ANALYSIS-US oil firms seek drilling access, but exports soar
07.03.08, 2:40 PM ET

United States - By Tom DoggettWASHINGTON3 (Reuters) - While the U.S. oil industry want access to more federal lands to help reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, American-based companies are shipping record amounts of gasoline and diesel fuel to other countries.

A record 1.6 million barrels a day in U.S. refined petroleum products were exported during the first four months of this year, up 33 percent from 1.2 million barrels a day over the same period in 2007. Shipments this February topped 1.8 million barrels a day for the first time during any month, according to final numbers from the Energy Department.

The surge in exports appears to contradict the pleas from the U.S. oil industry and the Bush administration for Congress to open more offshore waters and Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

"We can help alleviate shortages by drilling for oil and gas in our own country," President Bush told reporters this week. "We have got the opportunity to find more crude oil here at home."

"As a nation, we can have more control over our energy destiny by supplying more of the oil and natural gas we'll be consuming from resources here at home," Red Cavaney, president of the American Petroleum (otcbb: AMPE.OB - news - people ) Institute, said in a letter last week to U.S. lawmakers.

But environmentalists and other opponents to expanding drilling areas could seize on the record exports to argue Congress should not open more acres if U.S. refineries are churning crude oil into petroleum products that are sent out of the American market.

"It doesn't look good to say: 'We need more oil.' But then export the refined products that you're getting. It doesn't seem to be consistent," said Jim Presswood, energy lobbyist for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

But many energy experts say oil and petroleum products are traded globally, and it may make economic sense to export gasoline refined along the U.S. Gulf Coast to Latin America and import European-refined gasoline to U.S. East Coast markets.

"The fact is that the (United States) participates in global markets for both crude and refined products, and there are any number of variables that impact supply and prices in those markets," said Bill Holbrook, spokesman for the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association.

The 1.6 million barrels a day in record petroleum exports represented 9 percent of total U.S. refining capacity of 17.6 million barrels a day.

However, with refiners operating at 85 percent of capacity during the January-April period, the shipments represented a much a larger share of total U.S. oil products produced.

The exports were also equal to half the 3.2 million barrels of gasoline, diesel fuel and other petroleum products the United States imported each day over the 4-month period.

The biggest share of U.S. oil products exported went to Mexico, Canada, Chile, Singapore and Brazil.

U.S. consumers are paying record prices for gasoline and diesel fuel, which the Bush administration blames in part on tight supplies.

While the administration argues that more supplies would help to bring down prices, U.S exports of diesel fuel in April averaged 387,000 barrels per day, up almost seven-fold from 59,000 barrels a day in the same month a year earlier.

U.S. gasoline shipments in April averaged 202,000 barrels a day, the most for the month since 1945, when America was sending fuel overseas to ease supply shortages in other countries during World War II. Gasoline exports in April 2007 were almost half at 116,000 barrels per day.

Residual fuel exports in April were 377,000 barrels per day, the fourth highest level for any month, and up 10 percent from 344,000 barrels per day a year earlier.

John Felmy, the chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute, said a portion of the oil products exported, especially diesel, was fuel that did not meet U.S. clean air requirements and therefore could not be sold in America. "You may have some that you're not able to use," he said.

Also, while U.S. gasoline demand is down due to high prices and a weak American economy, there is "strong economic growth outside the United States" where fuel is often subsidized and demand is high, said John Cook, director of EIA's Petroleum Division.

However, both the EIA and API admitted they did not know why daily U.S. gasoline exports to Canada skyrocketed to 41,000 barrels in January-April this year from 9,000 barrels in 2007.

The EIA said more U.S. diesel is going to Latin American to fuel power plants because of a shortage of natural gas in the region, and China has switched to diesel from coal to run some of its generating facilities in order to reduce smog ahead of the summer Olympics next month in Beijing. (Editing by Christian Wiessner)

Copyright 2008 Reuters, Click for Restriction

As Klein explains in Shock Doctrine, 'disaster capitalism' is an economic model that exploits conditions of fear and mayhem resulting from multiple forms of crises: natural disasters (Katrina, Sri Lanka), terrorist attacks (9-11), political coups (Chile 1973), and warfare (Iraq). However, profit isn't the only motive. This form of slash and burn economics is perpetrated upon people who are reeling from shock, unable to form a plan of survival or resistance, and permanently disenfranchises them.

What are the latest abuses? In Disaster Capitalism: State of Extortion (The Nation, 7-1-08), Klein groups her examples under specific 'disasters' illustrating how the 'shock doctrine' strategy works: how the Iraq War makes it possible for Big Oil to steal the country's only natural resource; how the oil shortage is being used to undermine environmental policies against arctic drilling; and how rising food prices will allow the introduction of genetically modified foods into the mainstream marketplace.

Iraq Disaster: We Broke It, We (Just) Bought It
Oil Price Shock: Give Us the Arctic or Never Drive Again
Food Price Shock: Genetic Modification or Starvation

So much for 'disaster capitalism' and Milton Friedman's Chicago School, which I vulgarly refer to as the 'Scared/Scarcity/Screwed' School. By way of persuasion:

BACKGROUND -

The Shock Doctrine Short Film
A Film by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein, directed by Jonás Cuarón.

Fast Facts, Shocks and their Aftermath from the Shock Doctrine Short Film

Chile, 1973
50,000 tortured
80,000 imprisoned
Public spending cut by 50%
Incomes for the rich up 83%
45% of population in poverty

Wars – Falklands War, 1982
910 people die
Thatcher's popularity doubles
She privatizes gas, steel, airlines, telephones
She declares war on unions
Thousands are injured
Unemployment triples
Number of poor increases by 100%

Massacres
China 1989 – hundreds killed
Thousands jailed and tortured
China becomes sweatshop to the world
China embraces "free market" capitalism
Factory wages: $1/day

Russia, 1993
Yeltsin attacks parliament
Hundreds killed
Parliament burned
Opposition arrested
72 million impoverished
17 new billionaires created

Terrorist Attacks – New York, 2001
Attacks launch "War on Terror." It is privatized.
US spy agencies outsource 70% of their budgets
Pentagon increases budget for contractors by $137 billion/year
Department of Homeland Security spends $130 billion on private contractors

Invasions – Iraq, 2003
The most privatized war in modern history
US decrees 200 state companies will be privatized
Hundreds of thousands killed
4 million displaced

Natural Disasters – Sri Lanka, 2004
35,000 dead
Coastline handed over to hotels and industry
Nearly 1 million displaced
Fishing people forbidden to rebuild homes by the sea

Makes you kind of sick, doesn't it?

READ IT: Disaster Capitalism: State of Extortion by Naomi Klein, The Nation, 7-1-08

Cancer New Moon:
Family Ties
by Simone Butler

Why does a specific animal--or that certain person--instantly feel like family? Cancer rules family connections. And, with the Sun and Venus traveling through that nurturing sign during the first half of July, all of our hearts are more open than usual. READ IT

Cancer New Moon Meditation:
Honoring Earth's Ancestral Energies
by Pythia Peay

Contemplate the mystery of your physical incarnation on this particular planet in the universe. Just as you traced your family heritage, so, too, unearth your spiritual inheritance...As the Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat asks, "Can you remember your face before you were born?" READ IT

(Thanks to the ladies at MoonCircles.com)

Check out: New Moon Ritual, by Maria Kay Simms

-----------

Election Astrology

One of the most interesting things about astrology is that it can be used as a tool to predict all kinds of events, based on the planetary energies, even election outcomes. (Ronald Reagan was quite serious about astrology, if you can recall that flap, even though it was downplayed in the media.) Since I've only got a rudimentary sense of how to 'read' the signs, I go to the experts.

One fantastic blog I'd recommend is Jude Cowell's Stars Over Washington. Her June 28th post, The crystal ball of Underdog McCain, is most enlightening. She beats John McCain up pretty well, which I enjoyed, but if you're a McCain supporter, don't read it. (Then again, why are you reading THIS? *Cheek*)

Other astrologers are predicting high weirdness surrounding this year's elections.

SEE: The Cosmically Stressed Election of 2008 by Barry C. Orr

In 2008, astrologers are again energetically analyzing the astrological charts of the presumptive candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama. A big impediment has been the lack of reliable birth times for all of the candidates, but there is a bigger problem. This year, something doesn't seem right. No one feels good about the astrological conditions on election day, nor the conditions on inauguration day. There is a shadow looming over the charts. READ IT

Orr highlights an emerging popular consensus that there are three possible outcomes: 1) suspended elections 2) sudden candidacy changes or 3) grand scale election fraud.

Personally, I already think #1 might happen. I'm not sure about #2, and pray not! As for #3, on some level, it's a given, which is truly heartbreaking as we Americans are poised to celebrate our country's birthday. This truly seems to be 'the worst of times', to employ a well-worn Dickensian phrase. How 'worst'? View clips.

Mark Crispin Miller - Endgame: Bush & Cheney's desperate measures PT. 1

Mark Crispin Miller - Endgame: Bush & Cheney's desperate measures PT. 2

Produced by Good Films Inc. Thx to newsfromunderground

Relevant links:

BushCo hides its doomsday plans from Congress (Video Link to Rep. Peter DeFazio)
Travel Advisory, by Scott Horton (Brilliant, this had to be said!)

Well, friends, I leave you with a beloved Woody Guthrie song. It's my personal 'national anthem' and means more to me than the one we stand and salute the flag to.  Tears stream down every time I hear it.  I've included the lyrics below the screen, so, stand up, be proud, and sing it loud. When you get to that last verse, remember the hungry, tired, and poor of America, then think hard on what you can do for them.

A blessed 4th of July to you and yours!
Morgan Wolf

Woody Guthrie - THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND

Chorus:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me

I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me

When the sun comes shining and I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting
This land was made for you and me

Chorus

As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin'
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

Chorus (2x)

©1956 (renewed 1984), 1958 (renewed 1986) and 1970 TRO-Ludlow Music, Inc. (BMI)

Happy Birthday America!

What I've been reading/talking/pissed off/passionate about this week:

The crimes of the rich!
This Land Is Their Land
By Barbara Ehrenreich

GOPs are going down!
Ugly: The Future of the Republican Party
By David Michael Green (last two lines are priceless)

Habeas corpus is baaaaack!
Supreme Court to Bush: You’re Not Above The Law
By James Ross (Salon, reprinted in Common Dreams)

A 'false flag' before the November Elections?
State of Emergency: The US in the Final Six Months of the George W. Bush Administration
By Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg

Why's nobody talking about Dennis Kucinich?
Gore Vidal’s Article of Impeachment
By Gore Vidal (One of my favorite writers.)

Dennis Kucinich Says He's Not Giving Up on Impeachment: Morality and the Law Require It
A BuzzFlash Exclusive

Tile :Violent Femmes - I'm Nothing
This is lyrics from www.lyrics007.com
I-M-N-O-T-H-I-N
I-M-N-O-T-H-I-N
I'm nothing'
I'm nothin'
Are you a republican or a democrat
A liberal fascist full of crap
I'm nothin'
I'm nothin'
Somebody somewhere might be something
But everybody everywhere
Knows that I'm nothin
Politics and dirty tricks
I got no time for stones and sticks
Politics and dirty tricks
I got no time I'm chasing chicks
I'm nothin'
I'm nothin'
Somebody somewhere might be something
But everybody everywhere
Knows that I'm nothing
I'm nothing but I'm not proud
'Cause being nothing it's not allowed
Are you a gay or are you straight
Do you believe in love
Or do you believe in hate
I'm nothin'
I'm nothin'
Somebody somewhere said he was something
But to everybody everywhere
I'm saying I'm nothing
I'm nothing. I'm like a cloud
I'm free to be alone in a crowd
What's your reality. It's not real to me
What's your anomaly. It is my destiny
I-M-N-O-T-H-I-N
I-M-N-O-T-H-I-N
I'm nothin'
Nothin'
Nothin'
I'm nothing now and I'll be nothing when
This nothing world has it's nothing end

By Jason Leopold

Sen. John McCain says he opposes the $307 billion farm bill because it would dole out wasteful subsidies, but his chief economic adviser Phil Gramm also wants to stop its proposed regulation of energy futures trading, a market that was famously abused when Enron Corp. manipulated California’s electricity prices in 2001.

Clearing the way for that California price gouging, Gramm, as a powerful Texas senator in 2000, slipped an Enron-backed provision into the Commodities Futures Modernization Act that exempted from regulation energy trading on electronic platforms.

Then, over the next year, Enron – with Gramm’s wife Wendy serving on its board of directors – worked to create false electricity shortages in California, bilking consumers out of an estimated $40 billion.

Gramm left the Senate in 2002 but now has emerged as what Fortune magazine calls “McCain’s econ brain,” not only filling the Arizona senator’s acknowledged void on economic expertise (“I don’t know as much about the economy as I should”) but recognized as one of McCain’s closest friends in politics. The two men talk daily.

A McCain aide told me that the Arizona senator opposes the farm bill because it “rewards lobbyists” by granting rich farmers lucrative subsidies, although he would support “a reasonable level of assistance and risk management to farmers when they need America's help.”

But the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee also opposes the farm bill because Gramm advised McCain that he should resist its regulatory language on the energy futures market.

Democrats have dubbed that gap in energy futures regulation the “Enron loophole,” but it played a part, too, in the more recent attempt by the Amaranth Advisers hedge fund to corner the national gas market by shifting trades to the unregulated “dark markets” of the Intercontinental Exchange.

The “Enron loophole” also has become part of the debate over the soaring price of oil. Last week, a study sponsored by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, concluded that speculative futures markets were partly to blame for the surge in oil prices that have pushed gas at the pump toward $4 a gallon.

At a May 15 news conference, Levin said the skyrocketing price of oil is “not the result of supply and demand. Speculators have taken over most of the futures market."

However, the 673-page farm bill, containing the regulatory provisions on electronic energy trading, still faces obstacles amid overall concerns about the bill’s largesse to farmers at a time of rising food prices.

President George W. Bush has vowed to veto the bill, although it cleared the House and Senate by margins wide enough for an override, assuming Republicans don’t rally behind Bush and McCain, their current and future standard bearers.

Gramm and Enron

The battle over the “Enron loophole” also could draw attention to McCain’s dependence on Gramm as his chief economic adviser and Gramm’s key role in passing legislation that let Enron trade commodities on electronic platforms without federal oversight.

In 2000, with the Republicans in charge of Congress and Gramm chairing the Senate Banking Committee, the exemption on electronic trading was approved without a Senate hearing.

Internal Enron documents, which were released in 2002, revealed that the Houston-based company helped write the legislation, which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in December 2000.

Freed from regulatory interference, Enron then used manipulative trading practices to game the California electricity market and drive up electricity prices across the state.

While California consumers were getting fleeced, the new Bush administration shielded Enron from early accusations of market manipulation. President Bush personally joined the fight against imposing caps on the soaring price of electricity, buying additional time for Enron although the company’s house of cards collapsed anyway in fall 2001. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Enron Lies.”]

In 2006, the “Enron loophole” allowed Amaranth Advisers hedge fund to shift its trades from the regulated New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) to the unregulated Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in Atlanta.

That let Amaranth corner the natural gas market, betting that futures prices would rise. The hedge fund lost about $6 billion and imploded as natural gas prices fell to a two-year low in September 2006.

Last July, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged that Amaranth manipulated prices paid in the physical natural gas markets. FERC has proposed $291 million in penalties and the forfeiture of “unjust profits.”

“Unregulated markets are known as ‘dark markets’ because there is very little oversight of the trades,” said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Michigan, chairman of the subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, during a hearing on energy speculation last December.

By trading on the “dark” ICE market, traders can avoid the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s rules which are in place to prevent price distortions or supply squeezes.

Stupak said trading volumes on ICE “have skyrocketed in the past three years and are now as large or even larger in some months, than the volumes traded on the regulated futures market.”

The lack of oversight “makes it difficult for regulators to detect excessively large positions which could lead to price manipulation,” Stupak said.

Advising McCain

Gramm, who is now a vice chairman of financial services company UBS, began advising McCain in 2005 when the Arizona senator indicated he planned to run for President.

Since then, McCain has adopted much of Gramm’s anti-tax, anti-regulatory agenda. Most strikingly, McCain shifted to support Bush’s tax cuts, which McCain had voted against in 2001 and 2003. He now vows that, if elected President, he would make them permanent.

Yet Gramm’s influence over McCain’s economic agenda – and the checkered political-business history of Gramm and his wife Wendy – have largely escaped media scrutiny.

Gramm received more than $34,000 in campaign contributions from Enron and served as one of the company’s key legislative allies in Washington, including his help in 2000 removing federal oversight from energy trades on electronic platforms.

At the height of the Enron scandal in January 2002, Gramm’s press secretary Larry Neal told The New York Times that Gramm did not “recall a conversation” he apparently had with Enron’s chairman Ken Lay in 2000 to discuss that Enron legislative priority.

An internal Enron e-mail dated Aug. 10, 2000, under the subject “CFTC Reauthorization” – sent by Enron’s top lobbyist Richard Shapiro to Steve Kean, Enron’s executive vice president – said the company needed to get Lay on the phone with Gramm so the bill could be passed.

“The bill is not moving quickly in the Senate due to Senator Phil Gramm's desire to see significant changes made to the legislation (not directly related to our energy language),” Shapiro said.

“Last week at the [2000] Republican Convention, I asked the Senator about the bill and he said they were working on it, but much needs to be changed for his support. More telling perhaps, were Wendy Gramm's comments that she would rather the current bill die if a better bill can be passed next year.

“What this means is that we must, at the least, remove Senator Gramm's opposition to the bill to move the process and more importantly seek to gain his support of the legislation.”

Shapiro added: “However, with less than 20 or so legislative days left, we need Senator Gramm to engage.

“A call from Ken Lay in the next two weeks to Senator Gramm could be an impetus for Gramm to move his staff to resolve the differences. Gramm needs to fully understand how helpful the bill is to Enron.

“Let me know your thoughts on this approach. I am prepared to assist in coordinating the call and drafting the talking points for a Ken Lay/Sen. Gramm call.”

Several other internal Enron e-mails briefed company staffers on the status of Gramm’s position and Enron’s lobbying of the senator. Gramm finally removed a “hold” on the bill in December 2000, reintroduced the bill under a different number, and forced a vote on it without floor debate.

It was then attached to an appropriations bill that was signed by President Clinton on Dec. 21, 2000.

California Crisis

Less than a month later, California began to experience rolling blackouts due to artificial electricity shortages which, according to documents later released by federal energy regulators, were the result of manipulative trading practices employed by Enron.

The California crisis centered on Enron’s energy trades through a new platform called EnronOnline, which had been freed from regulatory oversight by the legislation pushed by Gramm.

In April 2002, Gramm blocked an amendment by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, that would have closed the loophole that Gramm had helped open.

Gramm’s wife, Wendy, also had played a role in the anti-regulatory policies that contributed to the Enron scandal.

On Jan. 14, 1993, in the final days of the first Bush administration, Wendy Gramm – as chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – pushed through a key regulatory exemption removing energy derivatives contracts and interest-rate swaps from federal oversight.

That was a major financial boon to Enron, where Wendy Gramm landed five weeks later as a member of the board of directors. She also became a member of the audit committee that signed off on another one of Enron’s fraudulent schemes, partnerships that hid the company’s growing debt.

Even after Enron had collapsed in fall 2001, Sen. Gramm continued to resist congressional efforts at tightening up the rules.

In 2002, despite the accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom and other major companies, Sen. Gramm objected to the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform bill designed to hold executives accountable for inaccuracies in financial reports.

Now, the Gramm family’s anti-regulatory agenda is returning via McCain’s presidential campaign.

As Fortune’s editor-at-large Shawn Tully wrote, “economic conservatives should take heart. McCain’s chief economic adviser – and perhaps his closest political friend – is the ultimate pure play in free market faith, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. … Most of [McCain’s] current positions are vintage Gramm indeed.” [Fortune, Feb. 19. 2008]

The first test of McCain’s commitment to Gramm’s anti-regulatory purity may come in the looming battle over the “Enron loophole” that the farm bill seeks to close.

Jason Leopold has launched a new Web site, The Public Record, at www.pubrecord.org

To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.

In stark contrast with the prevailing Western image of pre-invasion Tibet as a Shangri-La of peace and harmony, old Tibet was in reality a feudal tyranny in which the lamas and secular lords ruled despotically over a population of terrorized slaves and serfs. The reports of early travellers to the kingdom evoke images reminiscent of medieval Europe. An English visitor in 1895 wrote of the “intolerable tyranny of monks.” Another compatriot observed a decade later that “the great landowners and the priests… exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal.” As was the fate of heretics in the Middle Ages, torture was commonplace for Tibetans who fell foul of the religious authorities. One unfortunate serf, for example, had his eyes gouged out for stealing two sheep belonging to a monastery.

As in pre-Enlightenment Europe, religion in feudal Tibet served to justify the political and economic order. “The theocracy’s religious teachings buttressed its class order,” writes Michael Parenti in “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth.” As Parenti explains, “The poor and afflicted were taught that they had brought their troubles upon themselves because of their wicked ways in previous lives. Hence they had to accept the misery of their present existence as a karmic atonement and in anticipation that their lot would improve in their next lifetime.” The Dalai Lama appears to have no reservations about this theological apology for inequality. “It is a good thing to be rich,” he once said. “Those are the fruits for deserving actions, the proof that they have been generous in the past.” And the poor, he advised, should meekly accept their lot: “There is no good reason to become bitter and rebel against those who have property and fortune... It is better to develop a positive attitude.”

For many lowly Tibetans, the Chinese intervention must have seemed like a “liberation” from their feudal oppression. Not surprisingly, few of them joined the CIA-backed resistance in the 1950s, thereby ensuring its defeat by the Communists. Those who did resist the Chinese were primarily those with most to lose under communism - the landowning elites. Accordingly, many of those trained by the CIA as commandos were the chiefs of aristocratic clans or the sons of chiefs. The lamas, including two of the Dalai Lama’s brothers, also collaborated closely with U.S. intelligence efforts to subvert the Chinese. His eldest-brother, Thubtan Norbu, was active in a CIA-financed front, the American Society for a Free Asia, which promoted Tibetan resistance, while his second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, led a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose members were parachuted back into Tibet.

The Dalai Lama’s own connections with U.S. intelligence are also a matter of historical record. His flight from Tibet in 1959 - an event which has been mythologized as a divine exodus - was greatly facilitated by the CIA, although he denies receiving any assistance. From the late 1950s until 1974, the Tibetan spiritual leader received $186,000 a year out of the $1.7 million annual payments the Tibetan exile community was secretly getting from the CIA, as revealed by U.S. State Department documents released in 1998. The Dalai Lama’s organization subsequently admitted it received funding from the CIA to send armed exiles back into Tibet, but refused to say whether the Dalai Lama or his brothers worked for the agency.

Moreover, the Dalai Lama’s relationship with covert operations seems to be ongoing. The National Endowment for Democracy, which now openly funds many of the causes once covertly sponsored by the CIA, continues to support the unspecified “democracy activities” of Tibetan exiles. And George Soros, the putative progressive philanthropist whose billions are believed to have bankrolled the various so-called “colour revolutions” in the former Soviet Union, also donates money to the Dalai Lama.

Whatever about the extent of the Dalai Lama’s intelligence ties, there are even more disturbing links with Nazis. One of them, Heinrich Harrer, has been immortalised - and some would say sanitized - by Brad Pitt’s depiction of the SS tutor to the young god-king in Seven Years in Tibet. The other, Dr. Bruno Beger, is an even more controversial associate. On the eve of the Second World War, the Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, commissioned an anthropological expedition to Tibet, apparently in the belief that it would find evidence there of an “Aryan root race” among the Tibetan nobility. A few years after his return from the Himalayas, Beger continued his research in Auschwitz, where he selected concentration camp prisoners for tests designed to prove the superiority of the German people. One hundred and fifteen people, mostly Jewish, were gassed to facilitate Beger’s “scientific” research.

One might perhaps explain away the Dalai Lama’s friendship with two former SS officers, one a convicted war criminal, as solely a consequence of their knowledge of pre-occupation Tibet. That is, if the Tibetan leader didn’t have quite a few other troubling associates on the far-right. Indeed, the first Westerner to greet him as he crossed the border into India in 1959 was none other than Miguel Serrano, the chief ideologue of “esoteric Hitlerism.” In his mystical neo-Nazi novels, the former Chilean diplomat expounds the bizarre thesis that Hitler is the “last avatar,” supposedly waiting underground in Antarctica before his imminent return to wage an apocalyptic battle by the forces of light - the Aryans - against the forces of darkness who currently rule the world - the Jews. Serrano, while head of the Chilean National Socialist Party, also greeted the Dalai Lama, whom he claims is his “friend,” on his arrival in Chile. The Nobel Peace Prize winner has apparently never distanced himself from Serrano’s racist ideology. On the contrary, he subsequently called for Serrano’s erstwhile boss, the right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, to be spared a trial for his role in the torture and disappearance of thousands of Chileans.

On top of his right-wing Chilean connections, the Tibetan spiritual leader has discomfiting ties to another devotee of Hitler and apocalyptic terror - the Japanese cult leader, Shoko Asahara. Like Serrano, Asahara believes that Hitler will soon return with an escort of UFOs as a prelude to Armageddon. On a number of occasions, the Dalai Lama met Asahara, who considers himself the Tibetan’s pupil and an adherent of Tibetan Buddhism. Indeed, Asahara has amply expressed his gratitude to his alleged spiritual mentor by donating at least $1.7 million to the Tibetan exiles. Naturally, representatives of the Dalai Lama have disavowed any responsibility for Asahara’s crimes. Be that as it may, even after Asahara’s Aum Shinrikyo followers carried out the sarin nerve gas attack in the Tokyo underground in 1995, killing 12 and injuring thousands, the Dalai Lama still described the doomsday guru as his “friend, although not necessarily a perfect one.”

Apart from Tibet, the Dalai Lama is no stranger to subversion - some would call it terrorism - in other parts of China. Although it has by far the highest profile in the West, Tibet is not the only separatist headache troubling the Chinese. Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia also have movements for secesssion from the People’s Republic of China. Rich in natural resources, the three regions combined make up roughly half of the territory currently ruled from Beijing. Not surprisingly, Western countries - particularly the United States and Germany - have taken quite an interest in the independence struggles of ethnic groups such as the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Formerly employed by the Munich-based CIA-front Radio Liberty, Erkin Alptekin is a leading activist in the movement to establish East Turkestan, as the Uighurs consider themselves ethnic Turks. He is also a member of the board of the Dalai Lama Foundation. A close associate of the exiled Tibetan leader, Alptekin helped found the Allied Committee of the Peoples of Eastern Turkestan, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia in 1985. The Dalai Lama supports the ethnic separatist aims of the Committee, and sent this message to an international conference they organized in 1998: "Geography, history and currently Chinese occupation is connecting our three peoples. I remain optimistic that the true aspirations of the peoples of East Turkestan, Inner Mongolia and Tibet will be fulfilled in a not too distant future."

The Chinese are not the only ones worried by the Dalai Lama’s connections with separatists. His subversive activities have not escaped attention in his country of exile either, which has its own problems with domestic terrorism, particularly in Kashmir. “India should have reasons to be concerned over the Dalai Lama's hobnobbing with the pan-Islamic elements in Xinjiang,” B. Raman, the director of an intelligence/national security think-tank, wrote in a report to the Indian government. The 2002 report, “US and Terrorism in Xinjiang,” ominously noted that “some Uighurs who were trained by al-Qaeda have returned to China.”

When it comes to blaming religion for violent conflicts, Buddhism tends to get a lot better press than most other faiths, especially Islam. But the concept of a holy war is not alien to Tibbetan Buddhism either. In The Shadow of the Dalai Lama, two former publishers and close associates of the Dalai Lama, Victor and Victoria Trimondi, reveal a belligerent side to the Eastern faith rarely acknowledged in the West: “The Shambhala myth contains an apocalyptic vision borne by a “fascistoid” warrior ethos, in which the faithful (the Buddhists) brutally annihilate all non-believers (above all the Moslems).” According to the Trimondis, this dark side of Tibetan Buddhism is not merely a peripheral aspect of the religion headed by the Dalai Lama. “Lamaist culture,” they claim, “is in its essence undemocratic, fundamentalist, and totalitarian, and sees nothing bad in this — in contrast, it holds itself to be the best system of all.”

With the Olympics being hosted by Beijing this summer, there is no better time to highlight the genuine human rights abuses by the Chinese government in Tibet. But those who advocate the Tibetan cause should be aware that this issue, like most other conflicts around the world, is not simply a struggle of Tibetan good versus Chinese evil. Whenever Western governments express an interest in human rights abroad, there is usually something in it for them - oil, uranium, gold, etc. And those who have been canonized by the media are not always as innocent as they seem.

Born in 1920 in Japanese-occupied Korea, Sun Myung Moon has long been associated with the Japanese right-wing. In the early 1960s, Moon was introduced to alleged war criminals, yakuza bosses, and LDP power brokers Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa by Kim Jong Pil, the founder of the Korean CIA (KCIA), and one of Moon’s earliest backers. It was an auspicious meeting for Moon. With Sasakawa’s blessing, 50 leaders of an ultra-nationalist Buddhist sect later converted to the Unification Church.

But what attracted spooks and gangsters to Moon’s cult? The answer to that question is to be found in the worldwide post-war covert alliances forged by U.S. intelligence with right-wing underworld figures, such as Kodama and Sasakawa, ostensibly to oppose the threat of communism. In the name of fighting the Cold War, all kinds of criminal activity were tacitly tolerated, if not actively encouraged. The scourge of the Japanese left, Kodama, for example, was not only an important CIA asset but was believed to have been Asia’s leading drug trafficker. Moon, as we shall see, has played an invaluable role in this web’s clandestine activities.

Although nominally Korean, there seems to be a significant Japanese aspect to Moon’s network. Dave Emory, an American antifascist researcher and radio presenter, believes that "the Moon organization constitutes an extension of the Japanese patriotic societies” which helped bring the militarists to power in Japan. In an interview with Emory, Daniel Junas, the author of a suppressed book on Moon’s Japanese connections, Moon Rising, agreed with this speculation, pointing out the striking similarities in the organisational structure of both groups. Even more controversially, Junas suspects that the Japanese military industry may have helped fund the remarkable rise of Moon. In any event, Moon’s anti-communist alliance with right-wing Japanese elements soon extended throughout East Asia and beyond.

In 1966, the Asian People’s anti-Communist League, founded by the pro-American client governments of South Korea and Taiwan, expanded into the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Moon was one of the five key Asian leaders who made WACL possible, according to Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson’s Inside the League. The others were Kodama, Sasakawa, Taiwanese dictator Chiang Kai-shek and South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee. The Andersons believe that U.S. covert funding was behind WACL, which brought together the conservative political overworld with the underworld of “Nazi collaborators, Japanese war criminals, Latin death squad leaders, disciples of Moon's Unification Church, and fugitive Italian terrorists."

This unholy alliance was especially active in Latin America, where the desire of the poor for social change was viewed anxiously by the right. To avert the spectre of communism, the reactionaries took preemptive action. From the mid-1960s on, Brazilians, Chileans, Uruguayans and Argentinians all saw their democratically elected governments replaced by more corporate-friendly military regimes, backed by native elites and Washington.

In 1980, the leftist government of Bolivia too was overthrown, with the help of agents of the Argentinian military junta and Bolivia’s druglords. The latter were so central to the coup - and were arguably its prime beneficiaries - that it became known as the Cocaine Coup. The Moon network also played a pivotal role. Most of the coup-plotters were representatives of WACL, or members of CAUSA, another of Moon’s anti-communist organizations. A Moon representative helped finance preparations for the coup. And Moon’s right-hand man and former KCIA officer, Bo Hi Pak, was one of the first to visit La Paz to congratulate the new narco-regime, whose Interior Minister promised to “flood America's borders with cocaine.” A promise that was kept, according to former DEA officer and author of The Big White Lie, Michael Levine. “This was the beginning of the cocaine and crack ‘plague,’” he writes, adding that “the whole thing was CIA-inspired and supported.”

At the same time as the Soviet threat was receding, the Reagan-Bush administration began to exploit the threat of narcoterrorism to justify continued interventions against leftist regimes in Latin America. But in its covert war against the Sandanista government in Nicaragua, it was not America’s enemies but its allies who were the major drug traffickers and terrorists. “The Argentinians were mounting a continental WACL strategy of right-wing hegemony based on drug alliances,” write Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall in Cocaine Politics. “In 1980, as part of this continental strategy, WACL played a key role in forming the initial core Contra group.” Before long, the Learjets that brought arms to sustain the Contras’ campaign of terror were loaded with cocaine for their return flights to the United States.

But if the American public learned the sordid truth about the Contras lauded by the Reagan administration as “freedom fighters,” it could have been detrimental to the operation. Moon, however, provided an effective firewall. His organization used its influence in Washington to intimidate or discredit the few government officials and journalists who dared to investigate this component of the Iran-Contra scandal.

Central to Moon’s disinformation effort was The Washington Times newspaper which he bought in 1982. Little more than a right-wing propaganda organ, the Times once carried front-page editorials soliciting donations for a Freedom Fund to support the Contras. More recently, the paper has also been of great service to neoconservative hawks with its gung-ho support for the “war on terror” - the latest pretext for massive military spending and foreign interventions.

Swaying public opinion to the right hasn’t been cheap though. It’s estimated that Moon has pumped up to $3 billion into the Times over the past 25 years, prompting curiosity about his seemingly bottomless pool of cash.

Moon’s suspect cash has lavishly sponsored many on the right, but none more so than the Bush family. Former CIA director George H.W. Bush, and his wife, Barbara, have spoken at numerous Moon events around the world, earning huge speaking fees. At the launch of Moon’s South American newspaper, Tiempos del Mundo, Bush’s speech praised Moon as “the man with the vision,” for which he’s said to have been paid as much as $500,000. Bush’s shilling for Moon over the years is reckoned to have earned him up to $10 million, as well as staunch support for both his and his son’s presidencies. Neither Bush seem perturbed, however, by the anti-American and anti-democratic stance of Moon, whose stated goals include the "subjugation of the American government and population."

Such largesse to those in power may explain why Moon appears to enjoy protection from federal investigation in recent years. Moon’s shady activities haven’t always evaded scrutiny, however. In the 1970s, a U.S. Congressional investigation found that Moon’s organisation was involved in the KCIA influence-peddling operation which became known as Koreagate. As part of a conspiracy to influence Congress, the media, and academia, it seems that Japanese followers of Moon were used to smuggle cash into the country. “The Japanese had no trouble bringing the cash into the United States; they would tell Customs agents that they were in America to gamble at Atlantic City,” Moon’s ex-daughter-in-law, Nansook Hong, reveals in an 1998 exposé, In the Shadow of the Moons. But the source of Moon’s money remained obscure. “The ‘Koreagate’ investigation traced the church’s chief sources of money to bank accounts in Japan,” Robert Parry writes in Secrecy and Privilege, “but could follow the cash no further.”

There have been similar reports of suspicious behaviour from South America. In 1996, in what appeared to be a money-laundering scheme known as “smurfing,” 4,200 Japanese female members of the Unification Church walked into the Moon-controlled Banco de Credito in Uruguay, and deposited as much as $25,000 each. By the time the extraordinary procession had ended, there was $80 million in a Moon account.

Moon’s mysterious millions have also been a major force behind the rise of the Christian Right, despite the Korean’s religious teachings being fundamentally at odds with the stated beliefs of his Christian allies. Moon, above all, proclaims himself the Messiah sent by God to complete the mission of Jesus, whom he teaches, failed to purify humanity by not producing sinless offspring. But Moon’s heretical beliefs don’t seem to have unduly bothered evangelists like Jerry Falwell and Tim La Haye who received millions from Moon. Despite the lure of Moon’s money, one would expect genuine Christians to distance themselves from someone who says that the Holocaust was God’s punishment for killing Christ. But perhaps what Wayne Madsen says about George W. Bush, in his “Exposé: The ‘Christian’ Mafia,” applies equally to Moon and his friends on the Christian Right: “Bush only pays lip service to Jesus while advancing a Dominionist (“fascist”) plan for global control.”

Yet another anomaly in Moon’s myriad associations is his relationship with North Korea. Despite his professed anti-communism, Moon has given millions of dollars to North Korea’s leaders, including a $3 million “birthday present” to current dictator, Kim Jong Il. Although ostensibly connected to business investments in his native land, these gifts may have been diverted to finance the cash-strapped regime’s nuclear weapons programme. Considering Moon’s ties to the Japanese right-wing, it may seem implausible that he would knowingly help arm their archenemies. But then again, threatening neighbours can be quite useful to nationalists bent on remilitarization - not to mention profitable for corporations that produce armaments.

Those who don’t buy into the North Korea bogeyman thesis tend instead to see the resurgence of Japanese nationalism as the real threat. But their focus may also be too narrow. As the career of Reverend Moon powerfully illustrates, the greatest threat to peace and democracy comes not from any one nation, but from a small but potent international right-wing alliance which seems prepared to use any means necessary to attain power, not least exploiting gullible Japanese as accomplices in a vast criminal enterprise.

Part 17 & 18: "The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later"

Transcript (page 52)

In August of 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published a three-part investigation by Gary Webb into the U.S. government's links to the trade in crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles. Webb's investigation uncovered links between the Central Intelligence Agency's covert war against Nicaragua and convicted Los Angeles drug dealer "Freeway" Ricky Ross, whom the Los Angeles Times in 1994 had dubbed the "one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine." (20 December 1994 p. A20)

The (admittedly sensationalized, but basically accurate) story generated much controversy, and heated denials from the mainstream media (in particular the local paper of record, whose editor Shelby Coffey III couldn't bear the thought of someone else beating his paper out on a major story in his own backyard). This vehement denegation, however, is largely inconsistent with the historical record (some of which has been, and continues to be, reported in these same papers).

This web site is part of a long-standing research project of mine. As a scholar working at the interstices of speech communication and cultural studies, I have been investigating the public discourse surrounding the "war on drugs" as an exercise in disciplinary social control. This site is a database of information, evidence, and other resources that have helped guide me in this research project, and will hopefully help others working along the same lines.

http://www.csun.edu/CommunicationStudies/ben/news/cia/

Narco News Investigates DEA Corruption and Cover-Up in Colombia

Anbefalt severdighet!

"DARK ALLIANCE: Crack Cocaine, the CIA, the Contras, & the Censors", with Pulitzer Prize-Winner Gary Webb, Dennis Bernstein, & Martha Honey. Berkely, CA - June 13, 1998.

Mer om og av Gary Webb her.

PS - Webb vant ikke Pulitzer-prisen alene.

Liten kuriositet: Legg merke til Oliver Norths reaksjon da COG (Continuity of Government) blir bragt på banen (1:02:30).

Lyden er litt lav. Headset fikser biffen.

An extremely well-done, powerful video about the Iran-Contra scandal, and subsequent coverup. Includes interviews with former CIA analyst David MacMichael; Former U.S. Ambassador Robert White; Barbara Honegger, formerly a key Reagan/Bush '80 campaign worker; former Iranian President Bani-Sadr; Former contra Eden Pastora; Former contra directorate member Edgar Chamorro; Peter Dale Scott, co-author of The Iran-Contra Connection. Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era; quite a few, surprisingly candid government officials, including Rep. Henry Gonzales and Rep. Jack Brooks; Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey; the Christic Institute's Daniel Sheehan; etc. (...)

http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/videorsrc.html

COVER UP: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3383380805257581215&hl=en]

Og her er New York Times' kommentar. Også fra -88:

Review/Film; 'Coverup,' Iran-Contra Affair

Festlig.

(...)

According to many sources, it was Cheney – and not Bush – who authorized the shootdown of planes on 9/11. See, for example, this Washington Post story. Perhaps the reason that Cheney, and not Bush, authorized the shootdown was that Cheney became the head of the “shadow” government instituted on 9/11 under Continuity of Government measures. In other words, he became the real Commander-in-Chief of the COG government.

(...)

Stikkord: Reagan, Clinton, Oliver North, CIA, narko, Contras ... Og selvfølgelig Papa Bush lurkende i kulissene.

***

Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.com: Lost History: Reagan-Bush Crime Syndicate

WASHINGTON -- It should be clear by now that for 12 years, from 1981-1993, the United States was governed by political leaders who merged the power of the state with criminality to a degree possibly unmatched in modern American history. That disturbing reality was underscored again this past month by an exhaustively researched series by Gary Webb in The San Jose Mercury-News. . .

But a wealth of other evidence, collected by federal drug agents and congressional investigators during the 1980s, corroborated that the Reagan-Bush administrations knew about the drug trafficking and mounted a determined cover-up to protect the contras from exposure. Senior administration officials apparently shared Enrique Bermudez's situational ethics. After all, President Reagan had hailed the contras as the "moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers." They could not be unmasked as drug dealers. . .

Editor's Note: A little-known $385 million contract for Halliburton subsidiary KBR to build detention facilities for "an emergency influx of immigrants" is another step down the Bush administration's road toward martial law, the writer says.

(...)

"Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," says Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military's account of its activities in Vietnam. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."

(...)

Revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) has engaged in warrantless eavesdropping in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act prompted President Bush to admit last month that in 2002 he directly authorized the activity in the wake of 9/11.

But there are reasons to suspect that the illegal eavesdropping, and the related program of illegal detentions of U.S. citizens as well as foreign nationals, began earlier. Both may be part of what Vice President Dick Cheney has called the Bush administration's restoration of "the legitimate authority of the presidency" -- practices exercised by Nixon that were outlawed after Watergate.

In the 1980s Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld discussed just such emergency surveillance and detention powers in a super-secret program that planned for what was euphemistically called "Continuity of Government" (COG) in the event of a nuclear disaster. (Emphasis added throughout)

Creating Terror - godt foredrag av Nafeez Ahmed fra juli 2007.

• Krigen mot terror i bred historisk kontekst.
• Falskflagg-terror som geo-politisk strategi / strategy of tension.
• Lærer vi den hele og fulle sannhet om nazistene og 2. Verdenskrig på skolen?

Om boken Conjuring Hitler:

"Nazism is usually depicted as the outcome of political blunders and unique economic factors: we are told that it could not be prevented, and that it will never be repeated.

In this explosive book, Guido Giacomo Preparata shows that the truth is very different: using meticulous economic analysis, he demonstrates that Hitler's extraordinary rise to power was in fact facilitated -- and eventually financed -- by the British and American political classes during the decade following World War I."

http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=136681

Vestlige nasjoner finansierer og bruker selv terrororganisasjonene som er "årsaken" til "krigen mot terror"-paradigmet. Løsningen på problemene, blir vi fortalt av terrorkompisane, er blant annet mangfoldige former for overvåkning. Skap et problem. Presenter løsning. Mål oppnådd. Hvilket system har som mål å fjerne folkets friheter - spionere på sine egne? Og hva slags mennesker ?

Deler av Ahmeds konklusjon:

From 1979 until 2007 ... this amorphous network designated by the term al Qaeda has functioned seamlessly as a mercenary proxy force mobilized in diverse strategic regions in the service of Anglo-American imperial expansionism. It hasn't ever had a break. The extent of it is absolutely shocking ... Western state sponsorship, indirectly and directly, of al Qaeda as a destabilizing force in strategic regions.

Meanwhile, innocent citizens are being killed. They are being killed since 1993 ... yet the policy has not shifted. On the contrary it's now escalating in the context of developling an even more catastrophic conflict with Iran.

This has damning moral implications. It means that at some level, policy makers are morally indifferent to the deaths of our own citizens in al Qaeda terrorist attacks. Other strategic imperatives, such as the control of increasingly scarce energy resources are more important. There has been a shift of priorities, something in the National Security structure, since 1979, has relegated civilian life way at the bottom.

Audiofil her

Is an International Financial Conspiracy Driving World Events? by Richard C. Cook (Global Research, March 27, 2008)

Huzzah:

... to Chancellor Merkel, who says that Germany will boycott the Beijing Olypmics over the Tibet crisis. 

Boo-Hiss:

... to The Sierra Club for its recent deal with Clorox and their decision to suspend the FLA chapter for protesting it. 

By Rob Johnson and Robert Borosage

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/10-days-changed-capitalism

The world has changed. The market fundamentalism that has dominated our economics over last three decades has been unmasked as a sham, deemed useless by the guardian of the integrity of finance itself, the Federal Reserve.

Without a vote of the Congress or a public debate, the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve have made government the guarantor of the shadow banking system – the unregulated, unhinged hedge funds and investment houses whose compulsive excesses now threaten the global economy. They say necessity is the mother of invention, but we seen only a part of the new machine, not surprisingly, the part that buttresses Wall Street. They have scrambled to put this together in an emergency, behind closed doors, without a hint of the necessary regulatory changes that must rationally accompany such guarantees. That is what the fight in the coming months will surely be about.

As the article below by David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal summarizes, the intervention puts at risk hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

It also transforms the economic debate. It is inconceivable that taxpayers should be asked to bail out private buccaneer speculators without enforcing limits on their speculation – capital reserves, limits on what gambles they can take, oversight, transparency, new restrictions on their pay packages to remove the current multi-million dollar personal incentives to invent new Penza schemes and scams.

The shadow banking system now must be brought out of the shadows. After all we are constantly told that finance serves the economy, and the market system is the best means to solve our social goals. It feels very uncomfortable when our servant's servant becomes our master's master as Wall Street has been permitted to become in America in recent years by contribution- hungry elected officials.

As Barack Obama noted in his speech yesterday, the deregulation that fostered this folly was supported by both parties. It began under Jimmy Carter, accelerated under Ronald Reagan, went into hyper speed under Bill Clinton, and spiraled into catastrophe under George Bush. The freedom to gamble with other peoples’ money has been protected by lavish campaign contributions and powerful lobbies. These financial buccaneers have treated the laws and rules that govern our financial markets like just one more asset to be bought and sold. They have been unabashed in their arrogant abuse of power, rigging the rules and daring the world to stop them. A particularly audacious example occurred only last year when a concerted lobby campaign convinced the Democratic majority in the Senate to sustain the tax dodge that enables billionaire hedge fund operators to pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries.

This cannot continue. They ask to pocket their profits and have taxpayers protect them from their losses. That offends the principles of both democracy and the market. If they are too big to fail – if their failure will bring down the entire economy – then they are also too big to gamble on their own. They must be regulated – or perhaps nationalized, as the British have just done with one of their leading banks. After all they are asking to nationalize their losses. Why not some of their profits too?

This debate must be accessible to, and reflect the concerns of, citizens. It cannot be the exclusive province of so-called experts, Wall Street operators, economists and legislators. Too often, Wall Street manages to profit having the party and then make a bundle from the government in cleaning up the mess as they socialize the losses that they created.

It is important to understand how reckless Wall Street has been. They have not only victimized the American people through recession and bailouts. Their recklessness threatens to blow up their own cherished role as well. They have damaged the international reputation of the U.S. dollar, turning the world's reserve currency into the equivalent of a junk bond. The excesses of their hubris-driven repackaging of assets has muddied the U.S. credit allocation process and accelerated the US decline as the financial center of world commerce. Their sacred cow of "free trade" is unlikely to withstand the pressure of a prolonged slump. Wall Street is compulsively consuming itself.

We are going to follow this debate closely at CAF. It will be a constant feature of this blog. We’ll call on the best progressive economists and analysts to break it down. We’ll collect the best documents so you can follow the debate. And we’ll be driving campaigns to make certain that the public doesn’t once more get stuck with the bill for the bankers’ party, with no assurances that the reckless structure of finance has been repaired.

David Wessel provides good summary of where we are below.

David Wessel

The past 10 days will be remembered as the time the U.S. government discarded a half-century of rules to save American financial capitalism from collapse.

On the Richter scale of government activism, the government's recent actions don't (yet) register at FDR levels. They are shrouded in technicalities and buried in a pile of new acronyms.

But something big just happened. It happened without an explicit vote by Congress. And, though the Treasury hasn't cut any checks for housing or Wall Street rescues, billions of dollars of taxpayer money were put at risk. A Republican administration, not eager to be viewed as the second coming of the Hoover administration, showed it no longer believes the market can sort out the mess.

"The Government of Last Resort is working with the Lender of Last Resort to shore up the housing and credit markets to avoid Great Depression II," economist Ed Yardeni wrote to clients.

First, over St. Patrick's Day weekend, the Fed (aka the Lender of Last Resort) and the Treasury forced the sale of Bear Stearns, the fifth-largest U.S. investment bank, to J.P. Morgan Chase at a price so low that a shareholder rebellion prompted J.P. Morgan to raise the price. To induce J.P. Morgan to do the deal, the Fed agreed to take losses or gains, if any, on up to $29 billion of securities in Bear Stearns's portfolio. The outcome will influence the sum the Fed turns over to the Treasury, so this is taxpayer money; that's why the Fed sought Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's OK.

Then the Fed lent directly to Wall Street securities firms for the first time. Until now, the Fed has lent directly only to Main Street banks, those that take deposits from ordinary folks. That's because banks were viewed as playing a unique economic role and, supposedly, were more closely regulated than other types of lenders. In the first three days of this new era, securities firms borrowed an average of $31.3 billion a day from the Fed. That's not small change, and it's why Mr. Paulson, after the fact, is endorsing changes to give the Fed more access to these firms' books.

Increased Leverage

In the days that followed, the Republican Treasury secretary leaned on two shareholder-owned, though government-chartered, companies -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- to raise capital that their boards didn't want to raise. In exchange, their government regulator allowed them to increase their leverage so they can buy about $200 billion more in mortgage-backed securities.

So Fannie and Freddie will get bigger, a welcome development when mortgage markets are in trouble. Already, they have regained lost market share. They accounted for 76% of new mortgages in the fourth quarter of last year, up from 46% in the second quarter, Mr. Paulson said Wednesday. But everyone knows that if Fannie or Freddie stumble, taxpayers will get stuck with the tab.

And then, the federal regulator of the low-profile Federal Home Loan Banks, which are even less well capitalized than Fannie and Freddie, said they could buy twice as many Fannie and Freddie-blessed mortgage-backed securities as previously permitted -- more than $100 billion worth.

Was this necessary? It's messy, uncomfortable and undoubtedly flawed in many details. Like firefighters rushing to a five-alarm fire, policy makers are making mistakes that will be apparent only in retrospect.

Too Great to Ignore
But, regardless of how we got here, the clear and present danger that the virus in the housing, mortgage and credit markets is infecting the overall economy is too great to ignore. The Great Depression was worsened because the initial government reaction was wrong-headed. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke spent an academic career learning how to avoid repeating those mistakes.

Is it working? It is helping. One key measure is the gap between interest rates on mortgages and safe Treasury securities. A wide gap means high mortgage rates, which hurt an already sickly housing market. A lot of recent activity, including Wednesday's previously planned auction in which the Fed is trading Treasurys for mortgage-backed securities, is aimed at increasing demand for those securities to drive down mortgage rates.

The gap remains enormous by historical standards, but has narrowed. On March 6, according to FTN Financial, 30-year fixed-rate mortgages were trading at 2.92 percentage points above the relevant Treasury rates; Wednesday the gap was down to 2.22. Normal is about 1.5 percentage points. Money markets are still under stress, as banks and others hoard cash and super-safe short-term Treasurys.

Is it enough? Probably not. Although it's hard to know, the downward tug on the overall economy from falling house prices persists. The next step, if one proves necessary, is almost sure to require the explicit use of taxpayer money.

Cushion the Blow

The case for doing more is twofold. One is to cushion the blow to families and communities, even if some are culpable. The other is to disrupt a dangerous downward spiral in which falling prices of houses and mortgage-backed securities lead lenders to pull back, hurting the economy and dragging asset prices down further, and so on.

In ordinary times, a capitalist economy lets prices -- such as those of homes, mortgage-backed securities and stocks -- fall to the point where the big-bucks crowd rushes in, hoping to make a killing. But if the big money remains on the sidelines, unpersuaded that a bottom is near, the wait for bargain hunters to take the plunge could be very long and very painful.
So the next step, no matter how it is dressed up, is likely to involve the government's moving in ways that put a floor under prices, hoping that will limit the downside risks enough so more Americans are willing to buy homes and deeper-pocketed investors are willing, in effect, to lend them the money to do so.http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/10-days-changed-capitalism

NORAD, responsible for intercepting errant aircraft over the U.S., has a standard operating procedure for scrambling planes for interception which takes less than 15 minutes
They did this successfully (on time) 129 times in 2000 and and 67 times between September 2000 and June 2001.

Yet, on September 11th, they failed to do their job 4 times in a single day:

• NORAD, once notified of the off-course aircraft, failed to scramble jets from the nearest bases

• Once airborne, interceptors failed to reach their targets because they flew at small fractions of their top speeds

• Fighters that were airborne and within interception range of the deviating aircraft were not redeployed to pursue them

You might think that the military couldn't find the hijacked planes because the hijackers turned off the transponders. However, a former air traffic controller, who knows the flight corridor which the two planes which hit the Twin Towers flew "like the back of my hand" and who handled two actual hijackings says that planes can be tracked on radar even when their transponders are turned off (also, listen to this interview).

As a former senior air force colonel said:

"If our government had merely [done] nothing, and I say that as an old interceptor pilot—I know the drill, I know what it takes, I know how long it takes, I know what the procedures are, I know what they were, and I know what they’ve changed them to—if our government had merely done nothing, and allowed normal procedures to happen on that morning of 9/11, the Twin Towers would still be standing and thousands of dead Americans would still be alive. [T]hat is treason!"

Norad's stand down on 9/11 was so blatant that Norad has been forced to give 3 entirely different versions of what happened that day, as each previous version has been exposed as false. When someone repeatedly changes his testimony after being caught in lies, how believable is he? The falsity of Norad's explanations were so severe that even the 9/11 Commission considered recommending criminal charges for the making of false statements.

In addition, Dick Cheney monitored flight 77 for many miles as it approached the Pentagon -- one of the most heavily-defended buildings in the world -- and yet ordered that the airplane not be intercepted (confirmed here). Given that Cheney was in charge of all of the war games and coordinated the government's "response" to the attacks on 9/11 -- apparently including Norad (see this Department of State announcement, this CNN article, and this essay) -- Cheney's orders regarding flight 77 seem to be part and parcel of the Norad stand down.

Terror, oil and the "shadow government"

In this exclusive excerpt from his powerful new book, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), UC Berkeley professor emeritus Peter Dale Scott asks whether there is a connection between America’s historical use of terror as a political weapon and the recent moves by the Bush administration to suspend the Constitution and create a “shadow government” in the wake of the next terrorist attack: . . .

Peter Dale Scott bygger en overbevisende sak mot Dick Cheney, og forsåvidt mot 9/11-kommisjonens rapport. Ikke en sak for rettssalen, men en som presser på for at Cheney må forklare seg under ed - for første gang - om sine bevegelser på 9/11. Scotts hovedtese er at Rumsfeld, Cheney og Bush implementerte "COG" (Continuity of Government - eller "Change of Government", som Scott mer korrekt benevner det) mens nasjonen var under angrep, og at dette er en viktig brikke i 9/11-puslespillet. Det er ingen tvil om at COG ble iverksatt. Washington Post kalte det de facto "skyggemyndigheter"! Fotnoter finnes i transkriptet/artikkelen under.

A N B E F A L E S !

***

Peter Dale Scott - Richard Cheney, Continuity of Government, and 9/11

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2978244787099383010]

"The 9/11 Commission Report is an example of concerted cover-up, partly by omissions, and just as importantly by its cherry-picking of evidence to create impressions that are in fact authoritatively disputed, and in some cases probably not true. There are many examples of cherry-picking and contrived simulations of fact. More importantly, there is a consistent pattern in this: to minimize Cheney’s responsibility for what happened that day."

Transkript/artikkel:

9/11 Commission Deception, Cheney’s Actions on 9/11, and
Why He Should Testify Under Oath

http://journalof911studies.com/volume/2007/ProfScottWhyCheneyMustTestify.pdf

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton is the Democrat that the Republicans always want to handle one of their touchy national-security investigations because he never pushes too hard. That, however, has left some important questions for Hamilton to answer.

Editor’s Note: Whenever the Republicans have a touchy national-security scandal to put to rest, their favorite Democratic investigator is Lee Hamilton. Over the years, Hamilton has developed a reputation as a very reasonable fellow who knows how far he can go without ruffling too many important feathers.

Hamilton’s carefully honed skill for balancing truth against political comity has elevated him to the status of a Washington Wise Man. In this guest essay, however, Jerry Meldon suggests that attendees at a Tufts conference on the Middle East might want to ask Hamilton about his past compromises with history.

(...)

Judge er født og oppvokst i Washington DC, og hadde foreldre som begge jobbet ved Pentagon. Grunnet relevant kunnskap om topografi, forsvar, bakke-til-luft-raketter osv., stiller han de rette Pentagon-spørsmålene.

Blant mye annet.

Anbefales!

***

About John Judge

"You can call me a conspiracy theorist,
if you call everyone else a coincidence theorist.
I prefer to say I'm an alternate historian."

- John Judge

***

Conversations with John Judge - Part I

Stikkord:

• fyldig om Pentagon, sikkerhetstiltak, standardrutiner, det militær-industrielle kompleks, "militærøkonomi" (etter mitt syn burde det vært mulig å kreve en ny 9/11-granskning, kun basert på spørsmålene Judge stiller)
• strategy of tension, phoney terrorism
• pseudo-demokrati, valg, valgfusk, ekte demokrati, Clinton for riksrett - en etterretningsoperasjon

"Before they have an election they have polls. Well, now... Why would you have a poll in a democratic society? The only purpose is to influence the outcome of the election."

"In a real democracy you don't need a Democratic Party."

"The United States showed, not only us, but the whole world that we are not a democracy."

• "Eastern" & "Western" establishment, penge- og maktkonstellasjoner
• JFK, OKC-bomben(e), Oswald, McVeigh
• Orwells "1984", over 400 likhetstrekk med det kontemporære
• 9/11, plantet bevis/legendeproduksjon, bin Laden, al Qaida
• detaljert om anthrax og anthraxangrepene rett etter 9/11, bevis peker mot innside-jobb
• statlig hemmelighold, FOIA, COINTELPRO, desinformasjon

Not all conspiracies are created equal

• MK Ultra, mindcontrol
• ansvar og demokrati
• progressive og fredelige fremtidsvisjoner

Conversations with John Judge - Part II

Conversations with John Judge - Part III