GEITHNER FALLS FLAT ON HIS FACE

This was supposed to be a great week for Washington and Wall Street. The administration had leaked in advance that it was going to put a full-court press on for its stimulus and bailout programs. That led to intense anticipatory buying by the stock market bulls.

Monday night’s primetime news conference with President Barack Obama only heightened anticipation ahead of the main events on Tuesday: A big speech from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and testimony before Congress by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Geithner's speech was full of grandiose talk and fluff.
Geithner’s speech was full of grandiose talk and fluff.

But shortly after Geithner opened his mouth, stocks began to fall. Then they fell further. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrials had plunged 382 points, or almost 5%.

What the Heck Happened?

Why did the best laid plans of politicians and policymakers fail? What’s going to happen next? Those are questions every investor needs the answers to, and I’m going to provide them today.

Before I take the scalpel to Geithner’s gamble, let me explain exactly what the latest “plan” (and yes, I’m putting that in quotes for a reason) entails …

For starters, the Fed will be expanding its Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF. This is a program whereby the Fed will lend money to investors who buy securities that fund various types of loans.

The facility was originally designed to help the student loan, credit card, and auto loan securitization markets. Now, it’s going to cover commercial mortgages and most likely residential mortgages outside the purview of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The Treasury will seed the TALF program with as much as $100 billion. The Fed can then provide additional leveraged funding, allowing for the purchase of as much as $1 trillion in assets.

Second, the Treasury is going to set up a public-private program to buy crummy assets from banks. Private investors would be offered loss caps and/or cheap financing to encourage them to participate. The idea is to avoid the excessively high cost of setting up a program completely funded by Uncle Sam. Early estimates of the size of the program run as high as $500 billion.

Third, there will be additional capital injections into U.S. financial institutions. Regulators will “stress test” bank portfolios, and inject capital into them if necessary through the purchase of convertible preferred securities.
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Finally, there was some fuzzier talk about foreclosure mitigation and prevention. The details weren’t entirely clear, but any program will probably build on existing loan modification programs under way at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and private banks.

So what’s the problem? I hardly know where to start.

But Here Are the
Three Biggest Problems …

Problem #1:
The plan wasn’t ready
for prime time!

Heading into this week’s events, the stock market had rallied significantly. Certain options market indicators were reflecting high levels of complacency. Wall Street investors clearly were betting that this time, the government would spell out exactly how, when, and why it would save the day.

But while Geithner’s speech was full of grandiose talk and fluff — it was extremely light on details. A separate “fact sheet” on the bailout efforts wasn’t entirely clear on how things would work, either.

The message that came through to the markets, loud and clear: Policymakers don’t even have the specifics of their plan hammered out yet!

Why on earth would you make a big deal about a huge bailout plan, leak details to the press for days, and suggest everything was tied up with a ribbon, then essentially announce a “plan to come up with a plan?”

I have no idea …

But the market clearly felt that’s exactly what the administration did. So investors dumped their stocks.

Problem #2:
The “same old, same old” efforts

These programs appear to be nothing more than expanded versions of efforts that have already had either limited success, or failed entirely.

A public-private effort to buy up bad debts that are clogging the system?
Paulson’s attempt to buy up bad debts was a total flop.
Paulson’s attempt to buy up bad debts was a total flop.

Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson floated a plan similar to that called the “Super SIV” back in late 2007. It never really got off the ground and was a total flop.

Another Fed program designed to support the securitization market and jumpstart credit extension?

We’ve been seeing versions of these for more than a year. Remember the TAF, the TSLF, the PDCF, and all the rest of those acronyms? Those programs have kept many “zombie” financial institutions alive.

But the origination and securitization of all kinds of loans has continued to plunge — and credit standards have continued to get tighter.

Just one of many examples:

Commercial loan originations dropped 80% year-over-year in the fourth quarter. EIGHTY PERCENT! Just think of the impact that’s going to have on the commercial real estate business, which I warned you almost two years ago in my Money and Markets column was destined to collapse.

And how about the supposedly new effort to mitigate foreclosures or modify mortgage loans?
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Banks, loan servicers, and other interested parties are ALREADY trying to do that. Payment reductions, re-amortization of delinquent balances, interest rate cuts, and other “solutions” are ALREADY being used widely. Temporary foreclosure moratoriums have ALREADY been implemented in several states.

But they’re NOT stemming the tide of foreclosures — or keeping home prices from falling further. Indeed, many borrowers who’ve had their loans modified are just redefaulting anyway.

Don’t just take my word for it …

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national banks, recently reported on the success rate of loans that were modified in the first quarter of last year. Some 36% had fallen behind on their payments again after just three months. After eight months, a whopping 58% were falling behind again!
Washington is talking a big game out of stemming foreclosures. But no interest rate or payment reduction can offset the complete loss of a borrower’s income.
Washington is talking a big game out of stemming foreclosures. But no interest rate or payment reduction can offset the complete loss of a borrower’s income.

Those findings jibe with private reports I have seen or read about. And that’s completely understandable: Some borrowers are so far underwater (they owe more than their homes are worth) that they see no reason to keep paying on their loans. Others are losing their jobs, and no interest rate or payment reduction can offset the complete loss of a borrower’s income.

So sure, Washington is talking a big game out of stemming foreclosures. But the numbers show the efforts aren’t really bearing fruit.

Problem #3:
Investors may finally be
starting to face reality

I think it’s finally dawning on investors that what Martin and I have been telling you all along is true. To reiterate from my January 30, Money and Markets column:

“This latest scheme to save the world will fail just like all the others. That is because nothing … NOTHING … can prevent a painful adjustment process.

“I wish that weren’t the case. But the time to prevent this painful correction and deleveraging process was a few years ago when the bubble was inflating.

“If regulators, policymakers, borrowers, and lenders hadn’t acted so stupidly then, we wouldn’t be in this mess now. But they did, we are, and no amount of Washington happy talk can change that fact.”

Personally, I believe we need to stop shoveling hundreds of billions of dollars more down the financial sector rat hole and get busy eliminating the dead weight.

* That means we should start nationalizing and carving up crummy banks that are just walking zombies anyway — instead of propping them up.

* That means we should also stop pretending the problem is that bad assets can’t be priced. Or that we need to eliminate mark-to-market accounting. Or that we should use taxpayer money to buy assets at inflated values.

Instead, we should acknowledge that the REAL problem is sellers are living in denial. Vulture investors are willing to bid for bad assets. But the banks don’t want to accept those bids because doing so might push them into insolvency.

So we end up with a paralyzed market.

That is EXACTLY what happened in the early stages of the downturn in the underlying housing market. The official gauges of house prices didn’t fall even as volume all but dried up. The dynamic: Buyers were dropping their bids … but sellers weren’t willing to accept them … and the result was paralysis.

But pretending that prices weren’t really falling didn’t help those sellers one bit. By hanging on and hoping for improvement, rather than just selling and getting it over with, they ended up losing even more money because the “real” market kept deteriorating. The same thing is going to happen with the banking industry if policymakers and executives keep sticking their heads in the sand.

For investors like you, the bottom line is clear: You can buy into the hype coming out of Washington and Wall Street. You can believe that there’s some magic bullet solution out there for all that ails us. Or you can acknowledge reality and take steps to prepare your portfolio for a very tough slog.

I trust you know which is truly the best course of action.

Until next time,

Mike

THE PROBLEM WITH WHITES

The Problem With Whites
By Kevin MacDonald
2-13-9



America will soon have a white minority. This is a much desired state of affairs for the hostile elites who hold political power and shape public opinion. But it certainly creates some management issues - at least in the long run. After all, it's difficult to come up with an historical example of a nation with a solid ethnic majority (90% white in 1950) that has voluntarily decided to cede political and cultural power. Such transformations are typically accomplished by military invasions, great battles, and untold suffering.

And it's not as if everyone is doing it. Only Western nations view their own demographic and cultural eclipse as a moral imperative. Indeed, as I have noted previously, it is striking that racial nationalism has triumphed in Israel at the same time that the Jewish intellectual and political movements and the organized Jewish community have been the most active and effective force for a non- white America. Indeed, a poll in 2008 found that Avigdor Lieberman was the second most popular politician in Israel. Lieberman has advocated expulsion of Arabs from Israel and has declared himself a follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leading pioneer of racial Zionism. The most popular politician in the poll was Benjamin Netanyahu - another admirer of Jabotinsky. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Li vni are also Jabotinskyists.

The racial Zionists are now carrying out yet another orgy of mass murder after a starvation-inducing blockade and the usual triggering assault designed to provoke Palestinian retaliation - which then becomes the cover for claims that Israel is merely defending itself against terrorism. This monstrosity was approved by overwhelming majorities of both Houses of Congress. The craven Bush administration did its part by abstaining from a UN resolution designed by the US Secretary of State as a result of a personal appeal by the Israeli Prime Minister. This is yet another accomplishment of the Israel Lobby, but one they would rather not have discussed in public. People might get the impression that the Lobby really does dictate US foreign policy in the Mideast. Obviously, such thoughts are only entertained by anti-Semites.

But I digress.

In managing the eclipse of white America, one strategy of the mainstream media is to simply ignore the issue. Christopher Donovan ("For the media, the less whites think about their coming minority status, the better") has noted that the media, and in particular, the New York Times, are quite uninterested in doing stories that discuss what white people think about this state of affairs.

t's not surprising that the New York Times - the Jewish-owned flagship of anti-white, pro-multicultural media - ignores the issue. The issue is also missing from so-called conservative media even though one would think that conservatives would find the eclipse of white America to be an important issue. Certainly, their audiences would find it interesting.

Now we have an article "The End of White America" written by Hua Hsu, an Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College. The article is a rather depressing display of what passes for intellectual discourse on the most important question confronting white people in America.

Hsu begins by quoting a passage in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in which a character, Tom Buchanan, states: "Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?" Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be-will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

Buchanan's comment is a thinly veiled reference to Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color which Hsu describes as "rationalized hatred" presented in a scholarly, gentlemanly, and scientific tone. (This wording that will certainly help him when he comes up for tenure.) As Hsu notes, Stoddard had a doctorate from Harvard and was a member of many academic associations. His book was published by a major publisher. It was therefore "precisely the kind of book that a 1920s man of Buchanan's profile - wealthy, Ivy League­educated, at once pretentious and intellectually insecure - might have been expected to bring up in casual conversation."

Let's ponder that a bit. The simple reality is that in the year 2009 an Ivy League-educated person, "at once pretentious and intellectually insecure," would just as glibly assert the same sort of nonsense as Hsu. To wit:

The coming white minority does not mean that the racial hierarchy of American culture will suddenly become inverted, as in 1995's White Man's Burden, an awful thought experiment of a film, starring John Travolta, that envisions an upside-down world in which whites are subjugated to their high-class black oppressors. There will be dislocations and resentments along the way, but the demographic shifts of the next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone's lives, producing a culture that's more likely than any before to treat its inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group.

The fact is that no one can say for certain what multicultural America without a white majority will be like. There is no scientific or historical basis for claims like "the demographic shifts of the next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone's lives, producing a culture that's more likely than any before to treat its inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group."

Indeed, there is no evidence at all that we are proceeding to a color blind future. The election results continue to show that white people are coalescing in the Republican Party, while the Democrats are increasingly the party of a non-white soon-to-be majority.

Is it so hard to believe that when this coalition achieves a majority that it will further compromise the interests of whites far beyond contemporary concerns such as immigration policy and affirmative action? Hsu anticipates a colorblind world, but affirmative action means that blacks and other minorities are certainly not treated as individuals. And it means that whites - especially white males - are losing out on opportunities they would have had without these policies and without the massive non- white immigration of the last few decades.

Given the intractability of changing intelligence and other traits required for success in the contemporary economy, it is unlikely that 40 more years of affirmative action will attain the outcomes desired by the minority lobbies. Indeed, in Obama's America, blacks are rioting in Oakland over perceived racial injustices, and from 2002­ 2007, black juvenile homicide victims increased 31%, while black juvenile perpetrators increased 43%. Hence, the reasonable outlook is for a continuing need for affirmative action and for racial activism in these groups, even after whites become a minority.

Whites will also lose out because of large-scale importation of relatively talented immigrants from East Asia. Indeed, as I noted over a decade ago, "The United States is well on the road to being dominated by an Asian technocratic elite and a Jewish business, professional, and media elite."

Hsu shows that there already is considerable anxiety among whites about the future. An advertizing executive says, "I think white people feel like they're under siege right now - like it's not okay to be white right now, especially if you're a white male. ... People are stressed out about it. `We used to be in control! We're losing control'" Another says, "There's a lot of fear and a lot of resentment."

It's hard to see why these feelings won't increase in the future.

A huge problem for white people is lack of intellectual and cultural confidence. Hsu quotes Christian (Stuff White People Like) Lander saying, "I get it: as a straight white male, I'm the worst thing on Earth." A professor comments that for his students "to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, `I don't have a culture.' They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized."

This lack of cultural confidence is no accident. For nearly 100 years whites have been subjected to a culture of critique emanating from the most prestigious academic and media institutions. And, as Hsu points out, the most vibrant and influential aspect of American popular culture is hip-hop-a product of the African American urban culture.

The only significant group of white people with any cultural confidence centers itself around country music, NASCAR, and the small town values of traditional white America. For this group of whites - and only this group - there is "a racial pride that dares not speak its name, and that defines itself through cultural cues instead-a suspicion of intellectual elites and city dwellers, a preference for folksiness and plainness of speech (whether real or feigned), and the association of a working-class white minority with 'the real America.'"

This is what I term implicit whiteness - implicit because explicit assertions of white identity have been banned by the anti- white elites that dominate our politics and culture. It is a culture that, as Hsu notes, "cannot speak its name."

But that implies that the submerged white identity of the white working class and the lack of cultural confidence exhibited by the rest of white America are imposed from outside. Although there may well be characteristics of whites that facilitate this process, this suppression of white identity and interests is certainly not the natural outcome of modernization or any other force internal to whites as a people. In my opinion, they are the result of the successful erection of a culture of critique in the West dominated by Jewish intellectual and political movements.

The result is that educated, intellectually insecure white people these days are far more likely to believe in the utopian future described by Hsu than in hard and cautious thinking about what the future might have in store for them.

It's worth dwelling a bit on the intellectual insecurity of the whites who mindlessly utter the mantras of multiculturalism that they have soaked up from the school system and from the media. Most people do not have much confidence in their intellectual ability and look to elite opinion to shape their beliefs. As I noted elsewhere,

A critical component of the success of the culture of critique is that it achieved control of the most prestigious and influential institutions of the West, and it became a consensus among the elites, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Once this happened, it is not surprising that this culture became widely accepted among people of very different levels of education and among people of different social classes.

Most people are quite insecure about their intellectual ability. But they know that the professors at Harvard, and the editorial page of the New York Times and the Washington Post, and even conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are all on page when it comes to racial and ethnic issues. This is a formidable array, to the point that you almost have to be a crank to dissent from this consensus.

I think one of the greatest triumphs of the left has been to get people to believe that people who assert white identity and interests or who make unflattering portrayals of organized Jewish movements are morally degenerate, stupid, and perhaps psychiatrically disturbed. Obviously, all of these adjectives designate low status.

The reality is that the multicultural emperor has no clothes and, because of its support for racial Zionism and the racialism of ethnic minorities in America, it is massively hypocritical to boot. The New York Times, the academic left, and the faux conservatives that dominate elite discourse on race and ethnicity are intellectually bankrupt and can only remain in power by ruthlessly suppressing or ignoring the scientific findings.

This is particularly a problem for college-educated whites. Like Fitzgerald's Tom Buchanan, such people have a strong need to feel that their ideas are respectable and part of the mainstream. But the respectable mainstream gives them absolutely nothing with which to validate themselves except perhaps the idea that the world will be a better place when people like them no longer have power. Hsu quotes the pathetic Christian Lander: ""Like, I'm aware of all the horrible crimes that my demographic has done in the world. ... And there's a bunch of white people who are desperate - desperate - to say, `You know what? My skin's white, but I'm not one of the white people who's destroying the world.'"

As a zombie leftist during the 1960s and 1970s, I know what that feeling of desperation is like - what it's like to be a self- hating white. We must get to the point where college-educated whites proudly and confidently say they are white and that they do not want to become a minority in America.

This reminds me of the recent docudrama Milk, which depicts the life of gay activist Harvey Milk. Milk is sure be nominated for an Oscar as Best Picture because it lovingly illustrates a triumph of the cultural left. But is has an important message that should resonate with the millions of whites who have been deprived of their confidence and their culture: Be explicit. Just as Harvey Milk advocated being openly gay even in the face of dire consequences, whites need to tell their family and their friends that they have an identity as a white person and believe that whites have legitimate interests as white people. They must accept the consequences when they are harassed, fired from their jobs, or put in prison for such beliefs. They must run for political office as openly pro-white.

Milk shows that homosexuals were fired from their jobs and arrested for congregating in public. Now it's the Southern Poverty Law Center and the rest of the leftist intellectual and political establishment that harasses and attempts to get people fired. But it's the same situation with the roles reversed. No revolution was ever accomplished without some martyrs. The revolution that restores the legitimacy of white identity and the legitimacy of white interests will be no exception.

But it is a revolution that is absolutely necessary. The white majority is foolish indeed to entrust its future to a utopian hope that racial and ethnic identifications will disappear and that they won't continue to influence public policy in ways that compromise the interests of whites.

It does not take an overactive imagination to see that coalitions of minority groups could compromise the interests of formerly dominant whites. We already see numerous examples in which coalitions of minority groups attempt to influence public policy, including immigration policy, against the interests of the whites. Placing ourselves in a position of vulnerability would be extremely risky, given the deep sense of historical grievance harbored by many ethnic activists and organized ethnic lobbies.

This is especially the case with Jews. Jewish organisations have been unanimous in condemning Western societies, Western traditions, and Christianity, for past crimes against Jews. Similar sentiments are typical of a great many African Americans and Latinos, and especially among the ethnic activists from these groups. The "God damn America" sermon by President Obama's pastor comes to mind as a recent notorious example.

The precedent of the early decades of the Soviet Union should give pause to anyone who believes that surrendering ethnic hegemony does not carry risks. The Bolshevik revolution had a pronounced ethnic angle: To a very great extent, Jews and other non-Russians ruled over the Russian people, with disastrous consequences for the Russians and other ethnic groups that were not able to become part of the power structure. Jews formed a hostile elite within this power structure - as they will in the future white-minority America; Jews were "Stalin's willing executioners."

Two passages from my review of Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century seem particularly appropriate here. The first passage reminds me of the many American Jews who adopt a veneer of support for causes of leftist versions of social justice and racial tolerance while nevertheless managing to support racial Zionism and the mass murder, torture, and incarceration of the Palestinians. Such people may be very different when they become a hostile elite in a white-minority America.

Many of the commentators on Jewish Bolsheviks noted the "transformation" of Jews [after the Bolshevik Revolution]. In the words of [a] Jewish commentator, G. A. Landau, "cruelty, sadism, and violence had seemed alien to a nation so far removed from physical activity." And another Jewish commentator, Ia. A. Bromberg, noted that: the formerly oppressed lover of liberty had turned into a tyrant of "unheard-of-despotic arbitrariness". The convinced and unconditional opponent of the death penalty not just for political crimes but for the most heinous offenses, who could not, as it were, watch a chicken being killed, has been transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and, in fact, lost all human likeness. ...

After the Revolution, ... there was active suppression of any remnants of the older order and their descendants. ... The mass murder of peasants and nationalists was combined with the systematic exclusion of the previously existing non-Jewish middle class. The wife of a Leningrad University professor noted, "in all the institutions, only workers and Israelites are admitted; the life of the intelligentsia is very hard" (p. 243). Even at the end of the 1930s, prior to the Russification that accompanied World War II, "the Russian Federationwas still doing penance for its imperial past while also serving as an example of an ethnicity- free society" (p. 276). While all other nationalities, including Jews, were allowed and encouraged to keep their ethnic identities, the revolution remained an anti-majoritarian movement.

The difference from the Soviet Union may well be that in white- minority America it will not be workers and Israelites who are favored, but non-whites and Israelites. Whites may dream that they are entering the post-racial utopia imagined by their erstwhile intellectual superiors. But it is quite possible that they are entering into a racial dystopia of unimaginable cruelty in which whites will be systematically excluded in favor of the new elites recruited from the soon-to-be majority. It's happened before.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University­Long Beach.

OBAMA'S DEFENSE DEPARTMENT APPOINTEE-THE $$3.4 TRILLION $$ QUESTION

Former Raytheon lobbyist, William Lynn, was appointed deputy defense secretary on Wednesday, February 11th after a contentious Senate confirmation hearing that led Republican Senator for Iowa, Charles Grassley, to forcefully object to the appointment on the basis of Mr. Lynn's "very questionable accounting practices that were obviously not in the public interest" while in the position of Pentagon Comptroller during the Clinton administration. The Senator's objection did not go far enough in exploring the "very questionable accounting practices" that Lynn engaged in during his tenure at the Defense Department from 1997 to 2001. The relevant question that should have been asked is "Where did the $3.4 Trillion go?"

In fiscal year 1999, the Department of Defense reported that it was missing $2.3 Trillion. In fiscal year 2000 the Department reported a missing $1.1 Trillion. Total: $3.4 Trillion "missing" taxpayer money. This happened under the watchful eye of the same William Lynn that now passes through the revolving door between the Department of Defense and the Defense industry.

Lynn was the Defense Department's chief financial officer and as such was responsible for all budgetary administration and reporting. He was also responsible for the publication of audited financial statements which he failed to do during his tenure and which have not been published since.

Lynn was nominated by Obama-Biden because "Lynn brings decades of experience and expertise in reforming government spending and making the tough choices necessary to ensure that American tax dollars are spent wisely."

The other appointee, as Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller), Robert Hale, served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force in the role of Financial Comptroller from 1994 to 2001. He was also responsible, along with Lynn, for the management of Defense Department funds. Hale is also a Certified Defense Financial Manager with acquisition specialty. This is his particular connection to the Military Industrial Complex.

Between these two appointees, they have lost enough taxpayer money to pay for Obama's Stimulus Plan 4 times over and are now again responsible for overseeing how the Department of Defense manages its appropriations. Obama's promise of fiscal responsibility within his administration can now be dumped in to the already overflowing trash can of broken promises.

THE RACIST,APARTHEID STATE OF JEWISH ISRAEL

The Racist, Apartheid
State Of Jewish Israel
Jim Kirwan
2-12-9


"The United States administration, previous administrations, the European governments, the whole official international community has been complicit with Israeli crimes, war crimes in Gaza and in other places, and silent about forty-one years of occupation. So, basically, people in Israel think they can do what they want. If they violate human rights in such a terrible manner and nobody is objecting, I think they think they can move forward towards racism and an apartheid system, and that is unfortunately the case today.

And that gives you a very, very simple picture of how tragic the situation is in Israel today. And it puts us all, as Palestinians, in front of a very clear task: we have to struggle against this apartheid system. We have to break this apartheid system. But the challenge now is on the side of the whole international community, which has been either silent or complicit or trying to avoid the issue, when it is very clear."

HANIN ZOUBI: [translated] Indeed, Lieberman [one of the Israeli candidates] is a natural result of the racist policies in this country for sixty years. Lieberman didn't bring anything new. All the parties demand loyalty from the Arabs. The right, what's called the center, what's called by mistake left or center-left, they all demand loyalty from the Arabs. The new thing by Lieberman is only giving the punishment. The punishment for no loyalty is pulling the citizenship."

"anybody who is against war, for instance, that is conducted by Israel, on Gaza or anywhere else, would be considered as an illoyal or unloyal citizen. Anybody who is not supporting occupation would become not loyal to Israel. This is why it's very dangerous and risky. It is putting the oppressed, which are the Palestinians and the Arabs, who are oppressed from racism and discrimination, in a situation where either they approve of their own oppression by the Israeli government or they become disloyal to the Israeli government and then entitled to losing their citizenship. That is the risk, and that's why it looks like a very clear neo-fascist approach.

Now, on the issue of settlements, I want to say that since 1967 there hasn't been any period where there was a real freeze of settlement activities. On the contrary, they have been growing at a much faster rate, especially during the times of the so-called peace process. During Annapolisperiod, the rate at which settlement continued to expand was forty times more than before Annapolis. And now we are witnessing the creation of even new-whole new settlements." (1)

Which brings us to this global-crisis of having the world's most unstable and unfinished "nation" in the position of becoming even more rabid, in their pursuit of extermination for anyone not sharing their belief, in the superiority of the Zionist State, over everyone else on the planet.

For those that have not kept up with what Israel has taken control of, here are just a few of the things that have eluded the headlines. Israel is in charge of US stockpiles and facilities for all our nuclear weapons (leaked out during the mystery surrounding the missing nuke aboard a B-52 flight from South Dakota to New Orleans). Israel has also blackmailed the USA into backing their bid to achieve The Greater State of Israel which includes parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Lebanon, and possibly parts of Saudi Arabia.

Beyond these recent leaks we know for certain that JFK tried to prevent the Israelis from obtaining nuclear weapons, and that not only failed, but along the way JFK ended up dead. His successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson was blackmailed into 'Not-stopping' the Israeli attacks upon the unarmed USS Liberty, during the six day 1967 war. Thirty-four American sailors were killed and 174 were injured, many seriously. The attack was covered up by Senator John McCain's father-Admiral McCain. (2)

Then it was Robber-Baron-Ronnie's turn to turn traitor and run from Israel. This time it was the bombing of the US Marine Barracks in Beirut,Lebanon that killed 242 U.S. Marines, and we failed to challenge or investigate that false-flag terror attack upon us by Israel. Time and again events have been perpetrated against US interests that very specifically served Israeli interests, regardless of the cost in American lives.

We give Israel more money than all the other foreign-aid combined; yet what do we get in return? We get attacked and we are told exactly what we can and cannot do in foreign affairs and in all things having to do with the military security of Israel. Iraq and Iran as well as Pakistan andAfghanistan are all targets because they play into the creation of The Greater State of Israel. Turkey, Lebanon, Syria are also part of this massive war on all of Israel's neighbors. Israel for her part claims that all she wants is 'peace,' but what she means is that all she really wants is another "piece," of every country that is anywhere near her ever-shifting borders. The US government calls Israel our partner and ally: what she is our master, both at home and abroad-and Americans do not protest this blatant insult because they've been brainwashed!

No one has ever explained what we get for all that money and support that ordinary US taxpayer's give to Israel. If we have a 'partnership with Israel, where is the reciprocation-where is the benefit to all those American citizens that Israel thinks of as her enemies?

Israel has been a constant irritant to the entire world for the last 60 plus years. Israel hates everyone that does not bow-down to her infamous hatreds and unquenchable greed. Israel has become a pariah among nations, and a curse upon the planet. The world needs to have an immediate "Regime-Change" in Israel-especially now that her new government has chosen to eliminate democracy in favor of Apartheid, and Israel's stated goals have turned from supposed openness to just another fascist regime in a world that is plagued by state-terrorism at every turn. Here's Cynthia McKinney, just one of AIPAC's intended victims who has continually fought back. (4)

Jews have been banished forty-seven times in a thousand years ­ from a wide variety of countries and by very different peoples. The major exception has been the United States. We have not allowed any other people to take over the lives of Americans in their own country-only Israel gets away with that. And "this" is only possible when good people continue to choose to "Do Nothing"! (5)

Here's just an excerpt from one example:

"Commenting on the latest Israeli one-directional onslaught against the Palestinians of Gaza Strip, the Israeli 10th TV channel has disclosed that the Israeli genocidal forces had used half of its air force and had launched at least 2500 air raids against Gaza Strip.

The television military correspondent stated that the Israeli warplanes had dropped more than a thousand tons of explosives, including white phosphorous and DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosive) bombs, during three weeks on the virtually unarmed densely populated 360 square Kilometers Strip.

He added that the shells fired by tanks, artillery, gunboats, and infantry were not included in those fired by the air force.

After a whole week of continuous air bombardments Israel sent in its elite foot soldiers; 30,000 of them, and called in 10,000 of its reservists. Armed with the latest weapons of mass murder, covered with an umbrella of free reigning air force, and accompanied with raining shells of heavy artilleries, they drove their tanks into the civilian towns murdering civilians and destroying every structure in their path.

Living outside of Gaza one cannot fully understand the barbarity of this genocide especially when the Western media had barely covered any of its atrocity. To gain a slight idea of its enormity one should remember that, during the 6-days war of 1967, this same Israeli army was distributed on four fronts; Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, and Lebanese, and it was fighting regular armies. Now the whole brunt of this army is concentrated on a small strip against unarmed and untrained civilian population.

Latest official count was 1350 murdered, 40% of them were children, and 5300 were injured; mutilated and amputated. It was reported that 80% of the injured were the victims of burning phosphorous bombs. More dead are being discovered under the rebels, and many seriously injured are expected later on to die.

Israeli tanks had left several city blocks completely destroyed without any homes or structure standing. The tanks shelled homes and apartment towers. Due to the small size of Gaza Strip Palestinians had to build vertically. Many apartment towers went up 15-20 stories high with each story containing 6-8 apartments.

A total of 20,000 buildings were completely or partially burnt and damaged. The UN has reported that more than 50,000 Palestinians are left homeless and are now crowded into 50 emergency shelters.

An estimated of 50,000 more are living with relatives and in tents they erected on the ruins of their homes.

The Israeli bombardment targeted everything in Gaza including government buildings, police headquarters, banks and business offices, the main university, 67 schools sheltering civilians, shopping centers and market places, factories, water, sewer, and electricity infrastructures, private homes and apartment towers and charity organizations." (6)

We have a place that used to be a nation, but is no longer, because our leadership is wholly owned by others. Out of 535 members of congress 531 of them voted against the people of the United States and the world, when they endorsed the slaughter outlined above and more fully in the footnote. Israel stands for everything the founding documents opposed in the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist papers, and ultimately in the US Constitution and its Amendments.


If any other nation but Israel had done what Israel is now continuing to do to the world; the outrage and fury would have forced it from the global stage long ago. And probably, the world would have banished any surviving Zionists to uninhabitable parts of the earth, or to life imprisonment, if not death. But what have we done-NOTHING except to continue to give them whatever they demand!


Now Israel is a place where Apartheid will flourish, and where the people there shall no longer have rights or freedoms outside the narrow view of the fascists that run the world's smallest rogue state: A restless ruthless state with the fourth largest military on the planet, which we paid for ten times over. If we let that dung-heap continue to rule our every action, then we shall deserve to live in the hell that has been designed by the Zionists for us all.We could make a start by forcing all dual-citizens out of federal office: because our government ought to be reserved for Americans alone to occupy, as any other policy (such as the one that we have now) is a clear and potentially treasonous conflict of the national-interests of the United States.

kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net

1) The Israeli Elections
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/11/palestinian
_lawmaker_mustafa_barghouti_on_the

2) Israel's Attack on the USS Liberty
http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair06082007.html

3) Beirut was an Israeli Bomb
http://judicial-inc.biz/Beirut_false_flag.htm

4) What is Dignity ­ video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfb15ySoAVQ

5) Jews have been Banished 47 Times in a thousand years
http://www.rense.com/general85/banished.htm

6) Israeli Spokesman Brags about Controlling America
http://www.daily.pk/world/americas/9334-israeli-spokesman
-says-we-control-stupid-americans.html

EDITORIAL:TWO TYPES OF SCHOLARS IN THE GLOBAL AFRICAN COMMUNITY

There are two types of fundamental scholars within the world of
African people. There are those scholars who have internalized the
value system of white supremacy. They, generally, never question any
theories, models, perceptions, assumptions or concepts that come from
the minds of White males in the world. They then proceed to write and
teach rooted in the assumption that white scholars cannot be
questioned in their social, cultural, philosophical or theological
approaches to the human condition. In general their very merit as
scholars is rooted in their approval by the white male developed and
controlled institutions of higher learning, and they depend on the
validation of the white male as the source of their professionalism
and views. This group of scholars within the global African community
can command accesss to the media, major publishing companies, the
university lecture circuit, and even access to other nation of African
people. These scholars, in conjunction with a very dishonest
mainstream African media in the U.S., the Caribbean and on the African
continent then engage in reinforcing white supremacy simply because
that endorsement pays well, supports the business, provides the
indivdual with economic stability and personal notoriety. Even those
who take the position of being progressive, liberal and radical only
do so within the context of White male cultural thought. They only
referrence other Africans who reference radical, progressive and
liberal whites. Such scholars attempt to control the direction of the
conversation of African people. They are more prone to talk in
'universal' themes, 'international' themes, 'humanism' themes and
'class' themes which are all inventions of the white male mind in
their concept, assumptions, values to serve the purpose of his
maintenance of human supremacy. Thus the conversation for them is
always 'how do we transcend race to a common dialogue of humanity'
which is always based on how the white world wants to transcend race.
For them the goal is for African people to prove to the white world
that African people are worthy of respect, regard and assistance
whether that argument is posed from the conservative right or the
radical left of white cultural thought. In essence they spend a life
time promoting world white nationalism disguised as 'modernity,
technological advancement and social democracy' as defined by the
white male mind. They have not had an original thought ever and
denounce original thought as invalid and unrealistic because it does
not allow African people to learn how to live in a white cultural and
social reality. Their combined force of conversation then attempts to
drown out the second type of scholar, the African-centered,
Nationalist and Pan-Africanism scholar. This type of scholar has
struggled for two centuries to be heard by African people yet this
scholar has had to contend with the power of white supremacy by way of
the first scholar, the media preference of the first scholar and the
innate selfl-preservation of white male culture that has created a
climate and environment to starve his scholar out. This scholar has
learned the theories, models, perceptions, and concepts and
assumptions of the same schools of the white male thought as the first
group of scholars yet this scholar has not only chosen to challenge
their fundamental validity but has moved into the direction of
replacing them with sound thinking that comes out of an African way of
looking at the human condition rooted in those cultural concepts,
theories, models, perceptions and assumptions of a fundamentally
African value system. This scholar has been a student of Jeffersonian
philosophy, Marxism, Christianity, Islam, capitalism, industrialism,
and found all of them to be unAfrican in nature, sensibility and
application. This scholar has started from the position that the
white male is not above being challenged in ALL of his theories,
models, approaches, assumptions and concepts about anything human.
This scholar takes the position that the white male is no more
intelligent than any other group of people on the planet. He has
merely had the ability to use seduction, coercion and brutal violence
to persuade the rest of humanity that he is the ultimate
representative of civilization, human achievement and human
aspiration. These scholars, however, have generally worked in
isolation from one another, without the advantage of financial support
that their peers have received continuously. They have had to
struggle against a mainstream African American, Caribbean and
continental African media that has been convinced of the credibility
that anything worth doing must be a copy of the white male model of
human intellect and social organization. These scholars for the most
part have not headed any historically Black college departments in
America, nor have they been made the heads of such departments in
Caribbean and African universities. Often times these scholars have
not only struggled to print their material but to get it advertised in
the mainstream black media. They have never been featured on
mainstream black controlled programming on a regular basis. They have
not been offered syndication by the Black media in the U. S., in the
Caribbean or on the African continent. They have had to pursue an
intellectual guerrilla strategy to get exposure in the Black world
globally. The power of white male supremacy is such that those
African people on the right of the white male cultural perspective and
those on the left of the white male cultural perspective have attacked
them with equal venom, and where they have not been attacked, they
have been deliberately ridiculed or questioned. Those who have
challenged them have read nothing of Martin R. Delany, Paul Cuffee,
Edward Wilmot Blyden, Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells, Queen Nzingha,
Queen Asantewaa, Cheikh Anta Diop, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, etc..
Their books have not been used by the vast majority of Black history
courses in the U.S. And of course they have not been approached by
most universities in the Caribbean and on the African continent to use
their books for courses. Yet this group of scholars has always
attempted to put the needs of African people first, realizing that the
other groups on the planet do not need our help, and are generally
helping themselves bettter than we are helping ourselves. All of
these scholars have started with the assumption that we have enough
genius within our ranks to solve our problems if we are willing to
think ourside of the Eurocentric cultural box. For them, we need to
learn how to think from a position of power; work together to
establish a position of power and be able to threaten retaliation from
a position of power."

Baye Kes Ba Me-Ra
"Two Types of Scholars in The Global African Community"

THE TRIBE THAT CONTROLS AMERICA

The Tribe That Controls America
By Cochise Stronghold
2-6-9


Years ago, in the late 19th century, US troops launched punitive raids against native tribes in the far western states. We learn of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce, and the Lakota Sioux warrior chiefs, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. We learn of the legendary guerillas (or terrorists) Geronimo and Cochise. And we marvel at the courage, the resistance and the doomed efforts by these tribal leaders to preserve their way of life.

Nowadays, remnants of these tribes, Nez Perce, Lakota Sioux and Apache, survive in peace within the larger USA.

But suppose, one day, two native tribes went to war. Suppose Americans awoke one day and were overwhelmed by reports of an attack by the larger, more aggressive tribe on the lesser tribe. Wouldn't someone, anyone try to stop it?

Suppose US news reporters focused on the tremendous explosions, while avoiding any discussion of the reasons for the barbarity. But instead of condemning the attack, the entire US media strangely supported it.

Suppose, long before the attack, both Congress and the White House had designated the smaller tribe as terrorists. Suppose the Pentagon sent modern weapons to the superior tribe, weapons to eradicate the lesser tribe. Suppose, even, that disgruntled US taxpayers were required to fund this bloody tribal war with their tax dollars, despite taxpayer opposition. Suppose the warlike tribe so influenced US political, military and media leaders that no effective opposition could prevail.

Even more strange and unexplainable, the warlike tribe possessed a land area less than one percent of the greater USA. The warlike tribe also represented a tiny population almost wholly dependent on US foreign aid.

The warlike tribe then lobbied US Congressional leaders to vote on a resolution. Suddenly the US House of Representatives sprung into nervous action (So unlike Congress otherwise) and voted 399 to 6 to wholly support the warlike tribe's invasion of the lesser tribe's tiny reservation. Likewise the US Senate sprung into action (So unlike the Senate) to support the warlike tribe's invasion too.

So the warlike tribe attacked the primitive reservation. For three weeks the tiny enclave under bombardment suffered terribly and heart-rending photos recorded the suffering. None of these photos were permitted to be seen in the US media, since the warlike tribe prevented it. Indeed, the warrior leaders, the true leaders of America, prohibited the US media from eyewitness reports that might sway people to condemn the attack.





The warlike tribe boasted of their control. One tribal chieftain even bragged: "You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control Congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can't criticize us."

And the warrior chieftain was right.

If anyone in the USA dared to criticize the warlike tribe, a vast clique of tribal members in the media accused the critics of somehow being "Anti-tribal." No one wanted to be accused of being Anti-tribal. No politician dared being thought of as Anti-tribal, for fear of losing votes, even though tribal members living in the USA comprised such a tiny minority of voters. When thoughtful critics explained that BOTH tribes shared the same common ancestry, these critics-many of them fellow tribesmen---were shouted down, slandered, threatened or fired from their jobs.

We are victims, claimed the chosen warlike tribe. How can you judge us as being warlike, they said, when your own scorched earth policy killed men, women and children for centuries? Before you judge us, study your own history, said the warlike tribe.

After several weeks of destruction, having destroyed office buildings, banks, schools, hospitals, farms, orchards and wells with very little resistance, the warlike tribe withdrew from the smaller reservation. The leaders of the larger USA, nearly one hundred times larger, rather than condemn the victors, actually blamed the vanquished.

One tribal chief even boasted: "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on us. We control America, and the Americans know it."

In a way, the warlike tribe chieftain was right. America, presently the biggest warlike nation in the world, was founded on bloodshed and eradication. Once the lesser tribes were eliminated, then suddenly sanctimony and hand-wringing became popular.

War always unites tribe against tribe, down through the centuries until some peace, or the elimination of competitive tribes, is achieved. After all, one million Iraqi dead tribesmen would certainly agree. The warlike tribe controls America, whether in Gaza or Washington DC.

LITROENERGY MICRO PARTICLES GLOW FOR 12 YEARS

MPK is a glow-in-the-dark paint company that has recently announced a new product -- Litroenergy. It's made of self-luminous micro-particles that are cheap, non-toxic, and will keep a glow for over 12 years. They never need to be exposed to the sun or recharged in any way, they just glow like hell. The material can be injection molded or added to paint and can glow in any color desired. "The light is said to be equivalent to a 20 watt incandescent bulb" and the cost of a glowing 8 x 12" object is about $0.35. Awesome! I love green technology and I love this stuff. It's going to be all over the place in no time. And by "all over the place" I mean "all over my genitals", because they're hard to find sometimes.

New Light Glows For 12 Years [treehugger]

THE HYPERDIMENSIONAL ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA & 2012

EXAMINING THE FANTASY OF 24'S JACK BAUER

[Op-Ed] Examining the Fantasy of 24’s Jack Bauer: ‘Clip the Electrodes to His Balls and Turn on the Juice’

via AlterNet

Credit where credit is due. The TV show “24″ is probably the most significant piece of political drama in the last decade. jackbauer-tm

On one hand, it is very likely that Barack Obama got elected because America had already had a serious black presidential candidate (one season) and two black presidents (one season each). And he was always the most decent guy in the room. Often, the only decent guy in the room. Just like Obama.

On the other hand, there’s torture.

* Terrorists are going to nuke Los Angeles in three hours.

* Agent Jack Bauer has a suspect who knows where the bomb is.

* If Jack Bauer tortures the suspect, he can force him to say where it is, get there in 2 hours and 59 minutes, stop the bomb, and save 10 million people.

* What should, what must, Jack Bauer do?

That’s a no-brainer. Clip the electrodes to his balls and turn on the juice.

I don’t know how many people have actually watched “24,” but there’s not a person in America who is not familiar with the “ticking-bomb scenario.” It sounds so darn logical that it’s hard not to buy into it. A remarkable number of people have.

Dick Cheney and Michael Chertoff (ex-head of Homeland Security) are big fans. They thought that they were directing real-life Jack Bauers.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said a Jack Bauer should not be prosecuted, because “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”

If he were prosecuted, Alan Dershowitz has already laid out the defense!

As drama, the ticking bomb is thrilling. “24″ is the “Perils of Pauline” on crack.

In reality, it is a pernicious and deceitful fantasy.

The reference point is, of course, 9/11. Before that day, we were soft and naïve. If only we had tortured someone, we could have stopped it. And saved American lives! That, of course, is utterly false.

We had quite enough information to have prevented 9/11. It had been gathered through normal and legal police and intelligence methods. It was not used due to bureaucratic infighting, ineptitude, incompetence, excess secrecy, and, most of all, the willful and pointed disregard of that information by Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush.

Now, we’re smart and tough. We do torture light and outsource the really evil stuff. Has it worked?

In October 2001, the FBI put out a Most Wanted Terrorists list. It had 22 names on it. As of 2006, 17 of them were still at large. Including Osama bin Laden. Mullah Omar wasn’t on the list. But he’s the other guy we invaded Afghanistan to get. He’s still around and actively leading the Taliban.

Yeah, well, I bet going “to the dark side” stopped a bunch of terrorist attacks.

No.

None that we know of.

Yeah, of course not. When our secret intelligence services secretly foil a secret terrorist plot, it’s gotta be secret! National effin’ Security! Period. Dot. Exclamation point! End quote!

No.

The Bush administration trumpeted every arrest, capture or kill they ever made:

The Lackawanna Seven
The Sears Tower Plot
The Shoe Bomber
Jose Padilla, who was going to use a “dirty bomb.”
Each and every one of them sounded like a job for Jack Bauer when they were first announced. Then, somehow, all the “terrorists” they caught turned out to be inept losers. The terror plots turned out to be bull sessions, attempts to buy weapons from FBI agents or visits to Afghanistan long before 9/11.

Bush was even willing to disrupt a two-year, 600-man, British terrorism investigation in order to get a good headline before the 2006 election. The result was that “the mastermind” escaped after he was arrested, and the prosecution of the plotters fell apart due to lack of evidence.

If there had been a real plot and these guys had actually stopped it, they would not have kept it secret, they would have made John McCain campaign commercials out of it.

Here’s a real life ticking-bomb scenario: It’s 1943. A German soldier has been captured.

We have a lot of people in captivity today, in Guantanamo, in Iraqi prisons, in secret CIA prisons around the world and prisons run by other countries. It has been amply demonstrated that many of the people in captivity are not “terrorists.”

But back in World War II, when we captured that German, we could be dead sure certain that he was an actual enemy. He was part of an organization planning to kill Americans in the immediate future. Within hours or, at most, days. We could be certain that they had lots of weapons of mass destruction. And factories that were making more.

He represented a country that committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and that had mistreated POWs and civilians in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

So let’s torture the mutha-fuggin’ Nazi pig-plugger! That’s a no-brainer, right?

Apparently not.

He refuses to give more than his name, rank and service number. We say OK and accept our obligation to feed and cloth him, give him medical attention, allow him to follow his religion, read books and even have access to a musical instrument if that is his inclination.

Why don’t we torture him?

It has been against American policy since George Washington fought the British. It is illegal under the Geneva Conventions, to which we were signatory back before WW II. We accepted those standards, even though the enemy did not live up to them.

According to Army Field Manual FM 34-52 — Intelligence Interrogation, torture does not produce reliable information. How do they know?

Experience indicates that the use of prohibited techniques is not necessary to gain the cooperation of interrogation sources. Use of torture and other illegal methods is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.

FM 34-52, 1987.

Clearly they tried it, probably quite often, and it failed.

Revelation of use of torture by U.S. personnel will bring discredit upon the U.S. and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort. It also may place U.S. and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse by their captors. Conversely, knowing the enemy has abused U.S. and allied [prisoners of war] does not justify using methods of interrogation specifically prohibited by [international law] and U.S. policy.

FM 34-52, 1987

Most of all, what we were fighting for, and fighting as, was to be a country that is committed to the dignity of the individual, even an enemy, and to the rule of law, even in difficult circumstances.

OK, time for a different movie. “Judgment at Nuremburg” (1961). It has all-star cast, including: Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, Maximilian Schell, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich and Richard Widmark. It’s based on a real trial. The men being prosecuted are very interesting.

They didn’t run the death camps, plan the Final Solution, run wars of aggression or even fill the top ranks of the Nazi Party. They were judges. Men who simply put the legal veneer on the laws of genocide and oppression, which were national policy.

It is hard to say that today’s terrorists are either more evil or more fearsome than the Nazis and Wehrmacht. Yet these men were kept in decent condition and had real trials. They could meet with their attorneys, confront their accusers and all the rest.

Burt Lancaster plays a judge who, before the Nazis, had been a highly esteemed jurist, an internationally recognized scholar of the law. He explains how he came to be a functionary of the Nazi regime.

Above all, there was fear. Fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors, fear of ourselves. … There are devils among us. … Once the devils will be destroyed, your miseries will be destroyed. … What about those of us who knew better? We who knew the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did we sit silent? Why did we take part? Because we loved our country! What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights?
What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights?”

It is a perfect description of the American mentality after 9/11. It is a perfect description of the fantasy represented by “24.”

The impulse to torture, and excuses that are made for it, are well understood. That’s why the Convention Against Torture, which the U.S. signed and became U.S. law as federal statute 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340; 2340A, says:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

Yet that is what we did. We had lawyers in Washington who came up with legal theories that:

Created a class of people who were beneath the law, like Jews and Gypsies once were.
That evaded the Geneva Conventions.
That legitimized torture.
And said that “I was only following orders” would be a legitimate defense against war crimes charges.
The chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials for war crimes, U.S. Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson said:

Certain acts in violations of treaties are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.

In light of that, let me point out who some of those Washington lawyers are: Jay Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge; John Yoo, teaching law at the University of California, Berkeley; and Alberto Gonzales, recently the attorney general of the United States.

CHENEY WARNS OF NEW ATTACKS

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.

“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.

Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration — “that’s about 11 or 12 percent” — have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.”

The 200 or so inmates still there, he claimed, are “the hard core” whose “recidivism rate would be much higher.” (Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees have strongly disputed the recidivism figures, asserting that the Pentagon data have inconsistencies and omissions.) Cheney called Guantanamo a “first-class program,” and “a necessary facility” that is operated legally and with better food and treatment than the jails in inmates' native countries.


But he said he worried that “instead of sitting down and carefully evaluating the policies,” Obama officials are unwisely following “campaign rhetoric” and preparing to release terrorism suspects or afford them legal protections granted to more conventional defendants in crime cases.

The choice, he alleged, reflects a naive mindset among the new team in Washington: “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.”

The dire portrait Cheney painted of the country’s security situation was made even grimmer by his comments agreeing with analysts who believe this recession may be a once-in-a-century disaster.
“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Cheney said. “The combination of the financial crisis that started last year, coupled now with, obviously, a major recession, I think we’re a long way from having solved these problems.”

The interview, less than two weeks after the Bush administration ceded power to Obama, found the man who is arguably the most controversial — and almost surely the most influential — vice president in U.S. history in a self-vindicating mood.

He expressed confidence that files will some day be publicly accessible offering specific evidence that waterboarding and other policies he promoted — over sharp internal dissent from colleagues and harsh public criticism — were directly responsible for averting new Sept. 11-style attacks.

Not content to wait for a historical verdict, Cheney said he is set to plunge into his own memoirs, feeling liberated to describe behind-the-scenes roles over several decades in government now that the “statute of limitations has expired” on many of the most sensitive episodes.

His comments made unmistakable that Cheney — likely more than former President Bush, who has not yet given post-White House interviews — is willing and even eager to spar with the new administration and its supporters over the issues he cares most about.

His standing in this public debate is beset by contradictions. Cheney for years has had intimate access to the sort of highly classified national security intelligence that Obama and his teams are only recently seeing.

But many of the top Democratic legal and national security players have long viewed Cheney as a man who became unhinged by his fears, responsible for major misjudgments in Iraq and Afghanistan, willing to bend or break legal precedents and constitutional principles to advance his aims. Polls show he is one of the most unpopular people in national life.

In the interview, Cheney revealed no doubts about his own course — and many about the new administration’s.

“If it hadn’t been for what we did — with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth — then we would have been attacked again,” he said. “Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.”

Cheney said “the ultimate threat to the country” is “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” that is deployed in the middle of an American city.

“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” he said.

“I think there’s a high probability of such an attempt. Whether or not they can pull it off depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States.

HACKERS CLONE PASSPORTS IN DRIVE BY RFID HEIST

A British hacker has shown how easy it is to clone US passport cards that use RFID by conducting a drive-by test on the streets of San Francisco.

Chris Paget, director of research and development at Seattle-based IOActive, used a US$250 Motorola RFID reader and an antenna mounted in a car’s side window and drove for 20 minutes around San Francisco, with a colleague videoing the demonstration.

During the demonstration he picked up the details of two US passport cards, which are fitted with RFID chips and can be used instead of traditional passports for travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

“I personally believe that RFID is very unsuitable for tagging people,” he said.

“I don’t believe we should have any kind of identity document with RFID tags in them. My ultimate goal here would be, my dream for this research, would be to see the entire Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative be scrapped.”

Using the data gleaned it would be relatively simple to make cloned passport cards he said. Real passport cards also support a ‘kill code’ (which can wipe the card’s data) and a ‘lock code’ that prevents the tag’s data being changed.

However he believes these are not currently being used and even if they were the radio interrogation is done in plain text so is relatively easy for a hacker to collect and analyse.

The ease with which the passport cards were picked up is even more worrying considering that less than a million have been issued to date.

Paget is a renowned ‘white hat’ ethical hacker and has made the study of the security failings of RFID something of a speciality.

In 2007 he was due to present a paper on the security failings of RFID at the Black Hat security conference in Washington but was forced to abandon the plans after an RFID company threatened him with legal action.

He points out that RFID tags are increasingly being used in physical security systems such as building access cards and the technology needs significant security adding before it could be considered safe for commercial use.

THE WAR ON TERROR IS A HOAX

The War On Terror Is A Hoax
By Paul Craig Roberts
2-4-9


According to US government propaganda, terrorist cells are spread throughout America, making it necessary for the government to spy on all Americans and violate most other constitutional protections. Among President Bush's last words as he left office was the warning that America would soon be struck again by Muslim terrorists.

If America were infected with terrorists, we would not need the government to tell us. We would know it from events. As there are no events, the US government substitutes warnings in order to keep alive the fear that causes the public to accept pointless wars, the infringement of civil liberty, national ID cards, and inconveniences and harassments when they fly.

The most obvious indication that there are no terrorist cells is that not a single neocon has been assassinated.

I do not approve of assassinations, and am ashamed of my country's government for engaging in political assassination. The US and Israel have set a very bad example for al Qaeda to follow.

The US deals with al Qaeda and Taliban by assassinating their leaders, and Israel deals with Hamas by assassinating its leaders. It is reasonable to assume that al Qaeda would deal with the instigators and leaders of America's wars in the Middle East in the same way.

Today every al Qaeda member is aware of the complicity of neoconservatives in the death and devastation inflicted on Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza. Moreover, neocons are highly visible and are soft targets compared to Hamas and Hezbollah leaders. Neocons have been identified in the media for years, and as everyone knows, multiple listings of their names are available online.

Neocons do not have Secret Service protection. Dreadful to contemplate, but it would be child's play for al Qaeda to assassinate any and every neocon. Yet, neocons move around freely, a good indication that the US does not have a terrorist problem.

If, as neocons constantly allege, terrorists can smuggle nuclear weapons or dirty bombs into the US with which to wreak havoc upon our cities, terrorists can acquire weapons with which to assassinate any neocon or former government official.

Yet, the neocons, who are the Americans most hated by Muslims, remain unscathed.

The "war on terror" is a hoax that fronts for American control of oil pipelines, the profits of the military-security complex, the assault on civil liberty by fomenters of a police state, and Israel's territorial expansion.

There were no al Qaeda in Iraq until the Americans brought them there by invading and overthrowing Saddam Hussein, who kept al Qaeda out of Iraq. The Taliban is not a terrorist organization, but a movement attempting to unify Afghanistan under Muslim law. The only Americans threatened by the Taliban are the Americans Bush sent to Afghanistan to kill Taliban and to impose a puppet state on the Afghan people.

Hamas is the democratically elected government of Palestine, or what little remains of Palestine after Israel's illegal annexations. Hamas is a terrorist organization in the same sense that the Israeli government and the US government are terrorist organizations. In an effort to bring Hamas under Israeli hegemony, Israel employs terror bombing and assassinations against Palestinians. Hamas replies to the Israeli terror with homemade and ineffectual rockets.

Hezbollah represents the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon, another area in the Middle East that Israel seeks for its territorial expansion.

The US brands Hamas and Hezbollah "terrorist organizations" for no other reason than the US is on Israel's side of the conflict. There is no objective basis for the US Department of State's "finding" that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations. It is merely a propagandistic declaration.

Americans and Israelis do not call their bombings of civilians terror. What Americans and Israelis call terror is the response of oppressed people who are stateless because their countries are ruled by puppets loyal to the oppressors. These people, dispossessed of their own countries, have no State Departments, Defense Departments, seats in the United Nations, or voices in the mainstream media. They can submit to foreign hegemony or resist by the limited means available to them.

The fact that Israel and the United States carry on endless propaganda to prevent this fundamental truth from being realized indicates that it is Israel and the US that are in the wrong and the Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, and Afghans who are being wronged.

The retired American generals who serve as war propagandists for Fox "News" are forever claiming that Iran arms the Iraqi and Afghan insurgents and Hamas. But where are the arms? To deal with American tanks, insurgents have to construct homemade explosive devices out of artillery shells. After six years of conflict the insurgents still have no weapon against the American helicopter gunships. Contrast this "arming" with the weaponry the US supplied to the Afghans three decades ago when they were fighting to drive out the Soviets.

The films of Israel's murderous assault on Gaza show large numbers of Gazans fleeing from Israeli bombs or digging out the dead and maimed, and none of these people are armed. A person would think that by now every Palestinian would be armed, every man, woman, and child. Yet, all the films of the Israeli attack show an unarmed population. Hamas has to construct homemade rockets that are little more than a sign of defiance. If Hamas were armed by Iran, Israel's assault on Gaza would have cost Israel its helicopter gunships, its tanks, and hundreds of lives of its soldiers.

Hamas is a small organization armed with small caliber rifles incapable of penetrating body armor. Hamas is unable to stop small bands of Israeli settlers from descending on West Bank Palestinian villages, driving out the Palestinians, and appropriating their land.

The great mystery is: why after 60 years of oppression are the Palestinians still an unarmed people? Clearly, the Muslim countries are complicit with Israel and the US in keeping the Palestinians unarmed.

The unsupported assertion that Iran supplies sophisticated arms to the Palestinians is like the unsupported assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. These assertions are propagandistic justifications for killing Arab civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure in order to secure US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.

PARALLELS WITH THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Parallels With the Great Depression

FDR and ObamaWhat began early last year as a "credit crunch" and an "economic downturn" is now being characterized as a "long, severe recession." Once upon a time, such a crisis was known as a "depression" before Americans became squeamish about such stark language.

As with our reluctant semantic retreat from "credit crunch" to "recession," the reality of another Great Depression will probably not be acknowledged until years after the fact. But America and the rest of the modern world, by doggedly pursuing the same mistaken policies of the 1920s and '30s, have made a full-blown depression — lasting years, not months, and featuring catastrophic failures in entire economic sectors along with chronic double-digit unemployment and monetary malaise — all but inevitable. In fact, the parallels between the run-up to the Great Depression and today's economic havoc are stunning.

The Roaring '20s, '80s, and '90s

By 1929, the United States — and most of the rest of the industrial world — had been on a nine-year joy ride known as the "Roaring Twenties." It was an age of unparalleled new technology — the heyday of the silent film era and the Model T Ford, and the beginning of radio and commercial air service, among many other modern marvels. The first American generation to consecrate itself to mass entertainment came of age in the Twenties. It was the first recognizably modern decade, and the future, to the flappers, barnstormers, and other bons vivants that characterized the age, looked very bright indeed. Accordingly, it was also an age of bold enterprises — of the beginning of mass production and of skyscraper construction. For the first time ever, Americans had enough extra money to turn sports into a lucrative industry. From the vantage point of the mid-Twenties, the party was never going to end.

Like the Roaring Twenties, the long boom from approximately 1982 to 2000 was characterized by boundless optimism and an explosion of new technology. New forms of mass entertainment — MTV, cable television, video games, and the Internet — proliferated, turning the United States of America into the world's entertainment capital. Men with big ideas — the leveraged-buyout moguls of the '80s and the high-tech wizards of the '90s chief among them — had no trouble finding capital to leverage their grandiose ambitions. Like the Twenties, the last two decades of the 20th century were a time of larger-than-life colossi like Donald Trump, Warren Buffett, and numerous flamboyant entertainers, from rock stars and hectomillionaire athletes to the instant celebrities of reality TV and American Idol. Risk and chutzpah were everywhere rewarded and nowhere penalized, or so it seemed. Old-school caution and frugality were cast to the wind; the world belonged to the extravagant, the glitzy, and the fully leveraged.

But behind these two parallel utopias, separated by more than six decades, lay a common reality that none but a very few astute, well-connected, or economically well-schooled were able to perceive: an artificial economic expansion created by the issuance of vast amounts of paper money. The great episodes of monetary expansion of the '20s, '80s, and '90s resulted from the magic of central banking — in America's case, of the Federal Reserve's ability to create new debt by lowering interest rates far below any rational market pricing. This resulted in years of easy credit, abundant borrowing, and an illusion of far greater prosperity and growth rates than actually existed. The result was cultural and societal no less than economic: because so few Americans, then or more recently, understood how the banking and Federal Reserve System works, the illusion of unnatural prosperity encouraged waste, leisure, and the notion of American invincibility.

In both cases, the party came to a calamitous end. But despite what we assume nowadays, few in the late fall of 1929 — even after the storied stock market meltdown — imagined that more than a decade of economic hardship lay ahead. Indeed, had the federal government, and the Federal Reserve in particular, allowed the crisis to run its course, the American economy during the 1930s would have been far different, probably recovering after a severe recession at the beginning of the decade helped restore sanity to the markets.

Disastrous Intervention

Unfortunately, the Hoover administration chose to intervene in the markets to an unprecedented degree. In 1931, when the banking crisis was in full swing, President Hoover set up the short-lived and ineffective National Credit Corporation (NCC). This government agency aimed to induce banks to pool $500 million to help save failing financial institutions. Not surprisingly, banks, anxious to survive individually, were reluctant to participate. The NCC was only able to raise $150 million, and the program was soon terminated and replaced with the much more ambitious — and intrusive — Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC).

The RFC was not altogether a novelty. It was patterned after the War Finance Corporation (WFC), a government bailout fund set up to allow the government to shore up banks and other financial interests during the First World War. After the end of the war, the WFC, rather than being decommissioned, was transformed into a source of government loans for export industries and the farming sector, in which capacity it operated until the mid-'20s under the energetic leadership of one Eugene Meyer.

Meyer, whom Hoover made governor of the Federal Reserve Board in 1930, was appointed chairman of the new RFC in 1932. According to economist Murray Rothbard, "The RFC could make loans to banks and financial institutions of all types. The theory was that, ensured of freedom from failing, the timid banks would be emboldened to lend massively to business and industry, the money supply would rise, and prosperity would return." Additionally, the RFC was authorized to lend money to railroads, as these were deemed a critical industry in the day, too big and too pivotal to be allowed to fail. To achieve these ends, it was given $500 million outright, and authorized to issue up to $1.5 billion in additional securities — government debt, in other words.

The RFC was an abysmal failure, though not for want of trying. Under Meyer the new vehicle for bank and railroad bailouts doled out money right and left, only to see the bank and railroad failures continue apace. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured down various RFC rat holes were lost forever by hopelessly insolvent institutions whose only remaining aim was to service their debts and provide soft landings for major investors. The promised loosening of credit never took place, and commercial lending all but disappeared. The RFC, in a word, was a huge waste of taxpayer dollars at a time when America could ill afford such coerced largesse.

In our day, Congress allowed itself to be stampeded by President Bush, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, and a throng of special interests into passing the now-infamous $700 billion bailout bill that created the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

With its emphasis on bank and financial bailouts, as well as more recent forays into Big Three automotive handouts (today's "too-big-to-fail" transportation sector, precisely analogous to railroads in the early 20th century), TARP is eerily similar to Hoover's RFC. From the results so far, TARP is having no more success than its predecessor organization in rescuing the financial and automotive sectors. At the time of this writing, with the full extent of the original subprime meltdown still unfolding, attention is shifting to banks' exposure to the shaky commercial real-estate and so-called Alt-A mortgage market. On the day of President Obama's inauguration, financial stocks swooned, with money-center and regional banks alike caught in the downdraft. The balance of 2009 will likely see many more bank failures, some of the magnitude of Washington Mutual or greater, while of the Big Three automakers, only Ford appears to have some chance of surviving independently. The still-growing financial storm is likely to take a terrible toll, and the $700 billion from TARP will be wasted just like the RFC's misspent millions.

Scapegoating the Free Market

During the Great Depression, as in our day, politicians and the news media blamed the crisis not on government malfeasance but on a failure of the free markets. This false conceit was responsible for a revolution in the relationship between the federal government and the private sector, transforming America from a free-market system into the largely managed economy that we have today.

One of the first steps taken by President Hoover to regulate the activity of the markets was to compel the New York Stock Exchange to curb the practice of short selling. Short selling, whereby an investor borrows securities for immediate resale at a high price, expecting to repurchase them at a lower price, return them to the lender, and pocket the difference, has long been held up as a scapegoat during financial downturns dating all the way back to the 17th-century Dutch tulip market mania. Short selling, however, is merely a way of making money when the market is down, the inverse of purchasing securities in the expectation of profiting from a rise in value. Unlike a straightforward stock purchase, short selling can be a very risky enterprise. Imprudent short selling has ruined many an investor, and the inherent risks associated with the practice act as powerful disincentives. At the same time, short selling acts as a natural counterpoise for the irrational exuberance of the herd that sometimes tends to propel stock valuations to unrealistic highs.

Nevertheless, Wall Street short sellers in the '30s bore the brunt of Hoover's wrath. Later, during the FDR administration, the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission formalized restrictions on short selling in the so-called uptick rule, which from 1938 until July of 2007 imposed a lower limit relative to previous sale prices on the prices of shares sold short. In this way, the ability of selling short to blunt unwarranted rises in stock prices was severely curtailed.

Not long after the repeal of the Depression-era "uptick rule," the stock market began to fall from its dizzying mid-decade gains. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration on July 15, 2008, imposed restrictions on selling short shares in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and 17 investment banks, in a desperate bid to keep these institutions' inflated share prices from falling still further. The ban was subsequently lifted, although a similar ban in the UK remained in force until mid-January. However, if the stock market malaise continues into the Obama administration, as it is likely to do, expect restrictions and even an outright ban on short selling (a truly calamitous step) to be foisted on already exhausted investors and financial markets.

As mentioned in the "Correction, Please!" column in this issue (page 41), the Roosevelt administration that followed President Hoover further compounded the economic crisis that had become a depression by effectively nationalizing the entire economy. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 imposed a welter of new federal regulations on banks and the rest of the financial sector, mandating among other things an artificial separation of commercial and investment banking. The Securities Act, passed the same year, created the overweening Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), an entity that, like the rest of FDR's New Deal, had no constitutional legitimacy whatsoever and inflicted immense regulatory damage on the securities markets.

In our day, with a decades-old precedent for federal control over banking and finance, further federal controls likely to be imposed by Congress and the Obama administration will meet little principled resistance and, like the original New Deal, will only serve to further hamper the workings of the free market.

International Currency Crisis

The Great Depression, like the current crisis, was an international phenomenon. Bank failures, unemployment, and other economic problems took their toll across the entire industrial world. This was because central banks overseas did the same thing the American Federal Reserve did during the Roaring Twenties — printed money. They did this in a desperate attempt to rescue the ailing pound sterling, at that time the world's de facto international currency. Britain had gone off the gold standard with the rest of the belligerent nations in World War I, and had printed vast sums of pounds to finance the war effort. After the war, however, rather than accept the consequences in the form of a depreciated pound, Britain insisted on instituting a gold-exchange standard with other industrialized countries, with the pound valued at pre-war par. This meant that, although a true gold standard had been abandoned, foreign investors, banks, and government could still redeem pounds sterling in gold.

But if the artificially high valuation in gold were upheld, the precious metal would leave British shores as foreigners rushed to redeem overvalued pounds — unless other central banks could be persuaded to cooperate by debasing their own currencies in tandem with the pound.

The Americans proved particularly cooperative in this regard, thanks to the chummy relationship between Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, and Benjamin Strong, the head of the New York Federal Reserve and de facto boss of the entire Federal Reserve System. All through the '20s, Strong, at the behest of Norman, who traveled frequently to New York to cement the relationship, kept the Fed pumping new dollars into the economy, with most Americans oblivious to the fact that the artificial economic boom thereby created was a consequence of Benjamin Strong's desire to please the British banking establishment. When the bust hit, therefore, all of the major currencies had been massively inflated and their respective economies succumbed to the inevitable downturn.

The pound sterling, that supposedly indispensable currency, continued to be touted as unassailable, with Norman and the rest of the British financial nomenklatura promising that Britain would never default on her obligations to redeem the pound in gold. Yet in late 1931, after repeated assurances to the French, Dutch, and other large holders of pounds in reserve, the British government did precisely that, touching off an unprecedented international monetary crisis. In the havoc that followed, Britain and most of the rest of Europe went off even the gold-exchange standard, adopting for the first time an international fiat money regime (money not backed by a precious metal). The United States retained a gold standard, but, under FDR, that too was abandoned, although the dollar remained on an international gold-exchange standard until the Nixon administration.

The international currency crisis that accompanied the collapse of the gold standard in the early '30s prompted calls to "fix" the international currency markets by creating an international financial authority to restore order. The one concrete step in this direction was the establishment, in 1930 and at the behest of Montagu Norman, of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, a sort of bank for central bankers. Yet the BIS could neither forestall the abandonment of the gold standard (if such were ever its objective) nor mitigate the monetary chaos that followed.

The next attempt at an international financial order came in summer of 1933 with the World Economic Conference in London, convoked under the authority of the League of Nations. The purpose of the conference, to set up some kind of international stabilizing mechanism for the world's beleaguered currencies, was hampered from the start by widely divergent opinions among the participating nations as to the proper course to follow. France, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland, for example, doggedly clung to the gold standard, while America, enamored of the new doctrine of monetarism (that is, of pursuing inflationary policies to keep the economic pump primed), had no use for what it viewed as outmoded restraints. The conference accomplished little except to prefigure the creation of the first true global financial regime at Bretton Woods little more than a decade later.

In our time, the dollar has replaced the pound as the world's currency. No longer restrained by the inhibiting factor of a precious-metal standard, the American government has for decades been willing to print dollars almost without limit, and the rest of the world has been willing to accept them on trust. However, the Federal Reserve has for many years collaborated closely with the world's other major central banks, coordinating its inflationary policies to ensure that everybody else (or at least those responsible for the so-called "hard currencies") is inflating in tandem with the United States.

And once again, when the inflationary chickens came home to roost, the crisis was and is international. The deluge of easy money worldwide has brought about an avalanche of bankruptcies and a burgeoning global recession. Other governments worldwide are pursuing feckless bailouts and other interventionist policies similar to those of our own government, with similarly negative results.

Parallel Problems and Pressures

And just like in the '30s, pressure is building for a new international financial regime — for the same political and financial elites who created the problems to try to solve them. This time around, the inaugural conference was held not in London but in Washington, at the behest of the UN and other modern global authorities rather than the old League of Nations. And as in 1933, the participants in the recent international economic conference expect their efforts to culminate in a Bretton Woods-like revolution in international finance.

In sum, very little has changed in 70 years except the names of the actors. Given how closely events in 2008-2009 have tracked those of 1929-1933, it appears increasingly probable that the consequences of those actions — a lengthy, debilitating depression — will be the same as well.