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당신의 자신의 현실을 창조하는가? 드러내는 잠재의식 비밀 결코 다시에 속지 말라! 당신이 알고 가정되지 않는 무엇이

나이?

고위 이스라엘 외교관은 핵무기 발육시키기에서 그것을 막기 위하여 이스라엘이 이란에 대하여 군 공세를 시작하게 다는 것을 경고했다.

나이를 가진 면접시험에서는, 핵 기능을 취득하는 이란을 멈추는 외교적인 노력을 위한 시간이 이미 만료될지도 모르다는 것을 지난 9월까지 2003년에서 국제 연합에 이스라엘의 상주 대표인, Dan Gillerman는 말했다.

"세계 핵 이란으로 사는 것을 여유가 있을 수 없다,"는 Gillerman 씨는 말했다. "나는 외교가 작동할 것이라는 점을, 그러나 나는 일하는 확실하지 않다는 것을 우리 다는 것을 외교를 위한 시간을 희망한다.

"이스라엘에는 능력이 있고 그것을 확인하는 수용량이."는 일어나지 않을 것이라는 점을 핵 이란으로 살지 않으며 나가 믿는는다는 것을 이스라엘 아주 확실히 했다

호주를 이달 말에 방문할, Gillerman 씨는 2개의 시계가 이란에 관하여 달리고 있었다고 말했다: "이란의 과학 기술 시계가 있고 외교 시계가 있고, 이란 시계가." 매우 빨리 달리고 있다고 나는 생각한다

폭탄 이란의 핵 강화 공장에 상세한 군 계획은 이스라엘 군 지휘관의 테이블에 오랫동안 있었다. Ehud Barak 나가는 국방부 장관은 군사 공격을 위한 요구한 미국 지원이 지난 5월 있는 믿어진다, 그러나 계획은 그들을 승인하기 위하여 떨어진 then-president 후에 George Bush 유산되었다.

해석된 무슨이에 있는 이란의 원자력 발전소에 공격을 위한 예행연습으로 지난 6월, 이스라엘은 지중해에 군사 훈련을 실행해 100 이상 F-16와 F-15 전투기를 포함한. , 뉴욕 타임즈가 보고할 당시 만약에 폭탄 급료 우라늄 생성에서 이란을 멈추는 외교적인 노력이 이스라엘은 군으로 행동하는 준비되었다 Tehran에 경고를 보내는 뿐만 아니라, 운동은 미국에 메시지로 예정되었다는 것을 비플거리으면.

화요일에, 이스라엘의 다음 정부, Likud 지도자 Benjamin Netanyahu를 지도하는 아마 남자는, 그의 승리 연설에 있는 이란에 참고를 만들었다. 그는 말했다: "이스라엘은 멀리와 가까이에서 이란 위협을, 직면하고 있다. 핵 위협 및 공포 위협? 그것은 이것을 취급할 것이다 저희까지 이고, 우리는 이 2개의 도전을 성공적으로 취급할 수 있을 것이다."

Israel has carried out two strikes on suspected nuclear sites over the past 30 years. In 1981, its jets bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, and in September 2007, Israeli aircraft bombed a structure in Syria that was alleged to have housed a nuclear reactor.

Any new attack against Iran would be much more complicated, with the country’s uranium enrichment plants spread across many sites. Iran’s comparatively sophisticated military and its distance from Israel would present further complications for military planners and risk setting off a full-scale war.

Mr Gillerman said the world could not afford to underestimate the seriousness of the Iranian threat. “We have a very extreme, radical fundamentalist regime there with a president (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) who denies the Holocaust while preparing the next one, and has vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the map. My advice to the rest of the world is to listen to him very carefully and take him at face value.”

Create Your Own Reality? Subliminal Secrets Exposed Never Be Lied To Again! What You Aren't Supposed To Know

By Phil Mattera

Our culture worships spunky small businesses and entrepreneurship.? Stewart Parnell epitomized that ideal and was living the good life in Lynchburg, Virginia until last month, when his Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) was linked to one of the biggest salmonella outbreaks?at least eight deaths and more than 500 illnesses?ever to occur in the United States.

According to federal officials, PCA knowingly shipped contaminated peanuts as well as peanut butter and paste on numerous occasions, including 32 truckloads meant for the school lunch program. PCA also provided tainted raw materials for many large food processors, which have issued a cascade of product recalls. PCA is now the subject of a criminal investigation, and this week Parnell (photo) was compelled to appear at a Congressional hearing, where he grim-facedly invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions.

He had reason to look grim. The House Energy and Commerce Committee released several e-mail messages sent by Parnell, including one in which he told his plant manager to make shipments (his exact words were ?let?s turn them loose?) despite some test results showing evidence of salmonella. In another he complained that those problematic results were ?costing us huge $$$$$.?

This was also a week when the chief executives of the country?s largest financial institutions were called before Congress and pelted with questions about bonuses paid out amid the massive federal bailout of the industry. But these days everyone expects executives of large corporations to be reprobates.

The Parnell situation is more chilling. He is the head of a privately held company with annual revenues of only about $25 million, which makes it a small business by contemporary standards. PCA had almost no public profile until last month, and Parnell?s only previous time in the national spotlight (though a much dimmer one) was in 2005, when Bush Administration Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns appointed him to the Peanut Standards Board. (Parnell was just ousted from the panel by the USDA, which also announced that it is seeking to debar PCA from doing business with the federal government.)

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, PCA was built by Parnell?s father, Hugh Parnell, as an outgrowth of his ice cream sandwich business. The company later got caught up in the takeover wave that swept through the small world of peanut processing. The Journal-Constitution reports that PCA was sold in 1995 to Morven Partners, the vehicle set up by billionaire investor John Kluge to take over various nut companies such as Jimbo?s Jumbos.

Jimbo?s, by the way, was mentioned in one of the e-mails released this week by the House. In it Parnell said: ?We need to find out somehow what our competition (JIMBOS) is doing [about salmonella] and at the very least mimic their policy.?

Stewart Parnell and his brother Hugh Brian Parnell, the Journal-Constitution goes on to report, became management consultants for Morven until the late 1990s, when Stewart repurchased PCA.

Hugh Brian Parnell told reporters that work and family occupy his brother Stewart?s time. ?He doesn?t drink, smoke or socialize,? Huge was quoted as saying. ?He?s a family man. You never see him without a grandchild around.? The Associated Press quotes a neighbor of Stewart?s as saying: ?He?s always been an upstanding, generous person and a pillar of the community.? Parnell and PCA didn?t have a much of a presence in the business community in Lynchburg, where the company has its modest headquarters. ?This episode is the first time I?ve heard of them,? the president of the city?s chamber of commerce was quoted as saying.

Even less is known about Parnell?s associate David Royster III, who reportedly financed the acquisitions that allowed PCA to reach its current size. Royster is one of the younger members of a family that operates a variety of apparently respectable businesses in Shelby, North Carolina.

The apparent fact that supposed pillars of the community can engage in outrageously reckless business practices shows that there is sometimes a fine line between the aggressive pursuit of profit and behavior that can legitimately be called evil. Those who would venerate entrepreneurship should keep in mind that it can also have a dark side.

Create Your Own Reality? Subliminal Secrets Exposed Never Be Lied To Again! What You Aren't Supposed To Know

In testimony before the Senate Committee on Intelligence Thursday, Washington’s new director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, warned that the deepening world capitalist crisis posed the paramount threat to US national security and warned that its continuation could trigger a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and 1930s.

This frank assessment, contained in the unclassified version of the “annual threat assessment” presented by Blair on behalf of 16 separate US intelligence agencies, represented a striking departure from earlier years, in which a supposedly ubiquitous threat from Al Qaeda terrorism and the two wars launched under the Bush administration topped the list of concerns.

Clearly underlying his remarks are fears within the massive US intelligence apparatus as well as among more conscious layers of the American ruling elite that a protracted economic crisis accompanied by rising unemployment and reduced social spending will trigger a global eruption of the class struggle and the threat of social revolution.

The presentation was not only the first for Blair, a former Navy admiral who took over as director of national intelligence only two weeks ago, but also marked the first detailed elaboration of the perspective of the US intelligence apparatus since the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

“The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications,” Blair declared in his opening remarks. He continued: “The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and economists are divided over whether and when we could hit bottom. Some even fear that the recession could further deepen and reach the level of the Great Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism.”

Blair described the ongoing financial and economic meltdown as “the most serious one in decades, if not in centuries.”

“Time is probably our greatest threat,” he said. “The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to US strategic interests.”

The intelligence chief noted that “roughly a quarter of the countries in the world have already experienced low-level instability such as government changes because of the current slowdown.” He added that the “bulk of anti-state demonstrations” internationally have been seen in Europe and the former Soviet Union.

But Blair stressed that the threat that the crisis will produce revolutionary upheavals is global. The financial meltdown, he said, is “likely to produce a wave of economic crises in emerging market nations over the next year.” He added that “much of Latin America, former Soviet Union states and sub-Saharan Africa lack sufficient cash reserves, access to international aid or credit, or other coping mechanism.”

Noting that economic growth in these regions of the globe had fallen dramatically in recent months, Blair stated, “When those growth rates go down, my gut tells me that there are going to be problems coming out of that, and we’re looking for that.” He cited “statistical modeling” showing that “economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period.”

In another parallel to the 1930s, the US intelligence director pointed to the implications of the crisis for world trade and relations between national capitalist economies. “The globally synchronized nature of this slowdown means that countries will not be able to export their way out of this recession,” he said. “Indeed, policies designed to promote domestic export industries?so-called beggar-thy-neighbor policies such as competitive currency devaluations, import tariffs, and/or export subsidies?risk unleashing a wave of destructive protectionism.”

It was precisely such policies pursued in the 1930s that set the stage for the eruption of the Second World War.

Blair also raised the damage that the crisis has done to the global credibility of American capitalism, declaring that the “widely held perception that excesses in US financial markets and inadequate regulation were responsible has increased criticism about free market policies, which may make it difficult to achieve long-time US objectives.” The collapse of Wall Street, he added, “has increased questioning of US stewardship of the global economy and the international financial structure.”

The threat assessment also included evaluations of potential terrorist threats, the “arc of instability” stretching from the Middle East to South Asia, conditions in Latin America and Africa and strategic challenges from both China and Russia, centering in Eurasia. It likewise dealt with the war in Afghanistan, which the Obama administration is preparing to escalate, providing a scathing assessment of the Karzai regime in Kabul and the familiar demand for an escalation of the intervention in Pakistan. Nonetheless, the report’s undeniable focus was on the danger that economic turmoil will ignite revolutionary challenges on a world scale.

Blair’s emphasis on the global capitalist crisis as the overriding national security concern for American imperialism seemed to leave some of the Senate intelligence panel’s members taken aback. They have been accustomed over the last seven years to having all US national security issues subsumed in the “global war on terrorism,” a propaganda catch-all used to justify US aggression abroad while papering over the immense contradictions underlying Washington’s global position.

The committee’s Republican vice chairman, Senator Christopher Bond of Missouri, expressed his concern that Blair was making the “conditions in the country” and the global economic crisis “the primary focus of the intelligence community.”

Blair responded that he was “trying to act as your intelligence officer today, telling you what I thought the Senate ought to be caring about.” It sounded like a rebuke and a warning to the senators that it is high time to ditch the ideological baggage of the past several years and confront the real and growing threat to capitalist rule posed by the crisis and the resulting radicalization of the masses in country after country.

It may have been lost on some of those sitting at the dais in the Senate hearing room, but when Blair referred to a return to the conditions of “violent extremism” of the 1920s and 1930s, he was warning that American and world capitalism once again faces the specter of a revolutionary challenge by the working class.

There is no doubt that behind the fa?ade of Obama, the US national security apparatus is making its counter-revolutionary preparations accordingly.

Including Blair, Obama has named three recently retired four-star military officers to serve in his cabinet. The other two are former Marine Gen. James Jones, his national security adviser, and former Army chief of staff Gen. Erik Shinseki, his secretary of veterans affairs. This unprecedented representation of the senior officer corps within the new Democratic administration is indicative of a growth in the political power of the US military that poses a serious threat to basic democratic rights.

A report that appeared in a magazine published by the US Army War College last November, just weeks after the election, indicates that the Pentagon and the US intelligence establishment are preparing for what they see as a historic crisis of the existing order that could require the use of armed force to quell social struggles at home.

Entitled “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ?Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development,” the monograph insists that one of the key contingencies for which the US military must prepare is a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,” which could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.”

The report states: “Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order… An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home.”

In other words, a sharp intensification of the unfolding capitalist crisis accompanied by an eruption of class struggle and the threat of social revolution in the US itself could force the Pentagon to call back its expeditionary armies from Iraq and Afghanistan for use against American workers.

The document continues: “Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD [the Department of Defense] would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance.” The phrase?”an essential enabling hub for continuity of authority”?is a euphemism for military dictatorship.

The working class must draw its own urgent conclusions from the rapid deepening of the present crisis, above all the necessity of building a mass independent political party based on a socialist and internationalist program and fighting to put an end to the capitalist profit system. This means, above all, joining and building the Socialist Equality Party.

Bill Van Auken

Create Your Own Reality? Subliminal Secrets Exposed Never Be Lied To Again! What You Aren't Supposed To Know

By PAUL HASTE?

Create Your Own Reality? Subliminal Secrets Exposed Never Be Lied To Again! What You Aren't Supposed To Know

Blackwater Sheds Name, Shifts Focus

By Dana Hedgpeth

Blackwater Worldwide, a private security company whose work in Iraq was plagued by trouble, said yesterday that it is changing its name to Xe as it shifts its business focus.

The company, based in Moyock, N.C., has more than a dozen business units that are owned by Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and heir to an industrial fortune. Prince grew the company over the past decade from a small firm that offered training for law enforcement and small military units to landing part of a lucrative State Department contract to provide security in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Its work in those countries was plagued with problems. In 2004, four of Blackwater’s guards were ambushed by insurgents in Fallujah. The company made headlines again on Sept. 16, 2007, during a chaotic confrontation in downtown Baghdad, when Blackwater contractors allegedly shot and killed 17 Iraqis in a crowded square. That incident led to congressional inquiries and protests that it be removed from the country. Last month, the Iraqi government refused to issue a new operating license to Blackwater, and the firm is winding down its work there.

In a memo to employees, the company said its main focus will be on operating training facilities.

Anne Tyrrell, a spokeswoman for the company, said it was changing its name because “the idea is to define the company as what it is today and not what it used to be.”

“We’ve taken the company to a place where it is no longer accurately described as Blackwater,” she said.

Tyrrell said there is no meaning to the new name, which is pronounced “zee.” “It was just a choice of a name,” she said. “We thought of it internally.” Xe is also the chemical symbol for the element xenon.

The company got its start in July 1996, when Prince used about $900,000 of his share from selling off his father’s auto parts business to begin buying up land for a training facility in North Carolina, not far from Norfolk. The company’s name — Blackwater — was inspired by the dark, brackish water on the land, near the Great Dismal Swamp.

Tyrrell said the company spent over a year searching for a new name before choosing Xe. She said the Blackwater name is being shed from all business units. Blackwater Airships, which offers surveillance services for intelligence gathering, becomes Guardian Flight Systems. Blackwater Target Systems, the unit that develops and builds targets, is now known as GSD Manufacturing. The most well-known part of the business — Blackwater Lodge and Training Center — will now be called U.S. Training Center.

Company executives have also taken on new positions. Gary Jackson, longtime president of Blackwater Lodge and Training, is now president of Xe.

RJ Hillhouse, a national security expert and author of the blog called The Spy Who Billed Me, said the company is “obviously trying to distance itself from their image as reckless cowboys that’s etched into the world’s mind from the September shooting. With a new name, “there are a lot of people who probably won’t connect the dots,” she said. “In a year or two, people won’t remember that’s Blackwater.”

Create Your Own Reality? Subliminal Secrets Exposed Never Be Lied To Again! What You Aren't Supposed To Know

By Stephen C. Webster

Three major human rights organizations have declared the Department of Defense was running secret prisons at Bagram and in Iraq, actively sought ways around the terms of the Geneva conventions and cooperated with the CIA’s “ghost detention” program which saw prisoners hidden from Red Cross oversight.

The arrival of the documents comes on the same day the ACLU published two unredacted pages of a government report which reveals detainees in US custody were tortured to death

“These newly released documents confirm our suspicion that the tentacles of the CIA?s abusive program reached across agency lines,” said Margaret Satterthwaite, Director of the NYU International Human Rights Clinic, in a Thursday advisory. “In fact, it is increasingly obvious that defense officials engaged in legal gymnastics to find ways to cooperate with the CIA?s activities. A full accounting of all agencies must now take place to ensure that future abuses don?t continue under a different guise.”

The papers, part of a volley of responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, were released by Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.

The entire package, which encompasses hundreds of pages, was boiled down to several key points by the CCR in a report by Mother Jones writer Steve Aquino.

“One heavily redacted page mentions (PDF, page 34) an ‘undisclosed detention facility’ at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan,” he noted.

“Another, dated May 2004, highlights (PDF, page 17) how the Geneva Conventions can be interpreted to allow the CIA and the DoD to ghost detainees’ identities so they can be denied a visit from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“This was done, according to a memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to ‘maximize intelligence collection efforts.’ In other words, give them more time to interrogate inmates.”

And perhaps most outrageous, a Feb. 2006 e-mail disclosed by the groups highlights an effort to limit bad press by delaying the release of a detainee “for 45 days or so until things cool down.”

“It is astonishing that the government may have delayed releasing men from Guant?namo in order to avoid bad press,” said CCR attorney Gitanjali Gutierrez, who represents many of the men held in Guant?namo, in an Amnesty International release. “Proposing to hold men for a month and a half after they were deemed releasable is inexcusable. The Obama Administration should avoid repeating this injustice and release the innocent individuals with all due haste.”

“Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Thursday that he had not seen the documents and wasn’t aware of the story,” reported CNN.

After Washington Post reporter Dana Priest revealed the existence of the CIA’s secret prisons in a November 2005 report, RAW STORY was the first publication to uncover the exact location of one such “black site” in Eastern Europe.

President Obama has signed an order mandating the closure of the CIA’s secret prisons and the US military prison Guantanamo Bay within a year of Jan. 22, 2009.

Create Your Own Reality? Subliminal Secrets Exposed Never Be Lied To Again! What You Aren't Supposed To Know

By Stephen Lendman

Global economies are withering while Washington conceives “Financial Recovery Plan(s) from Hell,” according to economist Michael Hudson in his latest February 11 article. Bankers demand more trillions, “or (they’ll) plunge the economy into financial crisis.” What they want they’ll get, and here’s where things now stand.

On February 10, Bloomberg.com reported that Treasury Secretary Geithner “pledged government financing for as much as $2 trillion….to spur new lending and address banks’ toxic assets, seeking to end the credit crunch hobbling the economy.” Hudson calls it “Stage One of a two-stage plan,” so far unannounced, to transfer trillions more to corrupt bankers who caused the problem in the first place, yet taxpayers will get little more back than the bill.

On February 11, The New York Times reported that “House and Senate leaders….struck a deal on a $789 billion economic stimulus bill after little more than 24 hours of rapid-fire negotiations….clearing the way for final Congressional action later this week (so) Obama (can) sign the bill on” February 16 in a prime time TV spectacular.

In America today, they’re called bailouts, but throughout history they were handouts. Some quite generous (though nothing like today’s) and always for the privileged. Never for the public interest or greater good.

Last October, Howard Zinn wrote about them in his Nation magazine article titled “Bailout - A Great Opportunity:”

“Let’s face a historical truth: we have never had a ‘free market,’ we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. These titans of wealth hypocritically warned against ‘big government’ but only when (it) threatened to regulate their activities, or when it contemplated passing some of the nation’s wealth on to the neediest people.”

“They had no quarrel with ‘big government’ when it served their needs, (and it) started way back” in 1787 when the Constitution was drafted. The year before farmers from Western Massachusetts and elsewhere rebelled to protect their properties from being seized for nonpayment of taxes. The Founders took note and “created ‘big government’ powerful enough” to deter them in future incidents. To return runaway slaves to their owners, and to massacre Indians to make way for new settlers.

They established the idea of handouts as well. The first one to pay full value for near-worthless bonds held by speculators - an earlier version of buying today’s toxic assets.

It was bad enough, then compounded by taxing the public to pay for them each time, and having a standing army ready in case of resistance. What precisely happened in 1794 when Pennsylvania farmers stood up against unfair tax laws.

“In the first sessions of the first Congress,” markets were manipulated with tariffs “to subsidize manufacturers.” Government also partnered with private banks to establish a national one. These practices were commonplace from that time to now. Only the amounts get bigger. The more concentrated business gets, the greater its appetite and more power it has to satisfy it. It’s now insatiable enough to demand trillions more in handouts before the current crisis ends, looted from the Treasury with taxpayers getting the bill.

Zinn notes how in the 19th century government subsidized canals, the merchant marine, and before and during the Civil War gave about 100 million free acres of land to the railroad barons “along with considerable loans to keep” them in business. It was the largest ever giveaway until Paulson’s-engineered Wall Street one, and as stated above, lots more is coming, and much of it still ahead.

Democrats back it more than Republicans. Another long-standing tradition from the republic’s beginning, as Zinn again noted. He cited Democrat Grover Cleveland vetoing “a bill to give (a mere) $100,000 to Texas farmers to help them buy seed grain during a drought, saying (dismissively): ‘Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.’ ” However, in the same year he gave wealthy bondholders $5 million by pricing them $28 above market value. “Rugged individualism” he called it to make it on our own with a little government intervention for assistance. Only for business. Never the public.

After WW II, military Keynesianism became dogma. Aircraft and other defense industries had to be saved and another Depression avoided. The oil industry got its depletion allowance. Chrysler was resurrected from the dead. Continental Illinois Bank was taken over until sold to Bank of America. Business was shored up overall by the 1971 Emergency Loan Guarantee Act. Post-9/11, the Air Transportation Safety and Stabilization Act was for the airlines. Today it’s rescuing Wall Street and major banks, Fannie, Freddie, AIG, the auto giants, and any other “too big to fail” company. Generous government handouts to revive America’s business, or at least that’s the hope behind them.

Historian Charles Beard’s Documented History of Handouts

In December 1931, noted historian Charles Beard wrote about them for Harper’s Monthly in an article titled: “The Myth of Rugged American Individualism.” He documented 15 examples of government handouts/subsidies to business when the country was sinking into Depression.

(1) Government Regulation of Railways from 1887

Beard asked: “How did the Government get into this business?” At the “insistence of business men, shippers, who were harassed and sometimes ruined by railway tactics.” Through rebates, pools, stock watering, bankruptcy-juggling, savage rate slashing, merciless competition, and much more by some of the most cutthroad of all robber barons. They caused disastrous railway bankruptcies involving bloodshed and arson during the Panic of 1873, the result of financier Jim Fisk and railroad baron Jay Gould trying to corner the gold market. Ulysses S. Grant deterred them. A panic ensued and depression followed - two years after the great Chicago fire destroyed four square miles of the city, including close to where this writer lives.

(2) Waterways

Since the nation’s founding, the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding the development of rivers, harbors, canals, and other infrastructure, and continues to do it for business. “Who (was) back of all this,” Beard asked? “Business men and farmers who want lower freight rates. There is not a chamber of commerce on any Buck Creek in America that will not cheer until tonsils are cracked for any proposal to make the said creek navigable.” Dredging companies also backed it and companies making their machinery.

Beyond Beard’s timeline, the Eisenhower administration began building the Interstate Highway System at the behest of the auto industry, but its origin way pre-dated him with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938. Then another Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944. Still another in 1952 and under Eisenhower one more plus the Highway Revenue Act of 1956 that created the Highway Trust Fund to pay for the proposed 41,000 miles of roads (up to almost 47,000 by 2004).

(3) The United States Barge Corporation

Again Beard asked: “Who got the Government into the job of running barges on some of its improved waterways?” Not socialists. Good Republicans and Democrats representing the country’s business interests.

(4) The Shipping Business

WW I was the proximate cause. For over half a century government stayed out of subsidizing ship builders and allied industries. “Under the cover of war necessities,” it went into the business with much joy from the industry. It backed huge merchant marine expenditures in the form of cheap or subsidized funding, and did it by spending money “like water educating politicians.” What today we call lobbying.

Beard asked: “Who wants navy officers on half pay to serve on privately owned ships? Business men. Who wants the Government to keep on operating ships on ‘pioneer’ lines that do not pay? Business men. And when the United States Senate gets around to investigating this branch of business, it will find more entertainment than the Trade Commission has found in the utility inquest.” In other words, if Congress ever has second thoughts, it’ll be too late. Business will have pocketed their money and used it.

(5) Aviation

Government was already in this business by providing costly airway services free of charge and by subsidizing air mail. Once again, private enterprise was behind the whole scheme, or as Beard put it: “Gentlemen engaged in aviation and the manufacture of planes and dirigibles.” Government merely helped out by buying planes “for national defense” or whatever other reason it chose.

(6) Canals

Consider the Panama Canal, for example. East and West coast shippers backed it because of costly railroad rates. Others with a financial interest in the Cape Cod Canal found that one unprofitable. “They rejoiced to see (that) burden placed on the broad back of our dear Uncle Sam” to bail them out.

(7) Highway Building

Even in Beard’s day, “business men engaged in the manufacture and sale of automobiles and trucks” wanted the government to spend hundreds of millions on roads and tax railroads to help pay for them. With a touch of humor, Beard asked: “Who proposes to cut off every cent of that outlay? Echoes do not answer.”

(8) The Department of Commerce

Its very name defines its purpose. To promote what Calvin Coolidge called “the business of America.” A process Beard described going on in its “magnificent mansion near the Treasury Department, and its army of hustlers scouting for business at the uttermost ends of the earth. Who is responsible for loading on the Government the job of big drummer at large for business? Why shouldn’t these rugged individualists do their own drumming instead of asking taxpayers to do it for them?” Herbert Hoover headed the department at the time and outdid all his predecessors in dispensing public money. The same president Herbert Hoover we blame for his public stinginess after the country headed into Depression on his watch.

(9) The Big Pork Barrel

It’s been around for ages and entered into the vocabulary after the Civil War. It was named after a container to store pig meat in brine, and in 1801 a farmer’s almanac urged readers to “mind our pork and cider barrels.” Its need went out with refrigeration but got new life in reference to political bills bringing home the bacon for constituents. For all sorts of things like post offices, rivers, harbors, buildings, and a whole array of boondoggle projects and giveaways. Beard cited public buildings, navy yards and army posts with business interests every time the beneficiaries.

(10) The Bureau of Standards (NBS)

It’s now called the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), and was originally established in 1901 as a measurement standards lab under the Department of Commerce to promote US innovation and industrial competitiveness. Given its purpose was to help business, Beard asked: “Why shouldn’t they do their own (promoting) at their own expense, instead of turning to the Government?”

(11) The Federal Trade Commission

In 1914, it was established as an independent US government agency. While claiming its principle mission is to promote “consumer protection,” it exists solely for business and in Beard’s day for “business men who do not like to be outwitted or cheated by their competitors.” Why so for “rugged individualists,” he asked? Why not let them all do as they please “without invoking government intervention at public expense” and no public benefit.

(12) The Anti-trust Acts

Beard refers to the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act and 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act - trustbusting legislation of their day to defuse anti-competititive practices. Today they’re mere artifacts at a time business oligopolies and de facto monopolies dominate all major industry groups and are practically omnipotent. It’s why Chomsky calls them “private tryannies.”

Earlier, businesses complained that these laws constrained them and their ability to do large-scale planning without risking prosecution. Yet farmers and small business wanted them. The former for lower prices. The latter so as not to be undersold, “beaten by clever tricks, or crushed to the wall by competitors with immense capital.”

Individualism inspired both acts, what Woodrow Wilson called “The New Freedom. Break up the trusts,” he said, “and let each tub stand on its own bottom.” That’s how small businessmen felt. Lawyers representing them put it differently: “The natural person’s personal liberty should not be destroyed by artificial persons known as corporations created under the auspices of the State.”

(13) The Tariff

They go back to the 18th century and were the government’s largest source of revenue from the 1790s until WW I. Once income taxes became law in 1913, that changed although taxing income was used during the Civil War and again in the 1890s.

Beard referred to tariffs as the kind of “interference” business men demanded to protect their interests while at the same time wanting “the right of capital to find its most lucrative course, industry and intelligence their natural reward, and commodities their fair price.” The idea of “free trade” then was about the way it is now. One way with government protecting business against foreign competition, heavily by tariffs back then. More today by the WTO, NAFTA and the like. Beard’s response: “If competition is good, why not stand up and take it?”

(14) The Federal Farm Board

It was created in 1929 so was quite new when Beard wrote about it. He called it a “collectivist institution” and a product of “agrarian agitation on the part of our most stalwart individualists, the free and independent farmers.” Hoover sponsored it and signed it into law, but under him its measures were modest at best. It primarily and fundamentally stabilized prices and production through cooperative methods. It financed associations to limit production. The alternative was to let farmers produce what they wish, as much as they could, and sell it at whatever the market would bear. It’s slogan was “Grow Less - Get More,” cooperate under government leadership or hang separately.

(15) The Moratorium and Frozen Assets

It was a Herbert Hoover plan for a one-year moratorium on payments due the US from foreign powers at a time of growing economic duress as well as a “proposal to give public support to ‘frozen assets.’ ” Its “inspiration” was the jam American investment bankers were in. They made easy money in the 1920s, were now in trouble, and wanted government bailout help.

In 1927, a distinguished German economist told Beard that “the great game in his country, as in other parts of Europe, was to borrow billions from private bankers in the US, so that it would ultimately be impossible to pay reparations, the debts due the Federal Government, and then the debts owed to private parties.” As a result, they believed bankers would force their government to forego its claims for the benefit of private operators. It worked, and according to Beard: “American taxpayers (were) to be soaked and American bankers (were) to collect - perhaps.”

What then is a “frozen asset?” A piece of paper representing a transaction expecting to yield a larger return than possible on a prudent investment. For example, a 7% Western farm mortgage at the time was frozen tight and its holder with it. But why should government have to intervene to save them from “their folly and greed? No reason, except that (investors) want the Government to bring home their cake so they can eat it.”

Beard stressed that “the Federal government does not operate in a vacuum, but under impulsion from without.” From “rugged individualists - business men or farmers or both….The Government operates continually in the midst of the most powerful assembly of lobbyists the world has ever seen.” Representing every business interest “above the level of a corner grocery. For forty years or more there has not been a President, Republican or Democrat, who has not talked against government interference and then supported measures adding more interference to the huge collection already accumulated.”

Woodrow Wilson, for example. He based his 1912 campaign on individualism. A new freedom against corporate wealth controlling government. As a Jeffersonianism heir, “he decried paternalism of every kind.” But look at the laws enacted under him:

• the Federal Reserve Act subverting the Constitution by giving a private banking cartel the right to print money, control its supply and price, and charge government interest on what it would not have to pay if it printed its own;
• the Federal income tax to service the federal debt owed to bankers;
• the trainmen’s law virtually fixing wages on interstate railways for certain classes of employees;
• the shipping board law that put the government in the shipping business and let it regulate rates;
• the Farm Loan Act that established 12 regional Farm Loan Banks to serve members of Farm Loan Associations;
• federal aid for highway construction;
• the Alaskan railway;
• the Water Power Act that created a Federal Power Commission with extensive authority over waterways and the construction and use of water power projects; and
• various other acts belying the notion of “the less government the better” so increasingly more of it for business became the law of the land.

Republicans regained power in the early 1920s on a slogan of returning to normalcy and getting government out of business. In fact, they repealed none of Wilson’s laws. They and their ideological forebears “came honestly by subsidies, bounties, internal improvements, tariffs, and other aids to business.” It was their kind of normalcy. Individualism, with no interference, lots of handouts, and nothing changed under Republican and Democrat administrations through today.

Handouts to Business: the American Way of Life

American business is defined by Socialized costs and privatized profits - more than ever today with trillions in handouts plus all sorts of other generous benefits:

• subsidies and other direct grants;
• tax breaks, reductions, deductions, exclusions, write-offs, exemptions, credits, loopholes, shelters, and rebates even for profitable companies; the bigger they are, the more they get;
• letting corporations be headquartered off-shore and pay no federal income taxes; allowed to repatriate foreign earnings on the same basis; export jobs and erode the nation’s industrial base; financialize the economy; make it a casino, and loot the Treasury to cover their bad bets;
• large government contracts of every imaginable kind; some on a cost-plus basis with every incentive to cheat and get more;
• discounted user fees or subsidized use of public resources;
• free government-funded R & D;
• various other government direct payments; every cabinet department as a conduit for government funding to private business; every program from the Department of Commerce, Agriculture and others underwrites it; the FDA for Big Pharma; the FCC for media and telecommunications firms; the FAA for the airlines, the Treasury and Fed for Wall Street, and so forth; the most active “peoples” agency is the IRS;
• other subsidies like accelerated depreciation; the cost of advertising; direct aid for companies that advertise abroad; and much more with Democrats as pro-business as Republicans while at the same time curtailing essential social benefits;
• individual tax breaks for the rich; winking and nodding about billions offshored to tax havens; letting corporate fraud and abuse become the national pastime;
• privatizing more of what government should do and/or does best - schools, highways, bridges, airports, prisons, public lands, utilities, the running of elections, foreign policy, parts of the military, war through the use of mercenaries, outer space, and thus far a failed attempt to take away the most important poverty reduction program for seniors and the disabled - Social Security;
• privatizing wealth and socializing debt;
• abolishing welfare and other social benefits; rendering organized labor impotent in a “Walmartized” society; ruling by the doctrine of rewarding the privileged at the expense of beneficial social change; the greater good; government for the people; human need; and the democratic ideal that government should serve all its people, not just its preferential few.

Beard’s “rugged individualism” is pure myth for them. But, rugged or otherwise, it’s the consigned fate for the rest of us - sink or swim at a time a lot of us are submerging.

Create Your Own Reality? Subliminal Secrets Exposed Never Be Lied To Again! What You Aren't Supposed To Know

Close to two-thirds of those surveyed said there should be investigations into allegations that the Bush team used torture to interrogate terrorism suspects and its program of wiretapping U.S. citizens without getting warrants. Almost four in 10 favor criminal investigations and about a quarter want investigations without criminal charges. One-third said they want nothing to be done.

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Even more people want action on alleged attempts by the Bush team to use the Justice Department for political purposes. Four in 10 favored a criminal probe, three in 10 an independent panel, and 25% neither.

The ACLU and other groups are pressing for inquiries into whether the Bush administration violated U.S. and international bans on torture and the constitutional right to privacy. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and his Senate counterpart, Patrick Leahy, have proposed commissions to investigate.

Asked Monday about Leahy’s plan, President Obama said he would look at it. He added, “my general orientation is to say, let’s get it right moving forward.” Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have declined to rule out prosecutions. Leon Panetta, named to head the CIA, said this month that CIA officers would not be prosecuted for harsh interrogations authorized by the Bush White House.

Leahy, D-Vt., this week proposed a “truth commission” to assemble facts. He said the panel could offer immunity from prosecution for everything but perjury. “We need to get to the bottom of what happened and why,” he said.

Conyers, D-Mich., has called for a panel that would gather facts and make recommendations, and could possibly lead to prosecutions. “This isn’t payback,” he said. “We are getting things straightened out for the future.”

The Republican viewpoint was summed up recently by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa. “If every administration started to re-examine what every prior administration did, there would be no end to it,” he said. “This is not Latin America.”

The politics of any investigation would be delicate. “You’d need people who haven’t made up their minds,” says Tom Kean, a Republican who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission.

Create Your Own Reality? Subliminal Secrets Exposed Never Be Lied To Again! What You Aren't Supposed To Know

By JAMES TWEEDIE

Create Your Own Reality? Subliminal Secrets Exposed Never Be Lied To Again! What You Aren't Supposed To Know

By PAUL HASTE

Create Your Own Reality? Subliminal Secrets Exposed Never Be Lied To Again! What You Aren't Supposed To Know

By Richard Phillips

As each day brings new details of the terrible human cost of the bush fires which hit Victoria last weekend, evidence mounts that government neglect, the run-down of emergency services and the lack of any comprehensive plan were direct contributors to the tragic loss of life.

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The official death toll is currently 181, but the final casualty figure is expected to be well over 300 as police, soldiers and military personnel continue their search for bodies in the burnt-out ruins of more than 1,000 homes.

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So far more than 5,000 people have been left homeless by the inferno, which has burnt out more than 450,000 kilometres and hundreds of schools, small businesses and local facilities. Many homeowners face financial ruin, with property losses conservatively estimated at over $2 billion. According to Australia’s Insurance Council, up to one in five of those affected may not have had insurance coverage.

Milder weather conditions and rain on Wednesday and Thursday brought relief in some parts of the state but there are more than a dozen fires still burning, with several towns in danger. The Department of Sustainability and Environment warned today that the town of Healesville with a population of 6,700 is under serious threat from nearby fires. Hot weather forecast for this weekend is expected to produce new outbreaks in the state.

After the initial shock, public anger over the tragedy is growing. Letters to the newspapers have denounced the government and questioned its failure to act on the lessons of previous bushfires.

A letter to the Age from Paul Gleeson in Coburg declared: “We wake each morning to hear that the number of confirmed deaths from the bushfires has risen. Now is the time to demand that defence spending be directed to purchasing dozens of fire-fighting helicopters. Cancel the order for fighter planes, don’t build submarines?build bushfire shelters.”

In another letter, Alex and Marcia Leonard from Kinglake pointed out that every house in their street was destroyed by fire: “Our community was left exposed and unprotected by inadequate fire management before the fires occurred. The surrounding forests have had a fuel build-up of nearly a hundred years that, combined with 10 years of drought, left the whole, under-resourced community at risk of death by fire.”

Public debate has broken out over the government’s “stay and fight or evacuate” policy, which imposes all responsibility on residents in high-risk areas to decide individually on how to respond to bushfires. The policy, implemented in the aftermath of the Ash Wednesday fires in February 1983, was used to justify the lack of government spending on what is an ever-present danger during Australian summers.

Journalists and scores of first-hand survivor and emergency workers’ reports point to the impossibility of saving houses in the conditions prevailing last weekend. Many people died trying to defend their homes or were caught in cars trying flee from an inferno fueled by a 12-year drought and more than 46 degree centigrade temperatures.

According to Australia’s fire danger rating index, which takes into account temperature and humidity, an over 50 rating is extreme. Last Saturday, the index is reported to have been five to six times higher.

Government cover up

In the face of mounting public criticism, governments, state and federal, have been desperately seeking to obscure their own responsibility for the lack of planning or a proper warning system and the inadequacy of the firefighting resources.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has proclaimed the bushfires as Australia’s worst natural disaster and announced a “day of mourning” to honour those killed. Victorian Premier John Brumby has announced a Royal Commission investigation.

It is already clear, however, that no fundamental changes will be made. Even before the Royal Commission has convened, Premier Brumby told the media on Wednesday that a centralised evacuation policy is impossible.

“If you were to evacuate everybody every time there was a medium or high fire risk, you are literally talking about half a million people. To be honest, you can’t evacuate half a million people, it’s just not practical,” he said.

Far from being impossible, a clear evacuation plan along with modern warning systems and emergency services boils down to time and money?investments that the state and federal government are not prepared to make.

According to numerous eye-witness accounts, the situation last Saturday was utterly chaotic. Householders in many fire risk areas were compelled to contact the local ABC Radio service for blaze updates and emergency warnings.

Others were totally isolated?before and after the fires. Narbethong, for example, was cut off from the outside world for two days despite the fact that its local pub was providing accommodation and shelter to 150 people from nearby Marysville whose homes had been burnt to the ground. The first contact made was from a media team on Tuesday.

Victoria’s emergency phone line was deluged by more than 4,000 calls at the height of Saturday’s bushfires. The service, which had only 14 operators?all its available staff?working that day, simply could not cope as operators answered frantic calls from victims trapped in their homes or cars.

A report by Victoria’s auditor general in 2003 criticised the state government’s “consistent failure” to properly carry out controlled burning in bushfire zones; noted that only some of the municipalities covered by the Country Fire Authority were implementing voluntary planning controls in bushfire areas; and that fire education programs were “inadequate”.

According to the report, nearly half the residents surveyed in the Dandenongs, a heavily-wooded mountain range southeast of Melbourne, believed they would be alerted by a fire siren. In previous years fire-prone towns and hamlets maintained fire sirens and warning bells to warn residents. These no longer exist.

Fire experts have also pointed out that fire-protection building codes covering homes in Victorian bushfire areas were inadequate to current conditions.

Brumby and Rudd have declared that a national emergency notifications service will be established in the next 12 months but similar proposals have been rejected in recent years on cost grounds by state and federal governments.

The Victorian State Emergency Services successfully tested a telephone and text based emergency notification system in fire-prone areas in Victoria in 2005. Federal governments?Labor and Liberal?and the states, however, are still bickering over who would pay the estimated $20 million costs.

Arson witch-hunt

In an effort to deflect public criticism of governments, the media is deliberately whipping up an atmosphere of hysteria to pin blame for the fires on “arsonists”.

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A provocative editorial in Murdoch’s Australian newspaper on Tuesday, entitled “The pain of fire, the evil of arson,” bluntly declared: “Now is not the time to ask why so many lives were lost, whether warnings were inadequate or resources poorly deployed”. The real issue, it insisted, was whether the fire was deliberately lit and the necessity for “far harsher punishments.”

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Others have taken up the theme. Prime Minister Rudd denounced arsonists as “mass murderers”. Not to be outdone Brumby and South Australian Premier Mike Rann branded them as “terrorists”. Federal Attorney General Robert McClelland announced that any arsonist would face multiple murder charges and if found guilty would spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon appeared on ABC television’s “Lateline” program on Wednesday claiming that the Churchill and Marysville fires could have been deliberately lit but provided no serious evidence. The Victorian police have established a special squad to determine whether any of the fires were deliberately lit and released an identikit picture of a so-called serial arsonist. No arrests have been made.

Earlier on Wednesday, however, Assistant Police Commissioner Dannye Moloney, who heads the task force, expressed concern at the lynch mob mentality being created and appealed for calm. “There’s a lot of finger-pointing at people down the road who may be absolutely innocent. And what a crime to be accused of, if you are innocent. Let us identify if there is a crime and who may be responsible,” he warned.

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The cynical diversions of the media and politicians and the limited amounts of government aid provided stands in stark contrast to the generosity of ordinary working people. More than $75 million has been raised already in public donations, with over $53 million pledged in the first two days. Thousands of people have volunteered their services to provide food, shelter, clothing, children’s toys, medical care and other provisions for the bushfire victims.

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Such was the response in public donations that Red Cross officials issued a statement calling on people not to phone their offices but to donate on-line because their telephone service was overloaded. Scores of flood victims from Ingham in north Queensland where roads and homes have been under water for a fortnight even donated their $1,000 government relief grants to the appeal.

The elementary social solidarity displayed by this deluge of donations only underscores the inhumanity of a social order and its political defenders who place private profit before all else.

Create Your Own Reality? Subliminal Secrets Exposed Never Be Lied To Again! What You Aren't Supposed To Know

By Jerry White?

Chief executive officers from the eight largest banks in the US, which have collectively received $125 billion in bailout money, appeared before the House Financial Services Committee Tuesday. The hearing was a demonstration of the utter prostration of both the Democratic and Republican politicians before America’s financial elite.

Appearing before the congressional committee were Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs); James Dimon (JPMorgan Chase); Robert Kelly (Bank of New York Mellon);

Ken Lewis (Bank of America); Ronald Logue (State Street Corporation); John Mack (Morgan Stanley); Vikram Pandit (Citigroup) and John Stumpf (Wells Fargo). Collectively they have received hundreds of millions in individual compensation over the last few years, while their institutions precipitated the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression.

Far from conducting a serious investigation into these activities, the congressmen treated the executives with deference. They stressed that there would be no recriminations, but Congress would work with the bankers to restore confidence in the financial system. The witnesses were not put under oath or compelled to reveal any damaging or incriminating evidence. Instead, for the most part they were asked politely if they had learned their lessons and were ready to act more prudently.

This obeisance to the financial aristocracy was summed up in the opening remarks of committee chairman Barney Frank. The Massachusetts Democrat, himself a recipient of millions in campaign funds from Wall Street, acknowledged that there was widespread public anger against the banks and acknowledged that the overwhelming majority of the people wanted to “junk” the present financial system and build a new one. However, the “time and effort” made such a proposal “impractical,” Frank insisted.

In order to get the financial system working again, he said, “we are going to have to work within the ?existing institutions.’” He made it clear that there would be no substantive change in the operations or leading personnel of the tattered financial institutions, let alone any challenge to the wealth and prerogatives of those responsible for the worst crisis in 70 years.

Frank then hit at the political “dilemma” that he said the government faced. By funneling more public money into the banking system, he said, the same banking executives responsible for the crisis would be seen as the beneficiaries. This would only generate more public opposition, not only to Wall Street but to the government itself.

Indeed, the insistence of the financial elite in looting the public treasury, even if it means the bankruptcy of the country, has put the government in an extremely difficult position. However, given the complete subservience of the government to the financial aristocracy, and its unquestionable defense of the capitalist system, the politicians were reduced to begging the bankers to clean up their acts and do the public relations work necessary to get through the next installment of public money.

“I urge you going forward to be ungrudgingly cooperative,” Frank pleaded. “There has to be a sense of the American people that you understand their anger…and that you’re willing to make some sacrifices to get this working.”

What followed was political theater in which the executives explained that they weren’t really withholding credit but had issued billions in new loans to consumers, students and small businesses. They made these claims even as report after report has documented the virtual drying up of credit. The banks have used public assets to pay out dividends to wealthy bondholders and finance multi-billion dollar mergers that have resulted in the destruction of thousands of jobs.

The executives issued obligatory apologies for past “mistakes” and “errors,” pledged greater “accountability” and “transparency” and even said they would institute a three-week moratorium on foreclosures until the Treasury Department’s new bailout kicked in. Announcing that he would work without bonuses, John Mack, the CEO of Morgan Stanley, declared, “I know that American people are outraged about compensation packages,” although he did not offer to give back any of the $56 million he pocketed over the last five years.

A few Democrats on the finance committee joined the act, railing against excess bonuses, taxpayer-funded travel junkets, private jets and the millions of dollars in fees charged by the banks to process their own bailout money. The posturing was aimed at deflecting criticism from the Democrats who, like the Republicans, are widely perceived as shills for the Wall Street banks. As one Democratic congressman complained to the bankers, “your industry and ours are suffering from a credibility gap with the American people.”

In the course of the hearing it was revealed that Merrill Lynch, with the complicity of its new owner, Bank of America, had used accounting tricks to issue $3.6 billion in executive bonuses even as the bank was receiving taxpayer money. Bank of America’s executive quickly dodged any responsibility and the matter was dropped.

Another Democratic congressman complained that the American people had been “screwed out of $78 billion,” citing a report issued last Friday by the congressional panel set up to oversee the first $700 billion bailout. The report revealed that Bush administration officials overpaid for banks’ “troubled assets.” The congressman lamely asked, “Will you recommend to your boards that additional shares be given to the government?” The bankers met the question with silence.

Constantly in the background of the hearing was a fear that the banks and government were inciting a potential explosion as millions of working people were losing their jobs and homes, taking pay cuts and facing the prospect of destitution, while the financial elite on Wall Street is looting the US Treasury.

Several congressmen read letters from their constituents. One expressed what millions think of the banking executives: “Put them all in jail, which is where I would be if I robbed a financial institution.”

Despite their vocal contrition, the Wall Street executives were intransigent on their demands for more bailout money. On the most important issue?the sale of the trillions of dollars in virtually worthless mortgage-backed assets held by these insituttions?the banking executives made it absolutely clear they would not sell them at the current market prices and were waiting for the Obama administration’s new bailout to make any sale far more lucrative.

Abandoning their supposed commitment to the “free market,” the executives insisted the value of their assets should be pegged, not at the market value, but at some supposedly “fair value” that was far above their present price. In an attempt to justify this position, Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit declared, “We have a duty to our shareholders; if [the assets] are marked so far below the lifetime value we can’t do it.” However, if you get the funding flowing, he said, “then you will get a real bid.”

Wall Street reacted with disappointment to US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s unveiling of the Obama administration’s new bailout proposals on Tuesday. Behind this reaction was disquiet that the proposals?though entirely geared to the interests of Wall Street?did not include a more explicit plan for the purchasing of these “toxic” assets. The details of this new transfer of wealth to the Wall Street banks are currently being worked out behind the scenes.

America’s financial elite is holding the entire country for ransom in order to extract every penny from the national treasury. The only way to solve the crisis in a rational and socially beneficial manner is to break the grip of the financial aristocracy by transforming the banks into public utilities under the democratic control of working people.

Create Your Own Reality? Subliminal Secrets Exposed Never Be Lied To Again! What You Aren't Supposed To Know

By LOUISE NOUSRATPOUR?

Create Your Own Reality? Subliminal Secrets Exposed Never Be Lied To Again! What You Aren't Supposed To Know

President Barack Obama on Monday night held his first prime-time news conference. When questioned on Afghanistan, he replied, ?This is going to be a big challenge.? He also was asked whether he would change the Pentagon policy banning the filming and photographing of the flag-draped coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said he was reviewing it. The journalist who asked the question pointed out that it was Joe Biden several years ago who accused the Bush administration of suppressing the images to avoid public furor over the deaths of U.S. service members. Now Vice President Joe Biden predicts that a surge in U.S. troops in Afghanistan will mean more U.S. casualties: ?I hate to say it, but yes, I think there will be. There will be an uptick.?

? Meanwhile, the Associated Press recently cited a classified report drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommending a shift in strategy from democracy-building in Afghanistan to attacking alleged Taliban and al-Qaida strongholds along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

? And the campaign has clearly begun. Days after his inauguration, Obama?s first (known) military actions were two missile strikes inside Pakistan?s frontier province, reportedly killing 22 people, including women and children.

? Cherif Bassiouni has spent years going back and forth to Afghanistan. He is a professor of law at DePaul University and the former United Nations human rights investigator in Afghanistan. In 2005, he was forced out of the United Nations under pressure from the Bush administration, days after he released a report accusing the U.S. military and private contractors of committing human rights abuses. I asked Bassiouni about Obama?s approach to Afghanistan. He told me: ?There is no military solution in Afghanistan. There is an economic-development solution, but I don?t see that coming. … Right now, the population has nothing to gain by supporting the U.S. and NATO. It has everything to gain by being supportive of the Taliban.?

? Bassiouni?s scathing 2005 U.N. report accused the U.S. military and private military contractors of ?forced entry into homes, arrest and detention of nationals and foreigners without legal authority or judicial review, sometimes for extended periods of time, forced nudity, hooding and sensory deprivation, sleep and food deprivation, forced squatting and standing for long periods of time in stress positions, sexual abuse, beatings, torture, and use of force resulting in death.?

? I also put the question of the military surge to former President Jimmy Carter. He responded: ?I would disagree with Obama as far as a surge that would lead to a more intense bombing of Afghan villages and centers and a heavy dependence on military. I would like to see us reach out more, to be accommodating, and negotiate with all of the factions in Afghanistan.?

? Carter should know. He helped create what his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, called ?the Afghan trap,? set for the Soviets. This was done by supporting Islamic mujahedeen in the late 1970s against the Soviets in Afghanistan, thereby creating what evolved into the Taliban. Brzezinski told the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998: ?What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?? More than 14,000 Soviet troops were killed, and the Afghan toll exceeded 1 million. Osama bin Laden got his start with the help of the CIA-funded Afghan operation.

? Bassiouni suggests that a military solution is doomed to failure, noting that the Taliban ?realized they could not defeat the American forces, so they went underground. They put their Kalashnikovs under the mattresses, and they waited. A year ago, they resurfaced again. They can do the same thing. They can go back in the mountains, push the Kalashnikovs under the mattress, wait out five years. They have been doing that since the 1800s with any foreign and every foreign invader.?

? As Carter told me, ?To offer a hand of friendship or accommodation, not only to the warlords but even to those radicals in the Taliban who are willing to negotiate, would be the best approach, than to rely exclusively on major military force.?

? Have we learned nothing from Iraq?? ?When it comes to the war in Iraq, the time for promises and assurances, for waiting and patience is over. Too many lives have been lost and too many billions have been spent for us to trust the president on another tried-and-failed policy.? That was Sen. Barack Obama in January 2007. With his Joint Chiefs now apparently gunning for more fighting and less talk in Afghanistan, President Obama needs to be reminded of his own words.
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? Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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? Amy Goodman is the host of ?Democracy Now!,? a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the ?Alternative Nobel? prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

? ? 2009 Amy Goodman