NAOMI WOLF: "WE ARE SEEING SYSTEMATIC CORRUPTION IN BANKING -- AND SYSTEMATIC COLLUSION." THE COLLUSION IS BOTH AMONG BANKS AND BETWEEN BANKS AND GOVERNMENT. NO ONE HAS BEEN INDICTED FOR THESE MULTI-TRILLION-DOLLAR CRIMES. HOWEVER, THE U.S. IS PROPOSING NEW WAYS TO PUNISH WHISTLEBLOWERS.

This global financial fraud and its gatekeepers

The media's 'bad apple' thesis no longer works. We're seeing systemic corruption in banking – and systemic collusion

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Naomi Wolf
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 14 July 2012 15.47 BST 

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Protesters outside a Bank of America annual shareholders' meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Photograph: Jason Miczek/Reuters

Last fall, I argued that the violent reaction to Occupy and other protests around the world had to do with the 1%ers' fear of the rank and file exposing massive fraud if they ever managed get their hands on the books. At that time, I had no evidence of this motivation beyond the fact that financial system reform and increased transparency were at the top of many protesters' list of demands.

But this week presents a sick-making trove of new data that abundantly fills in this hypothesis and confirms this picture. The notion that the entire global financial system is riddled with systemic fraud – and that key players in the gatekeeper roles, both in finance and in government, including regulatory bodies, know it and choose to quietly sustain this reality – is one that would have only recently seemed like the frenzied hypothesis of tinhat-wearers, but this week's headlines make such a conclusion, sadly, inevitable.

The New York Times business section on 12 July shows multiple exposes of systemic fraud throughout banks: banks colluding with other banks in manipulation of interest rates, regulators aware of systemic fraud, and key government officials (at least one banker who became the most key government official) aware of it and colluding as well. Fraud in banks has been understood conventionally and, I would say, messaged as a glitch. As in London Mayor Boris Johnson's full-throated defense of Barclay's leadership last week, bank fraud is portrayed as a case, when it surfaces, of a few "bad apples" gone astray.

In the New York Times business section, we read that the HSBC banking group is being fined up to $1bn, for not preventing money-laundering (a highly profitable activity not to prevent) between 2004 and 2010 – a six years' long "oops". In another article that day, Republican Senator Charles Grassley says of the financial group Peregrine capital: "This is a company that is on top of things." The article goes onto explain that at Peregrine Financial, "regulators discovered about $215m in customer money was missing." Its founder now faces criminal charges. Later, the article mentions that this revelation comes a few months after MF Global "lost" more than $1bn in clients' money.

What is weird is how these reports so consistently describe the activity that led to all this vanishing cash as simple bumbling: "regulators missed the red flag for years." They note that a Peregrine client alerted the firm's primary regulator in 2004 and another raised issues with the regulator five years later – yet "signs of trouble seemingly missed for years", muses the Times headline.

A page later, "Wells Fargo will Settle Mortgage Bias Charges" as that bank agrees to pay $175m in fines resulting from its having – again, very lucratively – charged African-American and Hispanic mortgagees costlier rates on their subprime mortgages than their counterparts who were white and had the same credit scores. Remember, this was a time when "Wall Street firms developed a huge demand for subprime loans that they purchased and bundled into securities for investors, creating financial incentives for lenders to make such loans." So, Wells Fargo was profiting from overcharging minority clients and profiting from products based on the higher-than-average bad loan rate expected. The piece discreetly ends mentioning that a Bank of America lawsuit of $335m and a Sun Trust mortgage settlement of $21m for having engaged is similar kinds of discrimination.

Are all these examples of oversight failure and banking fraud just big ol' mistakes? Are the regulators simply distracted?

The top headline of the day's news sums up why it is not that simple: "Geithner Tried to Curb Bank's Rate Rigging in 2008". The story reports that when Timothy Geithner, at the time he ran the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, learned of "problems" with how interest rates were fixed in London, the financial center at the heart of the Libor Barclays scandal. He let "top British authorities" know of the issues and wrote an email to his counterparts suggesting reforms. Were his actions ethical, or prudent?

A possible interpretation of Geithner's action is that he was "covering his ass", without serious expectation of effecting reform of what he knew to be systemic abuse.

And what, in fact, happened? Barclays kept reporting false rates, seeking to boost its profit. Last month, the bank agreed to pay $450m to US and UK authorities for manipulating the Libor and other key benchmarks, upon which great swaths of the economy depended. This manipulation is alleged in numerous lawsuits to have defrauded thousands of bank clients. So Geithner's "warnings came too late, and his efforts did not stop the illegal activity".

And then what happened? Did Geithner, presumably frustrated that his warnings had gone unheeded, call a press conference? No. He stayed silent, as a practice that now looks as if several major banks also perpetrated, continued.

And then what happened? Tim Geithner became Treasury Secretary. At which point, he still did nothing.

It is very hard, looking at the elaborate edifices of fraud that are emerging across the financial system, to ignore the possibility that this kind of silence – "the willingness to not rock the boat" – is simply rewarded by promotion to ever higher positions, ever greater authority. If you learn that rate-rigging and regulatory failures are systemic, but stay quiet, well, perhaps you have shown that you are genuinely reliable and deserve membership of the club.

Whatever motivated Geithner's silence, or that of the "government official" in the emails to Barclays, this much is obvious: the mainstream media need to drop their narratives of "Gosh, another oversight". The financial sector's corruption must be recognized as systemic.

Meanwhile, Britain is sleepwalking in a march toward total email surveillance, even as the US brings forward new proposals to punish whistleblowers by extending the Espionage Act. In an electronic world, evidence of these crimes lasts forever – if people get their hands on the books. In the Libor case, notably, a major crime has not been greeted by much demand at the top for criminal prosecutions. That asymmetry is one of the insurance policies of power. Another is to crack down on citizens' protest.

ECONOMIST AND WHITE-COLLAR CRIMINOLOGIST BILL BLACK: THE NEW YORK FED UNDER TIM GEITHNER "WAS INFORMED BY BARKLEYS TRADERS THAT THE RATE WAS BEING MANIPULATED DOWN ... BUT THEY DON'T APPEAR TO HAVE MADE CRIMINAL REFERALS." "SO IF THE NEW YORK FED SCREWED UP OUR ABILITY TO PROSECUTE BY NOT TAKING ACTION AGAINST BARKLEYS, THAT'S NOT A CRIME BY GEITHNER BUT IT'S CERTAINLY SOMETHING WHERE HE SHOULD RESIGN IMMEDIATELY ... HE WAS AN ABJECT FAILURE AS A REGULATOR."

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 theREALnews                                                                               Permalink

Baltimore, Big Banks and a Criminal Conspiracy 

Bill Black: The LIBOR fraud stole millions upon millions from American cities and people around the world

Original with full transcript here.

Bio 

William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri - Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" - frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

A FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY FOR ECONOMIC POLICY AND A FORMER MANAGING DIRECTOR OF GOLDMAN SACHS JOINTLY PERCEIVE A "DEEPER, DARKER" REASON FOR THE BIG BANKS TO HAVE MANIPULATED THE INTERBANK BORROWING RATE (LIBOR) DOWNWARD.

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The Real Libor Scandal ~Paul Craig Roberts and Nomi Prins

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July 14, 2012 | Original here

According to news reports, UK banks fixed the London interbank borrowing rate (Libor) with the complicity of the Bank of England (UK central bank) at a low rate in order to obtain a cheap borrowing cost. The way this scandal is playing out is that the banks benefitted from borrowing at these low rates. Whereas this is true, it also strikes us as simplistic and as a diversion from the deeper, darker scandal.

Banks are not the only beneficiaries of lower Libor rates. Debtors (and investors) whose floating or variable rate loans are pegged in some way to Libor also benefit. One could argue that by fixing the rate low, the banks were cheating themselves out of interest income, because the effect of the low Libor rate is to lower the interest rate on customer loans, such as variable rate mortgages that banks possess in their portfolios. But the banks did not fix the Libor rate with their customers in mind. Instead, the fixed Libor rate enabled them to improve their balance sheets, as well as help to perpetuate the regime of low interest rates. The last thing the banks want is a rise in interest rates that would drive down the values of their holdings and reveal large losses masked by rigged interest rates.

Indicative of greater deceit and a larger scandal than simply borrowing from one another at lower rates, banks gained far more from the rise in the prices, or higher evaluations of floating rate financial instruments (such as CDOs), that resulted from lower Libor rates. As prices of debt instruments all tend to move in the same direction, and in the opposite direction from interest rates (low interest rates mean high bond prices, and vice versa), the effect of lower Libor rates is to prop up the prices of bonds, asset-backed financial instruments, and other “securities.” The end result is that the banks’ balance sheets look healthier than they really are.

On the losing side of the scandal are purchasers of interest rate swaps, savers who receive less interest on their accounts, and ultimately all bond holders when the bond bubble pops and prices collapse.

We think we can conclude that Libor rates were manipulated lower as a means to bolster the prices of bonds and asset-backed securities. In the UK, as in the US, the interest rate on government bonds is less than the rate of inflation. The UK inflation rate is about 2.8%, and the interest rate on 20-year government bonds is 2.5%. Also, in the UK, as in the US, the government debt to GDP ratio is rising. Currently the ratio in the UK is about double its average during the 1980-2011 period.

The question is, why do investors purchase long term bonds, which pay less than the rate of inflation, from governments whose debt is rising as a share of GDP? One might think that investors would understand that they are losing money and sell the bonds, thus lowering their price and raising the interest rate.

Why isn’t this happening?

PCR’s June 5 column, “Collapse at Hand,” explained that despite the negative interest rate, investors were making capital gains from their Treasury bond holdings, because the prices were rising as interest rates were pushed lower.

What was pushing the interest rates lower?

The answer is even clearer now. First, as PCR noted, Wall Street has been selling huge amounts of interest rate swaps, essentially a way of shorting interest rates and driving them down. Thus, causing bond prices to rise.

Secondly, fixing Libor at lower rates has the same effect. Lower UK interest rates on government bonds drive up their prices.

In other words, we would argue that the bailed-out banks in the US and UK are returning the favor that they received from the bailouts and from the Fed and Bank of England’s low rate policy by rigging government bond prices, thus propping up a government bond market that would otherwise, one would think, be driven down by the abundance of new debt and monetization of this debt, or some part of it.

How long can the government bond bubble be sustained? How negative can interest rates be driven?

Can a declining economy offset the impact on inflation of debt creation and its monetization, with the result that inflation falls to zero, thus making the low interest rates on government bonds positive?

According to his public statements, zero inflation is not the goal of the Federal Reserve chairman. He believes that some inflation is a spur to economic growth, and he has said that his target is 2% inflation. At current bond prices, that means a continuation of negative interest rates.

The latest news completes the picture of banks and central banks manipulating interest rates in order to prop up the prices of bonds and other debt instruments. We have learned that the Fed has been aware of Libor manipulation (and thus apparently supportive of it) since 2008. Thus, the circle of complicity is closed. The motives of the Fed, Bank of England, US and UK banks are aligned, their policies mutually reinforcing and beneficial. The Libor fixing is another indication of this collusion.

Unless bond prices can continue to rise as new debt is issued, the era of rigged bond prices might be drawing to an end. It would seem to be only a matter of time before the bond bubble bursts.

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Nomi Prins is author of It Takes A Pillage and a former managing director of Goldman Sachs.

MATT TAIBBI FREAKS OUT OVER THE LIBOR BANKING SCANDAL

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rsn   (Reader Supported News)                                                         Subscribe to free newsletter

Matt Taibbi at Skylight Studio in New York, 10/27/10. (photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

Why Is Nobody Freaking Out About the LIBOR Banking Scandal?

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

05 July 2012

he LIBOR manipulation story has exploded into a major scandal overseas. The CEO of Barclays, Bob Diamond, has resigned in disgrace; his was the first of what will undoubtedly be many major banks to walk the regulatory plank for fixing the interbank exchange rate. The Labor party is demanding a sweeping criminal investigation. Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, responded the way a real public official should (i.e. not like Ben Bernanke), blasting the banks:

It is time to do something about the banking system…Many people in the banking industry are hardworking and feel badly let down by some of their colleagues and leaders. It goes to the culture and the structure of banks: the excessive compensation, the shoddy treatment of customers, the deceitful manipulation of a key interest rate, and today, news of yet another mis-selling scandal.

The furor is over revelations that Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and other banks were monkeying with at least $10 trillion in loans (The Wall Street Journal is calculating that that LIBOR affects $800 trillion worth of contracts).

The banks gamed LIBOR for two semi-overlapping reasons. As noted here last week, there were instances of Barclays traders badgering the LIBOR submitters to "push down" rates in order to fatten their immediate bottom lines, depending on what they were trading or holding that day. They also apparently rigged LIBOR downward in order to produce a general appearance of better health, essentially tweaking their credit scores a few ticks upward.

Most intriguingly, or perhaps disturbingly, there were revelations last week that Bank of England deputy Governor Paul Tucker had a conversation with Diamond at the peak of the crisis in 2008. The conversation reportedly left Diamond, and subsequently his traders, with the impression that the bank had carte blanche to rig LIBOR downward in order to help allay spiraling public fears about the banks’ poor financial health.

British officials, and Tucker individually, deny that Tucker gave Diamond permission to rig rates. But a report by British regulators did conclude that the two were talking about Barclays LIBOR submissions on October 29, 2008, and that as a result of that conversation, Diamond came away with a “misunderstanding.” The Daily Mail quotes the Financial Services Authority report:

However, as the substance of the telephone conversation was relayed down the chain of command at Barclays, a misunderstanding or miscommunication occurred.

This meant that Barclays’ submitters believed mistakenly that they were operating under an instruction from the Bank of England (as conveyed by senior management) to reduce Barclays’ Libor submissions.

That is explosive stuff. Members of Parliament will be grilling Tucker tomorrow about those events in what is sure to be a far more combative and entertaining legislative inquiry than the Jamie Dimon dog-and-pony show we just went through here in the states in recent weeks.

The implications of that part of the story should be particularly chilling to Americans, who in recent years have been party to a number of revelations about strange and seemingly inappropriate contacts between senior regulatory officials and big bankers during the heat of the crisis.

We know that American officials in 2008-2009 were extremely concerned about the appearance of weakness in the financial markets, so much so that they may have resisted pursuing criminal prosecutions against big banks, and we also know that they spent a lot of time commiserating with Wall Street figures before and during the crisis.

If Bob Diamond and Paul Tucker were having these talks about LIBOR, is it fair to wonder what else Hank Paulson and Lloyd Blankfein were talking about in the 24 discussions they had in the six days following the AIG disaster? When Paulson had a secret meeting with the entire board of Goldman Sachs in, of all places, his hotel suite in Moscow, in June of 2008? Or what other material nonpublic information was exchanged when Paulson met with a gang of hedge fund chiefs at the offices of Eton Park management in July 2008, and laid out for them a possible scenario for putting Fannie and Freddie into receivership?

Anyway, the LIBOR story is leading the front pages of most of Britain’s dailies, it’s on TV, and it’s producing blistering editorials and howls of outrage amongst politicians and activists. But as compadre Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism put it, where’s the outrage here in America?

The big story on our shores in the last few weeks has been the health care ruling, which makes sense, but then after that… what? The heat? Tom and Katie? (There’s actually a story about how Katie can wear heels again, now that she’s not married to a short person). Joe Sandusky? Nightline’s big story tonight, which is already being hyped on the net, is about how fat Chris Christie is and why the hell he hasn’t done the bypass surgery yet:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie opened up about his weight problem in an interview with ABC News and stressed he is "trying" to lose weight, a battle he's waged for 30 years, but said he's never considered gastric bypass surgery because it's "too risky."

"I mean, see, listen, I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding among people regarding weight and regarding all those things that go into, to people being overweight," Christie said in an interview that will air Tuesday on "Nightline."

Glad to be informed! The New York Times, meanwhile, did chime in with a house editorial yesterday, and it was appropriately somber. And there has been some coverage in the financial press.

But to me what’s missing from all of this is the “Holy Fucking Shit!” factor. This story is so outrageous that it shocks even the most cynical Wall Street observers. I have a friend who works on Wall Street who for years has been trolling through the stream of financial corruption stories with bemusement, darkly enjoying the spectacle as though the whole post-crisis news arc has been like one long, beautifully-acted, intensely believable sequel to Goodfellas. But even he is just stunned to the point of near-speechlessness by the LIBOR thing. “It’s like finding out that the whole world is on quicksand,” he says.

So as far as the stateside press goes, I’ve got to assume the cavalry is coming soon. But when?

THE LIBOR SCANDLE "IS THE LARGEST RIGGING OF PRICES IN THE WORLD BY MANY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE" -- ECONOMIST AND CRIMINOLGIST, BILL BLACK

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UK to launch inquiry into banking scandal 

http://youtu.be/R0PkXPRUvP0  

Published on Jul 2, 2012 by AlJazeera

English Prosecutors in Britain are considering filing criminal charges against Barclays Bank. The UK lender is at the centre of a market manipulation scandal that could involve more than a dozen international banks. While much of the fallout has been confined to Britain - it's likely to spread overseas because Barclays manipulated a key interest rate known as libor - which is used to determine the value of financial products ranging from credit cards to ordinary loans. Al Jazeera's Laurence Lee reports from London. 

How Barclays manipulated the libor rates 

http://youtu.be/ZC_la9ar93w

Published on Jul 2, 2012 by AlJazeeraEnglish 

The Barclays Bank scandal centres around a key interest rate known as Libor. Al Jazeera's Dominic Kane reports on exactly what that is. We also speak to Bill Black, a former US banking regulator for more clarity on how this multi-million dollar fraud was perpetrated. 

ANY AMERICANS WHO HAVE BECOME QUEASY ABOUT THE DIRECTIONS IN WHICH THEIR NATION HAS BEEN MOVING AND WONDER HOW IT ALL BEGAN SHOULD READ AND SERIOUSLY CONTEMPLATE THE HISTORY SUMMARIZED BELOW.

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July 3, 2012 at 21:47:42

Promoted to Headline (H3) on 7/3/12:     Permalink

Can Americans Escape the Deception?

 By Paul Craig Roberts (about the author)

opednews.com

Hot Air Day is upon us. On July 4, hot air will spew forth all over the country as dignitaries deliver homilies to our "freedom and democracy" and praise "our brave troops" who are protecting our freedom by "killing them over there before they come over here."

Not a single one of these speeches will contain one word of truth. No speaker will lament the death of the US Constitution or urge his audience to action to restore the only document that protects their liberty. No speaker will acknowledge that in the 21st century the Bush/Obama Regime, with the complicity of the Department of Justice, federal courts, Congress, presstitute media, law schools, bar associations, and an insouciant public have murdered the Constitution in the name of the "war on terror."

As in medieval times, American citizens can be thrown into dungeons and never accounted for. No evidence or charges need be presented to a court. No trial is required, and no conviction.

As in tyrannies, US citizens can be executed at the sole discretion of the despot in the Oval Office, who sits there drawing up lists of people to be murdered. 

Protesters exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech and freedom of association are attacked by armed police, beaten, tasered, tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and arrested.  

Whistleblowers who report the government's crimes are prosecuted despite the statute that protects them.

US soldier Bradley Manning, who allegedly gave Wikileaks the documents revealing US war crimes, including the video of US soldiers in a helicopter gunship enjoying themselves murdering civilians walking along the street as if the soldiers were playing a video game, has been arrested and held in conditions of torture while the government tries to invent a case against him.  

According to the US Military Code, US soldiers are required to make war crimes known. However, the law on the books provided no protection to Bradley Manning, and conservative Republicans whom I know are foaming at the mouth for Manning to be executed for letting out the truth. The truth -- what is mere truth compared to the "exceptionalism of the great american people"? America has carte blanche to do whatever it wishes to the unexceptional peoples. Manning deserves to die, they say, because he took the side of the oppressed and not the side of the amerikan oppressors. 

After the Swedish prosecutorial office dropped the case against Wikileaks' Julian Assange, ruling that the charges of rape had no foundation, another prosecutor, many believe at the urging of the US government, demanded Assange be extradited from England in order to be questioned. Normally, extradition only applies to those who have been charged with a crime and for whom a warrant has been issued, which is most certainly not the case with Assange. But, of course, if Washington wants Assange, Washington will be sure every law is broken or bent until they get him. The Swedish puppet will do the exceptional country's will and be paid well for its service.

Peace activists in several states had their homes invaded by the FBI; computers and personal records taken, and a grand jury was convened in an attempt to indict them for supporting terrorism by their protests of Washington's illegal wars, wars that are war crimes under the Nuremberg standard established by the US government itself.

None of this will be mentioned in July 4 patriotic speeches. The inebriated masses will be wrapped in the flag and return home full of the hubris that despises lesser foreigners, such as Muslims, Arabs, Chinese, and the French.

And no dignitary will mention that those "we are killing over there" are mainly women, children, village elders, and aid workers. The US troops seem to specialize in soft targets like weddings, funerals, kids' soccer games, farm houses, and schools.

Recently Washington reduced the "collateral damage" count by declaring every murdered male of military age to have been a Taliban fighter or terrorist. Obviously, Washington has no way of knowing whether they were or not, but Washington's declaration is intended as a green light to murder Afghan males of military age.

Currently, Washington has wars underway, or occupations, or is violating the sovereignty of countries with drones and/or troops in seven Muslim countries, and is arming rebels in Syria. All of this is being done without the constitutionally-required authorization by Congress, allegedly the people's representatives. What a joke!

In short, in "freedom and democracy" america, the people have no voice and no rights and no representatives. 

Yet, this huge deficit of democracy and liberty will pass unmentioned by July 4th orators.

The crimes against humanity, the dismantling of the US Constitution and the lawlessness both domestic and international that define 21st century amerika are the results of September 11, 2001.  

Washington's account of 9/11 is the wildest conspiracy theory known to mankind. The absurdity of Washington's account is as follows:

A few Saudi Arabians without any government's backing or that of any intelligence service outwitted not only the CIA and the FBI but all 16 US intelligence agencies, even the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, together with the intelligence agencies of all of Washington's NATO allies and Israel's Mossad, which has infiltrated every radical Muslim group.

These humble Saudis of no known distinction or powers also simultaneously outwitted the National Security Council, NORAD, the Pentagon, Air Traffic Control, and caused Airport Security to fail four times in one hour on the same morning.

In other words, every part of America's defenses failed at the same moment. 

Think about that for a minute. If such a thing had actually happened, the President, Vice President, Congress, and media would have been demanding to know how such universal failure of every aspect of the national security state was possible. An investigation would have started immediately, not over a year later as a result of pressure from 9/11 families who could not be bought off with monetary payments. Such complete and total failure of every aspect of US security would mean that americans were not safe one single minute during the 40-year stand-off with the Soviet Union. At any moment the Soviets could have utterly destroyed the US and we would never have known what hit us.

In a real investigation, the 9/11 evidence would not have been illegally destroyed, and the investigation would have been conducted by experts, not by government agencies assigned a cover-up and by political hacks. The NIST report is abject nonsense. It explains nothing. It is a fabricated computer simulation of a non-event. The co-chairmen and legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission later wrote books in which they stated that information was withheld from the commission, the military lied to the commission, and the commission "was set up to fail." Yet, these astounding admissions by the leaders of the 9/11 Commission had no impact on Congress, the presstitute media, or the public. All heads were in the sand. Please, whatever you do, don't make us emotional weaklings face the facts.

More than 100 firefighters, police, first responders, and building maintenance personnel report hearing and experiencing scores of explosions in the twin towers, including powerful explosions in the sub-basements prior to the collapse of the towers.

Distinguished scientists, authors of many peer-reviewed scientific papers, report finding unreacted nano-thermite in the dust from the towers, tested it for its explosive and high-heat producing ability, and reported the unequivocal results. 

Seventeen hundred architects and engineers have testified in a petition to Congress that the three World Trade Center buildings were not brought down by fire and airplanes and have demanded a real scientific investigation of the cause of the buildings' destruction.

Yet, we are left with the paradox that scientific opinion based on careful examination of the remaining evidence has been designated by the ignorant and unwashed as a "conspiracy theory," while Washington's absurd conspiracy theory stands as the truth of the event. 

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth headed by high-rise architect Richard Gage has driven the final nail in the coffin of Washington's concocted conspiracy theory with its new film: "9/11: Explosive Evidence -- Experts Speak Out."

And they do speak out.

Scores of top level demolition experts and experts on the design, engineering, and construction of high rise steel structures provide the scientific, architectural, and engineering reasons that the three World Trade Center buildings came down only with the assistance of explosives that were placed and timed to remove the powerful structural support and permit the sudden collapse of the buildings. As the buildings were engineered and constructed according to known and tested principles that absolutely prevent rapid collapse, fire and structural damage that two of the three skyscrapers suffered from airliners could not possibly have caused the sudden disintegration of the three buildings.  

I saw the film in Atlanta on July 2. Atlanta was a stop on the 32-city premier of the film. The film was shown at the 7 Stages Theater on Euclid Avenue, the former Euclid Theater to which, 65 years ago, we kids used to ride our bikes to see Tarzan battle giant reptiles and ride elephants to victory over evil black tribesmen or evil white hunters, or to watch Randolph Scott bring justice with his six-shooter to a town ruled by black hats, or to witness the brave American soldiers liberate Europe from the Nazis. We never dreamed that we, residents of the "land of the free," would be menaced by a gestapo police state.

America's descent into a gestapo police state could be arrested, perhaps, if americans were not so ignorant of science or were capable of even realizing that what they see with their own eyes when they watch videos of the twin towers' destruction is buildings blowing up, not buildings falling down from structural damage. Building 7's destruction is the total and complete picture of controlled demolition. 

At the end of the powerful film, psychologists explain why the majority of a population lacks the mental and emotional strength to confront highly disturbing facts. A government that so thoroughly spies on its population as Washington does obviously knows its population's profile and sees nothing but weakness and fear that can be manipulated.  

What fact is more disturbing than the likely fact that 9/11 was a false-flag event designed to provide the neoconservatives with their "new Pearl Harbor" in order to launch Washington's Wars of Hegemony in the Middle East, and from there to Iran and to the nuclear powers: Russia and China, which are being encircled, as Iran has been, with US military bases?

What we are experiencing is a replay of the French Revolution, this time on a world stage. Napoleon, the inheritor of the French Revolution, conquered Europe several times in the effort to expand the New Order in France to all of Europe. The French Revolution was the first claim of a New World Order, but at that time the world was Europe.

Washington's "wars of liberation" are wars of world hegemony and wars of massive profits for the military/security complex. The combination of power and money that are the motives for Washington's concocted wars are hidden motives, wrapped in the flag, patriotic sentiments, and fear of dark-skinned demonized Muslims.  

Can Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth -- or any truth -- break through and liberate americans from the artificial reality created by government liars and a corrupt presstitute media, or are americans doomed to expire in the Matrix that has been created for them?

Perhaps the hope is that the economy will collapse under the would-be hegemons, and people who will not fight for principles and their liberty will fight for their economic survival.

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Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous university appointments and is Contributing Editor to Gerald Celente's Trends Journal. His columns are at www.paulcraigroberts.org.

 

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author

THIS 4TH OF JULY WE AMERICANS SHOULD GIVE A THOUGHT TO PEACE.

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There Never Was a Good War or a Bad Peace 

http://youtu.be/6Ma6Uv5jbKk

Published on Jun 30, 2012 by DavidKretzmann 

http://www.davidkretzmann.com 

We few who dare say no to war. 

http://facebook.com/davidkretzmann108 

http://twitter.com/david_kretzmann 

Re-upload (with minor changes) of "We Who Say No to War"

THE TRANS PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP (TPP) -- NOW BEING NEGOTIATED IN SECRET -- "ESSENTIALLY ABOLISHES THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF FOREIGN CORPORATIONS TO THE GOVENMENTS OF COUNTRIES WITH WHICH THEY TRADE." MOREOVER, IN ADDITION TO THIS QUOTE, PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS CONSIDERS A NUMBER OF POSSIBLE BUT UNCERTAIN EFFECTS OF THE TPP ON THE U.S. GOVERNMENT ...WHILE LEAVING NO DOUBT THAT THE HEALTH AND QUALITY OF LIFE OF THE 99%, TOGETHER WITH THE ENVIRONMENT, ARE CERTAIN TO BE BIG LOSERS.

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Trans Pacific Partnership: Corporate Escape From Accountability

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July 2, 2012 | Original here

Information has been leaked about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is being negotiated in secret by US Trade Representative Ron Kirk. Six hundred corporate “advisors” are in on the know, but not Congress or the media. Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate trade subcommittee that has jurisdiction over the TPP, has not been permitted to see the text or to know the content.

The TPP has been called a “one-percenter” power tool. The agreement essentially abolishes the accountability of foreign corporations to governments of countries with which they trade. Indeed, the agreement makes governments accountable to corporations for costs imposed by regulations, including health, safety and environmental regulations. The agreement gives corporations the right to make governments pay them for the cost of complying with the regulations of government. One wonders how long environmental, labor, and financial regulation can survive when the costs of compliance are imposed on the taxpayers of countries and not on the economic activity that results in spillover effects such as pollution.

Many will interpret the TPP as another big step toward the establishment of global government in the New World Order. However, what the TPP actually does is to remove corporations or the spillover effects of their activities from the reach of government. As the TPP does not transfer to corporations the power to govern countries, it is difficult to see how it leads to global government. The real result is global privilege of the corporate class as a class immune to government regulation.

One of the provisions allows corporations to avoid the courts and laws of countries by creating a private tribunal that corporations can use to sue governments for the costs of complying with regulation. Essentially, the laws of countries that apply to corporations are supplanted by decisions of a private tribunal of corporate lawyers.

The TPP is open to all countries. Currently, it is being negotiated between the US, Australia, Brunei, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam, Chile, and Peru. Australia, according to reports, has refused to submit to the private tribunal system.

What are we to make of the TPP? It is perhaps too early to have all the answers. However, I can offer some ways of thinking about it.

I doubt that the TPP is a New World Order takeover. If anything, the TPP reduces the scope of global government by exempting corporations from government control. Also, global government, unless it is government by the American Empire, is inconsistent with the neoconservatives insistence on US hegemony over the world. Powerful US ideological, private, and government interest groups have no intention of losing the power that they have acquired by being rolled into some New World Order unless the New World Order is a euphemism for American Empire.

In the criticisms of the TPP, much emphasis is placed on the costs that corporations of foreign members of the agreement can impose on the US. However, US corporations gain the same privileges over those countries, as the agreement gives every country’s corporations immunity to the other countries’ laws.

It could be the case that US corporations believe that their penetration of the other countries will greatly exceed the activities in the US of Brunei, New Zealand, Peru, et al. However, once Japan, Canada, China and others join TPP, the prospect of American firms getting more out of the agreement than foreign firms disappears, unless from the US perspective the definition of foreign firm includes US corporations that offshore the production of the goods and services that they market in the US. If this is the case, then US offshoring firms would be exempt not only from the laws and courts of foreign countries, but also exempt from the laws and courts of the US.

This point is possibly moot as the agreement requires all governments that are parties to the TPP to harmonize their laws so that the new corporate privileges are equally reflected in every country. To avoid discriminatory law against a country’s own corporations that do not engage in foreign trade, harmonization could mean that domestic corporations would be granted the same privileges as foreign investors. If not, domestic firms might acquire the privileges by setting up a foreign subsidiary consisting of an office.

As the TPP is clearly an agreement being pushed by US corporations, the implication is that US corporations see it as being to their relative advantage. However, it is unclear what this advantage is.

Alternatively, TPP is a strategy for securing exemption from regulation under the guise of being a trade agreement.

Another explanation, judging from the unusual collection of the initial parties to the agreement, is that the agreement is part of Washington’s strategy of encircling China with military bases, as the US has done to Russia. One would have thought that an agreement of such path-breaking nature would have begun with Japan, S. Korea, and Philippines. However, these countries are already part of China’s encirclement. Brunei, Singapore, New Zealand, and especially Vietnam would be valuable additions. Are the special privileges that Washington is offering these countries part of the bribe to become de facto outposts of American Empire?

Yet another explanation is that Ron Kirk is caught up in the deregulatory mindset that began with the repeal of Glass-Steagall and financial deregulation. If financial markets know best and are self-regulating, requiring no government interference, then so also are other markets and businesses.

Free market economists view regulations as “takings.” The argument is that regulations take corporate property–profits, for example, by making corporations comply with health, safety, and environmental regulation–just as government takes private property when it builds or widens a road. Therefore, corporations should be compensated for takings that result from regulation. As the argument goes, if government wants corporations to protect the environment, the government should pay the corporations for the cost of doing so. This argument gets rid of “external costs” or “social costs”–costs that corporations impose on others and future generations by the pollution and exhaustion of natural resources, for example. The argument turns social costs into compensation for takings.

The TPP is likely serving many agendas. As we learn more, the motives behind the TPP will become clearer. From my perspective as an economist and former member of government, the problem with Ron Kirk’s TPP is that the agreement is constructed to serve private, not public interests. Kirk is a public official charged with serving and protecting the public interest. Yet, he has conspired in secret with private interests to produce a document that exempts private corporations from public accountability.

There is a paradox here. While financial corporations and now all corporations are being made independent of government, US citizens have lost the protection of law and are now subject to being detained indefinitely or murdered without due process of law. Corporations gain an unimaginable freedom while citizens lose all freedom and the rights that define their freedom. Similarly, foreign countries, which as members of TPP can be exempt from US law, are subject to “pre-emptive” US violation of their air space and borders by drones and troops sent in to assassinate some suspected terrorist, but which also kill citizens of those countries who are merely going about their normal business.

Perhaps one way to understand TPP is that the US government is now extending its own right to be lawless to corporations. Just as the US government today is only answerable to itself, the TPP makes corporations answerable only to themselves.

Public Citizen’s analysis of TPP can be found here: http://www.citizen.org/documents/Leaked-TPP-Investment-Analysis.pdf and the leaked document here: http://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/tppinvestment.pdf

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I'VE ALWAYS REGRETTED NOT VOTING FOR CYNTHIA MCKINNEY IN THE 2008 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AS I HAD ORIGINALLY PLANNED, AND HERE I LEARN EVEN MORE LAUDABLE THINGS ABOUT THIS REMARKABLE LADY THAN I KNEW BACK THEN! INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE STORIES. WORTH WATCHING TWICE!

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Cynthia McKinney - We define the system, the system does not define us!

http://youtu.be/XxliHAtnBmg

Published on Jun 18, 2012 by Abirproduction 

Researched, Produced and Directed by Abir Alsayed 

A part of Asdekaa Al Arab series http://www.facebook.com/pages/Asdekaa-Al-Arab-%D8%A3%D8%B5%D8%AF%D9%82%D8%A7%...

THE PRECEEDING BLOG BY PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS STATES THAT IN SYRIA "THE FACTS ARE DIFFERENCT FROM THOSE PRESENTED BY THE PRESSTITUTE AMERICAN MEDIA AND MEMBERS OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT." WHILE I KNOW THAT PCR USES ONLY RELIABLE SOURCES TO MAKE SUCH ACCUSATIONS, MY READERS MAY LIKE TO ACCESS SUCH SOURCES. IF SO, FIND ALL OF THE SORDID DETAILS IN THE TWO VIDEOS IMMEDIATELY BELOW AS RELATED BY A VETERAN REPORTER WHO HAS ACTUALLY ROAMED THE LOCATIONS IN QUESTION.

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Pepe Escobar: US will continue to arm anti-government rebels in Syria after veto 

http://youtu.be/y7ZWgJbpVnE

Uploaded by RTAmerica on Feb 6, 2012

For several months anti-government rebels have been protesting the government led by Bashar al-Assad. In the past few days the violence in Syria has increased radically and over the weekend the Syria resolution proposed by the UN Security Council was vetoed by China and Russia. Many have criticized the two countries for the veto but many feel Syria will share the same fate as Libya if the resolution passes. Pepe Escobar, Asia Times correspondent, joins us to look at the bigger picture. 

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Escobar: Al-Qaeda agents worm into Syrian rebel army 

http://youtu.be/liXG_vm4jes

Uploaded by RussiaToday on Feb 18, 2012 

The EU states are calling for creating humanitarian corridors in Syria, which some fear could open the door to foreign intervention. But Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar says it's already underway. 

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Blogger's Note: A year or so ago I came across a couple videos by Pepe Escobar on his theme of "Pipelineistan." But I subsequently lost track of his publications until last week when I friended him on Facebook and then asking where I could find his latest reporting. He vectored me to Russia Today, from which I selected the two videos above. Those wishing to learn more about Pepe's concept of Pipelineistan should watch the video below. 

The Stream - Afghanistan...or Pipelineistan? - Pepe Escobar and Derrick Crowe 

http://youtu.be/JC3KPT3eSl0

Uploaded by AJstream on Jul 18, 2011

Many have theories as to why the US continues to fight in Afghanistan. One theory is that it's all about a pipeline. The Stream spoke with journalist Pepe Escobar and with political blogger Derrick Crowe. 

Read more: http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/afghanistan-or-pipelineistan