Next: The Mother of all bank runs?

When investors don't trust even venerable institutions like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, you know that the financial crisis is as severe as ever. When a nuclear option of a monster $700 billion rescue plan is not even able to rally stock markets, you know this is a global crisis of confidence in the financial system.

The next step of this panic could be the mother of all bank runs, i.e. a run on the trillion dollar-plus of the cross-border short-term interbank liabilities of the U.S. banking and financial system, as foreign banks start to worry about the safety of their liquid exposures to U.S. financial institutions. A silent cross-border bank run has already started, as foreign banks are worried about the solvency of U.S. banks and are starting to reduce their exposure. And if this run accelerates--as it may now--a total meltdown of the U.S. financial system could occur.

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'Is it ethical to use deception in order to control these people?'

From: The 2008 US Election is Not About the Issues

Bob's First Rule of Power

We live on a planet with 6 billion humans, and most of them are uninformed and ignorant. Here in the United States, despite high standards of living and abundant material wealth, the situation is no different. In 2006, during coverage of the manufactured debate over "Intelligent Design," Newsweek conducted a national poll about scientific literacy. All of the participants were adult residents of the United States. The results were astonishing:

Fewer than a third of those polled know that DNA is the molecule of heredity

Only 10 percent know what radiation is

20 percent think the Sun revolves around Earth.

But of course, that was from 2006, and Bush's educational reform program has probably improved things considerably since then. I truly hope so, since that same year an even more disturbing poll was conducted by the Washington Post:

While the country is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives and shocked the world, 95 percent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the attacks, according to Wednesday's edition of the newspaper.

But when asked what year, 30 percent could not give a correct answer. Of that group, six percent gave an earlier year, eight percent gave a later year, and 16 percent admitted they had no idea whatsoever.

This memory black hole is essentially the problem of the older crowd: 48 percent of those who did not know were between the ages of 55 and 64, and 47 percent were older than 65, according to the poll.

The Post telephone survey was carried out July 21-24 among 1,002 randomly selected adults. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

I'm Not Pointing Fingers and Laughing

Don't mistake this for crowing about how dumb people are. This is a serious and intractable problem. The vast majority of voters in the United States are dangerously ignorant and easily manipulated.

Syria signals it will stop U.N. nuclear inspectors

Syria suggested that it won't give United Nations weapons inspectors further access to its military installations, undercutting a U.S.-led campaign to uncover an alleged secret nuclear program run by Damascus.

The lack of access, and the assassination of a Syrian general who was a key contact on the nuclear issue, raise doubts that inspectors will be able to learn the exact nature of a facility Israel bombed last year. The Bush administration has said the site was a nuclear reactor being developed by Damascus in cooperation with North Korea.

Ibrahim Othman, director-general of Syria's Atomic Energy Commission, said on Friday that his country is cooperating with the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. "However, this cooperation will not in any way come at the expense of exposing our military sites or causing a threat to our national security," he said at the IAEA's headquarters in Vienna.

The Bush administration wants the IAEA to push more aggressively for access to suspected nuclear facilities inside Syria.

"We still have serious concerns. The Syrians have not cooperated with the IAEA," John Rood, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said in an interview on Thursday. "The IAEA has been to only one place" inside Syria.

Syrian officials said the bombed facility was a non-nuclear military site. They allege that the U.S. is hyping charges of Syrian nuclear activity.

"After destroying this target, you go to the nuclear agency and say this is a nuclear target. You should do it before," Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem said in a recent interview.

The IAEA acknowledged that it was facing difficulties in its Syria investigation during its quarterly Board of Governors meeting in Vienna last week.

Israel has never publicly detailed its reasons for the September 2007 Syria bombing. This April, the Bush administration briefed Congress and the media on the intelligence they had gathered on the site, known as Al Kibar, near the Euphrates River in eastern Syria. It shared with the IAEA photographs and slides, made before the bombing, of a facility under construction that appeared to be the same size and configuration as North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear reactor.

The U.S. also provided what it said was evidence of repeated visits by North Korea nuclear officials to Syria over more then a decade.

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'The finishing touches on this globalist super-state'

From: Flashback: CFR "Gamed" Economic Implosion in 2000

The CFR's eight hour "war-game simulation of the simultaneous breakdown of major financial markets around the world" foresaw what we are now experiencing up close and personal. The CFR's game closely paralleled what is going on now. Freeman writes:

What had been simulated, was a policy of pumping huge amounts of liquidity by the Federal Reserve, both through public sources and also through secret channels, to "keep the main markets open." The simulation was conducted such that "all the public would see, is that the Fed volume of loans to banks had gone up." Further, and darkly revealing, the CFR, according to its own testimony, the simulation began with a coup against the President of the United States.

As for the latter, we have experienced something somewhat different — a coup not by forces outside the presidency but already ensconced within, a coup launched against Congress, the Constitution, and the American people by a coterie of insiders firmly in control of the executive. The CFR enlisted like-minded current, former, and future insiders, described below, to game the meltdown simulation:

For the simulation, the CFR conscripted 75 people, including bankers, former Treasury Secretaries, and former State Department officials. Participants were divided into four teams, sent into four rooms, with the ability to communicate with each other and with a command headquarters through the computers. The four teams covered 1) monetary-financial, which dealt with the functions of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors; 2) economic and trade, which dealt with the functions of the U.S. Treasury Department; 3) regulatory matters; and 4) national security — nut case and former CIA director James Woolsey played the role of Secretary of Defense.

Indeed, Woolsey is a "nut case" – more accurately, a psychopath — and a dangerous one associated with the neocons and the Project for the New American Century, the Likudnik dominated JINSA, Frank Gaffney's neocon infested Center for Security Policy, and the American Foreign Policy Council. Let's say he represented the neocon branch of the CFR, not yet in power when the game commenced on Manhattan. However, it would not be long before the neocons were in control of the White House and began to implement their "new Pearl Harbor" and orchestrate the unitary dictatorship of the executive, resulting in numerous martial law pieces of legislation now hanging over us ominously like a legal Sword of Damocles.

The game-players were hit with breakdowns in several markets, which increased in severity, and in some ways interacted, during the simulation. The market assumptions included: the Dow Jones Average Industrial Average falling by stages, from 10,000 to 7,100; the price of oil shooting up to $36 per barrel; the dollar plummeting against both the euro and the yen; the affiliate of a large British insurance company that was a big player in the equity derivatives market getting into trouble, causing panic in the derivatives market…

"The potential for financial breakdown was often accurately presented at the conference, but no solution was even remotely discussed," Freeeman concludes. In other words, the purpose of the CFR "war game" was not to prevent or ameliorate such a crash, but obviously how to best manage it after the markets began a precipitous and catastrophic decline, as they are now in the process of doing at the behest of the CFR and the international banksters.

Startle response linked to politics

People who startle easily in response to threatening images or loud sounds seem to have a biological predisposition to adopt conservative political positions on many hot-button issues, according to unusual new research published yesterday.

The finding suggests that people who are particularly sensitive to signals of visual or auditory threats also tend to adopt a more defensive stance on political issues, such as immigration, gun control, defense spending and patriotism. People who are less sensitive to potential threats, by contrast, seem predisposed to hold more liberal positions on those issues.

The study takes the research a step beyond psychology by suggesting that innate physiological differences among people may help shape their startle responses and their political inclinations.

The study is part of a growing research effort to uncover the often hidden factors in people's political makeup. In recent years, a variety of studies have shown, for example, that voters are subtly biased in favor of attractive political candidates. Other research has probed how subconscious attitudes among undecided voters can predict whom they will eventually support, and how the speed with which voters answer poll questions can predict the depth of their commitment to one candidate or another.

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