"This certainly appears to be a case of TARP funds being recycled into campaign contributions"

Goldman Sachs vs. AIG

US federal regulators have warned of a “rampant Ponzimonium” as they disclosed they are investigating “hundreds” of possible scams in the aftermath of the $50bn fraud allegedly perpetrated by Bernard Madoff.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."

There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages. For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, "Bet you got raped!" A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies - such as "confirming the kill" (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim's head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.

In the crisis of 2009 the mounting evidence of fraud, conflicts of interest, indifference to suffering, repudiation of responsibility, and systemic absence of individual moral judgment produced an administrative economic massacre of such proportion that it constitutes an economic crime against humanity.

Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?

For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman's collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.
...

So here are several questions that should be answered, in public, under oath, to clear the air:

What was the precise conversation among Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson, and Blankfein that preceded the initial $80 billion grant?

Was it already known who the counterparties were and what the exposure was for each of the counterparties?

What did Goldman, and all the other counterparties, know about AIG's financial condition at the time they executed the swaps or other contracts? Had they done adequate due diligence to see whether they were buying real protection? And why shouldn't they bear a percentage of the risk of failure of their own counterparty?

What is the deeper relationship between Goldman and AIG? Didn't they almost merge a few years ago but did not because Goldman couldn't get its arms around the black box that is AIG? If that is true, why should Goldman get bailed out? After all, they should have known as well as anybody that a big part of AIG's business model was not to pay on insurance it had issued.

Why weren't the counterparties immediately and fully disclosed?

Failure to answer these questions will feed the populist rage that is metastasizing very quickly.

Delay is not innocuous. When a bank’s insolvency is ignored, the incentives for normal prudent banking collapse. Management has nothing to lose. It may take big new risks, in volatile markets like commodities, in the hope of salvation before the regulators close in. Or it may loot the institution—nomenklatura privatization, as the Russians would say—through unjustified bonuses, dividends, and options. It will never fully disclose the extent of insolvency on its own.

The most likely scenario, should the Geithner plan go through, is a combination of looting, fraud, and a renewed speculation in volatile commodity markets such as oil.

Courage Is The Primary Virtue

March 16th was the sixth anniversary of Rachel Corrie's death. (Seems more recent doesn't it.)

NAIMA SHAYER: [translated] On that last day, she didn’t want to leave our house. She’d get to the door and then rush back to hold and kiss us goodbye again. I asked her, “What’s wrong? Do you think you’re going to die today?” She did this a few times, as if she didn’t want to leave us.


That evening, my niece told me that Rachel Corrie had been killed by an Israeli bulldozer and had watched it on television. I didn’t believe her at first and thought she must have been lying.


All of us in the house were crying. She had stayed with us for over twenty days. I remember, whenever she was late, she’d call and apologize. If she got later than 7:00, she’d let us know. Once she got stuck at a checkpoint and called so we wouldn’t worry. She was just like one of us, a member of our family. She was so good to us.


ABU JAMEEL: [translated] Very few people live up to Rachel’s example. Honestly, even today, I remember her. I can see her: slender, fair, beautiful, wearing a kafia. She was graceful and so courageous, never afraid.


My house was near an Israeli watchtower near the wall. She’d be there with her megaphone, shouting, “Please, don’t fire. There are children here.” She had an open spirit, a pure spirit. She was a great person, irreplaceable. Rachel’s life should be recorded in history.

At the conference on the idea of communism in London three days before, organiser Slavoj Zizek urged his audience:

We must resist the temptation to act. We must refuse being told that children are dying of hunger in Africa or in the slums of India, for this is the philosophy of the present times. They don’t want us to think.

Oh yes that terrible temptation to act, which plagues that audience, stalks it everywhere with its blandishments and meretricious seductions, from which they know not where to hide. But one must be strong, be firm, one mustn't play into their hands, you see. Like Rachel Corrie, the hysterics of Seattle and Genoa, the antiwar protesting puppets of Bush, the shoe hurling journalists of Iraq, Free Gaza, or the millions of French strikers today.

The charismatic theorist's urgent appeal will no doubt be scrupulously obeyed. In fact it was already being obeyed before it was even made. But now, intransigent refusal to act can be self-righteous too, its protagonists can congratulate themselves, how brave and strong we are to resist the temptation to which weaklings and dupes like Corrie succumb.

Eleven of the individuals who received "retention" bonuses of $1 million or more are no longer working at AIG, including one who received $4.6 million.

In other words, I take this to be a threat: "if you don't give us our bonuses, we'll trigger a default event that will cost AIG the US government tens of billions of dollars." It's just a polite way of saying, "Pay us the $100 million ransom or we start exploding the suicide bomber vests we're wearing."

...the real issue is fraud. Why is no one at Treasury willing to use the F word? Who would it embarrass? There is not reason for NOT pursuing that angle, save that AIG must have the 5x7 glossies on some pretty influential people, or that pursuing fraud at AIG would, via a daisy chain of connections, reveal that fraud was pervasive, and the Treasury is desperate to preserve the false image that the system has integrity.

El Salvador's former rebel group-turned-political party has claimed victory in the country's presidential election.

Jubilant supporters of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) poured into the streets of San Salvador in the early hours of Monday, after Mauricio Funes, the FMLN leader, declared that he had won.

As a lesson in how capitalism works, the strike was invaluable. It showed that the state was not neutral and could easily expand its powers to criminalise labour activity. It laid bare the bias of the media and the strategic impotence of the Labour party leadership, which needed the miners to win to remain viable but felt it could not support them and remain credible.

As a lesson in how socialism might work it was edifying. Women kept these communities functioning, and supporters and donations flooded in from across the country and the world. I still recall the conversations of Nottingham miners as they adjusted their worldviews - or at least their language - to the arrival of lesbian and gay, black and feminist support groups. At times I thought the sheer determination to win would carry us through.

Comedy

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Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

Our Pitch

In spring 2008, by using some other measures, a Wall Street Journal investigation found it likely that several banks, Citibank in the lead, reported too low rates to LIBOR to hide their credit problems.The day after the WSJ first published on the issue, LIBOR rates corrected upwards. (I wrote about possible LIBOR manipulation on October 13 2008. The very next day LIBOR started their decline. But I admit that those were likely independent events - the WSJ circulation is still a bit higher then ours.)

From the WSJ investigation we know that LIBOR can be manipulated by the banks and was manipulated in spring 2008. It is hard to prove manipulation without the actual records. The British Banker's Association is supervising the LIBOR reporting and calculation. But what interest would it have to really find problems with it?

One thing is sure. In October 2008 banks had a huge incentive to report too high rates as it furthered the pressure to hand them over hundreds of billions. Simply ask yourself: What would you do to get a 100 billion dollar gift?

I'm sure the knowledgeable people already know this. But it turns out that one of the features of the 2005 Bankruptcy bill was to put derivative counter parties at the front of the line ahead of other creditors in bankruptcy proceedings. Actually, from what I can tell, they don't just go to the head of the line. They got to skip the line entirely. As the Financial Times noted last fall, "the 2005 changes made clear that certain derivatives and financial transactions were exempt from provisions in the bankruptcy code that freeze a failed company's assets until a court decides how to apportion them among creditors." As the article notes, ironically, this provision which Wall Street pushed for and got to protect investment banks actually ended up hastening the collapse of Lehman and Bear Stearns last year.

The Lunch Date

by Adam Davidson

Across the nation, 19 million houses and apartments — nearly one out of every seven — are vacant, the highest percentage since the 1960s. But only about six million of those homes are for sale or for rent. That means millions more could still flood onto the market, depressing prices further.

Quelle surprise!

1. Photographs, names and video footage of people attending protests are routinely obtained by surveillance units and stored on an "intelligence system".

2. The commissioner alleges that firms, including Balfour Beatty, Sir Robert McAlpine, Laing O'Rourke and Costain, have for many years covertly bought details of staff's trade union activities and their conduct at work, in breach of the Data Protection Act. Seized documents reveal files on invidivuals that included comments such as "communist party", "ex-shop steward" and "trouble-stirrer".

Like Frankenstein's monster, Thatcherism has turned on its creators.

Is there anybody out there willing to stand up – on this, of all days – and raise a toast to the wilful destruction of our manufacturing industry and its replacement by the financial services sector? Yes, there were unions who were resistant to change, but whoever came up with the idea that the solution to this problem was to import cars rather than make them ourselves sacrificed more than just the entire engineering skills base.

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Everything about this so called "Tea Party" movement was pre-planned--from the supposedly "spontaneous rant" of CNBC stock market reporter, Rick Santelli, to the presumed ground-level organizing of protests all over the country. Fake, fake, fake--like a product launch staged covertly to look like a spontaneous trend.

A passage from Marx about the insatiable greed of bankers was quoted on Radio 2 one morning by Terry Wogan. For all I know he's doing it every day now...

"I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Hank Greenberg was still a billionaire, even as the policies his company wrote have cost the average American household some $1,600. It’s time for his wealth to be confiscated: it might be only a drop in the bucket compared to AIG’s total losses, but it would feel very right.”

A 15-year-old called Hillary Transue got three months for creating a spoof web page ridiculing her school's assistant principal. Ciavarella sent Shane Bly, then 13, to boot camp for trespassing in a vacant building. He gave a 14-year-old, Jamie Quinn, 11 months in prison for slapping a friend during an argument, after the friend slapped her. The judges were paid $2.6m by companies belonging to the Mid-Atlantic Youth Services Corp for helping to fill its jails. This is what happens when public services are run for profit.

It's an extreme example, but it hints at the wider consequences of the trade in human lives created by private prisons. In the US and the UK they have a powerful incentive to ensure that the number of prisoners keeps rising.

DETROIT — It may be tough to get financing for a new car these days, but in Detroit you can buy a house with a credit card.

The median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a listing service.

Not $75,000. Remove a zero—it's seven thousand five hundred dollars, substantially less than the lowest-price car on the new-car market.

The federal government agreed Sunday night to provide an additional $30 billion in taxpayer money to the American International Group and loosen the terms of its huge loan to the insurer, which is preparing to report a $62 billion loss on Monday, the biggest quarterly loss in history, people involved in the discussions said.

They do what they want, these people, and you and I are cut out of the conversation. I'm sure they're dimly aware we still exist. They must spot us occasionally, through the window, jumping up and down in the cold with our funny placards . . . although come to think of it, they can't even see us through the window, since they banned peaceful protest within a mile of Parliament.

And wide-open, loosely regulated financial systems characterized many of the other recipients of large capital inflows. This may explain the almost eerie correlation between conservative praise two or three years ago and economic disaster today. “Reforms have made Iceland a Nordic tiger,” declared a paper from the Cato Institute. “How Ireland Became the Celtic Tiger” was the title of one Heritage Foundation article; “The Estonian Economic Miracle” was the title of another.

While youths in Athens protest by throwing Molotov cocktails, in Paris by toppling barricades, and in Budapest by hurling eggs at politicians, protesters in Berlin rage at their economic plight by targeting the most expensive cars -- symbols of German wealth and power.

A group calling itself BMW -- the initials stand for Movement for Militant Resistance in German -- has claimed responsibility for several attacks in left-wing magazines and Web sites, police spokesman Bernhard Schodrowski said.

One-third of the incidents are classed as “political,” prompting officers to assign a special unit to investigate, Schodrowski said. No arrests have been made. Schodrowski attributed the arson to “a protest against the world economy and rising rents.”

When you start asking around about how A.I.G. made money during the housing bubble, you hear the same two phrases again and again: “regulatory arbitrage” and “ratings arbitrage.” The word “arbitrage” usually means taking advantage of a price differential between two securities — a bond and stock of the same company, for instance — that are related in some way. When the word is used to describe A.I.G.’s actions, however, it means something entirely different. It means taking advantage of a loophole in the rules. A less polite but perhaps more accurate term would be “scam.”

Squadristi Recruiting Centre, No Kidding

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Apparently, the new Republican line on the stimulus is this:

To give the proposed economic stimulus plan some perspective, “if you started the day Jesus Christ was born and spent $1 million every day since then, you still wouldn’t have spent $1 trillion."

Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V

Economic writers from the 16th through 20th centuries recognized that free markets required government oversight to prevent monopoly pricing and other charges levied by special privilege. By contrast, today’s neoliberal ideologues are public relations advocates for vested interests to depict a “free market” is one free of government regulation, “free” of anti-trust protection, and even of protection against fraud (as evidenced by the SEC’s refusal to move against Madoff, Enron, Citibank et al.). The neoliberal ideal of free markets is thus basically that of a bank robber or embezzler, wishing for a world without police so as to be sufficiently free to siphon off other peoples’ money without constraint.

She patronizes the grimy discount stores whose prices run even lower than Wal-Mart's, and can tick off their notable sales going back for months. "I had some oranges," she recalls with a self-deprecating smile. "A couple of months ago, they had grapes on sale." And, "If it's less than three dollars for a package of six steaks, that looks like a good deal to me." (She tries not to think too hard about the quality of a 50-cent steak.) Her staples include PB&J, canned ham salad, soup: "I'll get chicken noodle or Campbell's Chunky. There's meat in there. You can pour it over noodles and put butter on it. It's like a delicacy."

In essence, the nation's biggest employers of unskilled labor often leave workers having to feed from the public trough. In 2004, a year in which Wal-Mart reported $9.1 billion in profits, the retailer's California employees collected $86 million in public assistance, according to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley.

Police are preparing for a "summer of rage" as victims of the economic downturn take to the streets to demonstrate against financial institutions, the Guardian has learned.

Britain's most senior police officer with responsibility for public order raised the spectre of a return of the riots of the 1980s, with people who have lost their jobs, homes or savings becoming "footsoldiers" in a wave of potentially violent mass protests.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police's public order branch, told the Guardian that middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.

He said that banks, particularly those that still pay large bonuses despite receiving billions in taxpayer money, had become "viable targets". So too had the headquarters of multinational companies and other financial institutions in the City which are being blamed for the financial crisis.

...the little bit of checking that has been done appears to reveal that a very large fraction of these securities contain, on the face of it, misrepresentation or fraud in the files.

So here we are: The banks are sitting on paper originally valued at 100 cents on the dollar (or even more) which is now worth 20 or 10 or 0 cents. If they sell the stuff at those prices, most of the capital they’ve put behind those assets will be erased, leaving them insolvent, technically and perhaps literally – as in, unable to cover their current liabilities. On the other hand, if they don’t sell their pieces of Big Shitpile, all their capital (including what Uncle Sam has already thrown into the till) will remain frozen in place, blocking them from doing any new lending. Without new lending, they can’t earn the profits they need to make good the losses they are sitting on. Zombies. Night of the Living Dead Banks.

The banks know this, investors know this, Geithner and Co. know this. And everybody knows that the others know. (...)

One of the things that creeps me out about the political system’s response to the crisis so far – the insolvency of the banking system in particular – are the increasingly desperate attempts to maintain a phony façade of free markets and private enterprise, in an economy now utterly dependent on the federal safety net. I totally expected that from Hank Paulson and the Cheney Administration, but is Obama’s financial team really pressed from exactly the same Wall Street mold?

It may be best not to think too much about that question. It reminds me too much of the USSR’s fetish for preserving the trappings of socialist "democracy" – a Supreme Soviet, a ministerial government, courts, etc. – even though the actual decisions were all made, behind the scenes, by the party and the Politburo. It’s not a good sign when societies routinely lie to themselves about such big, fundamental truths, which in turn suggests that toxic assets may not be the poison we most need to worry about: The rottenness and decadence of the entire system may do us in first (not exactly a new theme for me.)

In Giovanni Arrighi’s thorough account in The Long Twentieth Century, we see hegemony shifting from the city states of Genoa and Venice in the sixteenth century to Amsterdam and the Low Countries in the seventeenth before concentrating in Britain from the late eighteenth century until the United States eventually took control after 1945. There are a number of features to these transitions that Arrighi emphasizes and which are relevant to our analysis. Each shift, Arrighi notes, occurred in the wake of a strong phase of financialization (he cites with approval Braudel’s maxim that financialization announces the autumn of some hegemonic configuration). Each shift, Arrighi notes, occurred in the wake of a strong phase of financialization (he cites with approval Braudel’s maxim that financialization announces the autumn of some hegemonic configuration).

The laughter was at its height when Obama officials explained that the White House planned to guarantee a wide swath of toxic assets -- which they referred to as "legacy assets" -- but wouldn't be asking Congress for money. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), a bailout opponent in the fall, asked the officials to give Congress the total dollar figure for which they were on the hook. The officials said that they couldn't provide a number, a response met by chuckling that was bipartisan, but tilted toward the GOP side.

Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the bailout funds, told the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday that Treasury in 2008 paid $254 billion and received assets worth about $176 billion. (...) Referring to overpayment on assets, Warren said Treasury has failed to specify its goals and methods in helping more than 300 institutions. "There may be good policy reasons for overpaying, but without a clearly delineated reason, we can't know that," Warren said. Senate Banking chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said the overpayment was sure to "raise eyebrows." "I can understand some gap," he said. "No one is expecting perfection between the price you pay and what you think you're getting. But that's a pretty large disparity."

Gowan: Consequences of the New Wall Street System

Much of the mainstream debate on the causes of the crisis takes the form of an ‘accidents’ theory, explaining the debâcle as the result of contingent actions by, say, Greenspan’s Federal Reserve, the banks, the regulators or the rating agencies. We have argued against this, proposing rather that a relatively coherent structure which we have called the New Wall Street System should be understood as having generated the crisis. But in addition to the argument above, we should note another striking feature of the last twenty years: the extraordinary harmony between Wall Street operators and Washington regulators. Typically in American history there have been phases of great tension, not only between Wall Street and Congress but also between Wall Street and the executive branch. This was true, for example, in much of the 1970s and early 1980s. Yet there has been a clear convergence over the last quarter of a century, the sign of a rather well-integrated project. [30]

An alternative explanation, much favoured in social-democratic circles, argues that both Wall Street and Washington were gripped by a false 'neo-liberal' or 'free-market' ideology, which led them astray. An ingenious right-wing twist on this suggests that the problematic ideology was 'laissez-faire'—that is, no regulation—while what is needed is 'free-market thinking', which implies some regulation. The consequence of either version is usually a rather rudderless discussion of 'how much' and 'what kind' of regulation would set matters straight. [31] The problem with this explanation is that, while the New Wall Street System was legitimated by free-market, laissez-faire or neo-liberal outlooks, these do not seem to have been operative ideologies for its practitioners, whether in Wall Street or in Washington. Philip Augar's detailed study of the Wall Street investment banks, The Greed Merchants, cited above, argues that they have actually operated in large part as a conscious cartel—the opposite of a free market. It is evident that neither Greenspan nor the bank chiefs believed in the serious version of this creed: neo-classical financial economics. Greenspan has not argued that financial markets are efficient or transparent; he has fully accepted that they can tend towards bubbles and blow-outs. He and his colleagues have been well aware of the risk of serious financial crisis, in which the American state would have to throw huge amounts of tax-payers' money into saving the system. They also grasped that all the various risk models used by the Wall Street banks were flawed, and were bound to be, since they presupposed a general context of financial market stability, within which one bank, in one market sector, might face a sudden threat; their solutions were in essence about diversification of risk across markets. The models therefore assumed away the systemic threat that Greenspan and others were well aware of: namely, a sudden negative turn across all markets. [32]


[30] There were tensions between Wall Street and New York state regulator Eliot Spitzer after the dot.com bubble burst, but this simply highlighted how strong was the consensus at a higher level.
[31] References to these kinds of debates can be found in Andrew Baker et al., Governing Financial Globalization, London 2005.
[32] See Greenspan, ‘We will never have a perfect model of risk’; Alan Beattie and James Politi, ‘Greenspan admits he made a mistake’, FT, 24 October 2008.

Cálice

(Translation)

Censored version:

Gogol: Vous ne pensez pas qu'il y a une juste mesure entre le capitalisme débridé d'un Sarkozy et votre ligne radicale archaïque ?

Commençant son aventure il y a quatre siècles, le capitalisme, même débridé, est beaucoup plus ancien et archaîque que toutes les lignes radicales qu'on lui oppose. Cessons de considérer que le libéralisme, à la mode dans les années 1840, incarne la modernité et les réformes. C'est le communisme qui est une idée neuve en Europe.

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A US citizen caused delays to a Turkish Airlines flight between Istanbul and New York after complaining that there were “Arab-types” on board.

Child victims in Gaza

Down With Private Property

Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.

IS IT IN MY ECONOMIC INTEREST TO WALK AWAY?
You decide. This calculator is just a tool to help.

When a man who thinks you need to break a vase to get the water out of it starts arguing that you need to invade a country in order to change the minds of its people, you might want to start paying attention to how his approach to the vase problem worked out.Thomas Friedman is not a president, a pope, a general on the field of battle or any other kind of man of action. He doesn’t actually do anything apart from talk about shit in a newspaper. So in my mind it’s highly relevant if his manner of speaking is fucked.

The Central Elections Committee on Monday banned Arab political parties from running in next month's parliamentary elections, drawing accusations of racism by an Arab lawmaker who said he would challenge the decision in the country's Supreme Court.

Maybe our thinking is very simple, and we're lacking the nuances and annotations that are always so necessary in analyses, but to the Zapatistas it looks like there's a professional army murdering a defenseless population.

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil."

Norwegian medics told Press TV correspondent Akram al-Sattari that some of the victims who have been wounded since Israel began its attacks on the Gaza Strip on December 27 have traces of depleted uranium in their bodies.

Boyscout Motto

ARE you afraid that the eco nomic downturn could get out of hand? I mean, really out of hand?

Well, don't worry.

The US Army War College is on the case - ready to handle "unforeseen economic collapse" and the "rapid dissolution of public order in all or significant parts of the US."

Massad: The Gaza Ghetto Uprising

Many are wondering how the Arab regimes and the PCA can be so brazen in their "treachery" of the Palestinians. "Don't they fear being overthrown by the people?" is an oft-repeated question. The answer of course is a resounding "no." It is true that collaboration with Israel by Arab regimes is not new, and that what is new is merely their openness about it, but there is a perfectly good reason for this. In the 1940s and the 1950s, these regimes could not declare openly their alliance with Israel, as there were popular and international forces that would have removed them from power had they done so. Indeed, some at the time flirted with alliances that unofficially included Israel, like the Baghdad Pact, but they paid a heavy price for such collaboration. The Cold War, Third World revolutionism, Arab nationalism, the Soviet Union, China, Nasser, were all factors to be considered. While a few of these factors had remained when Egypt's Sadat declared his open alliance with the US and Israel in the late 1970s, none of these factors remains today. The US, Israel, and their major Arab allies have neutralized these forces one by one since 1967, opening the way for this brazen alliance between Israel and the Arab dictatorships, all of which are in the service of US interests in the region. These Arab regimes rule by terror and fear and have at their disposal the best secret police and repressive security apparatus that the US can train and equip and which oil money and US aid can buy.

When Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was asked point blank by al-Jazeera's anchorman if Israel had an arrangement with Arab regimes to commit the Gaza massacres, she refused to answer and finally denied such an arrangement existed but could not help but affirm that there are those in the Arab world who "think" as Israel does and that Hamas is their enemy as it is the enemy of Israel. This is, incidentally, the same Tzipi Livni, who only a few weeks ago informed Palestinian citizens of Israel that she has slated them for denationalization and deportation to the Palestinian Bantustans once Israel and the international community grants these West Bank prisons the status of an independent Palestinian state enclosed within the apartheid wall. After her war on Palestinians in Gaza started last week, Livni declared that her war against the Palestinian people is not only about security but also about Israel's "values" which non-collaborator Palestinians (unlike the PCA) do not share. Livni is of course right. Unlike Livni and the Israeli leadership, whose ethnic-cleansing ideals and plans are to make Israel a purely Jewish state that is Palästinenser-rein, most Palestinians believe that they should remain present on their lands even and especially if this sullies the purity of a Jewish Israel.

Livni has also asserted that Israel's values are shared by the "free world" and by unfree Arab regimes that are allies of the "free world." We can add, that her values are also shared by Saudi-funded neoliberal Arab intellectuals and by the leadership of the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority ensconced in the Green Zone of Ramallah. The civilized values of Israel are not unlike those espoused by the US in its ongoing wars against Arabs and Muslims, and are very much like European colonial values during the high age of colonialism and beyond. Livni and the Israeli leadership speak of human rights, democracy, peace, and justice as universal while applying them only to Jews and denying them especially to Palestinians. This is hardly an Israeli ruse. Let us remember the undying words of Frantz Fanon in this regard: "leave this Europe where they never tire of talking of man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe."

Cairo:

Gaza : Manif au Caire (30.12.08) غزة
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Istanbul:

Gaza : Manif à Istanbul (29.12.08)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

California:

Gaza : Manif en Californie (29.12.08)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Halifax:

Gaza : Manif à Halifax (UK) (29.12.08)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Sweden:

Gaza : Manif en Suède
envoyé par Mecanopolis

New Orleans:

Gaza : Manif à la Nouvelle-Orléans (29.12.08)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Washington:

Gaza : Manif à Washington (29.12.08)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Oujda:

Gaza : Manif dans un lycée à Oujda (Maroc) (29.12.08)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Casablanca:

Gaza : Manif à Casablanca (29.12.08)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Geneva:

Gaza : Manif à Genève (29.12.008)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Vancouver:

Gaza : Manif à Vancouver (CA) (29.12.08)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Berlin:

Gaza : Manif à Berlin (29.12.08)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Brisbane:

Gaza : Manif à Brisbane (29.12.08)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Chicago:

Gaza : Manif à Chicago (28.12.08)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Yemen:

Gaza : Manif au Yémen
envoyé par Mecanopolis

New York:

Gaza : NYC 5th Av. (29.12.08) (1)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Belfast:

Gaza : Manif à Belfast (29.08.12)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Toronto:

Gaza : Manif à Toronto (28.12.08 - 2pm)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

London:

Gaza : Juifs et Musulmans manifestent à Londres
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Paris:

Gaza/Paris : Manif le 31 décembre, 15h, République
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Damascus:

Gaza : Manif à Damas (28.12.08)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Amman:

Gaza : Manif a Amman (28.12.08)
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Amersterdam:

Gaza : Manif à Amsterdam
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Rabat:

Gaza : Manif à Rabat
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Paris:

Gaza : Manif à Paris
envoyé par Mecanopolis

Copenhagen:

Gaza : Manif à Copenhague
envoyé par Mecanopolis

The Megaphone desktop tool is a Microsoft Windows application distributed by the World Union of Jewish Students and other pro-Israel organizations, through the Giyus.org website. Released on July 19, 2006, it delivers real-time alerts about key articles, videos, blogs, and surveys to subscribers so that they can voice their opinions and work together to support Israel on the public opinion front.

Woke Up With Fleas

Folk Songs

Casey B. Mulligan is an economist at the University of Chicago

"The recent decrease in employment may be due less to employers’ unwillingness to hire more workers and more to workers’ unwillingness to work."

The State Under Neo-liberalism (PDF)
A Perspective on the Crisis

Entschwindet und vergeht

I began the question by saying that China would hurt itself by pulling out dollar assets—at which he interjected, “in the short term”...

Seventh Heaven

Part 2 etc.

We noticed

President Bush: “I’m sorry it’s happening, of course. Obviously I don’t like the idea of people losing jobs, or being worried about their 401Ks. On the other hand, the American people got to know that we will safeguard the system. I mean, we’re in. And if we need to be in more, we will.”

After Mumbai

Questions, Questions

And why not?

Here, via here

Yes Obviously

PLATTEVILLE, Colo. -- A farm couple got a huge surprise when they opened their fields to anyone who wanted to pick up free vegetables left over after the harvest -- 40,000 people showed up.
Joe and Chris Miller's fields were picked so clean Saturday that a second day of gleaning -- the ancient practice of picking up leftover food in farm fields -- was canceled Sunday. " 'Overwhelmed' is putting it mildly," Chris Miller said. "People obviously need food."

The curious case of Ken Haywood

From August 13, after the Ahmedabad serial bombings claimed by "Indian Mujahideen":

Ken Haywood, the American national from whose Internet Protocol (IP) address the Terror e-mail was sent prior to the Ahmedabad serial blasts, underwent lie detector tests on Wednesday, a senior police official said in Mumbai. Maharashtra’s Anti-Terror Squad (ATS), which is probing the case, traced the e-mail to Haywood’s flat in Navi Mumbai and found that his background and job were “of a slightly dubious nature”. But the information available so far is not good enough to charge him or suggest his involvement in the case.

“We have conducted inquiries on Haywood’s background and his company. These are of a slightly dubious nature, and even the company he works for and its office are a bit suspect,” ATS chief Hemant Karkare told The Indian Express. “However, this does not directly link him with the case in any way. After all, having a suspicious background, or even working for a bogus company is not enough to book anyone for involvement in terror activities,” he added.

G S Hegde, Haywood’s lawyer, said: “The ATS has not said anything about Haywood’s personal life, or his involvement in any criminal activities. We maintain he is innocent.”

The police in Mumbai and Bangalore have said there is primary evidence to show that Haywood’s wi-fi account was hacked into and compromised, resulting in the terror e-mail on July 26 — five minutes before the blasts. Questions remain as to who did it and how they picked on Haywood’s computer network.

Haywood is supposed to be a corporate training manager and general manager with a company called Campbell White, which describes itself on its website as a “premier executive soft skills trainer”.

On the corporate side, Daniel Rubianes is the managing director of the company with its main office at the first floor of the M S Plaza in east Bangalore. Rubianes, like many other employees of Campbell White, wears a second hat. On Thursdays and Sundays, he is pastor Dan Rubianes, the head of the Door Christian Centre — a church with origins in Arizona in the US but relatively new to India. Door Christian Centre is a part of the Pentecostal Christian Fellowship Ministries, also known as the Potter’s House. Haywood is a functionary of the Potter’s House in Mumbai.

August 19:

In a dramatic development in the terror email case, US national Ken Haywood, who had yet to be given a clean chit, flew out of the country with his family from Delhi late on Sunday night despite a lookout notice given to the immigration authorities.
According to sources, Haywood, his wife and their two teenaged daughters took a flight to Delhi from the Mumbai domestic airport on Sunday afternoon. They then took a flight to the US from the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi between midnight and 12.30am, sources said.
Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), which had summoned Haywood for questioning on Monday afternoon, was at a loss to explain how a person under investigation in a terror case managed to slip away.
In fact, this has led to speculation that the Indian government allowed him to leave the country. The US consulate in Mumbai refused to say anything on the case citing rules.

Historian and journalist Amaresh Misra:

Mumbai and India Under Attack

It is 4AM in India right now. I am in Mumbai reporting from the ground. I have not slept a wink. Mumbai is under attack. People and forces who killed Mahatama Gandhi, who demolished the Babari Mosque have triumphed. More than 16 groups of terrorists have taken over Taj, Oberai and several hotels. Hundreds of people are dead. For the first time no one is blaming Muslim organizations. The Mumbai ATS chief Hemant Karkare and other officers of the ATS have been killed. These were the same people who were investigating the Malegaon Blasts–in which Praggya Singh, an army officer and several other noted personalities of the BJP-RSS-Bajrang Dal-VHP were arrested. Karkare was the man to arrest them. Karkare was receiving threats from several quarters. LK Advani, the BJP chief and several other prominent leaders of the so-called Hindu terrorism squad were gunning for his head. And the first casualty in the terrorist attack was Karkare! He is dead–gone–the firing by terrorists began from Nariman House–which is the only building in Mumbai inhabited by Jews. Some Hindu Gujaratis of the Nariman area spoke live on several TV channels–they openly said that the firing by terrorists began from Nariman house. And that for two years suspicious activities were going on in this house. But no one took notice.

Our worst fears have come true. It is clear that Mossad is involved in the whole affair. An entire city has been attacked by Mossad and probably units of mercenaries. It is not possible for one single organization to plan and execute such a sophisticated operation. It is clear that this operation was backed by communal forces from within the Indian State. The Home Minister Shivraj Patil should resign. The RSS-BJP-VHP-Bajrang Dal should be banned. Advani and others ought to be arrested. Today is a day of shame for all Indians and all Hindus. Muslims and secular Hindus have been proven right. RSS type forces and Israel are all involved in not only destabilizing but finishing India. India should immediately snap all relations with Israel. We owe this much to Karkare and the brave ATS men who had shown the courage to arrest Praggya Singh, Raj Kumar Purohit, the army officer and several others.

A photograph publushed in Urdu Times, Mumbai, clearly shows that Mossad and ex-Mossad men came to India and met Sadhus and other pro-Hindutva elements recently. A conspiracy was clearly hatched.

And They Could Lifecast It

I propose that we pay for sending the current crop of bankers on a one way trip to the sun. It would be cheaper to put bankers and their families in launch vehicles directed towards the sun, than bail them out of their fictional mathematical games. The 'Zenit' rocket system can put one kg of stuff in orbit for less than three thousand dollars- You could put a family of bankers in orbit for less than a million. Building the launchers for putting bankers in orbit would create more real jobs than the trillions wasted in the futile efforts to make banks lend to consumers.

“When conditions are this volatile, consulting a psychic can be as good a strategy as any other.”

"Maroni should do what I did when I was secretary of the interior. He should withdraw the police from the streets and the universities, infiltrate the movement with secret (provacateurs) agents, ready to do anything, and, for about 10 days, let the demonstrators devastate shops, set fire to cars and lay waste the cities. After which, strengthened by popular consent, the sound of ambulance sirens should be louder than the police cars. The security forces should massacre the demonstrators without pity, and send them all to hospital. They shouldn't arrest them, because the magistrates would release them immediately, but they should beat them up. And they should also beat up those teachers who stir them up. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly lecturers, of course, but the young women teachers."

A senior Obama campaign official shared with The Washington Note that in July 2008, the McCain and Obama camps began to work secretly behind the scenes to assemble large rosters of potential personnel for the administration that only one of the candidates would lead.

Lists comprised of Democrats and Republicans were assembled, sorted into areas of policy expertise, so that the roster could be called on after the election by either the Obama or McCain transition teams.

This kind of out-of-sight coordination is rare between battling presidential camps and provides some indication that both Obama and McCain intended to draw expertise into their governments from both sides of the aisle -- or at least they wanted to appear interested in doing so if the information leaked out about the list development process.

Plunge Protection Team Protection Team

Cynical Illusions

Paul Street:
...
Before he could be in a position to be sold (brilliantly) on the mass American electoral market, of course, Obama first needed to sell himself to the national political and business elite that controls much of the political action behind the scenes. That sales job did not involve deceptive one- or two-message commercials and slogans. It was about candid, up-close meetings in which the candidate made it clear that he posed no substantive challenge to dominant domestic and imperial structures and doctrines. That earlier marketing project, ably recounted by Ken Silverstein and David Mendell, took place in late 2003 and 2004 and made possible the first great rolling out of Brand Obama during the senator's instantly famous keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in late July of 2004. It has continued behind the scenes ever since, with Obama continually reassuring his many big-money sponsors and corporate media enthusiasts that he is not some sort of starry-eyed idealist about to seriously question the interrelated hierarchies and ideologies of corporate-managed state capitalism, empire, and inequality.

The basic Obama message to the nation's ruling class - NOT advertised to the electorate - is that he is safe to concentrated power centers even if occasional populist-sounding slivers make their way into the construction of "Brand Obama." More than that, the campaign's message to the elite has included the promise that Obama will wrap reigning institutions and dogma in fake-progressive rebel's clothing and help repair the damage done to the United States' global public relations image by the vicious and clumsy post-9/11 excesses of the brazenly imperial Cheney-Bush gang.

Consistent with that hope, Advertising Age hails President-Elect Obama for producing "An Instant Overhaul for Tainted Brand America." The journal quotes David Brain, CEO of the global public relations firm Edelman Europe, Middle East and Africa, on how "the election and nomination process is the brand relaunch of the year. Brand USA. It's just fantastic."

Nick Ragone has an interesting resume. He is both "a presidential historian" and the senior VP of client development at the leading global advertising firm Omnicom Group's Ketchum. "We've put a new face on [America] and that face happens to be African-American," Ragone told Advertising Age. "It takes a lot of the hubris and arrogance of the last eight years and starts to put it in the rearview mirror for us."

Rigone might want to review Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four on the deletion of unpleasant history - sent "down the memory hole" - by totalitarian communication authorities. "Rearview mirror" is code language for Orwellian revisionism.

Then there's the interesting commentary of Harvard Business School professor John Quelch. Quelch is a former "WWP Group" (a global advertising firm) board member and the co-author of a recent book with an oxymoronic title: "Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy."

According to Welch, echoing Orwell, "The election result zero-bases the image of the United States worldwide. We have a clean slate with which to work," Welch told Advertising Age. "Let us hope the opportunity is not squandered the way it was after 9/11."

According to Carolyn Carter, the London-based president and CEO and Grey Group Europe, Middle East and Africa (creator of the popular teeth-rotting "Coke Zero" ad campaign for Northern Europe), "The last eight years broke faith in Brand America, and people want that faith restored."

Enter the openly imperial Obama, who is "almost like Che Guevera, in a good way," according to Foreign Policy magazine's web editor Blake Hounshell. "He has icon status," Hounshell explains, "with the all the art around the world of his face." The difference, of course, is that Che boldly inspired radical challenges to the American Empire but Obama inspires captivation with the corporate-imperial U.S. and its supposed self-reinvention as a land of progressive democracy and endless possibility. According to Scott Kronick, global marketing firm "Ogilvy PR's" Beijing-based president, Obama's triumph "send a strong message to the world that despite what many people believe and feel...America can be very open, democratic, and progressive."
...