Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Zioconned America is not a woman who ages gracefully...


Zioconned America is not a woman who ages gracefully....

http://www.opinion-maker.org/2012/07/vladimir-putin-russia-and-the-changing-world/

As Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel rightly acknowledged, "the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk"....

Your security's a joke; what the Deep US COG really wants, is to hide for ever the despicable/odious crimes of the most Infamous White House Murder INC,....

By Tom Engelhardt

When my daughter was little and I read to her regularly, one illustrated book was a favorite of ours. In a series of scenes, it described frustrating incidents in the life of a young girl, each ending with the line - which my tiny daughter would boom out with remarkable force - "that makes me mad!" It was the book's title and a repetitively cathartic moment in our reading lives. And it came to mind recently as, in my daily reading, I stumbled across repetitively mind-boggling numbers from the everyday life of our National Security Complex.

For our present national security moment, however, I might amend the book's punch line slightly to: That makes no sense!

Now, think of something you learned about the Complex that fried your brain, try the line yourself... and we'll get started.

Are you, for instance, worried about the safety of America's "secrets"? Then you should breathe a sigh of relief and consider this headline from a recent article on the inside pages of my hometown paper: "Cost to Protect US Secrets Doubles to Over $11 Billion."

A government outfit few of us knew existed, the Information Security Oversight Office or ISOO, just released its "Report on Cost Estimates for Security Classification Activities for Fiscal Year 2011" (no price tag given, however, on producing the report or maintaining ISOO). Unclassified portions, written in classic bureaucratese, offer this precise figure for protecting our secrets, vetting our secrets' protectors (no leakers please), and ensuring the safety of the whole shebang: US$11.37 billion in 2011.

That's up (and get used to the word "up") by 12% from 2010, and double the 2002 figure of $5.8 billion. For those willing to step back into what once seemed like a highly classified past but was clearly an age of innocence, it's more than quadruple the 1995 figure of $2.7 billion.

And let me emphasize that we're only talking about the unclassified part of what it costs for secrets protection in the National Security Complex. The bills from six agencies, monsters in the intelligence world - the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence - are classified. The New York Times estimates that the real cost lies in the range of $13 billion, but who knows?

To put things in perspective, the transmission letter from Director John P Fitzpatrick that came with the report makes it utterly clear why your taxpayer dollars, all $13 billion of them, are being spent this way: "Sustaining and increasing investment in classification and security measures is both necessary to maintaining the classification system and fundamental to the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration." It's all to ensure transparency. George Orwell take that! Pow!

Now let's try the line again, this time with more gusto: That makes no sense!

On the other hand, maybe it helps to think of this as the Complex's version of inflation. Security protection, it turns out, only goes in one direction. And no wonder, since every year there's so much more precious material written by people in an expanding Complex to protect from the prying eyes of spies, "terrorists", Freedom fighetrs and, well, you....and ZIOCONNED America and the criminal Western World.....

The official figure for documents classified by the US government last year is - hold your hats on this one - 92,064,862. And as WikiLeaks/CIA managed to release hundreds of thousands of them online a couple of years ago, that's meant a bonanza of even more money for yet more rigorous protection.

You have to feel at least some dollop of pity for protection bureaucrats like Fitzgerald. While back in 1995 the US government classified a mere 5,685,462 documents - in those days, we were practically a secret-less nation - today, of those 92 million sequestered documents, 26,058,678 were given a "top secret" classification. There are today almost five times as many "top secret" documents as total classified documents back then.

Here's another kind of inflation (disguised as deflation): in 1996, the government declassified 196 million pages of documents. In 2011, that figure was 26.7 million. In other words, these days what becomes secret remains ever more inflatedly secret. That's what qualifies as "transparency, participation, and collaboration" inside the Complex and in an administration that came into office proclaiming "sunshine" CIA policies. (All of the above info thanks to another of those ISOO reports.) And keep in mind that the National Security Complex is proud of such figures!

So, today, the "people's" government (your government) produces 92 million documents that no one except the nearly one million people with some kind of security clearance, including hundreds of thousands of private contractors, have access to. Don't think of this as "overclassification," which is a problem. Think of it as a way of life, and one that has ever less to do with you.

Now, honestly, don't you feel that urge welling up? Go ahead. Don't hold back: That makes no sense!

How about another form of security-protection inflation: polygraph tests within the Complex. A recent McClatchy investigation of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which oversees US spy satellites, found that lie-detector tests of employees and others had "spiked" in the last decade and had also grown far more intrusive, "pushing ethical and possibly legal limits." In a program designed to catch spies and ZIO-terrorists..., the NRO's polygraphers were, in fact, being given cash bonuses for "personal confessions" of "intimate details of the private lives of thousands of job applicants and employees ... including drug use ... suicide attempts, depression, and sexual deviancy." The agency, which has 3,000 employees, conducted 8,000 polygraph tests last year.
McClatchy adds: "In 2002, the National Academies, the nonprofit institute that includes the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that the federal government shouldn't use polygraph screening because it was too unreliable. Yet since then, in the ZIO-Defense Department alone, the number of national-security polygraph tests has increased fivefold, to almost 46,000 annually."

Now, think about those 46,000 lie-detector tests and can't you just sense it creeping up on you? Go ahead. Don't be shy! That makes no sense!

Or talking about security inflation, what about the "explosion of cell phone surveillance" recently reported by the New York Times - a staggering 1.3 million demands in 2011 "for subscriber information ... from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations"?

From the Complex to local police departments, such requests are increasing by 12%-16% annually. One of the companies getting the requests, AT&T, says that the numbers have tripled since 2007. And lest you think that 1.3 million is a mind-blowingly definitive figure, the Times adds that it's only partial, and that the real one is "much higher." In addition, some of those 1.3 million demands, sometimes not accompanied by court orders, are for multiple (or even masses of) customers, and so could be several times higher in terms of individuals surveilled. In other words, while those in the National Security Complex - and following their example, state and local law enforcement - are working hard to make themselves ever more opaque to us, we are meant to be ever more "transparent" to them.

These are only examples of a larger trend. Everywhere you see evidence of such numbers inflation in the Complex. And there's another trend involved as well. Let's call it by its name: paranoia. In the years since the barbaric False Flag 9/11 attacks, the Complex has made itself, if nothing else, utterly secure, and paranoia has been its closest companion. Thanks to its embrace of a paranoid worldview, it's no longer the sort of place that experiences job cuts, nor is lack of infrastructure investment an issue, nor budget slashing a reality, nor prosecution for illegal acts a possibility.

A superstructure of "security" has been endlessly expanded based largely on the fear that ZIO-terrorists will do you harm. As it happens, you're no less in danger from avalanches (34 dead in the US since November) or tunneling at the beach (12 dead between 1990 and 2006), not to speak of real perils like job loss, foreclosure, having your college debts follow you to the grave, and so many other things. But it matters little. The promise of safety from ZIO-terror has worked. It's been a money-maker, a stimulus-program creator, a job generator - for the Complex.

Back in 1964, Richard Hofstadter wrote a Harper's Magazine essay entitled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Then, however, paranoia as he described it, while distinctly all-American, remained largely a phenomenon of Zioconned American politics - and often of the political fringe. Now, it turns out to be a guiding principle in the way we are governed.

Yes, we're in a world filled with dangers. (Paranoia invariably has some basis, however twisted, in reality.) And significant among them is undoubtedly the danger the national security state represents to our lives, which are increasingly designed to be open books to its functionaries. Whether you like it or not, want it or not, care or not, you are ever more likely to be on file somewhere; you are ever more liable to be polygraphed until you "confess"; your cell phone, email, and texts are no longer your property; and one of the 30,000 employees of the Complex assigned to monitor American phone conversations and other communications may be checking you out. So it goes in twenty-first-century Zioconned America.

Maybe if you haven't said it yet, you're finally feeling the urge. Go on then, give it a try.

That makes no sense!
There's just one catch. The direction your government has taken - call it "transparency" or anything else you want - may boggle the mind. It may seem as idiotically wrong-headed as having 17 significant agencies and outfits in a single government on a budget of $180 billion-plus a year call the product of their work "intelligence." It may not make sense to you, but it does make sense to the National Security Complex. For its "community," the coupling of security with redundancy - with too much, too many, and always more - means you're speaking the language of the gods, you're hearing the music of the angels.

So much of what the Complex does may seem like overkill and its operations may often look laughable and inane. Unfortunately, the joke's on you. In our country, the bureaucrats of the Zioconned Complex increasingly have the power to make just about any absurdity they want the way of our world not just in practice, but often in court, too. And if you really think that makes no sense, then maybe you better put some thought into what's to be done about it.

(A note of thanks: to my friend John Cobb for reminding me of Hofstadter's essay and to Nick Turse from whose book title, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, I've long lifted the idea of the National Security Complex.)

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.


Every single American is being spied on illegally by the Zioconned US Government...., with DIRECT aid and obfuscation from MOSSAD, AMAN using Israeli territory for Cover.....

The TSA, DHS and countless other security agencies have been established to keep America safe from terrorist attacks in post-9/11 America. How far beyond that does the feds’ reach really go, though?

The attacks September 11, 2001, were instrumental in enabling the US government to establish counterterrorism agencies to prevent future tragedies. Some officials say that they haven’t stopped there, though, and are spying on everyone in America — all in the name of national security.

Testimonies delivered in recent weeks by former employees of the National Security Agency suggest that the US government is granting itself surveillance powers far beyond what most Americans consider the proper role of the federal government.

In an interview broadcast on Current TV’s “Viewpoint” program on Monday, former NSA Technical Director William Binney commented on the government’s policy of blanket surveillance, alongside colleagues Thomas Drake and Kirk Wiebe, the agency's respective former Senior Official and Senior Analyst.

The interview comes on the heels of a series of speeches given by Binney, who has quickly become better known for his whistleblowing than his work with the NSA. In their latest appearance this week, though, the three former staffers suggested that America’s spy program is much more dangerous than it seems.

In an interview with “Viewpoint” host Eliot Spitzer, Drake said there was a “key decision made shortly after 9/11, which began to rapidly turn the United States of America into the equivalent of a foreign nation for dragnet blanket electronic surveillance.”

These powers have previously defended by claims of national security necessity, but Drake says that it doesn’t stop there. He warns that the government is giving itself the power to gather intel on every American that could be used in future prosecutions unrelated to terrorism.

“When you open up the Pandora’s Box of just getting access to incredible amounts of data, for people that have no reason to be put under suspicion, no reason to have done anything wrong, and just collect all that for potential future use or even current use, it opens up a real danger — and to what else what they could use that data for, particularly when it’s all being hidden behind the mantle of national security,” Drake said.

Although Drake’s accusations seem astounding, they corroborate allegations made by Binney only a week earlier. Speaking at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York City earlier this month, Binney addressed a room of thousands about the NSA’s domestic spying efforts. But in a candid interview with journalist Geoff Shively during HOPE, the ex-NSA official candidly revealed the full extent of the surveillance program.

“Domestically, they're pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country and assembling that information, building communities that you have relationships with, and knowledge about you; what your activities are; what you're doing. So the government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it's a very dangerous process,” Binney said.

Drake and Binney’s statements follow the revelation that law enforcement officers collected cell phone records on 1.3 million Americans in 2011. More news articles are emerging every day suggesting that the surveillance of Americans — off-the-radar and under wraps — is growing at an exponential rate....



ZIO-US Recession ahoy, if it hits the mat again, it's down for good....
By Peter Morici

The US economy is teetering on the brink of another recession. The bad news is, if it goes down again, policymakers won't have many options, and like a weary heavyweight, if it hits the mat again, it's down for good. The recovery has been terribly disappointing - growth is hardly 2%, and unemployment hangs above 8%.

Manufacturing and exports powered the expansion but are now weakening. Consumer spending and existing home sales are flagging, because policymakers failed to aid underwater homeowners as generously as the banks.

President Barack Obama is doubling down on slow growth policies - new restrictions on offshore oil and carbon dioxide emissions, and financial regulations that haven't stopped Wall Street banks from trading recklessly and rigging markets.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has reverted to shopworn Republican prescriptions - tax cuts, free trade and deregulation. With the federal government spending 50% more than it takes in, no competent economist could endorse big tax-rate cuts, beyond renewing the Bush tax cuts.

China, by manipulating its currency and shutting out Western products, helped cause the Great Recession and is now constraining recovery in the United States and Europe. More free trade agreements won't fix that.

Dodd-Frank may be bureaucratic and ineffective, but no sane person could claim banks can regulate themselves - smarter solutions, like breaking up unmanageable and unsuperviseable institutions, is needed.

Many analysts ask if another big innovation - like the automobile or computer - could save the economy. The problems are many new products are creating more jobs in Asia than in the West, and many technology companies are consolidating or facing extinction - consider the smart phone, Hewlett Packard and Yahoo.

A lot of US innovation is starting to look more like French art than American commerce. Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter made great contributions to the economy and culture but simply don't have business models that generate enough revenue and jobs.

Google succeeded by cannibalizing newspapers - the net effect has been to destroy more - and branching into software and media - which displaces workers elsewhere.

The profitable core of finance - investment banking - is shrinking. Burdensome regulations are a problem, but many clients - ranging from municipalities to wealth managers to foreign governments burned by Wall Street schemes - are less interested in what Goldman Sachs and others peddle.

To save European governments, several trillions of dollars in sovereign debt must be written down.

Beyond lacking a plan to equitably distribute the loss, Germany and other stronger states have not accepted that they cannot continue to pursue export-driven growth strategies and import more if southern Europe is to recover.

China's policies hold itself and the West hostage. Europe and the United States can't keep printing and borrowing ever more money to sustain its export-driven growth strategy.

China must slow down because it is too late to reorient its economy toward domestic consumption without wrenching dislocations

When the United States entered the recent crisis, its budget deficit was $161 billion. Now it is $1.3 trillion, and the Federal Reserve is already maintaining rock bottom interest rates.

Even if congress and the president extend the George W Bush tax cuts, any hiccup in Europe or China could throw the US economy into a recession. And the world's biggest economy could hit the skids on its own.

Capital markets simply won't be able to absorb a $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion federal deficit to further stimulate the US economy, without sucking badly needed funds from struggling European and developing-country economies. The Fed could only print money to finance it and set off hyperinflation, but it can't lower interest rates much further.

Having failed to adequately address what caused the Great Recession - China's trade surplus and the imbalance in demand between the Middle Kingdom and the United States, the cowboy culture on Wall Street and the plight of underwater homeowners - not much can be done.

Get ready for a very bad ride....


Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Elie HOBEIKA, RIP ; God DID avenge YOUR blood....


تقبر قلبي هالضحكي...وعيون البدا تحكي...من يوم غيابك ايلي حبيقة... بس اسمع اسمك ببكي... اشتقتلك


لح بيضل بيقلبنا يا معلمنا في هيدا النهار الحلو بقلك الله يرحمك ونفسك بالسما وسلم لي على ايلي وعلى كل الشباب الله يرحمن

...احتفال بمقتل آصف شوكت


آصف شوكت الصهر واليد اليمنى... المجرم الأكبر آصف شوكت ....إغتيال مفبركوا الإغتيالات


....أتت ساعته بالفعل , جيران اقرب الى وحوش

....من يزرع الريح سيحصد العاصفة

CIA/MOSSAD-101;


Elie HOBEIKA, RIP ; God DID avenge YOUR blood, and the blood of your 3 wonderful companions....With our daily prayers since 2001-2002, ARIEL the Butcher SHARON is a Vegetable since 2006 and Assef SHAWKAT
has been blown to bits today in a Huge Bomb in Damascus....
but many more will see the same fate soon in Syria, IsraHell, Lebanon and many other countries as well.....
However, their time is drawing nigh, and the fires of the Brazen
Bull are destined to blaze brightly in the .....sky!

It may seem curmudgeonly, cowardly, or both, to regard this latest episode in Damascus with anything less than unqualified enthusiasm. However, an exclusive focus on the delinquencies of selected scapegoats during the despicable string of assassinations in the Levant, starting on January 24th 2002, may divert attention from questions more directly relevant to understanding how the scum-team of the most infamous White House Murder INC, with local cut-outs, came about sine 97 with a detailed road-map for barbaric extra-judicial and cowardly political assassinations by the smug butchers of Herzliya and Washington DC...., and how what now seems an almost inevitable recurrence might perhaps be prevented some day....
نم قرير العين يا رئيس ها هم قاتلوك يقتلون الواحد تلو الآخر بالأمس الارهابي .... واليوم السفاح آصف شوكت ... وبشر القاتل بالقتل ولو بعد حين

يطيب لي أن أصرخ، يطيب لي أن أبكي، يطيب لي ان تنهمر دموعي على خدي وان اتذكرك، وقلبي ودموعي عند .... وأنا اعرف أية علاقة تربطكما وأي تفاهم
آه كم رحلت باكراً، آه كم كانت تنتظرنا أحلاماً كبيرة، آه كم تصديت للمؤامرة
استشهادك وانت ما استشهدت، انت حيّ، انت موحّد، انت إنسان عظيم
رحلت باكرا وباكرا جدا، كنت النجم الساطع، كنت الامل الواعد
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Zioconned Western powers' clear intention is to wage war on earth and in the heavens above....

We know that and we are waiting!


The ZIOCONS big Plans continue...., they think!!! LOL
Counter-plans are in Place and the wait won't be long!
Total Victory is the only outcome.

After SYRIA, Lebanon and Iran...Russia's South is next.... Russia's SVR should quietly grab a few drunk Saudi princes, Qatari thugs, US/Israeli assassins from Paris, L.A. & London's ZIO-whorehouses and send their balls back to the ZIOCONNED Saudi octogenarians in Riyadh & Qatar....



The deliberate CIA disinformation about the dearth of strong U.S. intelligence
on the situation in Syria is a sharp contrast to its actual enormous presence on
the ground, in Syria, in Lebanon...., [ where hundreds of operatives are very active ]
in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, IsraHell, Cyprus, Dubai, Qatar, KSA, Egypt and in the Eastern
Mediterranean, as well as Greece....

The number ONE Target now for the White House Murder INC, is Maher ASSAD,
who is being tracked every second of the day or night. Huge resources have been
put in place to Take him out SOONEST. Bashar is a Target as well, but his moves
have been restricted to the Palace grounds for now....


"ما يجري في لبنان من فوضى وقتل ذريع وافقار هو متعمد من حكام هم ادوات حقيرة عند الاميركيين...."، انهم "يريدون لنا ان نبقى في العالم العربي نلحق لقمة الخبز وصولا الى تدمير بيئتنا اجتماعيا"






...معلومات عن آصف شوكت


A monstrous thug, a creep, an assassin for hire and a Barbarian who was the number one liaison with CIA, DIA, DGSE, MOSSAD, AMAN and ALL the arch-criminal Western intelligence KILLERS for well over a Decade or two....

He was instrumental after the False Flag attacks of 9/11 in the CIA rendition program and was an executioner for the most Infamous White House Murder INC, in the Levant, on January 24th 2002, and Feb. 12th 2008, etc etc...

He was asked to foment a Coup D'etat in Syria by his despicable and criminal Western handlers but he was unable to deliver because he is a cowardly thug and an assassin for hire and a pimp, not a Leader...., Hence the decision was taken to eliminate a whore who knew too much...


Good riddance.


HK, RIP



Tuesday, July 17, 2012

The eurozone endgame will begin in Greece...



Greece won't be able to make its austerity policies stick and, as the global depression worsens, will have to leave the Zioconned eurozone...

The June summit of the eurozone was initially trumpeted as a decisive step towards resolving the crisis. Italy and Spain won agreement to allow European institutions to recapitalise banks and purchase sovereign debt directly.

But once financial markets had a closer look, it became clear that little of substance had been achieved, and the borrowing costs of Italy and Spain again approached forbidding heights. Meanwhile the Spanish government has imposed fresh austerity, breaking its promises to the electorate. And unemployment in the eurozone continues to rise, exceeding 11% on average.

It is now a fair guess that the European Monetary Union (or the eurozone) has crossed the Rubicon and is heading towards breakup or collapse. In the periphery of Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain, there is despair at the ever-deepening recession. In France and Italy there is burgeoning opposition to long-term austerity. In Germany there is frustration at feckless southerners.

Disintegration is likely to take a turn for the worse in 2013, as a global slump is in the offing. The large economies of Europe, including the UK, are entering recession largely due to austerity policies. The US economy is veering towards negative territory, as Barack Obama's expansionary policies were never vigorous enough. China is facing a hard landing that will force a re-examination of its growth strategy. The international financial system, meanwhile, remains weak and unreformed.

After three years of festering, truly drastic action is now required. Peripheral countries must abandon austerity as part of a Europe-wide programme to raise productivity, financial institutions must be taken into public ownership, and debt written off. But it is unthinkable that Europe's current political leaders would embark on such changes. Hidebound by neoliberal economics, they will continue with austerity, privatisation and liberalisation. The financial markets have sensed it and are preparing for disaster.

The disaster is likely to start in Greece. The country is in the midst of an unprecedented depression, made largely in Brussels. In 2012 output is likely to contract by 7% to 9%, on top of about 14% in 2008-11. Not surprisingly, the bailout programme is again missing its targets as recession has reduced tax revenues.

Yet the EU is insisting that the country should stick with the failed programme by imposing huge cuts in public expenditure in 2012-14. The aim is to achieve a primary surplus at the earliest date. If the cuts do take place and a global slump does indeed materialise, the Greek economy will contract ruthlessly in 2013, even by 10%. It would be an economic and social catastrophe, especially as unemployment is already at 23%, including 52% for the youth.

The present Greek government, formed out of the establishment parties of New Democracy and Pasok with the addition of the ardent Europeanist Dimar, is incapable of dealing with the crisis. They won the June election by playing on middle-class fears about returning to the drachma and losing savings.

They also cynically promised to renegotiate bailout terms knowing full well that renegotiation was impossible as long as the framework of the bailout was accepted. In practice, they are about to impose the spending cuts demanded by the EU, while liberalising closed professions and selling public assets in the ludicrous hope of boosting growth.

The government is unlikely to survive for long. As depression worsens in the next six months to a year, Greece will again confront the impossibility of sticking with bailout policies.

This time the decision is likely to be final, with profound implications for the ruling elite that took the country into the EMU on a wing and a prayer. The elite is now watching in horror as its strategy is falling apart, and seems incapable of devising an alternative path.

But Greece is unlikely to attempt suicide: at some point it will default on its debts and exit the EMU. There will then be a genuinely new government, perhaps formed by the left, which will navigate the chaos and guide the rebuilding of economy and society. Once Greece has made its move, the unravelling of the EMU will probably start in full earnest...

World economy heads for another perfect storm...


Zioconned USA has seemed immune to Europe’s woes, but huge cracks are beginning to emerge....

http://divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids-blog/1066-great-revealing


The International Monetary Fund’s latest “World Economic Outlook” makes for chilling reading. A perfect storm in which all parts of the world economy go down together seems fast to be gestating somewhere out in the mid-Atlantic....

[ Like the old line goes...'if the Zioconned and utterly criminal/corrupt Western World could harness all the hot they blow up their sorry asses, they could power their entire nations for a year'....
In the Zioconned and crumbling USA, It is hard to believe Mittens Romney will do anything in Foreign Policy or the economy but be led around by the nose by his buddy BiBi Netanyahu and the Ziocon-pack as the Zioconned US goes down the drain. When confronted with some jabs around the edges, he does nothing but Whine... If he does not watch out, the label Whiner will stick for good, not that I think the other Zioconned CIA candidate is offering much....]


True enough, the IMF has not reduced its forecasts of world growth for this year and next by very much — just 0.1 and 0.2pc respectively — but it notes some key downside risks, and it is not just the problems of the eurozone it is talking about this time either. Already struggling to return to growth, the Zioconned UK needs these new pressures like a hole in the head.

To the all too familiar economic threats posed by the Zioconned eurozone must now be added the approaching “fiscal cliff” in the US, whose own nascent recovery is in any case fast losing momentum, and the evident slowdown in emerging markets.

All three cornerstones of the world economy seem now to be heading into the sand.

Let’s take each in turn. The Zioconned IMF makes the heroic presumption in keeping its aggregate growth forecasts on a roughly even keel that the eurozone is on the mend, with financial conditions gradually easing for periphery nations. In reaching this conclusion the IMF assumes that the measures agreed at a recent summit of European leaders will be implemented soon and will work as prescribed in restoring market confidence. These assumptions both look questionable.

It’s still far from clear quite how serious eurozone member states are about the banking union they’ve agreed. Details remain confused and thin on the ground. Northern creditor nations also seem to be fast backtracking on use of the European Stability Mechanism to recapitalise banks directly and on use of bailout funds for intervention in secondary bond markets.

And even if these things are enacted in uncompromised form, they only address the symptoms of the problem, leaving the root causes in widely divergent competitiveness between member states largely untouched. It sometimes seems that the IMF exists in a bubble of academic economic and financial analysis which pays scant regard to the way in which these problems play out in the real world.

Even if the “solutions” agreed at the summit do succeed in stilling the markets – and I’ll believe it when I see it – they will do little or nothing to lift these economies out of the economic slump they’ve fallen into. The euro cannot be safe until it delivers prosperity for all, and we are still a million miles away from such an outcome.

For the best part of the last year, the Zioconned US has seemed immune to Europe’s woes, but now cracks are beginning to emerge. With the recovery fading, the US may even have slipped back into negative growth in the second quarter, though that still remains a minority view. Even so, most anticipate at best anaemic growth of little more than 1pc in annualised terms, and that’s before we encounter the dreaded “fiscal cliff”, which could suck as much as 4pc out of US output.

The effect would be so extreme that, for that reason alone, the IMF assumes the politicians won’t allow it happen. Instead, the IMF comforts itself with the prediction that some kind of political consensus will eventually be reached that extends temporary tax cuts and prevents the deep automatic spending cuts due to kick in at the end this year.

Perhaps this is correct. The Zioconned American political system has a habit of going to the wire on these issues but, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, can in the end always be counted on to do the right thing, once everything else has been tried. That’s what happened during the debt ceiling crisis of early last year.

Unfortunately, the problem wasn’t finally resolved back then. In settling the debt ceiling crisis, the Zioconned US political system merely set itself up for the looming “fiscal cliff” of automatic tax rises and spending cuts. President Obama only managed to push the problem a couple of years out into the future.

Worries over the Budget have now come back to haunt. A fog of political uncertainty has once more descended over the US economy. Political gridlock is again the order of the day.

No doubt the Fed can be relied on to come riding to the rescue with a third round of quantitative easing – some believe it should already have done so – but even if you think more money printing the right approach, it couldn’t possibly counter a 4 percentage point fiscal squeeze. Still, there are always the turbo-charged emerging markets to support growth, aren’t there? Unfortunately not.

Even China is slowing fast. Caught between stagnant export markets and evident overcapacity in the domestic economy, a hard landing now seems all too possible.

China is about to test the assumption that a centrally directed economy can somehow buck the usual rules of market economics. I know which side my money is on.

What’s so worrying is that if the Chinese domestic economy stalls, China would then almost certainly attempt to export its way out of trouble by dumping its excess capacity wholesale on world markets. Some might argue that this is what it has been doing all along, and that this is a large part of the West’s problem. Well it could be about to get a whole lot worse, testing faith in free and open trade close to breaking point.

As for the UK, the IMF growth forecast has been downgraded more than any other advanced economy for this year and next, with virtually nil growth this year and just 1.4pc next. The IMF also trails official UK forecasts by some distance on deficit reduction.

A while back, when its forecasts for the UK looked much prettier than they do now, the IMF said the Government might have to consider a plan B if growth slowed. Since then it has slowed a lot, but still the IMF is not urging outright reversal of the austerity measures.

Of course we all know why this is the case. The IMF can’t go to a country not obviously in need of a bail-out and say you’ve got things hopelessly wrong, especially one that unlike the Zioconned US and Zioconned Canada, has just agreed to cough up more IMF funding.

What’s more, it was once glowing in its praise for the boldness of Osborne’s deficit reduction strategy. For the IMF to change tack would be a godsend to the Opposition and like a knife in the back to Osborne.

Still, the message was quite bad enough, coming the very day the Government chose to relaunch its growth strategy with a welcome but, in the scale of things, insignificant programme of rail electrification. The way things are going, the UK economy may soon need rather more urgent defibrillation than that.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Ramifications of Ziocon-Saudi Duplicity....



Center for Democracy and Human Rights In Saudi Arabia

By Ali Alyami

Coerced into living under the yoke of a monarchical tyranny since the formation of the Saudi state in 1932, many Saudis have been cowed into accepting this system of oppression as their divine fate, eradit Allah. Prior to WikiLeaks’ shocking publication of classified diplomatic cables between American diplomats in Saudi Arabia and their handlers in the State Department, the Saudi people may not have realized the full extent of their ruling family’s sinister nature. Via these documents the Saudi people learned that their “beloved” King Abdullah and his nephew Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal were covertly engaged in duplicitous schemes that would inexorably result in heavy loss of life and crippling damage to their oil facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia which provide the bulk of the country’s revenues. These dangerous Saudi schemes would also eventuate in far-reaching consequences.

The published WikiLeaks’ documents quoted King Abdullah pressuring President Obama to invade Iran and “cut off the head of the snake.” The dispatches also quoted Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, arguing for what would amount to US and other NATO forces invading Lebanon: “The U.S. and NATO would need to provide transport and logistical support, as well as naval and air cover,” ostensibly to help a coordinated Arab ground invasion of Lebanon to crush Hezbollah. The Saudi monarchs know that such Saudi-instigated attacks by the US, most likely from Saudi territory, would result in the killing of many fellow Arabs and Muslims and would generate punishing retaliation by Iran and its supporters against the Saudi people and their oil rich Eastern Province, located within the range of Iranian guns. The stark revelations by WikiLeaks exposed the Saudi monarchy for what it is, a regime that will not hesitate to sacrifice its citizens’ lives and livelihood to maintain its autocratic rule at home and influence abroad.

For the autocratic Saudi monarchy, maintaining control at home is inseparable from cultivating its influence abroad. The monarchy utilizes its exclusive domination over the nation’s oil wealth and over Muslims’ holy shrines as well as employing its extreme Wahhabi ideology to subdue Saudi citizens. As an extension of its domestic policies, the Saudi monarchy exports its lethal ideology, finances religious infrastructure projects and extremist groups for the purpose of establishing pro-Saudi Muslim regimes and communities which the monarchs use to influence decision-making in other countries and to extract favorable policies from Muslim and non-Muslim governments throughout the world.

While American Administrations, main stream media, some think tanks and prominent institutions of higher learning publicly hail Saudi monarchs as partners in the “War on Terror,” privately they concede that the Saudi government actively supports and encourages terrorism worldwide. What has been concealed from the Saudi and American peoples was publicly revealed in the released WikiLeaks documents. The documents quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complaining about the Saudi regime’s unwillingness to cut off support for terrorism; “It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority…donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” While cutting off financial support for extremist and terrorist groups is a priority for the US and the West, continuing it is a major element of the Saudi regime’s overall policy of global religious imperialism.

In addition to spreading its extreme brand of Sunni Islam worldwide, the Saudi monarchy seeks to eliminate Iran as a potential rival for leadership in the Muslim world. Furthermore, the Saudi rulers fear the possibility of rapprochement between the West and Iran which would drastically undermine the crumbling Saudi influence in the Gulf region. By pressuring the US and NATO to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and to invade Lebanon to neutralize Hezbollah, the Saudi monarchy hopes to eliminate its current remaining rivals in the region. As implied in King Abdullah’s phrase ‘cut off the head of the snake,’ an attack on Iran will not stop at taking out its nuclear facilities as publicly advocated, but would have to destroy Iran’s military and disrupt its political infrastructure if Iran’s threats to the Saudi monarchy and to other Arab Gulf regimes are to be removed. The Saudi monarchy knows that such an undertaking by the US and NATO will come at a high cost domestically, regionally and globally, but for the Saudi royals no price is too high to pay for their survival and regional dominance, including the lives of their populace.

The reason no one seems eager to embrace the warmongering Saudi schemes, including Israel which the Iranian leadership has vowed to “wipe from the surface of the earth”, is because the consequences of attacking Iran and Lebanon would be widespread and devastating. The would-be executors of the Saudi wishes realize that it would entail tremendous loss of lives and destruction of property in Iran, Saudi Arabia, other Gulf States and Lebanon. Regardless of how hard Iran and Hezbollah are hit initially, Iran’s proximity to the Saudi oil facilities and a large portion of the Saudi population makes it seem inevitable that the Iranians will retaliate against Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States from which attacks might be launched. In the unlikely event that the Iranians are unable to retaliate, their sympathizers (marginalized Arab Shi’a) who reside in Eastern Saudi Arabia and in other Gulf countries, would be expected to rise in support of Iran against their oppressive Sunni rulers. In such an event, the autocratic Sunni rulers of the Gulf States would use this opportunity to crush their vocal Shi’a minorities whom they consider threats to their exclusionary Sunni rule.

Likewise, if Hezbollah is attacked by a Saudi-instigated Arab force, the former would likely seek revenge on its Lebanese Sunni and Christian fellow citizens. Even though the Saudi royals employ the widely appealing rhetoric of crushing Hezbollah, an objective shared by many Arab and non-Arab states, the Saudi monarchy’s true intent is to ensure Sunni Muslim supremacy in Lebanon along the lines of Saudi-Wahhabi doctrine. Given Lebanon’s bloody history of civil strife, retaliation by Hezbollah on Sunni Muslims and Christians could lead to a prolonged Lebanese civil war that would guarantee interventions by Syria and Israel to protect their conflicting interests in Lebanon. Many Christians around the world would also pressure their governments to rescue their fellow Christians in Lebanon.

Given these likely scenarios, the regional and global consequences of the duplicitous ensnaring Saudi schemes exposed by the WikiLeaks’ documents would be more than the current fragile international political and economic environment can absorb.

Attacking Iran and Lebanon as the Saudi monarchy advocates will indubitably interrupt production, refining and shipping of oil from the Persian Gulf region to oil consuming nations worldwide. This would likely create global political, economic and psychological disorder that would make the 1973 Arab oil embargo look benign and would negatively impact national and international economies which are struggling to emerge from the recent protracted global financial downturn. In addition to global economic disorder, increased tension within Muslim communities and between Muslims and non-Muslims worldwide would quickly boil over. Strife between the already antagonistic Sunni and Shi’a Muslims would intensify and spread to other communities regardless of beliefs.

Moreover, Saudi instigated military campaigns against Iran and Lebanon by the West would drastically increase extremism, terrorism and anti-Americanism in Arab and Muslim countries and communities. Even though the Saudi royals and other Arab regimes are pressuring the West to rid them of what they consider their mortal Persian Shi’a enemies, these regimes will use their controlled media, mosques, clerics, Arab American intellectuals, Muslim groups in the West, selected American universities and Western recipients of their largess to depict the West as modern day Crusaders intent on destroying Islam and Muslims.

Given the probable consequences discussed here, the only beneficiaries of the Saudi schemes as exposed in WikiLeaks would be the Saudi ruling family and other totalitarian Arab regimes. It appears that the Machiavellian Saudi strategy is designed to prove that the West is an aggressive villain determined to destroy Arabs and Muslims.

In the past, the Saudi ruling family successfully linked Western interest to the monarchs’ survival and dominance in Arab and Muslim countries despite the Saudi regime’s draconian domestic polices and its ideological threats to Western democracies. The Saudi monarchs achieved their objective by making sure that the only alternative to their rule at home would be the extremists and terrorists they helped create and by ensuring that their external political and military rivals, such as Nasser of Egypt and Saddam of Iraq, are removed from the regional landscape.

By urging the US and other NATO forces to invade Iran and Lebanon regardless of consequences the Saudi rulers aim to maintain the status quo which is being relentlessly punctured by events some of which they myopically created. In recent years, geopolitical shifts and the rise of formidable power players around the Gulf area, the region and globally are slowly eroding the Saudi royals’ domination over OPEC, the financing of extremist groups and projects and undermining the Saudi monarchs’ invented indispensability to the West. The rise of Iran to regional and global prominence, the creation of Hezbollah and Hamas, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the imbalance of power in OPEC and the global search for new sources of energy continue to diminish the usefulness of the Saudi monarchy to the West. In addition, Western democracies have wrenchingly discovered that a royal Saudi autocracy empowered and protected by the West has proved more harmful than useful as exemplified by the most barbaric flase flag/inside job 9/11 attacks on the US, the spread of Saudi-Wahhabi doctrine and the financing of extremists and terrorists worldwide as described by Secretary Clinton in the WikiLeaks/CIA documents....

The US and other Western democracies are faced with one of their most grim challenges ever: a choice between protecting our individual liberties and democratic values or continuing to rely on the flow of oil and cash from an erratic, tyrannical system whose policies and practices promote destruction of democratic institutions and replace them with a totalitarian Islamic system....

[Somehow, the crypto-jewish Saudis have managed to work some form of primitive desert magic over us, effectively blinding us to what they have been doing, mostly in our name (CIA), obscuring the fact of their centrality in the realm of "Islamist" terror. It is no coincidence that 15 of the 19 names which have been forever wedded to the false flag 911 events were Zioconned Saudis. Using their dominance over other Muslim nations like Pakistan and Turkey, the Saudis have drawn together the force known as "al-CIAda," and dozens of other terrorist outfits that have been hiding behind constantly changing Arabic-sounding names, to exact revenge primarily upon the "unbelievers" and secondly upon "the infidels." The Pakistanis grew the Wahabbi virus right there upon their own soil, while the Turks toned down their rhetoric just a bit, so that they could export their "Wahabbi lite" extremist beliefs into the former Soviet Union and into other equally receptive Muslim nations, like Indonesia.

Around the world, we are doing the will of the Zioconned Saudi royal family. We are their enforcers, in the sense of "mob enforcers," as we push the world around in the name of "fighting terrorism," when it is the Saudis (and the others which they hold influence over) who are the authors of all global "Islamic terrorism." By making the Saudis partners in exporting CIA policy (to skirt the laws against arming terrorists), we have allowed the utterly Zioconned US policy towards Muslims to become focused through this Wahabbi lens. We have helped the Saudis export their terrorist beliefs to the entire Muslim world, so that their militant beliefs stood alongside True Islam, and understanding true believers. We have helped them to infect millions with the false belief that The Living God has commissioned them with a duty to kill "non-believers," as defined by them. The world media reports this killing spree of the non-believers as acts of "terrorism," committed by shadowy, unknown terrorists and nameless sponsors of that terror. They call it "Al-Qaeda," as if it really was that anonymous entity killing Muslims and the occasional Westerner around the world. Sectarian ethnic killing is going on around the world under the protective umbrella of the US and NATO militaries. The sad truth is, we are fighting the "war on terror" to extend Saudi power around the world and to create for them a "seat at the table" of "civilized" nations. We are helping the tribal barbarians to use their enormous wealth to purchase respectability from the world.]




I have to say that I am extremely impressed by Sergei Lavrov whom I consider to be one of the best diplomats I have ever listened to (the other one being James Baker whose views I never shared, but who undoubtedly was a top level diplomat). Russia is really fortunate to have such an excellent team as Sergei Lavrov and Vitalii Churkin (Russia's Permanent Representative to the UN) representing its interests on the foreign policy arena, in particular at such a difficult time of multiple crises.

I also really like the Russian approach to the Syrian crisis. Basically, Russia accepts that a transition to a new regime might be needed and that it does not defend the Assad regime as such, but it insists that any such transition must occur exclusively in the context of international law. What does that mean? That means the following:

1) Violence is not an acceptable way of seizing, or retaining, power.
2) Syria's territorial integrity cannot be compromised.
3) All parties must seek a negotiated solution and renounce violence without preconditions.
4) No external interference in the Syrian crisis.
5) UNSC Resolutions 2042 and 2043 and are mandatory on all the parties, as is the obligation to support Kofi Annan's peace plan.
6) No Chapter VII UNSC shall pass as long as UNSC Resolutions 2042 and 2043 are not fully implemented.
7) The future political regime of Syria can only be defined by the Syrian people.
8) The rights of all minorities must be fully guaranteed.

Ok, this might sound like the typical "doubleplusgoodwilling" language all diplomats use. But let's translate these into simple terms:

1) The current US policy of subversion of the Syrian regime is wholly illegitimate.
2) Russia will never allow a repeat of what happened in Libya.
3) No amount of US/NATO pressure will change Russia's principal stance on this issue.

This is very good news indeed. Russian cannot and therefore will not attempt to use its military power to prevent the US/NATO/Wahabi alliance to attack Syria, but short of that, Russia will use all its soft power to prevent such an outcome. Hillary's dumb threats about "Russia and China must be made to pay" are totally rejected as not only undiplomatic, but even as basically laughable and ill-mannered.

Something is becoming increasingly obvious: Russia is really getting fed up, badly, with the US and NATO and we can expect a lot of firm "niets" ("no" in Russian) in the future. Niet to the anti-missile shield in Europe. Niet to the US/NATO war on Syria. Niet to any attempts to interfere inside Russian affairs. Niet to any attempts to pressure Russia to comply with US/NATO demands, threats and ultimatums. Niet to any NATO expansion, in particular to Georgia or the Ukraine. Niet to any further conventional arms reductions in Europe. Niet to further sanctions on Iran and, of course, Niet to any military aggression on that country either.

The western elites finally got what they apparently so badly wanted: not some nonsensical "restart" or relations with Russia, but a full-spectrum Cold War.

I am left marveling at the mind-boggling stupidity and hubris of the international plutocracy of "1%" which is currently in power in the West. Do these fat cats really, sincerely, think that this time around they will prevail? Do they really want to take on Russia, China, the massive systemic, economic and social crisis which devastates every western country, and, potentially, face the rage of their own "99%" all at the same time?!

For all the lies of the corporate media, the regime in Russia is very popular and the country is booming. Structurally and politically, it has not been as strong as it is now since the reign of Tsar Alexander III (and I would say that it is stronger today than it was then), and it has enough reserves (financial, organizational, military, etc.) to face a prolonged crisis. If the western elites still think that these are the 1980s or 1990s they are sorely mistaken and they will pay the price for this mistake....
Russia has even learned to use the same tricks the West does, like defending human rights and democracy:

Pity that the Russian media doesn't have the same spread over the entire world as the US does.
Interesting how Lavrov mentions the Serb refugees who were ignored by the powers that be. I believe 200 000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from the Croat province of Krajina in 1995 by the fascist Tudjman regime, the biggest piece of ethnic cleansing of the war but nothing was done about it indeed NATO helped to arm the Croats at the time.

The classic Western doctrine of humanitarian intervention was stated by the liberal academic Timothy Garton Ash as follows

"Military intervention - preferably with explicit UN sanction, failing that with the support of a double majority (of democracies and of the country's neighbors, and in very exceptional cases even with a smaller coalition - can be justified a) where there is genocide taking place as in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Iraq in 1988 but not Iraq in 2003 or b) where there is a real and present danger of a regime or terrorist group acquiring weapons of mass destruction which they are likely to use against us, their neighbors or their own people. How on earth we establish whether there is such a real and present danger is something we shall all have to wrestle with - especially after this claim was made about Saddam's Iraq, on the authority of secret intelligence and turned out to be untrue. What qualifies as genocide is also a matter for the most serious debate. But intervention is not justified simply to end a dictatorship"

Criteria a)is wide open to abuse and tears up international law which is there for a reason. Garton Ash himself ruefully admits "There are good reasons why statesmen from the signatories of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the authors of the UN Charter in 1945 set such store by respect for state sovereignty and non-intervention. If I think I'm justified in invading your country you may equally well feel you're justified in invading mine. Or someone else's. President Putin plainly felt encouraged by America's unilateral action over Iraq to continue his oppression of Chechnya and China felt it had a freer hand in Tibet. The road back to international anarchy is a short one" Ash fails to recognize that Chechnya and Tibet are internal Russian and Chinese issues whereas Iraq was a sovereign state so there is no comparison between them.

Criteria b) is simply a license for imperialism on the base of pre-emptive strikes to a threat which may well turn out to be entirely bogus as it was in Iraq.

The idea that a majority of democracies licenses intervention without a UNSC is another ideological assault on international law. I've heard it argued that the SC veto would be justified if you had a two thirds majority of the General Assembly in which case the intervention would still be technically illegal but it would be legitimate.

My view is that there should have been an intervention in Rwanda but not Bosnia Kosovo or Iraq.

If by the middle of this century the West finds itself confronted by a Russian Chinese alliance plus Muslim satellites with a combined economic and military power equal to its own it may come to regret its lack of respect for international law. Having set a precedent for overriding the veto it may find the precedent used against it....

It is arguable that the consequence of supporting the rebels is that they have no incentive to cooperate with the Annan Peace Plan and so the ZIOCONNED West and their Zioconned Saudi Wahhabi thugs and their Qatari satellites are promoting the violence and have blood on their hands. Lavrov doesn't quite put it as bluntly as that but I suspect that is how he privately feels.

Garton Ash by the way recently wrote a Guardian article attacking Putin's Russia for having no shame over Syria. The liberal Guardian has been banging the drum against Putin for years, worse that the Zioconned "conservative" press....

Bank of International Settlements or “BIS” Slams the US Federal Reserve...


Bank of International Settlements or “BIS” Slams the Zioconned US Federal Reserve....


http://dailycloudt.com/voice-single?id=266


The central banks’ central bank, the Bank of International Settlements or “BIS” – which is the world’s most prestigious mainstream financial body – has slammed the policy of America’s economic leaders.

This is especially dramatic given that the banks own the Federal Reserve, and that the Federal Reserve and other central banks – in turn – own BIS. In other words, BIS is criticizing one of its main owners.

Economics professor Michael Hudson notes:

Paul Krugman has urged the Federal Reserve to simply lend banks an amount equal to their bad loans and negative equity (debts in excess of the market price of assets). He urges a “Keynesian” program of spending to re-inflate the economy back to bubble levels. This is the liberal answer: to throw money at the problem, without seeking structural reform.

[BIS] disagreed last week in its annual report. It said – and I believe that it is right – that monetary policy alone cannot solve an insolvency problem. And that is what Europe has now: not merely illiquidity for government bonds and corporate debt, but insolvency when it comes to the ability to pay.

In such circumstances, the BIS explains, it is necessary to write down the debt to the amount that can be paid – and to undertake structural reforms to prevent the Bubble Economy from recurring.

Too Big Has Failed...

BIS has also slammed “too big to fail” banks:

The report [by BIS] was particularly scathing in its assessment of governments’ attempts to clean up their banks. “The reluctance of officials to quickly clean up the banks, many of which are now owned in large part by governments, may well delay recovery,” it said, adding that government interventions had ingrained the belief that some banks were too big or too interconnected to fail.

This was dangerous because it reinforced the risks of moral hazard which might lead to an even bigger financial crisis in future.

Interest Rates Have Been Kept Too Low...

BIS has also repeatedly criticized the Fed and other central banks for setting interest rates too low.

BIS’ chief economist William White warned against overly lax monetary policy as early as 2003. As Spiegel reported:

White and his team of experts observed the real estate bubble developing in the United States. They criticized the increasingly impenetrable securitization business, vehemently pointed out the perils of risky loans and provided evidence of the lack of credibility of the rating agencies. In their view, the reason for the lack of restraint in the financial markets was that there was simply too much cheap money available on the market. [Low interest rates equal cheap money.] To give all this money somewhere to go, investment bankers invented new financial products that were increasingly sophisticated, imaginative — and hazardous….

The Telegraph noted:

“The fundamental cause of today’s emerging problems was excessive and imprudent credit growth over a long period. Policy interest rates in the advanced industrial countries have been unusually low,” [White] said.

The Fed and fellow central banks instinctively cut rates lower with each cycle to avoid facing the pain. The effect has been to put off the day of reckoning.

***

“Policymakers interpreted the quiescence in inflation to mean that there was no good reason to raise rates when growth accelerated, and no impediment to lowering them when growth faltered,” said the report.

In 2009, BIS released a paper amplifying on this point:

Easy monetary conditions are a classic ingredient of financial crises: low interest rates may contribute to an excessive expansion of credit, and hence to boom-bust type business fluctuations. In addition, some recent papers find a significant link between low interest rates and banks’ risk-taking ….

Indeed, BIS documents that interest rates which are too low are a grave risk financial to stability. See this, this and this.

The Fed Allowed Destructive Bubbles to be Blown … and then Used “Gimmicks” and “Palliatives” to Try to Paper Over the Mess

BIS also slammed the Fed and other central banks for blowing the bubble, failing to regulate the shadow banking system, and then using gimmicks which will only make things worse.

As the Telegraph noted reported in 2008:

Nor does it exonerate the watchdogs. “How could such a huge shadow banking system emerge without provoking clear statements of official concern?”

***

“Should governments feel it necessary to take direct actions to alleviate debt burdens, it is crucial that they understand one thing beforehand. If asset prices are unrealistically high, they must fall. If savings rates are unrealistically low, they must rise. If debts cannot be serviced, they must be written off.

“To deny this through the use of gimmicks and palliatives will only make things worse in the end,” he said.

In other words, BIS slammed the easy credit policy of the Fed and other central banks, and the failure to regulate the shadow banking system.

BIS also slammed “the use of gimmicks and palliatives”, and said that anything other than (1) letting asset prices fall to their true market value, (2) increasing savings rates, and (3) forcing companies to write off bad debts “will only make things worse”.

But Bernanke and the other central bankers (as well as Treasury and the Council of Economic Advisors, the heads of congressional and senate banking committees, and the others in control of American, British, French, Japanese, German and virtually every other country’s economic policy) ignored BIS’ advice in 2007 and 2008, and they are still ignoring it today.

Instead, they are doing everything they can to (2) prop up asset prices by trying to blow a new bubble by giving banks trillions, (2) re-write accounting and reporting rules to let the big banks and other giants keep bad debts on their books (or in sivs or other “second sets of books”) and to hide the fact that they are bad debts, and (3) encourage consumers to spend spend spend!

“The world’s most prestigious financial body”, “the ultimate bank of central bankers” has condemned Bernanke and all of the other G-8 central banks, and stripped bare their false claims that the crash wasn’t their fault or that they are now doing the right thing to turn the economy around....

Chapter 1 (an excerpt)....Cover art for "Predator Nation" by Charles H. Ferguson
WHERE WE ARE NOW
MANY BOOKS HAVE ALREADY been written about the financial crisis, but there are two reasons why I decided that it was still important to write this one.
The first reason is that the bad guys got away with it, and there has been stunningly little public debate about this fact. When I received the Oscar for best documentary in 2011, I said: “Three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail. And that’s wrong.” When asked afterward about the absence of prosecutions, senior Obama administration officials gave evasive nonanswers, suggesting that nothing illegal occurred, or that investigations were continuing. None of the major Republican presidential candidates have raised the issue at all.
As of early 2012 there has still not been a single criminal prosecution of a senior financial executive related to the financial crisis. Nor has there been any serious attempt by the federal government to use civil suits, asset seizures, or restraining orders to extract fines or restitution from the people responsible for plunging the world economy into recession. This is not because we have no evidence of criminal behavior. Since the release of my film, a large amount of new material has emerged, especially from private lawsuits, that reveals, through e-mail trails and other evidence, that many bankers, including senior management, knew exactly what was going on, and that it was highly fraudulent.
But even leaving this crisis aside, there is now abundant evidence of widespread, unpunished criminal behavior in the financial sector. Later in this book, I go through the list of what we already know, which is a lot. In addition to the behavior that caused the crisis, major U.S. and European banks have been caught assisting corporate fraud by Enron and others, laundering money for drug cartels and the Iranian military, aiding tax evasion, hiding the assets of corrupt dictators, colluding in order to fix prices, and committing many forms of financial fraud. The evidence is now overwhelming that over the last thirty years, the U.S. financial sector has become a rogue industry. As its wealth and power grew, it subverted America’s political system (including both political parties), government, and academic institutions in order to free itself from regulation. As deregulation progressed, the industry became ever more unethical and dangerous, producing ever larger financial crises and ever more blatant criminality. Since the 1990s, its power has been sufficient to insulate bankers not only from effective regulation but even from criminal law enforcement. The financial sector is now a parasitic and destabilizing industry that constitutes a major drag on American economic growth.
This means that criminal prosecution is not just a matter of vengeance or even justice. Real punishment for large-scale financial criminality is a vital element of the financial re-regulation that is, in turn, essential to America’s (and the world’s) economic health and stability. Regulation is nice, but the threat of prison focuses the mind. A noted expert, the gangster Al Capone, once said, “You can get much further in life with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.” If financial executives know that they will go to jail if they commit major frauds that endanger the world economy, and that their illegal wealth will be confiscated, then they will be considerably less likely to commit such frauds and cause global financial crises. So one reason for writing this book is to lay out in painfully clear detail the case for criminal prosecutions. In this book, I demonstrate that much of the behavior underlying the bubble and crisis was quite literally criminal, and that the lack of prosecution is nearly as outrageous as the financial sector’s original conduct.
The second reason that I decided to write this book is that the rise of predatory finance is both a cause and a symptom of an even broader, and even more disturbing, change in America’s economy and political system. The financial sector is the core of a new oligarchy that has risen to power over the past thirty years, and that has profoundly changed American life. The later chapters of this book are devoted to analyzing how this happened and what it means.
From: Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America by Charles H. Ferguson