“Award winning reporter and likely Mossad propagandist Seymour Hersh tells us that we must resort to the tactics the Jordanian security service used to catch the notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. “The Jordanians did not move directly against suspected Abu Nidal followers but seized close family members instead, mothers and brothers,” Hersh notes. Then he quotes an anonymous CIA officer as saying, “Jordan is the one nation that totally succeeded in penetrating a group,” because it was able “to get their families under control.”
So much for family values.
Hersh disingenuously adds that these tactics defy CIA procedures, but suggests it’s a better alternative than “sitting around making diversity quilts.”
Well, this is exactly the type of psychological warfare you can expect to be subjected to on a daily basis from here on out. As noted in the Marine Corps Gazette, “Psychological operations may become the dominant operational and strategic weapon in the form of media/information intervention. Logic bombs and computer viruses, including latent viruses, may be used to disrupt civilian as well as military operations. Fourth generation adversaries will be adept at manipulating the media to alter domestic and world opinion to the point where skillful use of psychological operations will sometimes preclude the commitment of combat forces.”
“Television news may become a more powerful operational weapon than armored divisions.”
Let me say it one last time: in the name of anti-terrorism, all of the nation’s pent-up anger and frustration over Vietnam, and a host of other, mostly Clinton-related issues, is poised to be unleashed on an enemy that lurks inside our borders.
And that enemy is you….”
Investigator and reporter, Douglas Valentine, author of the best book on the Phoenix Counter-Insurgency program, writing back in 2001.
“Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter which proposal is being batted around, whether it’s diddled this way and called “nationalization” or twiddled that and called “helping the market” or “preprivatization” or “private-public” or anything else – none of it is likely to make a substantial difference, as long as the government stays trapped in the sticky web of Goldman Sachs, AIG, & Friends.
“Nationalization” is likely to have been no more than “internationalization” – linguistic cover for a power-grab across national lines by the globalists, masquerading as economic therapy for your friendly neighborhood business.
And a power grab can be hustled through even without “nationalization.”
In fact, with nationalization shelved, Geithner has just turned around and asked for extraordinary powers for the Treasury.
Maybe Krugman is simply playing good cop to Geithner’s bad cop. And the real goal – more power for Treasury – is a done deal regardless of which program gets by the public?”
Comment
That’s the conclusion of a long (very long) piece I’ve been working on this whole month about what looks like a propaganda thrust involving most of the administration. I don’t buy the Bernanke/Geithner versus Paul K spectacle. I have a feeling that anyone whose voice gets heard at that level in the debate is already an insider and debates well within the parameters of the acceptable.
I have not way of proving what I’m saying, but when I put the timeline together (which is why it’s taking forever) it does give a better explanation of everything that’s happened so far. And it explains why gold hasn’t really done much in a crisis that ought to have set it on fire…
China’s leaders may press at the Group of 20 summit for specific steps to protect its more than $1 trillion of dollar assets as U.S. fiscal policies risk sparking a “currency war,” a senior Chinese researcher said.The dollar weakened after the Federal Reserve said March 18 it would buy as much as $300 billion of Treasuries and the U.S. this week outlined plans to buy as much as $1 trillion of illiquid bank assets.
U.S. purchases of Treasuries are “irresponsible” because they may weaken the dollar, Li Xiangyang, of the government- backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told a forum in Beijing today. “Chinese leaders are likely to articulate their concern to their U.S. counterparts strongly and ask for specific measures.”
But when I looked through Capital Markets wire just now I couldn’t find it.
Here’s a copy of the google search result for the piece:
Mar 18, 2009 …Yields plummeted by the widest margin since 1987. … 14:41 AIG chief asks execs to return bonuses» CNN.com. AIG chief Edward Liddy told lawmakers ….. (
Corrects the headline to reflect that Treasury yields plunged). …
cmwire.com/ – 39 minutes ago – Similar pages –
OK – I found the piece. It’s by Deborah Levine and I found it at Market Watch.
I think the original wire report on CMWire and Yahoo might have been taken off to make the headline look less alarming, so that the reference to 1987 didn’t spook stock investors – the media’s target patsies.
You can see that the article now reads – “Treasury prices soared Wednesday, sending yields plummeting….”
The powers that be want to keep the poor Dow’s chin up at least for today before the big bad short sellers come out in droves…
“Treasury prices soared Wednesday, sending yields plummeting by the largest amount since 1987 after the Federal Reserve surprised bond investors by saying it would buy $300 billion in longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months.”
Meanwhile here are the details at Bloomberg on the FOMC decision:
” This Wednesday, the Federal Open Market Committee of the United States’ Federal Reserve made a unanimous decision to keep the Fed Funds rate unchanged at the 0.25% to 0% range. The rate decision was not a surprise for a good number of investors since the Federal Reserve stated clearly on its last FOMC statement that “economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for some time”. Even so, today’s FOMC statement sounded a bit more dovish than expected, not reflecting the positive performance of the U.S. stock, bond and credit markets over the last two weeks. The Federal Reserve said “it sees some risk that inflation could persist for a time below rates that best foster economic growth and price stability in the longer term”. In addition, “to help improve conditions in private credit markets, the Committee decided to purchase up to $300 billion of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months.” So once gain, the Fed said it will employ all available tools to promote the resumption of sustainable economic growth and this makes us believe that the Fed will continue to purchase large quantities of agency debt and mortgage-backed securities to provide support to the mortgage and housing markets. In other words, the Fed will use quantitative easing. Currency traders reacted very negatively to the FOMC statement driving the U.S. dollar lower against the world’s most heavily traded currencies.”
Comment:
What are they doing? Blowing smoke in everyone’s eyes pretending they see deflation in store in order to throw everyone off the inflationary scent? Hoping meanwhile that gold doesn’t pop up too much and give the game away before they finish the next mighty round of mortgage hot potato? (Most plausible scenario).
Or, are they really terrified of having so destroyed the capital base of the economy that they think something, anything (maybe another financial instrument’s been discovered we haven’t heard about) has to be done. And since all they have is a printing press., well why not use it? Off with the heads of the middle class, the thrifty, the savers, those who have no debt, the creditors! (Also plausible, though probably only if combined with the theory above).
There’s a third option, but I’ll explore that in another post.
And why is Bill Gross pumping this whole business to the public?
“You want to continue to buy what the government will buy,” Pimco’s Bill Gross told CNBC.
“Will anyone ask the Democratic candidate how he feels about stoking up a replication of the Iraq disaster, with a possible war between nuclear Pakistan and nuclear India as lagniappe? The dawn of an Obama administration is now scheduled, on the candidate’s pledges, to see escalation of a doomed and pointless war in Afghanistan and perhaps also termination of Karzai, now square in Uncle Sam’s sights as a failure and probably scheduled for assassination. There’s the heritage of JFK and Vietnam for you. It’s back to 1963.
Asked if Russia was evil, just like the Soviet Union in Ronald Reagan’s eyes, Obama said yes, McCain “maybe”. Trade? Latin America? Africa? Europe? Nothing from either man, though they both agreed that they would flout the UN at will.
Of the two performances, Obama’s was the more appalling since he is meant to be the candidate of change and new ideas. He has no detectable commitment to change and no new ideas. Neither does McCain. Yet the post-debate panelists mostly claimed the Town Hall Meeting an absorbing affair, rich in content. We have one more debate, in which McCain will have another chance to reduce Obama’s commanding lead, something he failed to do last night, even though it now seems Sarah Palin did slow McCain’s slump with her performance last week. McCain and Palin are trying to get traction by slurring Obama for association with Bill Ayers, a leader of the the bomb-throwing antiwar Weathermen in the 60s. Obama was eight when they threw the bombs. It doesn’t seem a productive line of attack for McCain and Palin, particularly when many Americans wouldn’t mind blowing up Wall St themselves….”
“The US House of Representatives voted in support of the Wall Street bail-out package. As the vote began at 1:00pm, Europe’s equity market gains of +1.5% across the board had been locked in, but the US equity markets started to plunge, down -4.0% in the final three hours of trading.Was this a message from Humungous Bank & Broker that the Paulson Package was not a Wall St bail-out after all? You betcha. Deceitful stuff, this. And when Europe opens well down on Monday, will that be a message from HB&B that they want the same bail-out from the governments there? You betcha.
Interventionists are now in full control of the global equity market. Paulson has won. The banks have won. The people’s representatives caved in and the people can take a hike for all the banks care at this point….”
That’s the excellent Bill Cara who agrees with my take that this crisis was exploited to pave the way for mega-bank consolidation at the expense of the weaker banks.
The Citi offer (for $2.2 b) has the backstop of the FDIC and would cannibalize Wachovia, taking over only the banking operations, not Wachovia’s asset management or retail brokerage. Wells Fargo’s deal, on the other hand, would leave the bank intact and would give it $15.1 b.
And at the Congressional probe into AIG’s contribution to this mess, documents seem to show that AIG’s auditor, Pricewaterhouse Cooper gave a confidential warning that internal overseers weren’t allowed proper access to the highly-leveraged desks. (Of course, if you go back to 2005 and earlier, you’ll find Pricewaterhouse itself was being questioned for its behavior).
Secrecy has been the complaint for years over at Goldman Sachs. What beats me is why no one called these firms on any of this.
“In a report published in March by the Bank for International Settlements, economists Jacob Gyntelberg and Philip Wooldridge raised concerns that banks might report incorrect rate information. The report said that banks might have an incentive to provide false rates to profit from derivatives transactions. The report said that although the practice of throwing out the lowest and highest groups of quotes is likely to curb manipulation, Libor rates can still “be manipulated if contributor banks collude or if a sufficient number change their behaviour.”
The post at Naked Capitalism is concerned about Libor being unreliable because of banks understating the rates they are paying (to conceal their desperation). The rate is an estimate set at the HQ of the British Bankers’ Association at 11 a.m. every morning in London on the basis of offers from 16 member bankers. The possibility exists that it could be manipulated.
“Are we really supposed to take the alleged Iranian “threat” – which Barack Obama deems “the greatest strategic challenge to the United States in the region in a generation” – seriously? Not unless Photoshop is reclassified as a “weapon of mass destruction.”
“My visit to England reminded me of the role of English royalty and elites in pushing for a conflict starting with the leadership of the first Crusade and on to the Sykes-Picot agreement (1916, dividing Western Asia into British and French interests) the Balfour Declaration (1917 promising a homeland for Jews to get support for the war effort) to the first British occupation of Iraq and Palestine (1919-1920 and beyond) and to the latest British occupation (with the US) of Iraq and its support of the continued occupation and colonization of Palestine (so far 7 of the 10 million Palestinians were made refugees or displaced people).
But on the other hand, now as then many individual citizens and groups were doing such a fantastic job for human rights and justice. Believing indeed that silence is complicity these groups are making a huge difference (e.g. at the University of London and this excellent group that does twinning with Palestine: http://www.twinningwithpalestine.net/ )
The intensified media and educational campaign to vilify Muslims and Islam reached a new low with the David Horowitz blitzkrieg on campuses to promote Islamophobia and titled “Islamofascist awareness week.” Imagine the outrage if we had a Christofascist or Judeofascist awareness weeks on campuses!!. A good summary of this campaign is found on the Black Agenda Report
(My own guess is that this will help further awaken the sleeping giant, which is the Arab and Islamic world) The intensified efforts and plans to attack Iran (thinking of it as a supposed preempting of a potential/supposed liberator of the Holy Land). On this front, the attack on Iran is playing a significant factor in choice of president: de jure by the US public but de facto by the Israel lobby. In fact, Israel has the Chutzpa to even rate them on their allegiance: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/rosnerPage.jhtml
Giuliani and Clinton are top in subsuming US interests to serve Israeli interests. And here is the Israel positions of these presidential candidates taken from the Zionist think tank “Council of foreign Relations: which claims the conflict goes thousands of years: http://www.cfr.org/publication/13579/
There is now a malicious campaign of vilification and attacks on any one who dares discuss Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights. It was interesting to note the hysterical reactions of Zionist establishment to publications of books like Paul Findley’s “They Dare to Speak Out”, Jimmy Carter’s “Palestine: Peace not apartheid” and Profs. Mearsheimer and Walt “The Israel Lobby: influence on US Foreign Policy.” It is interesting to note that at every talk I give, the requisite quorum of at least three Zionists show up (a bad cop, good cop, and a supposed psychological commentator). This weekend, they are going full force against the Sabeel Conference (Sabeel is a Palestinian Christian liberation theology group with friends around the world). See Friends of Sabeel Website at http://fosna.org and the article promoting the racist demonstration at http://www.thejewishadvocate.com/this_weeks_issue/news/?content_id=3885 In all cases and failing to really address the substance, the attackers resort/ed to name calling the most common of which that was used over the years to silence people are calling them “anti-semite” and/or “self-hating Jews”. For apologists of an apartheid regime to claim victimization is not unusual (white rulers in Apartheid South Africa and their elite supporters in the West for decades claimed victimhood of ANC Terrorism and being trapped on the tip of a black and backward continent. The white rulers literally looked at themselves as a beacon of democracy in the barbarity of those who burn people alive (called neck lacing).
Today it seems unusual to speak about blacks in Africa in denigrating terms (although it is still done in the elite think tanks of Washington and behind the scenes in academic and other elite circles). The attack on Arabs and Muslims is now full fledged and is out in the open. The list is long from the PATRIOT act to warrantless surveillance, to profiling, to verbal abuse, to denial of the right to speak, to denial of employment and promotion, to Guantanamou and Abu Ghrieb, to “rendering” and secret CIA prisons, and on and on. One looks to history to understand the period we are in. The closest I could come-up with is the eleventh century when the Crusades were the norm. For the first 100 years of the crusader onslaught, the Arab and Muslim masses were divided and leaderless. The Crusaders were pragmatic and even established treaties and trades. Then they got greedy and expanded and broke treaties (see Karen Armstrong’s book “Holy War”) and aroused anger and aroused the sleeping giant of Islam.
We see the signs of a similar thing today (as posted above). Here is one more: “Extremist Jews Burn a Church in a Jerusalem” http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/916567.html
(Of course hundreds of religious sites were destroyed by Israel when they depopulated 530 Palestinian Towns and Villages between 1947-1950 and later in 1967 and beyond) Bizarre news: Israel to purchase Chinese fighter jets that have US technology (the article claims Israel technology when everyone knows that the Israeli Lavi was based on US F-16 technologies and that is the reason it was canceled but Israel profited handsomely). http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1192380641058&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
One good news, in a win for freedom of expression (and against Zionist attempted censorship) the University of Michigan Press will continue the distribution agreement with Pluto Press (the publisher of my book Sharing the Land of Canaan). And in a vuisually impressive action: Condoleeza Rice was confronted by Code Pink activist Desiree Firoos calling her a war criminal (in the opening of the hearings in Congress presided over by AIPAC stooge Tom Lantos, Lantos was visibly shaken).: see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9GytISiHzw
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” — Wendell Phillips
“Do you think the upcoming 2008 presidential campaign will provide a chance for the Israel lobby’s influence to be discussed?
Regrettably, no. The candidates will undoubtedly disagree on a wide array of domestic and foreign-policy issues: health care, education, taxes, the environment, what to do in Iraq, how to deal with a rising China, etc. But the one issue on which there will be virtually no debate is the question of whether the United States should continue to give Israel unconditional backing. Even though almost everyone recognizes that U.S Middle East policy is a disaster, no serious candidate is going to suggest anything other than steadfast and largely unconditional support for Israel. Indeed, all the major candidates (Clinton, Edwards, McCain, Obama, Romney, etc.) have already expressed their strong and uncritical backing for Israel, even though the campaign is just getting underway. Not only is this situation bad for the United States, it is also not good for Israel. The United States would be a better ally if its leaders could make support for Israel more conditional and if they could give their Israeli counterparts more candid and critical advice without facing a backlash from the Israel lobby.”