
Military flags have gold fringe.
More information here.
I'm just saying.
This is total bullshit. Vote them all out. This is a house of cards deal for the house of cards economy. The thing will fall down just as soon as our money gets whisked away.The plan calls for the Treasury Department to buy deeply distressed mortgage-backed securities and other bad debts held by banks and other investors. The money should help [or not help] troubled lenders make new loans and keep credit lines open. The government would later try [they will try, but they will fail] to sell the discounted loan packages at the best possible price.
At the insistence of House Republicans, some [unspecified amount] of the program's $700 billion would be devoted to a program that would encourage [as opposed to require] holders of distressed mortgage-backed securities to keep them and buy government insurance to cover defaults.
The legislation would place "reasonable" limits [as determined by the ultra-rich] on severance packages for executives of companies that benefit from the rescue plan, said a senior administration official who was authorized to speak only on background. It would affect fired executives of financial firms, and executives of firms that go bankrupt. Some [unspecified] of the provisions would be retroactive and some [unspecified] prospective, the official said.
The proposed legislation also calls for the financial sector to help [unspecified limited responsibility] make up the difference if [you mean when] the government does not recoup its investment in five years, the official said, but details were unclear. [wink wink]
Also, the government would receive stock warrants in return for the bailout relief, giving taxpayers a chance to share [kind of like the craps tables] in financial companies' future profits.
To help struggling homeowners, the plan would require the government to try [try but fail, then express regret] renegotiating the bad mortgages it acquires with the aim of lowering borrowers' monthly payments so they can keep their homes.
The measure's main elements were proposed a week ago by the Bush administration, with Paulson heading efforts to push it through the Democratic-controlled Congress. Democrats insisted on greater congressional oversight, more taxpayer protections, help for homeowners facing possible foreclosure, and restrictions on executives' compensation.
To some degree, [what do you think...2%?] all those items were added.
At the insistence of House Republicans, who threatened to sidetrack negotiations at midweek, the insurance provision was added as an alternative to having the government buy distressed securities. House Republicans say it will require less [CYA...they 'tried' to help us] taxpayer spending for the bailout.
But the Treasury Department has said the insurance provision would not pump enough money into the financial sector to make credit sufficiently available. The department would decide how to structure the insurance provisions, [Unitary Executive Powers] said Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., one of the negotiators.
Money for the rescue plan would be phased in, he said. The first $350 billion would be available as soon as the president requested it. Congress could try [and fail, surely expressing regret] to block later amounts if it believed the program was not working. The president could veto such a move, however, requiring extra large margins in the House and Senate to override.
Despite the changes made during an intense week of negotiations, the heart of the program remains Bush's original idea: To have the government spend billions of dollars to buy mortgage-backed securities whose value has plummeted as hundreds of thousands of Americans have defaulted on their home loans.
Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Saturday that the goal was to come up with a final agreement before the Asian markets open Sunday night. "Everybody is waiting for this thing to tip a little bit too far," he said, so "we may not have another day."
But consider that many financial analysts say that the real reason that the government bailed out Freddie and Fannie is because China demanded it. And there were rumors last week that China instructed its banks to stop lending to U.S. banks. The U.S. owes trillions of dollars to China which, along with Japan, Saudi Arabia, and other creditor nations, is keeping America afloat. If they pulled the plug, the U.S. would instantly default on its obligations.
They say that economics and finance are now global. Perhaps corruption, blackmail and tyranny are also.
What it can do is provide a one-time transfer of wealth to insiders who already have been playing the debt-credit system and siphoning off its predatory financial proceeds to themselves. The Wall Street bankers, brokers and fund managers to whom I’ve been speaking for many decades all know this. That is why they pay themselves such large annual bonuses and large salaries each year. The idea is to take as much as you can. As the saying goes: “You only have to make a fortune once in a lifetime.” They have been salting away their fortunes year after year, mainly in hard assets: real estate (free of mortgages), fine furniture, boats and trophy art.Do not believe these people. They lie ALL THE TIME. They don't care about Americans. They only care about themselves. They set this up, knowing it would come to this, and now they will force us at gunpoint to bail them out, lying the whole time that we will be made whole. We never will. Our dollar will collapse, chaos will break out, and then they will clamp down with Martial Law and begin the oppression in earnest. It's no coincidence that the Army will install an active duty unit on October 1st, within the US, to handle 'civil unrest' and 'crowd control,' using the latest 'non-lethal' weapons. That would be in 6 days.
Their plan now is for icing on the cake – to take Mr. Paulson’s $700 billion and run. It’s not a “bailout of the financial system.” It’s as giveaway – to insiders, to sell out all their bad bets. Companies across the board will get rid of their bad mortgages, and also their bad car loans, furniture time payments, credit-card loans, student loans – all the debts that any competent actuary could have told them never could have been paid in the first place.
...Promises that “taxpayers” will be able to recover a large part of this money are a fiction. If there were a hope of recovering this money, then investors abroad – foreign buyout funds, foreign banks, foreign sovereign wealth funds – would have been willing to buy Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, A.I.G. and other companies at some price. But they wouldn’t touch this at any price.
...For the government to even begin to recover some of the value of the $700 billion in junk mortgages it has bought would force new homebuyers to pay even more of their income to the banks. And if they do that, they will have less income to spend on goods and services. The domestic market will shrink, and tax revenues will fall at the state, local and federal levels. The debt overhead will deflate the economy, causing shrinkage all down the line.
So here’s where the cognitive dissonance comes in: It is necessary, even inevitable, for the volume of debt to come down – not up – to restore equilibrium. The economy was well on its way to preparing the ground for this last week. As Alan Meltzer of the American Enterprise Institute (of all places!) explained on McNeill-Lehrer, Merrill Lynch was able to be sold at 22 cents on the dollar; and the economy survived Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns being wiped out.
Such debt writes-offs are a precondition for writing down America’s mortgage debts to levels that are affordable. But Mr. Paulson’s plan is to fight against this tide. He wants the Wall Street to keep on raking in money at the expense of the economy at large. These are the big banks who lobbied Congress to appoint de-regulators, the banks whose officers paid themselves enormous bonuses and gave themselves enormous golden parachutes. They were the leaders in the great disinformation campaign about the magic of compound interest. And now they are to get their payoff.
The pretense is that not to pay them off would threaten “the economy.” The reality is that it only would stop their predatory behavior. Worse than that, for the economy at large a government take-over of these bad loans would prevent the debt write-down that the economy needs!
It gets worse. If Congress should be so destructive as to buy out $700 billion of bad loans (for starters), the sellers will do just what Russia’s kleptocrats did. They will take their money and move it abroad to a “hard” currency country. This will help collapse the dollar. Up will go gasoline costs and prices for other imports. America will be turned into a Russian-style post-Soviet economy, having endowed a new domestic kleptocracy of insiders, who use some of their gains to finance the campaigns of American Yeltsins such as McCain.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The financial turmoil that has rocked global markets appears to be benefiting US presidential hopeful Barack Obama, according to a new poll released Monday that finds the Democratic candidate pulling ahead of his Republican opponent John McCain with a 51 percent to 46 percent lead.Yes. Of course we do. We may be flouridated and gamma-rayed into bright smiling idiocy, but we're not dead yet. A few brain cells yet have the working synapses, ruthlessly connecting the Bush dot with the economic misery dot, over and over again.
The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll also finds that by a two-to-one margin Americans blame Republicans for the current financial crisis.
Forty-seven percent of registered voters say Republicans are more responsible for the state of the economy, compared to 24 percent of registered voters who say Democrats are more responsible.
The title character of my 2007 novel, Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy, was inspired by a real-life shoeshiner who plied his trade among the Guccis and Ferragamos of the financial district. What a view he had! From the very bottom rung of the economic ladder, he watched Wall Street insanity of outlandish proportions: the shady world of unbelievable hedge-fund profits, the supermodel girlfriends, $5,000 bottles of wine, cocaine-fueled trading and partying, the jaw-dropping castles of the new superrich being erected in Greenwich and the Hamptons.Oh dear. Dear dear dear. My goodness gracious. This is just terrible. Brown-bagged lunches?? What is the world coming to?...Few people on the trading floor were inclined to make small talk with menial workers last week, one such worker told me, because 90 percent of the staff had put in full days over the weekend, trying to figure out the latest repercussions for their company. All day, he saw people staring at their monitors in disbelief, pausing only to yell, "What the [expletive]?" or "This is a [expletive]-show." There was none of the usual horseplay or joking around. Instead, people were screaming into their phones and then slamming them down.
Many of the traders who were used to receiving six-figure annual bonuses have started brown-bagging their lunches instead of ordering in sushi or eating out at local restaurants. "Dude, we already passed the recession," one trader explained to the worker. "This is the Depression. Save your money."
The trading floor had always seemed, to one observer, rock-solid Republican -- until recently. One staunch Republican stood up in his trading group's row and announced, to the amazed stares of his colleagues, "I'm voting for Obama. I don't care if I have to pay more taxes. I just want things to be fixed."
Last week’s deepening financial crisis and the string of bailouts engineered by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke left Republicans bewildered, whipsawed and divided over how to respond....Some members of the Republican Study Committee, which represents conservative stalwarts, were decrying the bailout plan as a step closer to "socialism," according to Roll Call.No comment. But even farther up, in the hallowed halls, walk the people who are not confused, and not bewildered, and not upset. For these people, everything is under control and proceeding apace.
Yes. This is an emergency. It's time to ram some new dictatorial powers down the American people's collective throat quickly. OR ELSE!What happened on September 18-19 took years of preparation, capped by a faux ideology crafted by public-relations think tanks to be broadcast under emergency conditions to panic Congress - and voters - right before the presidential election. This seems to be our September election surprise. Under staged crisis conditions, Pres. Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson are now calling for the country to come together in a War on Defaulting Homeowners. This is said to be the only hope to "save the system." (What system is this? Not industrial capitalism, or even banking as we know it.) The largest transformation of America's financial system since the Great Depression has been compressed into just two weeks, starting with the doubling of America's national debt on September 7 with the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (My computer's spellchecker will not permit me to use the euphemism "conservatorship" that Mr. Paulson applied to bailing out the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fraudsters.)
Economic theory used to explain that profits and interest were a return for calculated risk. But today, the name of the game is capital gains and computerized gambling on the direction of interest rates, foreign currencies and stock prices - and when bad bets are made, bailouts are the calculated economic return for campaign contributions. But this is not supposed to be the time to talk of such things. "We must act now to protect our nation's economic health from serious risk," intoned Pres. Bush on September 19. What he meant was that the White House must make the Republican Party's largest group of campaign contributors whole - Wall Street, that is - by bailing out their bad gambles. "There will be ample opportunity to debate the origins of this problem. Now is the time to solve it." In other words, don't make this an election issue. "In our nation's history there have been moments that require us to come together across party lines to address major challenges. This is such a moment." Right before the presidential election! The same guff was heard earlier on Friday morning from Sec. Paulson: "Our economic health requires that we work together for prompt, bipartisan action." The broadcasters said that half a trillion dollars was discussed for this day's maneuverings.
She has now given two completely different answers to explain/describe her reaction to the VP nod. In the one to Gibson, she bragged about not even blinking. Now she says she consulted with her family and they even voted. Oh sure. How democratic is that?This is something I can't let pass--not without taking notice. Sarah Palin has just made her most blatant lie yet. It's one that the average television viewer can catch. And most tellingly, it's a lie that exposes not just mendacity, but a compulsion to lie.
In a transparent attempt to shore up her feminist appeal, she's changed her story on how she accepted the offer to run for vice-president.
Which one is it, Sarah? The problem with lying isn't so much putting the lies out there. It's in sticking to them.
So which one is it? What has happened here?
Her answer to Charlie Gibson was the real answer. She is in all likelihood a psychopath, as I wrote here. I noticed that Charlie also said, in asking his question, that it might belie some hubris for her to accept the job, but she glided right past that little remark and nobody else seems to have mentioned it either. There's a great deal of focus on her not knowing about the Bush Doctrine, and so forth. Be that as it may. But from a purely emotional level, her performance made it completely plain -- if you have eyes to see -- that she is ruthless and cutthroat, completely devoid of introspection or even a tiny shred of humility. This is not a nice person. I don't care what she looks like on the outside.
Psychopaths do not experience normal human emotions, and they try to fake it. But sometimes they just get it wrong. Her no blinking answer was a clashing gong to many thinking, feeling Americans; and now she has to redo that answer by having a new answer, the answer that a normal human would have. The fact that it contradicts her previous answer is of no concern to her. You have to understand that's how these people operate. Haven't we seen this over and over again with Bush/Cheney and the GOP? Reality is what they say it is. They actually believe that. They do not understand why we get all hung up on consistency and principles because they have no principles.
As for the comparisons to Cheney, I think they are accurate and justified. The main difference being that Cheney has been inside Washington for what, 30 years?, giving him plenty of time to learn how to spin his lies. Also, he spends so much time behind the scenes where he doesn't have to bother with all this pesky PR stuff. Sarah is a neophyte in comparison, but that does not mean that she is any less despicable. And if we're stupid enough to find out, well heaven help us.
Bonus: Additional information from Alaska about her ruthless behavior toward Monegan.
The Israeli and American war planners may be counting on all sides refraining from the use of WMD. Rather like Saddam held back his 29 WMD armed (chemical and anthrax) Scud-type guided missiles during the First Gulf War and like Hezbollah did during the Second Lebanon War in 2006. If this is the strategy it is one very, very, massive risk to all involved.And if they don't? If they don't, Iran will possibly use their ABW (Advanced Biological Warfare) weapons, which are scary as shit, and cheap, and you wouldn't know until two weeks later -- or in other words -- Too Late.
"I'm sure when we leave office we're all going to be hauled up before congressional committees and grand juries," Addington told one colleague in disgust.God Willing!
The surveillance state is well in place and all pervasive. The government here employs one in 25 people (2001) to snitch on their neighbors and clientele, and there are many more recruits available who do this out of some misguided zealotry: fundamental churches are sponsored to provide candidates for this role, as well as any other organization including but not limited to motorcycle club/gang members. Two way television surveillance is rife, and in place just about anywhere there are cable TV facilities. Many monitors and televisions are equipped with a camera OUT, letting law enforcement into your living room whenever they feel the need. The legislation enacted recently by boy george (Since 9-11) is just an attempt to make all this legal on paper.Watching people in their homes, through their TVs and computers? Was that what pushed Ashcroft and Comey over the edge? I mean, were they ok with monitoring all our phone calls and emails, but they drew the line at the peep show? I don't know. That's just the problem -- we don't know. So much secrecy surrounds our government, and what they're really doing, and to what nefarious ends.
The New World Order is wireless, and will never end unless the antennae come down. That is the stark truth. Get up close to them, see how they are made.I encourage you to explore the links at this site, especially if you have some background in science.
I was returning from hunting and walking along an avenue of the garden, my dog running in front of me.
Suddenly he took shorter steps, and began to steal along as though tracking game.
I looked along the avenue and saw a young sparrow, with yellow about its beak and down on its head. It had fallen out of the nest (the wind was violently shaking the birch trees in the avenue) and sat unable to move, helplessly flapping its half-grown wings.
My dog was slowly approaching it, when, suddenly darting down from a tree close by, an old dark-throated sparrow fell like a stone right before his nose, and all ruffled up, terrified, with despairing and pitiful cheeps, it flung itself twice towards the open jaws of shining teeth.
It sprang to save; it cast itself before its nestling, but all its tiny body was shaking with terror; its note was harsh and strange. Swooning with fear, it offered itself up!
What a huge monster must the dog have seemed to it! And yet it could not stay on its high branch out of danger. A force stronger than its will flung it down.
My Tresor stood still, drew back. Clearly he too recognized this force.
I hastened to call off the disconcerted dog, and went away, full of reverence.
Love, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.
Dream Tales and Prose Poems
Trans. Constance Garnett
Palin says she immediately accepted the VP offer from Sen. McCain, despite misgivings Gibson suggested she might have. "I didn't hesitate," she said. "I answered him yes because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink. So I didn't blink then even when asked to run as his running mate."In true psychopathic fashion, Sarah admits to being 'wired' in such a way that self-reflection has no role in such important, monumental decisions. Why would she stop for one nanosecond? To consider whether this might be good for her family? To consider whether she deserves to represent the American people in this way? To consider whether she can do this job?
PALIN: "In order to stop Islamic extremists, those terrorists who would seek to destroy America and our allies, we must do whatever it takes and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions in where we go and even who we target."Yes, Charlie. YES YES YES. She is ok with murdering Muslims, who hate us for our freedoms, and she does not have to 'think' about that either. No conscience required. Tough tough tough. All options on the table. Have to protect our 'allies.'
GIBSON: "And let me finish with this. I just, I got lost in a blizzard of words there. Was that a yes? You think we have the right to go across the border, with or without the approval of the Pakistani government, to go after terrorists... ?"
PALIN: "I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hell bent on destroying America and our allies. We have got to have all options out there on the table."
It should be emphasized that psychopaths are quite often interesting - even exciting! They exude a captivating energy that keeps their listeners on the edge of their seats. Even if some part of the normal person is shocked or repelled by what the psychopath says, they are like the mouse hypnotized by the torturing cat. Even if they have the chance to run away, they don’t. Many Psychopaths “make their living” by using charm, deceit, and manipulation to gain the confidence of their victims. Many of them can be found in white collar professions where they are aided in their evil by the fact that most people expect certain classes of people to be trustworthy because of their social or professional credentials. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, politicians, psychiatrists and psychologists, generally do not have to earn our trust because they have it by virtue of their positions. But the fact is: psychopaths are found in such lofty spheres also!
At the same time, psychopaths are good impostors. They have absolutely no hesitation about forging and brazenly using impressive credentials to adopt professional roles that bring prestige and power. They pick professions in which the requisite skills are easy to fake, the jargon is easy to learn, and the credentials are unlikely to be thoroughly checked. Psychopaths find it extremely easy to pose as financial consultants, ministers, psychological counselors and psychologists. And that’s a scary thought.
Psychopaths make their way by conning people into doing things for them; obtaining money for them, prestige, power, or even standing up for them when others try to expose them. But that is their claim to fame. That’s what they do. And they do it very well. What’s more, the job is very easy because most people are gullible with an unshakable belief in the inherent goodness of man which, I should add, has been programmed into normal people by psychopaths.
“The top secret operations will “some day in history … be described to people’s amazement,” Woodward told King.Amazement, eh? Try horror, you fucking asshole. Pardon me, but it is not amazing "in a good way" that our government has used billions of dollars, most likely laundered drug money which wrecked a few million American lives along the way to the Pentagon black ops budget, to develop secret laser weapons that have been used to kill innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon.
Dear all ,I wish I could help. All I can do is point out the LIES of our government and the INCESSANT LYING of the corporate media. All I can do is point out to my fellow Americans that these technologies will be used against us in the name of Homeland Security. And that you will be instructed to like it and be supportive because you are to believe that only bad people will ever come to know these things intimately, and while you're smoking that crack pipe please remember that all the people in the US military are truly and surely boyscouts who walk old ladies across the street and carry their groceries and would never, ever do anything to hurt an innocent person. So you can trust them completely with any kind of weapon, no matter how diabolical it may seem, because this is America. And I am just as qualified to be Vice President as Sarah Palin because my son plays hockey and I make my kids' own damned sandwiches, too. And that's all it takes. Right? RIGHT????Ok , I have to admit the attached pictures are hideously gruesome, but you have to look at them . Help me find out what kind of weapons cause this kind of dismemberment and mutation. What kind of weapons cause this kind of damage? Do you know? Could you find out?
None of this is confirmed, or could be here and now. However, there are growing doubts that Israel might be using internationally forbidden weapons in its current aggression against Lebanon. News from "Southern Medical Center", a hospital in Saida( in South Lebanon) are not good.
Dr. Bashir Sham, member of "French Association of Cardiovascular Surgeons", explains that the way the corps [sic] look when they reach the hospital , especially those of the air strikes in Doueir and Rmayleih, is very abnormal. One might think they were burnt , but their colour is dark , they're inflated, and they have a terrible smell. All this , and the hair is not burnt nor do the bodies bleed.
Eight of the victims of an air strike on Rmayleih bridge, near Saida, on the 15th of July, were transferred to Sham's hospital.
Sham says that only chemical poisonous substances "lead to instant death without bleeding". And what indicates the power of these substances, is the high and unusual of number of dead victimes, compared to the number of injuries.
Sham thinks that whatever abnormal substance causing these features might penetrate through the skin, or another explanation would be that the missiles contained toxic gas that stopped the proper functioning of the nervous system, and led to blood clotting.
These toxic materials cause immediate death, within two to thirty minutes, according to Sham, who admits that these doubts can't be proven, not even by an autopsy.
The director of the same medical center, Ali Mansour, says that due to the strong smell of the corps, he couldn't breath properly for at least 12 hours after the corps were handled.
He explains that the center received eight bodies from Rmeileh last Monday, and none of them was bleeding. Mansour tells us the hospital wrote to both the commissioner of the European Union for Foreign Affaires Javier Solana, and the United Nations Secretary general Kofi Anan. He said that dr Sham will communicate his doubts to the Doctors Order in Lebanon.
CAN YOU HELP US , PLEASE!
After seven days I dreamed a dream in the night. And lo, a wind arose from the sea and stirred up all its waves. As I kept looking the wind made something like the figure of a man come up out of the heart of the sea. And I saw that this man flew with the clouds of heaven; and wherever he turned his face to look, everything under his gaze trembled, and whenever his voice issued from his mouth, all who heard his voice melted as wax melts when it feels the fire.
After this I looked and saw that an innumerable multitude of people were gathered together from the four winds of heaven to make war against the man who came up out of the sea. And I looked and saw that he carved out for himself a great mountain, and flew up on to it. And I tried to see the region or place from which the mountain was carved, but I could not.
After this I looked and saw that all who had gathered together against him, to wage war with him, were filled with fear, and yet they dared to fight. When he saw the onrush of the approaching multitude, he neither lifted his hand nor held a spear or any weapon of war; but I saw only how he sent forth from his mouth something like a stream of fire, and from his lips a flaming breath, and from his tongue he shot forth a storm of sparks. All these were mingled together, the stream of fire and the flaming breath and the great storm, and fell on the onrushing multitude that was prepared to fight, and burned up all of them, so that suddenly nothing was seen of the innumerable multitude but only the dust of ashes and the smell of smoke. When I saw it, I was amazed.
After this I saw the same man come down from the mountain and call to himself another multitude that was peaceable. Then many people came to him, some of whom were joyful and some sorrowful; some of them were bound, and some were bringing others as offerings. 2 Esdras 13:1-13