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At just the time when everyone seems to be awakening to what a bad decision Homeland Security TSA pat-down forces really turned out to be (against an enemy that uses terror as a tactic), we get the headline-jolting news that a second fake CIA-trained underwear bomber has been exposed.
What a country! Not only are we securely in the hands of an information-skewing apparatus working against the interests of the citizens of a democracy, but they feel free to brag about their conquests (so to speak).
Professor Roberts, who comments on this phenomenon below, can't figure out how I (or you) can stay (ethically).
I keep saying I'd leave if I had a little bit of wherewithal to do so.
Anyone else thinking the same?
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Does The West Have A Future?
By Paul Craig Roberts
May 11, 2012
Living in America is becoming very difficult for anyone with a moral conscience, a sense of justice, or a lick of intelligence. Consider:
We have had a second fake underwear bomb plot, a much more fantastic one than the first hoax. The second underwear bomber was a CIA operative or informant allegedly recruited by al-Qaeda, an organization that US authorities have recently claimed to be defeated, in disarray, and no longer significant.
This defeated and insignificant organization, which lacks any science and technology labs, has invented an “invisible bomb” that is not detected by the porno-scanners. A “senior law enforcement source” told the New York Times that “the scary part” is that “if they buil[t] one, they probably built more.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that “the plot itself indicates that the terrorists keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people.” Hillary said this while headlines proclaimed that the US continues to murder women and children with high-tech drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa. The foiled fake plot, Hillary alleged, serves as “a reminder as to why we have to remain vigilant at home and abroad in protecting our nation and in protecting friendly nations and peoples like India and others.”
FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that the fake plot proves the need for warrantless surveillance in order to detect - what, fake plots? In Congress Republican Pete King and Democrat Charles Ruppersberger denounced media for revealing that the plot was a CIA operation, claiming that the truth threatened the war effort and soldiers’ lives.
Even alternative news media initially fell for this fake plot. Apparently, no one stops to wonder how al-Qaeda, which has become so disorganized and helpless that it is on the run and left its revered leader, Osama bin Laden, in a Pakistan village alone and unguarded to be murdered by US Navy Seals, could catch the CIA off guard with an “undetectable” bomb, to use the description provided by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein, who was briefed on the device by US intelligence personnel.
Notice that the Secretary of State has committed the bankrupt US and its unravelling social safety net to the protection of “India and others” from terrorists. But the real significance of this latest hoax is to introduce into the fearful American public the idea of an undetectable underwear bomb.
What does this bring to mind? Anyone of my generation or any science fiction aficionado immediately thinks of Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters.
Written in 1951 but set in our time, Earth is invaded by small creatures that attach to the human body and take over the person. The humans become the puppets of their masters. Large areas of America succumb to the invaders before the morons in Washington understand that the invasion is real and not a conspiracy theory.
On clothed humans, the creatures cannot be detected, and the edict goes out that anyone clothed is a suspect. Everyone must go about naked. Women are not even allowed to carry purses in their hand, because the creature can be in the purse attached to the woman’s hand.
Obviously, if the CIA, the news sources, and Dianne Feinstein’s briefers are correct that defeated al-Qaeda has come up with an “undetectable” bomb, we will have to pass through airport security naked.
If so, how will this be possible? If each airline passenger must go through a personal screening by disrobing in a room, how long will it take to clear “airport security”? I doubt there is any place in North or South America that the traveler couldn’t drive there faster. Or perhaps this is an answer to depression level US unemployment. Millions of unemployed Americans will be hired to view naked people before they board airliners.
As the Transportation Safety Administration division of Homeland Security has taken its intrusions, unchallenged, into train, bus, and highway travel, are we faced with the total collapse of the clothing industry? Stay tuned.
A couple of years ago a noted philosopher wrote an article in which he suggested that Americans live in an artificial or virtual reality. Another noted philosopher said that he thought there was a 25% chance that the philosopher was right. I am convinced that he is right. Americans live in the Matrix. Nothing that they know or think that they know is correct.
For example, our non-truth-telling “leaders” continually declare that “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.” This myth is one of the many reasons rolled out to justify American taxpayers’ declining incomes being taxed to provide the Israeli government with the means to murder Palestinians and steal their country.
Israeli democracy a myth you say? Yes, a myth. According to news reports compiled and reported by Antiwar.com (May 8), the September 4 Israeli elections have been cancelled, because the “opposition leader Shaul Mofaz is joining the government.”
Mofaz sold out his party for personal power, a typical politician’s behavior.
Mofaz’s treachery produced protests from his followers, but, according to news reports, “Israeli police were quick to crack down on the protest, terming it ‘illegal’ and arresting a number of journalists.”
Ah, “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.”
In truth Israel is a fascist state, one that has been in violation of international law and Christian morality during the entirety of its existence. Yet, in America Israel is a hallowed icon. Like Bush, Cheney, and Obama, millions of American “christians” worship Israel and believe it is “God’s calling” for Americans to die for Israel.
If you believe in murdering your opponents, not debating with them, dispossessing the powerless, creating a fictional world based on lies and paying the corporate media to uphold the lies and fictional world, you are part of what the rest of the world perceives as “The West."
Let me back off from being too hard on The West. The French and Greek peoples have shown in the recent elections that they are unplugging from the Matrix and understand that they, the 99%, are being put by their elites in a position to be the sacrificial lambs for the mistakes of the 1% mega-rich, who compete with one another in terms of how many billions of dollars or euros, how many yachts, collections of exotic cars, and exotic Playboy and Penthouse centerfolds they have as personal possessions.
The central banks of the West - the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the UK bank - are totally committed to the prosperity of the mega-rich. No one else counts. Marx and Lenin never had a target as exists today. Yet, the left-wing is today so feeble and brainwashed that it does not exist as even a minor countervailing power. The American left-wing has even accepted the absurd official account of 9/11 and of Osama bin Laden’s murder in Pakistan by Navy Seals. A movement so devoid of mental and emotional strength is useless. It might as well not exist.
People without valid information are helpless, and that is where Western peoples are. The new tyranny is arising in the West, not in Russia and China. The danger to humanity is in the nuclear button briefcase in the Oval Office and in the brainwashed and militant Amerikan population, the most totally disinformed and ignorant people on earth.
(Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following at www.paulcraigroberts.org)
If you're like I am, I'll bet you felt sorry for Eduardo Saverin when he was treated unethically, not to mention searingly humiliatingly by his one-time best friend, Mark Zuckerberg (explicated lovingly in The Social Network).
Bet you don't now.
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When it was revealed last week that Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin renounced his US citizenship, even notorious bad-boy billionaire Mark Cuban took to Twitter to express his disgust.
The move allows the thirty-year old Saverin to avoid paying a significant chunk of the taxes he will owe on the windfall coming his way with the impending Facebook IPO. In making this decision, the Brazilian native did more than expose his blind disregard for all that his adopted country has done for him. He has made himself the poster child for the callous class of one-percenters who are all too happy to use national resources to enrich themselves, and then skate, or cry foul, when asked to pay their fair share. The story evokes the image of the marauding aliens from the movie Independence Day, who come to Earth to take what they can get before moving on to another planet.
Saverin, who stands to make billions from his 4% share in Facebook, hastily moved here at the age of thirteen when his name turned up on a list of potential kidnap victims targeted by criminal gangs in Brazil. His father was a wealthy businessman, with a high profile in their home country, and so his family relocated to Miami to protect the youngster. Eduardo thrived in his new country, eventually attending Harvard University, where he had a stroke of life-changing luck when he was assigned future Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a roommate. Their subsequent struggle over the company has been immortalized in the blockbuster Academy Award winning film, The Social Network, which portrayed Eduardo as an outsider within the close knit circle of friends, who eventually only won his stake in the company through a lawsuit based on an early investment in the company.
Writer Farhad Manjoo does an excellent job at Pandodaily identifying all the ways that young Eduardo’s years in the United States played a role in the financial bonanza he’s about to experience. Starting with the obvious protection from kidnapping that wealthy people generally enjoy here in the US all the way through the reasonably functional US court system that awarded him the shares that are about to make him a billionarie, this country played a critical role in this young man’s life. In return, Saverin has decided to relocate to Singapore, where he’ll pay no capital gains taxes on any Facebook shares he sells in the future.
In fact, he’ll only pay an “exit tax,” which will be determined by his own team’s estimated value of his net worth at the time he renounced his citizenship. This little move could cost the US Treasury as much as $600 million dollars. That’s a novel way to thank your adopted country.
Saverin exemplifies the spoiled 1%-er who erodes the fabric of the country that afforded such opportunity by not paying back the investment America made in him. His decisions are a slap in the face of every person who recognizes that to be a place that can facilitate the birth of new innovations like Facebook, the United States needs resources.
Doubt that? Remember what government funded the research that created the internet and the web? Harvard University, where the Facebook plot was hatched, took in almost $700 million in federal grant support for tuition and research last year alone.
But Saverin’s decision is even more insulting to the millions of his less wealthy fellow immigrants who work hard to gain the privilege of giving back to the country that affords them opportunity to pursue their dreams in relative safety. Not to mention the DREAMers who offer to fight and possibly die for the country that they yearn to make their own.
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Want to know how the banksters are now able to continue getting big bonuses after getting the free use of taxpayer bailout funds? They are continuing to try to crash the market (and get out just ahead of the mayhem with the cream they've skimmed). It's kinda obvious isn't it that John Paulson of Goldman Sachs, who picked failures to bet against (to short), is their idol.
Paul Krugman tells us in rank detail why Jamie Dimon and his ilk are very bad guys (yeah, I know, how can guys that rich be bad - they are our idols!), and why they need to be regulated out of existence. (Because they will bring down our house again and again if not.)
Why We Regulate
Paul Krugman
May 13, 2012
One of the characters in the classic 1939 film “Stagecoach” is a banker named Gatewood who lectures his captive audience on the evils of big government, especially bank regulation — “As if we bankers don’t know how to run our own banks!” he exclaims. As the film progresses, we learn that Gatewood is in fact skipping town with a satchel full of embezzled cash.
As far as we know, Jamie Dimon, the chairman and C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, isn’t planning anything similar. He has, however, been fond of giving Gatewood-like speeches about how he and his colleagues know what they’re doing, and don’t need the government looking over their shoulders. So there’s a large heap of poetic justice — and a major policy lesson — in JPMorgan’s shock announcement that it somehow managed to lose $2 billion in a failed bit of financial wheeling-dealing.
Just to be clear, businessmen are human — although the lords of finance have a tendency to forget that — and they make money-losing mistakes all the time. That in itself is no reason for the government to get involved. But banks are special, because the risks they take are borne, in large part, by taxpayers and the economy as a whole. And what JPMorgan has just demonstrated is that even supposedly smart bankers must be sharply limited in the kinds of risk they’re allowed to take on.
Why, exactly, are banks special? Because history tells us that banking is and always has been subject to occasional destructive “panics,” which can wreak havoc with the economy as a whole. Current right-wing mythology has it that bad banking is always the result of government intervention, whether from the Federal Reserve or meddling liberals in Congress. In fact, however, Gilded Age America — a land with minimal government and no Fed — was subject to panics roughly once every six years. And some of these panics inflicted major economic losses.
So what can be done? In the 1930s, after the mother of all banking panics, we arrived at a workable solution, involving both guarantees and oversight. On one side, the scope for panic was limited via government-backed deposit insurance; on the other, banks were subject to regulations intended to keep them from abusing the privileged status they derived from deposit insurance, which is in effect a government guarantee of their debts. Most notably, banks with government-guaranteed deposits weren’t allowed to engage in the often risky speculation characteristic of investment banks like Lehman Brothers.
This system gave us half a century of relative financial stability. Eventually, however, the lessons of history were forgotten. New forms of banking without government guarantees proliferated, while both conventional and newfangled banks were allowed to take on ever-greater risks. Sure enough, we eventually suffered the 21st-century version of a Gilded Age banking panic, with terrible consequences.
It’s clear, then, that we need to restore the sorts of safeguards that gave us a couple of generations without major banking panics. It’s clear, that is, to everyone except bankers and the politicians they bankroll — for now that they have been bailed out, the bankers would of course like to go back to business as usual. Did I mention that Wall Street is giving vast sums to Mitt Romney, who has promised to repeal recent financial reforms?
Enter Mr. Dimon. JPMorgan, to its — and his — credit, managed to avoid many of the bad investments that brought other banks to their knees. This apparent demonstration of prudence has made Mr. Dimon the point man in Wall Street’s fight to delay, water down and/or repeal financial reform. He has been particularly vocal in his opposition to the so-called Volcker Rule, which would prevent banks with government-guaranteed deposits from engaging in “proprietary trading,” basically speculating with depositors’ money.
Just trust us, the JPMorgan chief has in effect been saying; everything’s under control.
Apparently not.
What did JPMorgan actually do? As far as we can tell, it used the market for derivatives — complex financial instruments — to make a huge bet on the safety of corporate debt, something like the bets that the insurer A.I.G. made on housing debt a few years ago.
The key point is not that the bet went bad; it is that institutions playing a key role in the financial system have no business making such bets, least of all when those institutions are backed by taxpayer guarantees.
For the moment Mr. Dimon seems chastened, even admitting that maybe the proponents of stronger regulation have a point. It probably won’t last; I expect Wall Street to be back to its usual arrogance within weeks if not days.
But the truth is that we’ve just seen an object demonstration of why Wall Street does, in fact, need to be regulated. Thank you, Mr. Dimon.
Couldn't be more grateful for your efforts to clarify.
Wonder if many voters have finally picked up on this yet?
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