"Bernanke warns that meddling with Fed's monetary policy cause harm economy

_________________

"Did Bernanke and Paulson Commit Bank Fraud?

May 31, 2009 - 09:25 AM

By: Global_Research 

"Thomas R. Eddlem writes: New revelations from the New York State Attorney General’s office have all but proven that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson committed bank fraud crimes in the case of the Merrill Lynch/Bank of America merger that took place last year. New York State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo revealed that Paulson and Bernanke illegally suppressed adverse financial data on the merger and threatened to replace the Bank of America CEO and board of directors if the company backed out of the Merrill Lynch merger. “Secretary Paulson has informed us that he made the threat at the request of Chairman Bernanke,” Cuomo wrote in an April 23 letter to Congress.

The two companies signed a tentative merger agreement September 15, 2008, but the agreement included a “Material Adverse Change” (MAC) clause that would allow Bank of America (BofA) to escape the merger if BofA financial officers found undisclosed financial information that would hurt BofA while looking at Merrill Lynch’s books. Bank of America shareholders approved the agreement with the MAC clause December 5, 2008. The final merger was to take place January 1, 2009.

But on December 14, BofA financial officers informed CEO Kenneth Lewis that Merrill Lynch’s quarterly losses would be $3 billion more than expected (the $9 billion in expected losses ended up being a $15 billion loss — a $6 billion increase over what stockholders expected and approved). Three days later Lewis informed U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson by phone that Bank of America planned to exit the merger using the MAC clause. Paulson urged Lewis to get on an airplane and visit his office.

Lewis met with Paulson and Bernanke December 21, where Lewis was told he would be replaced if BofA exercised the MAC clause. “I can’t recall if he said ‘we would remove the board and management if you called it’ or if he said ‘we would do it if you intended to,’”  Lewis told Cuomo. Then Bank of America Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lewis tried to “deescalate” the conflict by saying he’d talk to his board. Lewis also testified he was instructed not to reveal the staggering Merrill Lynch losses to his stockholders: “I was instructed that ‘We do not want a public disclosure,’” Lewis told Cuomo’s office. Lewis took it as a demand to defraud his stockholders, a demand that he and his board of directors complied with.

The BofA board met the next day to discuss the disastrous merger, and the minutes revealed: “The Treasury and Fed state strongly that were the Corporation [Bank of America] to invoke the material adverse change (“MAC”) clause in the merger agreement with Merrill Lynch and fail to close the transaction, the Treasury and Fed would remove the Board and Management of the Corporation.”

That decision by Lewis and his board led Bloomberg.com financial columnist Jonathan Weil to comment in a particularly insightful column: “As for Lewis and the rest of Bank of America’s board, it’s a foregone conclusion that their word is now mud. The more honorable and legally appropriate path for them would have been to resign rather than participate in the cover-up.”

But more than just honor was violated. The law was violated as well. According to bank fraud laws, Paulson, Bernanke, Lewis, and his board of directors committed bank fraud against their stockholders. The Justice Department’s Criminal Reference Manual says of the bank fraud law: “The elements of the offense of making a false statement are: (1) making a false statement or willfully overvaluing property or security knowing the same to be false, (2) for the purpose of influencing in any way the action, (3) of the enumerated agencies and organizations.”

Bank fraud laws are so severe that an actual loss of stock value needn’t be actualized in order for criminal bank fraud to take place, according to the Justice Department Criminal Reference Manual. “The mere probability of loss to the bank is sufficient to establish intent to injure, and neither a possibility of future benefit to the bank nor restitution is a defense.” Of course, Bank of America did experience a serious financial injury. The stock price tanked from about $30 per share in September down to $5 per share in March, an 87 percent loss of value, and the otherwise financially secure Bank of America needed billions in federal bailout money just to survive.

Senator Chris Dodd told CNN that hearings on Cuomo's revelations may be warranted, though Weil noted, “Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd took V.I.P. loans from Countrywide Financial Corp., now a subsidiary of Bank of America.” So what are the chances that a serious investigation will take place?

Weil correctly points out: “Knowing what we know now, how could you ever trust anything Bernanke says again?” He also appropriately wonders openly whether current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (then the New York Federal Reserve Bank chairman and number two man on the Fed’s Open Market Committee) was involved in the deal, or if he was somehow incompetently unaware of what was going on right under his nose. Either way, the government’s financial leadership in Washington right now is untrustworthy at best and felonious at worst.

In the mythology of the left, unregulated “free enterprise” as a financial system failed under the Bush administration. The Bank of America/Merrill Lynch fraud case authoritatively proves that mythology false. Laissez-faire free enterprise was pretty much the opposite of what happened on Wall Street during the financial boom and subsequent bust. The failure was caused by government, which in this case nearly bankrupted the largest bank in America when top government officials engaged in criminal fraud and leveled ugly political threats that — if they had been made by Mafia functionaries — would be prosecuted under racketeering laws."

© Copyright Thomas R. Eddlem, Global Research, 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article10991.html

Always thought Congress makes laws which are policy, justices interpret laws according to pleadings before them.

______________

Sonia Sotomayor: Courts make policy full clip

__________

June 24, 2009
"The Supreme Court nominee who can't write
By Carey Roberts

Source RenewAmerica.com

"Supreme Court opinions are words for the generations that can affect the lives and welfare of millions. No one doubts that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has a compelling life story. But more to the point, we need to inquire about her aptitude to draft thoughtfully-reasoned, well-crafted legal opinions.

On this count, there is reason for worry.

Sotomayor herself has admitted, "Writing remains a challenge for me even today...I am not a natural writer." Reporter Stephanie Mencimer has characterized Sotomayor's legal opinions as "good punishment for law students who show up late for class."

A cursory pass of Sotomayor's writings reveals them to be clumsy to the point of being impenetrable. This comes from her "wise Latina" speech: "I also hope that by raising the question today of what difference having more Latinos and Latinas on the bench will make will start your own evaluation."

So exactly what does "start your own evaluation" mean?

And this ringing — but ungrammatical — declamation: "Other simply do not care." Maybe it's acceptable to drop the final 's' in Spanish, but not in English.

Then there's the time Sotomayor referred to a chirping insect as "Jimmy the Cricket" — with no apologies to "Jiminy Cricket." That malapropism triggered a summer reading assignment for the future Supreme Court nominee to immerse herself in a round of children's classics.

When it comes to Spanish grammar, Sotomayor doesn't have a clue. In a 1996 speech she uttered this blooper, "in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition."

There is in fact a good Spanish adjective for such an off-key statement: "absurdo."

(For the compulsive linguists in the room, Sotomayor's name comes from a combination of the words soto ("thicket") and mayor ("greater"). Mayor is the adjective that modifies the noun soto. So Sotomayor means "greater thicket.")

Most telling is a person's ability to think analytically and reason logically, as revealed in a jurist's ability to write well. Here again, Sotomayor's nomination raises eyebrows.

Ms. Sotomayor has asserted her Latino heritage makes her a better, "wiser" judge. So see if you can follow this obtuse legal argument:

"For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir — rice, beans and pork....My Latina identity also includes, because of my particularly adventurous taste buds, morcilla, — pig intestines — patitas de cerdo con garbanzo — pigs' feet with beans, and la lengua y orejas de cuchifrito, pigs' tongue and ears."

So let's get the word out to our nation's jurists, Consuming swine guts makes you a more discerning and compassionate judge!

And when Sotomayor was asked to defend her membership in the all-female Belizean Grove, she rendered this risible verdict: "to the best of my knowledge, a man has never been asked to be considered for membership."

In a 1986 interview on Good Morning America, Sotomayor railed against the sex discrimination she allegedly had encountered. Want proof? "And if you're a male that grew up professionally in a male-dominated profession, then your image of what a good lawyer is a male image."

That's right, discrimination has nothing to do with the actions you may commit, it's clinging to a politically-incorrect "male image."

The real problem, of course, has nothing to do with one's image of being a good lawyer. The concern is the extent to which the affirmative action mindset has permeated our society, watering down standards and discriminating against more qualified applicants. "I am a product of affirmative action," Sonia Sotomayor boasted in a 1994 interview. "I am the perfect affirmative action baby."

During her now-famous address at the University of California School of Law, Judge Sotomayor concluded in her rambling, nearly incoherent prose:

"There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering. We, I mean all of us in this room, must continue individually and in voices united in organizations that have supported this conference, to think about these questions and to figure out how we go about creating the opportunity for there to be more women and people of color on the bench so we can finally have statistically significant numbers to measure the differences we will and are making."

If the Senate confirms Sonia Sotomayor next month, it will be only a matter of time until such sentiments begin to make their way into the legal opinions handed down from the High Court."

© Carey Roberts

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/roberts/090624

"U.N. TO EMERGE AS GLOBAL IRS

By Cliff Kincaid

June 24, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

"While our media sleep, the United Nations is proceeding, with President Obama’s acquiescence, to implement a global plan to create a new international socialist order financed by global taxes on the American people.

The Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development that begins on Wednesday will consider adoption of a document calling for “new voluntary and innovative sources of financing initiatives to provide additional stable sources of development finance...” This is U.N.-speak for global taxes. They are anything but “voluntary” for the people forced to pay them. [Read Cliff's book: "Global Bondage: The UN Plan to Rule The World"]

The most “popular” proposals, which could generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue for global purposes, involve taxes on greenhouse gas emissions and financial transactions such as stock trades.

The document was agreed to at an informal meeting of expert “facilitators” and was made available on Monday afternoon at 3 p.m. It is doubtful that any changes will be made to it.

The conference was postponed from June 1-3 and will now take place June 24-26 at the U.N. in New York. While the “outcome document” has been watered down somewhat from the previous version, it still reaffirms attainment of the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, which would require the payment of $845 billion from U.S. taxpayers. A commitment to the MDGs was a stated objective of the Global Poverty Act, which Barack Obama had introduced as a U.S. senator. It requires the U.S. to devote 0.7 percent of Gross National Income to foreign aid.

Now, as President, Obama can bypass the Congress and simply direct his Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice to approve the U.N. conference document. Then the pressure will be increased on Congress to come up with the money and satisfy our “international commitments.”

This is the pattern that he followed in regard to more money for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). After agreeing at the G-20 summit to provide more money for the IMF, the Obama White House slipped the cash and credit into the recently passed emergency war funding bill. The Obama White House had added billions in cash, as well as a $100 billion line of credit, for the IMF.

Rep. Mike Pence commented, “This legislation, which includes $108 billion in loan authorizations for a global bailout, for the International Monetary Fund—at a time when this government has run up a $2 trillion annual deficit—I believe does a disservice to taxpayers and to those that defend us. Passing a $108 billion global bailout on the backs of our soldiers is just not right.”

The U.N. conference document explains where all of this is leading—the destruction of the American dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the build-up of global institutions such as the IMF and the U.N.

It declares that “We acknowledge the calls by many states for further study of the feasibility and advisability of a more efficient reserve system, including the possible function of SDRs in any such system and the complementary roles that could be played by various regional arrangements.” SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a form of international currency that enables global institutions like the International Monetary Fund to provide more foreign aid to the rest of the world. The U.S. pays for SDRs through its financial contributions to the IMF.

If implemented, the document would officially mark the end of the United States as the world’s leading economic power.

Urging socialism as the solution to the crisis, the document states that “Insufficient emphasis on equitable human development has contributed to significant inequalities among countries and peoples. Other weaknesses of a systemic nature also contributed to the unfolding crisis, which has demonstrated the need for more effective government involvement to ensure an appropriate balance between the market and public interest.”

The nerve center of this emerging new international socialist system will be the United Nations, a body that has developed a reputation for corruption and incompetence and whose “peacekeepers” have been implicated in sexual abuse and other human rights violations.

“The United Nations, on the basis of its universal membership and legitimacy, is well positioned to participate in various reform processes aimed at improving and strengthening the effective functioning of the international financial system and architecture,” the document says.

“This United Nations Conference is part of our collective effort towards recovery,” it adds.

The Obama Administration’s unofficial point man in U.N. deliberations has been economist Joseph Stiglitz, who has been coordinating a “Commission of Experts” that has reported to U.N. General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto, the notorious Communist Catholic Priest who received the Lenin Peace Prize from the old Soviet Union.

Stiglitz produced his own document which called for “the issuance of additional SDRs,” “additional sources of funding” for global institutions, a new global reserve currency, and a new global credit facility. Key recommendations have been incorporated into the official U.N. conference document but Stiglitz and his “experts” provide far more details about them.

In terms of new funding sources, the document calls for “innovative sources of financing such as emission rights trading and financial transactions taxes…” The concept of “emissions trading” enables corporations to avoid limits on greenhouse gas emissions if they pay taxes to government. It is part of the “cap and trade” legislation that the liberals are now pushing on Capitol Hill.

Chapter Five of this document, “International Financial Innovations,” goes into detail, declaring that “For some time, the difficulty in meeting the UN official assistance target of 0.7 percent of Gross National Income of developed industrial countries as official development assistance, as well as the need for adequate funding for the provision of global and regional public goods (peace building, fighting global health pandemics, combating climate change and sustaining the global environment more generally) has generated proposals on how to guarantee a more reliable and stable source of financing for these objectives.”

The document notes that an international airline ticket tax is now in effect, as a result of the actions of the “Leading Group on Solidarity Levies” that now involves close to 60 countries and major international organizations. This money is going to fight global diseases.

The term “Solidarity Levies” is U.N.-speak for global taxes.

The Stiglitz document explains, “Some of the initiatives that have been proposed encompass ‘solidarity levies’ or, more generally, taxation for global objectives. Some countries have already decreed solidarity levies on airline tickets but there is a larger set of proposals. There have also been suggestions to auction global natural resources—such as ocean fishing rights and pollution emission permits—for global environmental programs.”

It goes on to say, “The suggestion of taxes that could be earmarked for global objectives has a long history. To avert their being perceived as encroachments on participating countries’ fiscal sovereignty, it has been agreed that these taxes should be nationally imposed, but internationally coordinated.”

So the nations of the world, including the U.S., will collect the taxes but then turn them over to institutions such as the U.N. The world body will function, in effect, like a global IRS.

Is it too much to ask that our media take some time off from talking about the girl with star tattoos on her face, “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” and Perez Hilton, to examine what is going on at the United Nations?"

© 2009 Cliff Kincaid - All Rights Reserved"

http://www.newswithviews.com/Kincaid/cliff323.htm

Interesting about the 1918 flu.

______

"German authorities warn of swine flu mutation risk

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE55M5EA20090623

___________

"Hybrid A/H1N1 flu tied to genetic trigger for larger, mutated version

By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Source OnlineJournal.com

Jun 24, 2009, 00:17

"(WMR) -- WMR previously reported on the genetic manipulation of the 1918 flu from tissue extracted from an Inuit woman who died from the pandemic in Alaska. On May 6, WMR reported: “WMR has obtained information from biological researchers that the 1918 Spanish flu genetic sequences were ‘manipulated’ in order to effect transmission capability.

The current H1N1 virus, called ‘swine flu,’ is reportedly a combination of two forms of human flu, two forms of swine flu (North American and Eurasian), and avian or bird flu . . . Two bio-safety laboratories have been associated with the genetic reverse engineering of not only A-H1N1, the current ‘swine flu’ strain, but also the deadly Ebola virus. They are the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada.”

WMR has now learned from virus researchers that the current A-H1N1 strain strongly appears tied to vaccinations for the seasonal form on influenza. The hybrid flu began in countries where seasonal vaccinations are commonplace and where A-H1N1 did not respond to the normal seasonal flu vaccination antibody, according to researchers studying the new virus.

What has some researchers alarmed is that the engineers of A-H1N1 purposely planned to make the virus non-responsive to any available vaccine. There is also a suspicion by researchers that the A-H1N1 vaccine under development will trigger a more deadly mutated form of the virus for which the A-H1N1 vaccine will be ineffective.

On May 19, WMR reported: “What researchers have told us is that as long as the current AH1N1 can infect humans, it will not try to mutate. Even though there have been deaths from AH1N1, most of those infected are sick for up to four days, take Tamiflu or similar drugs, and recover with immunity from the hybrid or ‘novel’ virus . . . However, with vaccinations, the AH1N1 virus will, of course, be rejected by human hosts and cases around the world will decrease. However, then, the virus will begin to mutate in order to successfully infect human hosts. And when that happens, the new, newly-mutated virus will become much more transmissible and more pathogenic. The nightmare scenario is that the new, mutated virus may take on the characteristics of H5N1 or the avian flu. The vaccines administered for AH1N1 will be ineffective against the new strain of H5N1 and the world may face a more deadly pandemic then the current AH1N1 outbreak. There are scientists at WHO who are aware of this scenario but their alarm has been suppressed by political and economic considerations.”

Public health officials in Brazil are reporting that the A/H1N1 virus is now in the process of mutating, confirming our earlier reports. A new variant of the pandemic virus is showing up in patients in Brazil making treatment more difficult.

On May 13, 2009, WMR reported: “Because of the rapid mutation of the virus and the fact that, unlike 1918, rapid global transportation is now the norm, scientists are predicting that the molecular clock of the A/H1N1 virus, coupled with modern transportation, means that almost all the countries of the world will experience an A/H1N1 outbreak within the next few months.”

The prediction about the rate of global infection is being borne out by reports of the virus now being reported in many more nations, including South Africa, Yemen, Qatar, India, and Morocco, as well as uncontained surges in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Utah, and Argentina.

In another suspicious turn of events, Ivorian national Konan Yao, a former researcher at the Winnipeg laboratory that has been involved in A/H1N1 research and who was arrested by the FBI at the U.S. border crossing on May 5 trying to sneak 22 vials of Ebola and HIV genetic material into the United States for his new job at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington, DC, was given his post-plea bargain sentence in federal court in Grand Forks, North Dakota, late last month: 17 days in prison which equated to time served and a $500 fine. Yao’s federal charge was “failure to present merchandise for inspection,” a lesser charge from the original “attempting to bring biological material into the United States without a permit.” Yao’s new job was at the NIH’s Biodefense Research Laboratory.

The federal prosecutor who cut the plea deal with Yao is Lynn Jordheim, the assistant U.S. attorney in Fargo, who also happens to be the U.S. Attorney’s office representative on the Anti-terrorism Advisory Council (ATAC) and Crisis Management Coordinator for the federal jurisdiction and, more intriguing, the “Confidential Human Source Coordinator.” "

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2009 WayneMadenReport.com

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4837.shtml

A young Peter Falk ... a very chilling drama with a timeless message.

________

"HR 2454 Cap and Trade: Consumer Costs Up, Emitters Buy Time

"Negotiations to soften carbon cap and trade legislation’s blow to agriculture, coal, and low-income families could win passage for the bill in the House Friday, reports TheHill.com, but AO finds the move could be at the expense of most consumers. Americans who are not among the poorest one-fifth of U.S. households may have cause for worry. H.R. 2454: Eyed by Government as a Revenue Source H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey bill, is intended to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 17 percent over 2005 emissions by 2020; but carbon emitters may buy themselves something of a reprieve by being able to stock up on emissions allowances, while still being allowed to pass costs on to consumers. The Congressional Budget Office, which estimates 7,400 facilities will fall under the legislation beginning in 2012, if Congress approves it, has calculated that H.R. 2454 will be a money machine for government: -Increasing federal revenue by $254 billion over 2010-2014 and $846 billion over 2010-2019 -Increasing direct spending by $241 billion and $821 billion over the respective periods and -Increasing discretionary spending by $50 billion through 2019 President Obama is counting on cap and trade to generate revenue he needs for his other spending initiatives as discussed in the AOH article, “Cutting Carbon Emissions: Who Pays?” His budget plan assumed that a carbon cap and trade system would be passed and implemented quickly and produce almost $650 billion in revenue from 2012 to 2019. He has pledged to low-income households he will protect them from higher costs with tax credits or rebates (but necessarily subsidized by higher costs on other households). Making H.R. 2454 Political Palatable to Special Interests Ironically, the emotional genesis of the measure – to reduce carbon emissions to stave off climate change and its effects, as described by advocates – may not be well served. So says The Breakthrough Institute. This independent think tank (which supports renewable energy) has come out with a new analysis that shows H.R. 2454 may reduce carbon emissions by only about 2 percent from 2012 to 2020. The reason, the group says, is all the political maneuvering and shifting of emissions requirements to placate political opponents that appears to be necessary to win support.  In fact, the group estimates that, by 2020, 61 percent of the reductions required by the legislation may exist on paper only – due to provisions that allow emitters to creatively use allowances to skirt reducing emissions in actual practice. Notably, utilities are coming out in support of the legislation, even in a coal-heavy state like Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia Inquirer quotes an official owning up to power companies’ role in producing 40 percent of carbon emissions and declaring the bill is a “reasonable business approach.” For utilities and manufacturers, perhaps, since the article points out they can pass along higher costs to consumers. But consumers will see higher energy costs. The Consumer Pays Omaha Public Power District described the future under H.R. 2454 in stark terms for its 340,000 electric customers in Nebraska. Click here to see an impactful chart that shows what happens to consumer costs under both an optimistic scenario and a realistic scenario, as assessed by the utility. -Under the optimistic scenario, consumer costs for these 340,000 electric customers would increase $74 million in 2012 and $410 million in 2030 -Under the realistic scenario, consumer costs for these 340,000 electric customers would increase $238 million in 2012 and $1.3 trillion in 2030 A policy leader with the CATO Institute, who writes WashingtonWatch.com, details the legislation’s costs to consumers nationwide like this: $3840.82 per person $7681.63 per couple $9870.90 per average household $11522.45 per household of three $15,363.26 per family of four Spark for Needed Coal Research The legislation also gets the government more involved in “clean coal” research, which still faces considerable hurdles as discussed by AOH in “CCS and the Goal of Making Energy Cleaner.” The legislation’s revisions may be in tacit recognition of the reality the world has already recognized: that coal will be needed for decades to come (see AOH, “Coal: World Moves Full Steam Ahead.”) A Los Angeles Times article this week also acknowledges that coal use will continue unabated under the bill, at least for the next decade."

http://www.analysisonline.org/site/aoh_display.asp?aoh_id=516&sec_id=140002434

"H.R. 675: Building Obama’s Civilian National Security Force

Published on 06-23-2009

By Kurt NimmoSource BlacklistedNews.com

"In January, without any recognizable corporate media coverage, Rep. Bob Filner, a California Democrat, introduced H.R. 675. The bill would amend title 10 of the United States Code and extend to civilian employees of the Department of Defense the authority to execute warrants, make arrests, and carry firearms. The bill was referred to the Armed Services Committee on January 26, 2009.

Filner’s bill would amend the United States code with the following: “Sec. 1585b. Law enforcement officers of the Department of Defense: authority to execute warrants, make arrests, and carry firearms… for any offense against the United States.” (Emphasis added.)

The Posse Comitatus Act, passed on June 18, 1878 after the end of Reconstruction, limits the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement. The Act prohibits members of the federal uniformed services from exercising nominally state law enforcement, police, or peace officer powers that maintain “law and order” on non-federal property within the United States.

H.R. 675 sidesteps Posse Comitatus by defining “law enforcement officer of the Department of Defense” as “a civilian employee of the Department of Defense,” including federal police officers, detectives, criminal investigators, special agents, and game law enforcement officers classified by the Office of Personnel Management Occupational Series 0083 (the United States Office of Personnel Management is described as an “independent agency” of the U.S. government that manages the civil service of the federal government).

In 2005, the Office of Personnel Management partnered with the Department of Homeland Security to create a “21st century human resources management system that fully supports the Department’s vital mission,” according to then Office of Personnel Management Associate Director for Strategic Human Resources Policy Ron Sanders.

At approximately the same time, the DoD issued a Defense Directive 1404.10 (read   PDF) that establishes a “DoD Civilian Expeditionary Workforce” and rescinds a prior Clinton era directive dealing with the emergency use of civilian personnel. The Obama administration describes the Civilian Expeditionary Workforce as follows:

Members of the DoD Civilian Expeditionary Workforce shall be organized, trained, cleared, equipped, and ready to deploy in support of combat operations by the military; contingencies; emergency operations; humanitarian missions; disaster relief; restoration of order; drug interdiction; and stability operations of the Department of Defense in accordance with DoDD 3000.05

“This new directive is odd, coming as it does after campaign promises by Obama to establish a paramilitary ‘civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded’ as our military,” writes Doug Ross.

According to Sec. Def. Robert Gates, defeating terrorism will require the use of more “soft power,” with civilians contributing more in communication, economic assistance, political development and other non-military areas. “Gates called for the creation of new government organizations, including a permanent group of civilian experts with a wide range of expertise who could be sent abroad on short notice as a supplement to U.S. military efforts. And he urged more involvement by university and other private experts,” the Associated Press reported in late 2007.

It should be noted that the original Civilian Expeditionary Workforce directive mentions the term “overseas” no fewer than 33 times, while the Obama revision does not mention “overseas” at all. In other words, the revised directive is designed for “emergency operations” in the United States.

Both H.R. 675 and the DoD Civilian Expeditionary Workforce directive will establish civilian “soft power” under the direction of the Pentagon. Obama is now actively working to create a paramilitary “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the military. In order to skirt Posse Comitatus, Obama’s paramilitary brownshirts will be organized and run out of the Office of Personnel Management with orders coming from the Pentagon.

In the recent past, the Pentagon sent operatives to snoop on anti-war and patriot demonstrations — for instance, Alex Jones’ protest at the Federal Reserve was monitored by the Pentagon . In the not too distant future they will likely send “civilians” with firearms and the power to arrest “rightwing extremists” who represent, according to the Department of Homeland Security and numerous federalized police agencies, “offense against the United States.”

Copyright © 2006-2009 BlackListedNews.com

http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-4619-0-5-5--.html

Following up my last post here are some more economic numbers.

_____________

Jun 24, 2009
 
"Nightmarish financial numbers
By The Mogambo Guru
Source Asia Times Online via SteveQuayle.com

"Minyanville.com had the headline, "Velocity of Money Comes to a Standstill." The report starts off with the news that "Current consumption, which at $8.2 trillion is around 70% of GDP, has fallen US$150 billion from last year," and that investment, which represents things like building factories, is $1.3 trillion or 11% of GDP, and down 23.3% from last year."

This is certainly bad news, although I am always leery of the concept of velocity, as it is just the plug number that makes Irving Fisher's famous equation (MV = PQ) work out, namely that the Money supply times the turnover of the money (Velocity) equals the Quantity of things sold times the Price of those things that were sold. Simple.

So since the Money supply (as measured by M2) is growing at almost 9%, Prices overall (as measured by the broad CPI) are not growing very much, and the Quantity of goods sold is way down as consumers stop consuming since they are out of money and credit, then Velocity must, by arithmetical necessity, be going down. Now do you know something that you didn't already know?

But perhaps this seeming fascination with velocity has something to do with why Bloomberg.com reports that "US household wealth fell in the first quarter by $1.3 trillion, extending the biggest slump on record, as home and stock prices dropped." Yikes! And in just the first three months of the year!

You may be thinking to yourself, "Well, since the Worthless Mogambo Idiot (WMI) goes ballistic at the drop of a hat these days, probably as a result of his having such a tenuous and apparently transitory grasp of reality, maybe he is just over-reacting, and this is not so much."

If you are one of those people who thinks such things, then I laugh - Hahaha! - in your face, and in response to the quizzical look on your face at my sudden rude arrogance, I hold up the rest of the article where it says, "Net worth for households and non-profit groups" is a nice, tidy $50.4 trillion, which seems like a lot of money, but which is actually the "lowest level since 2004," and which was down from $51.7 trillion in the fourth quarter.

For some reason, they add, "The government began keeping quarterly records in 1952," probably as a reassuring way of saying, "If you ignore the staggering loss of buying power of the dollar, which one experiences as a rise in prices, and you ignore the costs of all the taxes, fees and expenses of the cost of holding and accumulating all this net worth, and you only look at nominal prices then and now, then it looks like you are a lot better off than you were in 1952, and we have records to prove it, no matter what that Stupid Mogambo Loudmouth (SML) has to say about it!"

For homeowners, the bad news is that the report showed that "Owners' equity as a share of their total real-estate holdings decreased to 41.4% last quarter from 42.9% in the fourth quarter," which is bad news from the perspective of The Bad Old Days (TBOD) when Mortgage Equity Withdrawal (where homeowners were stupidly borrowing the increased "equity" that resulted from their houses going up in value so that they could spend it on sex, drug and rock & roll), was running in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year, fantastically super-charging the economy.

The ugly bottom line is that "The economy contracted at a 5.7% annual pace in the first quarter and consumer spending rose at a 1.5% pace."

Thus, the habit is engrained, as "Total borrowing by consumers, businesses and government agencies increased at an annual rate of 4.1% last quarter compared with a 6.2% gain the prior quarter. The gain was paced by a 23% surge in borrowing by the federal government, reflecting spending linked to the stimulus plan."

And this doesn't even count, of course, "Borrowing by state and local governments increased at a 4.9% rate", as they continue their habit of spending more than they can take in.

Bill Bonner here at The Daily Reckoning notes that, as we see, "some habits are hard to break. The habit of getting something for nothing is one of them," and at this rate, "The official US debt is exploding. Bill Gross says it will be 100% of US GDP within 5 years."

Instantly, my mind goes into some kind of weird dream and all I can see is three numbers floating around, bumping into one another. One of them is $14 trillion (which is GDP), and the other two are the number $11.3 trillion (which is the current national debt), and the last one is the number $3 trillion (which is how much MORE national debt will accrue this year alone) because of the sheer staggering amount of irresponsible deficit-spending the federal government will almost certainly commit this year, including the already-announced eye-popping $1.84 trillion in budget deficits and Another Freaking Trillion (AFT) or so in "surprise!" emergency supplemental appropriations as the year goes along, as is Congress's habit, altogether an insane amount of new money that guarantees ruinous inflation in consumer prices, which is the outward manifestation of the purchasing power of the dollar going down due to unprecedented creations of more and more money diluting the money stock, a devastating process which leads to social upheavals, a prospect which scares me so much that statistical analysis shows I usually pee in my pants in fear.

That is why I usually wear an adult-sized diaper when reading economics news, a habit I suggest that you get into, too, if you are going to keep up with the economics stuff, because you are going to get some nasty shocks, such as Bonner saying that national debt exceeding GDP in 5 years is actually optimistic, and that his "guess is that it will reach that level even sooner" which is one of those dense oracular announcements that could mean anything, such as "We're all freaking doomed because the <snip>ed GDP may go down by a lousy 20%, making existing federal debt equal 100% of the economy Right Freaking There (RFT)!"

Or he could mean that "We're all freaking doomed because the <snip>ed economy will remain at a standstill, at best, while the debt grows like a cancer, resulting in a debt-to-GDP exceeding 100%."

Either way, the news is bad, except for those who have been buying gold, silver and oil, and for them the news will be good! Whee! This investing stuff is easy!"

Richard Daughty is general partner and COO for <snip>, serving the financial and medical communities, and the editor of The Mogambo Guru economic newsletter - an avocational exercise to heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it.

(Republished with permission from The Daily Reckoning. Copyright 2009, The Daily Reckoning.)"

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/KF24Dj02.html

"Ron Paul: Obama’s ‘goal’ is economic collapse

Posts by David Edwards and Stephen Webster

Source The Raw Story

Published: June 23, 2009 Updated 2 days ago

"Ron Paul, the popular Republican Congressman from Texas, is ripping into the president and Congress for what he sees as their “goal” with round after round of stimulus: complete economic collapse.

“From their spending habits, an economic collapse seems to be the goal of Congress and this administration,” he said in his June 22, 2009, weekly address.

He added that Democrats who voted for the president’s war funding request, which gave an additional $106 billion to military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — among other, unrelated items — were actually voting in favor of the wars, not just authorization of the president’s agenda.

He called it an affront to everyone who believed a vote for Obama was a vote for a peace candidate.

The president’s insistence on including an additional $108 billion in asset exchange with the International Monetary Fund is merely “buying global oppression,” he said.

Paul added that, “this [bill sent] $660 million to Gaza, $555 million to Israel, $310 million to Egypt, $300 million to Jordan and $420 million to Mexico; and some $889 million will be sent to the United Nations for so-called peace keeping missions.”

In other words, the latest U.S. war funding was an “International bailout,” he said.

The legislation’s provisions for the IMF included 100 billion dollars for the New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB), a credit instrument providing the multilateral institution with additional resources to deal with exceptional risks to the stability of the international monetary system.

They also include an expansion of the nation’s special drawing rights by five billion SDRs, adding roughly eight billion dollars to the IMF’s financial firepower.

The 100 billion dollars for the NAB acts as a credit line for the IMF in case member countries need emergency loans that exceed the institution’s resources. As such, the money is not considered an immediate budget expense.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) had proposed to strip out the IMF funds, but his measure was defeated in May by a vote of 64-30.

“Not only does sending money to the IMF hurt citizens here, evidence shows that it even hurts those it pretends to help,” Paul said. “Along with IMF loans come IMF required policy changes called ’structural adjustment programs,’ which amount to forced Keynesianism. This is the very fantasy-infused economic model that brought our own country to its knees.”

This audio is from Congressman Ron Paul’s weekly address, released June 22, 2009. "

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/06/23/ron-paul-obamas-goal-is-economic-collapse/

• Strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis

"Tens of thousands of Chinese fight the police in Shishou

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/malcolmmoore/blog/2009/06/22/tens_of_thousands_of_chinese_fight_the_police_in_shishou

Three articles with live links.  First what they say they're trying to do which should have never been have happened in the first place had Lawrece (Larry) Summers not been in the middle of gutting the Glass-Steagall Act which Jarasan has mentioned several times in his blog.  Everyone has seen this on the news.

Second an in depth commentary by a well respected financial adviser who point by point refutes the current proposal.  Couple of his quotes are cited .... recommend reading the whole article.

Third is about Larry Summers a current White House Financial Advisor, architect of our current banking insolvency .... now in charge of "fixing" the problem.  Sure it's going to be great when he's done.    Or are we done ... for???

_____________________

"Eight reasons to dump Larry Summers

By Jerry MazzaOnline Journal Associate Editor

Apr 3, 2009, 00:26

onlinejournal.com

"I mentioned in my article Bankrupting the world that Tim Geithner was just the face, the voice, behind the PPPIP giveaway to America’s top commercial banks to restore what amounts to $200 trillion in their cumulative derivative debt. I can say today that it’s even more apparent that Larry Summers is the corrupt brain behind the give-away and should go.

First, Summers and his backers persuaded Obama they had the best way to solve the worst financial crisis in history, that is, hand the keys to the banking system to a gang of hedge fund thieves. Nevertheless, a number of “real” economists, like professor and noted author James Galbraith (son of FDR’s economic adviser John Galbraith), and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, warned that the bailout schemes would make things go from bad to worse.

They argued that to save the US banking system, it needed reorganization under bankruptcy protection, a view, as I mentioned, shared by Lyndon LaRouche as well. Additionally, Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker, who heads the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, reiterated even more resolutely in a speech in New York City that the current system had to be reorganized in a Glass-Steagall framework, no ifs, ands, or buts.

Apparently, Summer’s notorious ego blew and his penchant for job-losing got the better of him. He actually had the chutzpah to tell President Obama he wasn’t going to continue working in the same arena with Volcker. In the army, you get shot for that or spend a long time looking at brick walls. Yet the novice president, perhaps intimidated or brainwashed, feeling he needed Summers and Geithner to make things happen, quietly charged Volcker instead to head a tax-code review to close corporate loopholes, and streamline tax laws to generate revenue.

This was announced by OMB Director Peter Orszag, who said the review had a December 4 deadline, and the code, some 96 years old, needed simplifying to reduce tax evasion and what he termed “corporate welfare.” This is like being two touchdowns behind in the fourth quarter and you put your second-string quarterback in because the first one isn’t hacking it and is having a fit on the sidelines. Not good.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that as soon as Volcker butted heads with Summers, first over timing of regulatory reform, second, over the larger question of bringing back the Glass-Steagall Act, there would be major conflict. After all, Summers spent all of 1999 wrecking the act as Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, replacing it with his fellow free-marketer friends’ Gramm-Leach-Bileley Act. The latter killed the parts of The Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited commercial banks from getting into the mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations game.

The Gramm-Leach-Bileley Act also split supervision of banking conglomerates among a host of different government agencies, creating an oversight disaster. The Glass-Steagall Act would have allowed Congress to simply break down the US’s five largest banking conglomerates into their smaller components, and to determine which were solvent enough to continue, and which were too broke to live. So a lot was on the table. Yet, Obama, like a Manchurian Candidate gave the nod to Summers, not Volcker to proceed with “Summers plan.”

Second, consider Summers infamous comments at the World Bank. In December of 1999, Summers as Chief Economist for the World Bank wrote in a memo that bore his signature and was leaked to the press that though free-trade wouldn’t much benefit the environment in developing countries, there was a clear economic logic in dumping toxic waste in them. This gives you a sense of the man’s character, or lack of it.

Summers actually wrote, “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage countries is impeccable and we should face up to that . . . I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are also vastly under-polluted.” I wonder how that would have sat with President Obama’s late father who was Kenyan. It’s patronizing beyond insult. And if that’s how Summers calculates human value, we are in big trouble.

Third, back in 1998, Summers testified in Congress against regulating the derivatives market. He actually said we could trust Wall Street. “The parties to these kinds of contracts,” Summers pronounced, “are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies and most of which are already subject to basic safety and soundness regulation under existing banking and securities laws.” Is this our Wall Streeters he’s talking about? Bernie Madoff? Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein? AIG FC’s, Joseph Cassano? You’re kidding?

Summers ladled even more praise on over-the-counter derivatives, blocking all moves to regulate them right up through 2000. He waxed patriotic, calling them “an important component of the American capital markets and a powerful symbol of the kind of innovation and technology that has made the American financial system as strong as it is today.” And as strong as it is today, as I write, April Fool’s Day, 2009. Of course, after he retired from the Treasury, he took a high level management position at D.E. Shaw, a hedge fund famous for its omerta (Mafia for code of silence).

Fourth, Summers backed the awful Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, the flip-side of Glass-Steagall. The CFM ACT stopped the highly effective government regulatory agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC), from any oversight over trade of financial derivatives. As of 2000, they could not touch a one. So the door was wide open to disaster, again thanks to Summers.

Fifth, Summers ganged up with ex-Fed Chairman Greenspan and Enron’s corpse, “Kenny boy” Lay. This was during the California energy crisis of 2000 when the boyz beat up on then Governor Grey Davis, lecturing Davis that the reason for their energy crisis was excessive government regulation. Believe that? Summers even browbeat Davis into additional deregulation of California’s utilities and even relaxing California’s environmental standards in order to “reassure the markets.” Reassure them, that is, that they were going to make a bundle bankrupting California.

Sixth, Summers proclaimed in a New York Times Op-Ed “we’re all Friedmanites.” This was on the death of radical libertarian economist Milton Friedman, in which Summers confessed Friedman was “his hero,” “The Great Liberator,” and that “any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites,” adding that the old free-marketer made enormous contributions to monetary policy, and even greater contributions “in convincing people of the importance of allowing free markets to operate unencumbered.” That concept is in total contradiction to Obama’s platform of regulating markets to keep them safe and healthy for all concerned.

Seventh, economists and Democrats like Peter DeFazio (D.–Or.) stated President Obama was “ill-advised by Larry Summers.” In January 2009, as the administration tried to pass its stimulus bill, DeFazio, James Galbraith, Paul Krugman, and economist Joseph Stiglitz argued that more of the stimulus money should be spent on infrastructure projects. But Summers favored more tax cuts.

DeFazio said, “Larry Summers HATES infrastructure.” After all, what did infrastructure ever do for him, except get him to work, pump water and power into his home, and build the city he made his fortune in? So, if he hates infrastructure, he doesn’t want a consumer driven recovery. He thinks we need an investment and productivity driven recovery (read financial give-away to banks recovery) for this county. Good luck.

But this is the Summers who has the ear of President Obama who ran on the need to overhaul infrastructure and reregulate the nation’s financial and banking system. Who’s on first? I thought it was Obama, who wants to push through a major social agenda and be known as the president who built a cross-country, high-speed, maglev transportation system and also led the US out of the biggest economic crisis ever. You have to put your foot down, Mr. President.

Eighth, Summers fired a derivatives whistleblower at Harvard. After suffering Enron’s collapse, Iris Mack, a derivatives researcher, sought a quieter life. Mack joined Harvard Management Co., a privatized company which managed the university’s endowment fund in 2002. To her surprise, she found the Harvard endowment fund was not so staid. In fact, it was involved in the same speculative trading as her former employer, Enron. Worse, after she spoke up about it to Harvard President Larry Summers’ chief of staff, Marne Levine, she was fired four months later for raising the subject. No academic freedom in finance, I guess.

Mack eventually sued (and won out of court) saying she was “shocked at the inexperience of her co-workers,” some not even licensed securities dealers. “The group I was working for had no background whatsoever to be working on [complex derivatives trades],” she told the Harvard Crimson. Traders were also using discredited variants of Black-Scholes statistical modeling, now acknowledged as having been at the heart of the 1998 collapse of Long Term Capital Management.

Bottom line: “When the bottom fell out” in 2007, Harvard’s endowment went with it. Her former boss, Jeffrey Larson, lost $350 million of Harvard’s cash in a hedge fund he’d started in 2005. Overall, the endowment plunged 22 percent in four months, with a projected collapse of 30 percent for the year. Iris Mack adds, “I’m not trying to pretend I’m omniscient or anything, but a lot of people who were quantitative traders . . . we knew a lot of those models were just that: guestimates . . . I wasn’t crazy, I knew what I was talking about. But maybe if more and more people had spoken up, the economy wouldn’t be the way it is now.” How prescient!

And so it goes. There is also the terrible story about what Summers did to the Russian economy in 1999, but let’s save that for another day and hope he doesn’t do it to America in 2009. If you’re not convinced this guy’s not only a free-market loose-cannon, dangerous to and heedless of anyone around him, read as well Debra Hanania-Freeman’s President Obama Must Dump Summers To Save His Presidency at LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review. Summers should not be advising Obama. Summers should be looking for new employment. It’s that simple. Sack him, President Obama. And give America, yourself and your vision a chance to survive."

"US Banks Operating Without Reserve Requirements

One of the best articles I've ever read.  If the gold standard for currency is so bad then why are so many of the other world governments backing up their currency with gold?  At the current rate of inflation, world devaluation of our fiat money (Money that the government declares to be legal tender although it cannot be converted into standard specie) our US$ will be cheaper to use than toilet paper.

_______

http://www.thetreeofliberty.com/vb/showthread.php?t=65621