Olberman about says it all in last nights Special Comment.

Shut The Hell Up Bush!: Part 1

Shut The Hell Up, Bush!: Part 2

It kind of makes Mr. C. want to stand up and applaud!

Mr. C read the following article from Alternet. It reminded him of who the real movers and shakers are in this F*#$%ed up world really are. Like any crime, all that you have to do is figure out who really benefits to find the culprit.

If you are still on the fence thinking that the Bushtards have your best interests in mind then move along. If on the other hand, you know that the current US government and most others in the world really dance to the tune of another piper other than their citizens then keep following the rabbit hole.

Hedge Fund Titans Are Treating Us Like Pawns in Their Economic Chess Games

By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on May 13, 2008, Printed on May 13, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/84682/

Recently, two important and related events occurred. The first is that hedge fund kingpin Cerberus Capital Management was considering buying Blackwater, the notoriously Orwellian security contractor that has become the scourge of Iraq and America alike. And the second event? As soon as the news was reported, the deal was killed.

Neither company, you see, likes the publicity. Plus, with Blackwater in its portfolio, Cerberus would have more than lived up to the origin of its name, which comes from Greek mythology. Yes, Cerberus is the three-headed demon dog that guards the gates of Hell.

“We do our best to avoid the spotlight,” secretive Cerberus founder Stephen Feinberg reportedly told his staff in a memo earlier this year, “but unfortunately, when you do some large deals, such as Chrysler and GMAC, it is hard to avoid.”

True, Stephen, true. When you bail out two of the worst environmental and economic offenders in the automotive business (and subprime debacle, in the case of GMAC), and then follow that up by looking into acquiring what passes for a private army with itchy trigger-fingers and a suspicious habit of corruption and cost overruns, well yeah, people will talk.

The irony is more than sweet; it is transparent, at least for private equity groups, hedge funds, and those that follow and capitalize upon them. As for you, if you find such talk about what on the surface looks like a financial organization to be alarmist, then it might be time you read up on hedge funds. As I wrote last year, private equity groups and hedge funds play both sides of the global economy, its destruction and reconstruction, its war and its peace, its bears and bulls. And they do so by manipulating markets, multinationals and the media with practically zero governmental regulation or oversight, to the tune of paydays that redefine opulence and waste.

Like the similarly invested Milo Minderbinder said in Joseph Heller’s brilliant novel of war and capitalism Catch 22: “Anyone who would not steal from the country he loved would not steal from anyone.”

Take John Paulson, for example, who took home $3.7 billion last year, which is stunning considering that, as of June 2007, his hedge fund Paulson and Co. had $12.5 billion in assets under management. By my crude math, Paulson walked away with about a third of that worth by himself. George Soros and Renaissance Technologies’ James Simons were right behind Feinberg, with $2.9 billion and $2.8 billion respectively, while average compensation for hedge funds’ top 25 managers cashed in at $892 million in 2007, an explosive increase of 68 percent over the previous year. In other words, one could say in all confidence that hedge funds, whose financial instruments range from conventional stockpicking to proprietary quantitative computer modeling, are getting paid megabucks during a panic-stricken time of economic collapse, endless war and repressive stagflation.

What one could argue, with an increasing degree of confidence, is that those things are all inextricable.

Take Soros, a grandfather of the hedge fund industry, who made his name as the man who “broke the bank of England” by currency speculation, which is to say manipulation. In 1992, after shorting more than $10 billion worth in pounds, Soros’ cutthroat maneuver forced the bank to devalue its currency, a move that netted him over a billion alone. Similar moves against Thailand’s riggit incited former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad to call Soros an economic war criminal who uses the misfortunes of those beneath his speculation to acquire money for himself. But at least Soros is sharing some of his ill-gotten goods: He’s a well-known progressive who’s backing Obama, and for that he has been rewarded with intense scrutiny and attacks from the hypocrites at Fox News and elsewhere.

The same, however, cannot be said about his peers. Paulson’s Wikipedia entry is a mere stub, while Simons’ entry talks more about his philanthropy and autism research than it does his political views or financial instruments. Meanwhile, their official sites are as indistinct as they are secretive. One would imagine that Simons, after scoring $2.8 billion in 2007 alone, could afford an upgrade of Renaissance Technologies Corp.’s practically blank site, and the same goes for Paulson and Co. That is, for people who are making Hummers full of cash off of the American economy and its vicissitudes, Paulson and Simons are sure acting like players who don’t want anyone else snooping around their game.

Paulson’s game is especially interesting: He made his billions after devising complex, and unexplained, financial instruments to profit from the housing collapse and increasing foreclosures. While Joe and Jane American were getting kicked to the curb at home and on the job, Paulson was breaking the bank wide open. He’s not totally heartless: After all, he donated $15 million, or about two-hundredths of his bonanza, to a nonprofit designed to keep homeowners in their houses. (Whattaguy!) Even worse, after he nailed his big payday as the housing Ponzi scheme, and the hedge funds who built it up, collapsed last August, Paulson hired none other than Alan Greenspan, whose perversely slashed interest rates following 9/11 kickstarted the housing meltdown, to be his exclusive financial Nostradamus.

Greenspan, as time has illustrated, is peerless at driving an economy into the ground, while Paulson, as the balance sheet explains, is proving to be talented at profiting off of it. That is how inextricable these things are.

All of which brings us to our current crises of speculation, now that the dream of affordable housing and cheap credit is all but dead with a “for sale” sign stabbed through its heart. Right now, the money is in food and oil, which by no accident happen to be exponentially shrinking resources in the crosshairs of global warming. As land dries up across Earth, and so-called Third World entities like India and China enter the First World’s overstretched hyperconsumption, demand for everything is exploding while stores are shrinking. And as resources shrink, so do benefits and wages for the middle class.

In fact, while hedge funds and private equity groups exploited the misfortunes of those caught beneath currency, housing or internet bubbles, the rest of us watched as the American Dream was being dismantled piece by piece. The $20 an hour wage that had allowed access into the American middle class is now devolving: As a recent article in the International Herald Tribune explained, since the 1970s “the percentage of people earning at least $20 an hour has eroded in every sector of the economy, falling last year to 18 percent of all hourly workers from 23 percent in 1979 — a gradual unwinding of the post-World War II gains.” In 2007, a hedge fund manager had to take home at least $360 million, more than 18 times what s/he had to pull down in 2002, to be considered a player. The American family, by contrast, had to earn more than the median $60,500. And as the former is going up like a rocket, the latter is sinking like a stone.

And if things get any worse, stones might be all that average families have to eat in the coming decades as the climate crisis amplifies and destroys what’s left of America’s breadbasket. As it is now, prices for everything from wheat, rice, corn and more are skyrocketing, squeezing First World offenders like America with double-digit increases and Third World victims like Haiti, and Egypt with food riots and destabilized infrastructures. While big-box retailers like Wal-Mart and Costco are limiting purchases of food staples here at home, overseas the so-called silent tsunami of market-based starvation is already under way. It is no accident that the food and oil crises have reaped fat checks for companies trafficking in energy: Exxon’s first quarter profit from 2008 was a galling $10.9 billion, the world’s second-highest ever, behind only its fourth quarter 2007 profit of $11.7 billion). Meanwhile, agrichem titan Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and other food producers have gotten into the energy game, as well as the lucrative food game they already own. Capitalizing on the switch to ethanol, which exists only because of the rampant speculation on oil, ADM now makes billions from growing corn not to put into our bodies, but our fleet.

So, how long do we have before the whole thing explodes into a global conflagration? A better question to ask is this: Who will profit off of that explosion? By destabilizing everything from the currency and housing markets to resuscitating wastrels like Chrysler, GMAC and Clear Channel — and even down to possibly buying up its own private armies — hedge funds, private equity groups and other secretive, unregulated financial institutions have gone, ironically enough, utterly transparent. It is now easier than ever to see, by their acquisitions, paydays and disgraceful hires, how the rest of us are mere pawns in their economic chess games. We can see our dystopia clearly in the distance, as temperature records are broken by the month and hostile takeovers, whether in Iraq or on Wall Street, leverage death and depression for the sake of profit.

And it may look like science fiction still, but give it time and it may look like home. And this time around, you won’t own it. It will own you.

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

What do you do when you help a large corporation, like Dow Chemical, get out of having to clean up your mess? Well if you are a “public” aka. (corporate) servant like Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson, you just refuse to testify to congress on why you help corporations dodge to bullet of responsibility.

What do you give as your excuse? You just say that your back hurts and hand the judge your doctors excuse. Just make sure that the note is not from Dr. Strangelove. :-0

From The Washington Post:

Too Sore to Answer Questions

Speaking of administrator Johnson, he was scheduled to appear at a hearing tomorrow of Rep. Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, but that has been postponed because Johnson’s got some back problems.

No, it was not from carrying heavy golf bags or luggage on his important two-week tour of Australia last month. He had plenty of staff help for that.

EPA officials say Johnson had a “recurrence of ongoing back issues stemming from a car accident years ago.” Something like this happened another time he was to appear for a ritual pummeling — which is what happens when any administration official appears before Waxman (D-Calif.). No new date for a hearing has been set.

Meanwhile, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), whom Johnson stiffed to go to Australia, is still lying in wait for him if he survives Waxman.

From Think Progress:

EPA’s Johnson Claims ‘Ongoing Back Issues’ Prevent Him From Testifying Before Congress»

As each day brings new scandals involving the Environmental Protection Agency to light, the pressure for EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson to respond is growing. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA)’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee had scheduled a hearing for tomorrow with Johnson to testify on White House interference with ozone standards.

Today, Al Kamen reports that the hearing has been postponed because Johnson refused to appear:

EPA officials say Johnson had a “recurrence of ongoing back issues stemming from a car accident years ago.”

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is conducting a hearing right now into the politicization of EPA scientific decisions (live webcast). Administrator Johnson declined the invitation to appear.

The Wonk Room wishes Administrator Johnson well and hopes that his recurring back pain subsides. Once he recovers, he should be ready to testify on these and other ongoing scandals involving his agency:

UPDATE: Council on Foreign Relations fellow and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson argues today in the Washington Post:

There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a “war on science.”

UPDATE II: The Sacramento Bee reports that the EPA will probably not regulate toxic rocket fuel contamination of water:

In a Senate hearing Tuesday, EPA assistant water chief Benjamin Grumbles did not dispute studies showing that perchlorate increases risks of brain damage in fetuses and infants and thyroid disorders in adults.

But, Grumbles said, there’s a “distinct possibility” the environmental agency won’t take action because they don’t know whether regulation would meaningfully reduce those risks.

What do you do if you if you were caught dumping toxic chemicals into the environment? Worse yet, what do you do when after delaying cleaning up your mess, the EPA finally insists that you begin cleaning up?

Well, if your Dow Chemical, or any other conservative corporation, you call your local Bush mafia representative. After all, the Bush administration is the best corporate protection racket money can buy.

Update: 05-07-2008

The Washington Post’s Al Kamen points out that the EPA said Gade was leaving for “personal reasons” about 1.5 hours after the Chicago Tribune (second story below) broke the story.

Don’t Do Any Environment Stuff

Loop Fans know to be highly skeptical of those political announcements that a top administration official is resigning “to spend more time with the family,” or maybe to “return to his first love,” coin collecting or weight lifting. These phrases are almost always euphemisms for getting the boot or being squeezed out.

But there was even greater skepticism Thursday at the Environmental Protection Agency when deputy administrator Marcus Peacock circulated this e-mail to senior officials at 5:06 p.m. about the resignation of EPA’s administrator in the Chicago region.

Subject: Region 5 Personnel Announcement

As of this afternoon, Thursday, May 1, 2008, Mary Gade has resigned her position as Regional Administrator for EPA Region 5. I want to thank Mary for her many years of service to the people and the mission of EPA.

She has worked hard to help protect human health and our environment.

Mary plans to return to private life and spend time with her family.

Bharat Mathur, the Deputy Regional Administrator, will assume the responsibilities of Acting Regional Administrator. I thank Bharat for his continued service and leadership.

Problem was, the e-mail came 1 1/2 hours after the Chicago Tribune posted a story online quoting Gade, who said she had been forced out of her job because of her aggressive stand on dioxin flowing from Dow Chemical’s Midland, Mich., plant into Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron.

Gade said two political appointees at headquarters told her to quit or be fired by June 1. The EPA confirmed she was leaving but declined to discuss a personnel matter.

Gade, appointed by President Bush 18 months ago, told the Tribune: “There is no question this is about Dow. I stand behind what I did and what my staff did. I’m proud of what we did.”

Gade had been trying to force Dow to clean up several inland hot spots contaminated by the cancer-causing chemical. She told the Tribune that top aides to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson repeatedly questioned her actions against the chemical giant.

Next thing you know, she “plans to return to private life and spend time with her family.”

EPA official ousted while fighting Dow

By Michael Hawthorne

Tribune reporter

May 2, 2008

SAGINAW, Mich.

The battle over dioxin contamination in this economically stressed region had been raging for years when a top Bush administration official turned up the pressure on Dow Chemical to clean it up.

On Thursday, following months of internal bickering over Mary Gade’s interactions with Dow, the administration forced her to quit as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Midwest office, based in Chicago.

Gade told the Tribune she resigned after two aides to national EPA administrator Stephen Johnson took away her powers as regional administrator and told her to quit or be fired by June 1.

The call came as the Tribune was preparing to publish a story about the dioxin issue and Gade’s crusade.

Jonathan Shradar, an EPA spokesman in Washington, said Gade has been placed on administrative leave until June 1. He declined further comment, saying the agency does not publicly discuss personnel matters.

Gade has been locked in a heated dispute with Dow about long-delayed plans to clean up dioxin-saturated soil and sediment that extends 50 miles beyond its Midland, Mich., plant into Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron. The company dumped the highly toxic and persistent chemical into local rivers for most of the last century.

Many local residents see Dow as a lifeline in region plagued by plant closings and layoffs. But all along the two wide streams that cut through this old industrial town, signs warn people to keep off dioxin-contaminated riverbanks and to avoid eating fish pulled from the fast-moving waters. Officials have taken the swings down in one riverside park to discourage kids from playing there. Men in rubber boots and thick gloves occasionally knock on doors, asking residents whether they can dig up a little soil in the yard.

Gade, appointed by President Bush as regional EPA administrator in September 2006, invoked emergency powers last summer to order the company to remove three hotspots of dioxin near its Midland headquarters.

She demanded more dredging in November, when it was revealed that dioxin levels along a park in Saginaw were 1.6 million parts per trillion, the highest amount ever found in the U.S.

Dow then sought to cut a deal on a more comprehensive cleanup. But Gade ended the negotiations in January, saying Dow was refusing to take action necessary to protect public health and wildlife. Dow responded by appealing to officials in Washington, according to heavily redacted letters the Tribune obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Regional EPA administrators typically have wide latitude to enforce environmental laws, but in April Gade drew fire from officials in Washington after she sent contractors to test soil in a Saginaw neighborhood where Dow had found high dioxin levels. The levels in one Saginaw yard were nearly six times higher than the federal cleanup standard, and 65 times higher than what Michigan considers acceptable.

On Thursday, Gade said of her resignation: “There’s no question this is about Dow. I stand behind what I did and what my staff did. I’m proud of what we did.”

Dioxin, measured in trillionths of a gram because it is so toxic, was a manufacturing byproduct of the herbicide Agent Orange and other chlorinated chemicals. Company documents show Dow knew by the mid-1960s that it could make people sick or even kill them. Citing years of independent studies, the EPA says dioxin causes cancer and disrupts the immune and reproductive systems, even at very low levels.

Concerns about dioxin contamination were behind two of the most infamous environmental disasters in U.S. history: the evacuations of the Love Canal neighborhood in upstate New York and the entire town of Times Beach, Mo.

But in the Saginaw area, cleanup remains stalled, mainly because Dow asserts the contamination does not threaten people or wildlife.

“There is all of this mystique about dioxin,” said John Musser, a Dow spokesman. “Just because it’s there doesn’t mean there is an imminent health threat.”

Dow says it has agreed in principle to restore polluted areas but is contesting how it should be done—which critics view as more stalling.

“Denial and delay has been part of Dow’s game plan for years,” said Michelle Hurd Riddick, a Saginaw nurse and member of the Lone Tree Council, a local environmental group. “They still haven’t delivered.”

Dow was forced to stop releasing dioxin into waterways in the mid-1980s. But when high levels of dioxin were found in fish from Saginaw Bay around the same time, Dow repeatedly claimed it wasn’t responsible, saying the chemical had settled into the water from air pollution caused by forest fires and wood-burning fireplaces.

Dow and Michigan officials took until 2003 to negotiate legal guidelines for a comprehensive cleanup. The company later paid to scour the interiors of more than 300 homes and spread wood chips outside to reduce exposure to contaminated soil. At the same time, Dow’s political allies tried to relax the state’s dioxin standards.

More recently, Dow financed a University of Michigan study that the company and its supporters say shows dioxin in soil and sediment has little to do with levels of the chemical in people. The EPA cautions the study hasn’t been peer-reviewed and appears to underestimate health risks.

“Dow has powerful sway in that area and in the state as a whole,” said Dave Dempsey, a former Michigan activist who was environment adviser in the 1980s to then-Gov. James Blanchard. “But with all of the information out there about dioxin, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to avoid doing something.”

At the center of the latest dispute was Gade, who as a corporate attorney had represented big companies like Dow against environmental regulators. Her aggressive action against Dow surprised the company, local activists and her Washington bosses. But she still won high marks from EPA officials during her last performance evaluation.

The steps Gade took were influenced in part by her experience as an EPA staffer during the early 1980s, when the agency’s top official in Washington was forced to resign after he allowed Dow to censor an EPA study documenting dioxin’s dangers.

“We have a responsibility to make sure people are living in a healthy and safe environment,” Gade said. “This problem has been out there for more than 30 years, and it’s unconscionable that action hasn’t been taken.”

“We know Dow is responsible,” said Ralph Dollhopf, associate director of the EPA’s regional Superfund office. “The question now is when something will finally be done about it.”

In Saginaw, some are reluctant to question one of the area’s biggest employers and benefactors. They tout Dow’s 3,100 manufacturing jobs and its donations to community and arts groups, including its sponsorship of a struggling civic arena, now known as the Dow Event Center.

Bob VanDeventer, president of the Saginaw County Chamber of Commerce, said local leaders are trying to fight the perception that dioxin makes the area unsafe. He argued “not one illness” can be attributed to dioxin and insisted the only way someone could be exposed to dioxin is if they “eat the dirt.”

“Michigan is in the tank economically already,” VanDeventer said. “For us, this situation certainly creates more uncertainty as long as it remains unresolved.”

Others who were drawn to living along the picturesque Tittabawassee and Saginaw Rivers fear the contamination will make it impossible to sell their homes or will get them sick.

For more than 40 years, Lloyd and Joy Cooper have lived in a cottage near where the tree-lined rivers meet. Contractors for the EPA and Dow have tested their yard at least four times in two years.

In February Dow told federal regulators they had found dioxin levels of 5,900 parts per trillion in the Collins’ neighborhood, above the federal cleanup standard of 1,000 parts per trillion. Michigan’s far more stringent limit is 90 parts per trillion.

“It gets pretty frustrating,” said Lloyd Cooper, a retired contractor. “It seems like they’re dragging this out as long as they can. If they’re going to do something, do it and get it over with for good.”

Bush and Cheney have had a hard on to invade Iran ever since they have throughly and permanently screwed up Afghanistan and Iraq.

If an unthinking person were to believe the main stream media, one may be inclined to believe that Iran is in fact planning on invading the AmeriKKKun Homeland next week.

Luckily, for the conservatards, the American public is stupid enough to believe CBS,NBC,Fox News, ABC and the rest of the main stream media. Mr. C’s prediction? The Bustard regime will get away with invading yet another oil rich nation, and the American tax payer will be left holding the bag.

Viva la New World Order Baby!

Paul Craig Robers from “Counterpunch” says it better than Mr C. can.

Repeating The Crime

The Iraq War Morphs Into the Iran War

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

It is 1939 all over again. The world waits helplessly for the next act of naked aggression by rogue states. Only this time the rogue states are not the Third Reich and Fascist Italy. They are the United States and Israel.

The targeted victims are not Poland and France, but Iran, Syria, the remains of the Palestinian West Bank and southern Lebanon.

The American mass media is overjoyed. War coverage attracts viewers and sells advertising.

The neoconservatives are ecstatic. Hegemony uber alles is back on track.

The US Air Force can’t wait “to show what it can do.”

Defense contractors see no end of the profits.

Under cover of the mayhem and propaganda, Israel can grab the remains of the West Bank and have another go at grabbing the water resources of southern Lebanon.

Unlike the US and Israel, Iran is neither occupying any other country’s territory nor threatening to invade another country. Nevertheless, propaganda against Iran is spouting from US and Israeli mouths at an increasing rate. Lie after lie rolls off the tongues of leaders of the “two great democracies.”

On April 27 Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, blamed Iran for “increasingly lethal and malign influence” in Iraq. Has Admiral Mullen forgot that it is the US, not Iran, that is responsible for as many as one million dead Iraqis and four million displaced Iraqis, the “collateral damage” of a “cakewalk war” now into its sixth year?

On April 26 the Washington Post reported that “the Pentagon is planning for potential military courses of action” against Iran.
The Bush Regime’s national security advisor says Iran is a threat in Iraq, an accusation echoed endlessly by secretary of defense Robert Gates, secretary of state Rice, vice president Cheney, and president Bush. The US, which has 150,000 troops in Iraq, is not a threat. The US troops are protecting Iraq from Iran, al Qaeda, and the Taliban. Just ask Fox “News.”

Doing its part to egg on war with Iran, the US TV news program, “60 MInutes,” gave air time to the commander of the Israeli Air Force, General Eliezer Shkedi, who declared in a special interview that Iranian president Ahmadinejad was the new Hitler and that we must not again make the mistake of disbelieving a Hitler.

There are better candidates for the role than Ahmadinejad.
Gen. Shkedi himself sounds like Hitler blaming Poland for the outbreak of the second world war. Ahmadinejad has attacked no country, whereas Israel repeatedly invades its neighbors and continues 40-year occupations of Syrian and Palestinian territory.

As Noam Chomsky has written, the US government thinks that it owns the world (Chomsky could have added that Israel thinks it owns the Middle East and America). Americans can wallow in indignation over China’s occupation of Tibet, but be perfectly content with America’s occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel can wax eloquently about “Palestinian terrorism” while its military and Zionist settlers terrorize Palestinians.

Americans see no hypocrisy in “their” government’s damning of Russia for opposing the incorporation of former Russian satellites and constituent parts in a US military alliance.

Americans see manifest destiny, not US aggression, when “their” government drops bombs on Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Pakistan. Americans do not think it is aggression for them to develop war plans to attack Iran or China or N. Korea or whomever, or to maintain hundreds of military bases all over the globe. The same Americans work themselves into hysterical frenzies over “Iranian influence in Iraq” and “al Qaeda plans to bring the war to America.”

As Chomsky says, we own the world. No one else counts.
Except Israel.

Israel counts so much that every presidential candidate has declared his and her willingness to expend whatever American blood and treasure are necessary “to protect Israel.” There are no limits on the promise “to defend Israel,” no matter what Israel does, no matter if Israel initiates (yet again) war with its neighbors, no matter if it continues to force Palestinians out of their homes and villages in order to “create living room” for Israelis.

With this sort of promise, why should Israel ever settle for anything less than “greater Israel”?

Just as the US government launched its illegal invasion of Iraq on the back of lies about weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds, the US government claims it must attack Iran or Iran will build a nuclear weapon. The Bush Regime has learned never to discard a lie as long as it works.

The lie works for the US Congress, the US media and much of the US public, but it is breaking down abroad. On April 27 the British newspaper, the Independent, responded to the recent US government claim that the Syrian facility attacked last September by Israel in an act of naked aggression was a nuclear reactor built by N. Korea:

“There is no independent way to verify any of this, especially since the installation has now been destroyed. We must rely on the integrity of the Israeli and US intelligence. That is where we hit a problem. The former US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented similar evidence to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 showing what we were told was strong evidence of Iraqi storage of weapons of mass destruction. As we all know, that intelligence turned out to be bogus.”

A needless war, a country destroyed, all for bogus intelligence.

Why must we repeat our crime in Iran?

Why do we persist in our crime in Iraq? On April 27 McClatchy Newspapers reported that 50 Iraqi political leaders representing numerous political groups including Sunnis went to Sadr City to protest the siege by the US military. Why is al Sadr under seige?

He called for a halt to bloodshed between Iraqis, for a “liberation of ourselves and our lands from the occupier,” for “a real government and real sovereignty.” However, for the Bush Regime, rhetoric about “freedom and democracy” is but a mask behind which to impose a US puppet government. Real Iraqi leaders like al Sadr are “terrorists” who must be eliminated.

Why do the American people and “their” representatives in Congress continue to tolerate a criminal Bush Regime that uses lies and propaganda to mask its acts of naked aggression, war crimes under the Nuremberg standard?

Why does the rest of the world continue to receive political representatives from a war criminal government?

What if the rest of the world told the US to close its bases, its embassies, its CIA operations and to go home?

Self-righteous Americans would regard such demands as effrontery! We own the world.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

]]> http://conservatard.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/onward-conservatard-soldiers-when-one-fiasco-isnt-enought/feed/ Mr. Ronald Nobrain Conservatard When Screwing Up Iraq is not enough! http://conservatard.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/why-bail-out-wall-street-when-we-cant-bail-out-main-street/ http://conservatard.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/why-bail-out-wall-street-when-we-cant-bail-out-main-street/#comments Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:28:41 +0000 Mr. Conservatard http://conservatard.wordpress.com/?p=348

Posted on the Guardian Unlimited, economist Dean Bakers analysis of the Federal Reserves bailout of wall street at the U.S. Taxpayers expense is frightening.

Fed up with Wall Street

Dean Baker

March 18, 2008 8:00 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dean_baker/2008/03/fed_up_with_wall_street.html

The collapse of the housing bubble in the US continues to wreak havoc on the financial geniuses who fostered its growth. All over Wall Street, the mantra “Who could have known?” is being heard with every more frequency and greater expressions of pain.

Things got really serious last week, when Bear Stearns was placed on life support, and was then disposed of in a fire sale last weekend. One of the longstanding giants of Wall Street investment banking now has less value than a street corner lemonade stand, if not for the generosity of the Fed. The Fed lent money to Bear Stearns and its purchaser, JP Morgan Chase, under terms that no private lender would have agreed to. The risk that the Fed will end up with a substantial loss on its advances to Bear Stearns is quite large, with no prospect for any real return on its investment.

This raises the obvious question: why did the Fed, an agency of the US government, use our tax dollars to keep Bear Stearns and its rich managers and shareholders above water? After all, the government supposedly doesn’t have enough money to provide kids with healthcare and child care, to guarantee families decent housing or to meet a long list of other needs. Why do we have the money to lend tens of billions of dollars to prop up Bear Stearns at discounted interest rates?

There are two points about this bailout that should be clear. First, this is a bailout - we are handing money to Wall Street. Second, we don’t have to hand tens of billions of dollars to the country’s richest people to save the financial system.

The politicians will try to do their best to obscure the first point. They say “we aren’t giving them money - we’re lending money and we’re getting interest, so the government can make a profit.”

This is what politicians tell people who they think are stupid. No private bank would have lent money to JP Morgan Chase or Bear Stearns at the same interest rate and under the same terms as the Fed. (We know this for certain; otherwise Bears Stearn would not have run to the Fed.) When the government makes a loan at below market interest rates, it is giving away money. People on Wall Street know this very well, that is how they got to be fabulously rich: they borrow money at a lower interest rate than they lend it out.

If they can’t get away with the “no bailout” nonsense, the Wall Street welfare boys will then try the route of claiming that we have to bail them out in order to prevent the whole financial system from collapsing. Such a collapse could turn the recession into a depression, leaving millions unemployed for years.

This is also nonsense. We know how to keep banks operating even as they go into bankruptcy. The UK just did this with Northern Rock, a major bank that managed to get itself into huge trouble because of its holding of bad mortgage debt. After it was clear that the bank was insolvent, the Bank of England stepped in and essentially took over the bank. It replaced the incompetent managers who had ruined the bank and brought in a new team to straighten out the books. The plan is to resell the bank to the private sector once the books are in order.

In the mean time, the bank keeps operating. The depositors can continue to make deposits and withdrawals just as before. This prevents any chain reaction from bringing down the financial system.

The difference between the Northern Rock route and what happened with Bears Stearns last week is that in the Northern Rock, the highly paid managers that ruined the bank are sent packing. What will happen to those at Bear Stearns is not clear - its new owners are planning a wave of staff cuts, but many will be keeping their jobs. Similarly, the shareholders will get little or nothing. They own a bankrupt company, why should the government give them money?

As the financial crisis deepens, it is important that the public realize the distinction between what the Bank of England did with Northern Rock and the handouts from the Fed to Bear Stearns and JP Morgan Chase. There are other banks in serious trouble who are also looking to the Fed for help.

The best thing that the Fed can do is to go the Northern Rock route. Instead of giving more money to troubled banks, it should give less. It should end the Term Auction Facility and its other special mechanisms for injecting money into banks. The economy will recover quickest if we let the banks and the bankers get the full benefit of their own bad judgment. When they have written down their bad debts and are taken over by new management, the banks will again be able to play a productive role in financing growth.

I guess that Rupert Murdoch hasn’t totally ruined the reputation of the Wall Street Journal, yet.

Like Greg Palast, Alan Dershowitz seems to be thinking that the whole “investigation” into former governor of New York seems suspect at best, and probably entrapment by the justice department.

Another thing that Dershowitz points out is how the Bushtard government is abusing their illegal domestic spying programs. We have been told that the Bushtard administration needed to spy on us American sheeple to protect us from the Islam O’ Fascists and would never be used for political gain or other fascist like activities. Well I guess that George W. Bushtard has “Fooled Us Again”, Doh!

If you ask me, what really sparked the justice departments interest in Eliot Spitzer wasn’t his Vitter like appreciation of call girls, but his column in the Washington Post from last Wednesday. Which do you think is a larger threat the the Bush administration? Spitzer bedding prostitutes or the govener writing an opinion piece called “Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime - How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers“.

The Entrapment of Eliot

The federal criminal investigation that has led to Eliot Spitzer’s resignation as governor of New York illustrates the great dangers all Americans face from vague and open-ended sex and money-transaction statutes.

Federal law, if read broadly, criminalizes virtually all sexual encounters for which something of value has been given. Federal money-laundering statutes criminalize many entirely legitimate and conventional banking transactions. Congress enacted these laws to give federal prosecutors wide discretion in deciding which “bad guys” to go after.

Generally, wise and intelligent prosecutors use their discretion properly — to target organized crime, terrorism, financial predation, exploitation of children and the like. But the very existence of these selectively enforced statutes poses grave dangers of abuse. They lie around like loaded guns waiting to be used against the enemies of politically motivated investigators, prosecutors and politicians.

There is no hard evidence that Eliot Spitzer was targeted for investigation, but the story of how he was caught does not ring entirely true to many experienced former prosecutors and current criminal lawyers. The New York Times reported that the revelations began with a routine tax inquiry by revenue agents “conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks.” This investigation allegedly found “several unusual movements of cash involving the Governor of New York.” But the movement of the amounts of cash required to pay prostitutes, even high-priced prostitutes over a long period of time, does not commonly generate a full-scale investigation.

We are talking about thousands, not millions, of dollars. We are also talking about a man who is a multimillionaire with numerous investments and purchases. The idea that federal investigators would focus on a few transactions to corporations — that were not themselves under investigation — raises as many questions as answers.

Even if Mr. Spitzer’s derelictions were serendipitously discovered as a result of routine, computerized examination of bank transactions, the dangers inherent in selective use of overbroad criminal statutes remain. Money laundering, structuring and related financial crimes are designed to ferret out organized crime, drug dealing, terrorism and large-scale financial manipulation. They were not enacted to give the federal government the power to inquire into the sexual or financial activities of men who move money in order to hide payments to prostitutes.

Once federal authorities concluded that the “suspicious financial transactions” attributed to Mr. Spitzer did not fit into any of the paradigms for which the statutes were enacted, they should have closed the investigation. It’s simply none of the federal government’s business that a man may have been moving his own money around in order to keep his wife in the dark about his private sexual peccadilloes.

But the authorities didn’t close the investigation. They expanded it, because they had caught a big fish in the wide net they had cast.

In this case, they wiretapped 5,000 phone conversations, intercepted 6,000 emails, used surveillance and undercover tactics that are more appropriate for trapping terrorists than entrapping johns. Unlike terrorism and other predatory crimes, prostitution is legal in many parts of the world and in some parts of the U.S. Even in places like New York, where it is technically illegal, johns are rarely prosecuted. Prostitution rings operate openly, advertising “massage” and “escort” services in the back pages of glossy magazines, local newspapers and television sex channels.

If the federal government really wanted to shut down these operations, they could easily do it without a single wiretap or email intercept. All they would have to do is get an undercover agent to answer the ads, arrange for the “escort” to go from New York to New Jersey and be arrested. But many in law enforcement would much rather reserve these statutes for selective use against predetermined targets.

In this case, if the serendipitous bank audit really led federal agents to Mr. Spitzer, and Mr. Spitzer led them to the Emperor’s Club, and federal prosecutors really wanted to get the Club, they could easily have sent an undercover cop to pose as a john, instead of tapping phones and reading emails — tactics designed to catch and embarrass Mr. Spitzer with his own recorded words, which could be, and were, leaked to the media. As this newspaper has reported: “It isn’t clear why the FBI sought the wiretap warrant. Federal prostitution probes are exceedingly rare, lawyers say, except in cases involving organized-crime leaders or child abuse. Federal wiretaps are seldom used to make these cases . . .”

Lavrenti Beria, the head of Joseph Stalin’s KGB, once quipped to his boss, “show me the man and I will find the crime.” The Soviet Union was notorious for having accordion-like criminal laws that could be adjusted to fit almost any dissident target. The U.S. is a far cry from the Soviet Union, but our laws are dangerously overbroad.

Both Democrats and Republicans have targeted political adversaries over the years. The weapons of choice are almost always elastic criminal laws. And few laws are more elastic, and susceptible to abuse, than federal laws on money laundering and sex crimes. For the sake of all Americans, these laws should be narrowed and limited to predatory crimes with real victims.

Mr. Dershowitz teaches law at Harvard University and is the author of “Finding Jefferson” (Wiley, 2007).