Tuesday, June 30, 2009

"We are living in the wreckage of the Greenspan bubble" Where the Poor Pay Much, Much More

Happy talk - explains our guru Michael Hudson is only happy for those on the receiving end of our hard-earned payouts. We don't really save. We pay down debt because our financial lives depend on it - more so now than at any prior time due to the "wreckage of the Greenspan bubble." So, if you think the Obama-Geithner plan is working to recreate your past happy times, you are sadly mistaken. The people at the bottom of the feeding-frenzy pyramid are just trying to regain lost ground through taking the losses that will only deteriorate into even heavier losses if not taken now.

*If you could possibly donate to keep this blog afloat financially, it will be sincerely appreciated!*

Happy-face media reporting of economic news is providing the usual upbeat spin on Friday's debt-deflation statistics. The Commerce Department's National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) for May show that U.S. “savings” are now absorbing 6.9 percent of income. I put the word “savings” in quotation marks because this 6.9% is not what most people think of as savings. It is not money in the bank to draw out on the “rainy day” when one is laid off as unemployment rates rise. The statistic means that 6.9% of national income is being earmarked to pay down debt – the highest saving rate in 15 years, up from actually negative rates (living on borrowed credit) just a few years ago. The only way in which these savings are “money in the bank” is that they are being paid by consumers to their banks and credit card companies. Income paid to reduce debt is not available for spending on goods and services. It therefore shrinks the economy, aggravating the depression. So why is the jump in “saving” good news? It certainly is a good idea for consumers to get out of debt. But the media are treating this diversion of income as if it were a sign of confidence that the recession may be ending and Mr. Obama's “stimulus” plan working. The Wall Street Journal reported that Social Security recipients of one-time government payments “seem unwilling to spend right away," while The New york Times wrote that “many people were putting that money away instead of spending it.” It is as if people can afford to save more. The reality is that most consumers have little real choice but to pay. Unable to borrow more as banks cut back credit lines, their “choice” is either to pay their mortgage and credit card bill each month, or lose their homes and see their credit ratings slashed, pushing up penalty interest rates near 20%! To avoid this fate, families are shifting to cheaper (and less nutritious) foods, eating out less (or at fast food restaurants), and cutting back vacation spending. It therefore seems contradictory to applaud these "saving” (that is, debt-repayment) statistics as an indication that the economy may emerge from depression in the next few months. While unemployment approaches the 10% rate and new layoffs are being announced every week, isn't the Obama administration taking a big risk in telling voters that its stimulus plan is working? What will people think this winter when markets continue to shrink? How thick is Mr. Obama's Teflon?

We are living in the wreckage of the Greenspan bubble

As recently as two years ago consumers were buying so many goods on credit that the domestic savings rate was zero. (Financing the U.S. Government's budget deficit with foreign central bank recycling of the dollar's balance-of-payments deficit actually produced a negative 2% savings rate.) During these Bubble Years savings by the wealthiest 10% of the population found their counterpart in the debt that the bottom 90% were running up. In effect, the wealthy were lending their surplus revenue to an increasingly indebted economy at large.

Today, homeowners no longer can re-finance their mortgages and compensate for their wage squeeze by borrowing against rising prices for their homes. Payback time has arrived – paying back bank loans, whose volume has been augmented to include accrued interest charges and penalties. New bank lending has hit a wall as banks are limiting their activity to raking in amortization and interest on existing mortgages, credit cards and personal loans.

Many families are able to remain financially afloat by running down their savings and cutting back their spending to try and avoid bankruptcy. This diversion of income to pay creditors explains why retail sales figures, auto sales and other commercial statistics are plunging vertically downward in almost a straight line, while unemployment rates soar toward the 10% level. The ability of most people to spend at past rates has hit a wall.

So . . . there.

Suzan _____________________

"The Transition From Democracy" To A "Bank-Run Society" - The "Bloodless Coup"

Has it been merely "A Bloodless Coup?" Did you really believe (swallow for even a nanosecond) that the ever-brilliant, all-knowing Alan Greenspan was really "sorry" for his past performance at the U.S. helm of all things financial? Mike Whitney thinks our transition from democracy to an oligarchy has been "bloodless," but I disagree. (Emphasis marks were added and some minor editing performed - Ed.)

The trouble started 24 months ago, but the origins of the financial crisis are still disputed. The problems did not begin with subprime loans, lax lending standards or shoddy ratings agencies. The meltdown can be traced back to the activities of the big banks and their enablers at the Federal Reserve. The Fed's artificially low interest rates provided a subsidy for risky speculation while deregulation allowed financial institutions to increase leverage to perilous levels, creating trillions of dollars of credit backed by insufficient capital reserves.

When two Bear Stearns hedge funds defaulted in July 2007, the process of turbo-charging profits through massive credit expansion flipped into reverse sending the financial system into a downward spiral which has just recently begun to decelerate.

It is inaccurate to call the current slump a "recession," which suggests a mismatch between supply and demand that is part of the normal business cycle. In truth, the economy has stumbled into a multi-trillion dollar capital hole that was created by the reckless actions of the nation's largest financial institutions. The banks blew up the system and now the country has slipped into a depression.

Currently, the banks are lobbying congress to preserve the "financial innovations" which are at the heart of the crisis. These so-called innovations are, in fact, the instruments (derivatives) and processes (securitization) which help the banks achieve their main goal of avoiding reserve requirements. Securitization and derivatives are devices for concealing the build-up of leverage which is essential for increasing profits with as little capital as possible. If Congress fails to see through this ruse and re-regulate the system, the banks will inflate another bubble and destroy what little is left of the ailing economy.

On June 22, 2009, Christopher Whalen, of Institutional Risk Analysis, appeared before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, and outlined the dangers of Over-The-Counter (OTC) derivatives. He pointed out that derivatives trading is hugely profitable and generates "supra-normal returns" for banking giants JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and other large derivatives dealers. He also noted that, "the deliberate inefficiency of the OTC derivatives market results in a dedicated tax or subsidy meant to benefit one class of financial institutions, namely the largest OTC dealer banks, at the expense of other market participants."

Christopher Whalen:

"Regulators who are supposed to protect the taxpayer from the costs of cleaning up these periodic loss events are so captive by the very industry they are charged by law to regulate as to be entirely ineffective. . . . The views of the existing financial regulatory agencies and particularly the Federal Reserve Board and Treasury, should get no consideration from the Committee since the views of these agencies are largely duplicative of the views of JPM and the large OTC dealers."

Whalen's complaint is heard frequently on the Internet where bloggers have blasted the cozy relationship between the Fed and the big banks. In fact, the Fed and Treasury are not only hostile towards regulation, they operate as the de facto policy arm of the banking establishment. This explains why Bernanke has underwritten the entire financial system with $12.8 trillion, while the broader economy languishes in economic quicksand. The Fed's lavish gift amounts to a taxpayer-funded insurance policy for which no premia is paid.

Whalen continues:

"In my view, CDS (credit default swaps) contracts and complex structured assets are deceptive by design and beg the question as to whether a certain level of complexity is so speculative and reckless as to violate US securities and anti-fraud laws. That is, if an OTC derivative contract lacks a clear cash basis and cannot be valued by both parties to the transaction with the same degree of facility and transparency as cash market instruments, then the OTC contact should be treated as fraudulent and banned as a matter of law and regulation. Most CDS contracts and complex structured financial instruments fall into this category of deliberately fraudulent instruments for which no cash basis exists."

No one understands these instruments; they are deliberately opaque and impossible to price. They should be banned, but the Fed and Treasury continue to look the other way because they are in the thrall of the banks. Insiders call this phenomenon "regulatory capture".

Credit default swaps (CDS) are a particularly insidious invention. They were originally designed to protect against the possibility of bond going into default, but quickly morphed into a means for massive speculation which is virtually indistinguishable from casino-type gambling. CDS can be used to doll-up one's credit rating, short the market or hedge against potential losses. CDS trading poses a clear danger to the financial system (The CDS market has mushroomed to $30 trillion industry) but the Fed and other regulators have largely ignored the activity because it is a cash cow for the banks.

Whalen again:

"It is important for the Committee to understand that the reform proposal from the Obama Administration regarding OTC derivatives is a canard; an attempt by the White House and the Treasury Department to leave in place the de facto monopoly over the OTC markets by the largest dealer banks led by JPM, GS and other institutions. . . .

The only beneficiaries of the current OTC market for derivatives are JPM, GS and the other large OTC dealers. . . . Without OTC derivatives, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG would never have failed, but without the excessive rents earned by JPM, GS and the remaining legacy OTC dealers, the largest banks cannot survive and must shrink dramatically." (Statement by Christopher Whalen to the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investment, United States Senate, June 22, 2009)

The Geithner-Summers reform proposals are an utter fraud. They're a meaningless public relations scam designed to conceal the fact that the banks will continue to maintain their stranglehold on OTC derivatives trading while circumventing government oversight. Nothing will change. Bernanke and Geithner's primary objective is to preserve the ability of the banks to use complex instruments to enhance leverage and maximize profits.

The banks created the financial crisis, and now they are its biggest beneficiaries. They don't need to worry about risk, because Bernanke has assured them that they will be bailed out regardless of the cost. Financial institutions that have explicit government guarantees are able to get cheaper funding because lending to the bank is the same as lending to the state. And, so it goes. The underwriting of the banks with public resources changes the fundamental structure of the existing system. It's the end of free markets and the beginning of state capitalism.

Did you need someone to explain Hitler's actions to you? Goering's? Himmler's? Is everyone awake yet? Suzan __________________

Monday, June 29, 2009

President Zelaya of Honduras Just Kidnapped & The Planned “Coup” in Iran

More regime change (and taking no chances) - Obama's first (yay for military riots!). Aren't you glad we've got that David Gregory-led media intelligence going for us? Long live fascist democracy! (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

[Note: As of 11:15am, Caracas time, President Zelaya (of Honduras) is speaking live on Telesur from San Jose, Costa Rica. He has verified the soldiers entered his residence in the early morning hours, firing guns and threatening to kill him and his family if he resisted the coup. He was forced to go with the soldiers who took him to the air base and flew him to Costa Rica. He has requested the U.S. Government make a public statement condemning the coup, otherwise, it will indicate their compliance.] Caracas, Venezuela - The text message that beeped on my cell phone this morning read “Alert, Zelaya has been kidnapped, coup d'etat underway in Honduras, spread the word.”

It's a rude awakening for a Sunday morning, especially for the millions of Hondurans that were preparing to exercise their sacred right to vote today for the first time on a consultative referendum concerning the future convening of a constitutional assembly to reform the constitution. Supposedly at the center of the controversary is today's scheduled referendum, which is not a binding vote but merely an opinion poll to determine whether or not a majority of Hondurans desire to eventually enter into a process to modify their constitution.

Such an initiative has never taken place in the Central American nation, which has very limited constitution that allows minimal participation by the people of Honduras in their political processes. The current constitution, written in 1982 during the height of the Reagan Administration's dirty war in Central America, was designed to ensure those in power, both economic and political, would retain it with little interference from the people. Zelaya, elected in November 2005 on the platform of Honduras' Liberal Party, had proposed the opinion poll be conducted to determine if a majority of citizens agreed that constitutional reform was necessary. He was backed by a majority of labor unions and social movements in the country.

If the poll had occurred, depending on the results, a referendum would have been conducted during the upcoming elections in November to vote on convening a constitutional assembly. Nevertheless, today's scheduled poll was not binding by law.

In fact, several days before the poll was to occur, Honduras' Supreme Court ruled it illegal, upon request by the Congress, both of which are led by anti-Zelaya majorities and members of the ultra-conservative party, National Party of Honduras (PNH). This move led to massive protests in the streets in favor of President Zelaya. On June 24, the president fired the head of the high military command, General Romeo Vásquez, after he refused to allow the military to distribute the electoral material for Sunday's elections. General Romeo Vásquez held the material under tight military control, refusing to release it even to the president's followers, stating that the scheduled referendum had been determined illegal by the Supreme Court and therefore he could not comply with the president's order. As in the Unted States, the president of Honduras is Commander in Chief and has the final say on the military's actions, and so he ordered the General's removal. The Minister of Defense, Angel Edmundo Orellana, also resigned in response to this increasingly tense situation.

But the following day, Honduras' Supreme Court reinstated General Romeo Vásquez to the high military command, ruling his firing as “unconstitutional'. Thousands poured into the streets of Honduras' capital, Tegucigalpa, showing support for President Zelaya and evidencing their determination to ensure Sunday's non-binding referendum would take place. On Friday, the president and a group of hundreds of supporters, marched to the nearby air base to collect the electoral material that had been previously held by the military. That evening, Zelaya gave a national press conference along with a group of politicians from different political parties and social movements, calling for unity and peace in the country.

As of Saturday, the situation in Honduras was reported as calm. But early Sunday morning, a group of approximately 60 armed soldiers entered the presidential residence and took Zelaya hostage. After several hours of confusion, reports surfaced claiming the president had been taken to a nearby air force base and flown to neighboring Costa Rica. No images have been seen of the president so far and it is unknown whether or not his life is still endangered.

President Zelaya's wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, speaking live on Telesur at approximately 10:00am Caracas time, denounced that in early hours of Sunday morning, the soldiers stormed their residence, firing shots throughout the house, beating and then taking the president. “It was an act of cowardness,” said the first lady, referring to the illegal kidnapping occuring during a time when no one would know or react until it was all over. Casto de Zelaya also called for the “preservation” of her husband's life, indicating that she herself is unaware of his whereabouts. She claimed their lives are all still in “serious danger” and made a call for the international community to denounce this illegal coup d'etat and to act rapidly to reinstate constitutional order in the country, which includes the rescue and return of the democratically elected Zelaya.

Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela have both made public statements on Sunday morning condeming the coup d'etat in Honduras and calling on the international community to react to ensure democracy is restored and the constitutional president is reinstated. Last Wednesday, June 24, an extraordinary meeting of the member nations of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), of which Honduras is a member, was convened in Venezuela to welcome Ecuador, Antigua & Barbados and St. Vincent to its ranks. During the meeting, which was attended by Honduras' Foreign Minister, Patricia Rodas, a statement was read supporting President Zelaya and condenming any attempts to undermine his mandate and Honduras' democratic processes.

Reports coming out of Honduras have informed that the public television channel, Canal 8, has been shut down by the coup forces. Just minutes ago, Telesur announced that the military in Honduras is shutting down all electricity throughout the country.

. . . The situation is eerily reminiscent of the April 2002 coup d'etat against President Chávez in Venezuela, when the media played a key role by first manipulating information to support the coup and then later blacking out all information when the people began protesting and eventually overcame and defeated the coup forces, rescuing Chávez (who had also been kidnapped by the military) and restoring constitutional order.

And speaking of coups (from John R. MacArthur, Publisher of Harper's Magazine) have you heard about Mir-Hossein Mousavi's Iran/Contra Connection?

What do Michael Ledeen (the American 'neo-conservative'), Mir-Hossein Mousavi (the Iranian presidential candidate of 'chagne') and Adnan Khashoggi (the opulent Saudi Arabian jet-setter) have in common?

They are all good friends and associates of Manuchehr Ghorbanifar (an Iranian arms merchant, an alleged MOSSAD double agent, and a key figure in the Iran/Contra Affair, the arms-for-hostages deals between Iran and the Reagan administration). In one or two, at most three, degrees of separation, these people hung out in the same circles and very likely drank to the same toasts.You can find all kinds of trivia about Ghorbanifar in the Walsh Report on the Iran/Contra affair. In Chapter 8, for example, we learn:

"Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile and former CIA informant who had been discredited by the agency as a fabricator, was a driving force behind these proposals [for arms-for-hostages deal];" or, "Ghorbanifar, as broker for Iran, borrowed funds for the weapons payments from Khashoggi, who loaned millions of dollars to Ghorbanifar in "bridge financing'" for the deals. Ghorbanifar repaid Khashoggi with a 20 percent commission after being paid by the Iranians," (see: http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_08.htm).

Here is a bit from an article by Time magazine that shows Ghorbanifar's circle of associates; it is from a January 1987 cover story (The Murky World of Weapons Dealers; January 19, 1987):

"By [Ghorbanifar's] own account he was a refugee from the revolutionary government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, which confiscated his businesses in Iran, yet he later became a trusted friend and kitchen adviser to Mir Hussein Mousavi, Prime Minister in the Khomeini government. Some U.S. officials who have dealt with Ghorbanifar praise him highly. Says Michael Ledeen, adviser to the Pentagon on counterterrorism: "[Ghorbanifar] is one of the most honest,educated, honorable men I have ever known." Others call him a liar who, as one puts it, could not tell the truth about the clothes he is wearing," (emphasis added).This second bit is from Chapter 1 of Walsh Iran/Contra Report: (http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_01.htm)

"On or about November 25, 1985, Ledeen received a frantic phone call from Ghorbanifar, asking him to relay a message from [Mir-Hossein Mousavi] the prime minister of Iran to President Reagan regarding the shipment of the wrong type of HAWKs. Ledeen said the message essentially was "we've been holding up our part of the bargain, and here you people are now cheating us and tricking us and deceiving us and you had better correct this situation right away.''[...]"In early May, North and CIA annuitant George Cave met in London with Ghorbanifar and Nir, where the groundwork finally was laid for a meeting between McFarlane and high-level Iranian officials, as well as financial arrangements for the arms deal. Among the officials Ghorbanifar said would meet with an American delegation were the president and prime minister [Mousavi] of Iran and the speaker of the Iranian parliament," (emphasis added).

And to remind how Michael Ledeen became involved in the Iran/Contra affair in 1985, here is a bit from Chapter 15 of Walsh Report (http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_15.htm):

"[McFarlane] authorized Michael A. Ledeen, a part-time NSC consultant on anti-terrorism, to ask Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres to check on a report that the Israelis had access to good sources on Iran. By early August 1985, Ledeen's talks had led to a direct approach by Israeli officials to McFarlane, to obtain President Reagan's approval to ship U.S.-supplied TOW missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages in Beirut. McFarlane said he briefed the President, Regan, Shultz, Weinberger, Casey and perhaps the Vice President about the proposal in July and August 1985.40 McFarlane said that Casey recommended that Congress not be informed of the arms sales."There you have it. Now, I'm no investigative journalist, so I'll leave it to the professionals to dig deeper into this.But, I do have to wonder aloud: Seeing how we cannot ignore his 'neo-con' credentials and that Michael Ledeen maintained his very good relations with Ghorbanifar, (who at least used to be) a good friend of Mir-Hossein Mousavi (the 'candidate of change' in the Iranian presidential elections); and given the support that Mousavi's candidacy has been receiving from the American 'moderates', maybe this kind of 'change' is the 'regime change' the Americans have had in mind for Iran.

Suzan _____________________

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Osama bin Laden Not on List of Perpetrators of 9/11 Attacks - No Evidence - Ever

"The commission had to subpoena the F.A.A. for documents, had to subpoena NORAD for documents and they will never get the full story. That is one of the tragedies. One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up."Former Senator Max Cleland who stepped down from the 9/11 Commission December 2003 - Interview with 'Democracy Now', 23 March 2004"

Remember Senator Max Cleland from Georgia? No? Perhaps you'll remember him now.

FBI Director Robert Mueller stated "we have not uncovered a single piece of paper - either here in the United States or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere - that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot." And, even though lots of false flags were floated after this strident denial of links, none have been mentioned in years (and, of course, "W" said publicly that he was no longer concerned with his whereabouts). Surprise. Surprise. I'll never forget telling my Intro to Business class on September 12, 2001, to be very careful in viewing the evidence with which they would be presented about who caused 9/11 as everything that was reported initially seemed spurious to me (from my background in middle eastern politics (not to mention the 25 years in aerospace defense logistics systems)). It's still looking like good advice. Especially in light of the "necessary" invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq and the upcoming one of Iran if Cheney's NeoCons can be believed as they spread out over the mainstream media to tout their solution to the Iranian "stolen" election (Mossad) tweets. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

In a speech in San Francisco on April 19, 2002, FBI Director Robert Mueller stated that, "In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper - either here in the United States or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere - that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot." In the speech, there was a tone of underlying surprise in Mueller's voice because he, like so many of us, had by that point accepted as self-evident truth the given narrative of 19 Arab hijackers under the direction of Osama bin Laden as the responsible perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. And such a complex, well-orchestrated crime should have left a long paper trail and discarded pile of evidence for investigators to follow and pick up. But there was none. In fact, "the FBI's (current) page on bin Laden as a 'Most Wanted Terrorist' does not list him as wanted for 9/11, and when asked why, a FBI spokesman said, 'because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11'." (Debunking 9/11 Debunking, pg. 21, Dr. David Ray Griffin, Olive Branch Press, 2007.)

And the reason no evidence has been uncovered connecting bin Laden to 9/11 is simple - the plot was not hatched in a cave in Afghanistan. There is no cave, there is no evidence to find (at least not where we are looking) because the plot was hatched by a small group of people yet to be investigated - a cabal of high level, in-house perpetrators intent on inventing a 'new enemy' and a 'new Pearl Harbor'-like incident in order to conjure public support for their pre-existing, well-documented agenda and plans to redirect American domestic and foreign policy to feed their own self-serving imperial desires. After all, who benefited more from September 11th than the leaders of PNAC (Project for the New American Century), the Neo-Con movement, and their corporate overlords?

The paper that follows will offer proof to support the above hypothesis and direction for further inquiry and investigation.

And nothing has changed since then. Other than that even more innocents are dying in droves in Afghanistan and Iraq (and more mideast Emerald City construction is planned by Halliburton's new entity) and the planning for Iran's has moved into high gear aided by twits. Suzan ____________________

"Raving Christianist" and Others "Cleaned Up As Market Crashed"

All secrets revealed here. Especially the secret about why the Democrats are voting like Rethuglicans on almost everything that affects (and will affect much, much more in the future) you negatively (but them positively) financially. And if you think these thugs were smart enough to play the market so precisely on their own, I've got several bridges in Brooklyn to sell you cheap. This essay also reminds me of the transaction transferring ownership of the WTC in the July preceding that fateful September to a Mr. Larry Silverstein. Do you wish you had friends this lucky? (How many more coincidences can we stand?) Mark Crispin Martin reports that (emphasis marks added - Ed.):

Members of the House Financial Services Committee, who are supposed to oversee the banking industry, each seem to have made a bundle as the market tanked, by snapping up, or dumping, bank stocks.

One of them, Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, is a raving Christianist whose “re-election” in 2006 was evidently stolen (from John Russell), like that year’s “wins” by other Florida Republicans, including Tom Feeney (who “beat” Clint Curtis) and Lincoln Diaz-Balart (who “beat” Frank Gonzalez).

Those outcomes were contested by the “losers,” who canvassed their respective districts, and thereby found that the official vote counts were completely off, by margins large enough to have “elected” their Republican opponents.

(Curtis led that effort, knowing, as he did, that the Republicans in Florida were routinely rigging vote-counts electronically – as he knew all too well, since Feeney had, two years before, asked him to help develop a computer program for that very purpose. For more, please click here; and for a terrifying documentary about it all, see Patty Sharaf’s Murder, Spies and Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story.)

So what did those three “losers” do with their statistical proof of Bushevik election fraud? They took it to the House Administration Committee, now in Democratic hands – and that committee unanimously voted not to look at the evidence. And that was that.

Why do I (re)tell this story here? Because both parties are corrupt – as the article below makes clear. For it wasn’t only the extremist Brown-Waite who made a bundle off of bank stocks while the market crashed. As the blog below informs us, that surreptitious rip-off was a perfectly bipartisan affair.

So how can we expect the Democrats (or most of them) to give a s**t about the dire state of our voting system, when it served to put them in their very lucrative positions?

Members of U.S. House Financial

Services Committee snapped up or dumped bank stocks as bottom fell out of market

A representative for Rep. Charlie Wilson said the congressman leaves day-to-day investment decisions to a money manager.

Members of Congress were chasing profits while making policy

WASHINGTON — As financial markets tumbled and the government worked to stave off panic by pumping billions of dollars into banks last fall, several members of Congress who oversee the banking industry were grabbing up or dumping bank stocks.

Anticipating bargains or profits or just trying to unload before the bottom fell out, these members of the House Financial Services Committee or brokers on their behalf were buying and selling stocks including Bank of America and Citigroup — some of the very corporations their committee would later rap for greed, a Plain Dealer examination of congressional stock market transactions shows.

Financial disclosure records show that some of these Financial Services Committee members, including Ohio Rep. Charlie Wilson, made bank stock trades on the same day the banks were getting a government bailout from a program Congress approved. The transactions may not have been illegal or against congressional rules, but securities attorneys and congressional watchdog groups say they raise flags about the appearance of conflicts of interest. Read more.

Please. Suzan _____________

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Illicit Sex and Death Drive Iran Follies Off Media Map, Bollyn, Driftglass & Driving Me Crazy

We didn't really need another lesson in the truism that sex (and the death of celebrities) has the power to knock real news off the towers, but this week should have really increased our awareness of that reality. The CIA/Mossad-inspired coup coming to Iran has not been displaced totally yet by the media saturation of the latest excitement events, but it sure seems like it. Within the space of just days, Jacko dies from what was either some type of drug-induced mistake or quackery (if he had a heart condition that required monitoring), Farrah dies after a heroic fight against anal cancer for years (with all the bad-taste joking about her ex-boyfriend offering finally to marry her the day before she passed) and Ed McMahon expired previously at 86 (after a life lived in the shadows of true greatness) and was only exposed to intense public view when he had embarrassing financial problems right before he died. And then there's the Argentinian hegira of that love-starved, unbalanced, but totally reelectable (in S.C.) Clenis impeachment voter Mark Sanford, the seeming John Edwards twin currently holding the Governor's seat in South Carolina, who until that fateful day was still being touted nationally as the next upright GOP Presidential candidate. (And you gotta admit, he fits right in with his GOPredecessors/predators.) Do you think anyone remembers that the Iranian election hoo-rah was only a made-for-American-TV event? Nope. Me neither. Paul Krugman (who is one of my favorite observers of the commonplace as well as the positing of sophisticated economic reasoning) explains the mindset of the right-wing viewers about their properly selected officials having illicit sex not being as bad a fault with them as you might have thought (if you're a "liberal"). It doesn't comfort me, however you explain it, that the ignorant get to call the game in their favor for what I'd consider to be selfish reasons. I don't care that they are doing "God's work" (whatever that may be), just that it's a little bit too obviously self-serving, rather like having your cake and eating it too. In moments of reflection I sometimes am left considering that it might be worth taking up fundie religion just to get that neverending forgiveness.

Sex and the married politician I think Joe Conason get(s) this wrong:

If they looked honestly at themselves, religious conservatives might notice that they are morally lax, socially permissive and casually tolerant of moral deviancy — just like the liberals they despise.

Yes, conservatives sin just as much as liberals. But they aren’t “socially permissive and casually tolerant” — at least not in the same way that liberals are. First of all, there’s a difference in what bothers them. When a liberal politician engages in sexual betrayal, what bothers his erstwhile supporters is the betrayal. When a conservative politician does it, what bothers the supporters is the sex. And after watching a series of scandals unfold, I’ve come to the conclusion that the liberal reaction — that the hypocrisy of the moralizers undermines their cause — just doesn’t come to grips with the conservative worldview. From their point of view the cause, the need to police what people do in bed, is, by definition, right, because it’s literally God-given. So the fact that some of those trying to police what other people do in bed are themselves doing nasty things does not reflect on the cause itself — on the contrary, it shows just how necessary more bed-snooping is. It’s also notable that conservatives are, in practice, more forgiving of their politicians’ sins than liberals. John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer ended their political careers; Ensign and Vitter are still in the Senate, and Newt Gingrich is out there on the Sunday shows, speaking for the GOP. Why? Because where liberals see gross hypocrisy, conservatives see men doing the Lord’s work — which partially excuses their own failings. Liberals think that a man who has an affair is worse if he preaches moral values; conservatives think he’s better. You might say that as they see it, if he interferes with what enough other people do in bed, it doesn’t matter what he does himself. So left is left and right is right, and never the twain shall meet.

And since I love to tout Paul's clear thinking, here's a keeper on climate change:
One of the favorite arguments of climate-change deniers is “but it was warmer in the late 90s.” In fact, the odds are good that I’ll get that argument from George Will on This Weak tomorrow. I basically know the answer: temperature is a noisy time series, so if you pick and choose your dates over a short time span you can usually make whatever case you want. That’s why you need to look at longer trends and do some statistical analysis. But I thought that it would be a good thing to look at the data myself.

So here’s average annual global temperature since 1880, shown as .01 degrees C deviation from the 1951-80 average.

Take a look at that chart. No doubt about it. We are headed for disaster, but don't worry, it'll happen to our grandchildren's grandchildren who will write the history of our selfish, smart-assed generation with an overwhelming fatal sadness. Christopher Bollyn addresses present concerns (chiming in about Chicago politics echoing almost precisely my mentor Driftglass) with why Obama does nothing (well, almost nothing) that Bush and Cheney wouldn't have done regarding a number of issues that folks thought they voted to change. The Valerie Plame suit comes so easily to mind - and the reasons they give for not objecting to the Supremes condescension to the rule of law is mind-boggling. And on a personal note, one of the things that drives me absolutely crazy is watching all the young (largely know-nothing) beautifully-coiffed/dressed people who have hooked their dreams of success into spouting the lies of Faux Snooze and its look(sound)-alikes. Don't they know that there is a moral choice involved here? Or have the greedsters won so completely that young people actually believe there are few other choices (or are just not bothered by any type of morality considerations at all)? I guess I'm particularly put out because I had to make this choice early in my career and it wasn't a hard choice at all (and it's led me to stop watching those programs, which are not only not news anymore, but are so full of themselves and Murdoch's lies that I will never watch them again). Please forgive my forgetfulness, but I meant to give you the link to Bill Moyers' stellar interview with Robert Reich which happened last week. (He had the poet W.S. Merwin on last night which was also stellar but in another galaxy.) If you want an informed discussion about the healthcare Nightmare on Capitol Hill, you can't do better than listen (or read the transcript) to this one.

Happy almost Fourth of July (and a special note of the anniversary of my beloved Dad's birthday (who passed away in 1990)). Suzan ____________________

In Search of "America?" Road To Change Or Perdition?

One of my favorite writer/reporters (and much, much more) Danny Schechter has a very informed take on the Obama/Geithner financial plans for you and yours (in your search for "America") as he asks is this the "Road To Change Or Perdition?" (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

So now we have 88 pages of financial reforms as if the authors of this compromised and consensualized agenda were being paid by the word. The President is telling us that “mistakes” were made as if massive crimes, theft, fraud and unregulated greed were not involved in causing the calamity at the heart if the crash of the economy. Bloomberg surveyed the wreckage: “Financial firms worldwide have recorded more than $1.4 trillion in writedowns and credit losses since 2007 as the U.S. housing market collapsed and the economy sank into recession.” Billions spent to unlock credit and get banks lending again have led nowhere. The financial news service quotes Tim Backshall, chief strategist at Credit Derivatives Research LLC in Walnut Creek, California:

“It is becoming clearer that banks are not as willing to lend,” he said in an e-mailed message. “With their risk rising once again, risk premiums on non-financials must rise commensurately.”

They don’t see a recovery around the corner either, “The broad sense is we have not seen the bottom there yet,” said Bert Ely, a banking consultant in Alexandria, Virginia. “For later this year, and into next year, there are just big question marks out there.” Question marks indeed. What are the questions we should be asking? What happened to changes for ratings agencies that gave high marks for bogus mortgage securities? Why trust the Fed which, in the words of one critic “started the fire” through low interest rates to extinguish it.

. . . Has the President really been briefed on the supposed benefits of having large financial institutions with great economic power and pervasive political influence? Don’t just claim that these are a good thing – tell us, in detail and preferably with numbers, what we the public gain from the presence of these behemoths among us. Keep in mind that “everyone has them” is no kind of argument – something so manifestly dangerous is not to be blindly copied. Why was executive and other compensation so notably absent from the latest Geithner-Summers joint statement of our problems and likely solutions? Does the President really expect us to believe that any set of reforms will work if they do not directly constrain the amounts that can be earned from misunderstanding risk today and hoping that the consequences do not appear on your watch? Does he have any idea of how the people who run big financial firms will game whatever controls try to limit their risk-taking? Can President Obama finally talk about the much broader break down of corporate governance in this country, with boards of directors serving no discernible purpose in terms of limiting the excesses of corporate executives in the financial sector but also more broadly? Surely, without a reform package that includes measures to address this core issue, we will get exactly nowhere.” Perhaps “exactly nowhere” is the real destination” in the sense that the real goal of the Geithner-Summers-Obama “reform” package seems to be to restore the old financial order, not restructure it, or heavens forbid, bring it under public control and accountability. New Rules and regulations are great, but do they add up to real reform?

Have the banks really acknowledged their role in the demolition derby that wrecked the economy? Not really, even as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs admits, "We know that we have an explicit contract with our shareholders to be responsible stewards of their capital . . . we regret that we participated in the market euphoria and failed to raise a responsible voice." Is that all they are copping to? A few weeks back. Goldman paid $60 million to Massachusetts to settle a complaint that they funded mortgages “designed to fail.” They admitted no wrong-doing, in a practice so common when Wall Street gets its fingers caught in the cookie jar of criminality. Tell that to the millions losing their homes. After helping to fund the subcrime market, Goldman was hailed as a visionary for turning against it. “it made $4bn profit from betting against the sub-prime mortgage market, and because - bar the fourth quarter of 2008 - it has continued to make a profit throughout.” Clearly the profiteers are far more secure than their victims. Here are the thoughts of some knowledgeable people who want progressive change and who are in the know: Former Investment Banker Nomi Prins: “The plan makes no mention of reconstructing the financial system.” Marshall Auerback sees an opportunity for real reform squandered. “As with so much of the Obama administration, great-sounding words, but nothing in the way of substantive change. Particularly disturbing are the moves on derivatives, notably “credit default swaps”. Excuse us for not liking a market that is rigged in favor of the sellers, the monopoly dealers, who even today refuse to allow open price discovery in credit default swaps among and between other dealers. True to their Wall Street ethos, Summers and Geithner have capitulated on the most important aspect of derivatives, by refusing to place these instruments on a regulated exchange, where transparency and standardization would be far more operative. A New Way Forward: “It’s not enough to try to patch up the current system. We demand serious reform that fixes the root problems in our political and economic system: excessive influence of banks, dangerous compensation systems, and massive consolidation. And we demand that the reform happen in an open and transparent manner.” “You go to war,” the not-missed Mr. Rumsfeld once said “with the army you have.” Unfortunately in the case of Financial Reform, we are being led by Generals at the top but there are no troops or people’s army below to hold them accountable, much less push them to emulate a more aggressive approach a la FDR. Organizing put this president in office. Only organizing can push him to do what must be done. Can we get the Congress to toughen up these uneven and timid proposals?

News Dissector Danny Schechter, blogger-in-chief at Media Channel, is making a film based on his book PLUNDER (Cosimo) http://www.news.dissector.com/plunder. Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org.
Thanks, Danny. You rock! John Perkins of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man has a new eye-opener for you entitled The Secret History of the American Empire. Watch it if you dare. Suzan _____________________

Friday, June 26, 2009

The Waning Power of Truth - "Disinformation Campaigns" Have Rare Failure (In Iran)

Can you stand another article on why Building 7 of the WTC had to be destroyed along with the other two buildings? Building 7 is the one that wasn't hit by an airplane and thus, magically, fell down due to extreme sympathy with the fate of its siblings. Christopher Bollyn is either a very clever provocateur or exactly what he says he is: the only true reporter allowed in the basement of the WTC. Pictures of the scene of destruction are here.

After September 11, it was discovered that concealed within Building Seven was the largest clandestine domestic station of the Central Intelligence Agency outside of Washington DC, a base of operations from which to spy on diplomats of the United Nations and to conduct counterterrorism and counterintelligence missions.

. . . I’ve described all of this extensively in my book, and it’s apparent that things of importance were taken out of harm’s way before the attacks. For example, the CIA didn’t seem too concerned about their losses. After the existence of their clandestine office in Building Seven was discovered, an agency spokesman told the newspapers that a special team had been dispatched to scour the rubble in search of secret documents and intelligence reports, though there were millions, if not billions of pages floating in the streets. Nevertheless, the spokesman was confident. “There shouldn’t be too much paper around,” he said.

And Customs at first claimed that everything was destroyed. That the heat was so intense that everything in the evidence safe had been baked to ash. But some months later, they announced that they had broken up a huge Colombian narco-trafficking and money-laundering ring after miraculously recovering crucial evidence from the safe, including surveillance photos and heat-sensitive cassette tapes of monitored calls. And when they moved in to their new building at 1 Penn Plaza in Manhattan, they proudly hung on the lobby wall their Commissioner’s Citation Plaque and their big round US Customs Service ensign, also miraculously recovered, in pristine condition, from their crushed and cremated former office building at the World Trade Center.

Read much, much more here. Paul Craig Roberts has a very interesting essay entitled "The Waning Power of Truth" where he quotes David Ray Griffin on what's happened to Osama bin Laden. Even though he used to work to spread the Reagan economic madness as a Treasury undersecretary, I think he's repented and now wants to serve citizens of the U.S. who are increasingly maddened by the lack of news reporting in the mainstream media (and thus, he's decided to become a part of blogtopia's most compelling media). (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

David Ray Griffin, the nemesis of the collection of disinformation known as the 9/11 Commission Report, has taken up the question of Osama Bin Laden, Dead or Alive? On the basis of the available evidence, Griffin concludes that bin Laden died in December 2001, most likely of kidney failure. He has been kept alive in the media by US government PSYOPS as a useful bogyman to justify America’s illegal wars of aggression. The messages received from bin Laden since his death appear to be conveniently timed fabrications designed to advance US government purposes. Osama bin Laden is likely to become a mythical person, like the Georgia Tech student, George P. Burdell, who will be sighted from time to time over a period that exceeds the length of a human life. It was less than one year ago that Americans were subjected to PSYOPS misinformation from their government concerning the Russia-Georgia conflict over South Ossetia. Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin incorporated South Ossetia, formerly a part of Russia, into his home province of Georgia. When the Soviet Union broke up, Georgia became independent and retained South Ossetia. Secession movements arose in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia. These secession movements were the reason European members of NATO rejected the US government’s attempt to make Georgia a NATO member in order to extend the US/NATO military presence on Russia’s borders in contravention of previous US government agreements with Russia. To terminate the secession movement and, thereby, remove the barrier to Georgia becoming a NATO member, the US, with Israel’s help, trained and equipped the Georgian military and gave the American puppet ruler, installed in the aftermath of one of the US-orchestrated color revolutions, the green light to attack South Ossetia. Under mutual agreement, Russia and Georgia both provided peace-keeping troops in South Ossetia to prevent violence by secessionists. On the night of August 7-8, 2008, Georgian troops attacked South Ossetia, destroying a town and killing many Russian Ossetians and some Russian soldiers who were part of the peace-keeping force. Large numbers of South Ossetians fled across the border to Russia. The US government, in its hubris, assumed that Russia would accept the ethnic cleansing of Russians from South Ossetia. Instead, Russian troops arrived and quickly destroyed the American trained and equipped Georgian army and could easily have taken control of Georgia, but refrained. Defeated in its aim, the US government unleashed a PSYOPS disinformation war against the Russian government, claiming falsely that Russia had initiated the conflict by attacking Georgia. The US government’s blatant and transparent lies were force-fed to the American public by the US media. British disinformation services cooperated with their American masters, but the rest of the world blew the whistle. The real facts emerged, and an American disinformation campaign experienced a rare failure. Now ten months later, US “black ops” is at it again, pumping out disinformation about the “stolen” Iranian election. The US media is again serving the government’s disinformation campaign. This despite the fact that on May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell ABC News.” On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”A few days previously, the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.” On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.” The Iranian election protests, essentially by the westernized youth of Tehran who wish to be free of Islamic moral codes, have the hallmarks of orchestration. The protesters are color-coded with green wristbands. Their protest signs are in English and are obviously directed at the western media. Their chants are propagandistic and bear no relation to facts known by every Iranian. And again, the US media and various experts, whose ambitions depend on government-related careers, are force-feeding the American public the disinformation designed to further isolate and weaken, if not overthrow, the Iranian government. Until 1978 the US ruled Iran through the Shah. The US intends to again rule Iran through puppets. The only two remaining independent governments in the region are Iran and Syria. If the US doesn’t first bankrupt itself, both countries will fall to US black ops destabilization. The limitless gullibility of the American people guarantees carte blanche to the US government’s schemes. Americans seemingly cannot put two and two together. They have already forgotten the lies about weapons of mass destruction that have resulted in the destruction of Iraq. They have forgotten Secretary of State Colin Powell’s publicly expressed remorse at the lies he told the UN. Americans blithely accept the conflation of Taliban with al Qaeda and terrorists and the new war that the Obama regime has started in Pakistan, a war that has already produced 2 million refugees. It can fairly be said that there is not much difference between the American public and the fictional one under Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. The few independent voices that do exist are simply drowned out by the constant flow of disinformation. The US government’s success in spinning 9/11 guaranteed the government’s success in pursuing a hegemonic agenda under a cloak of lies. Although a large percentage of the US population does not believe the government’s account and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of experts and informed and well-connected people have challenged the government’s tale, the US media has shown no interest despite the official account of 9/11 bearing every known hallmark of a coverup.High-ranking fire marshals have complained that legally required forensic procedures were not followed by authorities entrusted with investigation. The testimony of more than 100 policemen, firemen, and maintenance personnel who were in the towers at the time and report hearing and experiencing a series of explosions was ignored and withheld from the public until the government got its story in place. The National Institute of Standards and Technology studiously avoided testing for evidence of explosives. The severed steel beams were quickly collected and sold abroad as scrap. As a number of observers have complained, the crime scene was destroyed, not investigated. The government’s story of the destruction of the towers is based on computer simulations that produce results in keeping with the assumptions. The collapse of the third building is not even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. No one abroad believes the US government’s story. Europeans have produced documentary films that laugh at the official explanation. Recently, an international team of scientists reported on their two year examination of dust samples from the debris. They report that they found nano-thermite in the samples. To my knowledge no mainstream US media reported the finding. One would think that such a finding would lead to a real investigation. Instead, within the US the finding is dismissed by debunkers of “conspiracy theories” (except of course the government’s own conspiracy theory) with the charge that the dust samples have not been in controlled environments since collected and could have been contaminated by those who volunteered the samples. In other words, the nano-thermite, if actually in the samples, was planted. One wonders how residents of lower Manhattan obtained nano-thermite with which to contaminate the dust. Indeed, who has access to nano-thermite other than government? Why doesn’t the National Academy of Science choose a team to examine the samples? If the finding of nano-thermite is verified, the issue of contamination can be investigated. If it turns out that the people who volunteered the samples have no possible access to nano-thermite, the case for a real investigation is established. There is little prospect of such a development in the US. American science and the careers of scientists are heavily dependent on US government funding. It would be a career-ending event for American scientists to get involved with this matter other than as a contributer to a cover-up. Professor Steven Jones, a physicist at BYU who first raised the issue of explosives being used to bring down the three WTC buildings, was terminated, despite his tenure, by BYU. Many believe Jones was terminated because of political threats to the university’s funding. In the US truth is an ineffective means by which to hold government accountable. Consider, for example, the fate of whistleblowers. Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers was perhaps the last successful whistleblower and that was three decades ago. Since then the government has put in place many defenses against whistleblowers. The American public has looked to government for its salvation since Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Government provides education, health care (Medicare, Medicaid), pensions (Social Security), food stamps, housing subsidies, child care and protects Americans from a long list of demonized villains ranging from spouse abusers and child molesters to terrorists. Americans see themselves and their government as the salt of the earth, an image supported by American generosity to other peoples who suffer natural calamities. Most Americans believe that their government does stupid things, but not evil things except perhaps by accident. The right-wing believes that America was attacked on 9/11 because we are so good, hubris to which Bush successfully played with his statement that “they hate us for our freedom and democracy.” The left-wing finds emotional satisfaction in its belief that 9/11 was deserved blow-back from peoples oppressed by US foreign policy who rose up and struck back. Truth is so impotent in America that the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty 42 years ago is still covered up by the US government despite the best efforts of Admiral Tom Moorer, who was Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by decades of effort by the Liberty survivors. This raises the question: Why do some people blow whistles? Why do those few write books and columns that challenge the lies and deceptions? There is probably more than one answer. For some, hope springs eternal. Others naively destroy their careers thinking that truth will be honored. Still others speak from a sense of responsibility to truth and not from a hope that anything will actually change. In October 1987 John Stockwell, a former CIA covet operative who ran the CIA’s covert war in Angola, gave a lecture in which he said he abandoned his career when he realized that CIA covert operations resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people and were totally unconnected to any US national security interests. “I concluded that I just couldn’t see the point.

”Nothing has changed. What was the point of the US invasion of Iraq? Even President Bush eventually conceded that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

What was the point of the US invasion of Afghanistan and what is the point of Obama’s escalation of the war there? The Taliban is not al Qaeda and was totally focused on unifying Afghanistan under an Islamic government. The US was not on the Taliban’s radar screen.

What is the point of the war that the US has started in Pakistan?

What is the point of the destabilization of the Iranian government? After the stolen elections of the Karl Rove/Bush era, why does the US think it must overthrow the Iranian government because of allegations that Ahmadinejad stole an election?

If the answer is that these wars and interventions serve the interest of US hegemony, the obvious reply is that US hegemony is more likely to be lost from the massive red ink in the government’s budget that is likely to be monetized, thus destroying the dollar as reserve currency, the main source of US hegemony.

If the US wants to have an empire in the Middle East or elsewhere, the government should come out and say so. At least then Americans could revel in the glories of empire. As it is, the pleasure must be gained surreptitiously under the table, pretending that we are protecting the world from evil-doers while we do evil ourselves.

Thanks, Paul! No one has said this better. Suzan _________

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Mousavi Was "Butcher of Beirut" & Did CIA Place an Agent as President of French Republic?

Paul Craig Roberts argues that "Ignorance is Strength" and wonders "if anyone anywhere in the US media or US government knows that Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who served as prime minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran from 1981 to 1989, the decade following the overthrow of the American puppet government by Khomeini, has been fingered as the Butcher of Beirut, responsible for the bloody attacks on the US embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut during the Reagan administration that blew to pieces 241 US Marines, Sailors, and Army troops.?"

Bob Baer, a CIA Middle East field officer at the time, says that Mousavi “dealt directly with Imad Mughniyah,” the person responsible for both attacks.

All of these facts have gone into the Memory Hole. The US media and government have turned Musavi, the bloody butcher of US servicemen, into the would-be liberator of Iran from theocracy.

Only in America and in George Orwell’s fictional population in his predictive book, 1984 can we find such citizen ignorance.

Every day in America, a.k.a. Oceania, we see the growing power of Big Brother’s three slogans: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

From ignorance comes the strength to create a hero out of America’s terrorist enemy, Mousavi.

From freedom comes the protection provided by being constantly spied upon, no longer endangered by privacy which might keep Big Brother from discovering a terrorist plot. This freedom from terrorists morphs into the slavery of being held in indefinite detention without evidence or charges. Habeas corpus has become the opposite of freedom as it prevents our protection from terrorists.

According to this missive from Voltairenet.org, they are all a bunch of big-swinging dicks.

Everywhere.

And that's why we're in such big trouble. You think election reform will change this? Ha! (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)
One should judge Nicolas Sarkozy according to his actions, and not according to his personality. Yet when his doings surprise even his own constituents, it is legitimate to take a detailed look at his biography and question the bonds that brought him to power. Thierry Meyssan has decided to write the truth about the French Republic’s president background. All the information included in this article is provable, except for two assertions signalled by the author who alone takes full responsibility. Tired of the overextended presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, the French elected Nicolas Sarkozy counting on his energy to revitalize their country. They were hoping for a break with years of no-change and ideologies of the past. What they got instead was a break with the very principles which founded the French nation, and have been shocked by this "hyper-president,” seizing every day a new dossier, attracting towards him the right and the left wing, and tearing apart all points of reference to the point of creating a total confusion. Like children who have just made a boo-boo, the French are too busy trying to find excuses for themselves to admit the magnitude of the damages and of their naiveté, and they refuse all the more to see who Nicolas Sarkozy really is, that they realize they should have known since a long time who he was. One must say the man has talents. Like a magician he tricked them. By offering them the spectacle of his private life and posing in People’s magazines, he got them to forget his political history. The aim of this article must be clearly understood. It is not to reproach to M. Sarkozy his family, his friends or his professional ties, but the fact of having hidden those ties from the French who believed, wrongly, they were electing a free man. To understand how a man whom all agree today to view as an agent of the United States and of Israel was able to become the head of the Gaullist party and the president of the French Republic, we must go back in time, very very far back. We must make a long digression in the course of which we will present the protagonists who are today taking their revenge.
The Family Secrets At the end of Second World War, the United States secret services relied on Italo-US godfather, Lucky Luciano, to control the security of American ports and prepare their disembarking in Sicily. The main contacts of Luciano — held at that time at a New York luxury prison — to the US intelligence services went notably through Frank Wisner, Sr. Later, when the “godfather” was liberated and chose to exile in Italy, they operated through his Corsican "Ambassador,” Étienne Léandri.

Read the rest of this history here.

Suzan _______________________

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Dr. George Friedman (Stratfor Global CEO) "Iran Election Fair" - US Psyops Triumphs?

Would this rather upright, highly educated, Republican-like guy lie to you? Do you think he watches the Noise de Faux? No? Here's what he says about the situation in Iran now (emphasis marks added - Ed.). (Paul Craig Roberts also has some very inside dope here on U.S. psyops that you might also want to consider.)

In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.

The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch’s modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years — Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn’t speak Farsi all that well.

The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at liberalizing the country. Their sources were the professionals and academics who supported the uprising — Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn’t think he had much popular support. They thought the revolution would result in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in this group spoke even less Farsi than those in the first group.

Misreading Sentiment in Iran

Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading — because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy — people Americans didn’t speak to because they couldn’t. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.

Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years.

Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization — a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country.

We call this outlook “iPod liberalism,” the idea that anyone who listens to rock ‘n’ roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran — a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.

There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran.

They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand — but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran.

Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would probably reach people who had phones and lived in Tehran and other urban areas. Among those, Mousavi probably did win.

But outside Tehran, and beyond persons easy to poll, the numbers turned out quite different.

Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin. Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people, and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly have spotted this and would have called him on it.

Mousavi still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the mechanics of this.

Ahmadinejad’s Popularity

It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization.

But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.

First, Ahmadinejad speaks of piety.

Among vast swathes of Iranian society, the willingness to speak unaffectedly about religion is crucial. Though it may be difficult for Americans and Europeans to believe, there are people in the world to whom economic progress is not of the essence; people who want to maintain their communities as they are and live the way their grandparents lived. These are people who see modernization — whether from the shah or Mousavi — as unattractive. They forgive Ahmadinejad his economic failures.

Second, Ahmadinejad speaks of corruption.

There is a sense in the countryside that the ayatollahs — who enjoy enormous wealth and power, and often have lifestyles that reflect this — have corrupted the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad is disliked by many of the religious elite precisely because he has systematically raised the corruption issue, which resonates in the countryside.

Third, Ahmadinejad is a spokesman for Iranian national security, a tremendously popular stance.

It must always be remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering, and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made in that war — something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he speaks to the veterans and their families, who want something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in the war.

Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Upper East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.

For a time on Friday, it seemed that Mousavi might be able to call for an uprising in Tehran. But the moment passed when Ahmadinejad’s security forces on motorcycles intervened. And that leaves the West with its worst-case scenario: a democratically elected anti-liberal.

Western democracies assume that publics will elect liberals who will protect their rights. In reality, it’s a more complicated world. Hitler is the classic example of someone who came to power constitutionally, and then proceeded to gut the constitution. Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s victory is a triumph of both democracy and repression.

The Road Ahead: More of the Same

The question now is what will happen next. Internally, we can expect Ahmadinejad to consolidate his position under the cover of anti-corruption. He wants to clean up the ayatollahs, many of whom are his enemies. He will need the support of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This election has made Ahmadinejad a powerful president, perhaps the most powerful in Iran since the revolution.

Ahmadinejad does not want to challenge Khamenei, and we suspect that Khamenei will not want to challenge Ahmadinejad. A forced marriage is emerging, one which may place many other religious leaders in a difficult position. Certainly, hopes that a new political leadership would cut back on Iran’s nuclear program have been dashed. The champion of that program has won, in part because he championed the program. We still see Iran as far from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon, but certainly the Obama administration’s hopes that Ahmadinejad would either be replaced — or at least weakened and forced to be more conciliatory — have been crushed. Interestingly, Ahmadinejad sent congratulations to U.S. President Barack Obama on his inauguration. We would expect Obama to reciprocate under his opening policy, which U.S. Vice President Joe Biden appears to have affirmed, assuming he was speaking for Obama. Once the vote fraud issue settles, we will have a better idea of whether Obama’s policies will continue. (We expect they will.)

What we have now are two presidents in a politically secure position, something that normally forms a basis for negotiations. The problem is that it is not clear what the Iranians are prepared to negotiate on, nor is it clear what the Americans are prepared to give the Iranians to induce them to negotiate. Iran wants greater influence in Iraq and its role as a regional leader acknowledged, something the United States doesn’t want to give them. The United States wants an end to the Iranian nuclear program, which Iran doesn’t want to give.

On the surface, this would seem to open the door for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Former U.S. President George W. Bush did not — and Obama does not — have any appetite for such an attack. Both presidents blocked the Israelis from attacking, assuming the Israelis ever actually wanted to attack.

For the moment, the election appears to have frozen the status quo in place. Neither the United States nor Iran seem prepared to move significantly, and there are no third parties that want to get involved in the issue beyond the occasional European diplomatic mission or Russian threat to sell something to Iran. In the end, this shows what we have long known: This game is locked in place, and goes on.

Chris Hedges wants us to know the facts concerning the CIA-inspired coup that first took Iran's democracy away in 1953. Just for fun here's a youngster from the good ole USA with a unique outlook. Not. Twittering, anyone? Suzan _________________

(Green Shootz!) "A Tale of Two Depressions"

John Mauldin is always good for a dark laugh. (NOT!) His tale of two depressions fits in compellingly here and he's much, much darker than Paul Krugman. Read it and weep for our hopes for real "change." Don't miss the charts! (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

A Tale of Two Depressions

New findings: World industrial production continues to track closely the 1930s fall, with no clear signs of ‘green shoots'.

World stock markets have rebounded a bit since March, and world trade has stabilized, but these are still following paths far below the ones they followed in the Great Depression.

There are new charts for individual nations' industrial output. The big-4 EU nations divide north-south; today's German and British industrial output are closely tracking their rate of fall in the 1930s, while Italy and France are doing much worse.

The North Americans (US & Canada) continue to see their industrial output fall approximately in line with what happened in the 1929 crisis, with no clear signs of a turn around.

Japan's industrial output in February was 25 percentage points lower than at the equivalent stage in the Great Depression. There was however a sharp rebound in March.

The parallels between the Great Depression of the 1930s and our current Great Recession have been widely remarked upon. Paul Krugman has compared the fall in US industrial production from its mid-1929 and late-2007 peaks, showing that it has been milder this time. On this basis he refers to the current situation, with characteristic black humour, as only "half a Great Depression."

The "Four Bad Bears" graph comparing the Dow in 1929-30 and S&P 500 in 2008-9 has similarly had wide circulation (Short 2009). It shows the US stock market since late 2007 falling just about as fast as in 1929-30.

Comparing the Great Depression to Now for the World, Not Just the US

This and most other commentary contrasting the two episodes compares America then and now. This, however, is a misleading picture. The Great Depression was a global phenomenon. Even if it originated, in some sense, in the US, it was transmitted internationally by trade flows, capital flows and commodity prices. That said, different countries were affected differently. The US is not representative of their experiences.

Our Great Recession is every bit as global, earlier hopes for decoupling in Asia and Europe notwithstanding. Increasingly there is awareness that events have taken an even uglier turn outside the US, with even larger falls in manufacturing production, exports and equity prices.

In fact, when we look globally, as in Figure 1, the decline in industrial production in the last nine months has been at least as severe as in the nine months following the 1929 peak. (All graphs in this column track behaviour after the peaks in world industrial production, which occurred in June 1929 and April 2008.) Here, then, is a first illustration of how the global picture provides a very different and, indeed, more disturbing perspective than the US case considered by Krugman, which as noted earlier shows a smaller decline in manufacturing production now than then.

(Click here for the rest of the article.)

Conclusion

To summarise: the world is currently undergoing an economic shock every bit as big as the Great Depression shock of 1929-30. Looking just at the US leads one to overlook how alarming the current situation is even in comparison with 1929-30. The good news, of course, is that the policy response is very different. The question now is whether that policy response will work. For the answer, stay tuned for our next column.

I know I will. Suzan _________________

Monday, June 22, 2009

Iranian Elections: The ‘Stolen Elections’ Hoax & U.S./Saudi/Israeli Ploys

James Petras informs us about the ‘Stolen Elections’ hoax, and Left Edge North (a site with attitude!) beckons us to read Bill Moyers' research on the U.S.'s role in all this brou-ha-ha about nothing.

If you remember your history you will realize that Iran was "democratic" before the U.S./CIA-inspired coup removed their democratically-elected leader Dr. Mohammed Mossedegh and installed the Shah as dictator. Funny how we have to keep learning the obvious lessons that poor people almost always vote their economic interests (except in the U.S.). (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

The History of Our (USA) Secret Government by BILL MOYERS:

video part 1 video part 2 video part 3 video part 4 video part 5 video part 6 video part 7 video part 8

'YES WE CAN", "HOPE", "CHANGE"?

Don't hold your breath waiting for it.

________________________

"Change for the poor means food and jobs, not a relaxed dress code or mixed recreation . . . Politics in Iran is a lot more about class war than religion.”

Financial Times Editorial, June 15 2009

There is hardly any election, in which the White House has a significant stake, where the electoral defeat of the pro-US candidate is not denounced as illegitimate by the entire political and mass media elite. In the most recent period, the White House and its camp followers cried foul following the free (and monitored) elections in Venezuela and Gaza, while joyously fabricating an ‘electoral success’ in Lebanon despite the fact that the Hezbollah-led coalition received over 53% of the vote.

The recently concluded, June 12, 2009 elections in Iran are a classic case: The incumbent nationalist-populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (MA) received 63.3% of the vote (or 24.5 million votes), while the leading Western-backed liberal opposition candidate Hossein Mousavi (HM) received 34.2% or (3.2 million votes). Iran’s presidential election drew a record turnout of more than 80% of the electorate, including an unprecedented overseas vote of 234,812, in which HM won 111,792 to MA’s 78,300. The opposition led by HM did not accept their defeat and organized a series of mass demonstrations that turned violent, resulting in the burning and destruction of automobiles, banks, public building and armed confrontations with the police and other authorities.

Almost the entire spectrum of Western opinion makers, including all the major electronic and print media, the major liberal, radical, libertarian and conservative web-sites, echoed the opposition’s claim of rampant election fraud. Neo-conservatives, libertarian conservatives and Trotskyites joined the Zionists in hailing the opposition protestors as the advance guard of a democratic revolution.

Democrats and Republicans condemned the incumbent regime, refused to recognize the result of the vote and praised the demonstrators’ efforts to overturn the electoral outcome. The New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, the Israeli Foreign Office and the entire leadership of the Presidents of the major American Jewish Organizations called for harsher sanctions against Iran and announced Obama’s proposed dialogue with Iran as ‘dead in the water’.

The Electoral Fraud Hoax

Western leaders rejected the results because they ‘knew’ that their reformist candidate could not lose. . . . For months they published daily interviews, editorials and reports from the field ‘detailing’ the failures of Ahmadinejad’s administration; they cited the support from clerics, former officials, merchants in the bazaar and above all women and young urbanites fluent in English, to prove that Mousavi was headed for a landslide victory. A victory for Mousavi was described as a victory for the ‘voices of moderation’, at least the White House’s version of that vacuous cliché. Prominent liberal academics deduced the vote count was fraudulent because the opposition candidate, Mousavi, lost in his own ethnic enclave among the Azeris.

Other academics claimed that the ‘youth vote’ – based on their interviews with upper and middle-class university students from the neighborhoods of Northern Tehran were overwhelmingly for the ‘reformist’ candidate.

What is astonishing about the West’s universal condemnation of the electoral outcome as fraudulent is that not a single shred of evidence in either written or observational form has been presented either before or a week after the vote count. During the entire electoral campaign, no credible (or even dubious) charge of voter tampering was raised. As long as the Western media believed their own propaganda of an immanent victory for their candidate, the electoral process was described as highly competitive, with heated public debates and unprecedented levels of public activity and unhindered by public proselytizing. The belief in a free and open election was so strong that the Western leaders and mass media believed that their favored candidate would win.

The Western media relied on its reporters covering the mass demonstrations of opposition supporters, ignoring and downplaying the huge turnout for Ahmadinejad. Worse still, the Western media ignored the class composition of the competing demonstrations – the fact that the incumbent candidate was drawing his support from the far more numerous poor working class, peasant, artisan and public employee sectors while the bulk of the opposition demonstrators was drawn from the upper and middle class students, business and professional class.

Moreover, most Western opinion leaders and reporters based in Tehran extrapolated their projections from their observations in the capital – few venture into the provinces, small and medium size cities and villages where Ahmadinejad has his mass base of support. Moreover the opposition’s supporters were an activist minority of students easily mobilized for street activities, while Ahmadinejad’s support drew on the majority of working youth and household women workers who would express their views at the ballot box and had little time or inclination to engage in street politics. A number of newspaper pundits, including Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times, claim as evidence of electoral fraud the fact that Ahmadinejad won 63% of the vote in an Azeri-speaking province against his opponent, Mousavi, an ethnic Azeri. The simplistic assumption is that ethnic identity or belonging to a linguistic group is the only possible explanation of voting behavior rather than other social or class interests. A closer look at the voting pattern in the East-Azerbaijan region of Iran reveals that Mousavi won only in the city of Shabestar among the upper and the middle classes (and only by a small margin), whereas he was soundly defeated in the larger rural areas, where the redistributive policies of the Ahmadinejad government had helped the ethnic Azeris write off debt, obtain cheap credits and easy loans for the farmers. Mousavi did win in the West-Azerbaijan region, using his ethnic ties to win over the urban voters. In the highly populated Tehran province, Mousavi beat Ahmadinejad in the urban centers of Tehran and Shemiranat by gaining the vote of the middle and upper class districts, whereas he lost badly in the adjoining working class suburbs, small towns and rural areas.

The careless and distorted emphasis on ‘ethnic voting’ cited by writers from the Financial Times and New York Times to justify calling Ahmadinejad ‘s victory a ‘stolen vote’ is matched by the media’s willful and deliberate refusal to acknowledge a rigorous nationwide public opinion poll conducted by two US experts just three weeks before the vote, which showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin – even larger than his electoral victory on June 12. This poll revealed that among ethnic Azeris, Ahmadinejad was favored by a 2 to 1 margin over Mousavi, demonstrating how class interests represented by one candidate can overcome the ethnic identity of the other candidate (Washington Post June 15, 2009). The poll also demonstrated how class issues, within age groups, were more influential in shaping political preferences than ‘generational life style’.

According to this poll, over two-thirds of Iranian youth were too poor to have access to a computer and the 18-24 year olds “comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all groups” (Washington Porst June 15, 2009). The only group, which consistently favored Mousavi, was the university students and graduates, business owners and the upper middle class. The ‘youth vote’, which the Western media praised as ‘pro-reformist’, was a clear minority of less than 30% but came from a highly privileged, vocal and largely English speaking group with a monopoly on the Western media. Their overwhelming presence in the Western news reports created what has been referred to as the ‘North Tehran Syndrome’, for the comfortable upper class enclave from which many of these students come.

While they may be articulate, well dressed and fluent in English, they were soundly out-voted in the secrecy of the ballot box.

In general, Ahmadinejad did very well in the oil and chemical producing provinces. This may have be a reflection of the oil workers’ opposition to the ‘reformist’ program, which included proposals to ‘privatize’ public enterprises. Likewise, the incumbent did very well along the border provinces because of his emphasis on strengthening national security from US and Israeli threats in light of an escalation of US-sponsored cross-border terrorist attacks from Pakistan and Israeli-backed incursions from Iraqi Kurdistan, which have killed scores of Iranian citizens.

Sponsorship and massive funding of the groups behind these attacks is an official policy of the US from the Bush Administration, which has not been repudiated by President Obama; in fact it has escalated in the lead-up to the elections.

What Western commentators and their Iranian protégés have ignored is the powerful impact which the devastating US wars and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan had on Iranian public opinion: Ahmadinejad’s strong position on defense matters contrasted with the pro-Western and weak defense posture of many of the campaign propagandists of the opposition.

The great majority of voters for the incumbent probably felt that national security interests, the integrity of the country and the social welfare system, with all of its faults and excesses, could be better defended and improved with Ahmadinejad than with upper-class technocrats supported by Western-oriented privileged youth who prize individual life styles over community values and solidarity.

The demography of voting reveals a real class polarization pitting high income, free market oriented, capitalist individualists against working class, low income, community based supporters of a ‘moral economy’ in which usury and profiteering are limited by religious precepts. The open attacks by opposition economists of the government welfare spending, easy credit and heavy subsidies of basic food staples did little to ingratiate them with the majority of Iranians benefiting from those programs. The state was seen as the protector and benefactor of the poor workers against the ‘market’, which represented wealth, power, privilege and corruption. The Opposition’s attack on the regime’s ‘intransigent’ foreign policy and positions ‘alienating’ the West only resonated with the liberal university students and import-export business groups. To many Iranians, the regime’s military buildup was seen as having prevented a US or Israeli attack.

The scale of the opposition’s electoral deficit should tell us is how out of touch it is with its own people’s vital concerns. It should remind them that by moving closer to Western opinion, they removed themselves from the everyday interests of security, housing, jobs and subsidized food prices that make life tolerable for those living below the middle class and outside the privileged gates of Tehran University.

Amhadinejad’s electoral success, seen in historical comparative perspective should not be a surprise. In similar electoral contests between nationalist-populists against pro-Western liberals, the populists have won. Past examples include Peron in Argentina and, most recently, Chavez of Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia and even Lula da Silva in Brazil, all of whom have demonstrated an ability to secure close to or even greater than 60% of the vote in free elections. The voting majorities in these countries prefer social welfare over unrestrained markets, national security over alignments with military empires.

The consequences of the electoral victory of Ahmadinejad are open to debate. The US may conclude that continuing to back a vocal, but badly defeated, minority has few prospects for securing concessions on nuclear enrichment and an abandonment of Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas. A realistic approach would be to open a wide-ranging discussion with Iran, and acknowledging, as Senator Kerry recently pointed out, that enriching uranium is not an existential threat to anyone. This approach would sharply differ from the approach of American Zionists, embedded in the Obama regime, who follow Israel’s lead of pushing for a preemptive war with Iran and use the specious argument that no negotiations are possible with an ‘illegitimate’ government in Tehran which ‘stole an election’.

Recent events suggest that political leaders in Europe, and even some in Washington, do not accept the Zionist-mass media line of ‘stolen elections’. The White House has not suspended its offer of negotiations with the newly re-elected government but has focused rather on the repression of the opposition protesters (and not the vote count). Likewise, the 27 nation European Union expressed ‘serious concern about violence’ and called for the “aspirations of the Iranian people to be achieved through peaceful means and that freedom of expression be respected” (Financial Times June 16, 2009 p.4). Except for Sarkozy of France, no EU leader has questioned the outcome of the voting.

The wild card in the aftermath of the elections is the Israeli response: Netanyahu has signaled to his American Zionist followers that they should use the hoax of ‘electoral fraud’ to exert maximum pressure on the Obama regime to end all plans to meet with the newly re-elected Ahmadinejad regime.

Paradoxically, US commentators (left, right and center) who bought into the electoral fraud hoax are inadvertently providing Netanyahu and his American followers with the arguments and fabrications: Where they see religious wars, we see class wars; where they see electoral fraud, we see imperial destabilization.

As an ironical twist, Robert Stark sees a victory for Neocons in Ahmadinejad's reelection.

Ahmadinejad's recent victory over challenger Moussavi is sparking riots in Iran and is being used as an opportunity for Neocons and Israel's President Netanyahu and his Likud Party to demonize Iran and call for military action against Iran.

Ahmadinejad is not the Hitler figure the Neo-cons make him out to be. Yes, Iran's government is oppressive to its own people due to the Mullah's power structure, but Ahmadinejad much like Obama is just a figure head. Ahmadinejad DID NOT threaten to attack Israel but his staunch anti-Israel rhetoric combined with his regime's pursuit of nuclear energy causes many to believe he is a threat to Israel.

Daniel Pipes’ endorsement of Ahmadinejad's victory shows the Neo-cons in America and Likudnik's in Israel want Ahmadinejad in office because he provides a convenient scapegoat to demonize Iran. Speaking at the Heritage Foundation, Pipes said, “I’m sometimes asked who I would vote for if I were enfranchised in this election, and I think that, with due hesitance, I would vote for Ahmadinejad. The reason, is that he would prefer to have an enemy who’s forthright and obvious, who wakes people up with his outlandish statements.”

On a similar note a Senior Israeli official said, “His extremism and his calls for Israel’s destruction have pushed the international community to try to head off Iran’s nuclear program.” Despite the fact the official lied about Ahmadinejad's call for Israel's destruction he does provide a convenient bogeyman for Israel's government to exploit. Columnist Ben C spi wrote in the Israeli Newspaper The Daily Ma’ariv, “There is no one who has served Israel’s information program better than him . . .”

The American Pro-Israel Lobby known as AIPAC is pushing the Iran Diplomatic Enhancement Act in Congress, which mandates for greater economic sanctions against Iran, which could cripple their economy which is dependent on oil exports. Israel has elected a hawkish right Wing Government led by Netanyahu who has vowed to take a hard-line approach against Iran, including military strikes if necessary.

Ahmadenejad may not be much different in foreign policy than his opponent Moussavi, but it is the rhetoric that matters, just like Bush and Obama are both in line with AIPAC's agenda on the Middle East but their rhetoric towards the Arab world is what makes the difference in their perception.

So there. Suzan ___________