What US Generals used to think of Torture

Tom Ricks, over at Foreign Policy, posts a quote made by US Army Maj. Gen. George Davis, who in 1902 lambasted all who, at the time, believed water-boarding was not torture and that "enhanced interrogation techniques" were acceptable in the face of international obligations.

No modern state, which is a party to international law, can sanction, either expressly or by a silence which imports consent, a resort to torture with a view to obtain confessions, as an incident to its military operations. If it does, where is the line to be drawn? If the ‘water cure' is ineffective, what shall be the next step? Shall the victim be suspended, head down, over the smoke of a smouldering fire; she he be tightly bound and dropped from a distance of several feet; shall he be beaten with rods; shall his shins be rubbed with a broomstick until they bleed?

Corruption in China

One of the enduring attributes of a functioning state, is its ability to operate in an efficient and productive manner for all its citizens.  This isn't a trivial task.  Regardless of the country, great lengths are made by those in authority, both in government and commerce, to conceal their actions, distort public policy, and disseminate propaganda, so that they utilize the resources of the state to their own advantage.  Tolerance for corruption is varied, but is solidly rooted in those nations that are governed by dictatorships, unstable military regimes, and crony-capitalism.  Democracies for all their faults, through transparent legal frameworks, the nature of adversarial and partisan politics, and an open and free press, permit some of the most egregious behavior associated with institutional corruption to be minimized.

According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, China's failure to contain, "Endemic corruption among Chinese officials poses one of the most serious threats to the nation’s future economic and political stability."  This particular study finds that due to the low prosecution rate of corruption, the context is created for even low-level officials to amass an illicit fortune.  As China has moved to a market-driven economy, corruption has exponentially increased.  The report estimates that the direct costs could be as much as $86 billion each year.

The indirect costs of corruption (efficiency losses; waste; and damage to the environment, public health, education, credibility and morale) are incalculable. Corruption both undermines social stability (sparking tens of thousands of protests each year), and contributes to China’s environmental degradation, deterioration of social services, and the rising cost of health care, housing, and education.

The Chinese government has publicly stated its displeasure with this societal manifestation and has made efforts (how successful they are is another question) to rectify the situation.  For example, a mass public trial in Chongqing earlier this year was conducted upon, "9,000 suspects, 50 public officials, a petulant billionaire and criminal organizations that dabbled in drug trafficking, illegal mining, and random acts of savagery, most notably the killing of a man for his unbearably loud karaoke voice."  The trial has exposed to the Chinese public and the world the vast intermingling between organized crime and government.

The New York Times has another interesting article in which the Chinese government itself reports that corruption amongst it's officials is having a serious and negative impact on the country.  How long the country can absorb this activity and what it entails towards China's global aspirations, will dictate the nature of global economics for the next decade. 

NY Times article follows: 

***

China Finds Huge Fraud by Officials
By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI — Chinese officials misused or embezzled about $35 billion in government money in the first 11 months of the year, according to a national audit released this week.

The announcement is the latest indication of how widespread corruption has become among government agencies and how difficult it will be for Beijing to root it out.

The National Audit Office, which carried out the examination, did not disclose the size of the budgets reviewed this year. But the agency, which is based in Beijing, said that it surveyed nearly 100,000 government departments and state-owned companies, and that more than 1,000 officials were facing prosecution or disciplinary action because of the audits.

Auditors said government officials engaged in everything from money laundering and issuing fraudulent loans to cheating the government through the sale or purchase of state land or mining rights.

“Criminals are now more intelligent, and covert,” Liu Jiayi, the director of the National Audit Office, was quoted as saying in the state-run news media.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao hailed the work of the auditors on Tuesday and called on them to monitor government projects and prevent waste.

But analysts say the Communist Party faces significant hurdles in trying to curtail corruption. Every year Beijing announces new anticorruption drives, new laws and new policies aimed at dealing with the problem.

But every year the scale of fraud seems enormous, particularly in a country where the average person earns less than $50 a week.

In 2005, for instance, the National Audit Office reported finding about $35 billion worth of government funds misused or embezzled. That was the last year the office gave a national figure covering its audits, according to its Web site.

Experts say the audits revealed one thing: many in government are finding ways to steal public money.

“The huge crackdown reflects the seriousness of corruption in China’s government,” said Zhu Lijia, a professor of public policy at the Chinese Academy of Governance in Beijing. “Even the National Audit Office should be supervised. In the past few years it was the N.A.O. that decided whether to publish or hide some statistics.”

My Person of the Year: Neda Agha Soltan

Unlike TIME magazine and FT who respectively chose FED Chairman Ben Bernanke and Goldman Sachs' CEO Lloyd Blankfein as their "person of the year", the Times of London (UK) newspaper has chosen a very modest person, who gave her life not in the pursuit of capital or saving the financial behemoths of Wall Street from their own self-inflicted greed, but rather for simple measures that we in the West take for granted every day.

Neda Soltan was not political. She did not vote in the Iranian presidential election on June 12. The young student was appalled, however, by the way that the regime shamelessly rigged the result and reinstalled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ignoring the pleas of her family, she went with her music teacher eight days later to join a huge opposition demonstration in Tehran.

“Even if a bullet goes through my heart it’s not important,” she told Caspian Makan, her fiancé. “What we’re fighting for is more important. When it comes to taking our stolen rights back we should not hesitate. Everyone is responsible. Each person leaves a footprint in this world.”

In Iran Neda has become the face of the revolution against the aging, sclerotic, and corrupt Mullahs.  Vigils and shrines were established across the country to commemorate her murder by a Basij militiaman on a motorcycle as she protested and chanted, "Death to the dictator!"  The Times elaborates:

It was not hard to see why Ms Soltan so quickly became the face of the opposition, the Iranian equivalent of the young man who confronted China’s tanks during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations 20 years earlier. She was young and pretty, innocent, brave and modern. She wore make-up beneath her mandatory headscarf, jeans and trainers beneath her long, black coat, and liked to travel. She transcended the narrow confines of religion, nationality and ideology. She evoked almost universal empathy.

The cowardice of the Mullahs and their police apparatus reached new heights in the months that followed her death.  The regime banned public displays of mourning, intimidated and jailed witnesses who observed her death, harassed Neda's family to prevent them from talking in public, and blamed foreign journalists for her death.

The corporate yes-men who have bankrupted our states, the war-mongers intent on justifying torture and genocide, and the shifty immoral politicans who run our governments and collectively represent the very worst of humanity, deserve nothing but contempt.  We however, as individuals can look through the veil fashioned by the corporate media and find virtue and human decency even in the darkest corners of this world.  This is why I too, even though her life was short and her contribution an accident, feel that Neha Soltan deserves to be known by us all; because her struggles and the ideals of the Green Revolution are our struggles.

***

For more information on Neda and the international response to her death, PBS's Frontline has an excellent documentary that is viewable online and also has a set of links on the subject.

Iran's Green Revolution Continues

Six months ago I started this blog to document the indolence of the mainstream press and the vast hypocrisy and duncery that masquerades as civil society across the world.  At the moment of this blog's inception the theft of the Iranian election by the Mullahs was presenting itself. The clerics terrified at their own dwindling domestic support, handed their lackey Ahmadinejad the election and brutally suppressed student protesters, reform minded civilians, and even former colleagues of the 1979 Iranian revolution, who disagreed with the Mullahs maniacal objectives.

Today I return to Iran, where thousands of people have rallied together in the face of certain prosecution, incarceration, torture, and possible death via the police forces that serve the criminal theocrats in Tehran.  Again, the slothful mainstream press have done a stupendous job at not providing coverage, insightful commentary, or acknowledging the seriousness that this revolution may portend to global politics.  Bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, who in this particular case have replaced the MSM, has an excellent on-the-ground compilation of twitter, you-tube, and individual first-hand accounts by protesters from across Iran.

To contextualize this uprising further, one should first remind oneself that if the neo-conservatives of America and their belligerent and bellicose accomplices in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Pentagon had had their way, these very protesters -who are striving for Western ideals of freedom and liberty- would lay bloody and bleeding, not from the truncheon or pistol of the Iranian stormtroopers, but from American heavy armaments.  The nascent struggle for individual liberty against the corrupt and incompetent rule of the Mullahs would have been aborted, leaving the Islamic regime even more powerful.  Instead, the theocrats are now deprived of the old canard that the evil Satan, in the form of the Americans, the British, and the BBC, are stirring dissent and chaos within their borders.

In addition, it should be understood that the moral vacuousness and intellectual dishonesty of the neo-cons, which has been apparent for all to observe since the Iraq fiasco detonated in their collective faces, has an equivalent in the autocratic and murderous actions of the Iranian theocrats.  The leaders of the American war machine and the murderous Mullahs are the same: greedy, pugnacious old-men bereft of civil decency, who are dedicated to maintaining their own power at the cost of innocent lives.

***

I have a series of earlier blog posts that explain the origins of dictatorships, outline the original rationals about the election fraud committed by the Mullahs (here and here), and the propaganda model as it relates to Western media (here).

"A Seamless Transition" on the Afghanistan War

Ralph Nader gives an antiwar speech in front of the White House on December 12 2009. In it he succinctly summarizes a number of the inconsistencies and obvious logical fallacies made by president Obama in pursuit of his current Afghan policy.

I would add, it is getting a bit tiresome to hear propagandists, including Mr. Obama in his West Point speech, lecturing us about the necessity of having to contain illiterate Afghan tribesmen, who live in mud huts and reside in a country that has been undergoing civil war for thirty years and which has no air force, navy, or army, because they somehow pose an existential threat to Western civilization. The Taliban are outnumbered 10:1 by NATO troops and Al Qaida abandoned Afghanistan in 2001 for Pakistan, which is the central nexus of Islamist and Jihadi activity. If America was serious about eradicating Islamist terrorism it would have attacked Pakistan and overthrown the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia.

A trillion dollars is spent every year by the American government, more than all other nations combined, to sustain their Imperial ambitions across the planet. Nearly 60% of discretionary spending in the US goes to the Pentagon, intelligence gathering, nuclear weapons development, the Veterans Administration, and other military operations. America has spent more time and money than it did in either Vietnam or the Second World War to date and is still unable to defeat fifth-rate insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Chris Hedges, former war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner for journalism, says the obvious:

The deviousness and stupidity of generals, the absurdity of most war plans and the pathological addiction to violence—which is the only language most who command our armed forces are able to understand—make the American military the gravest threat to [America's] anemic democracy, especially as we head toward economic collapse.

Global Arsonist named TIME's man of the year!

For the majority of the year the managers of America's economic news have been issuing headline-after-headline declaring that 'green shoots' were upon us, jobs growth was around the corner, consumer confidence was returning, the banks were once again sound, and corporate profits are once again booming. To date, none of these exaggerations have been remotely correct; including the statement by Ben Bernanke, "that the recession is very likely over."

In terms of understanding propaganda, 2009 has been another boom year. Much like the Bush years, where government lackeys bemoaned the fact that little good-news was being reported about the Iraq war, the Obama administration has likewise, with the collusion of mainstream media (MSM), produced voluminous statements to create the public perception that the global economy was on the mend. This week Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, was named TIME magazine's man of the year. To the glee of media bobble-heads everywhere, Mr. Bernanke has single-handily prevented America from sliding into a depression. Endless articles have now been written about how in the darkest moments after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bernanke marshaled all the power of his office to save capitalism and right the debt-laden banks from implosion. It's a compelling narrative, but one that is completely false.

Bernanke, Greenspan, and the rest of the laissez-faire economists of the Federal Reserve not only ignored regulating the housing bubble and the "shadow economy" that included the toxic assets that brought down Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers, but encouraged the expansion of these bubbles. Bernanke served as one of the Fed's governors from 2002 to 2005, and then did a brief stint as head of the Council of Economic Advisers before taking over as Fed chair in early 2006. There were few people in government who were better situated to correct the "irrational exuberance" in the markets than this man.

In the fourth quarter of 2007, Bernanke repeated to congress and the media that there was no need to cut interest rates and that there was no recession on the horizon. Weeks later, he cut interest rates. He remained steadfast afterwards that the economy in 2008 would be "strengthening as the effects of tighter credit and the housing credit began to wane." However, his actions and private statements belied the opposite was occurring. Two months after he gave his prepared statements to Congress, the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression began December 2007.

When the September Crisis of 2008 unfolded, the FED loaned at least $2 Trillion dollars to both US and foreign banks. Economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, elaborates on Bernanke's perfidy at this critical juncture:

[Bernanke] has refused to provide the public, or even the relevant congressional committees, with information on the trillions of dollars in loans that were made through the Fed's special lending facilities. While anyone can go to the Treasury's website and see how much each bank received through Tarp and under what terms, Bernanke refuses to share any information on the loans that banks and other institutions received from the Fed.

Where we do have information, it is not encouraging. At the peak of the financial crisis in October, Goldman Sachs converted itself from an investment bank into a bank holding company, in part so that it could tap an FDIC loan guarantee programme. Remarkably, Bernanke allowed Goldman to continue to act as an investment bank, taking highly speculative positions even after it had borrowed $28bn with the FDIC's guarantee.

The rational in naming Ben Bernanke as the most important person of the year, is simply to provide him with official credibility in the face of the ruinous laissez-faire ideology that has held sway over Washington for the past thirty years. Wall Street has given the MSM its orders to present the fiction that Mr. Bernanke is the man who saved the world and who must naturally be given another term as FED chairman. The financial world that existed pre-Lehman Brothers no longer exists and the elites who destroyed the world economy, do not wish anyone to understand the scope of their mismanagement in hyping casino-capitalism, while destroying the American dream.

***

Additional blog postings and links of interest:

Eliot Spitzer has "Nine Questions for Ben Bernanke," which to date, none have been adequately addressed by either Mr. Bernanke, the FED, or the feckless MSM.

Critics who said Bernanke should not be re-appointed: Nassim Taleb, Anna Jacobson-Schwartz, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Ron Paul (R-TX) to name a few.

People who have advocated Bernanke's reappointment in the media with reservations are Nouriel Roubini and Paul Krugman.

They know where you are: adventures in domestic spying

It was easy to put the black hat on the evil-doers of the Bush Imperium, with their full-throttle propaganda declaring the triumphalism of good over evil and the virtues of the military fighting for the freedom of Halliburton overseas, while the government was curtailing civil liberties domestically. With the ascent of Barack Obama, there was a short-lived belief that the worst transgressions against individual civil rights, as exemplified in the Patriot Act, would come to an end. They did not.


Part I- Background

Earlier this year reports were made public of continued violations of federal laws that constrained the domestic surveillance of American citizens by the NSA (National Security Agency); a secretive intelligence agency that operates out of a black cube-shaped building outside Baltimore, MD. The violations were an extension of the massive data sweeps initiated by the Bush Administration and executed in part by the telecommunications companies on behalf of the state. The reported violations involve data on tens of millions of domestic phone calls and emails, providing the agency with the ability to conduct “data-mining” operations that yield extensive intelligence on large numbers of Americans. The government furthermore, was forced to admit that the NSA had operational plans of spying on select congressmen who were visiting overseas.

The persisting conceit that America is this shinning beacon of freedom and liberty is a complete myth. The criminal excesses of the executive branch and intelligence community against its own citizens, members of the legislative branch, and the press throughout this past decade are in display for all to view. Last year the "FISA Amendment Act essentially provided congressional sanction for the secret and illegal warrantless wiretapping program initiated by the Bush administration in 2001." Then Senator Barack Obama, left the campaign trail to cast his vote in support of this unconstitutional legislation and provide "support and comfort" for the American police state and its henchmen.

The act, approved with the support of the entire Democratic leadership in the House and nearly half of the Democratic senators, overturned even the limited restraints on government spying that existed under the FISA law passed in 1978, in the wake of revelations of gross abuses of power by the White House and the intelligence agencies under the Nixon administration.

Mr. Obama's Justice Department, mimicking their predecessor's penchant for statist philosophy, made the claim to the courts adjudicating individual cases brought against the government on the matter of domestic wiretapping violations, that 'the government enjoys “sovereign immunity,” meaning that no citizen can sue the government.'

The Obama administration’s uncompromising defense of illegal domestic spying under the Bush White House is not only an attempt to prevent anyone from being held accountable for these crimes and to bar the American people from learning the extent of the surveillance conducted against them. It is also a defense of the continuation of these same essential practices today, hidden behind a wall of secrecy.

Part II- GPS Tracking

Scott Horton over at Harper's Magazine's blog has recently come across an even more invasive practice conducted by the NSA and the telecom companies. Apparently in one situation, Sprint Nextel has been providing law enforcement agencies in America with the GPS coordinates of its cell phone customers (some eight million times per year); without any of the customers providing consent or either knowing anything about it. Sprint Manager of Electronic Surveillance Paul Taylor revealed the government monitoring technology at an industry conference

We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy.

So, not only has the American police state decided they do not require warrants to read or listen to your personal communications, they can and will track you or any other person within American territory, just like an inmate released on day-parole, with the use of your own cell phone.

American Fascism brought to you by the letters 'W' and 'O'.

The Cult of Personality- Mr. Obama & Liberals

Glenn Greenwald has a wonderful post explaining how those on the political right, with George W. Bush, and on the left, with current US president Obama, voluntarily abdicated rationality and independence to engage in hero-worship of their beloved leaders. He elaborates

Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom are similar in kind to those whose reaction to Obama is dominated by their view of him as an inspiring, kind, sophisticated, soothing and mature intellectual. These are personality types bolstered with sophisticated marketing techniques, not policies, governing approaches or ideologies. But for those looking for some emotional attachment to a leader, rather than policies they believe are right, personality attachments are far more important. They're also far more potent. Loyalty grounded in admiration for character will inspire support regardless of policy, and will produce and sustain the fantasy that this is not a mere politician, but a person of deep importance to one's life who -- like a loved one or close friend or religious leader -- must be protected and defended at all costs.

A year into his administration, Mr. Obama appears either unable or unwilling to exorcise the demons of corporatism, militarism, and crony-capitalism that have long possessed congress and made any real reform, in favor of the public interest, impossible. Whether it is the promised reforms to Washington's corrupt and as usual politics or putting an end to the many reckless and undemocratic Bush era policies, a great many of those on the left who once believed Mr. Obama's exhubrant rheotric, are seething at the lack of change. As Bob Herbert of the New York Times said in his column, "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House."

Why do you make them so stupid, God?

Every time I review a poll done assessing the average American's grasp of economics, public policy, or science I cringe. The latest is a doozy!

According to the a Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey no less than 44% of Americans polled wish that Dubya was still in the White House managing affairs. As a quick recap, lets look at Mr. Bush's greatest accomplishments and legacy:

• Failed to prevent terrorists from attacking America on 11-Sept. 2001
• Invaded Afghanistan, but failed to capture and prosecute Bin Laden
• Assisted members of the Bin Laden family and assorted Saudi nationals to leave America eight days after 9-11
• Illegally invaded Iraq to the opposition of nearly the entire planet
• Mismanaged the entire Iraq War and let terrorism exponentially grow across the world
• Allowed nuclear weapons proliferation to rogue nations like North Korea and Iran
• Ignored New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck and let the city nearly be destroyed by his administration's incompetence and neglect
• Tried to scuttle and then block corporate crime prevention legislation, after the first wave of corporate criminality (i.e. Enron, WorldCom,...etc.)
• Produced virtually no jobs during his eight years in office, that is capped by two recessions
• Caused the greatest economic meltdown in the history of the world (in terms of absolute size) through his deregulatory and laissez-faire policies
• Increased the US National Debt by 86% (i.e. $4.9 Trillion)
• Eliminated the 800 year rule of habeas corpus in common law
• Instituted torture, extraordinary rendition, and indefinite imprisonment as common tools against enemies of the state and created concentration camps and CIA controlled "black-sites" for torturing/executing prisioners overseas
• Conducted a series of wide reaching and illegal searches of Americans personal email, phone calls, physical mail, purchasing habits, library and book borrowing habits, and monitored public speech
• Criminalized public protest of Republicans during his election convention in 2004
• Stole or rigged three elections (2000, 2002, and 2004) through well documented forms of fraud, voter intimidation, destruction of ballots, and suppression of Democratic voters
• Attempted to create a unitary Presidency in violation of the US Constitution
• Politicized every office and branch of the US government to serve his dogmatic Christianist and pro-business agendas.
• Denied man-made Climate Change was occurring for years, then when he said that it did exist, stated that there was nothing anyone could do about it.... etc.

What type of world are these people living in that they think George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, Donald Rumsfeld, Condollezza Rice, and rest of the criminal junta that ran America off the cliff and made it the most loathed nation in the world, should be allowed back into the White House?

Well, it is most likely the same world inhabited by Americans, who in another Pew survey, think that the world's leading economic power is China. An incomprehensible 44% of Americans polled thought that China, a country with an economy one-sixth as large as the US and where the majority of people have no indoor plumbing and are agrarian farmers, has the world's largest economy. They are also equally likely to be amongst the, "19% of the public [that] says the use of torture is often justified to gain important information from terrorist suspects... [or the] 35% [that] say the use of torture in these circumstances is at least sometimes justified."

There you have it! A large percentage of Americans believe that Bush should have remained as president, that torture is an excellent and ethically sound policy, and that China is economically more significant than America. FUCKING RETARDS!

Goldman Sachs PR Initiative

Every time Goldman Sachs waddles out a policy meant to assuage public criticism of their morally bankrupt behavior, they only expose their inherent inability to understand the scope of the animus that has been generated. The NY Times has an article outlining that Goldman Sachs top executives will forgo direct cash bonuses for deferred stock options that are contingent on the overall performance of the bank over the period of the next five years.

In 2007, [GS's CEO Lloyd Blankfein] was paid about $67.5 million, a Wall Street record. This year, he and 29 other top executives will receive bonuses that would be quite large, but they will be in the form of what Goldman called “shares at risk,” or stock that cannot be sold for five years and can be retracted if the executive does something that hurts the firm. Goldman has long paid a portion of bonuses in stock.

All this is just public relations, because for the majority of those engaged in Goldman Sachs casino capitalism scam, the winning never stops. For example, the majority of the investment bank's employees will still receive their record-sized bonuses this year, with the average employee receiving $700,000 USD. Despite the company being literally saved by the taxpayer, the crooks at GS will continue to for years to come, to hand out half of their profit to the grinning fiends on Goldman's payroll. To the general public shareholder they have said, "It would give [them] a say in determining compensation." However, any such vote will not be binding! Imagine that you tell your employee that he's not entitled to a bonus and he pats you on the head and says, "Thanks for your opinion, but if I want it I'll tell you what to say!"

To be fair, Goldman Sachs is not alone in this egregious behavior. Many of the largest entities that took TARP funds are rushing to repay their loans, so that the government will no longer be given the legal option of limiting executive compensation packages. Bank of America and Citibank have officially said they are moving in this direction. Given the extraordinary amounts secretly given to all these banks by the FED, it is impossible to determine how much money has actually been transferred between the government and Wall Street; however.

On the point of executive compensation in general, I have to say to those who bemoan that they have to pay these bankers massive salaries to preserve talent, you're a fool. First, if you blow up the global economy and push your company into defacto bankruptcy you should be fired. Investing is a zero-sum game. Making a bundle through casino-capitalism means someone else got screwed. In the recent Wall St. fiasco that 'someone' was everyday people and general investors who saw their 401K's disintegrate, their retirement funds nuked, and the value of their homes fall off the cliff. Furthermore, those same people who saw their personal wealth vanish, were forced to incur further debt by accepting government backed bailouts of the bankers who caused the mess in the first place.

Secondly, the executives of these companies aren't the company and they should not be treated as if they and they alone have the exclusive expertise and talent to meet shareholders demands. What should be evident, is Goldman's institutional influence within the shadowy halls of government, the offices of bank regulators, and in the boardrooms of multinationals is the primary reason why they have succeeded. Individuals, even CEO's, do not have this clout or ability, so why compensate them for what they do not possess? Recent history has shown that many executives who have left Goldman Sachs for other companies or other professions have fallen flat on their faces. Former GS CEO Robert Rubin's performance at Citibank should be recognized as a total catastrophe for shareholders of that company and Jon Corizine's (another GS CEO) single term as governor of NJ was so uninspiring, the citizens of the state decided they'd rather have a Republican running the state a mere ten months after Dubya left the White House.

How's that Surge Working Bub?

In 2007, George W Bush authorized the the deployment of more than 20,000 soldiers into Iraq, five additional brigades, and sent the majority of them into Baghdad. It was called "the surge" and was meant, at least as far as the public was concerned, to provide the time and conditions conducive to reconciliation among political and ethnic factions. Considerable discussion was made by American politicians during the 2008 Presidential election about the merits of the surge strategy and the failing Iraq War. President Obama, who as a candidate vigorously opposed the surge, now takes a less explicitly oppositional stance to it as he continues with his predecessor's failed polices of throwing good money after bad decisions. As an example, according to the New York Times,

A series of car bombs on Tuesday ripped through Baghdad in Iraq's deadliest attack in six weeks, a brutal reminder of the threat still posed by an insurgency that has killed thousands since the 2003 U.S. invasion. Health Ministry officials said 77 people died, but police sources put the figure higher at 112.

The attacks came hours before the government announced March 7 as the date for the parliamentary election, ending weeks of political bickering that had delayed the vote from mid-January and could have complicated U.S. military withdrawal plans.

While the American public gleefully supports their Nobel Peace Prize winning Commander-in-Chief in his own attempt to execute a "Dubya-esque Surge" in Afghanistan (with an additional 30,000 troops), the Iraqi situation continues to be problematic, with persistent bombings, mass causalities, and a non-functioning federal state that is incapable of independently creating the conditions necessary for American soldiers to leave at any substantial level.

Palin versus Gore on Climate Change

I have made no attempt to deny over the past year my utter contempt for Sarah Palin, otherwise to be spoken of as Caribou Barbie, the Wasilla Whack-Job, or the grand priestess of American theo-fascist buffoonery. Until now, I had decided to ignore writing about her and the zombie masses that have flocked to her media-manufactured book tour out of sheer disdain. However, the Washington Post, in an attempt to completely repudiate itself as a newspaper, has decided to publish today (9 Dec. 2009) an op-ed written (or purportedly so) by Caribou Barbie, which lambastes scientists as opportunists and frauds, scientific debate as politicized drivel, and climate change mitigation as a massive exercise in liberal taxation and socialism.

I want to remind people, exactly what Sarah Palin believes in. First, she is a bigot who stated to her father, upon returning from a brief stint at Hawaii Pacific University, that she was "uncomfortable" around Asians and Pacific Islanders. “They were a minority type thing,” her father says, “and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” She makes the claim in her pseudo-biography/ manifesto that she had a great deal of "affection" for her gay roommate from college (which no one can find), but opposes all rights for gay couples, opposes allowing gays to serve openly in the military, opposes gay-inclusive hate crimes legislation, and opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

Second, she has no background and zero credentials to discuss any subject on science. Her entire history is one that dismisses empirical fact and core scientific knowledge for superstition, innuendo, and demonstrably false lies whenever it serves her personal or political needs. Palin is an evangelical Christian that believes in creationism, thinks that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and proposes that fundamentalist dogma should be taught in every public school; she is an adherent of end-of-times theology, which involves the conversion of the believers of Judaism to Christianity and the rapture; she has made proclamations for the removal of the constitutional separation of church-and-state; and she is against cell stem research or any scientific research that she arbitrarily dislikes. With respect to climate change, she has repeatedly clung to the odious supposition, without providing any corroborating evidence, that there is no man-made (i.e. anthropogenic) element to current atmospheric or climate changes.

In the WaPo op-ed, she specifically calls the stolen emails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia, proof that, "Leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." Unwilling to address the science itself or the overwhelming consensus generated by scientists and climate researchers across the planet for more than 20-years, she states that, "while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes."

This woman is an absolute ignoramus and demagogue, who will lie and distort any fact to empower herself and the theo-fascists in the Republican Party that have surrounded her.

In response to this exhibition of white-trash duncery and recycled claptrap, Al Gore has been asked on repeated occasions to address her complaints about the entire Climate change debate and the current United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen (COP15). He states the obvious:

The global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality. After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?
The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies -- drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths [sic] in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.

These effects are taking place all over the world exactly as predicted by the scientists, who have warned for years that, if we continue putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, the accumulation -- that's going to trap lots more heat, raise temperatures, and cause all of these consequences that are already beginning.

Reasonable people can argue and dispute matters of opinion, but facts as to whether humans have injected extraordinary levels of greenhouse-effect producing gases into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution is not subject to debate; it is a fact. There is no dispute that ocean levels are rising, whether the oceans are becoming acidified due to excess C02 in the atmosphere placed there by man, or even if this past decade and the decade of the 1990's have been the warmest in recorded human history. All these statements are facts that anyone can independently verify.

The twin forces of globalization and human tribalism have locked us all into a fearful downward spiral and there appears little hope that the majority of the human species is equipped to adjust to a low carbon economy, much less understand the dire situation we have created.

How to Kill an Economy: Eliminate the Middle-Class

Elizabeth Warren, the US Chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel overseeing the TARP, has an excellent article titled "America without the Middle Class" in the Huffington Post.

The article summarizes what many have been saying for the past thirty years; the American middle class is in serious decline. The macroeconomics should be clear to everyone. Income for middle class workers has been stagnant since the late 1970's. Permanent company jobs with lifetime employability and benefits are now non-existent, as short-term contract work and a mobile class of professional workers has become the norm. The American manufacturing base, once the envy of the world, has been hollowed out through corporate globalization reaching for the lowest common denominator. Union jobs, once the backbone of the middle class, are derided and repeatedly dismissed as inefficient and anti-capitalistic, while Wall Street's financial services as a percentage of GDP have doubled during the same period.

Warren illustrates the declining purchasing power of the middle class here:

In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

In order to maintain their standing of living, the American family was initially forced into having two wage earners in the family. With greater credit and a variety of other quick-debt schemes in the 1980's, these same middle-class denizens were enticed into believing that they, like every Republican Administration since Nixon, could just charge their concerns away. Remember Cheney saying, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter!"

The underlying strength of the American economy this past century has been the growth of the middle class and their attendant purchasing practices. New homes were built around highways leading to factories; cars in every driveway that would ferry the masses; increased attendance at colleges and universities that spawned further innovation and technological growth; and increased consumerism created mega-malls filled with shiny-happy shoppers. However, as the demographics shifted from rural agriculture and domestic manufacturing to a service-based economy, the captains of high-capital rejected Henry Ford's axiom that workers needed a decent wage in order to buy their employers produce.

Professor Warren concludes:

America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security. Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety. Paying for a child's education and setting aside enough for a decent retirement have become distant dreams. Tens of millions of once-secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, watching as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pink slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff.

Indeed. Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who was on Democracy Now yesterday, also stated the obvious,

The reality is median family income has been stagnant for forty years, and the policies of what I call financialization, which is major banks trading assets back and forth, the Wall Street banks, such as Goldman, which is rightly a lightning rod right now for much of what’s going on, buying and selling, playing with tax dollars in proprietary trading—they make huge money, nothing is added to the economy, jobs are sent overseas. All of this going on simultaneously. That is what our economy has become.

The issue is simple. Government of all stripes and labels, be it Republicans or Democrats, have decided it was more important to bail out and feed the banks money borrowed by the middle-class, rather than institute policies that would nurture and enhance the middle class. As Spitzer says, "So what are the priorities, in terms of infrastructure investment, job creation, building the foundation of an economy that will permit us to be competitive so that real Americans can get jobs, not just investment bankers and lawyers?" A specific example of this short-term profit driven corporatism, is in the $12.9 Bn that was alone given to Goldman Sachs through the AIG government backed bailout. Compare that sum with the meager $4 Bn given to invest in K-12 education across the nation or the $8 Bn for high-speed trains. As usual, socialism for the rich, fuck-you-very much capitalism for the rest.

Chinese Students Caught Cheating...

Yes I know, it's a truism and anyone who has attended any university in North America consisting of a large population of Chinese students, knows that some unsavory academic behavior is not untypical.

BusinessWeek has an article titled "Crackdown on China GMAT Cheating."

The US company, which manages the Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT) recently won a copyright infringement court case in China against a local company that was distributing testing materials, questions, and answers to potential students. It also won a ruling against an American company, run by a Chinese national, "which allowed students to get a look at live questions from the GMAT exam." The scale of the operations and distribution of fraud were not elaborated in the article, but studies have shown due to the standardized nature of the Business School entrance test, more students partake in cheating than in other graduate study fields.

In addition to pursuing companies that facilitate cheating, the GMAT testing agency has

heightened security measures at testing centers [including] palm vein readers, which use infrared light to capture each test-taker's unique palm vein pattern, as well as digital photographs and passport scanners... The organization also has Web crawling software that scans 15 million Web sites every evening, looking for sites that illegally compile "live" GMAT questions.

The penalty imposed by GMAT for Chinese students committing user fraud have included revocation of test scores, notification to the universities to which the student has applied to of fraud, blocking individuals from re-taking the test for five years, and in one case, unspecified disciplinary action against one woman who, "took the GMAT on seven different occasions for seven different people."

Bankers Prepare for Open Revolution

Bloomberg has an article today on what may be the most interesting story of the year. The invertebrate vampire-squids of Goldman Sachs have been quietly seeking gun permits to protect themselves from the restless mobs and death-mail sending public. How is it that the proletarians could want to liquidate the robber-Barron's of the 21st Century? Surely, the masses know that Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs' CEO, and the squids are as Blanky said, "Doing God's work!"

The article reveals that Blanky and Company were fortifying their residences a year prior to the meltdown, by placing enhanced security fences and armed guards around their lavish estates, in excess to the norm. More importantly though, it blows the whistle on what the bailout was really about: saving the greedheads of casino-capitalism. As you see, this bullshit about efficient markets, innovative investing, and all that other gibberish spouted by the dunces on CNBC and virtually every financial bobble-head network, is just meant as high-fructose Kool-Aid for the cult-members as the real thieves take your money. Consider the following excerpt from the same Bloomberg article:

Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary during the bailout and a former Goldman Sachs CEO, let it slip during testimony to Congress last summer when he explained why it was so critical to bail out Goldman Sachs, and -- oh yes -- the other banks. People “were unhappy with the big discrepancies in wealth, but they at least believed in the system and in some form of market-driven capitalism. But if we had a complete meltdown, it could lead to people questioning the basis of the system.”

There you have it. The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one. Goldman Sachs blew its cover when the firm’s revenue from trading reached a record $27 billion in the first nine months of this year, and a public that was writhing in financial agony caught on that the profits earned on taxpayer capital were going to pay employee bonuses.

I have long said, if the people want to live free of the incompetent rule of plutocrats and their moneyed trolls, then they need to have the guillotine brought out in public and let the heads roll. Its all happened before and will happen again. We only have to remember the New Testament to know the solution:

Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. (Matthew 21:12)

More Chinese investment blunders

The following news-piece, from Al Jazeera, documents the enormous efforts the Chinese government has gone towards maintaining the illusion of growth and prosperity within their nation. They have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into so-called infrastructure with the publicly stated intention of increasing domestic mobility and instituting structural efficiencies. However, as the piece illustrates, substantial sums of that investment have gone into cosmetic and wholly unnecessary projects that may never have any real use. Consider the newly built city of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, built for over one million residents, but remains nearly vacant as no one has yet to move in.

Dubai Inc. Scuttled

There were plenty of indicators that things weren’t right at Dubai Inc. even before the fiasco emerged on Wednesday about Dubai World, the emirate’s sovereign wealth holding company. For example, in February 2009 it was reported in the Times UK that expatriates were “abandoning their cars at the airport and fleeing home rather than risk jail for defaulting on loans.” The same forces that were making their way through the capitals of high finance and choking credit were emptying out the professional classes of Dubai Inc’s most notable businesses.

Throughout the past decade, Westerners invested in Dubai’s ever more grandiose aspirations by saddling themselves with overpriced homes, that in many cases were never built, in the hope that they could prosper through perpetual ‘flipping.’ However, as the great recession spread across the globe, property values in Dubai plummeted and construction work was either delayed or outright cancelled. Businesses went unpaid, many lost substantial amounts in real estate speculation, and the economy contracted. The heady days of unrestrained double-digit growth had come to an end, and while Westerners could scurry to safer ports, the Arab rulers of this city-state could not as easily pass the bill onto others. The great de-leveraging that had begun a year earlier and had forced economic re-alignments everywhere, was upon the emirates.

With Wednesday's announcement, Dubai World effectively declared itself insolvent. “People are panicking: this whole process counters everything that the rulers [of Dubai] have been saying and the way it has been communicated before the holidays is confusing,” said one hedge fund manager. International investors across the globe reacted with equal outrage at Dubai World's announcement. Markets declined sharply, with commodities such as gold and oil falling and investors moving to safer investments.

Overall, Dubai World and its real estate arm Nakheel, is shouldering some $60bn (£36.5bn) in debt and was due to repay around $4bn next month. Abu Dhabi, with its oil-rich cash reserves had been touted by both the ruling family of Dubai and investors alike as the most obvious source of assistance. However, it is also widely understood that Abu Dhabi has grown annoyed and frustrated at Dubai's profligacy and was not willing to simply hand over money carte-blanc. Business Week states,

It's been obvious for some time that the emirate owes more money than it can repay. But what remained unclear was the overall extent of the debt load and what officials were doing to avert a panic at a time when the world was in the nascent stages of emerging from its worst recession in over six decades.

Although the amount is not significant in global terms, it presents the undesirable possibility that many other countries (i.e. Greece, Latvia, Hungary…etc) and issues that have been hidden, such as in the case of China, may likewise follow. Arnab Das, of Roubini Global Economics, provides a moderate's assessment of the current circumstances in Bloomberg,

The Dubai situation signifies that although the major central banks around the world have stabilized the financial system, they can’t make all the excesses simply disappear. We still have to work out those balance sheet stresses. The recovery is proceeding, but significant challenges still lie ahead.

Sucky, Sucky, Mr. Jones?

Apparently the real emerging market is not to be found in the Mekong delta or in the bustling streets of Rio de Janeiro, but rather in the pants of lonely Western men, who are desperately in search of that perfectly porcelain-skinned oriental beauty.

Some cunning Beijing entrepreneur (or at least that's the claim) has come up with an i-phone application that allows any man who has fallen victim of a restraining order in the West, to exhibit his worldly grasp of Mandarin through this app and seek the ideal oriental mate.

The creators of the application ask worthy consumers whether they have ever "found [themselves] speechless while dating a Chinese girl?" How one lands a date with someone, who doesn't speak the same language is another question. Although perhaps when the creators of this application talk about dates, they are actually speaking about the nightly rituals and exchanges of bodily fluids that occur in Shanghai's less than refined nightclubs.

Angry Asian Man finds the whole thing sad. Not me! Given that the Chinese have stolen all these jobs from these hard working American men, it is only fair that they have at least the chance to strike back at the heart of their nemesis. As I'm sure Confucius once said, "All's fair in love and trade wars caused by globalization Mr. Jones."

Democrats attempt to Deep-6 FED Audit Bill

The Ron Paul (R-TX) and Alan Grayson (D-FL) amendment to HR 3996, the “Financial Stability Improvement Act of 2009,″ allows the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct a wide-ranging audit of the financial activities of the Federal Reserve Board. Specifically:

• Removes the blanket restrictions on GAO audits of the Fed
  
• Allows audit of every item on the Fed’s balance sheet, all credit facilities, all securities purchase programs, etc.
  
• Retains limited audit exemption on unreleased transcripts and minutes
  
• Sets 180-day time lag before details of Fed’s market actions may be released
  
• States that nothing in the amendment shall be construed as interference in or dictation of monetary policy by Congress or the GAO
  

This amendment, if enacted, would permit for the first time, since the inception of the US Federal Reserve in 1913, a complete examination of the underlying financial machinations of this institution.

Only to prove their critics point, that this bankers-only club is rotten to its core, current Chairman Ben Bernake, FED lawyers, and an assortment of affiliated yes-men have said implicitly or as in the case of former FED Governor Laurence Meyer explicitly that, "U.S. stocks, bonds and the dollar would collapse" if the US Federal Reserve was audited. In other words, according to these finely tailored gentlemen, if the current institution is audited, they suggest that the entire financial system of the United States of America, maybe even the world, will be ruined! The conclusion is clear: only a system based on fraud, corruption, and extreme kleptocratic policies that are meant to enrich a small coterie of elite entities (ex. post-Soviet Russia in the 1990's and their oligarchs and criminal syndicates), would make such outrageous statements, if subject to the same rules of transparency, openness, and accountability that every other small business is. The end of crony-capitalism is near, and the only question left is whether the greed-heads in control will take the whole world down with them?

The Torture Debate: Making comparisons

NY Times Editorial column comes down hard on the cowardice that has become the legal system in America when it comes to addressing the high crimes of the Bush junta. It makes the comparison between the Maher Arar case that was recently dismissed in American courts versus the verdict issued last week against CIA operatives in Italy regarding the extraordinary rendition of an Islamic cleric. Again and again as the editorial elaborates, the US judiciary dismisses these cases of gross institutional criminality on the basis of fatuous "state secrets" claims or punts the claimant's to higher courts.

***

NYT: A National Disgrace

Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture. The Italian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong.

In Italy, a judge ruled that a station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency and 22 other Americans broke the law in the 2003 abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim cleric who ended up in Egypt, where he said he was tortured.

Two days earlier, a federal appeals court in Manhattan brushed off a lawsuit by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was seized in an American airport by federal agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials. He was held incommunicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was tortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians let him go.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided that none of that entitled Mr. Arar to a day in court.

In Mr. Nasr’s case, authorities said that they had reason to suspect he was involved in recruiting militants to go to Iraq. It has long been established that Mr. Arar was not guilty of anything. Canada admitted that it had supplied false information to American authorities, and in 2007, it apologized and offered Mr. Arar $10 million in damages. Neither the Bush nor Obama administrations followed suit, leaving Mr. Arar to pursue litigation.

In June 2008, a three-judge panel of the same court dismissed Mr. Arar’s civil rights suit on flimsy grounds. The court then took a rare step, scheduling a rehearing before all of the court’s active members before an appeal was filed. Sadly, the full court’s decision is even more insensitive to the violation of his rights and the courts’ duty to hold government accountable for breaches of the law.

Written by Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs, the 59-page majority opinion held that no civil damages remedy exists for the horrors visited on Mr. Arar. To “decide how to implement extraordinary rendition,” he wrote, is “for the elected members of Congress — and not for us as judges.” Allowing suits against policy makers for rendition and torture would “affect diplomacy, foreign policy and the security of the nation,” Judge Jacobs said.

The ruling distorts precedent and the Constitutional separation of powers to deny justice to Mr. Arar and give officials a pass for egregious misconduct. The overt disregard for the central role of judges in policing executive branch excesses has frightening implications for safeguarding civil liberties, as four judges suggested in dissenting opinions.

It is painful to recall that this is the same federal circuit court that declared in 1980 that even foreigners accused of torture in foreign countries can be called to account in American courts.

The torturer is the “enemy of all mankind,” the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declared back then. One of the dissenters, Judge Guido Calabresi, said that “when the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay.”

The damage to Mr. Arar, America’s reputation and the rule of law is already quite plain. The Supreme Court should reverse this ruling.

Chillout Session: Rammstein ("Das Model")

The Demon of 85 Broad St.: Goldman Sachs

Brian Griffiths, A Goldman Sachs International adviser, recently told a forum on investment ethics in the UK that, “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all.” You have to give it to these folks at Goldman Sachs; they are indisputably some of the most immoral creatures slithering up and down the financial food-chain.

McClatchy Newspapers has published a four-part series on Goldman Sachs investment strategies in the American housing market. The articles outline how the company grew unbelievably rich by,

making massive bets against the housing market while simultaneously selling off billions in soon-to-be worthless securities. In 2006 and 2007, the bank reportedly peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in US housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

As impressive as Goldman Sachs earnings are, their true achievement isn’t making it big through casino-capitalism. No, its greatest accomplishment is creating a world-wide network of faithful former employees that are embedded throughout the regulatory and legislative branches of government, allowing them to place themselves at the center of a global financial system that has effectively co-opted democracy. The entire securitization game has been shown to be a complex scheme that utilizes outright fraud, deception, and market manipulation to achieve exorbitant profits for the demon bankers insulated at 85 Broad St. New York.

The articles elaborate how throughout the years leading up to the crash, “Goldman Sachs used its name to buy, bundle and sell some of the worst investments in the history of trading. It jumped into the subprime game with dubious mortgage lenders. And it played it ruthlessly, selling off toxic assets that carried bogus quality ratings and the assurance of its venerable name.”

McClatchy's investigation found that Goldman Sachs:

• Bought and converted into high-yield bonds tens of thousands of mortgages from subprime lenders that became the subjects of FBI investigations into whether they'd misled borrowers or exaggerated applicants' incomes to justify making hefty loans.
  
• Used offshore tax havens to shuffle its mortgage-backed securities to institutions worldwide, including European and Asian banks, often in secret deals run through the Cayman Islands, a British territory in the Caribbean that companies use to bypass U.S. disclosure requirements.
  
• Has dispatched lawyers across the country to repossess homes from bankrupt or financially struggling individuals, many of whom lacked sufficient credit or income but got subprime mortgages anyway because Wall Street made it easy for them to qualify.
  
• Was buoyed last fall by key federal bailout decisions, at least two of which involved then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former Goldman chief executive whose staff at Treasury included several other Goldman alumni.

The conclusion one must realize is that Goldman Sachs is not serving its intended commercial and societal purpose of allocating capital to create an efficient market-place nor is it enhancing the public sphere by enriching productive companies. Their racket is and has been to generate maximum earnings solely for themselves at the detriment to society, by exploiting "so-called sophisticated investors", who in actual fact are just dumb insitutional players who knew less than them, and simply steal their money; even if they have to change the laws to do so.

As Dylan Ratigan says,

Now this method of "business" is only possible if the government continues to allow these crooked insurance contracts to be written in secret, allows them to hold little or no money in reserve for payment and allows them to sell enough coverage on enough vital national assets that if there is a default -- the taxpayer has no choice but to pay.

No meaningful legislative change will occur, because the US government and the demon bankers of Broad Street, are one and the same. Just see a few of the recent parties in government (Republican and Democrat) with ties to Goldman Sachs.

Adam Storch: Appointed the SEC’s first Chief Operating Officer on Oct. 15, 2009. This branch of government regulates the securitization industry, including mortgage backed CDO’s and related derivative products. The 29 year old Storch comes directly from Goldman Sach’s business intelligence unit.

Henry Paulson: Served as Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush. Was CEO of Goldman from 1999 to 2006.

Robert Rubin: Served as Treasury Secretary under President Clinton. Previously, he was co-chairman of Goldman from 1990 to 1992.

Robert K. Steel: Served as Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance, the principal adviser to the secretary on matters of domestic finance and led the department’s activities with respect to the domestic financial system, fiscal policy and operations, governmental assets and liabilities, and related economic and financial matters. Retired from Goldman as a vice chairman of the firm in 2004, where he worked as head of equities for Europe and head of the Equities Division in New York.

Mark Patterson: Chief of Staff to Secretary Tim Geithner. Was director of government affairs at Goldman.

Dan Jester: Key adviser to Geithner, who played a key role in shaping the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Was strategic officer at Goldman.

The list goes on. For a comprehensive listing of the numerous figures in positions of government authority that were associated with G-S visit the following link.

Taxi Drivers to the Dark Side Convicted

In common law, rendition "is a transfer of persons from one jurisdiction to another, and the act of handing over, both after legal proceedings and according to law." Whereas, extraordinary rendition is a rendition, which is illegal and exists outside the bounds of international law. Although the practice has existed for some time, according to the ACLU, it was refined during the Clinton administration by CIA officials in the mid-1990s who were trying to track down and dismantle militant Islamic organizations throughout the Middle East. What came next under the watchful eye of the Bush junta and its own clandestine services, has come to exemplify the reckless cowboy-like swagger and irresponsibility of both the policies and people tasked to execute those orders.

Canadians are well versed in the tawdry details involved with the Mahar Arar extraordinary rendition case. As summarized in Wikipedia:

Arar, a Syrian-born dual Syrian and Canadian citizen, was detained at Kennedy International Airport on 26 September 2002, by US Immigration and Naturalization Service officials. He was heading home to Canada after a family holiday in Tunisia. After almost two weeks, enduring hours of interrogation chained, he was sent, shackled and bound, in a private jet to Jordan and then Syria, instead of being extradited to Canada. There, he was interrogated and tortured by Syrian intelligence. Maher Arar was eventually released a year later. He told the BBC that he was repeatedly tortured during 10 months' detention in Syria — often whipped on the palms of his hands with metal cables. Syrian intelligence officers forced him to sign a confession linking him to Al Qaeda. He was finally released following intervention by the Canadian government.

These illegal embarrassments, when revealed, have been completely ignored by the American judiciary and investigations into criminal activities committed by the Executive under George W. Bush have been scuttled by the Obama administration. However, not all countries consider the principles of justice to be malleable and subordinate to governmental abuse. After years legal blockage, an Italian judge has sentenced 23 Americans in absentia to up to eight years in prison on Wednesday for the abduction and extraordinary rendition of a Muslim cleric.

The case surrounds the actions of CIA agents, who were tasked with "the secret kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan in early 2003, his transport via US airbases in Italy and Germany to Egypt, and there, evidently with the CIA station chief for Italy riding shotgun, directly into the hands of Egyptian torturers." The problem with the whole affair was that their actions were anything but secret. Believing they were immune from all prosecution and international law, the agents were observed by Italian police publicly talking on their cell phones, running up huge expenses at luxury hotels, and were caught in their rental cars by local traffic cameras "as they drove illegally through pedestrian walkways." Obviously not being able to watch the Bourne Ultimatum in cinema, they were completely unaware of how clandestine operations were to be conducted.

According to the NY Times,

The heaviest sentence -- eight years in prison -- was handed down to the former head of the CIA's Milan station, Robert Seldon Lady, while 21 other former agents got five years each. U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Romano was also sentenced to five years, despite a request from the Pentagon that the case should be tried by U.S. courts. [Judge] Magi dropped the case against three Americans, including a former CIA Rome station chief, because of diplomatic immunity. Charges were also dropped against five Italians, including the former head of the Sismi military intelligence service, Nicolo Pollari, because evidence against them violated state secrecy rules. However, the judge sentenced two more junior Sismi agents to three years in prison as accomplices, indicating Italian authorities were aware of the abduction.

Instead of having foreign governments with an independent judiciary prosecute the criminal activities of the CIA and members of the Bush administration, the Democratic led Congress and Presidency should be reaffirming constitutional law and prosecuting those persons, agencies, and officials who violated America's treaty obligations and casually prescribed kidnapping, murder, and torture as America's new modus operandi in fighting terrorism. Then again, that would entail caring about anything other than just being elected.

Another Japanese First: A Comic Book Library

According to France24,

"In a move to promote serious study of Japanese manga, a university in Tokyo plans to open a library with two million comic books, animation drawings, video games and other cartoon industry artifacts. Tentatively named the Tokyo International Manga Library, it would open by early 2015 on the campus of the private Meiji University, and be available to researchers and fans from Japan and abroad."

To those of the wider public who have never read or watched Japanese animation, although your children definitely have, it is an ornate and bizarre world (somewhat like Japan culture itself) that includes a broad range of subjects: action-adventure, romance, sports and games, historical drama, comedy, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, horror, sexuality, and business and commerce, among others. Unlike the uber-geek "Comic Book-Guy," who peddles his wares to children in the television cartoon The Simpson's, the manga genre is embraced by people of all ages in Japan.

Manga itself is a hybrid art that combines historical Japanese motifs and modern Western styles of animation. These highly stylized comic-book novels and their televised adaptions, have over the decades depicted the continuous cultural development of the Japanese people and its larger society since the Second World War. The gekiga style of drawing (emotionally dark, realistic, and sometimes violent) focuses on the day-in, day-out grim realities of life, and is often drawn in a fashion that has been described as 'gritty'.

Unlike a number of Japanese re-inventions that have failed to find a foot-hold outside of Japan, Anime or Japanese Animation has produced a significant following around the world. As an example, Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies were based on a 1972-3 manga released in Japan called Lady Snowblood. In North America over the past few decades, a variety of children's television programing have highlighted Anime. These westernized adaptions include shows like Sailor Moon, which has been exported to more than 23 countries, and Pokemon, which has spawned a dozen movies and a worldwide audience.

As odd as it may seem, a serious academic exploration of the cultural roots and influence of Japanese animation on modernist artwork and global pop-culture is warranted.

Arigatou gozaimasu.

US Q3 GDP Breakdown

Celebrations have broken out across the American nation, declaring the end of the Great Recession. Statistics published by the government claim that the nation grew at an annualized rate of 3.5%. Consumption, which is almost 71% of GDP contributed roughly proportionally to the increase in GDP. Investment as a whole, which has fallen to just about 11% of GDP amounted to approximately 35% of Q3 growth. However, a further breakdown of the data provides a revealing look at the continued lack of real improvement and growth in the American economy.

Auto Sales: 1.66%, or almost half, of the 3.5% increase in GDP can be attributed to "Cash for Clunkers" program. Upon termination, auto sales dramatically declined and returned to levels seen earlier in the recession. According to Reuters, "U.S. consumers are expected to buy only between 10 million and 10.5 million cars and light trucks this year, well below the pre-recession peak near 17 million hit in 2005." It is therefore certain that future vehicle sales will not have as much contribution as this quarter.

Housing Tax Credit: An $8,000 tax credit was offered to first time buyers of houses as an incentive. This program added another 0.53% to GDP. According to Bloomberg, "Many buyers accelerated purchases of new homes to take advantage of the $8,000 tax credit before it expires Nov. 30." Systematic fraud has been observed in the program. Out of the 400,000 people who participated in the program, at least 70,000 cases could have been fraudulent, as in 500 cases where children applied for the credit. In addition, sales of new homes decreased for the first time in six months, falling 3.6%. Year-over-year, new home sales were 7.8% lower and the year-over-year median sales price of a new home fell 9.1%. Foreclosure rates are up 5% in the Q3 and are at record highs in Nevada, Arizona and California. Altogether, the housing market is far from stabilized and little reprieve should be anticipated.

Military Expenditures: National defense increased 8.4 percent or 0.45% of GDP. This portion represents continued combat in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan and other related Pentagon build-ups. In terms of real stimulus value, this is the worst of the lot. Under the Bush years, GDP was always inflated due to the immense cost and waste incurred by the GWOT. Iraq alone is still costing the US taxpayer, as of October 2009, nearly $8 billion dollars a month. Unlike infrastructure and other forms of long-term domestic investment in such things as people and the environment, military expenditures are a black hole. There is no wealth creation in producing bullets or tanks except to those who manufacture these implements of war.

Inventory: The final reason for this past quarter’s growth is through companies dumping inventory, though less aggressively than during the previous quarter. This too is hardly any reason to be dancing in the streets.

Thus, what can be discerned from the poor growth numbers is that the government’s attempts at pump-priming the economy, in hopes of restarting the engines of growth, have been inadequate and in the long-term, possibly fruitless as the recession continues to shed jobs, shutter real businesses, and foreclose on homes. The conceit of the consumer being king is dead; the bills are past due, consumer confidence is shot, and everyone is hoarding every penny they have.

At least the rat-bastards at Goldman Sachs are happy.

Ahmadinejad's Poor Choice of Analogies

Under an agreement hammered out by negotiators from France, the US, and Russia, Iran would send 1.2 tons of low-enriched uranium to Russia in a single shipment, where it would be converted to fuel exclusively for a Iranian research reactor. However, Iran's president Ahmadinejad has refused to respond to the proposal and wants in typical fashion to have more discussions on the matter.

In my opinion, Ahmadinejad has always been underwhelming. He clearly has no grasp of international politics and by his own pathetic antics in this summer's bloody suppression, has shown that his primary interest is in propping up the corrupt and exceedingly maladroit theocrats of Tehran. This past Sunday, in response to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's comment that the US was "not going to wait forever" for a response to the IAEA's proposal, Ahmadinejad gave this classic bit of mindless frivolity:

"While enemies have used all their capacities ... the Iranian nation is standing powerfully and they are like a mosquito," a government Web site quoted Ahmadinejad early Sunday as saying. ... "Given the negative record of Western powers, the Iranian government ... looks at the talks with no trust. But realities dictate to them to interact with the Iranian nation.

A mosquito? I'm assuming he meant housefly or some other irritating insect, because there is no single animal that has caused more misery and death than the mosquito. Alexander the Great who conquered and dispatched the ancient Persians was fallen not by foreign swords but by the malaria parasite delivered by a mosquito. Entire armies have been wiped out by malaria and other mosquito borne illnesses throughout the course of history. During the American civil war, for example, malaria accounted for 1,316,000 episodes of illness and 10,000 deaths. The parasite furthermore fell more allied troops in the Pacific theater during World War II than did enemy combat.

If Ahmadinejad does mean to equate the West with mosquitoes, then he should prepare for an adversary that has proven both unstoppable and ultimately lethal.