“The bipartisan commission would make recommendations to the president and Congress on how the country can best prevent and respond to any future bio-terrorism attack,” Holt said.

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WWIII alert: US kicks Iran war prep into high gear

Just days after the top US commander sketched out plans to strike Iran, the US military claims Tehran sent a drone into Iraq in February.

The US military on Monday claimed that American jets had shot down an Iranian unmanned surveillance aircraft 97 kilometers northeast of Baghdad in February.

The Ababil 3 was tracked for about 70 minutes before it was shot down “well inside Iraqi airspace”, reads a statement from the army.

The statement also suggests that the aircraft’s presence over Iraq “was not an accident”.

The US claim comes just two days after Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke of the next possible US target — Iran.

“What I worry about in terms of an attack on Iran is in addition to the immediate effect, the effect of the attack, it’s the unintended consequences,” Mullen said.

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Cheney: Obama responsible for next 9/11

US President Barack Obama’s decisions against Bush’s “war on terror” policies would cause another 9/11, says former vice president Dick Cheney.

“President Obama campaigned against it all across the country,” Cheney told CNN on Sunday.

“And now he is making some choices that in my mind will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack,” he added.

When asked if he believes Obama has made the nation less safe through his reversal of certain Bush administration anti-terror policies, Cheney said, “I do.”

Meanwhile, Cheney criticized the new administration’s decision for shutting down the Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, closing CIA “Black Sites” abroad, and defining waterboarding as torture.

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Lawyers Group Urges Bush Be Arrested or Barred from Canada in First Trip Abroad Since Leaving Office

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Kucinich Calls For Congressional Investigation Into Cheney “Assassination Unit”

Congressman says Hersh claims should be subject of formal probe

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, March 16, 2009

Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has called for a formal Congressional probe into allegations by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that former Vice-President Dick Cheney had his own SS-style political assassination unit.

Kucinich made the call Friday in a letter to Chairman Edolphus Towns of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee which has been published on the Congressman’s website.

Kucinich explains in the letter that, “Mr. Hersh made the allegation before an audience at the University of Minnesota on Tuesday, March 10, 2009. He stated, ‘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… It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. . .Congress has no oversight of it.’”

“If true, these operations violate longstanding U.S. policy regarding covert actions and illegally bypass Congressional oversight,” Kucinich adds. “Hersh is within a year or more of releasing a book that is said to include evidence of this allegation. However, we cannot wait a year or more to establish the truth.”

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