Sixteen Trillion * * *|
This period — up to a future where the veil can no longer cloak — is going to see heightening dissembling within our present structures!
Dissemble — to hide under a false semblance or seeming; to feign (something) not to be what it really is; to put an untrue appearance upon; to disguise; to mask.
And from now — and for the next few years — we are going to see major dismembering of everything we have viewed and expected as a progression of our Earth lives!
Whatever they are telling you, the time to prepare is fast coming to an end!
Prepare means food procurement and private storage and other survival mechanisms!
This applies to people in all Western countries, and all other nation-states also!
Kewe |
Sixteen Trillion * * *
The US National Debt has increased an average of $2.27 billion per day since 2005 until 2008!
Now, due to the bailout of the rich bankers and world elite, the US National Debt is increasing substantially faster!
The US trade deficit is on track to set a record for an eighth consecutive year, running at an annual rate of $780 billion.
During fiscal year 2010/2011 the U.S. Treasury is on-track to pay upwards of $500 billion just in interest payments to finance the already-existing debt.
Annual interest payments for individuals, households, businesses, and all levels of US government are likely to reach $3 trillion — out of a $14 trillion annual GDP, an annual GDP that this year will likely decline. |
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The debt limit was raised for the third time in less than a year with the passage of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 on February 13, 2009 (ARRA; H.R. 1).
Signed into law on February 17, 2009 (P.L. 111-5), the debt limit was increased to $12,104 billion
An end-of-session vote in December 2009 increased the debt ceiling by $290 billion set at $12.394 trillion.
12 February 2010 Obama signed a law increasing the debt limit from $12.394 trillion to $14.294 trillion.
April 15, 2011 US stated debt exceeded present US law until August 1, 2011 when a stop-gap measure of four hundred billion was passed by Congress biding new 'Super-Congress' legislation.
The current Debt Limit was increased from $14.694 trillion to $15.194 trillion effective September 22, 2011.
The Debt Subject to Limit is the maximum amount of money the Government is allowed to borrow without receiving additional authority from Congress. The current statutory limit is $15.194 trillion.
The estimated population of the United States 2006 is around 300,000,000 people. David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the US and head of the Government Accountability Office, in his December 17, 2007, report to the US Congress on the financial statements of the US government noted that "the federal government did not maintain effective internal control over financial reporting (including safeguarding assets) and compliance with significant laws and regulations as of September 30, 2007."
The US government cannot pass an audit.
The GAO report states accrued liabilities of the federal government "totaled approximately $53 trillion as of September 30, 2007", likely to increase to $70 trillion by the end of 2009.
USA TODAY May 28, 2009, used federal data to compute all government liabilities, from Treasury bonds to Medicare to military pensions.
Bottom line: The government took on $6.8 trillion in new obligations in 2008, pushing the total owed to a record $63.8 trillion.
No funds have been set aside against the liability.
The estimated net worth of all Americans including all business is about $47 trillion, reducing as property and company value reduces.
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| This is not the Depression of the 30's, folks
This is much more serious!
Deflation in times of great crisis does not apply to gold
But then you cannot eat gold
Better to buy food, food in cans, stored food
Something you will not be able to buy, even with gold, makes gold somewhat pointless
Until things start to get better
Then it will be good to have stored gold
Kewe |
 Image: http://benbittrolff.blogspot.com/ |
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benbittrolff.blogspot.com
The Monetary Base has turned down.
That is the monetary base is being eroded faster than it can be replaced as debt destruction continues to accelerate.
The Fed is ‘injecting’ liquidity through REPO agreements.
The Fed is NOT ‘printing’ money.
Either way, debt destruction is exceeding liquidity injections.
As I benbittrolff.blogspot.com wrote in my first post:
“In the land of economics, debt and money are ‘fungible’.
That simply means they are interchangeable and for all intents and purposes the same.
Debt is money and money is debt.
The sudden rapid destruction of debt (every write down you hear coming out of the financial sector) has the effect of destroying money.
If debt is destroyed fast enough, and it will be, then you get a rather sudden contraction in money supply.
This is known as DEFLATION... and it ALWAYS happens when a debt bubble bursts.
ALWAYS.”
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| "So it would be rational for the banks to take Carlyle's assets and exchange them for top-quality, liquid US government bonds, rather than leave loans in place to a business, Carlyle, whose assets remain highly illiquid gone." [Modification by TheWE.biz]
BBC |
| They are expecting China and Japan to pay for this, folks
I feel like it's pre-second-world-war all over again!
Germany!
You get that feeling!
Bring on the evening's entertainment!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Kewe |
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$516 trillion
To grasp how significant this five-fold bubble increase is, let's put that $516 trillion in the context of some other domestic and international monetary data:
* U.S. annual gross domestic product is about $15 trillion
* U.S. money supply is also about $15 trillion
* Current proposed U.S. federal budget is $3 trillion
* U.S. government's maximum legal debt is $9 trillion
* U.S. mutual fund companies manage about $12 trillion
* World's GDPs for all nations is approximately $50 trillion
* Unfunded Social Security and Medicare benefits $50 trillion to $65 trillion
* Total value of the world's real estate is estimated at about $75 trillion
* Total value of world's stock and bond markets is more than $100 trillion
* BIS valuation of world's derivatives back in 2002 was about $100 trillion
* BIS 2007 valuation of the world's derivatives is now a whopping $516 trillion
Recently Pimco's bond fund king Bill Gross said "What we are witnessing is essentially the breakdown of our modern-day banking system, a complex of leveraged lending so hard to understand that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke required a face-to-face refresher course from hedge fund managers in mid-August."
In short, not only Warren Buffett, but Bond King Bill Gross, our Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the rest of America's leaders can't "figure out" the world's $516 trillion derivatives.
PAUL B. FARRELLBuffett and Gross warn: $516 trillion bubble is a disaster waiting to happen |
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How it went wrong |
Invasion paid by YOU |
Badly charred and mutilated body of man
US Israel missile hit a van carrying civilian passengers
US Taxpayer gives Israel more than 15 million dollars a day
Every day 15 million dollars given by US to Israel
Secret deadly weapons Tanks Missiles Warplanes Artillery Shells All funded by the US |
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Invasion paid by YOU |
Killed along with 17 others
US Israel missile hit a van carrying civilian passengers
US Taxpayer gives Israel more than 15 million dollars a day
Every day 15 million dollars given by US to Israel
Secret deadly weapons Tanks Missiles Warplanes Artillery Shells All funded by the US |
An Economy Driven By Debt Don't Confuse the Jobs Hype with the Facts By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The November payrolls job report was announced Friday with the usual misleading hype.
Spinmeisters made the most out of the 215,000 jobs.
Looking beyond the glitter at the real facts, this is what we see.
21,000 of those jobs were government jobs supported by taxpayers.
There were only 194,000 new jobs in the private sector.
Of those new jobs, 37,000 are in construction and only 11,000 are in manufacturing.
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration |
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Bulk in domestic service
The bulk of the new jobs — 144,000 — are in domestic services.
Wholesale and retail trade account for 20,000.
Food services and drinking places (waitresses and bar tenders) account for 38,000.
Health care and social assistance account for 27,000.
Professional and business services account for 29,000.
Financial activities gained 13,000 jobs.
Transportation and warehousing gained 8,000 jobs.
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Balance of trade!
Very few of these jobs result in tradable services that can be exported or help to close the growing gap in the US balance of trade.
The 11,000 new factory jobs and the 15,000 of the previous month are a relief from the usual loss.
However, these gains are more than offset by the job cuts recently announced by General Motors and Ford.
Despite the gain in jobs, total hours worked declined as the average workweek fell to 33.7 hours.
The decline in the labor force participation rate, a consequence of the shrinkage in well-paying jobs, masks a higher rate of unemployment than the reported 5 percent.
The ratio of employment to population fell again in November.
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Hourly earnings not keeping up
Average hourly earnings (up 3.2 percent over the last year) are not keeping up with the consumer price index (up 4.3 percent).
Consequently, real incomes are falling.
This is not the picture of a healthy economy in which growth in high productivity, high value-added jobs fuel the growth in consumer demand and provide savings to finance Washington's red ink.
What we are looking at is an economy that is coming unglued from the loss of jobs that provide ladders of upward mobility and from massive trade and budget deficits that are resulting in unsustainable growth in indebtedness to foreigners.
Inflation 4.3 percent?
The consumer price index measures inflation at 4.3 percent over the past year.
Many people, experiencing household budgets severely impacted by fuel prices and grocery bills, find this figure unrealistically low.
PNC Financial Services has a Christmas price index consisting of the gifts in the song, "The 12 Days of Christmas." The index reports that the cost of the collection of gifts has risen 6 percent since last Christmas. Some of the gifts have risen substantially in price.
Gold rings are up 27.5 percent, and pear trees are up 15.4 percent. The cost of labor (drummers drumming, maids-a-milking) has remained the same.
Populations are hard pressed when the prices of goods rise relative to the price of labor, because this makes it impossible for the population to maintain its standard of living.
The US economy has been kept alive by low interest rates, which fueled a real estate boom.
Consumers have kept growth alive by refinancing their home mortgages and spending the equity in their houses. Their indebtedness has risen.
Debt-fueled growth is qualitatively different from economic growth that results from an increase in high value-added jobs.
Economists who look at the 3+ percent economic growth rate and conclude that things are fine are fooling themselves and the public.
When the real estate boom ends, what will be the source of new spending power? |
Invasion paid by YOU |
A young girl — Teir Hafra,
US Israel killing of men, women and children
US Taxpayer gives Israel more than 15 million dollars a day
Every day 15 million dollars given by US to Israel
Secret deadly weapons Tanks Missiles Warplanes Artillery Shells All funded by the US |
Iraq War Winners: Al-Qaeda, Iran and Military Contractors America is Running Out of TimeBy PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS September 26, 2005 G eorge W. Bush will go down in history as the president who fiddled while America lost its superpower status. Bush used deceit and hysteria to lead America into a war that is bleeding the US economically, militarily, and diplomatically. The war is being fought with hundreds of billions of dollars borrowed from foreigners. The war is bleeding the military of troops and commitments. The war has ended the US claim to moral leadership and exposed the US as a reckless and aggressive power. Focused on a concocted "war on terrorism," the Bush administration diverted money from the New Orleans levees to Iraq, with the consequence that the US now has a $100 billion rebuild bill on top of the war bill. The US is so short of troops that neoconservatives are advocating the use of foreign mercenaries paid with US citizenship. US efforts to isolate Iran have been blocked by Russia and China, nuclear powers that Bush cannot bully. The Iraqi war has three beneficiaries: (1) al Qaeda, (2) Iran and (3) US war industries and Bush-Cheney cronies who receive no-bid contracts. Everyone else is a loser.
The war has bestowed on al Qaeda recruits, prestige, and a training ground.
The war has allied Iran with Iraq's Shi'ite majority.
The war has brought soaring profits to the military industries and the firms with reconstruction contracts at the expense of 20,000 US military casualties and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties.
The Republican Party is a loser, because its hidebound support for the war is isolating the party from public opinion.
The Democratic Party is a loser, because its cowardly acquiescence in a war that is opposed by the majority of its members is making the party irrelevant.
The latest polls show that a majority of Americans believe the US cannot win against the Iraq insurgency.
The majority support withdrawal and the redirection of war spending to rebuilding New Orleans. Despite the clarity of the public's wishes, the Republican Party continues to support the unpopular war.
With the exceptions of Reps. Cynthia McKinney and John Conyers, Democrats fled the scene of the Sept. 24 antiwar rally in Washington DC. The cynical Democrats are apparently owned by the same interest groups that own the Republicans and are refusing the mantle of majority party that the electorate is offering to the party that will end the war.
The Bush administration is churning out red ink in excess of $1 trillion annually. The federal budget deficit is approaching $500 billion. The US trade deficit is approaching $700 billion.
The budget deficit is being financed by foreigners, primarily Asians who now hold enough US government debt to exercise power over US interest rates and the value of the dollar whenever they decide to use the power that Bush has placed in their hands.
The trade deficit is being financed by turning over the ownership of US assets and future income streams to foreigners, making Americans forever poorer from the loss of accumulated wealth.
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Iraq War Winners: Al-Qaeda, Iran and Military Contractors America is Running Out of Time By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS September 26, 2005 For the time being, China is willing to accumulate US assets as a way of taking over our consumer markets, attracting US manufacturing industry with cheap labor subsidized by artificial currency values, and gaining our technology.
China's strategy is to over-value the US dollar in order to encourage the transfer of US economic capabilities to China.
China's strategy gives artificial value to the dollar and keeps US interest rates at an artificial low.
The values of US stocks, bonds, and real estate depend on the support that Asians' economic strategies provide the dollar and US interest rates.
As Asia achieves its goal of preeminence in manufacturing, innovation, and product development, the strategy will change.
Once China completes its acquisition of US capabilities, it will no longer have a reason to support the dollar.
When the dollar goes, it will affect costs, profits, interest rates and living standards in dramatic ways.
Costs and interest rates will soar, and profits, living standards, equity values, bond prices and real estate will plummet.
These unpleasant events await only Asia's decision to curtail its support for US red ink. That will happen when this support no longer serves Asia's interest.
When Asia pulls the plug on the dollar, the US government will find that monetary and fiscal policy are powerless to offset the consequences.
Compared to US budget and trade deficits, terrorists are a minor concern.
The greatest danger that the US faces is the dollar's loss of reserve currency role.
This would be an impoverishing event, one from which the US would not recover.
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An intelligent government sincerely concerned with homeland security would find a way to halt the global labor arbitrage that is stripping the American economy of high value-added jobs and manufacturing capability, thereby causing the US trade deficit to explode.
The loss of tax base that results when US companies outsource jobs and relocate production abroad makes it ever more difficult to balance a budget strained by war, natural disasters, and demographic impact on Social Security and Medicare.
Global labor arbitrage is rapidly dismantling the ladders of upward mobility and thereby endangering American political stability.
This threat is far greater than any Osama bin Laden can mount.
Time is running out for Republicans and Democrats to escape from the distraction of a pointless war and to focus on the real threats that endanger the United States of America.
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Published on Thursday, July 21, 2005 by Working for Change
Big Time Trouble America continues to weaken, but why worry? by Molly Ivins
If you had done a poll in November 2000, or in November 2004, I don't think you would have gotten out of single digits with this proposition: "George W. Bush wants to radically revise American law, including complete repeal of the New Deal, and take us back to the economic legal system that prevailed at the turn of the 19th century — Robber Barons Redux."
During the past five years, both media and political circles have devoted an enormous amount of attention to social issues and culture wars — rise of the Christian Right, anti-abortion groups, our debates over moral decline and moral relativism, prayer in the schools, school vouchers, displaying the Ten Commandments, sex and violence in entertainment, bias in the news media, gay marriage and all the rest of it.
I sometimes think all of it amounts to a bunch of people saying, "The world would be a much better place if everybody else thought exactly the same way I do."
Reminds me of Dr. Henry Higgins in his famous philosophical disquisition, "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?"
Higgins finally discovers the ultimate problem: "Why can't a woman be more like ME?"
Then, of necessity, we have spent huge amounts of time on Sept. 11, terrorism, Iraq, and related and ancillary problems.
It is not necessary to review the bidding here, but Iraq is becoming as divisive and unpopular as the Vietnam War.
While we have been absorbed in the silly circus of cultural issues and the riveting questions of the war, we've also been getting our pockets picked.
Big time.
I am impressed that cartoonist Lloyd Dangle in the strip Troubletown managed to get the whole problem into 12 panels, each announcing some piece of economic news accompanied by an American saying, essentially, "What, me worry?"
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The U.S. is over $7 trillion [&8 rising]in debt (no problem).
China buys $1 billion worth of U.S. treasury bills a day (thanks for floating us).
Americans love the prices at Wal-Mart (made in China, cute!); the Chinese save 50 percent of their domestic product.
The average American has $9,000 on his credit cards.
Our economy is fueled by a fragile housing bubble.
The minimum wage is $5.15 per hour...
Taxpayers who earn over $1 million saved $30K under Bush tax cuts.
The war in Iraq costs $9 billion a month.
By 2040, our kids will be unable to do more than pay the interest on the national debt ...
Bankruptcy reform makes it impossible to escape your debts.
In Darfur [Sudan], people earn $1.25 a day.
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Structural economic problems as serious as those that destroyed the late Soviet Union
For those who prefer to get their economic news from a more respectable source than a cartoon, I recommend Bill Greider's op-ed article in the July 18 New York Times, "America's Truth Deficit."
He begins with the startling thesis that we face structural economic problems as serious as those that destroyed the late Soviet Union and that, like the USSR before its breakup, our leaders cannot talk about these problems honestly.
"[Our] weakening position in the global trading system is obvious and ominous, yet leaders in politics, business, finance and the news media are not willing to discuss candidly what is happening and why.
Instead they recycle the usual bromides about the benefits of free trade and assurances that everything will work out for the best."
It is a curious thing that as the disadvantages and, indeed, perils of globalization become clearer and the subject of ever-more worried books by respected economists, the mainstream media keep treating the whole problem as though it were about a bunch of protesters in turtle costumes at the G8 summit.
If it were not for Lou Dobbs on CNN, one would never even hear it mentioned on television.
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Our multinational corporations increasingly work against the interests of Americans themselves
Forget what the Supreme Court thinks about teaching creationism in the schools:
Think about what it will contribute to the spiraling disasters of globalization by dismantling the entire economic regulatory system built up over the past 100 years.
As Greider notes, "Washington defines 'national interest' primarily in terms of advancing the global reach of our multinational enterprises."
Problem is, our multinational corporations increasingly work against the interests of Americans themselves.
In addition to outsourcing jobs, the companies locate sham headquarters in off-shore tax havens to avoid paying taxes.
The only restraints we have ever had on multinational corporations are government regulation and the right to sue the bastards for the various kinds of harm they cause.
It is precisely those two forms of control that are being not just undermined but tossed out entirely by an increasingly activist right-wing judiciary.
Recommended reading: Greider's One World, Ready Or Not; David Korten's When Corporations Rule the World; and Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling. © 2006 Working for Change Common Dreams © 1997-2006 |
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Classified Spending On the Rise
By Dan Morgan Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, August 27, 2003; Page A23 "Black," or classified, programs requested in President Bush's 2004 defense budget are at the highest level since 1988, according to a report prepared by the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The center concluded that classified spending next fiscal year will reach about $23.2 billion of the Pentagon's total request for procurement and research funding. When adjusted for inflation, that is the largest dollar figure since the peak reached during President Ronald Reagan's defense buildup 16 years ago. The amount in 1988 was $19.7 billion, or $26.7 billion if adjusted for inflation, according to the center. "It's puzzling. It sets the mind to wondering where the money's going and what sort of politically controversial things the administration is doing because they're not telling anybody," said John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research group in Alexandria that has been critical of the administration's defense priorities. Pike said part of the surge in the classified budget probably can be explained by increases for the Central Intelligence Agency's covert action programs, which are central to the war on terrorism. Traditionally, Pike said, much of the funding for the CIA is hidden in Air Force weapons procurement accounts. But unlike the 1980s, when it was widely known that the 'black' budget was going to the development of stealth aircraft such as the B-2 bomber and F-117 fighter, the uses of the classified accounts today are far murkier, Pike said. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments is a Washington research group that analyzes many aspects of the defense budget. Steven Kosiak, who prepared the report on classified spending, said he reached his conclusions by comparing sums requested for 'open,' or nonclassified, programs with the total Defense Department request for fiscal 2004. Some black spending in the Pentagon budget is designated for code-named programs such as the Army's "Tractor Rose" and the Navy's "Retract Larch." But sources said some names may be accounting fictions that do not stand for actual programs. Other classified spending is accounted for under such bland headings as "special activities." Officials at the Pentagon and in Congress declined to comment on the center's report, which was compiled earlier this summer. Key congressional defense committees will meet in the next several weeks to resolve differences over the 2004 Pentagon spending plan, including those involving classified programs. According to the Kosiak analysis, the Air Force's classified weapons procurement budget has jumped from $7 billion in 2001 to almost $11 billion as requested for 2004. In dollar terms, total classified spending in the Pentagon budget request has almost doubled since the mid-1990s, according to tables provided by Kosiak. Kosiak said in his report that performance in the classified programs has been mixed. He noted that highly successful weapons systems such as the F-117 and the B-2 were initially developed within the classified budget. But so was the Navy's A-12 medium attack plane, which was canceled in 1991 after a series of technical problems and cost increases. After it was canceled, manufacturers complained that secrecy in the program kept them from acquiring critical data needed to head off some of the problems. "Restrictions placed on access to classified funding have meant that the Defense Department and Congress typically exercise less oversight over classified programs than unclassified ones," Kosiak wrote. In the case of the new defense budget, it is anybody's guess where most of the classified money is going, Pike said. But he said it is a good bet that some of it is going to programs that the administration is known to strongly favor, such as missile defense and the development of hypersonic planes that can fly beyond Earth's atmosphere. "This is an administration that likes to play I've got a secret," he said.
"The growth of the classified budget appears to be part of a larger pattern of this administration being secretive."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company |
| In 2000 the US merchandise trade deficit with China became larger than the chronic US trade deficit with Japan. By 2003 the US trade deficit with China was almost twice as large as the US deficit with Japan: $124 billion versus $66 billion. 2004 the US trade deficit with China was $162 billion, a 30.9% increase. |
The Negative Return Economy — a discourse on America’s black budget
Fascinating and lucrative
Keep the people frightened
Black Budget? What Black Budget?
At the time of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001 according to the Government Accounting Office (GAO), Pentagon had incurred $3.4 trillion of “undocumentable transactions,” that is to say that there were $3.4 trillion worth of financial transactions for which there was no discernible purpose.
Of things they cannot know Is the secret of the Tomb If they knew what you and I know They would know it is just men Who rob them, cheat them, kill them Then start it all again — Orville X |
The day before the attack, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned that the lack of control over its budget was a greater danger to the national security of the United States than terrorism.
After the attacks, the government stopped publicly disclosing information about “undocumentable transactions”.
Blame the Bookkeeper
The problem is not restricted to the Pentagon but affects the entire spectrum of government agencies and departments from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Defense Department.
For a number of years the GAO has compiled a parallel set of books for the Federal Government called the Financial Report of the United States.
This report attempts to impose “Generally Accepted Accounting Principles” to the government’s financial
reporting process in order to give a clearer picture of the government’s actual assets and liabilities and thereby
enable better planning. Neither the Pentagon nor the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), to name just two, have ever been able to pass a GAO audit on this basis.
Significantly, the government does not employ double entry bookkeeping in the preparation of its accounts.
This has been standard accounting practice since the seventeenth century, which classifies and tracks sources and uses of funds to create an accurate picture of a business (or public) enterprise.
Today the Pentagon utilises no accountable means of tracking money authorised by Congress from its initial authorisation to its use, say in developing a fighter plane.
Running a 21st century military machine using antique accounting methods is an anomalous situation with interesting implications, not least of which is that government agencies cannot, or will not, explain what they are doing with the money that is appropriated for their operations by Congress.
A similar state of affairs prevails at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
It exists primarily, at least in law, to ensure that low income Americans have access to affordable housing, which HUD provides as well as both credit and credit insurance on a nationwide scale.
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Yet HUD has never compiled information on its activities so that it or anyone else can see, by place, whether or not its activities in that place make money, lose money, or are simply irrelevant.
Conflict of Interests
Few Americans are probably aware that Lockheed Martin, builder of the F22 air superiority fighter, is also a major outside contractor supplying financial control and accounting systems to the Pentagon.
The Pentagon for its part is Lockheed Martin’s biggest customer.
This example is by no means unique.
Lockheed also has a subsidiary employed by HUD to administer housing in American cities, an unusual diversification for a corporation the majority of whose business is done with the military and intelligence agencies. [ii]
Similarly Dyncorp (recently acquired by Computer Sciences Corporation) is another contractor that, like Lockheed, derives almost all its revenue from government security and military contracts.
It is also a contractor supplying information technology to a variety of government agencies including the Pentagon, HUD, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Department of Justice.
At the Department of Justice it manages the case management software used by DOJ lawyers to manage investigations. [iii]
A prime example of overlapping interests is Herbert “Pug” Winokur. Not only was he on Dyncorp’s board of directors but he is also the Enron director in charge of that company’s risk management committee, and a long-standing board member of the Harvard Management Corporation, which invests in HUD projects.
AMS Inc., a computer software firm hired by HUD in 1996 to take over the management of its internal software for accounting and financial control, presided in two short years over an explosion in undocumentable transactions of nearly $76 billion. AMS violated fiduciary and control practices by installing its own equipment and software with no parallel runs against the legacy software and accounting system.
In those same two years, HUD’s management more than tripled the volume of loan and insurance business being pushed through the system. Anyone familiar with running such systems in a bank or an insurance company immediately understands that a decision such as this (for it had to be a decision) would result in huge losses. [iv]
Is this incompetence or design? Only the credulous would believe accident: the reward for Charles Rossotti, president of AMS, was to be named Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner at the Department of the Treasury, from which position he oversaw significant Treasury contract amendments to AMS.
He was a direct beneficiary of this as a special White House waiver permitted Rossotti and his wife to retain their AMS
stock.
Government’s response to criticism
The reaction of many people to the sorts of facts related above is to dismiss them as no more than evidence of incompetence and accident.
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The government does little to resist this sort of interpretation; on the contrary, it encourages it.
For example, in response to calls for an investigation of its financial control, the Pentagon countered with an offer to investigate credit card abuse.
Complaints about the performance of outside contractors such as AMS have been answered by a government-wide contract award to IBM for the standardisation of IT systems and practices.
IBM, in turn, has awarded subcontracts to AMS, Lockheed, Dyncorp, SAIC and Accenture (formerly spun out from Arthur Andersen of Enron fame).
It is these firms that have failed to provide systems that can pass a GAO audit.
This manoeuvring and the government’s justifications affront common sense and are unethical.
As private sector firms, they have to pass audits before their own accounts can be approved and reported to shareholders. Yet they routinely fail to meet the same standard for the government.
Often the government blames the previous, outgoing administration.
However, consider that the incoming Bush administration replaced all the senior Clinton political appointees except: the Comptroller of the Currency, John D. Hawke; IRS commissioner Charles Rossotti (formerly of AMS); Comptroller General David Walker (Formerly of Arthur Andersen [v] and CIA director George Tenet.
(see: http://www.npr.org/programs/npc/2001/010423.dwalker.html)
In short, the key positions necessary for the control of the federal credit, financial control, audit and intelligence.
Comptroller of the Currency, John D. Hawke ---->control of the federal credit
This undisturbed transition from Democratic to Republican administrations represents a remarkable cross-party consensus, and highlights the real positions of power. With the exception of Rossotti, all these men are still in place in 2004. And Rossotti? He left the IRS to become a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group for information technology. A more richly symbolic and meaningful job move could scarcely be imagined.
Carlyle’s business is global venture venture capital, which is to say it invests in corporate acquisitions all over the world with a speciality in arms manufacturers and technology.
The large levels of undocumentable transactions at HUD and the Department of Defense inevitably inspire curiosity.
Where is the money associated with those transactions?
It is no great leap of imagination to wonder equally where the Carlyle Group raises the money with which to finance its
acquisitions. [vi]
The trusts are dead. Long live the trusts
The cartelisation of the American economy was for all intents and purposes completed by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. [vii]
IRS commissioner Charles Rossotti ----> financial control Comptroller General David Walker ----> audit CIA director George Tenet ----> intelligence |
In 1889, America’s leading banker JP Morgan held a meeting at his 5th Avenue mansion in New York. Its purpose was to reach a consensus whereby the owners of America’s railroads merged their competing interests. [viii]
This was no mere group of transportation executives agreeing to fix prices. The railroads also controlled the nation’s coalfields and oil supplies, and were tightly bound to the nation’s largest banks.
The creation of the Federal Reserve in 1914 completed this process of consolidation.
In effect, Congress ceded control of the US currency system and the federal credit to the banks, thereby officially recognizing the cartel.
This placed a relatively small number of men in a position to set prices across the economy with a degree of control heretofore unknown in US history.
The banking cartel’s interest in war
American foreign policy and the wars that America has fought over the course of the twentieth century (including the Spanish American War in 1898 [ix] and the present War on Terror) have successfully extended the cartel’s control over the world economy.
The American Civil War was fought to determine control of the US economy. [x] Most Americans would explain the last 150 years of warfare as sadly necessary for reasons beyond America’s control.
The implication is that America has accumulated its preponderant international position by some providential accident and not by design.
Arguments for a contrary view elicit derisive accusations of falling victim to “conspiracy theory.”
Reassuringly, they believe that self-interested individuals and organisations are incapable of collaboration to achieve
common ends.
When JP Morgan sat the owners of America’s railroads around a table and hammered out a non-compete agreement, it was no accident. Similarly, neither have America’s wars been accidents; they have been far more profitable than is widely understood.
The US confiscated billions of dollars worth of German and Japanese war treasure at the end of World War Two. President Truman made a conscious decision to not reveal this to the public or repatriate it.
Instead, it was used to finance covert operations. [xi]
Command economy
Popular myth has it that the trusts were broken up in the first decade of the twentieth century thanks to the crusade of Theodore Roosevelt on behalf of the middle class.
Roosevelt certainly used his public stance against “big business” to successfully bid for campaign money from the very businessmen whom he was attacking.
This perhaps explains why he subsequently signed legislation repealing criminal penalties for those same businessmen.
This is a common trait of “liberal” or “progressive” presidents.
The second Roosevelt, Franklin, is remembered as the champion of the downtrodden, who put an end to the Great Depression.
It was he who established the nation’s social security system which in reality was (and is) funded by a highly regressive tax on its beneficiaries.
Matching contributions from business were allowed to be deducted as a business expense before tax which simply extended the regressive nature of the program by financing business’ share out of foregone tax revenue.
Roosevelt, a superb politician, won a landslide victory on a platform of reform which he adroitly sidestepped fulfilling.
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Instead, he declared a national economic emergency, short-circuiting any constitutional challenge to his power in the court.
He promptly defaulted on the gold clause in the government’s bond contracts, and established the Exchange Stabilisation Fund (ESF) in 1934.
Ostensibly meant to promote dollar stability in the foreign exchanges, the Fund in practice was and is something quite different.
It is exempt from reporting to Congress and is answerable only to the President and Secretary of the Treasury.
It is, in short, an undisclosed fund that can tap federal credit.
Apparatus of a Command Economy
The establishment of the ESF was an extension of the same logic behind the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1914.
The latter, the Fed, was also created in response to a crisis: the crash of 1907.
The Wall Street legend credits JP Morgan’s genius and patriotism with saving the Nation.
In reality, the crash and resulting depression enabled Morgan to destroy his competitors, buy up their assets and in the process revealed to the nation and the world just how powerful the banks and Morgan were.
Not all were grateful, and some demanded legislative action to bring the federal credit and national monetary system under public oversight and control.
In a campaign of masterful political legerdemain, the Federal Reserve was created in 1912 by an act of Congress to do just this.
But by creating it as a private corporation owned by the banks, Congress effectively ceded to the banks a position even stronger than they had occupied before.
Even today it is not widely understood that the Fed is a privately held business owned by the very interests that it nominally regulates.
Thus the control of federal credit and the US monetary system and the rich flow of insider information that results from that control are veiled from public view and are privately controlled in secret which rather explains the Delphic nature of the Fed’s chairman.
The extension of secret control was not limited to finance.
The National Security Act of 1947 created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council (NSC) and consolidated control of the three armed services under one roof at the Pentagon.
This merely served to extend this principle of secrecy to the field of “national security.”
Like the Fed, the CIA was exempted from public disclosure of its budget and was given budgetary control over the entire intelligence community, while the National Security Council was set up as a policy-making body separate from the existing organs of state policy such as the State Department and the military commands reporting directly to the president.
The CIA Act of 1949 created a budget mechanism that allowed the CIA to spend as much money as it wanted “without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds.”
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In short, the CIA has a way to fund anything — legal or illegal — behind the protection of national security law. [xii]
Implementation
Having created the bureaucratic means to conceive and make policy in secret, the next development was to create the means to implement it.
The main issue was how to control money flows in the national economy.
The government’s solution was to assume a commanding position in the credit markets.
To that end, it created first the Federal Housing Authority in 1934 (forerunner of HUD and now part of HUD) [xiii] and subsequently Ginnie Mae and then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) to supply mortgage finance and insurance for homebuyers.
The underlying political purpose is more subtle.
Combined with the power of the Federal Reserve (i.e. the cartel) to set the price of money, the ESF, the GSEs, and latterly the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), have proven to be a powerful force for regulating money flows and demand in the US economy.
The military, too, was reformed with the adoption for the first time in American history of a wartime military budget and force structure in peacetime.
In the early 60s this was fine tuned with the adoption of an explicit cost-plus acquisition process.
The justification for this was, as usual, national security.
This military budget has proven as effective in regulating the industrial sector as control over home finance has proven in regulating credit.
Together they confer virtual control over the economy as conventionally measured in terms of money GDP.
Credit, credit, and more credit
A few moments reflection on the institutional structure briefly outlined above makes clear the central importance of the federal credit in underwriting it.
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The federal government underwrites the GSEs by extending to them a subsidised line of credit from the Treasury. An additional indirect subsidy in the form of lower borrowing costs flows from the belief in the marketplace that this constitutes an implicit government guarantee of their solvency.
While this subject from time to time excites controversy, the truth is that the GSEs are not the only corporate entities benefiting from government support.
Since the failure of Continental Illinois in the early 80s, the government has informally made it clear that it stands behind the banking system. This was made even more explicit with the bailout of Citibank in the early 90s and the implicit subsidy that the entire banking industry received as a result.
Nor are financial institutions the only ones to enjoy this kind of support.
Both Lockheed Martin and Chrysler have been effectively saved from insolvency by the taxpayer in the past, presumably due to their status as major defence contractors.
Such a system places a significant value premium on sheer size, if for no other reason than what the banking system cheerfully and disingenuously refers to as the “too-big-to-fail” doctrine.
But for industrial firms, too, there is significant value in having a contracting relationship with the Pentagon.
Not only is there the economic nirvana of cost-plus contracting but, if you are big enough, your fundamental business risk is underwritten for national security reasons.
Thus, there is a tendency for firms to migrate their businesses to military rather than purely civilian markets; today the Boeing Company is a perfect case study of this in action.
And a result is that civilian business in sector after sector has been driven into insolvency or into acquisition by the very national security industry that is ostensibly protecting them. [xiv]
The dynamics of cost-plus contracting are such that profits rise as costs rise. [xv] This explains a great deal about the size of American military budgets, which have risen inexorably over the years even as military
preparedness has fallen. [xvi]
But as we have seen, the losses in terms of lower productivity are felt across wide swaths of the economy as non-military contracting competition is squeezed out or acquired.
Obviously these losses in the real economy have to be financed, producing a higher demand for credit than would otherwise be the case.
Given declining productivity and a narrowing production base, it was inevitable that at some point net exports would become negative, a condition that the US entered in 1982 and which has intensified since.
Today the US net foreign debt [xvii] is on the order of $3,000 billion (30% of GDP) and is increasing at a rate of some $500 billion per year (5% of GDP). [xviii]
Concentrating capital
To finance such a large foreign borrowing requirement without currency depreciation requires both the ability to control as much of the national cash flow as possible as well as the collaboration of at least a few key foreign countries to achieve the same sort of control over international cash flows.
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In the latter case, this takes the form, in part, of ever larger amounts of intervention on the part of those countries running dollar surpluses and strong net export positions to prevent the markets from driving the dollar lower.
In practice this means that they accumulate more and more dollars, which they in turn invest in US Treasury securities.
Foreigners now own some 45% of US Treasury debt outstanding.
In January this year the Bank of Japan intervened in the currency markets on behalf of Japan’s Ministry of Finance, purchasing a whopping $69 billion in that month alone, or more than 30% of its total intervention in 2003 which was itself a record year.
Current trends
All of this may seem to have little to do with the black budget, which most people associate with intelligence covert “black” operations.
The truth, however, is that the black budget cannot be understood in isolation without understanding the political, historical and economic context from which it springs.
One way of understanding this is by comparing trends.
For example, in 1950 the Dow Jones Industrials stood at 200, and today the Dow is at 10,600.
In 1950 narcotics trafficking was a relatively unknown crime in the United States.
Today it is endemic, and not only in cities but in smaller towns and rural communities as well.
In 1950 the US possessed most of the world’s gold and was the world’s biggest creditor.
Today it is the world’s biggest debtor.
In 1950 the US was a major exporter of industrial goods to the rest of the world.
On current trends the US is not self-sufficient in manufactured goods and will not even have a manufacturing industry worth the name by 2020.
Then And Now
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Narcotics trafficking and the stock market
Is there a connection between these trends or are they random?
It may seem strange to think of a positive correlation between narcotics trafficking and the stock market, but consider: in the late 90s the US Department of Justice estimated that the proceeds of such trade entering the US banking system were between $500 and $1.000 billion annually, or more than 5-10% of GDP.
Now the proceeds of crime need to find a way into legitimate, that is legal, channels or they are worthless to the holders.
If one further imagines that the banking system earns a fee of 1% for handling this flow (rather low considering that money laundering is a seller’s market) then the profits for the banks from this activity are on the order of $5 to $10 billion.
Applying Citigroup’s current stock market multiple of 15 or so to this yields a market capitalisation of anywhere from $65 to $115 billion.
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One can thus readily see the importance of the illegal drug trade to the financial services industry.
As it happens, this trade in illegal profits is concentrated in four states: Texas, New York, Florida and California, or four Federal Reserve districts: Dallas, New York, Atlanta and San Francisco.
Can anyone seriously suppose that the Fed is unaware of this if the Department of Justice is?
It, after all, handles the flows.
Narcotics trafficking and the National Interest
One reason for the Fed’s silence is that agencies of the government itself have been involved in drug trafficking for sixty years or more. [xix]
For the purposes of understanding the black budget, one needs to be aware of the American practice of opening the American consumer market for drugs to foreign exporters in order to pursue strategic objectives abroad.
The portability of narcotics and the huge price mark up from production to point of sale makes them a particularly useful source of financing for covert operations.
Even more important is that the proceeds from narcotics sales fall completely outside conventional, constitutional channels of funding.
This helps explain the ubiquitous presence of narcotics trafficking in zones of conflict around the world, from Columbia to Afghanistan. [xx]
Little examined, however, is the impact of narcotics trafficking on communities and economies at the point of sale.
Consider, for example, the impact on real estate markets and financial services.
Real estate is an attractive area in which to employ the cash surplus resulting from narcotics sales because it is, as an industry, entirely unregulated with respect to money laundering.
Because cash is an acceptable and in some places familiar method of payment, large sums can be disposed of easily and with little comment.
This can and does result in considerable distortion to local demand, and in turn provide fuel for real estate speculation and increased credit demand to finance it along with considerable opportunities for speculation and fraud. [xxi]
The Iran Contra episode during the 1980s contained all these elements; although many are familiar with the sale of arms to Iran to provide cash to finance CIA backed guerrillas in Nicaragua and death squads in El Salvador, less well-known is the systematic looting of local financial institutions and narcotics sales in the US.
Banking allows the application of leverage to the cash that is generated by “illegal” activity while simultaneously making it possible to launder the funds.
And when a bank fails, it is the shareholders, uninsured depositors and the taxpayer who pick up the bill.
The point here us that narcotics trafficking creates a milieu in which the incentives to engage in uneconomic activity are greater than those to engage in economic activity.
In a word, the profits from stealing are higher than the profits from playing by the rules.
What counts from a public policy point of view in the cartelised economy is the ability to control and concentrate cash flows of any kind.
To this end, it is less important that a bank fails than that the federal credit is available to make good the losses.
In doing so, the cash cost of losses is shifted, or socialised, to the national taxpayer base.
As long, therefore, as there are willing lenders to the Federal Government, the game can go on.
Technology gives an edge
Government’s power combined with advancing computer technology has over the last thirty years vastly simplified the task of managing the national — and by extension the international — cash flow.
Politically, the American victory in the Second World War meant that the entire West and its dependencies were co-opted into the International Monetary Fund (IMF) negotiated at Bretton Woods in 1944.
Forty-five years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 meant that for the first time in history there was no alternative monetary or political choice in the international arena.
The British Empire had surrendered to the Americans precisely because America, represented an alternative to sterling, namely the dollar.
Today the US presides over a more or less fully closed global monetary system centred on the dollar.
In practice this means that those countries within the system must exchange real value in the form of manufactures and commodities with the US cartel in exchange for dollars, which are no more than an accounting entry created out of thin air.
This is analogous to a company with no assets exchanging watered stock for cash, and indeed this is no accident.
It was a favoured technique by which the JP Morgans of the nineteenth century successfully financed the consolidation of American industry and finance.
Today their heirs are busily dong the same thing, but on a global scale.
The diagram is a stylized representation of the relationship between the cartel and its allies outside the United States. Flows are both concrete and abstract.
Concrete flows are manufactures, narcotics and commodities (mainly oil) inwards and arms outwards.
Abstract flows are money outwards in payment for concrete flows inwards, which profits are recycled inwards where they both finance the inflation of the Federal Credit as well as buying political influence.
Technology has transformed the possibilities for creative management in banking.
Its sheer number-crunching power has rendered the cost of iterative calculations to more or less zero.
This has enabled the creation of a new sector in the industry, the derivatives business, which is nothing more than the breaking down of financial instruments such as stocks and bonds into their constitutive parts.
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This has increased the power of the banks many-fold, thanks to the cooperation of the Federal Reserve and Congress, who have allowed the banks to not only self-regulate their derivatives portfolios and businesses but have enacted rules to force other banks to use derivatives to “control” risk.
In practice this has meant that the most profitable business of the banks has been moved off balance sheet, in effect creating a high level of secrecy in their business.
It also confers a huge advantage on the largest banks to whom the others have to come for their derivatives.
This has, in part, fuelled the manic consolidation in banking over the last twenty five years and has been applied with tremendous success internationally thanks to the imposition of the Basel Accords on money and banking which have forced other country’s financial institutions to either cooperate, which in practice has largely meant be acquired, or go out of business.
The banks’ tactics have been copied and refined by industry.
An excellent example of this is the case of Enron, nominally an industrial company engaged in the production and transport
of petroleum and natural gas, but which was transformed into a highly leveraged financial operation with a huge off balance sheet business trading derivatives.
It secured a release from regulatory oversight by the time-tested method of purchasing lawmakers and by suborning its auditors.
This gave it the power to restate earnings, virtually at will, simply by changing the assumptions on future interest rates embedded in the options, swaps and futures contracts constituting its unregulated derivatives book.
Enron is a model also of the increasingly blurred distinction between the public and private sector.
It employed as many as twenty CIA officers.
One of its senior executives, Thomas White, was an army general before joining Enron and then left Enron to become Secretary of the Army.
Enron executives were intimately involved with Vice President Richard Cheney’s energy task force.
It is difficult to avoid concluding that Enron was anything other than a money-laundering operation employed in the interest of “National Security” on behalf of the cartel. [xxii]
The US has embarked on a costly global military adventure the outcome of which is anything but certain.
This marks the culmination of more than fifty years of nearly continuous overt and covert warfare.
In this it is supported by the most sophisticated financing apparatus in history, capable of mobilising the cash generated from a wide variety of activities both open and covert.
The price has been the progressive hollowing out of the American economy itself, and the progressive erosion of civil liberties and the rule of law.
The black budget is not the cause of this but the means.
(rearranged by TheWE.biz — originally at beginning of page)
Introduction
The United States government has operated a secret budgeting and spending program for decades outside the framework of the American Constitution. The institutional and political roots of this system of clandestine finance reach back to at least a century.
The turn of the 19th and 20th centuries saw the consolidation of American industry and banking under the control of a restrictive cartel that for all practical purposes assumed control of the economy. The great magnates of American industry and finance in the late nineteenth century were superb practitioners of covert operations.
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Witness to this fact are the institutions set up during the twentieth century through which their descendants maintain
control.
This paper is a summary of the structure of the American political economy which fits the facts better than the official model.
Officially, American capitalism is characterised by democracy, opportunity, self-improvement, open and free markets, and constructive regulation for the public good, in short, happiness.
Under this construct America has never fought a war of aggression and harbours no designs to do so.
Its leaders have the nation’s interests at heart, and its politicians listen to their constituencies.
The truth is different.
Why the United States is so widely misunderstood is due in part to a controlled educational system and media.
As the system evolved over the decades, time lent it legitimacy spanning the political spectrum.
Gustavus Meyers, author of the seminal work History of the Great American Fortunes and no panegyrist, believed — following Marx as did many on the left — that the consolidation of American industry was inevitable and that the men who accomplished it were acting their part in a predetermined historical evolution.
Once monopoly control had been achieved, the proletariat would rise and its dictatorship would begin.
We shy away from such determinism; nothing happens but as a consequence of what men do and choose to do.
If Meyers were alive today, he would still be waiting.
Published in Scoop: Thursday, 26 August 2004
About the authors
Catherine Austin Fitts — http://www.solari.com is the founder of Solari, Inc and a member of the advisory board of Sanders Research Associates.
Ms. Fitts is a former managing director and member of the board of directors of Dillon Read & Co, Inc, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing-Federal Housing Commissioner in the first Bush Administration, and President of The Hamilton Securities Group, Inc.
She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and The Wharton School.
Chris Sanders — http://www.sandersresearch.com is a principle of Sanders Research Associates in London.
Mr. Sanders has been a banker and asset manager for 21 years, and is a visiting professor in international finance at the School of Public Administration at the University of Göteburg in Sweden.
He has degrees from in political science from Duke University and Arabic literature from the University of Michigan. He began his financial career as a private banker with Citibank in Saudi Arabia in 1979.
Since 1984, he has lived in London and worked in the international investment management industry. He founded Sanders Research Associates in 1997.
Sanders Research Associates Ltd. provides international strategic planning and risk management services to both corporate and private clients. SRA also publishes a webzine available by subscription. Visit http://www.sandersresearch.com to get a good feel for the real deal.
FOOTNOTES:
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[i] Remark attributed to a Wall Street broker in 1895 describing J.P. Morgan. Gustavus Meyers (2002). History of the Great American Fortunes. University Press of the Pacific, Volume 3, p.225.
Morgan, regularly portrayed as a patriot, was at the time deeply engrossed in relieving the government of its gold reserve.
[ii] Lockheed’s contract was recently terminated by HUD — an action that the company is contesting.
[iii] Dyncorp was appointed as well to run the Department of Justice’s asset forfeiture program in 1993, winning a $60 million five year contract to do so.
[iv] For an insider’s account of the problems at HUD, see Catherine Austin Fitts, The Myth of the Rule of Law at www.sandersresearch.com.
[v]
See http://www.npr.org/programs/npc/2001/010423.dwalker.html
[vi] See Dan Briody (2003), The Iron Triangle, Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group. John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken. ISBN 0-471-28108-5. Carlyle’s phenomenal success as an investment firm owes a great deal to its ability to lure former political figures and senior industry executives onto its executive team and advisory board. Examples are former US President George H.W. Bush and former British Prime Minister John Major; Frank Carlucci, former deputy director of the CIA and former Secretary of Defense; James Baker III, former Secretary of State; Richard Darman former director of the Office of Management and Budget; Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and present Secretary of State (a Carlucci protégé); William Kennard, former head of the Federal Communications Commission; Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; Park Tae Joon, former Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea, and Louis Gerstner, former chairman of IBM. Of some interest as well has been the involvement of the Bin Laden family as major private investors in the Carlyle Group, represented by Shafiq Bin Laden, a brother of Osama Bin Laden. |
[vii] For a brilliant history of the rise of America’s elite and its disenchantment with democracy and free markets, see Sven Beckert (2001). The Monied Metropolis. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. ISBN 0521790395.
[viii] Gustavus Meyers (2002). History of the Great American Fortunes, Volume 3. University Press of the Pacific: Honolulu. (Reprint of the 1910 edition), p.225.
[ix] See Walter Karp ((1979). The Politics of War. Harper & Row: New York) for an analysis of the move to war in the case of both the war with Spain and WWI.
Of particular interest here is Woodrow Wilson’s extension of a domestic security apparatus ostensibly to deal with a supposed foreign threat during war time.
In fact, the draconian legislation and executive orders that created the FBI as a new appendage of the Department of Justice was hardly used during wartime, but were deployed after the war against domestic political opponents in the labour unions and the Progressive Movement.
[x] See Beckert, op. cit.
[xi] See Tim Weiner ((1990) Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget, Warner Publishing) and Sterling and Peggy Seagrave ((2003) Gold Warriors, Verso Press: New York). There is ample evidence that these funds were invested and have grown substantially in the years since, and are still used to further political and personal agendas.
[xii] Seagrave, Sterling and Peggy, op. cit., pp 119-120.
The use of National Security as a rationale for acts that would otherwise be considered unconstitutional and illegal has become embedded in the America legal system, a curious inversion of original intent.
Franklin Roosevelt declared a national economic emergency in the 30s which was used to justify extraordinary measures by the executive, including the abrogation of the government’s obligations to redeem government debt I gold.
The Supreme Court refused to hear a case contesting the administration’s action.
More recently, the government intervened in a labour dispute between the International Longshoremen Workers Union and the Pacific Maritime Association, citing the Patriot Act of 2001 and equating the union’s position to economic “terrorism”.
In fact, rather than the union striking, the PMA locked the union out of the ports.
Government intervention was in the form of the direct intercession of Tom Ridge, head of the Department of Homeland Security to force the union to accede to PMA demands.
[xiii] Notably, this is the same year in which the Exchange Stabilisation Fund was set up.
[xiv] In a similar fashion, manufacturing firms have migrated into finance, finding it easier to make money by arbitrage than by competition.
Thus General Motors manufactures cars as collateral for its leasing business; similarly GE or Boeing make as much or more money out of financing the purchase of their products than from making them.
[xv] This is to say nothing of the wholesale transfer gratis of research undertaken at the taxpayer’s expense; for example nuclear technology transferred to the power industry.
[xvi] See Franklin Spinney, The Defense Death Spiral, www.d-n-i.net for an in depth analysis of the micro economics of military procurement and its impact on force readiness.
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[xvii] This is the cumulative borrowing from abroad to finance net exports (or the trade deficit if you prefer).
[xviii] The annual rate of increase is the current account deficit.
[xix] See Alfred McCoy (1991). The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia. 2nd ed. Lawrence Hill Books: Brooklyn. ISBN 1556521251.
McCoy documents thoroughly the genesis of US wartime cooperation with the mafia in Italy during WWII and its post-war toleration of narcotics trafficking in the US as a quid pro quo for the cooperation of Corsican and Italian organised crime in its covert war against the Communist Party in France and Italy.
In Asia, it supported the opium and heroin business of a Chinese nationalist army in Burma after the Chinese Revolution in 1948.
In Indochina the US supplanted French colonial rule after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, inheriting in the process French covert ties to opium production amongst the Hmong hill tribes.
With overt American intervention in 1965 the importance of this traffic grew enormously, financing an escalation of the ground war in Laos.
See also Seagrave, Sterling and Peggy, op. cit.
There is ample international precedent for American involvement in narcotics trafficking, beginning with the British organisation of opium production in Bengal two centuries ago and of its illegal distribution into China.
For that matter, Japan turned Manchuria under its occupation into the biggest producer of opium and refined opiates in the world, the cash flow from which proved to be immensely useful to the operations of Japan’s Manchurian Army and intelligence services.
[xx] Peter Dale Scott (2003). Drugs, Oil and War: the United States in Afghanistan, Columbia and Indochina. Rowman & Littlefield Pub: Oxford. ISBN 0742525228.
[xxi] See Roger Morris ((1999) Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, Regnery Publishing) for a case study of the interaction of covert operations, narcotics trafficking, financial markets and politics in Arkansas during the governorship of Bill Clinton.
[xxii] See Catherine Austin Fitts and Daniel Armstrong, The Real Deal About Enron at www.sandersresearch.com.
Copyright (c) 2004 Scoop Media
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Are We Seeing the Imminent Decline of the US?
Arab News, Saudi Arabia/ Aljazeera.net English April 12, 2006
The miscalculated policies of the US administration in the Middle East are quickly depleting the country’s ability to sustain its once unchallenged global position.
Winds of change are blowing everywhere, and there is little that Washington’s ideologues can do to stop that.
The above claim is increasingly finding its way into the realm of mainstream thinking, despite all attempts to mute or relegate its importance.
A recent speech by US Republican congressman and chairman of the House of Representatives’ International Relations Committee, Henry Hyde, was the focal point of analysis by Martin Jacques in The Guardian newspaper.
“Our power has the grave liability of rendering our theories about the world immune from failure. But by becoming deaf to easily discerned warning signs, we may ignore long-term costs that result from our actions and dismiss reverses that should lead to a re-examination of our goals and means,” Hyde said.
In his poignant analysis — decoding Hyde’s deliberately implicit thoughts — Jacques argued:
“The Bush administration stands guilty of an extraordinary act of imperial overreach which has left the US more internationally isolated than ever before, seriously stretched financially, and guilty of neglect in east Asia and elsewhere.”
Ironically, the invasion of Iraq with its “thousands” of “tactical” mistakes — as recently admitted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — was meant to solidify and ensure the US’ post Cold-War global dominance.
According to Jacques, as inferred from Hyde’s notable speech:
“It may well prove to be a harbinger of its decline.”
It can also be argued that the US adventurism in Iraq has provided the coveted opportunity to other countries to further their national and regional interests without the constant fear of US reprisals.
In a recent interview with Radio Havana, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky delineated a new global political reality that is being forged as the US stubbornly insists on fighting a losing battle in Iraq.
“What’s happening is something completely new in the history of the hemisphere.
Since the Spanish conquest, the countries of Latin America have been pretty much separated from one another and oriented toward the imperial power.
For the first time, they are beginning to integrate and in quite a few different ways.”
That integration is evident, according to Chomsky, not only by examining the unbridled rise of the Left in these countries and the almost immediate alliances that these populace governments have achieved.
There is a simultaneous rise of the political relevance of the indigenous Indian population in Bolivia, and the opportunities it represents to the Indian populations of Ecuador and Peru.
Moreover, there is a noteworthy South-South integration that is already breaking regional boundaries and significantly undermining the overpowering grip of the International Monetary Fund, which has played the infamous role of the unfair middleman between the rich and hapless poor.
China and India
China and India, on the other hand, continue to achieve astounding economic growth with China’s economic might and relevance to soon surpass that of the United States.
In fact, there is an intense diplomatic clash underway between the US and China, since the latter has dared to violate the understanding of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which gave the US alone the right to manage its Latin American domains.
For the first time since then, says a BBC News analysis, a foreign country has challenged American influence in that region, and successfully so.
Indeed, China is upgrading its economic relations with Brazil — both increasingly formidable economic powers — in ways that will eventually help Brazil break away from a domineering US hold.
US destructive war in Iraq rages on
These are all part of the “warning signs” to which Hyde was referring to in his speech.
While there are indications that Washington is finally waking up to this grim reality, which it has helped create, there are no signs whatsoever that a fundamental change of course in US foreign policies in the Middle East is taking place:
The US destructive war in Iraq rages on.
The self-inflicting damage of unconditionally backing Israel in its endless colonial ambitions perpetuates, and the same detrimental policy line used with Iraq is employed, almost identically with Iran.
US policy planners seem as ever insistent on following the same destructive course that has compromised their nation’s global standing like never before.
US and Israeli policies one and the same
Despite President Bush’s recent “historic” trip to India and other top US officials’ hasty attempts to reassert US global dominance, there should be no illusions that the United States’ chief foreign policy debacle starts and ends with the Middle East, particularity its unwarranted, yet “special” relationship with Israel.
While the latter has served the role of the client state since its establishment on ethnically cleansed Palestinian territories, this relationship was significantly altered in recent years, with the pro-Israeli lobby taking center stage, not simply by influencing US foreign policies toward Israel, but eventually by directing that policy altogether in the region.
The rise of the neoconservatives helped create the false impression that the US and Israeli policies are one and the same, including their mutual interests in maintaining Israel’s military “edge” over its neighbors, which eventually led to the invasion of Iraq.
Militaristic, self-defeating and overbearing
While the neocons are washing their hands from any responsibility in the deadly Middle East impasse, the US administration’s arrogance is stopping it from immediately withdrawing its troops from Iraq and seriously reassessing its relationship with Israel.
The world is changing, yet the US government refuses to abandon its old ways: Militaristic, self-defeating and overbearing.
Indeed, the US must remold, not only its policies in the Middle East, but also its hegemonic policies throughout the world.
For once, the US administration needs to tap into its sense of reason, and discern the “warning signs”, that should lead to “the re-examination of [its] goals and means.”
A first step is to bring the troops home, and with them the entire doctrine that unrestrained violence and perpetual wars can further the cause of an already dishonored superpower.
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Nanci Pelosi — U.S. House Democratic leader — Congresswoman California, 8th District
Speaking at the AIPAC agenda May 26, 2005
This article below from:
The Daily Life of Kawther Salam http://www.kawther.info/ US Officers planned the Beit Hanoun Massacre
If you find the images in this article revolting, like me, think of the following: people everywhere in Palestine see such images on a daily basis not as pictures but live and anywhere they go, and that this genocide is supported equally by ALL western countries, the EU and the UN.
If you live in any "western" country, your taxes are very probably financing what you see here.
Speak with your politicians if you do not like what you see.
When the psychopaths and moral degenerates who commit these acts with the help of your governments stop commiting them, I (and others) will stop publishing these images.
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Since the criminal State of Israel denied me the right to work as a journalist in my homeland Palestine and forced me to flee to Europe, I often ask myself why the U.S.A does not stop donating to Israel the bombs which they use against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
What, ever, have we done to the USA?
Why did the U.S.A send military detachments to Israel after the Israeli lost the war in the south of Lebanon?
The Israeli military radio, 'Tsahal Radio' announced these news.
They said that the American detachment of officers had arrived in Israel to take part in the 'Autumn Clouds' operation in Gaza.
That they helped the Israeli military to perform their 'killing duties' without any loss.
American officers were involved in the last Beit Hanoun massacre, in which in one incident 20 Palestinians were killed, at least 60 innocent children, old men and women were injured.
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The question poses itself, why is the political discourse of the European countries still fixated on the crimes against the Jews over 60 years ago?
All the while allowing and even supporting the perpetration of the big disaster which befalls my homeland Palestine?
Why do all European politicians keep silence about all the crimes which the Israeli perpetrates in Palestine?
Are they scared that the Jews will return to Europe, or are they themselves involved in these crimes?
Is it logical that the European countries signed the convention against Genocide, and then they impose a siege against the Palestinian.
Create conditions for real starvation for another nation in another land?
Why does the international media impose a veil of silence over what is happening in Palestine?
The concentration camps which are Gaza and the West Bank?
Never anything comes out in the media, the TV, the newspapers.
The media only relates minor incidents, or, in a hugely inflated manner, when something small happens against the Israeli occupation terrorists.
As far as I am concerned, all the western media is complicit in this genocide.
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The Beit Hanoun massacre, a day of bloody clouds.
On November 1, 2006, the number of the Palestinians who were killed in Gaza during the 'Autumn Clouds' Israeli military terror operation reached 86, and at least 265 were injured.
This happened before the criminals of the Israeli State perpetrated the now generally known massacre in Beit Hanoun.
The morning of November 8, 2006, Israeli tanks shelled Palestinians in their homes in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.
They fired eleven shells into six homes, killing at least 20 Palestinians, wounding some 60 more.
The Irony is that this attack comes a day after Israeli troops pulled out of the town after a week-long offensive in which dozens of Palestinian died, and hundreds were injured.
A person from Gaza, who also sent me most of the pictures of this article, posted this on that day:
It has been the 7th day of the israeli aggression against citizens in gaza strip town of Bieth Hanoon, till this moment they have killed more than 90 citizen withen those 7 days.
What is most important about this, is the kind of strange weapons used in the attack.
These bombs explode in a strange way to make fatal damage of human body.
Cuts and burns more than any bomb we have ever experienced ... so this is why the number of kills is very high till now.
And for the most important even the wonded, thay almost have no hope to cure, as the damage that happens to their bodys .. the Palestinian Health ministray believes that some nuclear radiations might be contented in these weapons, as they can not really understand what is going on till now.
As i said more than 90 were killed and more than 500 wonded, tens in danger ... and more than 100 handdicapped as the type of weapons they use ..
The israelis destroyed many houses, and they killed many trees in simple words a New Jenin Camp.
If you remember what happened in Jenen, they destroyed roads, electricity and water nets.. in simple words what happened was an earth quack.
During searching some houses they stole what they found, some cellphones and PCs and gold.
What is happpening now that they Israelis partially withdrawn from Beith Hanoon, but not completely as some media say.
For that more than 9 were killed yesterday morning by Israeli snipers, or air raids and the army still ocuupying and having terrorist militant activities against civils.
Tonight some thing that happened which might be good to consider here, is an Israeli airstrike against the house of Jamila AL-Shanty, the member of the Palestinian Legaslative Council.
This caused the death of her sister and her sister's husband and an other passerby.
About the school bus that happened the day before, they shot the female teacher inside the bus in front of little kids about 4 and 5 years old.
Imagine how would they grow up?
Today there has been aggression using arsenal.
The Israeli arsenal killed more than 20 civilians as they bombed houses over the heads of the inhabitants.
So many kids and women were killed or injured this morning..."
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Each time I read about the criminal Israeli operation in Gaza, seeing the increase in the number of the civilian victims, I swallowed my pain and closed the computer.
Until that evening, a day after the Beit Hanoun massacre, when I saw a group of Jews lead a demonstration against an Austrian rightist group which has its office near my house.
Suddenly the questions started coming:
How can it be that such a criminal nation has the gut to complain about the deplorable things which befell them in the past?
While they are perpetrating massacres and crimes on a daily basis.
Often worse than the most extreme crimes attributed to the Nazis.
Against the civilians of another nation.
The Palestinian population jailed in Gaza and the West Bank?
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The Israeli practices in Gaza and the West Bank is indescribable.
The daily crimes of Israel in Palestine are uncountable.
Their hateful and shameless incitements against the Arab world increase day after day....
In Beit Hanoun, some of the shells landed on a home, killing 11 members of one family called Al-'Athamneh, including a 9-year-old child and a 73-year-old woman.
The other shells landed on other five homes at Hamad Street in Beit Hanoun.
Other victims were from the Al-Kafarneh family.
Muhammad Athamneh described the massacre to Palestinian newspaper Hayat Al-Jadidah.
He said that the killed were children, women, and old men, that they had killed his mother, sister, uncle and his six sons, and four sons of his second uncle.
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Athamneh said that it was 5:30 at the morning, everybody were sleeping, when they heared the very strong blast of the first explosion which landed at his cousins house, followed by screaming and crying.
He ran out, found his relatives, old and young men running in the streets, escaping from the shelling and looking for protection in other places, but that this did not help them to escape from the Israeli shelling.
The "Autumn Clouds" rained missiles on their heads.
They all were killed on the roads.
The whole place was converted into a collective grave.
Athamneh was shocked, he did not know how to save the life of his family and relatives, everybody was bleeding and the floor was covered by a big pool of blood!
He saw the horrible death in front of his eyes.
His cousin’s wife died with her two children while he was screaming and seeking the Ambulance.
Nobody was able to come near under the heavy, blind shelling killing everybody moving in the area.
The sky rained blood that day.
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Today Saturday, the US, who said in advance that Israel has the right to defend itself and gave the Palestinian resistance the responsibility for the massacre, vetoed a draft UN Security Council resolution condemning an Israeli attack in the Gaza Strip that killed 20 Palestinian civilians and injured more 60.
The disgusting American Psychopath Bolton described the text as 'unbalanced' and 'biased against Israel and politically motivated'.
Does anyone wonder why the Palestinian resistance is shooting missiles toward Israel, which by the way never really reach anything?
The reason is simple: the big concentration camp which is Gaza, where a million and a half people are caged, impoverished and hungry, and where almost all civilian infrastructure has been left in ruins caused by Israel.
The increased poverty and real hunger which the Palestinians suffer in their reclusion:
The shortage of food for the children,
The damaged infrastructure which the occupation left behind,
The closed entrances of the city,
The daily killings and destruction — including the bombing of the power station — in Gaza,
These reasons are enough for anyone to fight against the Genocide and look for a better life to live.
Does anyone wonder how much the face of the Israeli occupation is bloody, ugly and inhuman?
Does anybody wonder how much the American leaders are criminals in their support to Israel?
When will the world give Israel a firm ultimatum to stop the occupation, the genocide which has been going on for about 60 years now?
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Seeking International Military Forces in Palestine
Why did the European politicians not adopt the request of the Palestinians, who asked for European military forces to be sent to Palestine to protect them and the infrastructure from the Israeli crimes?
We are really seeking International military forces to stop the bloody crimes against Palestine, to make a halfways normal life possible.
The Palestinians Authority does not really exist any more.
Abbas and the people around him don’t have even the power to protect their underpants.
The Palestinian civilians lost their trust to the P.A. long time ago, when it became evident that they are a bunch of corrupt, sold-out traitors.
The Palestinian civilians are seeking protection against the Jewish criminals, and they will be thankful for anybody who will stop the crimes commited against them.
Please, send military forces to stop the Israeli rampage in Gaza and the West Bank.
Part of the images here come from the Al-Ittihad newspaper, part of them were submitted by somebody from Beit Hanoun who lost seven friends and relatives during this last Israeli rampage.
His only comment was "that's life", because he knows, as all those who live in Gaza, that his life is worth nothing.
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The United States will stand with Israel now and forever. Now and forever. |
29 July 2007
Israel hails US military aid rise
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has confirmed that the United States is planning a significant increase in military and government aid to Israel.
US Democrats and Republicans Have Enough Votes To End The Palestine Israel conflict
[If They Choose To Do So]
US Democrats and Republicans simply have to block passage of any bill that would continue to fund the Israel government.
This requires not 67 or 60 US Senate votes, or even 51, but just 41 — the number of US senators needed to maintain a filibuster and prevent a bill from coming up for a vote.
In other words, the US Democrats and Republicans have more than enough votes to end the Palestine conflict — if they choose to do so.
The US Democratic and Republican leadership may believe — rightly or wrongly — that such a strategy would entail unacceptable political costs, especially with the high level funding from AIPAC and other Israel backed monetary support.
But that's very different from being unable to affect policy.
To insist that the US Congress cannot stop the Palestine conflict obscures the actual choices facing the US people — by confusing "can't" with "won't. |
March 16, 2005 Outsourcing Innovation...And Everything ElseAmerica's Has-Been Economy By Paul Craig Roberts
A country cannot be a superpower without a high tech economy, and America's high tech economy is eroding as I write.
The erosion began when US corporations outsourced manufacturing. Today many US companies are little more than a brand name selling goods made in Asia.
Corporate outsourcers and their apologists presented the loss of manufacturing capability as a positive development.
Manufacturing, they said, was the "old economy," whose loss to Asia ensured Americans lower consumer prices and greater shareholder returns.
The American future was in the "new economy" of high tech knowledge jobs.
This assertion became an article of faith. Few considered how a country could maintain a technological lead when it did not manufacture.
So far in the 21st century there is scant sign of the American "new economy."
The promised knowledge-based jobs have not appeared.
To the contrary, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a net loss of 221,000 jobs in six major engineering job classifications.
Today many computer, electrical and electronics engineers, who were well paid at the end of the 20th century, are unemployed and cannot find work.
A country that doesn't manufacture doesn't need as many engineers, and much of the work that remains is being outsourced or filled with cheaper foreigners brought into the country on H-lb and L-1 work visas.
Confronted with inconvenient facts, outsourcing's apologists moved to the next level of fantasy.
Many technical and engineering jobs, they said, have become "commodity jobs," routine work that can be performed cheaper offshore.
America will stay in the lead, they promised, because it will keep the research and development work and be responsible for design and innovation.
Alas, now it is design and innovation that are being outsourced.
Business Week reports ("Outsourcing Innovation," March 21) that the pledge of First World corporations to keep research and development in-house "is now passé."
Corporations such as Dell, Motorola, and Philips, which are regarded as manufacturers based in proprietary design and core intellectual property originating in R&D departments, now put their brand names on complete products that are designed, engineered, and manufactured in Asia by "original-design manufacturers" (ODM).
Business Week reports that practically overnight large percentages of cell phones, notebook PCs, digital cameras, MP3 players, and personal digital assistants are produced by original-design manufacturers.
Business Week quotes an executive of a Taiwanese ODM: "Customers used to participate in design two or three years back. But starting last year, many just take our product."
Another offshore ODM executive says: "What has changed is that more customers need us to design the whole product. It's now difficult to get good ideas from our customers. We have to innovate ourselves."
Another says: "We know this kind of product category a lot better than our customers do. We have the capability to integrate all the latest technologies."
The customers are America's premier high tech names.
The design and engineering teams of Asian ODMs are expanding rapidly, while those of major US corporations are shrinking.
Business Week reports that R&D budgets at such technology companies as Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, Ericsson, and Nokia are being scaled back.
Outsourcing is rapidly converting US corporations into a brand name with a sales force selling foreign designed, engineered, and manufactured goods.
Whether or not they realize it, US corporations have written off the US consumer market.
People who do not participate in the innovation, design, engineering and manufacture of the products that they consume lack the incomes to support the sales infrastructure of the job diverse "old economy."
"Free market" economists and US politicians are blind to the rapid transformation of America into a third world economy, but college bound American students and heads of engineering schools are acutely aware of declining career opportunities and enrollments.
While "free trade" economists and corporate publicists prattle on about America's glorious future, heads of prestigious engineering schools ponder the future of engineering education in America.
Once US firms complete their loss of proprietary architecture, how much intrinsic value resides in a brand name?
What is to keep the all-powerful ODMs from undercutting the American brand names?
The outsourcing of manufacturing, design and innovation has dire consequences for US higher education.
The advantages of a college degree are erased when the only source of employment is domestic nontradable services.
According to the Los Angeles Times (March 11), the percentage of college graduates among the long-term chronically unemployed has risen sharply in the 21st century.
The US Department of Labor reported in March that 373,000 discouraged college graduates dropped out of the labor force in February—a far higher number than the number of new jobs created.
The disappearing US economy can also be seen in the exploding trade deficit.
As more employment is shifted offshore, goods and services formerly produced domestically become imports.
Nothink economists and Bush administration officials claim that America's increasing dependence on imported goods and services is evidence of the strength of the US economy and its role as engine of global growth.
This claim ignores that the US is paying for its outsourced goods and services by transferring its wealth and future income streams to foreigners.
Foreigners have acquired $3.6 trillion of US assets since 1990 as a result of US trade deficits.
Foreigners have a surfeit of dollar assets.
For the past three years their increasing unwillingness to acquire more dollars has resulted in a marked decline in the dollar's value in relation to gold and tradable currencies.
Recently the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans have expressed their concerns.
According to Bloomberg (March 10), Japan's unrealized losses on its dollar reserve holdings have reached $109.6 billion.
The Asia Times reported (March 12) that Asian central banks have been reducing their dollar holdings in favor of regional currencies for the past three years.
A study by the Bank of International Settlements concluded that the ratio of dollar reserves held in Asia declined from 81% in the third quarter of 2001 to 67% in September 2004.
India reduced its dollar holdings from 68% of total reserves to 43%. China reduced its dollar holdings from 83% to 68%.
The US dollar will not be able to maintain its role as world reserve currency when it is being abandoned by that area of the world that is rapidly becoming the manufacturing, engineering and innovation powerhouse.
Misled by propagandistic "free trade" claims, Americans will be at a loss to understand the increasing career frustrations of the college educated.
Falling pay and rising prices of foreign made goods will squeeze US living standards as the declining dollar heralds America's descent into a has-been economy.
Meanwhile the Grand Old Party has passed a bankruptcy "reform" that is certain to turn unemployed Americans living on debt and beset with unpayable medical bills into the indentured servants of credit card companies.
The steely-faced Bush administration is making certain that Americans will experience to the full their counry's fall.
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| www.counterpunch.org July 25, 2005
The US Navy...Made in China
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
My poor beloved country, trapped in a Middle Eastern quagmire and tricked by Osama bin Laden into subsidizing to the tune of $300 billion (spent or appropriated) a training ground for Muslim terrorists and insurgents while our once fabulous economy disintegrates.
If the US were still rich and just wanted to throw several hundred billion dollars at bin Laden as a good will gesture, that would be one thing.
But we are borrowing the money that we are using to train Muslim terrorists to kill and maim our troops in Iraq and Londoners in England.
The money is being lent to us mainly by Asians, especially the Chinese.
China has so many dollars to lend to us because we send so many dollars to China to pay for the goods and services that patriotic American corporations have decided to supply to us from China instead of from America.
US corporations decided that the way to get rich was to destroy their American consumer base by closing their American factories, throwing their US employees out of work and hiring Chinese instead.
The Chinese work for less, you see, and free trade economists say lowering costs makes us better off.
What US corporations and the free trade economists overlook is that giving Americans' jobs to foreigners raises foreign incomes and lowers American incomes.
When credit cards and home equity lines are maxed out, there will be nothing to support the US consumer market.
The American corporations who moved their capital and technology to China will have to find new customers. |
Vladimir Putin and the rise of the petro-ruble
Mike Whitney
"If one day the world’s largest oil producers demanded euros for their barrels, it would be the financial equivalent of a nuclear strike".
Russia is planning a preemptive strike on the United States that is likely to trigger a market meltdown and economic disaster in America.
On May 10, in his State of the Nation speech to parliament, President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would make the ruble "internationally convertible" so that it could be used in oil and natural gas transactions.
Currently, oil is denominated exclusively in dollars.
Putin’s announcement is tantamount to a declaration of war.
Bill O’ Grady, A.G. Edwards
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If Russia goes forward with its conversion plan, central banks throughout Europe and Asia will reduce their stockpiles of dollars sending billions of surplus greenbacks back to the US.
The aftershocks on the American economy are bound to be catastrophic; precipitating either a deep recession or depression.
The US cannot absorb the billions of dollars that are now circulating in oil transactions without undergoing a violent cycle of hyper-inflation.
"The ruble must become a more widespread means of international transactions. To this end, we need to open a stock exchange in Russia to trade in oil, gas, and other goods to be paid for in rubles."
Putin’s plan is similar to that of Iran, which announced that it would open an oil-bourse (oil exchange) on Kish Island in two months.
The bourse would allow oil transactions to be made in petro-euros, thus discarding the dollar.
Iran’s action has intensified the Bush administration’s belligerence and put the two nations on the fast-track to war.
We should note that Saddam was attacked just 6 months after he made the conversion to euros. Iran should expect a similar fate.
The United States must protect its dollar-monopoly in the oil trade or it will lose the advantage of being the world’s "reserve currency".
Russias President Vladimir Putin
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As the reserve currency, the US can maintain its towering $8.4 trillion national debt (and $800 billion trade deficit) without fear of soaring interest rates or hyper-inflation.
The Federal Reserve simply prints money that foreign countries accept for valuable resources and manufactured goods.
America’s economic supremacy depends entirely on its ability to compel nations into making their crucial energy acquisitions in greenbacks.
This allows Washington to shift the expense of its war in Iraq as well as Bush’s enormous tax cuts onto the backs of the developing world.
This is the system that the US intends to prolong into perpetuity.
America’s monopoly on the oil trade is the greatest fraud in history.
The dollar is the equivalent of a bad check written on an account that is $8.4 trillion overdrawn.
Regrettably, the Bush administration has every intention of defending this extortion-racket by eliminating any competition to the dollar.
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That means that the growing coalition of states (Venezuela, Russia and Iran) that are threatening to move away from the greenback, can expect the full force of Uncle Sam’s wrath.
Waging war may be an option with Iran, but what about Russia? Would the Bush administration risk nuclear Armageddon to protect the flaccid dollar?
The administration is exploring all of its options and is developing a strategy to crush Putin’s rebellion.
(This may explain why Newsweek editor and spokesman for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Fareed Zacharia, asked his guest on this week’s "Foreign Exchange" whether he thought Putin could be "assassinated")
In the recently published "Collapse of the petrodollar looming", Dave Kimble provides the details of Russia’s importance to the world oil market.
"Russia's oil exports represent 15.2% of the world's export trade in oil, making it a much more significant player than Iran, with 5.8% of export volumes.
Russia also produces 25.8% of the world's gas exports, while Iran is still only entering this market as an exporter….
Venezuela has 5.4% of the export market."
Dave Kimble
Obviously, it is not in Russia’s interest to trade with its European partners in dollars any more than it would be for the US to trade with Canada in rubles.
Putin can strengthen the Russian economy and improve Russia’s prestige in the world as an energy superpower by transitioning to rubles.
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But will Washington allow Putin to succeed?
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the secretive organization of 4,400 American elites from industry, finance, politics and the military (who run the machinery of state behind the mask of democracy) has already issued a tersely worded attack on Putin ("Russia’ Wrong Direction"; Manila Times) outlining what is expected for Russia to conform to American standards of conduct.
The missive says that Russia is headed in "the wrong direction" and that "a strategic partnership no longer seems possible".
The article reiterates the usual canards that Putin is becoming more "authoritarian" and "presiding over the rollback of Russian democracy".
(No mention of flourishing democracy in Saudi Arabia or Uzbekistan?)
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The CFR cites Putin’s resistance to "US and NATO military access to Central Asian bases" (which are a dagger put to Moscow’s throat) the banishing of Washington’s "regime change" NGOs from operating freely in Russia ("Freedom Support Act funds") and Russia’s continued support for Iran’s "peaceful" development of nuclear energy.
America is no friend of Russia. It took full advantage of the confusion following the fall of the Soviet Union and used it to apply its neoliberal policies which destroyed the ruble, crushed the economy, and transferred the vast resources of the state to a handful of corrupt oligarchs.
Putin single-handedly, put Russia back on solid footing; taking back Yukos from the venal Khordukovsky and addressing the pressing issues of unemployment and poverty reduction.
He now enjoys a 72% approval rating and does not need the advice of the Bush administration or the CFR on the best political path for Russia.
The US is assuming its traditional antagonistic role towards Russia by putting more military bases in Central Asia, feeding the turmoil in Chechnya, isolating Russia from its European neighbors, and directly intervening in its elections.
When the G-8 summit takes place next week, we should expect a full-throated attack from the corporate media disparaging Putin as the latest incarnation of Adolph Hitler.
(It should also be noted that Putin’s announcement of converting the oil trade to rubles has not appeared in ANY western media.
Like the Downing Street Memo, the firebombing of Falluja, or the "rigged" 2004 elections, the western media scrupulously avoids any topic that may shed light on the real workings of the US government)
Putin’s challenge to the dollar is the first salvo in a guerilla war that will end with the crash of the greenback and the restoration of parity among the nations of the world.
It represents a tacit rejection of a system that requires coercion, torture and endless war to uphold its global dominance.
When the dollar begins its inevitable decline, the global-economic paradigm will shift, the American war machine will grind to a halt, and the soldiers will come home.
For that, we can thank Vladimir Putin and the rise of the petro-ruble. |
As I Lay Dying: Americans Are at Ease with Ugly Imperial Government
By John Chuckman Al-Jazeerah, November 11, 2006 Sadly, little coming from America's politics can fire my enthusiasm. During my lifetime, America has busied itself with the task of burying liberalism, reminding one of October's frenetic squirrels hunting and burying acorns. The nation is pretty much at ease with ugly imperial government. Liberalism, and I mean liberalism in the broadest, richest sense of the word, is a topic of bathroom humor. We read and hear a great deal about the Democrats' sizable victory in mid-term elections, and I suppose after six years of Bush's near-insanity, people have a right to a little excitement, although one is sobered by the recollection that the same people returned him to office just two years ago. At least, the world can be grateful that Bush has been hobbled for his last two years. Democratic Party no cause, no fire in the belly The Democratic Party has been all but dead for years as a meaningful national alternative. The party has no recognized national leader. It has no cause, no fire in the belly. It has been largely silent for six years while Bush rampaged through the world and literally peed on American liberties like a grotesquely-smirking, small-town sheriff. No President in history has shown so little respect for human rights, and with so little excuse, yet all the would-be defenders of the Republic, whether Congressmen or the Don't-Tread-on-Me crowd, have been no where to be seen. And Democrats like Lieberman or Kerry can hardly be distinguished from Republicans. The Democrats have been elected because Americans are now sick of Iraq. Their enthusiasms die quickly. American expectations for the wars they start are perfectly captured by the image of Bush landing on an aircraft carrier with a big banner behind him saying Mission Accomplished. Blockbuster version of Homecoming Game It's a blockbuster version of the Homecoming Game with guys in uniforms and cheerleaders and flags, and there is no hint of death or decay. Anything beyond that kind of performance is welcomed like the kid who couldn't make the team. I doubt there is widespread concern that Iraqis still huddle in homes with no reliable electricity or clean water, no jobs, and fearful to step into murderous streets. I doubt there is much guilt over having killed half a million of them. I doubt there is guilt about running a secret gulag and torturing helpless captives. I doubt there is guilt about blood-spattered holes like Abu Ghraib. Because if there were such guilt, there would have been a revolt against Bush's criminal government.
Depressing consciousness of having lost
The American tendency to quickly tire of things is mightily reinforced by the depressing consciousness of having lost.
Americans are conditioned in the great booming engine of Social Darwinism they call society that there is no substitute for winning, and winning in a chest-thumping way.
Losing is for losers, and loser is a favorite American expression of contempt for others.
They hate losing, and yet the simple fact is that many of the conflicts into which they thoughtlessly are led end up lost.
Greatest horror Bush has inflicted on humanity
I am sure Americans are tired of images and commentary about Iraq on television, tame as they have been deliberately kept.
They're tired of knowing that cute little Steve and Susie graduating high school this year can't just join up to have their college paid and be heroes in uniform without risking their health.
The greatest horror Bush has inflicted on humanity, the suppurating body of Iraq, is unlikely to be attended by Democrats.
They want the White House in two years, and they do not want to be left holding Bush's "tarbaby."
Instead, they will scrutinize and highlight every twist and turn of Bush's bumbling, murderous efforts as he struggles to leave Iraq.
American politics are just that brutal.
No wonder there are so many wars.
Opinions are the sole responsibility of the author and may not represent Al-Jazeerah's. |
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| New Statesman May 31, 2004 Cover story: John Pilger
It was all fake, as the profoundly cynical Powell has since hinted.
Bush himself has since joked about the lack of evidence of weapons.
Paul Wolfowitz has revealed that the WDM "story" was "agreed" as one that the public would swallow.
Donald Rumsfeld has admitted there was no link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
In Iraq, soldiers talk about killing and mistreating Iraqis "as payback for 9/11".
...Thanks to their propaganda, played unchallenged through most of the media, millions of Americans still believe it.
...Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council in February last year as a final justification for the invasion. This was made up of cartoon-like drawings, such as "Slide 21", of which Powell said: "Here you see both truck and railcar-mounted mobile factories."
Powell called this "diagramising".
Of the satellite images he presented, he said, "The photos that I am about to show you are sometimes hard for the average person to interpret, hard for me.
The painstaking work of photo analysis takes experts with years and years of experience, poring for hours and hours over light tables."
This was the "irrefutable evidence" for "65 facilities [that have] housed chemical weapons".
...Charles Lewis, a former CBS star reporter and now director of the Centre for Public Integrity, told me that had the media "fulfilled their unique constitutional role and challenged the administration's lies, such as those tying Iraq to al-Qaeda, there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war".
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www.counterpunch.org July 25, 2005
The US Navy...Made in China
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS Maybe the Chinese government will let the relocated US firms sell to Chinese customers, or maybe the Chinese government will let the US firms go bankrupt. The latter favors China's strategic interest. Chinese businessmen will purchase the bankrupt firms, and Chinese businesses will sell to Chinese customers. Americans are pouring so much money into China that China can finance our wars while it buys up our companies. Everyone was shocked that a Chinese company could outbid Chevron for Unocal. China has already purchased IBM's personal computer business, and is now after US appliance maker Maytag (whose appliances are made in Mexico). The outsourcing mania has hit the Pentagon, and China will soon be supplying the ships for the US Navy. The Pentagon, seeking lowest cost, is pushing defense contractors to outsource offshore for more materials, components and systems. This means the end of US shipbuilding capability. Component suppliers to American shipbuilding are already skeletal thin, with most components only having sole suppliers. For example, Manufacturing & Technology News (July 8) reports that 80% of the components for the Virginia Class submarine come from sole sources. With not enough US Navy ships being built to support even an industry of sole suppliers, Asia is fast becoming the only source for US Navy ships. While President Bush spends $300 billion recruiting and training terrorists for bin Laden in Iraq, US Navy ship procurement has fallen 33% since 2001. Meanwhile China is on a rip. China is now the third largest shipbuilder after South Korea and Japan. In five years China's submarine fleet will be twice the size of America's. In 10 years China's navy will be larger than the American fleet. This is amazing performance for a country that as recently as 1989 had essentially no shipbuilding industry. This year the US is producing 6 ships, one-tenth of South Korea's output. In 2006 the US is scheduled to produce only 4 ships, because China has outbid us for the steel. The US "superpower" can no longer afford to compete against China for essential materials. Cynthia Brown, president of the American Shipbuilding Association says that "the manufacture of entire components and systems will migrate to China in the next several years under current Department of Defense policy with respect to outsourcing." But, hey, we will get ships cheaper, and it is making us rich! Paul Craig Roberts served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. |
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| When War is Swell By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR ...Still not all of the president's men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel's triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself. Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son's war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They've remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don't need to hire lobbyists. ...Another Carlyle subsidiary, Vought Aircraft, holds more than a billion dollars in federal contracts to provide components for the C-117 transport plane, the B-2 bomber and the Apache attack helicopter. Prior to 2001, Vought had fallen on hard times. Just before the 9/11 attacks, Vought announced that it was laying off more than 1,200 employees, more than 20 percent of its workforce. But business picked up briskly following the airstrikes on Afghanistan and the war on Iraq. ...So the men behind the Carlyle Group drift through Washington like familiar ghosts, profiteering off the carnage of Bush's disastrous crusades, untroubled by any thought of congressional investigation or criminal prosecution, firm in the knowledge that the worse things get for the people of the world, the less secure and more gripped by fear the citizens in their own country become, the more millions they will reap for themselves. Perpetual war means perpetual profits... |
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| Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son's war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They've remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don't need to hire lobbyists. ...So the men behind the Carlyle Group drift through Washington like familiar ghosts, profiteering off the carnage of Bush's disastrous crusades, untroubled by any thought of congressional investigation or criminal prosecution, firm in the knowledge that the worse things get for the people of the world, the less secure and more gripped by fear the citizens in their own country become, the more millions they will reap for themselves. Perpetual war means perpetual profits... |
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| By Sue Kirchhoff USA TODAY 6/15/2003 WASHINGTON — Huge tax cuts, soaring spending and rising deficits. It's beginning to look a lot like the 1980s again — with one big difference. When deficits started taking off 20 years ago, the retirement of the baby boom generation was just a distant worry. Now, as the nation faces years of red ink, including at least a $400 billion shortfall in 2003 alone, the graying population is a fast-approaching reality that will put unprecedented strains on Medicare, Social Security and the economy starting around 2010. While recent advances in productivity are expected to help the nation cope with the bulge in retirees, the reduced workforce, possible slowing of immigration and huge new fiscal burdens mean that, unlike the 1990s, the nation could have a tougher time growing out of new budget problems, economists say. At the same time, by locking in years of deficits, lawmakers and the White House are reducing national savings and putting upward pressure on interest rates. That could limit their flexibility to increase taxes, issue bonds or take other steps to reform the massive health and retirement programs — while forcing deeper benefit cuts. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has warned of an "unstable system" of rising debt relative to the size of the economy without changes in budget and program policies. ...A May poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press asked a variety of questions about the economy and the latest, $350 billion tax cut. More than half thought it would mainly help the wealthy and increase the deficit, 44% said it would help the economy, while 42% said it would force spending cuts. About a fifth thought it was fair to all. Greenspan, who in the early 1980s chaired a commission that recommended raising taxes and increasing the retirement age to solve a previous Social Security financing gap, has told Congress the earlier it acts, the better chance it has of minimizing economic and social dislocations. "I must say, the silence is deafening," he recently told a congressional hearing. Many economists, while heeding Greenspan's warnings, argue the deficits — including the $350 billion tax cut law signed by Bush last month — have been necessary, given the slack economy. With interest rates already at historic lows, they argue the Fed has limited room to act. "When you have an economy that's underperforming and far away from potential, the opportunity that you miss every year by not being back to full employment, the cost is enormous," says Jim Glassman, chief economist at J.P. Morgan Chase. He predicted the recent tax cut could increase economic growth by 1/2 percentage point in the next two years, Dimitri Papadimitriou, president of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, says the deficit should be as much as $600 billion to jolt the economy, though he would have preferred a payroll tax cut. "For the time being, I don't think one should worry about the deficits," Papadimitriou says. Others say Congress and the White House have used short-term economic problems as an excuse for policies with long-term ramifications. The House last week passed $82 billion in 10-year tax cuts — on top of the $350 billion measure, Bush's 2001 $1.6 trillion tax cut plan and a 2002 stimulus bill. "It builds up the pressure to cut benefits over the long run," says Art Benavie, economics professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has written a book on deficits. "You're going to have structural deficits down the road as far as we can see, long-term deficits in an economy that's eventually going to be around full employment, which crowds out private investment ... personally, it makes me nauseous," Benavie says. |
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November 20, 2004 Storm Clouds from HeavenApocalypse Soon By Dave Lindorff
T he allegedly pious George Bush, champion of the saved, is said to be a believer in Armageddon.
He may indeed live to see the apocalypse in his final term of office, but it will not be the one he had read to him in from the Bible. It is likely to be rather more secular in nature, though perhaps nearly as cataclysmic.
As he heads towards his second inauguration, Bush's handlers and new neo-con cabinet will be looking at storm clouds gathering all around.
First, of course, there's the war in Iraq, which is getting nastier by the day for the U.S. Hungary is the latest to leave the coalition of the willing, and Poland, the third largest "ally" after Great Britain, with its 2000 troops, won't be far behind.
Soon it will just be stop-loss indentured American troops doing the fighting and dying, with a few British soldiers standing near the gangplank in the port city of Basra, ready to beat a hasty retreat.
The election, in which the administration professes to place such stock, will be a sham exercise, with Sunni Iraqis either boycotting, or unable to vote because their polling places have been flattened by American bombs.
If the remaining balloting is honest, a fundamentalist Shi'ia coalition will triumph and order the U.S. out of the country.
Alternatively, in the more likely event that the January plebiscite is orchestrated by the same folks who brought us the 2000 and 2004 election charades in the U.S., we'll see the victory going to a U.S. puppet who will have no popular support, thus further empowering the insurgency.
Any way you cut it, it's only going to get worse and bloodier and more costly.
Then there's the U.S. dollar.
In case you haven't noticed, it's been sinking like a rock, trading at roughly 100 Japanese yen to the dollar and $1.30 to the Euro.
Today, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, who in the run-up to the election was pooh-poohing any concern about the U.S. dollar and the ballooning trade deficit, told European bankers that he is worried that foreign investors, who have been propping up the greenback for decades, are finally showing signs of giving it up for dead.
Should that happen, we can expect to see in short order a major economic disaster here in the U.S.
The first thing that would likely happen is that the big oil exporting nations — Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela and Iran — would, along with the rest of the producing countries, switch their pricing away from dollars to Euros, or perhaps a basket of currencies.
That would have the effect of undercutting all support for the dollar, while causing energy prices in the U.S. to go through not just the roof but also the stratosphere.
The impact on the U.S. economy would be immediate and drastic — akin to your SUV runing out of gas on the freeway.
Yet another storm cloud on the horizon is the U.S. budget deficit.
As long as the economy stays marginally healthy, this is a problem deferred, as incomes and tax revenues keep rising or at least holding steady, and as the stock market keeps attracting foreign investment (necessary to keep the dollar afloat and interest rates low).
But should the economy founder, as it already shows signs of doing, and as it surely will do over the course of the next four years, government revenues will plummet, leading to deficits that will dwarf anything seen in history, even relative to the gross domestic product.
(With the dollar in collapse, there would be no option to lower interest rates.
In fact, interest rates will soar.)
Such a crisis would lead to demands for massive cuts in social programs and government services — everything from highway repair to postal services, from school funding to veterans' care.
Nor would state and local governments be able to pick up the slack — they're all cutting back services and raising taxes already.
Little wonder that over the last four years the administration spent so much of its time undermining civil liberties and packing the courts.
The protests against these disasters, as the raindrops from these darkening clouds start to pelt down on the voters of red and blue states alike (perhaps more on red states than on blue, given that the red states have long been the net beneficiaries of federal largesse), will be huge and widespread.
Maybe that's what the rumored prison camps being constructed in the California desert and elsewhere are all about.
The Rovian campaign machine has proven itself brilliant at diverting public attention from the real issues of war and economy, and at focusing the attention of voters instead on such trivia as gay marriage laws and flag burning.
As the deluge begins, this sleight of hand will become much harder to pull off, even with the unflagging help of the Foxed media.
Bush may be surrounding himself this term with an amen chorus cabinet, but the amens from the public will not be very loud or inspired as these storms begin to hit.
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| By Steve Schifferes BBC 8 April, 2004 The cost of the Iraq war: One year on ...The Bush administration has chosen to finance the war by off-budget emergency supplemental appropriations, rather than include Iraq spending in the budget sent to Congress. It was only after the war began, on 25 March 2003, that President Bush asked for $75bn extra to pay for the initial costs of the war. And it was more than six months later before the next supplemental appropriation, for another $87bn, was made. That has reduced the political flack over appropriations for the war — and has also meant that the war spending does not formally count as part of the budget deficit in the future. And that deficit is predicted to exceed $500bn this year. According to economics professor William Nordhaus of Yale University, these costs are "a significant burden on the federal budget, another straw on the camel's back". "The major problem is the Bush administration's unwillingness to face up to the need to finance any of the additional costs, whether the war in Iraq, homeland security, or most important of all the new Medicare provisions," he says. "Like a teenager who gets further in debt on a credit card, the Bush administration is racking up costs that will have to be paid in the future in higher taxes or lower government programs. "The fiscal irresponsibility is really awesome." |
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James Forrestal’s oil portrait always hung prominently in one of the private Dillon Read dining rooms for the eleven years that I worked at the firm. Forrestal, a highly regarded Dillon partner and President of the firm, had gone to Washington, D.C. in 1940 to lead the Navy during WWII and then played a critical role in creating the National Security Act of 1947.
He then became Secretary of War (later termed Secretary of Defense) in September 1947 and served until March 28, 1949.
Given the central banking-warfare investment model that rules our planet, it was appropriate that Dillon
partners at various times lead both the Treasury Department and the Defense Department.
Shortly after resigning from government, Forrestal died falling out of a window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital outside of Washington, D.C. on May 22, 1949.
There is some controversy around the official explanation of his death — ruled a suicide.
Some insist he had a nervous breakdown. Some say that he was opposed to the creation of the state of Israel.
Others say that he argued for transparency and accountability in government, and against the provisions instituted at this time to create a secrete “black budget.”
He lost and was pretty upset about it — and the loss was a violent one.
Since the professional killers who operate inside the Washington beltway have numerous techniques to get perfectly sane people to kill themselves, I am not sure it makes a big difference.
Approximately a month later, the CIA Act of 1949 was passed.
The Act created the CIA and endowed it with the statutory authority that became one of the chief components of financing the “black” budget — the power to claw monies from other agencies for the benefit of secretly funding the intelligence communities and their corporate contractors.
This was to turn out to be a devastating development for the forces of transparency, without which there can be no rule of law, free markets or democracy.
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Protecting the brand with dirty tricks — Enforcement Terrorism The profitable liquidation of every place — Coutts, bank for British Queen and royals Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits |
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What Briody does not mention is allegations regarding Brown & Root's involvement in narcotics trafficking. Former LAPD narcotics investigator Mike Ruppert once described his break up with fiance Teddy — an agent dealing narcotics and weapons for the CIA while working with Brown & Root, as follows:
“Arriving in New Orleans in early July, 1977 I found her living in an apartment across the river in Gretna. Equipped with scrambler phones, night vision devices and working from sealed communiqués delivered by naval and air force personnel from nearby Belle Chasse Naval Air Station, Teddy was involved in something truly ugly.
She was arranging for large quantities of weapons to be loaded onto ships leaving for Iran.
At the same time she was working with Mafia associates of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate the movement of service boats that were bringing large quantities of heroin into the city.
The boats arrived at Marcello controlled docks, unmolested by even the New Orleans police she introduced me to, along with divers, military men, former Green Berets and CIA personnel.
“The service boats were retrieving the heroin from oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, oil rigs in international waters, oil rigs built and serviced by Brown and Root.
The guns that Teddy monitored, apparently Vietnam era surplus AK 47s and M16s, were being loaded onto ships also owned or leased by Brown and Root.
And more than once during the eight days I spent in New Orleans I met and ate at restaurants with Brown and Root employees who were boarding those ships and leaving for Iran within days.
Once, while leaving a bar and apparently having asked the wrong question, I was shot at in an attempt to scare me off.”
Source: "Halliburton’s Brown and Root is One of the Major Components of the Bush-Cheney Drug Empire" by Michael Ruppert, From the Wilderness
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Dark Alliance — The Story Behind the Crack Explosion The "Good Guys" Who Can Do No Wrong
Profoundest suspicions of white malfeasance were true |
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The Clinton Administration took the groundwork laid by Nixon, Reagan and Bush and embraced and blossomed the expansion and promotion of federal support for police, enforcement and the War on Drugs with a passion that was hard to understand unless and until you realized that the American financial system was deeply dependent on attracting an estimated $500 billion-$1 trillion of annual money laundering.
Globalizing corporations and deepening deficits and housing bubbles required attracting vast amounts of capital.
Attracting capital also required making the world safe for the reinvestment of the profits of organized crime and the war machine.
Without growing organized crime and military activities through government budgets and contracts, the economy would stop centralizing.
The Clinton Administration was to govern a doubling of the federal prison population.
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The rich are playing and you are paying
Rich elite setting up derivatives on India Stock Exchange
Cannot get enough of the poison that is causing the rise in food commodity prices and oil prices
The reason your food bill is going up |
The reason your house mortgage is going up
The reason the price of your home is going down
The reason your gas — petrol — oil has gone up
The reason all bills are going up
The reason the price of everything you touch is going up!
It's the rich elite playing the derivative market
The rich are playing and you are paying |
The international elite cartel running the US government will not make the rich pay for their play
The international elite cartel running Europe will not make the rich pay for their play
The international elite cartel who control everything
They are the one's doing the playing
Watch out India!
That middle class you think is being created
Just like in the US!
Just like in the UK!
Going! Going! Going! Gone! |
US Dention centers Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America State of the Union |
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Depleted Uranium — its use in Afghanistan, Iraq, Balkans
Photos of Iraq children being born deformed
He was a young boy and he spent three days in the detainee facilities US soldiers sent to Iraq committing suicide NSA coverup - Vietnam - Kerry More atrocities — Lest we forget — Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying All with U.S. Money: More on the building of the wall. US and Israel's use of chemical agents All with U.S. Money: Israel agents stole identity of New Zealand cerebral palsy victim. (IsraelNN.com July 15, 2004) The Foreign Ministry will take steps towards restoring relations with New Zealand. New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark today announced she was implementing diplomatic sanctions after two Israelis were sentenced on charges of attempting to obtain illegal passports. Despite Israeli refusal to respond to the accusations, the two are labeled in the New Zealand media as Mossad agents acting on behalf of the Israeli intelligence community. Foreign Ministry officials stated they will do everything possible to renew diplomatic ties, expressing sorrow over the “unfortunate incident”. Darfur pictures and arial views of destruction — 2003 — 2005 October 2004 photos Follow the torture trail... September 2004 photos Should the dam break, as attempts are being made in Saudi Arabia Photos July 2004 The real Ronald Reagan — Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, South Africa Photos June 2004 The real Ronald Reagan — Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, South Africa Photos May 2004 American military: Abu Gharib (Ghraib) prison photos, humiliation and torture — London Daily Mirror article: non-sexually explicit pictures Photos April 2004 The celebration of Jerusalem day, the US missiles that rained onto children in Gaza, and, a gathering of top articles over the past nine months Photos March 2004 'Suicide bombings,' the angel said, 'and beheadings.' 'And the others that have all the power — they fly missiles in the sky. They don't even look at the people they kill.' Photos February 2004 US missiles — US money — and Palestine Photos January 2004 Ethnic cleansing in the Beduin desert Photos December 2003 Shirin Ebadi Nobel Peace Prize winner 2003 Photos November 2003 Atrocities — graphic images... Photos October 2003 Aljazeerah.info Photos September 2003 |
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Taxpayers who earn over $1 million saved $30K under Bush tax cuts.
The war in Iraq costs $9 billion a month.
By 2040, our kids will be unable to do more than pay the interest on the national debt.
