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Paul Merrell

Russia Gets Very Serious on De-dollarizing | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...very-serious-on-de-dollarizing

war & peace economic-warfare Russia China yuan gold reserve currrencies

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Russia is about to take another major step towards liberating the Ruble from the Dollar System. Its Finance Ministry just revealed it is considering issuing Russian state debt in Chinese Yuan. That would be an elegant way to decouple from the dependence and blackmail pressures from the US Treasury financial terrorism operations while at the same time strengthening the bonds between China and Russia–Washington’s worst geopolitical nightmare.
  • Russian Deputy Minister of Finance, Sergei Storchak, announced that his ministry is making a careful study of what would be required to issue Russian bonds denominated in Chinese Yuan. The latest news is part of a long-term strategy between Russia and China that goes at the heart of American hegemony—the role of the dollar as the leading world central bank reserve currency. The dollar is used in some 60% of central bank reserves today. The second largest is the Euro. Now clearly China is carefully moving, as the world’s largest trading nation, to create its Renminbi or Chinese Yuan as another major reserve currency. That has huge geopolitical implications. So long as the US dollar is leading reserve currency, the world must de facto buy US dollar Treasury bonds for its reserves. That has allowed Washington to have budget deficits since 1971 when the dollar left the gold exchange standard. In effect, China, Japan, Russia, Germany—all trade surplus countries, finance Washington’s deficits that allow her to make wars around the world. It is a paradox that Russia and China at least, are determined to end as soon as possible.
  • What all this indicates is that Russia and China are carefully planning a long-term strategy of getting out from dependence on the US currency, something that, as the US sanctions last year revealed, make both countries vulnerable to US currency wars of devastating impact. China has just been accepted “in principle” by the Group of 7 finance ministers to have its yuan included in the International Monetary Fund basket of currencies making up IMF Special Drawing Rights. Today only US dollar, Euro and Japanese Yen are included in the basket. Including the yuan would be a huge step towards making the yuan a recognized international reserve currency, and at the same time would weaken the dollar share. China’s foreign reserves consist overwhelmingly of US dollar claims, mainly US Treasury bonds, which is a strategic weakness, because in case of war these can be frozen, as Iran knows too well. It is imperative for China to increase the gold content of the reserves and to diversify the rest into other currencies. China has also agreed with Russia to unify the new Silk Road high-speed rail project with Russia and Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union. At the same time Beijing has announced it is creating a huge $16 billion fund to develop gold mines along the rail route linking Russia and China and Central Asia. That suggests plans to greatly build up gold as central bank reserve share. China’s central bank has greatly increased its gold holdings in recent years, though whether it is now greater than the alleged Federal Reserve gold holdings of 8000 tons is not yet public. It is expected China must reveal its gold reserves on being formally accepted into the IMF SDR basket perhaps later this year.
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  • Last year, 2014, Song Xin, president of the China Gold Association stated, “We need to establish our gold bank as soon as possible…It can further help us acquire reserves and give us more say and control in the gold market.” A gold sector fund involving countries along the Silk Road has been set up in northwest China’s Xi’an City this May, led by Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE), part of China’s national bank, PBOC. China is the world’s largest gold producer. Among the 65 countries along the routes of the Silk Road Economic Belt, there are numerous Asian countries identified as important reserve bases and consumers of gold. Xinhua reports that 60 countries have invested in the fund, which will facilitate central banks of member states to increase their holdings of gold. Dr. Diedrick Goedhuys, former economic adviser to the Reserve Bank of South Africa in an interview told me, “I want to emphasize the unique quality of gold, when viewed as a financial asset, of being an asset that is no-one’s liability. A treasury bond, for instance, is an asset in my hands, but a liability, or debt to be repaid, in the books of the treasury. Gold is a pure asset. The Chinese gold mining plan is of vast importance. It’s a long-term plan; it may take ten years before it has a significant effect.”
Paul Merrell

Reuters Investigates - UNACCOUNTABLE: The Pentagon's bad bookkeeping - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...pentagon

war & peace DOD financial-mismanagement

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • MILES OF AISLES: At the Defense Logistics Agency's giant storage facility outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, lack of reliable information on what's there makes it hard to throw out excess inventory. REUTERS/TIM SHAFFER
  • Part 2: For two decades, the U.S. military has been unable to submit to an audit, flouting federal law and concealing waste and fraud totaling billions of dollars
  • At the DFAS offices that handle accounting for the Army, Navy, Air Force and other defense agencies, fudging the accounts with false entries is standard operating procedure, Reuters has found. And plugging isn’t confined to DFAS (pronounced DEE-fass). Former military service officials say record-keeping at the operational level throughout the services is rife with made-up numbers to cover lost or missing information.
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  • Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts. Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the U.S. Treasury’s - a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies. And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. “A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate,” Woodford says. “We didn’t have the detail … for a lot of it.”
  • The data flooded in just two days before deadline. As the clock ticked down, Woodford says, staff were able to resolve a lot of the false entries through hurried calls and emails to Navy personnel, but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take “unsubstantiated change actions” - in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called “plugs,” to make the Navy’s totals match the Treasury’s. Jeff Yokel, who spent 17 years in senior positions in DFAS’s Cleveland office before retiring in 2009, says supervisors were required to approve every “plug” - thousands a month. “If the amounts didn’t balance, Treasury would hit it back to you,” he says.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Nov 13
     
    Nothing new here. Remember when Donald Rumsfeld announced the day before 9-11 that the Pentagon could not account for $2.3 trillion? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj1rT4bszWg It was the same way in Viet Nam. During my entire 27 months there, we could not be issued socks. We had to write home to ask family or friends to buy socks and send them to us. They could buy them at military surplus stores in the U.S., regulation Army field socks with cushion soles, but we couldn't get them from the Army. "An army travels on its feet," but no socks. Socks were not the only supply chain failures, of course. If you can't manage to get socks to your soldiers because they've been declared surplus, maybe you'd have problems accounting for expenditures too, ya' think? 
Paul Merrell

Pakistan Charges CIA Officials Over Drone Deaths | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...-lawyer-over-drone-deaths.html

war & peace drone attacks Pakistan murder-charges CIA U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • A Pakistani judge on Tuesday ordered criminal charges to be filed against a former CIA lawyer who oversaw the agency’s drone program and a former station chief in Islamabad over a 2009 strike that killed two people. Former acting general counsel John A. Rizzo and former station chief Jonathan Bank must face charges of murder, conspiracy, waging war against Pakistan and terrorism, ruled Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui of the Islamabad High Court. A court clerk and a lawyer involved in the case, Mirza Shahzad Akbar, confirmed details of the ruling. Rizzo and Bank could not be immediately reached for comment. The CIA declined to comment when contacted by Al Jazeera America. Bank’s cover was blown in late 2010 when a Pakistani man, Kareem Khan, threatened to sue the CIA and others for $500 million over the deaths of his sons Zaenullah Khan and Asif Iqbal in a Dec. 31, 2009, strike in the North Waziristan tribal region.
  • As the outrage over the deaths grew, protesters in Islamabad began carrying placards bearing Bank's name, as listed in the lawsuit, and urging him to leave the country. The CIA pulled Bank from the country on Dec. 16, 2010, when he began receiving death threats. His outing spurred questions at the time of whether Pakistan's spy service might have leaked the information, something Islamabad denied. The disclosure didn't prevent Bank from landing another sensitive job. He became chief of the Iran operations division at CIA headquarters in Virginia. He was removed from that post after CIA officials concluded that he created a hostile work environment in the division. He has since been detailed to the Pentagon's intelligence arm.   Rizzo was the CIA's acting general counsel overseeing its drone program. He later left the agency and wrote a book about his experiences at the CIA.  
  • It is estimated that since 2004, the U.S. has carried out over 400 drone strikes in the country, killing anywhere from 421 to 960 civilians, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which tracks the U.S. campaign. The foundation says the last U.S. drone strike in Pakistan was on Jan. 29 and killed at least six suspected fighters. It is not clear how the judge's ruling will affect relations between Pakistan and the U.S., especially over the drone program. While Pakistan's government often decries the strikes, many believe it allows them to target the insurgents who threaten it. Massive protests against the drone program previously blocked a land route used by NATO forces to resupply troops in neighboring Afghanistan.   Any legal action stands no chance of success unless U.S. officials cooperate with the court, something highly unlikely, given the secretive nature of the drone program, which the CIA rarely publicly discusses.
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  • Under the judge's order, Pakistan's federal police force must file the charges against Rizzo and Bank, though the police have so far refused, reportedly out of a reluctance to upset the country's diplomatic relations with the U.S.
Paul Merrell

US's Saudi Oil Deal from Win-Win to Mega-Loose | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...eal-from-win-win-to-mega-loose

must-read banksters big oil Saudis Russia shale-oil U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Who would’ve thought it would come to this? Certainly not the Obama Administration, and their brilliant geo-political think-tank neo-conservative strategists. John Kerry’s brilliant “win-win” proposal of last September during his September 11 Jeddah meeting with ailing Saudi King Abdullah was simple: Do a rerun of the highly successful State Department-Saudi deal in 1986 when Washington persuaded the Saudis to flood the world market at a time of over-supply in order to collapse oil prices worldwide, a kind of “oil shock in reverse.” In 1986 was successful in helping to break the back of a faltering Soviet Union highly dependent on dollar oil export revenues for maintaining its grip on power. So, though it was not made public, Kerry and Abdullah agreed on September 11, 2014 that the Saudis would use their oil muscle to bring Putin’s Russia to their knees today.
  • It seemed brilliant at the time no doubt. On the following day, 12 September 2014, the US Treasury’s aptly-named Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, headed by Treasury Under-Secretary David S. Cohen, announced new sanctions against Russia’s energy giants Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, Lukoil, Surgutneftgas and Rosneft. It forbid US oil companies to participate with the Russian companies in joint ventures for oil or gas offshore or in the Arctic. Then, just as the ruble was rapidly falling and Russian major corporations were scrambling for dollars for their year-end settlements, a collapse of world oil prices would end Putin’s reign. That was clearly the thinking of the hollowed-out souls who pass for statesmen in Washington today. Victoria Nuland was jubilant, praising the precision new financial warfare weapon at David Cohen’s Treasury financial terrorism unit. In July, 2014 West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark price for US domestic oil pricing, traded at $101 a barrel. The shale oil bonanza was booming, making the US into a major oil player for the first time since the 1970’s. When WTI hit $46 at the beginning of January this year, suddenly things looked different. Washington realized they had shot themselves in the foot.
  • They realized that the over-indebted US shale oil industry was about to collapse under the falling oil price. Behind the scenes Washington and Wall Street colluded to artificially stabilize what then was an impending chain-reaction bankruptcy collapse in the US shale oil industry. As a result oil prices began a slow rise, hitting $53 in February. The Wall Street and Washington propaganda mills began talking about the end of falling oil prices. By May prices had crept up to $62 and almost everyone was convinced oil recovery was in process. How wrong they were.
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  • Since that September 11 Kerry-Abdullah meeting (curious date to pick, given the climate of suspicion that the Bush family is covering up involvement of the Saudis in or around the events of September 11, 2001), the Saudis have a new ageing King, Absolute Monarch and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman, replacing the since deceased old ageing King, Abdullah. However, the Oil Minister remains unchanged—79-year-old Ali al-Naimi. It was al-Naimi who reportedly saw the golden opportunity in the Kerry proposal to use the chance to at the same time kill off the growing market challenge from the rising output of the unconventional USA shale oil industry. Al-Naimi has said repeatedly that he is determined to eliminate the US shale oil “disturbance” to Saudi domination of world oil markets. Not only are the Saudis unhappy with the US shale oil intrusion on their oily Kingdom. They are more than upset with the recent deal the Obama Administration made with Iran that will likely lead in several months to lifting Iran economic sanctions. In fact the Saudis are beside themselves with rage against Washington, so much so that they have openly admitted an alliance with arch foe, Israel, to combat what they see as the Iran growing dominance in the region—in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq.
  • This has all added up to an iron Saudi determination, aided by close Gulf Arab allies, to further crash oil prices until the expected wave of shale oil company bankruptcies—that was halted in January by Washington and Wall Street manipulations—finishes off the US shale oil competition. That day may come soon, but with unintended consequences for the entire global financial system at a time such consequences can ill be afforded. According to a recent report by Wall Street bank, Morgan Stanley, a major player in crude oil markets, OPEC oil producers have been aggressively increasing oil supply on the already glutted world market with no hint of a letup. In its report Morgan Stanley noted with visible alarm, “OPEC has added 1.5 million barrels/day to global supply in the last four months alone…the oil market is currently 800,000 barrels/day oversupplied. This suggests that the current oversupply in the oil market is fully due to OPEC’s production increase since February alone.” The Wall Street bank report adds the disconcerting note, “We anticipated that OPEC would not cut, but we didn’t foresee such a sharp increase.” In short, Washington has completely lost its strategic leverage over Saudi Arabia, a Kingdom that had been considered a Washington vassal ever since FDR’s deal to bring US oil majors in on an exclusive basis in 1945.
  • That breakdown in US-Saudi communication adds a new dimension to the recent June 18 high-level visit to St. Petersburg by Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister and son of King Salman, to meet President Vladimir Putin. The meeting was carefully prepared by both sides as the two discussed up to $10 billion of trade deals including Russian construction of peaceful nuclear power reactors in the Kingdom and supplying of advanced Russian military equipment and Saudi investment in Russia in agriculture, medicine, logistics, retail and real estate. Saudi Arabia today is the world’s largest oil producer and Russia a close second. A Saudi-Russian alliance on whatever level was hardly in the strategy book of the Washington State Department planners.…Oh shit! Now that OPEC oil glut the Saudis have created has cracked the shaky US effort to push oil prices back up. The price fall is being further fueled by fears that the Iran deal will add even more to the glut, and that the world’s second largest oil importer, China, may cut back imports or at least not increase them as their economy slows down. The oil market time bomb detonated in the last week of June. The US price of WTI oil went from $60 a barrel then, a level at which at least many shale oil producers can stay afloat a bit longer, to $49 on July 29, a drop of more than 18% in four weeks, tendency down. Morgan Stanley sounded loud alarm bells, stating that if the trend of recent weeks continues, “this downturn would be more severe than that in 1986. As there was no sharp downturn in the 15 years before that, the current downturn could be the worst of the last 45+ years. If this were to be the case, there would be nothing in our experience that would be a guide to the next phases of this cycle…In fact, there may be nothing in analyzable history.”
  • October is the next key point for bank decisions to roll-over US shale company loans or to keep extending credit on the (until now) hope that prices will slowly recover. If as strongly hinted, the Federal Reserve hikes US interest rates in September for the first time in the eight years since the global financial crisis erupted in the US real estate market in 2007, the highly-indebted US shale oil producers face disaster of a new scale. Until the past few weeks the volume of US shale oil production has remained at the maximum as shale producers desperately try to maximize cash flow, ironically, laying the seeds of the oil glut globally that will be their demise. The reason US shale oil companies have been able to continue in business since last November and not declare bankruptcy is the ongoing Federal Reserve zero interest rate policy that leads banks and other investors to look for higher interest rates in the so-called “High Yield” bond market. Back in the 1980’s when they were first created by Michael Millken and his fraudsters at Drexel Burnham Lambert, Wall Street appropriately called them “junk bonds” because when times got bad, like now for Shale companies, they turned into junk. A recent UBS bank report states, “the overall High-Yield market has doubled in size; sectors that witnessed more buoyant issuance in recent years, like energy and metals mining, have seen debt outstanding triple or quadruple.”
  • Assuming that the most recent downturn in WTI oil prices continues week after week into October, there well could be a panic run to sell billions of dollars of those High-Yield, high-risk junk bonds. As one investment analyst notes, “when the retail crowd finally does head for the exits en masse, fund managers will be forced to come face to face with illiquid secondary corporate credit markets where a lack of market depth…has the potential to spark a fire sale.” The problem is that this time, unlike in 2008, the Federal Reserve has no room to act. Interest rates are already near zero and the Fed has bought trillions of dollars of bank bad debt to prevent a chain-reaction US bank panic. One option that is not being discussed at all in Washington would be for Congress to repeal the disastrous 1913 Federal Reserve Act that gave control of our nation’s money to a gang of private bankers, and to create a public National Bank, owned completely by the United States Government, that could issue credit and sell Federal debt without the intermediaries of corrupt Wall Street bankers as the Constitution intended. At the same time they could completely nationalize the six or seven “Too Big To Fail” banks behind the entire financial mess that is destroying the foundations of the United States and by extension of the role of the dollar as world reserve currency, of most of the world.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 15
     
    I give a lot of credibility to this article's author when it comes to matters involving the oil market. Remember when reading that the only thing propping up the U.S. dollar is the Saudi (later extended to all OPEC nations) insistence that they be paid for their oil and natural gas in U.S. dollars, which creates artificial demand for the dollar globally. If the Gulf Coast States begin accepting payment in rubles or yuan, it is curtains for the U.S. dollar in global markets.  
Peter Manoukian

The Artificial Socialist VS The GOD Fearing Social Democrat - 2 views

Also Found On: http://www.petermanoukian.com/eventdet.php?id=10&cidd=2 The Social Democrat Socialist who declared his faith in GOD was regarded to be a Romantic Perfectionist and a Uthopian, anawa...

Faith GOD LORD social justice christian socialist democrat marxism politics religion righteous humanity international humanitarian socialism

started by Peter Manoukian on 13 Oct 10 no follow-up yet
Gary Edwards

Speculators, Politicians, and Financial Disasters : A history of Banking and Socialism - 0 views

www.commentarymagazine.com/...the-madness-of-crowds-13180

politics banking socialism fannie-freddie

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Oct 08 - Cached
  • As the sorry tale of the S&L crisis suggests, the road to financial hell is sometimes paved with good intentions. There was nothing malign in attempting to keep these institutions solvent and profitable; they were of long standing, and it seemed a noble exercise to preserve them. Perhaps even more noble, and with consequences that have already proved much more threatening, was the philosophy that would eventually lead the United States into its latest financial crisis—a crisis that begins, and ends, with mortgages. A mortgage used to stay on the books of the issuing bank until it was paid off, often twenty or thirty years later. This greatly limited the number of mortgages a bank could initiate. In 1938, as part of the New Deal, the federal government established the Federal National Mortgage Association, nicknamed Fannie Mae, to help provide liquidity to the mortgage market.
  • it was, ironically, the New Deal that institutionalized discrimination against blacks seeking mortgages. In 1935 the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), established in 1934 to insure home mortgages, asked the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation—another New Deal agency, this one created to help prevent foreclosures—to draw up maps of residential areas according to the risk of lending in them. Affluent suburbs were outlined in blue, less desirable areas in yellow, and the least desirable in red. The FHA used the maps to decide whether or not to insure a mortgage, which in turn caused banks to avoid the redlined neighborhoods. These tended to be in the inner city and to comprise largely black populations. As most blacks at this time were unable to buy in white neighborhoods, the effect of redlining was largely to exclude even affluent blacks from the mortgage market.
  • In 1977, responding to political pressure to abolish the practice, Congress finally passed the Community Reinvestment Act, requiring banks to offer credit throughout their marketing areas and rating them on their compliance. This effectively outlawed redlining.
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  • in 1995, regulations adopted by the Clinton administration took the Community Reinvestment Act to a new level. Instead of forbidding banks to discriminate against blacks and black neighborhoods, the new regulations positively forced banks to seek out such customers and areas. Without saying so, the revised law established quotas for loans to specific neighborhoods, specific income classes, and specific races. It also encouraged community groups to monitor compliance and allowed them to receive fees for marketing loans to target groups.
  • the Clinton changes in 1995. As part of them, Fannie and Freddie were now permitted to invest up to 40 times their capital in mortgages; banks, by contrast, were limited to only ten times their capital. Put briefly, in order to increase the number of mortgages Fannie and Freddie could underwrite, the federal government allowed them to become grossly undercapitalized—that is, grossly to reduce their one source of insurance against failure. The risk of a mammoth failure was then greatly augmented by the sheer number of mortgages given out in the country.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 29 Oct 08
       
      wow, there's that "40 to 1" lending to asset ratio that took down the big five investment banks in October of 2008!
  • Since banks knew they could offload these sub-prime mortgages to Fannie and Freddie, they had no reason to be careful about issuing them. As for the firms that bought the mortgage-based securities issued by Fannie and Freddie, they thought they could rely on the government’s implicit guarantee. AIG, the world’s largest insurance firm, was happy to insure vast quantities of these securities against default; it must have seemed like insuring against the sun rising in the West.
  • remaining at the heart of the financial beast now abroad in the world are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the mortgages they bought and turned into securities. Protected by their political patrons, they were allowed to pile up colossal debt on an inadequate capital base and to escape much of the regulatory oversight and rules to which other financial institutions are subject. Had they been treated as the potential risks to financial stability they were from the beginning, the housing bubble could not have grown so large and the pain that is now accompanying its end would not have hurt so much.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Oct 08
     
    Fueled by easy credit, the real-estate market had been rising swiftly for some years. Members of Congress were determined to assure the continuation of that easy credit. Suddenly, the party came to a devastating halt. Defaults multiplied, banks began to fail. Soon the economic troubles spread beyond real estate. Depression stalked the land. The year was 1836.
Gary Edwards

Empire of Debt Book Review | Silver Monthly - The Silver Investor's Resource - 2 views

www.silvermonthly.com/...empire-of-debt-review

bill-bonner american-debt debt-crisis inflation

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 May 10 - Cached
  • America’s delusion is this: debt doesn’t matter, and “the rest of the world will take American IOUs forever.”
  • It’s a delusion that may well signal the end of the American financial system.
  • There’s only thing wrong with the American Empire. “Instead of getting paid for providing protection, the United States is on the receiving end of loans from its tributary states and trading partners.” In other words, instead of functioning as a proper empire, which means making a profit, America malfunctions as an Empire of Debt.
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  • The authors suggest that America has sold its birthright to China for a mess of pottage. They point out that “consumer spending is 71% of the U.S. economy. Current U.S. debt is about $37 trillion. The total value of all assets in America is only about $50 trillion.”
  • there are three ways for America to reduce its debt. The U.S. dollar can be devalued. The dollar can be made less valuable because of inflation. Or the debt may be forsaken.
  • Gary Edwards on 13 May 10
     
    Empire of Debt was published in 2006. It stated bluntly that the housing market occupied the center of an inflated bubble. The authors asserted the bubble would pop, leaving a sticky residue everywhere. They were right. The authors stated that Alan Greenspan's policies were detrimental to the U.S. economy. They were right. Empire of Debt not only identified the problems, but it provided a solution. Invest in gold or the Japanese yen. It would appear that once again they were right. The yen is strong and gold has made a phenomenal run, selling for over $1000 per ounce.
Joseph Skues

Prisoner Advocate Elaine Brown on Georgia Prison Strike: "Repression Breeds Resistance" - 0 views

www.democracynow.org/...vocate_elaine_brown_on_georgia

elaine advocate prisoner brown on georgia

shared by Joseph Skues on 17 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • four prisons in Georgia remain in lockdown five days after prisoners went on strike
  • Using cell phones purchased from guards, the prisoners coordinated the nonviolent protests to stage the largest prison strike in U.S. history.
  • reports of widespread violence and brutality by the guards against the prisoners on strike
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  • Elaine Brown, Longtime prison activist and former chair of the Black Panther Party. Her books include The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America and A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story.
  • Black Panthers, Then and Now (5/13/1996)
  • until they receive better medical care and nutrition, more educational opportunities, payment for the work they do in the prisons.
  • they’re demanding just parole decisions, an end to cruel and unusual punishments, and better access to their families.
  • the newly formed group Concerned Coalition to Respect Prisoners’ Rights
  • And t hey made a decision that that would be on December 9th.I have no idea why they picked that date and how they ended up getting perhaps ten prisons involved. But at that point, of course, the guards and the administration became aware of their intention. And so, when they locked down on the night of the 8th, their decision was to not get up.
  • they’re talking about four prisons, and there were probably ten in the initial one-day strike
  • Can you tell us a little bit about your life and how you came to be a prison activist today?
  • have known him for 15 years, and I have been with him for that long, since he was incarcerated and put into an adult facility at 14 years old.
  • there’s no real educational opportunities. There’s no exercise. There’s nothing else.
  • e food is bad. They have poor nutrition.
  • the constant violence being perpetrated against them by guards, who with their own idle time look to try and instigate an incident here or there, so there’s a lot of screaming, hollering, you know, aggressive behaviors that go on. And so, there’s always some incident jumping off,
  • But the prisoners in the state of Georgia are paid nothing at all.Now, that’s not to say that the prisoners in other states are being paid. They’re mostly being paid a dollar a day to 50 cents an hour
  • they are not paid one single dime, and they are required to clean the floors, clean the showers, do the yard work, do the dishes, cook the food—in other words, to maintain the prison itself.
  • I learned the other day that one guy said he paid $800 to a guard for a cell phone that was probably worth about 50 bucks. So, that’s the first point that has to be made, because people imagine that there’s all this smuggling going on—and there is, but it’s on the part of—in the main, on the part of guards that are inside these facilities.
  • all of them, for reasons that I cannot explain how they suddenly understood how to be unified, decided, “Yeah, we’re not working, and we’re down with this, and we’re not going to get up, and we’re going to stay united.” And across the prisons, in the various sets, they called each other, sent text messages
  • Not only is he on lockdown, but he’s in the hole right now, because from almost day one or so, I was informed that he was taken off to the hole, deemed some sort of leader.
  • In the Black Panther Party, there was a 10-point platform and program that articulated some of the manifestations of our general oppression, talking about lack of education, as a matter of fact, not having enough food and housing. In essence, what we called for was freedom and right of self-determination.
  • the Brown Berets, the Red Guard, the Young Lords, the Young Patriots, and so forth
  • So, we became internationalists.
  • when we consider that we black people make up approximately 12 to 13 percent of the overall population and yet almost 50 percent of the prison population, we have to ask the question, is this the result of some genetic flaw in black people? Are we obviously some sort of criminally minded? Or is there something wrong in the scheme of things? Obviously, the latter is what I would say. And so, I’ve committed myself to bringing people out of prison.
  • So I helped to organize the Committee to Free Chip Fitzgerald. These people have been buried in prison for their political beliefs, and they’ve been buried in prison for their poverty. There are no rich people languishing in the prisons of America.
  • which is what they are doing by prodding men with everything, turning off the heat, beating people, forcing them out of their cells, turning off the hot water, destroying and trashing people’s property, not feeding them, and so forth and so on, all kinds of tactics to instigate a violent response.
Joseph Skues

America: No Vacation Time For You | NEWS JUNKIE POST - 0 views

newsjunkiepost.com/...erica-no-vacation-time-for-you

vacation america labor congrss

shared by Joseph Skues on 20 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • In the richest country in the world, there is no right to any vacation time
  • In most other wealthy nations, there are between 20-35 vacation days per year (4-7 weeks).
  • 1 in 4 private-sector workers in the US do not receive any paid vacation or paid holidays
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • *The average paid vacation + paid holidays provided to U.S. workers in the private sector (15) is less than the minimum required by law in nearly every other rich country
  • 69% of low wage workers have vacation
  • 36% of part time workers have any paid vacation
  • The United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation.
  • but most of the rest of the world’s rich countries offer between five and 13 paid holidays per year.
  • For example, the average lower-wage worker (less than $15 per hour) with a vacation benefit received only 10 days of paid vacation per year in 2005, compared to 14 days of paid vacation for higher-wage workers with paid vacations. If we look at all workers ? those who receive paid vacations and those who don’t ? the vacation gap between lower-wage and higher-wage workers is even larger: only 7 days for lower-wage workers, compared to 13 days for higher-wage workers.
  • we also note that several foreign countries offer additional time off for younger and older workers, shift workers, and those engaged in community service including jury duty.
  • Three countries even mandate that employers pay vacationing workers a small premium above their standard pay in order to help with vacation-related expenses
  • Our analysis does not cover paid leave for other reasons such as sick leave, parental leave, or leave to care for sick relatives.
  • A 2007 report by the World Tourism Organization cataloged a sampling of nations to compare and contrast figures of the average number of vacation days offered: Italy 42 days France 37 days Germany 35 days Brazil 34 days United Kingdom 28 days Canada 26 days Korea 25 days Japan 25 days U.S. 13 days
  • Even Koreans who work hundreds of more hours per year than Americans average nearly twice the number of paid vacation days
  • On the other side of the scale, people in The Netherlands work hundreds of hours less per year than Americans,  and averaged 45 paid days off at one time (recent data not available).
  • One in six workers in the US are unable to take any vacation days for various reasons (usually due to workload), with some people going for years without taking their offered time off.
  • They calculate this to be worth $19.3 billion a year to their employers.
  • And 53% of respondents did not know that US employees receive considerably less annual vacation time than their counterparts in other industrialized countries.
  • The research firm Ipsos
  • lists the percentage of people in the following countries that used the full amount of their offered paid vacation time: France: 89 percent Argentina: 80 percent Hungary: 78 percent Britain: 77 percent Spain: 77 percent Saudi Arabia: 76 percent Germany: 75 percent Belgium: 74 percent Turkey: 74 percent Indonesia: 70 percent Mexico: 67 percent Russia: 67 percent Italy 66 percent Poland: 66 percent China: 65 percent Sweden: 63 percent Brazil: 59 percent India: 59 percent Canada: 58 percent United States: 57 percent South Korea: 53 percent Australia: 47 percent South Africa: 47 percent Japan: 33 percent Why the discrepancy?  Kathleen E. Christensen, the founder of the Workplace, Work Force and Working Families program at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and author of the book Workplace Flexibility: Realigning 20th-Century Jobs for a 21st-Century Workforce, states
  • Many of these countries have strong labor unions and the workers are more protected than in the U.S.”
  • Ironic that the country with the largest economy and greatest wealth in the world does not require any vacation time for the workers who create the wealth with their labor.  When paid annual and holiday leave is offered, it is less than half of what most other countries receive, and of that almost half of Americans do not use all of their days.
  • addition to our finding that the United States is the only country in the group that does not require employers to provide paid vacation time, we also note that several foreign countries offer additional time off for younger and older workers, shift workers, and those engaged in community service including jury duty
  • addition to our finding that the United States is the only country in the group that does not require employers to provide paid vacation time, we also note that several foreign countries offer additional time off for younger and older workers, shift workers, and those engaged in community service including jury duty
  • n addition to our finding that the United States is the only country in the group that does not require employers to provide paid vacation time, we also note that several foreign countries offer additional time off for younger and older workers, shift workers, and those engaged in community service including jury duty.
Gary Edwards

Cow Economics & Politics - 1 views

docs.google.com/...pub

Banksters Cows S&P-downgrade

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Aug 11
     
    Update on that classic economic-political use case; "You have two cows". Hard to joke when the stock market has lost over $2 Trill in one week, and neither the government or the Federal Banksters Reserve show any concern.  Obama's golf game, fund raising and vacation schedule will not miss a beat.  Cape Cod calls and Obama is there.  Bernake and the Banksters met today, with a stock market begging for him to print up some more free fuel.  Bernake decides to stick with the plan and go with the collapse of the USA and the Dollar as scheduled. GOLD today is over $1780 /oz.  It's value in dollars has risen over $120 /oz since the raising of the debt limit to near $17 Trillion. The stock market melted down yesterday, crashing through key support barriers … shattering the confidence of millions of individual investors … and prompting most - who had been trying to turn a blind eye to the carnage - to start heading for the hills. Yesterday, Aug 9 2011 was the worst trading day since December of 2008. Just since the market began falling on July 26th, more than $7.8 trillion in equity has now been erased! Even though the Banksters are flush with $16.1 Trill in Federal Bankster Reserve coupons (GAO Audit of 2009-2010 Bankster books), the market can't seem to sort things out. And Banks stocks got hit hardest of all in yesterdays crash: US Bancorp and Wells Fargo were both down 9%. Huntington Bancshares and JP Morgan Chase declined 8.5% and 9.4% respectively. Fifth Third Bankcorp fell 11.4% and Capital One fell 12.08%. Regions Bank dropped 13.5% and SunTrust lost 13.9% of its value. Saw a National Media special on S&P last night.  These clowns gave Enron, Worldcom, Lehman Brothers, Ireland, Greece and Iceland their highest ratings right up until the eve of their collapse.  And then there's those trillions in garbage mortgage securities and derivatives rated triple A right through the collapse of the World economy
Gary Edwards

911: Lloyds of London Insurance brokers have sued Citigroup-AMEC et al. in respect of t... - 1 views

www.godlikeproductions.com/...pg1

9_11 911-Conspiracy-facts Lloyd's-of-London 911-Insurance-Fraud

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • We allege the Citigroup-AMEC partners sabotaged the diesel generators to feed fires lit by arsonists on the 11th, 12th or 13th floors of WTC7 where the Securities & Exchange Commission lost between 3,000 to 4,000 files. The SEC files contained evidence of insider trading by Citigroup-AMEC investment bank partners in the shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom. The House Financial Services Committee was seeking information about the treatment Citigroup's Salmon Smith Barney investing banking division may have given WorldCom executives. Salomon had offices in 7 World Trade Center and Citigroup says back-up tapes of corporate emails from September 1998 through December 2000 were stored at the building and destroyed in 9/11. Citigroup subsequently paid $2.65 billion to the settlement class which purchased WorldCom securities during the period from April 1999 through June 2002. www.thestreet.com/markets...36925.html www.citigroup.com/citigro...40510a.htm
  • At 5:20 p.m. on 9/11, 7 World Trade Center collapsed in its own footprint at a speed slightly slower than free fall under gravity in a manner consistent with a controlled demolition. Molten steel and partially evaporated steel members were found in the debris pile of WTC #1, 2 and 7. The thermal signature of 32 hot spots, 5 days and 10 days after the collapse, is consistent with all the buildings being rigged for demolition with an incendiary such as thermite.
  • We allege that the Citigroup-AMEC partnership now conspired to remove and destroy evidence of arson before filing bogus property insurance claims in an arrangement with Larry Silverstein and Silverstein Properties, including a claim for a double payment for the destruction of the Twin Towers. "Griffin quotes court documents to the effect that Silverstein had only $14 million invested in the insurance deal for the Twin Towers (compared to 50 times as much by his [off-book] lenders) through limited liability investment vehicles."
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Sep 11
     
    Incredible.  In 2006 Lloyd's of London sued a group comprised of Citigroup, AMEC and GMAC for a "concealed demolition" conspiracy resulting in insurance fraud.  This is complicated, but the key assertion is that World Trade Center building #1, #2, and #7 were rigged for demolition prior to the 9/11/01 attack.  The claim also alleges the involvement of Larry Silverstein, who had purchased these buildings a few months prior to the 9/11 attack, and made the subsequent and fraudulent insurance claim. Based on the Lloyd's of London report: "9/11 - A Citigroup-AMEC insurance fraud on Lloyd's of London?" .. by David Hawkins, Foundation Scholar, Cambridge University, Founder of the Citizen's Association of Forensic Economists at Hawks' CAFE .
Gary Edwards

Will The Dollar Standard Collapse? - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/-inflation-or-deflation-2009-5

financial-crisis obama-socialism inflation dollar-destruction Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 May 09 - Cached
  • Before I begin, I’ll make a prediction, since I’m an investor and my job is to predict. I increasingly believe that the dollar will collapse, and its ramifications could be as violent as when the credit markets cracked in July 2007. Currency collapses are nothing new, just as the bursting of a credit market bubble was nothing new. A dollar collapse could very well lead to carnage in domestic asset markets, whether it be the stock market, bond market, etc. Also, US imports and the overvalued dollar are fueling many of the export-oriented economies abroad, so a dollar collapse could wreak havoc on foreign asset markets as well. And once it happens, we’re going to view the collapse of the dollar as an obvious event that we should have long seen coming. Just as we now view the subprime wreckage and bursting of the real estate bubble as an event we should have easily predicted.The problem is timing. Does the dollar collapse in 2009, or 2015? And is it a slow depreciation, or a sudden 50% fall? Those are tougher questions. Richard Duncan predicted the dollar’s demise in 2002. His error of timing discredited an otherwise brilliant book.
  • In a sentence, “The Dollar Crisis” is about how the world changed in 1971. That was when Richard Nixon dropped the gold standard (or its close cousin, the Bretton Woods international monetary system). Here’s the youtube video: Youtube Bretton Woods. The end of the gold standard ushered in a new era of large trade imbalances and the buildup of foreign currency reserves, and these trade imbalances and large foreign currency reserves have had significant impacts on the global economy that many people don’t realize. Huge trade imbalances and large foreign reserves didn’t really exist during the gold standard. During the gold standard, a country’s money supply was determined by the amount of gold it had. Banks’ reserves were either gold or indirectly tied to gold, and so the amount of money they could lend, and that the nation could print, was backed by the nation’s gold reserves. To see the implications of that sort of monetary system on trade imbalances, let’s take a hypothetical United States and China, where the US is buying lots of goods from China. The US gets goods; China gets dollars. China takes its excess dollars, gives them to the US, and gets gold in exchange. The US gold reserves would decline, causing credit contraction in the US. This would lead to recession; prices would adjust downwards; and falling prices would enhance the trade competitiveness of the US. The US would stop exporting so many goods from China as China’s costs of production begin rising relative to the United States’. The US would stop being a net importer; gold would flow back in; and equilibrium on the balance of payments would be re-established.Under the gold standard, trade imbalances were unsustainable and self-correcting.
  • Today, in the system of fiat money, that’s no longer the case.
  • Gary Edwards on 19 May 09
     
    The Dollar Crisis Quick Synopsis:     * Abandoning the gold standard in 1971 has resulted in large global trade imbalances and a massive buildup of foreign currency reserves     * These trade imbalances and buildup of foreign reserves have resulted in frequent booms and busts since 1971     * The Japanese bust of 1989, the Asian economic crisis of 1997, and the current US credit market collapse have resulted from the post-1971 paper money monetary system     * Abandoning the gold standard has gradually resulted in a very overvalued US dollar, and that the dollar is headed for disaster     *  "The dollar standard is inherently flawed and increasingly unstable. Its collapse will be the most important economic event of the 21st century."
Paul Merrell

Edward Snowden doesn't deserve clemency: The NSA leaker hasn't proved he is a whistlebl... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...r_hasn_t_proved_he.single.html

surveillance state NSA Snowden amnesty

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • And yet I firmly disagree with the New York Times’ Jan. 1 editorial (“Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower”), calling on President Obama to grant Snowden “some form of clemency” for the “great service” he has done for his country.
  • If that were all that Snowden had done, if his stolen trove of beyond-top-secret documents had dealt only with the NSA’s domestic surveillance, then some form of leniency might be worth discussing. But Snowden did much more than that. The documents that he gave the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.” In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong. These operations have nothing to do with domestic surveillance or even spying on allies. They are not illegal, improper, or (in the context of 21st-century international politics) immoral. Exposing such operations has nothing to do with “whistle-blowing.”
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Jan 14
     
    Another "kill the messenger" piece on Edward Snowden, this one by a Council on Foreign Relations analyst. 
Paul Merrell

Defending Dissent » New Docs Show Army Coordinated Spy Ring - 1 views

www.defendingdissent.org/...army-spy-ring

surveillance state Army fusion-centers litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 May 14 - No Cached
  • Army illegally supplied  intelligence on nonviolent antiwar protesters to FBI and police in multiple states Tacoma, WA – Recently obtained public records confirm an Army-led, multi-agency spy network that targeted “leftists/anarchists” as domestic terrorists. The Army used illegal infiltration to gather information on nonviolent antiwar protesters, disseminate it to the FBI and police departments in multiple states, and in some cases used it to disrupt planned protests by preemptively and falsely arresting activists. Public records obtained last month by Olympia activist Paul French reveal new evidence in the widely-watched Army spying case Panagacos v. Towery. An email from November 2007, in particular, shows that intelligence analyst John J. Towery was paid by the Army to infiltrate political groups and share unlawfully obtained intelligence with a growing network of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, and police departments in Los Angeles, Portland, Eugene, Everett, and Spokane. The Towery email not only represents a broader spying program than previously thought, it also confirms the program was led by the Army, a fact contradicted by Towery’s 2009 sworn statements.
  • “The latest revelations show how the Army not only engaged in illegal spying on political dissidents, it led the charge and tried to expand the counterintelligence network targeting leftists and anarchists,” said Larry Hildes, a National Lawyers Guild attorney who filed the Panagacos lawsuit in 2010. “By targeting activists without probable cause, based on their ideology and the perceived political threat they represent, the Army clearly broke the law and must be held accountable.” Previously obtained public records indicate that absent such accountability, the Army will continue to spy on and target protesters, which it did until at least 2010, long after Towery’s identity was exposed. Public records previously obtained in 2009 already established that over a two-year period beginning in 2006, Towery (under the alias “John Jacob”) spied on the Olympia antiwar group Port Militarization Resistance (PMR) as well as several other organizations, including Students for a Democratic Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Iraq Veterans Against the War. It has also already been established that Towery’s intelligence was passed on to the Washington State Fusion Center, a communications hub of  local, state and federal law enforcement, and then used by local police to target activists for repeated harassment, preemptive and false arrest, excessive use of force, and malicious prosecution
  • The recently disclosed Towery email was a follow-up to a 2007 Domestic Terrorism Conference he attended in Spokane, during which “domestic terrorist” dossiers on some of the Panagacos plaintiffs were distributed. The Towery email shows the development of a multi-agency spying apparatus in intimate detail. “I thought it would be a good idea to develop a leftist/anarchist mini-group for intel sharing and distro,” wrote the Army analyst to several law enforcement officials. Towery references books, “zines and pamphlets,” and a “comprehensive web list” as source material, but cautions the officials on file sharing “because it might tip off groups that we are studying their techniques, tactics and procedures.” Towery, who worked at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, not only coordinated his actions with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, many of whom are named defendants in the Panagacos case, he also admitted to eavesdropping on a confidential, privileged attorney-client email listserv of criminal defendants and their legal counsel. Such conduct is considered a constitutional violation, but Towery also took sensitive information from the listserv vital to a pending criminal trial in 2007 and passed it on to fusion center officials who then transmitted it to prosecutors, forcing a mistrial in a case the defense was winning handily. The case was later dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The public records disclosure comes as government spying and criticism of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program has reached a fever pitch. However, a little-known and rarely, if ever, enforced law from 1878 distinguishes the spying under Panagacos from that of the NSA. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the military from enforcing domestic laws on U.S. soil by making such actions a Gross Misdemeanor, yet to-date no official has been prosecuted under the Act. Instead of conceding to the violations, the Army is currently using the Panagacos case to try to seal nearly 10,000 pages of documents, many of which are incriminating and embarrassing to the government. The legal effort to unseal those documents will play out over the next few weeks. The Obama Administration tried to dismiss the Panagacos lawsuit, but in a Ninth Circuit decision from December 2012 the court rejected the government’s arguments, ruling that allegations of First and Fourth Amendment violations were “plausible,” and ordered the case to proceed to trial. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of seven PMR members who sought to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through nonviolent civil disobedience and is being heard by U.S. District Court Judge Ronald B. Leighton. In addition to Towery, named defendants in Panagacos include Thomas Rudd, one of Towery’s superiors at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the U.S. Army, Navy, and Coast Guard, as well as certain officials within its ranks, the City of Olympia and its police department, the City of Tacoma and its police department, Pierce County, and various personnel from those jurisdictions.
  • Panagacos v. Towery is currently in the discovery stage and is scheduled to go to trial in June 2014. Further information: Recently disclosed Towery email Panagacos lawsuit complaint Domestic terrorism dossiers on plaintiffs
  • Paul Merrell on 30 May 14
     
    One I had missed from February, 2014. I believe I had bookmarked something about this before the lawsuit was filed. Now not only has the case been filed but the alleged grounds for the lawsuit have been greenlighted by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. If you click through the link to the court's opinion, you'll find one of the Ninth Circuit's shorter opinions, less than five pages, which does not even mention that the defendants were employed by the U.S. Army or any branch of government, while still rejecting their claim of government officials' qualified immunity from suit for the alleged First and Fourth Amendment violations. The third amended complaint sufficiently alleged facts to support claims that had been clearly established as violative of the First and Fourth Amendments.   It's clear that the plaintiffs have smoking gun evidence and that the National Lawyers' Guild is all over this one. Trial is scheduled next month, according to the article. It's just under 300 miles from here to Seattle, but I just might make the trip to watch a few days of this trial. Strong First Amendment cases for damages that survive appellate review of the qualified immunity nearly always settle before trial. But this one smells like it is going to trial for publicity purposes even if not for the vindication of rights, considering the nature of the organizations involved both as targets of the surveillance and their lawyers. It's great entertainment watching government guys and gals squirm on the witness stand when they've been caught violating civil rights. In criminal cases, invoking the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination cannot be taken as evidence of guilt. But in a federal civil rights case, that entitles the plaintiffs to have the jury instructed that it can infer liability from the resort to the Fifth Amendment to refuse answering questions.  Better back in the day when I was the lawyer asking the questions. But it's still great fun just to watch
Paul Merrell

Testosterone Pit - Home - NSA Spying Crushes US Tech Companies in Emerging Ma... - 0 views

www.testosteronepit.com/...es-in-emerging-markets-an.html

surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback emerging-economies

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Cisco CEO John Chambers had a euphemism for it during the first quarter earnings call: the “challenging political dynamics in that country,” that country being China. But then there was India and others, including Russia where NSA leaker Edward Snowden is holed up, and where sales crashed much worse than in China. It led Cisco to chop its guidance. Overall revenues, instead of rising, would drop 8% to 10%. Or, as Tal Liani, an analyst from Bank of America, pointed out during the call, by “11% sequentially,” the worst since January 2009 when “the world was about to collapse.” It was in between the lines everywhere, but never once did Chambers, or anyone else on his team, mouth the acronym NSA. It was off limits. And that’s exactly how another tech giant, IBM, had dealt with its own China revenue fiasco.
  • How fast has the collapse happened? Cisco had already been struggling in China a year ago, when business was “flat.” Chambers had explained at the time that China was “very important” to Cisco. “We have invested a lot of resources in innovation in China for the last 20 years, and our commitment to China has not changed in any way,” he’d said. But China is home to some of Cisco’s largest competitors, Huawei and ZTE – whose forays into the US have been blocked by Congress for security reasons. Cisco was feeling the heat from that imbroglio – but it thought that problem would go away in a couple of quarters. In Q4, ending July 31, after the Snowden revelations had been ricocheting around for months, the China business fell 6%. “China is a little bit unique to Cisco because of some of the issues going on, which you all are aware of,” he’d said during the earnings call on August 14, once again refusing the utter NSA. Three months later, due to “the challenging political dynamics in that country?” An 18% plunge. Business in India, the “highlight in Asia-Pacific,” as Chambers had called it three months ago, had been up a dizzying 19% during Q4. Three months later, a stunning reversal: down 18%.
  • A year ago, Brazil was a star: orders had jumped 24%! By Q4 this year, orders were flat. Then revelations pushed Brazil center-stage in the spying scandal, and it had an allergic reaction. The government is even trying to force Google and others to keep Brazilian data in local data centers, not spread around the world. It would require the reengineering of the internet. During that quarter, orders plunged 25%! And Russia, where Snowden is trying to find new footing? Already damaged from the revelations, business in Q4 had been “approximately flat.” But now it plummeted 30%, the worst of any major market in Cisco’s book.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “I’ve never seen that fast a move in emerging markets,” Chambers said. His industry peers were seeing the same thing. “Most of my CEO counterparts can almost finish my sentences in terms of what’s occurring,” he said. He even mentioned IBM. It’s “an industry phenomenon.” The collapse in the emerging markets – “We believe that more than half the world’s GDP occurs there,” he said – was “very consistent across the board.” And that consistency is what he was fretting about. “We usually, unfortunately, see things a couple of quarters ahead of our peers. This time we were a little bit surprised.” In the top five emerging markets, the “softening” started in Q4, “when we said they went from 13% growth the quarter before to flat in Q4. The other 15 countries continued to grow in the low teens. This time, all of them came down, and so out of our top 10, it was pretty brutal on that.” The NSA’s reckless all-encompassing spying, and its hand-in-glove multi-billion-dollar collusion with US tech companies to accomplish it, is now wreaking havoc on these same tech companies. Revenues are getting crushed overseas. Emerging market governments and companies are looking at other options. Trust that has taken decades to build has evaporated. A study in early August estimated that the spying scandal would cost US tech companies $35 billion. Which might not even be enough for a down-payment: alone that 11% drop in Cisco’s stock today cost shareholders $16 billion. 
  • It’s not a temporary issue. New revelations bubble to the surface all the time to complete the picture of a seamless, borderless, nearly perfect surveillance society. One dimension: the NSA and British GCHQ secretly break into the “clouds” of US companies to syphon off user data on a large scale. Illegal in the US. But the cloud is worldwide. Read..... NSA Secretly Breaks Into The Cloud Of US Tech Companies, Siphons Off Data, Fouls Up Revenues Overseas And here is my whole series on the spreading NSA spying scandal and its implications.
Paul Merrell

The Most Important Surveillance Order We Know Almost Nothing About | American Civil Lib... - 0 views

www.aclu.org/...r-we-know-almost-nothing-about

surveillance state CIA NSA DIA DoD litigation FOIA

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Over the last seven months, we have learned an incredible amount about the government's post-9/11 surveillance efforts. But there is a crucial gap in our basic understanding. We now know, for example, a good deal about how the government conducts surveillance that targets Americans, and about surveillance of foreigners that sweeps up Americans' international communications when the actual surveillance takes place on U.S. soil (for example, from a Google facility in the United States). But we still know very little about Executive Order 12,333, which governs the NSA's surveillance abroad — even when that surveillance sweeps up Americans' communications. To fill that gap, the ACLU, along with the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, today filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demanding that the government release basic information about its use of Executive Order 12,333 to conduct surveillance of Americans' international communications. Why is Executive Order 12,333 so important? Here is how we explained it in our complaint (filed today in federal court in New York):
  • Although EO 12,333 permits the government to target foreigners abroad for surveillance, recent revelations have confirmed that the government interprets that authority to permit sweeping monitoring of Americans' international communications. How the government conducts this surveillance, and whether it appropriately accommodates the constitutional rights of American citizens and residents whose communications are intercepted in the course of that surveillance, are matters of great public significance and concern. While the government has released several documents describing the rules that govern its collection and use of Americans' international communications under statutory authorities regulating surveillance on U.S. soil, little information is publicly available regarding the rules that apply to surveillance of Americans' international calls and emails under EO 12,333. That gap in public knowledge is particularly troubling in light of recent revelations, which make clear that the NSA is collecting vast quantities of data worldwide pursuant to EO 12,333. For instance, recent news reports indicate that, relying on the executive order, the NSA is collecting: nearly 5 billion records per day on the location of cell phones, including Americans' cell phones; hundreds of millions of contact lists or address books from personal email and instant messaging accounts; and information from Google and Yahoo user accounts as that information travels between those companies' data centers located abroad.
  • The core of the problem is that the NSA has, for years, relied upon its authority to gather foreign intelligence as permission to conduct sweeping surveillance of Americans' international communications. We know that this happens under the laws that govern surveillance on U.S. soil, and recent revelations confirm that it happens — perhaps to an even greater extent — in the surveillance that takes place abroad under Executive Order 12,333. Moreover, the rules that govern surveillance under the executive order are of particular concern because that surveillance is not meaningfully overseen by Congress, and it is not overseen at all by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In other words, the executive is conducting surveillance under its own executive order without any real oversight. We now know too well that unchecked surveillance authority can lead to dangerous overreach. That's why we are fighting for the release of documents that would shed light on the internal rules that the executive has set for itself when it monitors international communications abroad — including Americans' international communications.
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Jan 14
     
    The lawsuit names as defendants the CIA, NSA, and DoD (because the Defense Intelligence Agency is under DoD). 
Gary Edwards

The Purchase Of Our Republic | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...purchase-our-republic

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The massive consolidation of wealth, combined with the removal of any limits on money in campaigns, has allowed for the purchase of our government. Today I am publishing a comprehensive and important guest essay, The Purchase of Our Republic, by longtime correspondent Y. Falkson.
  • Americans know that something is wrong, deeply wrong. They see signs of the problem everywhere: income inequality, growing concentration and power of mega corporations, political donations/corruption, the absence of jobs with decent salaries, the explosion of the US prison population, healthcare costs, student loan debt, homelessness, etc. etc.  However, the true causes and benefactors behind these problems are purposely hidden from view. What Americans see is Kabuki Theater of a functioning form of capitalism and democracy, but beyond this veneer our country has devolved into the exact opposite. Those who benefit from this crony capitalist state go to extreme lengths to paper over the reality and convince Americans that the system works, the American Dream is still a reality and that American democracy is in fact democratic. Below I hope to begin to outline some of the underlying dynamics and trends that have evolved in recent decades and led us so far from what we once were. As fun as it would be, the answer is not some evil conspiracy by the Illuminati, but rather the unfortunate result of three long term and mutually reinforcing components that have been attacking the fundamental roots of the structure of our Republic. The first is the increased concentr
  • ation of corporate and private wealth. Both of which are quickly yelled down in the media as anti-free market and class war hysteria. The second is the use of this wealth to capture all three branches of government in order to ensure the continued extraction of capital from the many and to the few.The rich might have climbed the ladder because they earned it, but they have then purchased government to pull up the ladder behind them. The consequence of the first two components is a democracy in name only that represents the very few.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • 1. Faux Capitalism = Wealth Consolidation / Income Inequality
  • While there is no true beginning to the story, we can start with the incredible build up and concentration of wealth among corporations in recent decades. The USA now boasts a cartel-like set of corporate titans in almost every industry. It goes beyond, but certainly includes, our Too Biggerer To Fail banks, merged from what was 37 banks in 1995 into a Frankenstein’s monster like 5 (Citigroup, JP Morgan-Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs). In agriculture, Monsanto alone controls over 85% of all corn and soy bean crops, four companies control 83% of the beef market, 66% of the hog market and 58% of the chicken market. So while shopping at the grocery store might appear to be the manifestation of capitalism at its finest, it doesn’t take much digging to look behind the curtain to see how little competition truly exists.
  • When the average American goes to pick up some groceries, they are shopping at Walmart and buying something from P&G that is mostly made of Monsanto corn. Is that true choice? The same story plays out with our news and media (and other industries) where we have gone from 50 companies in 1983 to the big 6 which control over 90% of all media. Is choosing to watch one of 30 news channels, all of which are owned by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch) a real choice? This is not capitalism and they are not competing, not in the true sense of the word. Along with this consolidation of corporations in recent decades, their senior leaders have taken up a larger and larger piece of the pie at the expense of their employees. In particular, the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has increased 1,000 percent since 1950. Unsurprisingly, Walmart is both the largest employer in the country and the worst CEO pay offender with a ratio of over 1000:1. This is at a time where worker productivity has increased significantly, something that historically correlated with increased pay. But no more. It’s a new twist on the old Soviet saying “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”, but now it’s closer to “we do all of the work and they pretend to pay us”.
  • Private Wealth: As a consequence of the royal tribute we pay to the C-suite class these days, we have likely surpassed the pre-Depression Roaring Twenties in terms of inequality.
  • This, amazingly, has only accelerated since the crisis in 2008 in thanks to bailouts, Quantitative Easing and other gifts from Congress and the Fed. The wealthy 1% and in particular the .01% have now grown their fortunes to levels that tax comprehension and even their ability to spend it (the decisions by a few billionaires such as Bill Gates to essentially donate his fortune is a tacit acknowledgement that our current system over provides wealth to a select few).
  • So what is an incredibly wealthy capitalist CEO of a mega-corporation do once they control their industry and have essentially limitless wealth? Well in a competitive market, the only way to go from the top is down and the only thing that can make that happen is competition. Consequently, competition must be avoided whenever possible.
  • To squash or prevent competition, the oligopolies and oligarchs target their resources on the one place that can make competition illegal, our government.Something to keep in mind the next time you see a corporate billionaire grandstanding about the importance of “Free Markets” when their strategy is quite the opposite. As this capture of the government has taken place we have essentially shifted from capitalism and to crony capitalism. So we now have industries that have mastered the art of faking capitalism by turning our government into one that fakes democracy. This government takeover took time, but the purchase of all 3 branches of government has almost been completed by 2014. You don’t have to take my word for it, luckily that has now been empirically proven in an analysis of over 20 years of government policy where the clear conclusion was that policy makers respond solely to those in the top 90th percentile and essentially ignore the large majority of Americans.
  • 2. Wealthy Purchase of Government Institutions / Elections
  • Purchase of the Executive Branch:
  • Let’s take a step back and take a glimpse at how the government was purchased, beginning with the executive branch. In 1980, Reagan’s election cost less than $300 million. When Bush beat Kerry in 2004, it cost almost 3x times as much, almost $900 Million. 4 years later, the 2008 election cost a record $1.3 Billion. It was in this election where Obama hammered the final nail in the coffin for government funded for elections. Obama, more so than any other candidate in recent decades had the widespread support of millions of small donors, but in the end I guess it wasn’t enough. So when Obama “leaned to the green”, it forever set the precedent that you can’t win without the backing of our nation’s oligarchs. Consequently, the money has only gushed in since as the cost of Obama’s reelection in 2012 skyrocketed to an unfathomable $7 billion. Needless to say this is slightly above the rate of inflation. Our Presidents are now preselected exclusively by a tiny fraction of Americans can have the money to fund what has become necessary for a legitimate run. Summary: Candidates spend years courting the super-rich to build up a multi-billion dollar war chest. Only those who succeed can actually run a campaign that an average American will be aware of. Then Americans get to choose one of the pre-selected “candidates”. No wonder voter turnout is so low… Executive branch, check!
  • – Note that media corporations benefit doubly as they can use their cash to fund elections, but are also the beneficiary of all that money as it is used for campaign spending.
  • Purchase of the Legislative Branch:
  • The process has progressed similarly in Congress. In 1978, outside groups spent $303,000 on congressional races. In 2012 that was up to $457,000,000. That is over 1,500 times the level in 1978. It would be funny, if it was so blatant and terrifying. By many accounts, our “leaders” in Congress spend 50% or more of their time working the phones or fundraisers rather than trying (and failing) to actually do the “people’s business”. Let’s also take a minute to appreciate the hypocrisy of anyone that pretends that the money doesn’t influence our government. Businesses do not give to politicians for charity. This is a payment for services that has proven exceedingly reliable and profitable. The ROI for money invested in purchasing Congressman is what CEO dreams are made of. No wonder the incentive is to invest in Congress rather than R&D or marketing. There are very few places in the world or times in history where you can find ROI’s in the thousands, or even the tens of thousands.
  • Review: Congressmen beg for money to get elected, make sure to vote the way your benefactors would like, consequently get more money to get elected again. If at any point they do lose or quit, they take the big payday to work for those who have been paying them all along. Legislative Branch, Check!
  • In addition, increasingly those who work on Congress (and regulators) were previously employed by these large corporations or expect to work there later. A recent example is Chris Dodd who left the Senate the head lobbyist for Hollywood at the MPAA, the guys behind SOPA and PIPA, but there are many many others.
  • Judicial Branch Endorsement of the Purchase of Government:
  • Last but not least, we have the enabling Judicial Branch. It only took a few purchased presidents to ensure the appointment of a majority of “free market” and “pro-business” judges. For instance, and disgracefully, Clarence Thomas was once legal counsel for Monsanto, but has not once recused himself from any cases involving Monsanto and always votes in their favor. These radicals have now fully endorsed and enabled the influx of money used to purchase the other branches. Specifically, 2 major decisions have completely opened the floodgates, Citizens United and McCutcheon. The first allowed unlimited contributions of corporate money into elections and brought us the notorious declaration that “corporations are people” and that “money is free speech”. This was more recently followed up with the private wealth equivalent in McCutcheon. In this ruling, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said as part of his majority opinion (presumably with a straight face) “… nor does the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner influence over or access to elected officials or political parties”. And with this, the Supreme Court has fully endorsed both major sources of immense wealth to purchase our elections and consequently our government. Review: The rich fund Presidential elections, Presidents nominate “business-friendly” judges and then the bought Congress approves their nominations. New judge then votes to ensure even more money is allowed to purchase elections. Judicial Branch, CHECK!
  • 3. A Faux Republic Dependent Upon the Funders and Not the Voters
  • The Founder’s Hope and the Sad Reality:
  • Acknowledging where we are as a country, it is often helpful to look to where we started for some perspective. Unsurprisingly, this type of problem was not overlooked back in the 18th century. In 1776, James Madison stated that his goal was to design a republic in which “powerful interest groups would be rendered incapable of subdoing the general will”. Madison hoped, perhaps naively, that factions would be thwarted by competing with other factions. Sadly, we are now in a time where factions (aka wealthy special interests) subdue the will of the people and ensure the government responds to them alone on those issues where they have a “special interest” and consequently asymmetric stakes in the game (Charles Hugh Smith). As a result, these groups essentially collude to allocate their resources to their own issues, but do not “thwart” or compete with other factions as they do the same. It’s a pretty great system, as long as you’re one of the wealthy few who can use their money to drown out the poor and voiceless many. And just like that, what was once a Republic has become a corrupt shell of its past self. All the signs are still there; votes, elections, campaigns, branches of government, etc., but behind the scenes the only ones represented are those who can afford to be heard.
  • Summary: This massive consolidation of wealth, combined with the removal of any limits on money in campaigns, has allowed for the purchase of our government, or as Dick Durban once stated, “frankly they [the banks in this case] own the place”. If money = free speech, then those with all the money, have all the free speech.
  • What Might Help? Now that I have likely and thoroughly depressed the reader, let’s bounce around some ideas for what can be done. As stated in the beginning, this is not an unknown problem and many people are promoting a number of ways to fix or at least ameliorate the problem. I will briefly describe just a few which I think provide some direction any of us could easily implement or support.
  • Change the Rules: Laurence Lessig of Harvard Law has put forward a visionary proposal for re-writing the way that campaigns are financed in his book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It. Put simply, he would like to empower every voter with a stipend, say $150 per election to give to whatever candidate or candidates they prefer. If you would like to accept this money, you would need to forgo any other contributions or support (one would hope including the indirect PAC kind). This would actually provide even more money than is used in current elections, but would effectively democratize the funding process. While there would still be a “funding election” that takes place before the actual election, the funding would not be unequally provided. Lessig’s work has only begun, as this sort of bill or likely constitutional reform is nearly impossible to achieve, but he has undertaken and I assume will continue to implement many brave and creative ways of bringing about the change all American’s should support. Most recently he has suggested we begin to fund, ironically enough, a Super PAC to end all Super PACs. It would be funded with the solitary goal of changing how money impacts our elections. Please support them here: www.mayone.us/
  • Change Our Day-to-Day: At the more micro level, Charles Hugh Smith believes that we will inevitably see our overly centralized and inefficient system erode away as it is replaced by more resilient, local and efficient businesses and societies outside of the current system. With that in mind, he recommends that “all anyone can do is the basic things--lower our energy footprint, stay healthy and avoid unnecessary medications and procedures, support local businesses, organic food growers, etc. In other words, what we can do is support local businesses that are part of the emerging economy rather than support corporate cartels.” Your Vote Does Matter: Do you live in Ohio, Florida or New Hampshire? Probably not. Despite what we are told every 4 years, there are actually states outside of the “swing states”, and even more surprising, the very large majority of Americans live in those states where your “vote doesn’t matter”. New Yorkers an Californians all know their state will turn Blue no matter who the candidates are and either don’t vote at all, or often vote for the Blue team in order to feel like they are on the winning side.
  • The truth is that if you see the election as Red vs. Blue, you vote probably doesn’t matter. But here is the trick, if all the people who think their vote didn’t matter decided to vote for whom they might actually believe in, then their votes just might matter.
  • What if all the growing number of “Independents” (who usually still vote Blue), chose to vote for a third party? What if a third party candidate won a state like New York or California? What if that candidate was one whose primary promise to the voters was to champion a change to the role of money in government (perhaps in line with what Lessig proposes)? Would you vote for such a person?I would argue you should. If California alone (with 55 electoral votes) were to vote for a 3rd party that would likely prevent either Red or Blue candidate from winning the requisite 270 electoral votes.
  • Think about the message that would send to both parties. I would predict that both sides would start to bend over backwards for an endorsement from that 3rd party and they would have to get it by taking up the same primary cause for reforming money in government. Consequently, at the root of our corrupted system which is perpetually ignored as both sides might suddenly become the big issue of the election. Then maybe we might begin to turn things around.
  • Sources: Charles Hugh Smith (oftwominds, Surivival+, etc.), Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism, Econned), Laurence Lessig (Republic Lost, multiple TED Talks), Matt Taibbi (blog at Rolling Stone and now at The Intercept), Zero Hedge, John Robb, Max Keiser, Clay Shirky (Cognitive Surplus), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited), George Orwell (1984), Michael Lewis, Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow), James Richards (Currency Wars), Han Joon Chang (23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism) and Joseph Stiglitz (Mismeasuring Our Lives) 
Paul Merrell

Hillary Clinton wanted to arm Syrian rebels, memoir reveals | World news | theguardian.com - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...on-arming-syrian-rebels-memoir

war & peace Syria Auction 2016 Hillary Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Hillary Clinton favoured arming Syria's rebels early in the country's civil war but was overruled by Barack Obama, the former secretary of state said in her new memoir, according to CBS News.Clinton's long-awaited book Hard Choices – seen as the unofficial start to her expected bid for the presidency in 2016 – is set to launch on 10 June, but CBS said on Thursday it had got hold of a copy at a bookshop"Wicked problems rarely have a right answer; in fact, part of what makes them wicked is that every option appears worse than the next. Increasingly that's how Syria appeared," Clinton wrote.She said she returned to Washington from an overseas trip convinced that the training and arming of moderates among the Syrian rebels was the best way to turn the tide against the country's president, Bashar al-Assad."The risks of both action and inaction were high, [but] the president [Obama]'s inclination was to stay the present course and not take the significant further step of arming rebels," she added."No one likes to lose a debate, including me. But this was the president's call and I respected his deliberations and decision," she wrote, according to CBS News.
  • She also wrote about how she eventually realised that her vote supporting the Iraq war resolution in 2002 when she was a US senator was a grave mistake."I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. And I wasn't alone in getting it wrong," she wrote. "But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple."
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14
     
    Hillary wanted to army the jihadis but Barack said no. The article should have mentioned that Barack changed his mind recently, so Hillary got her way in absentia.
Paul Merrell

Hillary admits she was wrong on Iraq war vote - 0 views

www.nation.com.pk/...she-was-wrong-on-iraq-war-vote

war & peace Iraq Auction-2012 Hillary

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • In a frank admission, Hillary Clinton, a potential presidential candidate, says she ‘got it wrong. Plain and simple’ when she voted as a U.S. senator to authorize the war in Iraq, according to her new memoir. Mrs Clinton’s support, in 2002, for the Iraq War Resolution dogged her unsuccessful 2008 run for President against Barack Obama, who opposed the war from the start. Clinton has distanced herself from her vote — but never in such forceful terms as in her book, ‘Hard Choices,’ which will be officially released on June 10.‘Many senators came to wish they had voted against the resolution. I was one of them,’ she writes, according to CBS News, which obtained an advance copy and posted excerpts on its website. ‘As the war dragged on, with every letter I sent to a family in New York who had lost a son or daughter, a father or mother, my mistake (became) more painful,’ Clinton adds.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jun 14
     
    Let's reword that first quote more accurately: "I gladly stampeded with a majority of the Senate instead of waiting until the facts were in. Obviously, I am unfit to become our nation's Commander in Chief because I act on the basis of false pro-war propaganda instead of reality." 
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