Next 9/11 scheduled for week of May 1-8, with Martial Law as a bonus

With the next new moon arriving May 5, 2008, which is usually the time the Pentagon War Mongers love to attack countries Israel wants bombed, this next terror drill, coming up next week, could be more than interesting. Especially the part about invoking "Continuity Plans and Capabilities."

That's bureaucrat speak for Martial Law.

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'It is this ever increasing desperate attempt to manufacture profits out of thin air that has brought our banking system to the brink of collapse'

From: “Financial” Crisis?

Our leading financial institutions have gone over the line, the result being what financial reporters call a “crisis”. This is not a question concerning economic orientation. These are questions of morality, criminality and national character.

The major-league bunko artists that have brought this nation to the brink of ruin took their lead from practices perfected down on the farm. In the minor leagues of high finance, certain sectors of our lending establishment have long feasted on the desperate and naïve elements of our society living from paycheck to paycheck. These seedy practices are widespread and readily apparent in the car- loan, check cashing, credit card, student loan, and paycheck loan operations that prey on these desperate folks. In these industries, the more you take advantage of your customers the better off you are. Too many of our fellow Americans earn their living everyday by selling bad deals to the rest of us. The worse the financial instrument is for the customer, the more money they make in profit and commission. These sordid practices were an inspiration to our banking elite. They were an enabler of things to come.

This malevolent consciousness provided the architecture within which the initial fraud that underpins this scandal occurred. In the past, predatory loans represented a hardship to the borrower, but lenders still predicated profit on the expectation of being paid back. Today's mortgage brokers issued loans to homebuyers knowing full well the borrowers would default. Every professional credit review informed the lenders that they were handing out loans that would never be repaid, and that they would never see a profit on the capital they were “investing”. This is not the twenty bucks your buddy “borrows” from you at the pub on Friday night. We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps trillions. The loss of such sums would represent the greatest disaster in our financial history, yet this huge amount was exposed knowing full well that it was not properly secured. This exposure had to be covered up, and this cover-up can be described as “stage two” of the scheme.

The availability of bad mortgages distorted the market for homes by increasing demand. This distortion in demand artificially increased home prices, an increase that provided a smokescreen to the underlying unsound mortgages and a rosy story for the business desk to report. These market distortions cannot be understood by traditional financial analysis because they were predicated on unsound principles, and perpetuated outside the bounds of all normal lending models. Even if the press didn't, the perps knew these mortgages were no good. The proof of this is how fast they repackaged them and got them off the books. After all, if they were good loans, why the bum's rush to get rid of them?

This derivative process can be likened to the role that “fences” play in the criminal underground. Hot goods are not worth a dime unless they can be fenced, turned into cash. Banks, institutions run by our leading citizens, took these highly questionable mortgages off the hands of the mortgage lenders, keeping the fraudulent scheme alive. Like an art thief scribbling a moustache on the Mona Lisa, losing mortgages were turned into derivatives. Apparently, on Wall Street, you can make a silk purse out of a cow's ear. In this way, they enabled the unscrupulous lending they depended on to continue evading the economic consequence of a shady practice. While this went on, the financial press did not see a thing, nor sound the alarm, but restricted their abbreviated commentary to the single word: “bubble”.

To make the swindle complete, one more “accessory after the fact” was required. They needed somebody to provide a French bath to keep the stink off. The firms that rate bonds and derivatives provided this final link in the crooked scheme. Ratings agencies are supposed to be the Sergeant at Arms for the bond markets, providing one last firewall, protecting investors from instruments of dubious quality. Despite the fact they were based on bad loans, this garbage paper was allowed to enter global markets with a “Triple A” rating. These austere gentlemen were acting in a manner akin to Al Capone slapping a Stolichnaya label on a bottle of bathtub gin. Once again, the business desk missed the story, only continuing to murmur softly, “bubble”.

In the last few months the entire fabric of this scheme has come unwoven. Reported losses have already amounted to several hundred billion dollars. Lending institutions have lost so much money; they don't have sufficient funds to make the legitimate loans
that allow for business expansion. This they call a “credit” crisis.

When a sun-glassed coke-head on a used car lot informs a customer (who may be a recent immigrant barely able to comprehend English), that the “good news” is that he has qualified for the special low rate of l6% on that lovely overpriced rust-bucket, we all know what that is about. But when you can no longer distinguish between that used car salesman and the heads of our largest banks; that is a sorry spectacle.

How can we explain the financial media missing the biggest story of the century?

The community of business journalists and economic commentators, including great newspapers, several magazines and a fistful of cable networks, did manage to send up a warning balloon. They called the situation a “bubble.” That was their way of saying, “there is something going on here, but we can't say what it is, can we Mr. Jones?”

At that point, we should have gone on alert. After all, it was less than a decade ago, that our economy last suffered the damages caused by a “bubble”. That scam was called the dotcom “bubble”, when any jackass that could post a pricelist online was hailed, by our friends at the business desk, as a captain of industry. Have we forgotten how the entire nation was gulled into spending billions on resetting the clocks on our computers? We all learned then, or should have, what a “bubble” was and the damage it could do. When the dotcom bubble burst, to begin the new millennium, billions were lost. But today's bursting, perhaps because we seemed to have learned nothing from the last one, is much, much worse.

The Lords of Capital Decree Mass Death by Starvation

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

Fidel Castro called biofuels "genocide," and he was right. And there can be no question as to the identity of the perpetrators of this global genocide: the Lords of Capital that formulate the foreign and domestic policy of the United States. That policy calls for 20 million acres of corn from states like Iowa to be converted from food to fuel. As should have been expected, such a massive diversion almost immediately pushed up the price of all other basic foodstuffs - a global disaster made quick and easy by the fact that, over the past several decades, planetary food production has been taken over by agribusiness - the speculative human parasites that control how food is bought and sold, and to whom, and for what purpose. These Lords of Capital are killers on a mass scale.

"Hot" money has totally distorted the "marketplace" for life-sustaining goods, causing millions of the desperately poor in scores of countries to take to the streets. "In less than a year," writes the Guardian newspaper, in Britain, "the price of wheat has risen 130 per cent, soya by 87 per cent and rice by 74 per cent."

These are nothing less than crimes against humanity, and cannot help but destroy the lives of millions who are already at the very edge of the precipice.

The so-called "market" - which is actually a club of super-rich men who distort and destroy everything of value to humanity that they touch - will be the death of us all, and much quicker than through the effects of global warming, which is also greatly accelerated by the ghoulish, greedy rush to grow food for cars rather than people. In such a murderous environment -manipulated purely for the profits of the Lords of Capital - neither trees nor peasants stand a chance. The United Nations  says it needs about half a billion dollars for the most critical cases of starvation, but no amount of emergency aid is sufficient to make up for the wild price rises that have already occurred - and which will put trillions in the pockets of the Lords of Capital.

Agribusiness wiped out small farmers in the U.S., and impoverished and pushed off the land untold millions of peasants, worldwide. Now the Lords of Capital have imposed a triage of death by starvation on the planet. The people who live on two dollars or less per day will have to die, and then, as prices rise, the three dollar people will follow.

The men who profit from such mass murder use terms like "structural adjustment" and "economic fundamentals" to attach a veneer of rationality to a chaotic system they have created on the fly for the sole purpose of mega-theft. In the end, the Lords of Capital have mastered only one art: the production of overlapping calamities, each more lethal than the last. Soon, if not already, the Haitian poor will have no cooking oil to mix with clay for their diet of dirt pies. The Lords of Capital will have turned them into dirt for another Haitian's consumption and demise.