The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.
A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.
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Monday, November 28, 2011
Voices of Veterans at Occupy Wall Street
On November 2nd US Veterans marched to Occupy Wall Street to voice their support for the occupiers and the 99%.
Historian Thaddeus Russell on the Renegades Who Helped Make America Free
Who is responsible for America's culture of freedom?
Much credit is given to the Founding Fathers who crafted the Constitution, but what about the drunkards who threw horse manure at British soldiers?
Historian Thaddeus Russell explores the taboo side of America's fight for freedom in his new book, A Renegade History of the United States . Russell's list of heroes of freedom includes pub owners, prostitutes, and sexually liberated pirates.
"People who existed and operated purely for their own pleasures and interests expanded freedoms for all of us, says Russell. "They broke open American culture in ways that most of us—not all of us—value if not cherish today."
See: People Who Live in the Shade - Revisionist historian Thaddeus Russell on American renegades, delusional socialists, left-libertarians, and Obama fans
DO THE JFK
Ochsner Hospital staff 1954, zoom to Dr. Mary Sherman
Mary S. Sherman worked as a doctor in New Orleans who was murdered on 21st July, 1964. She had been stabbed in the heart, arm, leg and stomach. Her mattress had been set on fire, but her massive burns could not have come from the smoking mattress. The crime has never been solved. Sherman's death occurred on the day the Warren Commission came to her city (New Orleans) to obtain testimony about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Dr. Mary's Monkey
How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK Assassination and Emerging Global Epidemics
Evidence of top-secret medical experiments and coverups of clinical blunders
The 1964 murder of a nationally known cancer researcher sets the stage for this gripping exposé of medical professionals enmeshed in covert government operations over the course of three decades. Following a trail of police records, FBI files, cancer statistics, and medical journals, this revealing book presents evidence of a web of medical secret-keeping that began with the handling of evidence in the JFK assassination and continued apace, sweeping doctors into coverups of cancer outbreaks, contaminated polio vaccine, the arrival of the AIDS virus, and biological weapon research using infected monkeys.
For more information see:
http://www.themonkeyvirus.com/
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKshermanM.htm
Dr_Mary.html
RAW reviews Pound's prose
BOOK REVIEW
By Robert Anton Wilson
Selected Prose 1909-1965, by Ezra Pound. New Directions, New York, 1973. 475 pages. $4.75.
Ezra Pound, probably the greatest poet of the 20th Century, was obsessed with the injustices of modern banking which he characterized as a false-system of book-keeping which prevents the producers of wealth from buying back their own product. He wrote about this in essays which grew increasingly angry and "fanatical" in tone as the decades passed, because he found that, despite his recognized literary stature, he could not get anything on this subject printed in any of the major media but only in "little magazines" of limited circulations. Eventually he began to suspect that the major publishers were in collusion with the major bankers, and his writings grew even more angry and "fanatical." Contemporary literary opinion generally regards this whole aspect of Pound's life work as a mania or obsession, but those who think for themselves might form a more favorable impression from this volume which contains nearly half a century of serious research and documentation.
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Among the solutions discussed by Pound are C.H. Douglas's National Dividend (currently revived, or diluted, in Friedman's Negative Income Tax plan), the stamp-script of Silvio Gesell (money which creates negative interest, i.e. favors the spender rather than the lender), shortening the working day (now inevitable as cybernetics advances) and reorganizing the Congress, guild-style, so that we would be represented by our labor unions or professional organizations rather than by politicians. He does not insist that any one of these would produce Utopia, and often discusses combinations or permutations among them. To my delight, he also admits, several times, that the ultimate escape from the tyranny of the present banking system must be "local control of local purchasing power," but he is uncharacteristically vague about how this might be managed, evidently never having discovered the People's Banks and alternative currency schemes of libertarians such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker.
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The Revolution Will Not Be Organized
The now-familiar chant of OccupyLA protesters wafted through the warm night air outside the south-side steps of City Hall, as a lanky man with corkscrew hair drew closer to the mic. Old men in track pants, hippie girls with hula hoops, young men in suits and the now ubiquitous Guy Fawkes’ masks, were asking him to speak up. Hundreds of others, their dome tents sprung up like a blanket of mushrooms on the lawn, faced his direction. For the second night, a consensus failed to be reached on the subject of courting unions. “In New York, they came to Zuccotti Park. We don’t even have a list of demands yet,” he argued, noting that local media had erroneously attributed a recent protest at a downtown BoA to OccupyLA. “We can’t afford to get hijacked.”
A Third World War Won’t Stop A Second American Revolution
“It’s not a scientific report, it’s a political document,” said investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on Democracy Now on November 21, referring to the latest IAEA report about Iran’s nuclear program.
The same could be said about the 9/11 Commission report. Philip Zelikow, who served as the Director of the Commission, is an expert at creating public myths. Zelikow was instructed by the neocons in the Bush administration and the overlords in the shadow government to stick to the official version of the 9/11 attacks.
As a storyteller and strategist, Zelikow knew what had to be done. He made sure that 9/11 eyewitnesses who saw or heard explosions near the World Trade Center site were silenced. All alternative explanations of the 9/11 events were to be erased from public memory. At least, that was the attempt of the Commission under Zelikow.
The 9/11 Commission’s totalitarian aim to hide the truth about 9/11 from the global public has not worked on everyone. It tried to cover up the reality about the uniform collapse of Building 7, which was not hit by a plane, but it has failed thanks to the hard work done by 9/11 family members, ordinary citizens, and organizations like Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth to bring Building 7 to public attention.
The totalitarian myth-makers in Washington and Israel have lost the infowar. Major psychological change in the global public mind has been achieved by the truth-telling of the 9/11 truth and justice movement. This was not true five years ago, but today it is a fact staring humanity in the face.
See also: US Military’s 5-Year World War III Plan
Egypt struggles for democracy, US backs tyranny
There has been a fairly successful attempt over the months since the beginning of the Arab Spring to re-write history putting America and other western powers on the side of the protesters, rather than on the side of their oppressors. The opposite was the case, and still is.
Up until the very last days America was calling for a "transition" led by either Mubarak himself, or the much-hated Omar Suleiman - a man allegedly responsible for horrific oppression, including personally overseeing the torture of Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib - to lead the transitional government.
This made sense of course, Suleiman was someone the Americans had experience dealing with. Habib's alleged torture, like that of many others in Egypt's nightmarish dungeons, was committed, one can only assume, at America's behest. American forces took Habib from Pakistan, and transferred him to Egypt where he says he suffered unspeakable acts of violence and humiliation before being turned back over to American custody and transferred to Guantanimo Bay.
There are many stories like his. They demonstrate the close cooperation between America's imperial system and the odious Mubarak regime. Only after it became resoundingly clear that neither Mubarak nor one of his cronies would placate the Egyptian people did America give up on them. They then decided to throw their weight behind the next best thing. They did not have to look far.
When the uprising began, Sami Annan, a senior figure in the Egyptian military and currently the deputy chairman of the Supreme council of Armed Forces - effectively the Number 2 man in the country - was in Washington meeting with high ranking American officers. This kind of military-to-military contact, including a great deal of joint training and exercises - such as the biannual Operation Bright Star - has been an important and under-reported fact of world politics for decades. When Sadat signed the Camp David accords, forging a submissive peace with Israel, and bringing Egypt into the American fold, the military still had an almost exclusive grip on power, and it was with them that Washington first developed its relationship. The cornerstone of this relationship was then, as it is now, massive military aid, which America has poured into Egypt's secretive military budget ever since. In 2010 this is estimated to have been around $1.3 billion, making Egypt the second largest recipient of US military aid, with Israel predictably, coming in at number one.
Democracy 4.0
Democracy 4.0 is the fastest road to direct democracy. We could implement this system tomorrow if we wanted to. It won’t happen of course, because our ‘representatives’ are scared sick of people actually exercising their popular sovereignty. As a movement we will have to adopt it ourselves first, and then maybe, sooner or later, there will be a little country or a little region brave enough to start a real trial of real democracy…