RE: George Bush Alienating America Russia China India Muslims et

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From: Patriots Speak Out ®©™
Date: Oct 17, 2007 12:08 AM

OpEdNews

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_karen_fi_071016_why_is_george_bush_a.htm

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October 16, 2007

Why is George Bush Alienating America Russia China India Muslims et al

By Karen Fish

Mission Accomplished

"One of George Bush’s favorite sayings is that the United States in Iraq is but one member of “the coalition of the willing”. It turns out that George Bush is paying 30 nations hundreds of millions of dollars each to send three non combat soldiers each to Iraq to build the fiction that the United States has international backing in Iraq. In fact Kofi Annan called George Bush a war criminal for invading Iraq.

On 9/11 the United States of America had the support and the goodwill of the entire world. According to the Oxford Research Group George Bush’s retaliatory Crusade against Islam, his war on terror aka his war on Islam has backfired and fueled more and more terrorist extremists. George Bush is acting like a bull in a China shop, deliberately alienating every country in the world, including his own. The key question is why is he doing this? Does anyone know? I personally have no idea. Maybe you could explain it to me. Is he just a madman, stupid, insane, or is their a method to his madness?

Not content with alienating Afghanistan and Iraq, George Bush is now threatening to nuke Iran. One would think that George Bush would need Russia as an ally in any attack on Iran but instead George Bush is doing everything he can to alienate Russia. Why is George Bush installing nuclear missiles in the Czech Republic and Poland? Doesn’t the European Union have radar? This move has so infuriated Vladimir Putin that he is threatening to aim Russia’s nuclear arsenal at Europe. Vladimir Putin has called George Bush’s policies unrestrained out of control violence and he has likened George Bush to Adolf Hitler. This has led Vladimir Putin to form a strategic alliance with Iran.

Another country which could be a key U.S. ally is China. Today despite the strong opposition of China George Bush entertained the Dalai Lama in the White House. China has now called for a strong Iran. Another key American ally Turkey has just recalled their ambassador from Washington and is now threatening to use the second largest army in NATO to invade the American colony of Iraq. India has now backed out of their agreement to purchase nuclear reactors from the United States because they fear getting too close to George Bush. Now that George Bush’s poodle Tony Blair has left office the United Kingdom has left Basra and has only 2,500 troops remaining in Iraq.

The country which loathes George Bush the most is the United States of America. Thanks to George Bush lying us into Iraq under false pretenses and manufactured evidence George Bush has crippled the American military, run up a $10 trillion deficit for the next generation to choke on, sent the dollar into a free fall, sent oil through the roof, sent our jobs overseas, and has left the U.S. with no money for education, health care or social security. For those people who thought that the master of Katrina would conquer the Middle East oil fields, he has now been checkmated by a strategic alliance of Russia, China and Iran. The Muslim world wants his head for launching a Crusade against them in 2003. The simple question which I pose to you is why is George Bush deliberately alienating the United States of America from Russia, China, India, the Muslim World, and the people of the United States of America? Does anyone know? If so, please tell me. I’m very curious to know the answer.




Authors Website: http://www.thetempleoflove.com

Authors Bio: Karen Fish is a writer currently living in Los Angeles California. The Temple of Love - The World Peace Religion makes peace among and unites Christianity Islam Judaism and Everyone else and the Countries they all live in as the first step towards world peace, by tying everyone together with their common threads and resolving all of their differences once and for all.

RE: It’s Time For The Banks To Face The Hangman

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From: Shane (Infoseekr)
Date: Oct 17, 2007 12:31 AM


RE: It’s Time For The Banks To Face The Hangman

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From: d.j.101 a.k.a. The White Rabbit
Date: Oct 16, 2007 8:35 PM

It’s Time For The Banks To Face The Hangman

go to original
By Mike Whitney

"There is today an incredibly speculative financial sector hell bent on sustaining Credit and asset Bubbles – and perfectly content to adulterate our functional system of "money" in the process. The Federal Reserve is perceived to condone the whole affair and is openly willing to employ all measures to avoid bursting Bubbles. And in a contemporary world of acutely fragile finance structures, this ensures that bust avoidance translates briskly to bubble perpetuation and speculator delight." Doug Noland "Credit Bubble Bulletin"

"How can one defend a system that creates wealth by making the majority poor?" Henry C. K. Liu

Officials in the Treasury Dept----working with their colleagues at Citigroup, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America---have concocted a scheme to rescue the banks from their massive losses in mortgage-backed securities. The group is planning to set up a $100 billion emergency fund which will purchase non-performing assets for short term debt. In truth, the fund is a bailout which provides the financial giants with an excuse for not reporting their enormous losses from bad bets.

The story first appeared in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal and was followed on Monday with a second headline piece:

"RESCUE READIED BY BANKS IS BET TO SPUR MARKET"

WSJ: "The high stakes plan to RESCUE BANKS FROM LOSSES on mortgage securities amounts to a big bet that a consortium of financial giants—AT THE PRODDING OF THE US GOVERNMENT—can PERSUADE INVESTORS TO POUR MORE MONEY INTO THE TROUBLED CREDIT MARKET."

That’s right; the Treasury Dept is directly involved in a scam that saves the banks while trying to "persuade" investors to "pour more money" into toxic mortgage-backed sludge. Treasury Dept officials clearly have a different idea of "moral hazard" than the rest of us.

The banks are presently holding hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) that they cannot sell—because there are no buyers ---and don’t want to take back on their balance sheets because they’ll be forced to increase their capital reserves. So they’ve decided to launch a public relations campaign to promote some goofy-sounding fund, called the "Master-Liquidity Enhancement Conduit" or M-LEC, which will allow the banks to place their unwanted bonds in Limbo until some future date when the public appetite for garbage CDOs improves.

The WSJ does a good job of disguising the real motive behind the new "Super-Conduit" (aka the Bailout fund) but in the last paragraph, buried in Section C-3, they reveal the truth:

"The goal is to reassure investors and make them more willing to buy its short-term debt." So, the fund is really just a way of rearranging the marketplace until the next crop of gullible investors sprouts up and buys more mortgage-backed garbage.

Where are the regulators? The SEC and Treasury should be forcing the banks to be straightforward with the public and let them know about the hanky-panky they’ve been up to with their risky SIVs (structured investment vehicles) Citigroup alone has nearly $80 billion in off-balance sheets operations which are in distress. The bank accounts for "25% of the global SIV market. As of August, assets held by SIVs totaled $400 billion".

SIVs are set up as a way to make money without taking the risk onto their balance sheets. "They issue their own short-term debt, usually at relatively low rates …then use the proceeds to buy higher yielding assets such as securities tied to mortgages." (WSJ)

Ever since Bear Stearns blew up in late July, investors have been steering clear of any securities connected to real estate, which means the SIVs are getting the Double Whammy---they can’t sell their asset-backed commercial paper (because it’s mortgage-backed) and they find buyers for their collateralized debt obligations. (CDOs) To a large extent, the market is still frozen despite the upbeat cheerleading on the business pages. Clearly, the worst is yet to come.

How bad is it?

An article in yesterday’s Financial Times said that, "Only $9.9 billion of home equity loan securitizations have come to market since July 1---A 95% DECLINE FROM THE $200.9 BILLION IN THE FIRST HALF OF THIS YEAR AND A ROUGHLY 92% DECREASE FROM THE SAME PERIOD LAST YEAR."

The banks are in trouble. Big trouble. Main sources of revenue have dried up overnight and they’re stuck with hundreds of billions of debt. That’s why the papers broke the story on Saturday when there was NO chance of triggering a stock market crash.

Imagine the horror of investors around the world when they discover that the major investment banks are running these shabby "off-balance sheets" operations while concealing their real financial condition from their investors. Consider the disgust the public feels when they see Treasury officials bailing out the banks instead of ordering them to report their losses and get on with business.

Still, Wall Street nonchalantly leaps from one swindle to the next never considering the damage it’s doing to the credibility of the market.

Susan Pulliam summed it up like this in the Oct 12 edition of The Wall Street Journal:

"Since the invention of the ticker tape 140 years ago, America has been able to boast of having the world’s most transparent financial markets. The tape and its electronic descendants ensured that crystal-clear prices for stocks and many other securities were readily available to everyone, encouraging millions to entrust their money to the markets. These days, after a decade of frantic growth in mortgage-backed securities and other complex investments traded off exchanges, that clarity is gone. Large parts of American financial markets have become a hall of mirrors."

"Hall of mirrors" is an understatement. The system is thoroughly opaque and crooked as a ram’s horn. The market’s new architecture, "structured finance", is a dismal rip-off from start to finish. Consider the mentality of the hucksters who dreamed up "securitizing" subprime mortgages and selling them off as precious jewels in the secondary market. This was a blatant con-job. How can the liabilities of "borrowers with bad credit" be traded to foreign investors and pension funds like they were valuable assets? And where were the regulators while this scam was going on?

Isn’t this sufficient evidence that the system is totally out of whack?

Wall Street avoids transparency like the plague. That is to be expected. But what about the government? It’s the government’s job to protect the investor and maintain the integrity of the system. Is that what Treasury Dept is doing or are they "LURING investors to buy debt issued by the rescue fund as part of the plan"? (quote from the Wall Street Journal)

"Luring"? Is that how Paulson sees it; like luring turkeys to the chopping block with a trail of bread crumbs?

The idea of protecting the little guy has never occurred to anyone in the Bush administration. Their job is to shift wealth from one class to the other via equity bubbles and government bailouts----anything that advances the corporate agenda.

Presently, the banks are sitting on $200 billion in non-performing mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and collateralized debt obligations. (CDOs) They are also hold another $300 billion in collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) from mergers and acquisitions which stalled after the Bear Stearns meltdown. If the present bailout doesn’t materialize, we’re likely to see bank closures and a plummeting stock market.

Shouldn’t the regulators have considered the probability of a crash before they allowed trillions of dollars of radioactive-bonds to flood the market when no one had any idea of their real value? Wouldn’t that have been the prudent thing to do?

Now we know what they are worth. They’re worth nothing. That’s why the banks are running scared and refusing to put them up for auction. They’d rather sleaze them into a lofty-sounding superfund that masks their true value.

In the last 2 weeks the stock market soared on the news that the banks were reporting billions of dollars in losses. Investors were hoodwinked into believing the banks were being honest and had "come clean" about their financial condition. What a joke. In reality, the banks only reported roughly 5% of their potential losses; the rest were hidden in their off balance sheets operations.

Equities skyrocketed to new heights. Wall Street was euphoric.

Now we know the truth. It was all baloney.

The Wall Street Journal: "The new fund is designed to stave off what Citigroup and others see as a threat to the financial markets world-wide: the danger that dozens of huge bank-affiliated funds will be forced to unload billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities and other assets, driving down their prices in a fire sale….The ultimate fear: If banks need to write down more assets or are forced to take assets onto their books, that could set off a broader credit crunch and hurt the economy. It could make it tough for homeowners and businesses to get loans."

It could "hurt the economy" and "make it tough for homeowners and businesses to get loans?"

Ahhh, yes. It’s all clear now. The banks only cooked up this colossal bailout to make things better for us common people. How is it that we didn’t notice that before? Our problem is that we don’t see the magnanimity and altruism which drives the corporate agenda.

From the New York Times:

"The conduit (The bailout fund) is expected to start operating in 90 days and will stay in place for a few years until it has disposed of the assets it buys, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

To maintain its credibility with investors from whom it would raising money, the conduit will not buy any bonds that are tied to mortgages made to people with spotty, or subprime, credit histories. Rather, it will buy debt with the highest ratings — AAA and AA — and debt that is backed by other mortgages, credit card receipts and other assets."

We already know about the problems with the ratings agencies and how they are in bed with the investment banks. We also know that the whole purpose of the new fund is to off-load mortgage-backed tripe which is no longer sellable on the market. What we didn’t know is that the New York Times eagerly provides the peppy public relations narrative to assist big business in dumping its failing assets.

NY Times: "The conduit will pay market prices for the securities it buys. But it remains unclear how officials will determine the price of some bonds that have not been actively traded since August, because the difference between what buyers are willing to pay and what sellers want has widened significantly."

Of course, they’ll pay full price because they want to be "made whole" again. The truth is, however, that these derivatives will probably only fetch pennies on the dollar unless they get another Wall Street PR face-lift.

Christian Stracke, market analyst from the research firm CreditSights, said the effort appears to be "an attempt to soothe tense investors in the debt market, rather than to provide substantive relief to the worst-hit mortgage securities".

Stracke added, "For me, this is more of a P.R. blitz."

Bingo.

The announcement of the forthcoming Master-Liquidity Enhancement Conduit or M-LEC further underlines the gravity of the problems facing the banking system. The fund creates a "buyer of last resort" so that these dubious assets won’t be sold on the market at fire-sale prices.

Citigroup appears to be the greatest beneficiary of the current plan. They have a number of Enron-type SIVs which could be at risk.

Again, the problems that are surfacing in the banking sector today are the direct result of Greenspan’s loose monetary policies coupled with the dismantling of the regulatory regime that was created following the 1929 stock market crash. We are now back to Square 1. All of the various scams and swindles which permeated that hyper-inflated market are now back in full-force foreshadowing a steep decline in investor confidence, increased market manipulation, and an unavoidable economic calamity.

"Structured finance" has transformed US markets into a carnival sideshow. Productivity and real growth have been replaced with never-ending credit expansion and speculative abuses. Reckless monetary policies and the behemoth current account deficit have destabilized the global economy a set the stage for a fiscal Armageddon.

The subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent shrinking of asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) has thrown a wrench in the funding of daily corporate operations. These are the harbingers of an impending recession. As mortgages continue to default at a record pace; the aftershocks will continue to rumble through the credit markets where subprime loans have been "securitized" into bonds and leveraged at maximum levels. It’s just one domino knocking down the next.

The financial system is at greater risk now than any time in the last 80 years. Regrettably, the only remedies coming from the Fed are more currency-destroying rate cuts or hundreds of billions of dollars in repos to remove mortgage-backed bonds from the banks’ balance sheets. Neither of these solutions addresses the critical issues; they do not stabilize the market, reinvigorate lending, or restore investor confidence. They are merely band aids on a sucking chest-wound. They won’t stop the bleeding.

The Fed’s monetary policies promote financial speculation which inevitably leads to equity bubbles. Under Greenspan’s stewardship, the country has lurched from the 1990’s bond bubble, to the dot.com bubble, to the subprime meltdown, to the liquidity crisis, to the credit crunch---all engineered at the Federal Reserve with ancillary assistance from the charlatans in the banking industry.

An article in China Worker, "Credit Crunch threatens Global Downturn" summarizes our present predicament it like this:

"Financial globalization has rebounded on the system. Capitalist leaders boasted that the near total integration of financial markets across the globe would provide lenders and borrowers everywhere with instant access to a completely liquid money market. New types of financial securities and sophisticated derivatives would spread the risk of borrowing so widely that it would eliminate risk entirely. While economies were growing and bubbles inflating, it appeared that---through derivatives trading--- losses would be widely diffused among speculators, reducing risk to very low levels. Not even the most astute financial analysts could predict what would happen in the event of recession. The unanswerable question was: Who would ultimately bear the risks arising from widespread defaults or bankruptcies? The veteran investor, Warren Buffet, warned that derivatives would prove to be ’weapons of mass destruction’.

The fantasy of financial alchemy transforming high risk gambling into low risk money-making has now been shattered."

The author is right. "Structured finance" is a fraud. Risk has not been eliminated. In fact, it has exploded and become a system-wide problem. The dead wood is everywhere.

The banks are being crushed by a debt-load they generated through "securitization". They need to accept responsibility for their poor judgment (or greed?) and report their losses. The Super-Conduit is just a dodge to put off the unavoidable day of reckoning. The whole wretched plan should be scrapped. No amount of financial chicanery will eradicate billions of dollars in bad bets. It’s time for the banks to face the hangman.

RE: Tax Protestor Ed Brown Gassed, Tortured In Deprivation Tank

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From: A Local Revolution (coming 2 UR city) by Leo K.
Date: Oct 17, 2007 6:16 PM


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From: Brian[RONPAUL2008.COM]
Date: Oct 17, 2007 5:15 PM

Digg

Ed Brown Gassed, Tortured In Deprivation Tank
Tax protester speaks for first time since arrest in prison phone call

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Wednesday, October 17, 2007

In a disturbing audio clip, Ed Brown speaks for the first time since his arrest and relates how he was gassed by noxious fumes for three days in a detention center as well as being put in a deprivation tank for 15 hours.

Shaun of MaketheStand.com was able to call the Ohio prison that Brown has been incarcerated in and talk with him on the phone for 10 minutes.

Sensory deprivation is a form of torture and extended deprivation can result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and antisocial behavior.

Brown also said he had been prevented from making any phone calls or receiving mail.

For the first time, Brown reveals what happened when he was tricked and arrested by U.S. Marshals, including how he was tasered multiple times.

Brown said that he had a chance to fight back during the arrest but that he did not want to hurt anyone.

Brown said his captors were treating him with "professional cruelty" and mentioned that they had also done harrowing things to his wife following her arrest, but refused to go into detail.

"I guess Ed and Elaine Brown, the elderly couple, really rattled their cages, we must be a real terror to the federal government, the corporate structure," said Brown.

Following our article about Ed Brown supporters fearing Brown was being mistreated or tortured, U.S. Marshal Stephen Monier dismissed it, saying, "That's absolutely ludicrous."

From what Ed Brown relates in the audio clip, it's abundantly clear that he is being cruelly mistreated.

Click here to listen to the MP3.

In a related development, Elaine Brown's son David told WMUR News that he has also been prevented from speaking to his mother.

FLASHBACK: Supporters Fear Ed Brown Is Being Tortured