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Tomgram: Gregoire Chamayou, Hunting Humans by Remote Control | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...nting_humans_by_remote_control war & peace drones history
shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • It was during the Vietnam War that the U.S. Air Force, to counteract the Soviet surface-to-air missiles that had inflicted heavy casualties on it, invested in reconnaissance drones nicknamed “Lightning Bugs,” produced by Ryan Aeronautical. An American official explained that “these RPVs [remotely piloted vehicles] could help prevent aircrews from becoming casualties or prisoners… With RPVs, survival is not the driving factor.” Once the war was over, those machines were scrapped. By the late 1970s, the development of military drones had been practically abandoned in the United States. However, it continued elsewhere. Israel, which had inherited a few of these machines, recognized their potential tactical advantages. In 1973, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), facing off against Egypt, ran up against the tactical problem of surface-to-air missiles. After losing around 30 planes in the first hours of the Yom Kippur War, Israeli aviation changed its tactics. They decided to send out a wave of drones in order to mislead enemy defenses: “After the Egyptians fired their initial salvo at the drones, the manned strikes were able to attack while the Egyptians were reloading.” This ruse enabled Israel to assume mastery of the skies. In 1982, similar tactics were employed against the Syrians in the Bekaa Valley. Having first deployed their fleet of Mastiff and Scout drones, the Israelis then sent out decoy planes that were picked up by enemy radar. The Syrians activated their surface-to-air missiles, to no effect whatsoever. The drones, which had been observing the scene from the sky, easily detected the positions of the antiaircraft batteries and relayed them to the Israeli fighter planes, which then proceeded to annihilate them.
  • The drones were used for other purposes as well: “Two days after a terrorist bomb destroyed the [U.S.] Marine Barracks in Beirut in October 1983, Marine Commandant Gen. P.X. Kelley secretly flew to the scene. No word of his arrival was leaked. Yet, across the border, Israeli intelligence officers watched live television images of Kelley arriving and inspecting the barracks. They even zoomed the picture in tight, placing cross hairs directly on his head. Hours later, in Tel Aviv, the Israelis played back the tape for the shocked Marine general. The scene, they explained, was transmitted by a Mastiff RPV circling out of sight above the barracks.” This was just one of a series of minor events that combined to encourage the relaunch of American drone production in the 1980s. “All I did,” confessed Al Ellis, the father of the Israeli drones, “was take a model airplane, put a camera in it, and take the pictures… But that started an industry.”
  • But it would take a “‘different kind of war’ to make the Predator into a predator.” No more than a few months before September 11, 2001, officers who had seen the Predator at work in Kosovo had the idea of experimentally equipping it with an antitank missile. Writes Bill Yenne in his history of the drone, “On February 16, 2001, during tests at Nellis Air Force Base, a Predator successfully fired a Hellfire AGM114C into a target. The notion of turning the Predator into a predator had been realized. No one could imagine that, before the year was out, the Predator would be preying upon live targets in Afghanistan.” Barely two months after the outbreak of hostilities in Afghanistan, George Bush was in a position to declare: “The conflict in Afghanistan has taught us more about the future of our military than a decade of blue ribbon panels and think-tank symposiums. The Predator is a good example… Now it is clear the military does not have enough unmanned vehicles.”
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U.S. begins aerial refueling for Decisive Storm - Al Arabiya News - 0 views

english.alarabiya.net/...eling-for-Decisive-Storm-.html war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Yemen aerial-refueling
shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The United States has started daily aerial refueling for warplanes in the Saudi-led coalition carrying out air strikes against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Pentagon said Wednesday. The first refueling flight took place on Tuesday night with a U.S. Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker providing fuel for a F-15 fighter jet operated by Saudi Arabia and an F-16 flown by the United Arab Emirates, spokesman Colonel Steven Warren told reporters. “We will have a tanker sortie every day,” Warren said, adding that all flights will be outside of Yemeni air space.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15
     
    Mission creep.
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Iran's Khamenei breaks silence in nuclear deal, says sanctions must go | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...-rouhani-idUSKBN0N00EQ20150409 war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Iranian-nukes-myth negotiations sanctions
shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • (Reuters) - Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Thursday demanded that all sanctions on Iran be lifted at the same time as any final agreement with world powers on curbing Tehran's nuclear program is concluded. Khamenei, the Islamic Republic's most powerful figure and who has the last say on all state matters, was making his first comments on the interim deal reached between Iran and the powers last week in the Swiss city of Lausanne.He repeated his faith in President Hassan Rouhani's negotiating team. But in remarks apparently meant to keep hardline loyalists on side, he warned about the "devilish" intentions of the United States."I neither support nor oppose the deal. Everything is in the details, it may be that the deceptive other side wants to restrict us in the details," Khamenei said in a speech broadcast live on state television.His stand on the lifting of sanctions matched earlier comments by Rouhani, who said Iran would only sign a final nuclear accord if all measures imposed over its disputed atomic work are lifted on the same day.
  • These include nuclear-related United Nations resolutions as well as U.S. and EU nuclear-related economic sanctions."All sanctions should be removed when the deal is signed. If the sanctions removal depends on other processes, then why did we start the negotiations?" Khamenei said.However, the United States said on Monday sanctions would have to be phased out gradually under the comprehensive nuclear pact. France also said on Tuesday that many differences, including on sanctions, needed to be overcome if a final agreement was to be reached.
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Yemen crisis: What will Saudi Arabia do when - not if - things go wrong in their war wi... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ia-houthi-rebels-10153113.html war & peace Yemen Houthis Hezbollah Saudis Pakistan
shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The depth of the sectarian war unleashed in Yemen shows itself in almost every Gulf Arab official statement and in the official press. The Saudis take it as read that Iranian forces are actually present in Yemen to assist the Shia Houthis. There are Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon with the Houthis. Iran is itself behind the Houthi uprising. One Kuwaiti journalist calls the Houthi rebels “rats”. As usual in Arab wars, real evidence has gone out of the window.
  • At a Syrian refugee conference in Kuwait this week, the Saudis were lauded for their generosity in pledging $60m for homeless and destitute Syrians out of a total of $3.8bn of promised aid world wide. No-one was ungenerous enough to mention that the Saudis bought $67bn worth of weapons from the US in 2011-12.
  • With that kind of money you might be able to buy up most of the protagonists in the Syrian war and get them to agree on a ceasefire. But this is the figure that makes sense of the Yemen war.That, and the fact that Pakistan is part of this extraordinary coalition. Pakistan is a nuclear power – “Saudi Arabia’s nuclear bomb outside Saudi Arabia”, as one conference delegate bleakly put it in Kuwait.There are 8,000 Pakistani troops based in the Saudi kingdom. And Pakistan is one of the most corrupt and unstable nations in South-west Asia. Bringing Pakistan – widely believed to have shipped second-hand weapons to anti-government rebels in Syria via Saudi Arabia – into the Yemen conflict is not adding oil to the fire. It’s adding fire to the oil.Iran has maintained a diplomatic silence. When Saudi foreign minister Saud al-Faisal accused Iran of supporting the destabilisation of Yemen, the Iranian deputy foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian warned that the Saudi attack was a “strategic mistake”, a comparatively mild reaction.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Perhaps that is what you expected to hear when the Iranian minister’s nation was still trying to persuade the Americans to lift sanctions against Tehran. Or perhaps he actually meant what he said, which means that the Saudis may find it to have been easier starting a war in Yemen than ending one.
  • The leader of the Lebanese Shia Hezbollah movement, Hassan Nasrallah, scored a point in his own country when he asked why the Saudis were prepared to fight the Houthis with their huge forces but had never raised the sword to fight for the Palestinians.Saudis are being told to regard their country’s struggle as a decision even more important than Saudi Arabia’s appeal to the US to send troops to the land of the Two Holy Mosques in 1990 – a view Osama bin Laden might have disagreed with.What is less clear, however, is where Washington stands amid all this rhetorical froth in the Gulf and real dead bodies in Yemen. There have been reports in the Arab states that US drone attacks have been made as part of the coalition’s battle in Yemen, that American intelligence has been pin-pointing targets for the Saudis (with the usual civilian casualties). There was a time when America’s war in Yemen seemed to be just part of the whole War on Terror fandango throughout the Middle East. Not any more.
  • And what of Israel? In Kuwait, Arabs privately agreed that Saudi fears of Iran’s nuclear potential suited Israel very well – although there has been no evidence in the Gulf that Israel heartily supported the Saudis to the point of sending them a message of approval over the Yemen assault.But with the US an ally of both countries, this would be unnecessary. What we now have to learn is what the Saudis will do when – not if – things go wrong.Ask the Pakistanis to send part of their vast army into the cauldron? Or ask their Egyptian allies to earn their pocket money from Riyadh by sending their soldiers to the land which the greatest of all Egyptian presidents once retreated from with deep regret: a man called Gamel Abdul Nasser
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 15
     
    The Saudis did request that Pakistan send in ground troops. The Pakistan Parliament is in its fourth day of debating the issue, with very strong opposition to the Saudi request. Still, the Saudis have sent Parkistan so much financial aid that fears of not acceding to the request might prevail. But another factor is that Pakistan has its domestic unrest to fight along the Afghan border where U.S. drones keep the kettle aboil; it may be reluctant to dilute its strength to send sufficient troops to Yemen to do the job.   Although the Saudi Army is ridiculously well-armed, it has no experience in fighting wars. The Saudis have preferred to work through mercenaries instead. If forced to send in its own troops, Yemen could indeed become the House of Saud's Afghanisatan.   The Houthi are battle-hardened and well organized along Hezbollah guerrilla lines with a Hezbollah advisory force in attendance. The Houthis took Yemen and no one should forget that Hezbollah has repelled the best that Israel could throw at them in Lebanon at least twice. (Hezbollah was originally trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces in the early 1990s.) There is also the enormous home court advantage for the Houthis, even more pronounced if the Saudis send in their own troops; the Houthis would then be fighting Salafists for their very survival as a culture.  
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The Investigation into 12333 Begins | Just Security - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...investigation-12333-begins surveillance state oversight PCLOB EO-12333
shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) voted 4–1 yesterday to conduct reviews of how Executive Order 12333 is used in counterterrorism investigations by the CIA and NSA. The PCLOB’s plan to investigate two surveillance programs conducted under the wide-ranging executive order will result in three reports — two classified, one public — that it hopes to complete by the end of this year. Rachel Brand, the sole board member to vote against the plan, did so largely because the public proposed reports will focus on the legal framework and adequacy of EO 12333’s privacy and civil liberties protections. She expressed concern that the report might make judgments about the whole of EO 12333 activities based on information about only two programs. But EO 12333 and its implementation are clouded in secrecy. The public knows very little about the activities that are conducted according to its terms. Such activities are usually conducted with very little congressional oversight. Examining two discrete sets of activities conducted under its auspices seems like a perfect place to start the process of informing the public about how EO 12333 is understood and used by the executive branch to conduct intelligence activities that fall largely outside of other independent oversight mechanisms.
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How Israel Hid Its Secret Nuclear Weapons Program - Avner Cohen and William Burr - POLI... - 0 views

www.politico.com/...el-nuclear-weapons-117014.html war & peace Israel-nukes history Office-365
shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • For decades, the world has known that the massive Israeli facility near Dimona, in the Negev Desert, was the key to its secret nuclear project. Yet, for decades, the world—and Israel—knew that Israel had once misleadingly referred to it as a “textile factory.” Until now, though, we’ve never known how that myth began—and how quickly the United States saw through it. The answers, as it turns out, are part of a fascinating tale that played out in the closing weeks of the Eisenhower administration—a story that begins with the father of Secretary of State John Kerry and a familiar charge that the U.S. intelligence community failed to “connect the dots.
  • In its final months, even as the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race captivated the country, the Eisenhower administration faced a series of crises involving Cuba and Laos. Yet, as the fall of 1960 progressed, President Dwight D. Eisenhower encountered a significant and unexpected problem of a new kind—U.S. diplomats learned and U.S. intelligence soon confirmed that Israel was building, with French aid, a secret nuclear reactor in the Negev Desert. Soon concluding that the Israelis were likely seeking an eventual nuclear weapons capability, the administration saw a threat to strategic stability in the Middle East and a nuclear proliferation threat. Adding fuel to the fire was the perception that Israel was deceitful, or had not “come clean,” as CIA director Allen Dulles put it. Once the Americans started asking questions about Dimona, the site of Israel’s nuclear complex, the Israelis gave evasive and implausible cover stories. 
  • This article, recounting the Dimona discovery and its implications, is based on a special collection of declassified documents published on Wednesday by the National Security Archive, the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, and the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California.
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Activists send the Senate 6 million faxes to oppose cyber bill - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...ion-faxes-to-oppose-cyber-bill surveillance state CISA legislation faxes Obama
shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Activists worried about online privacy are sending Congress a message with some old-school technology: They're sending faxes -- more than 6.2 million, they claim -- to express opposition to the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA).Why faxes? "Congress is stuck in 1984 and doesn't understand modern technology," according to the campaign Fax Big Brother. The week-long campaign was organized by the nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group Access and Fight for the Future, the activist group behind the major Internet protests that helped derail a pair of anti-piracy bills in 2012. It also has the backing of a dozen groups like the ACLU, the American Library Association, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and others.
  • CISA aims to facilitate information sharing regarding cyberthreats between the government and the private sector. The bill gained more attention following the massive hack in which the records of nearly 22 million people were stolen from government computers."The ability to easily and quickly share cyber attack information, along with ways to counter attacks, is a key method to stop them from happening in the first place," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who helped introduce CISA, said in a statement after the hack. Senate leadership had planned to vote on CISA this week before leaving for its August recess. However, the bill may be sidelined for the time being as the Republican-led Senate puts precedent on a legislative effort to defund Planned Parenthood.Even as the bill was put on the backburner, the grassroots campaign to stop it gained steam. Fight for the Future started sending faxes to all 100 Senate offices on Monday, but the campaign really took off after it garnered attention on the website Reddit and on social media. The faxed messages are generated by Internet users who visit faxbigbrother.com or stopcyberspying.com -- or who simply send a message via Twitter with the hashtag #faxbigbrother. To send all those faxes, Fight for the Future set up a dedicated server and a dozen phone lines and modems they say are capable of sending tens of thousands of faxes a day.
  • Fight for the Future told CBS News that it has so many faxes queued up at this point, that it may take months for Senate offices to receive them all, though the group is working on scaling up its capability to send them faster. They're also limited by the speed at which Senate offices can receive them.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Aug 15
     
    From an Fight For the Future mailing: "Here's the deal: yesterday the Senate delayed its expected vote on CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act that would let companies share your private information--like emails and medical records--with the government. "The delay is good news; but it's a delay, not a victory. "We just bought some precious extra time to fight CISA, but we need to use it to go big like we did with SOPA or this bill will still pass. Even if we stop it in September, they'll try again after that. "The truth is that right now, things are looking pretty grim. Democrats and Republicans have been holding closed-door meetings to work out a deal to pass CISA quickly when they return from recess. "Right before the expected Senate vote on CISA, the Obama Administration endorsed the bill, which means if Congress passes it, the White House will definitely sign it.  "We've stalled and delayed CISA and bills like it nearly half a dozen times, but this month could be our last chance to stop it for good." See also http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/125953876003/senate-fails-to-advance-cisa-before-recess-amid (;) http://www.cbsnews.com/news/activists-send-the-senate-6-million-faxes-to-oppose-cyber-bill/ (;) http://www.npr.org/2015/08/04/429386027/privacy-advocates-to-senate-cyber-security-bill (.)
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Obama, the 'Manchurian Candidate' Starts War on Business: Kevin Hassett - Bloomberg.com - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...news financial-crisis obama-socialism war-on-business war-on-capitalism banksters
shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Mar 09
     
    March 9 (Bloomberg) -- Back in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson gave us the War on Poverty. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs. Now that we have seen President Barack Obama's first-year legislative agenda, we know what kind of a war he intends to wage. It is no wonder that markets are imploding around us. Obama is giving us the War on Business. Imagine that some hypothetical enemy state spent years preparing a "Manchurian Candidate" to destroy the U.S. economy once elected. What policies might that leader pursue?
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Walking Away From Your Mortgage: Is it moral? Or is it a legitamate financial option b... - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/away-from-your-mortgage-2009-3 financial-crisis obama-socialism banksters
shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Mar 09 - Cached
  • MM CA said: Mar. 04, 1:28 PM Borrower_underwater: and your point is? defending the banks and mortgage industry? who said his house was dump? he said it was his dream home... pay attention... either way the man and his fmaily were smart enough to save 300k for a down payment. i live in california and the appreciation of housing the past 10 years was irrational and unsustainbale. he boguht three years ago. there was no crisis then. Why woudlnt he buy. Renting now is smart but then? i think you need to inderstand the crisis better. i understand a little bit more than you think i do: see my list of issues/predcitons i developed 3 mtonhs ago... most are coming true...
  • So here lies the squeeze. Originator gets paid per loan made. People in an iron lung are getting approved for subprime. Bank hopes to package loan into CMO and sell to Helsinki or some such. Who is supposed to make sure that the house is really worth what the guy in the iron lung is willing to pay? The appraiser. Not the Originator. Not the bank (we're clearly not talking the good old commmunity bank days were your loan officer knew your neighborhood).
  • it is easy to see where the bank's first protection against a borrower default, correctly establishing a home's value at the time of purchase, falls to the side. That's where it starts to look like the "pay me to rate you" goons at the rating agencies. The populace and ultimate debt holders have counted on the ratings and home valuation process to be clean but simple economic incentives should tell us otherwise.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • I agree that the argument that "it's priced into the rate" is insufficient, what is sufficient is the fact that the consequences of walking away are actually in the contract! If I stop paying, you take the house. That's why the bank gets to have a lien. It's all part of the deal we signed, remember?. I don't think walking away from the mortgage is even "breaking" the contract. We will simply be exercising a different clause of the contract: foreclosure in lieu of payment.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Mar 09
     
    Mortgage lenders absolutely hate borrowers who walk away from underwater mortgages, especially those who could actually afford to keep paying off their mortgages but just decide it isn't worth it. They hate them so much that the term-of-art for these borrowers is "ruthless." But the ethics of mortgage lenders don't have much to recommend them. We need to decide for ourselves whether or not there's a moral obligation to keep paying off a mortgage. For some it's practically a patriotic duty. For others it's a matter of being a good neighbor, since foreclosures could hurt their home values also. Still others say it's just a matter of being a moral person who keeps promises. Great comments to this story. Check out the predictions from MM_CA. They have a diigo highlight. At the time of my reading of this story, the DOW was down 200 pts to 6678.95. The Supreme Leader is busy conducting a healthcare summit, claiming that "fixing" (read "nationalizing") the healthcare system will result in so many jobs that the economy will turn around. The comments are well worth the time!
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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
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How JP Morgan Took Over All Kentucky's Financial Services, And Why You Should Be Scared... - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...C_and_why_you_should_be_scared Banksters JP-Morgan-Chase financial-collapse
shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Writing in response to the JP lawsuit on his Rolling Stone blog, Taibbi lamented that big banks were getting away with crimes that, when pulled off by blue-collar muscle outfits like the mob (and they are), result in lengthy jail sentences. Fraud on the part of JP Morgan and other corporate banks, he concluded, is “not going to stop until people start doing hard time for these crimes.”
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Aug 11
     
    On July 1, JP Morgan Chase became the Commonwealth's bank. As the state's official depository, JP now receives all deposits, writes all checks and makes all wire transfers on the $12-15 billion that flow through Kentucky state government in the course of a fiscal year. It will cut payroll checks, receive federal and other funds earmarked for the state, and disburse educational or transportation or any other funds to their appropriate monetary endpoints. For its trouble, the bank will receive $1.3 million in state fees and the ability to re-lend idle state funds out to customers for private gain. Yes, you should be worried. JP's decade A global corporation with more than $2 trillion in assets and operations in 60 countries, JP Morgan Chase has been a major figure in the ongoing global financial crisis. As one of the largest private banks in the U.S., the bank made incredible amounts of money by underwriting many of the questionable loans (sub-prime, zero down, adjustable rate) that fueled the American housing bubble. It then made even more money by packaging hundreds of these shitty loans into a single "product," a mortgage backed security, which it sold like Twinkies to pious religious non-profits, filthy-rich hedge fund managers, municipal fire-fighters, retired auto-workers, and the like, each security effectively putting these groups on the hook-and not JP-for the shitty loans that it had helped create. When, inevitably, individual homeowners began to default on their loans, thereby triggering the stock market collapse of 2008, JP Morgan found a way to make money on that, too, by buying insurance (known as credit default swaps) on the shitty securities of shitty mortgages that it had sold to unwitting investors. For good measure, the U.S. government handed the corporation $25 billion in TARP funds, $30 billion in U.S. treasury backing to purchase bankrupt Bear Stearns (previously a global leader in mortgage backed securities), and the biggest chun
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The Looting Of America: The Federal Reserve Made $16 Trillion In Secret Loans To Their ... - 0 views

endoftheamericandream.com/...uption-that-has-been-uncovered
shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • If the federal government shut down the Federal Reserve system, started issuing debt-free money and established a new system based on sound financial principles we might have a chance of turning this thing around.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 28 Sep 11
       
      Presidents Lincoln, Kennedy and Reagan all thought they could issue silver certificates from the US Treasury.  Only Reagan lived to tell about his once and future ambition, but even that was a close call. 1/4" from his heart to be exact.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 28 Sep 11
       
      An interesting side note is that Sadam Hussein, Hitler, and Quadafi shared more than just tyrannical blood lust.  They each defied the world order of international Banksters by threatening to create hard currencies.  Sadam wanted to be paid for his oil in Euro's denominated in gold and silver equivalencies rather than dollar denominated contractual agreements.  Meaning, whatever the prive of gold/silver is on a given day instead of whatever the dollar contracts specify.  Hitler ended the Wiemar fiat currency and moved to a hard Deutch Mark based on Bankster gold used to lauch the national socialist movement (the Banksters also famously funded Lenin's international communist revolution).  And it's well known that Quadafi tried to convince the congress of African nations to move off the dollar/euro fiat currencies to a hard gold/silver backed African currency initially launched through the trade of oil, diamonds and yellow cake commodities. One thigns for sure.  The Banksters are very good at stirring nationalist sentiment, and using these militaries to defeat those who would defy their control of the worlds money.
  • “”If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation,the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” – Thomas Jefferson
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Is Bank of America Headed for the Glue Factory? » Counterpunch: Tells the Fac... - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...ca-headed-for-the-glue-factory Banksters Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel Bank-of-America FDIC banksters
shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • The GAO detailed instance after instance of top executives of corporations and financial institutions using their influence as Federal Reserve directors to financially benefit their firms, and, in at least one instance, themselves….
  • The corporate affiliations of Fed directors from such banking and industry giants as General Electric, JP Morgan Chase, and Lehman Brothers pose ‘reputational risks’ to the Federal Reserve System, the report said. Giving the banking industry the power to both elect and serve as Fed directors creates ‘an appearance of a conflict of interest,’ the report added….
  • ‘If we [i.e. the World Bank] had seen a governance structure that corresponds to our Federal Reserve system, we would have been yelling and screaming and saying that country does not deserve any assistance, this is a corrupt governing structure.’” (“Non-Partisan Government Report: Federal Reserve Is Riddled with Corruption and Conflicts of Interest,” Washington’s Blog)
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • this move amounts to a direct transfer from derivatives counterparties of Merrill to the taxpayer, via the FDIC, which would have to make depositors whole after derivatives counterparties grabbed collateral.
  • This move paves the way for another TARP-style shakedown of taxpayers, this time to save depositors. No Congressman would dare vote against that. This move is Machiavellian, and just plain evil.” (Naked Capitalism)
  • Let’s say the second biggest bank in the country is starting to teeter because it’s loaded with all manner of dodgy (toxic?) derivatives that could blow up at any minute and take down the entire global financial system. Would you (a) Wait until the bombshell exploded knowing that the only choice you would then have would be to further expand the Fed’s balance sheet by another couple trillion dollars or (b) Try to sleaze the whole thing off on Uncle Sam and let the taxpayers pick up the tab?
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Oct 11
     
    Nice catch by Marbux.  A Bloomberg article explains how Bank of America is moving high risk derivatives into the coffers of a federally insured subsidiary.  Meaning, when (not if) the derivatives fail, the tax payers will get stuck with covering the losses and making the Banksters whole. The article also explains the recent GAO audit of the Federal Reserve where it was disclosed that through interlocking directories and shareholdings, the Bankster industry is in control of the Federal Reserve.  Awful, sickening stuff.  But a good catch nevertheless. excerpt: There are two things worth noting in this article. First, according to Bloomberg, "the transfers (of derivatives) are being requested by counterparties." Well, how do you like that? In other words, the investors on the other side of these contracts want Merrill to put them under an insurance umbrella provided by the FDIC. Now, why would that be? The only reason I can come up with, is that they know that a lot of these complex instruments are undercapitalized and ready to implode, so they want to make sure they get their money back any way possible. That means they need to latch on to Uncle Sam without anyone knowing about it. But, like we said, the cat is out of the bag. The other thing worth noting is that the Fed and the FDIC are at loggerheads over the matter. ("The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting.") Now, that's not good at all, in fact, it's a big red flag that suggests the Fed trying to pull a fast one on the American people. One does not have to look too far for other examples of Fed misbehavior; the endless bailouts (TARP, QE1 and 2, Operation Twist, ZIRP, etc) In fact, the Fed's history is a tedious chronicle of one shifty deal after another. This is just more of the same; another gift to big finance at the public'
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JPMorgan Chase Nears a $2 Billion Deal in a Case Tied to Madoff - NYTimes.com - 0 views

dealbook.nytimes.com/...-deal-in-a-case-tied-to-madoff banksters JPMorgan Madoff litigation settlement
shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Working through a long list of legal problems, JPMorgan Chase is starting the new year with another steep payout to the government. The bank plans to reach as soon as this week roughly $2 billion in criminal and civil settlements with federal authorities who suspect that it ignored signs of Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, according to people briefed on the case. All told, after reaching the Madoff settlements with federal prosecutors in Manhattan and regulators in Washington, the bank will have paid some $20 billion to resolve government investigations over the last 12 months.
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CNN Poll: Afghanistan war arguably most unpopular in U.S. history - CNN Political Ticke... - 0 views

politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/...-most-unpopular-in-u-s-history war & peace Afghanistan polls
shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Support for the war in Afghanistan has dipped below 20%, according to a new national poll, making the country's longest military conflict arguably its most unpopular one as well. The CNN/ORC International survey released Monday also indicates that a majority of Americans would like to see U.S. troops pull out of Afghanistan before the December 2014 deadline.
  • Just 17% of those questioned say they support the 12-year-long war, down from 52% in December 2008. Opposition to the conflict now stands at 82%, up from 46% five years ago.
  • "Independents have a much gloomier view of the war in Afghanistan than Republicans or Democrats," Holland said. "That may be because a Republican president started the war and a Democratic president has continued it, so there may be some residual support among people who identify with either party."
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  • The poll was conducted for CNN by ORC International between December 16 and 19, with 1,035 adults nationwide questioned by telephone. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points. The discontent evident in the CNN poll is also seen in two other national surveys conducted earlier this month. Two-thirds of those questioned in an ABC News/Washington Post poll said the war has not been worth fighting, and an Associated Press/GfK survey showed 57% saying the U.S. did the wrong thing in going to war in Afghanistan.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Jan 14
     
    82 per cent of Americans oppose the Afghan War, but Obama is still pressing Karzai to extend the war until 2014 and beyond. 
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Alt Thai News Network ATNN : Thailand: Next Anti-Regime Rally - January 13, 2014 - 0 views

altthainews.blogspot.com/...anti-regime-rally-january.html banksters Thailand Carlyle-Group corruption
shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In protest of unelected dictator Thaksin Shinawatra and his proxy regime led by his own nepotist-appointed sister Yingluck Shinawatra, anti-regime protesters plan to shut down Thailand's capital of Bangkok starting on Monday, January 13, 2014.  The necessity of continued mass mobilizations is due in part to the current regime's immense foreign backing - including across the West's mass media who continue to claim Thaksin Shinawatra's rule is legitimate despite him being a convicted criminal hiding abroad and openly running the country through a series of nepotist proxies which have included both his brother-in-law and now sister. While unthinkable and unacceptable in any other country, news fronts such as the BBC, New York Times, CNN, Reuters, AP, AFP and others insist that this cartoonish, criminal arrangement is somehow representative of "democracy" in Thailand.  The New York Times, despite defending what is by all measures an absurd abuse of the principles of representative governance, would even report in its article titled, "In Thailand, Power Comes With Help From Skype," that:  For the past year and a half, by the party’s own admission, the most important political decisions in this country of 65 million people have been made from abroad, by a former prime minister who has been in self-imposed exile since 2008 to escape corruption charges. 
  • The country’s most famous fugitive,Thaksin Shinawatra, circles the globe in his private jet, chatting with ministers over his dozen cellphones, texting over various social media platforms and reading government documents e-mailed to him from civil servants, party officials say.  It might be described as rule by Skype. Or governance by instant messenger, a way for Mr. Thaksin to help run the country without having to face the warrant for his arrest in a case that many believe is politically motivated. There is no question that an accused mass murderer and convicted criminal hiding abroad from a 2 year jail sentence, multiple arrest warrants, and a long list of pending court cases, is illegally running Thailand by proxy.  Of course, just as a convicted criminal running America or England via Skype would be a laughable prospect entirely unacceptable by Americans or English, likewise, it is unacceptable in Thailand. The sham elections the regime is planning for February 2, 2014 which have Thaksin Shinawatra's sister and brother-in-law once again at the top of the candidate list, have already been boycotted by all opposition parties, leaving the regime alone posting campaign posters along Thailand's roads, reminiscent of scenes of sham elections carried out in North Korea. 
  • Who is Thaksin Shinawatra and Why do People Detest Him?
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 14
     
    Long list of crimes and sins committed further down in the article. The Thai protest demonstrations have been massive of late. A group of U.S.-based banksters and other corporate interests have been plucking the Thai economy down to bare skin. 
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The Left Ought to Worry About Hillary Clinton, Hawk and Militarist, in 2016 | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...inton-hawk-and-militarist-2016 Auction 2016 war war & peace Hillary
shared by Paul Merrell on 28 May 14 - No Cached
  • When it comes to Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy, start first by disentangling the nonsense about Benghazi—a nonexistent scandal if ever there was one—from the broader palette of Clinton’s own, relatively hawkish views. As she consolidates her position as the expected nominee in 2016, with wide leads over all the likely GOP challengers, it ought to worry progressives that the next president of the United States is likely to be much more hawkish than the current one. Expect to be deluged, in the next few weeks, with news about Hard Choices, the memoir of her years as secretary of state under President Obama, to be released June 10. But we don’t need a memoir to know that, comparatively speaking, two things can be said about her tenure at the State Department: first, that in fact she accomplished very little; and second, that both before her appointment and during her service, she consistently came down on the hawkish side of debates inside the administration, from Afghanistan to Libya and Syria. She’s also taken a more hawkish line than Obama on Ukraine and the confrontation with Russia.
  • Commentators were observing that in an administration where all power and decision making were gravitating toward the White House, Clinton and I represented the only independent “power center”, not least because…we were both seen as “unfire-able.” [page 289] Gates confirms that he and Clinton lined up with the hawks against the doves on Afghanistan
  • In the brief excerpt that’s been released by her publisher, Clinton notes that as secretary of state she “ended up visiting 112 countries and traveling nearly one million miles.” But what, if anything, did she accomplish with all that to-ing and fro-ing? Not a lot. She largely avoided the Israel-Palestine tangle, perhaps because she didn’t want to risk crossing the Israel lobby at home, and it’s hard to see what she actually did, other than to promote the education and empowerment of girls and women in places where they are severely beaten down. And, while it’s wrong (and really silly) to call Clinton a neoconservative, she’s more of—how to put it?—a “right-wing realist” on foreign policy, who often backed military intervention as a first or second resort, while others in the White House—especially Obama’s national security staff and Vice President Biden’s own aides, were far more reluctant to employ the troops. In that vein, it’s useful to explore the memoirs of Robert Gates, who was secretary of defense under George W. Bush and then, inexplicably, under President Obama, too. In Duty: Memoir of a Secretary at War (which could also be the subtitle of Clinton’s own memoir), Gates says several times that he and Clinton saw eye to eye. (This has also been extensively documented by Bob Woodward, if more narrowly focused, in his 2010 book, Obama’s Wars.) In Duty, Gates says that he formed an alliance with Clinton because both he and her had independent power bases and were, in his words, “un-fireable”
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  • And Gates says that on the crucial decision to escalate the Afghan war in 2009 and then to slow the drawdown in 2010, he and Clinton were on the same side:
  • Paul Merrell on 28 May 14
     
    Criticism of Hillary from the progressive side: even more prone to use military intervention than Obama and pro-military/industrial complex, with some evidence to back those classifications. The problem, of course, is that public wishes bedamned, both the Republicans and Democrats will select candidates representing the War Party then present the choice of evils as their campaign theme. Either way, the War Party wins unless a winning third party candidate miraculously emerges. Such is the state of democracy in the American republic.   
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Venice votes to split from Italy as 89% of the city's residents opt to form a new indep... - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...orm-new-independent-state.html italy Venice secession
shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Venetians have voted overwhelmingly for their own sovereign state in a ‘referendum’ on independence from Italy. Inspired by Scotland’s separatist ambitions, 89 per cent of the residents of the lagoon city and its surrounding area, opted to break away from Italy in an unofficial ballot.The proposed ‘Repubblica Veneta’ would include the five million inhabitants of the Veneto region and could later expand to include parts of Lombardy, Trentino and Friuli-Venezia Giulia.
  • The floating city has only been part of Italy for 150 years. The 1000 year–old democratic Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia, was quashed by Napoleon and was subsumed into Italy in 1866. Wealthy Venetians, under mounting financial pressure in the economic crisis, have rallied in their thousands, after growing tired of supporting Italy’s poor and crime ridden Mezzogiorno south, through high taxation.
  • Campaigners say that the Rome government receives around 71 billion euros  each year in tax from Venice - some 21 billion euros less than it gets back in investment and services.Organisers said that 2.36million, 73 per cent, of those eligible to take part voted in the poll, which is not recognised by the Rome government. The ballot also appointed a committee of ten who immediately declared independence from Italy. Venice may now start withholding taxes from Rome. 
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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.
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  • “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.
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U.S. to China: We Hacked Your Internet Gear We Told You Not to Hack | Wired Enterprise ... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...nsa-cisco-huawei-china surveillance state U.S. China NSA-backdoors
shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The headline news is that the NSA has surreptitiously “burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture” sold by the world’s largest computer networking companies, including everyone from U.S. mainstays Cisco and Juniper to Chinese giant Huawei. But beneath this bombshell of a story from Der Spiegel, you’ll find a rather healthy bit of irony. After all, the United States government has spent years complaining that Chinese intelligence operations could find ways of poking holes in Huawei networking gear, urging both American businesses and foreign allies to sidestep the company’s hardware. The complaints grew so loud that, at one point, Huawei indicated it may abandon the U.S. networking market all together. And, yet, Der Speigel now tells us that U.S. intelligence operations have been poking holes in Huawei networking gear — not to mention hardware sold by countless other vendors in both the States and abroad. “We read the media reports, and we’ve noted the references to Huawei and our peers,” says William Plummer, a Huawei vice president and the company’s point person in Washington, D.C. “As we have said, over and over again — and as now seems to be validated — threats to networks and data integrity can come from any and many sources.”
  • Plummer and Huawei have long complained that when the U.S. House Intelligence Committee released a report in October 2012 condemning the use of Huawei gear in telephone and data networks, it failed to provide any evidence that the Chinese government had compromised the company’s hardware. Adam Segal, a senior fellow for China Studies at the Center for Foreign Relations, makes the same point. And now we have evidence — Der Spiegel cites leaked NSA documents — that the U.S. government has compromised gear on a massive scale. “Do I see the irony? Certainly the Chinese will,” Segal says, noting that the Chinese government and the Chinese press have complained of U.S hypocrisy ever since former government contractor Edward Snowden first started to reveal NSA surveillance practices last summer. “The Chinese government has been hammering home what they call the U.S.’s ulterior motives for criticizing China, and there’s been a steady drumbeat of stories in the Chinese press about backdoors in the products of U.S. companies. They’ve been going after Cisco in particular.”
  • To be sure, the exploits discussed by Der Spiegel are a little different from the sort of attacks Congress envisioned during its long campaign against Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese manufacturer. As Segal and others note, Congress mostly complained that the Chinese government could collaborate with people inside the two companies to plant backdoors in their gear, with lawmakers pointing out that Huawei’s CEO was once an officer in China’s People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, the military arm of the country’s Communist party. Der Spiegel, by contrast, says the NSA is exploiting hardware without help from anyone inside the Ciscos and the Huaweis, focusing instead on compromising network gear with clever hacks or intercepting the hardware as it’s shipped to customers. “For the most part, the article discusses typical malware exploits used by hackers everywhere,” says JR Rivers, an engineer who has built networking hardware for Cisco as well as Google and now runs the networking startup Cumulus Networks. “It’s just pointing out that the NSA is engaged in the practice and has resources that are not available to most people.” But in the end, the two types of attack have the same result: Networking gear controlled by government spies. And over the last six months, Snowden’s revelations have indicated that the NSA is not only hacking into networks but also collaborating with large American companies in its hunt for data.
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  • Jim Lewis, a director and senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, adds that the Chinese view state-sponsored espionage a little differently than the U.S. does. Both countries believe in espionage for national security purposes, but the Chinese argue that such spying might include the theft of commercial secrets. “The Chinese will tell you that stealing technology and business secrets is a way of building their economy, and that this is important for national security,” says Lewis, who has helped oversee meetings between the U.S. and the Chinese, including officers in the PLA. “I’ve been in the room when they’ve said that. The last time was when a PLA colonel said: ‘In the U.S., military espionage is heroic and economic espionage is a crime. In China, the line is not that clear.’” But here in the United States, we now know, the NSA may blur other lines in the name of national security. Segal says that although he, as an American, believes the U.S. government is on stronger ethical ground than the Chinese, other nations are beginning to question its motives. “The U.S has to convince other countries that our type of intelligence gathering is different,” he says. “I don’t think that the Brazils and the Indias and the Indonesias and the South Africas are convinced. That’s a big problem for us.”
  • The thing to realize, as the revelations of NSA snooping continue to pour out, is that everyone deserves scrutiny — the U.S government and its allies, as well as the Chinese and others you may be more likely to view with skepticism. “All big countries,” Lewis says, “are going to try and do this.”
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Jan 14
     
    Of course, we now know that the U.S. conducts electronic surveillance for a multitude of purposes, including economic. Check this group's notes tagged "NSA-targets" and/or "NSA-goals".
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