“I. Control - The capacity to cause or change certain types of human behaviour by implying or using physical or psychological means to induce compliance. Compliance may be voluntary or involuntary.

Control can rarely be established without control of the environment. By controlling the subject’s physical environment, we will be able to control his psychological state of mind.”

Human Resource Exploitation Manual - 1983, p. A-6

You did not bear the shame,
You resisted,
Sacrificing your life,
For freedom, Justice and Honour.

- From the German Resistance Memorial, Berlin

Ted Rall
The State Journal Register
June 2, 2009

We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.

Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous.

From health care to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied. So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending, of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has officially reneged on his campaign promise to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. When a president doesn’t have the nerve to annoy the Turks, why does he bother to show up for work in the morning?

Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now — before he drags us further into the abyss.

I refer here to Obama’s plan for “preventive detentions.” If a cop or other government official thinks you might want to commit a crime someday, you could be held in “prolonged detention.” Reports in U.S. state-controlled media imply that Obama’s shocking new policy would only apply to Islamic terrorists (or, in this case, wannabe Islamic terrorists, and also kinda-sorta-maybe-thinking-about-terrorism dudes). As if that made it OK.

In practice, Obama wants to let government goons snatch you, me and anyone else they deem annoying off the street.

Preventive detention is the classic defining characteristic of a military dictatorship. Because dictatorial regimes rely on fear rather than consensus, their priority is self-preservation rather than improving their people’s lives. They worry obsessively over the one thing they can’t control, what George Orwell called “thoughtcrime” — contempt for rulers that might someday translate to direct action.

Locking up people who haven’t done anything wrong is worse than un-American and a violent attack on the most basic principles of Western jurisprudence. It is contrary to the most essential notion of human decency. That anyone has ever been subjected to “preventive detention” is an outrage. That the president of the United States, a man who won an election because he promised to elevate our moral and political discourse, would even entertain such a revolting idea offends the idea of civilization itself.

Obama is cute. He is charming. But there is something rotten inside him. Unlike the Republicans who backed George W. Bush, I won’t follow a terrible leader just because I voted for him. Obama has revealed himself. He is a monster, and he should remove himself from power.

“Prolonged detention,” reported The New York Times, would be inflicted upon “terrorism suspects who cannot be tried.”

“Cannot be tried.” Interesting choice of words.

Any “terrorism suspect” (can you be a suspect if you haven’t been charged with a crime?) can be tried. Anyone can be tried for anything. At this writing, a Somali child is sitting in a prison in New York, charged with piracy in the Indian Ocean, where the U.S. has no jurisdiction. Anyone can be tried.

What they mean, of course, is that the hundreds of men and boys languishing at Guantánamo and the thousands of “detainees” the Obama administration anticipates kidnapping in the future cannot be convicted. As in the old Soviet Union, putting enemies of the state on trial isn’t enough. The game has to be fixed. Conviction has to be a foregone conclusion.

Why is it, exactly, that some prisoners “cannot be tried”?

The Old Grey Lady explains why Obama wants this “entirely new chapter in American law” in a boring little sentence buried a couple of paragraphs past the jump and a couple of hundred words down page A16: “Yet another question is what to do with the most problematic group of Guantánamo detainees: those who pose a national security threat but cannot be prosecuted, either for lack of evidence or because evidence is tainted.”

In democracies with functioning legal systems, it is assumed that people against whom there is a “lack of evidence” are innocent. They walk free. In countries where the rule of law prevails, in places blessedly free of fearful leaders whose only concern is staying in power, “tainted evidence” is no evidence at all. If you can’t prove that a defendant committed a crime — an actual crime, not a thoughtcrime — in a fair trial, you release him and apologize to the judge and jury for wasting their time.

It is amazing and incredible, after eight years of Bush’s lawless behavior, to have to still have to explain these things. For that reason alone, Obama should resign.

Glenn Greenwald
Salon
Thursday April 30, 2009

Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely spoken: “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.” The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis “own” the U.S. Congress — according to one of that institution’s most powerful members — demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is.

The ownership of the federal government by banks and other large corporations is effectuated in literally countless ways, none more effective than the endless and increasingly sleazy overlap between government and corporate officials. Here is just one random item this week announcing a couple of standard personnel moves:

Former Barney Frank staffer now top Goldman Sachs lobbyist

Goldman Sachs’ new top lobbyist was recently the top staffer to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., on the House Financial Services Committee chaired by Frank. Michael Paese, a registered lobbyist for the Securities Industries and Financial Markets Association since he left Frank’s committee in September, will join Goldman as director of government affairs, a role held last year by former Tom Daschle intimate, Mark Patterson, now the chief of staff at the Treasury Department. This is not Paese’s first swing through the Wall Street-Congress revolving door: he previously worked at JP Morgan and Mercantile Bankshares, and in between served as senior minority counsel at the Financial Services Committee.

So: Paese went from Chairman Frank’s office to be the top lobbyist at Goldman, and shortly before that, Goldman dispatched Paese’s predecessor, close Tom Daschle associate Mark Patterson, to be Chief of Staff to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, himself a protege of former Goldman CEO Robert Rubin and a virtually wholly owned subsidiary of the banking industry. That’s all part of what Desmond Lachman — American Enterprise Institute fellow, former chief emerging market strategist at Salomon Smith Barney and top IMF official (no socialist he) — recently described as “Goldman Sachs’s seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs.”

Meanwhile, the above-linked Huffington Post article which reported on Durbin’s comments also notes Sen. Evan Bayh’s previously-reported central role on behalf of the bankers in blocking legislation, hated by the banking industry, to allow bankruptcy judges to alter the terms of mortgages so that families can stay in their homes. Bayh is up for re-election in 2010, and here — according to the indispensable Open Secrets site — is Bayh’s top donor:

Goldman is also the top donor to Bayh over the course of his Congressional career, during which Bayh has received more than $4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate sectors:

In a totally unrelated coincidence — after the Government, as Matt Taibbi put it, enacted “a bailout program that has now figured three ways to funnel money to Goldman, Sachs”– this is what happened earlier this month:

Goldman reports $1.8 billion profit

Goldman Sachs reported a much stronger-than-expected first-quarter profit Monday, bouncing back from its worst quarter as a public company. . . .

In reporting its results a day earlier than expected, New York-based Goldman said it earned $1.81 billion, or $3.39 a share, for the quarter ended March 31. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial were looking for a profit of $1.64 a share.

Goldman shares, which have surged more than 70% during the past month, continued rising late Monday, gaining about 4.7% for the day.

Nobody even tries to hide this any longer. The only way they could make it more blatant is if they hung a huge Goldman Sachs logo on the Capitol dome and then branded it onto the foreheads of leading members of Congress and executive branch officials.

Of course, ownership of the government is not confined to Goldman or even to bankers generally; legislation in virtually every area is written by the lobbyists dispatched by the corporations that demand it, and its passage then ensured by “representatives” whose pockets are stuffed with money from those same corporations. Just as one example, as Jane Hamsher reported about Bayh:

Bayh’s little “lobbyist problem” is considered by many to be what tanked his Vice Presidential aspirations. His wife Susan earns about $837,000 a year serving on seven corporate boards, among them Wellpoint, a health insurance company for which Bayh helped secure a $24.7 million dollar grant. She’s on the board of ETrade, even as Bayh is on the Senate Finance Committee.

Bayh wants people to believe he’s a “moderate” who sits in the “center.”

Center of K Street, maybe.

Meanwhile, the only citizen protests relating to this mass robbery are driven by anger at the government for treating bankers too harshly and unfairly — one of the most classic manifestations of what Taibbi, in a separate piece, so aptly calls the “peasant mentality”:

After all, the reason the winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That’s why even people like [Glenn] Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. . . .

Actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish . . . can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff.

One might think it would be a big news story for the second most-powerful member of the U.S. Senate to baldly state that the Congress is “owned” by the bankers who spawned the financial crisis and continue to dictate the government’s actions. But it won’t be. The leading members of the media work for the very corporations that benefit most from this process. Establishment journalists are integral and well-rewarded members of the same system and thus cannot and will not see it as inherently corrupt (instead, as Newsweek’s Evan Thomas said, their role, as “members of the ruling class,” is to “prop up the existing order,” “protect traditional institutions” and “safeguard the status quo”).

That Congress is fully owned and controlled by a tiny sliver of narrow, oligarchical, deeply corrupted interests is simultaneously so obvious yet so demonized (only Unserious Shrill Fringe radicals, such as the IMF’s former chief economist, use that sort of language) that even Durbin’s explicit admission will be largely ignored. Even that extreme of a confession (Durbin elaborated on it with Ed Schultz last night) hardly causes a ripple.

By Binyamin Appelbaum and Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 30, 2009

On the day before Thanksgiving in 1991, the U.S. Senate voted to vastly expand the emergency powers of the Federal Reserve.

Almost no one noticed.

The critical language was contained in a single, somewhat inscrutable sentence, and the only public explanation was offered during a final debate that began with a reminder that senators had airplanes to catch. Yet, in removing a long-standing prohibition on loans that supported financial speculation, the provision effectively allowed the Fed for the first time to lend money to Wall Street during a crisis.

That authority, which sat unused for more than 16 years, now provides the legal basis for the Fed’s unprecedented efforts to rescue the financial system.

Since March 2008, the central bank’s board of governors has invoked its emergency powers at least 19 times: to contain the wreckage of Bear Stearns and ease the fall of American International Group, to preserve Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to limit losses at Bank of America and Citigroup, to lend more than $1 trillion.

The repeated use of the once-dusty law has surprised and alarmed a wide range of people, including economists and members of Congress. It has even raised worries among presidents of the regional banks that make up the Federal Reserve system.

Many critics are concerned that an institution not accountable to voters is risking vast amounts of public money and choosing which companies get help. Others are concerned that the Fed’s new role will interfere with its basic responsibility for regulating economic growth.

There is also a question about the roots of the crisis: Did investment banks take greater risks in the past two decades because they knew the Fed could rescue them?

The 1991 legislation, authored by Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), was requested by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms in the wake of the 1987 market crisis, and it would save some of them a generation later.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and other leaders of the central bank have argued that the emergency authority has allowed it to rescue the financial system and that without it, the economy would be in far worse shape. And they argue that they are using the power as Congress intended.

“This provision was designed as a last resort to make sure credit flows when times are tough and credit isn’t being extended,” said Scott Alvarez, the Fed’s general counsel. “That’s exactly what it’s being used for today.”

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said that the actions taken by the Fed have been necessary and important but that those actions should have been taken by an agency accountable to voters. He said he was not aware of the Fed’s emergency power until September, and he favored removing much of that authority from the Fed once the crisis has passed.

“This is a democracy, and there is a problem with too much power going to an entity that is not subject to democratic powers,” Frank said.

Politics of Independence

The Fed, by law and tradition, is insulated from political pressure. Members of its Board of Governors are appointed to 14-year terms, allowing them to take painful, unpopular actions to help the economy.

That independence has become a valuable political tool for the Bush and Obama administrations, which have worked with the Fed to create vast rescue programs outside the reach of Congress. The most recent example is the Fed’s agreement to spur up to $1 trillion in new lending by funding the purchase of securitized loans.

“By necessity, the Fed was the institution everybody looked to because they had the balance sheet and the legal authority to act,” said Phillip L. Swagel, an assistant Treasury secretary in the George W. Bush administration who is to become a professor at Georgetown University’s business school.

But the government’s reliance on the Fed has roused critics.

“There’s no accountability,” said Walker F. Todd, a former economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland whose writings raised some of the earliest questions about the 1991 law. “How much power do you want to concentrate in a few people who are not directly accountable to the political process?”

Those criticisms have been heightened by the Fed’s refusal to disclose which firms have benefited from many of the emergency programs, such as the names of the companies that have used the Fed’s “commercial paper funding facility” to issue short-term debt.

Fed officials argue that disclosure could spark runs on those firms by alerting investors to the depth of their problems.

Legislation pending before Congress would require the Fed to disclose more information. Other bills would impose additional oversight. The mounting political pressure has alarmed some experts, who worry that the autonomy necessary to make monetary policy will be forever damaged.

“What the Fed has done is almost irreparable,” said Allan H. Meltzer, a Carnegie Mellon University economist who is a leading historian of the Fed. “It’s going to be hard to get them to unlearn it. Now Congress will look to the Fed every time a constituent has a hard time getting a loan.”

Without a Net?

The Fed has always served as a lender of last resort for commercial banks.

During the Depression, it was authorized by Congress to lend on an emergency basis to other companies that couldn’t get money anywhere else. From 1932 to 1936, it made only 123 loans. A broader program launched in 1936 was more successful, and the Fed would make thousands of loans to businesses before Congress terminated the program in 1958.

The original authority survived, but by then, a new generation of Fed officials had lost the will to lend.

Intermittently, other parts of the government would press the Fed to dust off its powers — to save the Penn Central Railroad in 1970, to rescue New York City in 1975, to rescue property and casualty insurers in the 1980s — but in each case, the Fed demurred out of concern for its independence.

Ernest T. Patrikis, former general counsel at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, recalled that in some cases the Fed went so far as to conduct legal research into its options, but never further than that.

“We always knew about it, but we always knew it would only be used in extreme cases,” said Patrikis, now a partner at the law firm White & Case.

The wind shifted in the late 1980s. During the stock market crash of October 1987, some commercial banks had refused to lend money to investment banks. A few years later, the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert, then the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank, renewed concerns about the absence of a safety net beneath Wall Street.

Rodgin Cohen, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, suggested to several of his clients the idea of modifying the 1932 law to allow lending to investment banks, according to people involved in the discussions. Cohen is a legendary figure on Wall Street, building a career as perhaps the preeminent legal adviser on banking mergers, in part through his command of the minutiae of federal regulations.

Dodd, at the time chairman of the securities subcommittee of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, agreed to insert the language into a bill whose primary purpose was to reform the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which guarantees commercial bank deposits.

Dodd declined to comment for this story, but at the time, he said the legislation gave the Fed “greater flexibility to respond in instances in which the overall financial system threatens to collapse.”

During a meeting to discuss the bill’s final language, a representative of the Federal Reserve was asked to comment. Donald L. Kohn, then the director of the Fed’s Division of Monetary Affairs, said the agency had no objections, according to people in attendance that day.

The Fed has extensive regulatory authority over commercial banks, to keep them from needing its safety net. But after Dodd’s language passed into law, the Fed did not seek new regulatory authority over investment banks, nor did Congress move to provide new authority.

Instead, over the next two decades, federal officials would emphasize that investment banks had an incentive to be cautious because they were operating without a safety net.

‘Opening That Window’

Sixteen years later, Kohn, now the Fed’s vice chairman, appeared on March 4, 2008, before the Senate Banking Committee. Dodd, now the chairman, asked whether the Fed was considering using its emergency authority to help restore the flow of money through the capital markets. Kohn responded that he “would be very cautious” about lending Fed money to institutions other than banks or, as he put it, “opening that window more generally.”

But by then, the Fed already was on the verge of invoking the emergency lending authority for the first time since the 1930s. Fed lawyers had started to dust off past research on the emergency-powers law during the fall of 2007, shortly after the earliest indications that the financial system was breaking down. Initially, the goal was to understand how the power might be used in a crisis, without any specific company or lending program in mind.

By March, however, the Fed was focused on a particular program. Wall Street firms once again were struggling to borrow money. Lenders were charging much higher interest rates if borrowers pledged mortgage-backed securities rather than Treasurys.

On March 11, the Fed’s Board of Governors invoked the emergency-powers law for the first time since the Great Depression, allowing firms to swap their securities for Treasurys, preserving their ability to raise money without requiring them to sell the securities at large losses.

The Fed’s biggest concern: Invoking a law that could be used only in a financial crisis might deepen the fear in the markets. The answer: The Fed, in its press release announcing the facility on March 11, didn’t mention where the legal authority came from.

Three days later, on a bright Friday morning, the Fed governors and staff gathered again in a giant, formal conference room built during the Great Depression. They were bleary-eyed, having stayed up all night grappling with the deterioration of the investment bank Bear Stearns. The markets were soon to open.

Moments later, the four governors present voted unanimously to support the sale of Bear Stearns to J.P. Morgan Chase, breaking the fall of an investment bank for the first time.

Herald Sun
October 29, 2008

AUSTRALIA will join China in implementing mandatory censoring of the internet under plans put forward by the Federal Government.

The revelations emerge as US tech giants Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and a coalition of human rights and other groups unveiled a code of conduct aimed at safeguarding online freedom of speech and privacy.

The government has declared it will not let internet users opt out of the proposed national internet filter.

The plan was first created as a way to combat child pornography and adult content, but could be extended to include controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy revealed the mandatory censorship to the Senate estimates committee as the Global Network Initiative, bringing together leading companies, human rights organisations, academics and investors, committed the technology firms to “protect the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users”.

Mr Conroy said trials were yet to be carried out, but “we are talking about mandatory blocking, where possible, of illegal material.”

The net nanny proposal was originally going to allow Australians who wanted uncensored access to the web the option of contacting their internet service provider to be excluded from the service.

Human Rights Watch has condemned internet censorship, and argued to the US Senate “there is a real danger of a Virtual Curtain dividing the internet, much as the Iron Curtain did during the Cold War, because some governments fear the potential of the internet, (and) want to control it”

Groups including the System Administrators Guild of Australia and Electronic Frontiers Australia have attacked the proposal, saying it would unfairly restrict Australians’ access to the web, slow internet speeds and raise the price of internet access.

EFA board member Colin Jacobs said it would have little effect on illegal internet content, including child pornography, as it would not cover file-sharing networks.

“If the Government would actually come out and say we’re only targeting child pornography it would be a different debate,” he said.

The technology companies’ move, which follows criticism that the companies were assisting censorship of the internet in nations such as China, requires them to narrowly interpret government requests for information or censorship and to fight to minimise cooperation.

The initiative provides a systematic approach to “work together in resisting efforts by governments that seek to enlist companies in acts of censorship and surveillance that violate international standards”, the participants said.

In a statement, Yahoo co-founder and chief executive Jerry Yang welcomed the new code of conduct.

“These principles provide a valuable roadmap for companies like Yahoo operating in markets where freedom of expression and privacy are unfairly restricted,” he said.

“Yahoo was founded on the belief that promoting access to information can enrich people’s lives, and the principles we unveil today reflect our determination that our actions match our values around the world.”

Yahoo was thrust into the forefront of the online rights issue after the Californian company helped Chinese police identify cyber dissidents whose supposed crime was expressing their views online.

China exercises strict control over the internet, blocking sites linked to Chinese dissidents, the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement, the Tibetan government-in-exile and those with information on the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

A number of US companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, Google and Yahoo, have been hauled before the US Congress in recent years and accused of complicity in building the “Great Firewall of China”.

The Australian Christian Lobby, however, has welcomed the proposals.

Managing director Jim Wallace said the measures were needed.

“The need to prevent access to illegal hard-core material and child pornography must be placed above the industry’s desire for unfettered access,” Mr Wallace said.

Paul Joseph Watson
Propaganda Matrix
Thursday, January 8, 2009

Following Northcom’s denial that U.S. Army combat teams would be used to deal with “civil unrest” after the announcement that thousands of active duty military personnel were being moved inside the United States, an Army.com report now concedes that more than 400 Marines assigned to one unit includes a “security force” that would operate within the homeland.

A September 8 Army Times report stated that active duty troops from the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team returning from Iraq would be on call as a “federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks,” for a period of 12 months from October 1st.

This preceded a December 1 Washington Post article which reported on plans to station 20,000 more U.S. troops inside America for purposes of “domestic security” from September 2011.

According to the Army Times article, their duties would include dealing with “civil unrest and crowd control”. This admission was later denied by Northcom’s operations division chief Army Col. Michael Boatner, who told Homeland Security Today, “This response force will not be called upon to help with law enforcement, civil disturbance or crowd control, but will be used to support lead agencies involved in saving lives, relieving suffering and meeting the needs of communities affected by weapons of mass destruction attacks, accidents or even natural disasters.”

However, a January 7 American Forces Press Service story posted on Army.com confirms that at least some units operating inside the U.S. will rely on a “security force” to provide protection for troops responding to a mass casualty event in America.

Marines assigned to the Chemical, Biological Incident Response Force (CBIRF) operating out of the Naval Support Facility in Indian Head, Maryland are “tasked by the Defense Department with responding to disasters that require federal assistance,” according to the article, a job that mandates “the squad’s weapons were replaced with metal pry bars, Kevlar helmets with construction hard-hats, and combat uniforms with coveralls.”

“The commandant of the Marine Corps set in place the guidelines for designing a highly trained and specialized unit designed to respond to such a threat in the event that state and local authorities need Defense Department assistance,” we read.

“The 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force led the operational efforts of the unit until October 2008 when, in a historic move, the U.S. Northern Command pulled into its ranks nearly 5,000 active-duty forces designated to respond to homeland emergencies.”

“Now, the CBIRF is associated administratively with the 2nd MEF, but can tap into the extensive medical, aviation, transportation and logistical support of the other units within Northcom’s response force.”

Although Marine Col. John M. Pollock states, “Security for our forces operating within the homeland is a law-enforcement issue, and I would much rather leverage local and state law enforcement to provide that security,” the article does reveal that a “security force” tasked with protecting Marines during their duties is a component of the unit.

“The unit has specialists in bomb disposal, technical rescue decontamination, chemical identification and detection, medical and casualty extraction. It also has a security force,” states the article.

Pollock also stated that the unit was in position at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota, an open violation of Posse Comitatus, the law that restricts the military from undertaking law enforcement operations except in times of declared national emergency.

Just who do the Marines need protecting from if all they will be doing is aiding rescue efforts and saving people’s lives? The only conceivable scenario in which Marines would need other Marines to protect them in a law enforcement guise would be if the tasks they were undertaking were highly unpopular and risked reprisals from the general public.

The fact that the original Army Times report of September 8 let slip that Marines would have access to non-lethal weapons to be used domestically, a revelation that was later retracted after it stoked media controversy, perhaps offers a not too subtle hint about what the real mission of the Marines will be in anticipation of a total economic collapse or the dreaded mass casualty terror attack that is constantly being hyped by the establishment and the corporate media.

MINA
Monday, June 1, 2009

General Motors Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy early Monday, marking the humbling of an American icon that once dominated the global car industry and setting up a high-stakes gamble for U.S. taxpayers.

The bankruptcy filing, made in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, marks the climax of a lengthy debate over the auto maker’s future after it sought a bailout from the U.S. government in December to stay alive. In the end, GM couldn’t complete its restructuring out of court and filed for bankruptcy-court protection to get billions more in aid from U.S. taxpayers.

The question now facing 56,000 auto workers, 3,600 GM dealers and the Obama administration: Will it work?

The U.S. government has agreed to provide GM with another $30 billion in aid, in addition to the $20 billion the auto maker has already borrowed, to see it through its restructuring and exit from bankruptcy protection. In return, the government will get a controlling stake in the company. The Canadian and Ontario governments are putting in $9.5 billion for a 12.5% stake.

The reorganization faces myriad risks, ranging from legal challenges to the uncertainty of when consumer demand for new cars will rebound. In becoming GM’s new owner, the government is also entering largely unexplored terrain filled with political minefields, notably the possibility of meddling by Congress in the company’s daily operations and business plans.

In bankruptcy, the auto maker will split apart into two companies: a leaner new GM and a so-called old GM, which will include the pieces that will be wound down. GM intends to accomplish the split through a Section 363 sale, which would transfer the new GM assets to an entity owned by the U.S. and Canadian governments, the United Auto Workers union and the company’s unsecured creditors.

Even if a new GM emerges swiftly from bankruptcy, the administration will face a thicket of challenges, including closing more than a dozen factories and shedding the Pontiac, Saturn, Saab and Hummer brands. Shepherding these unwanted parts of GM — the so-called Old GM — through liquidation in court could take years, with potential extra costs to taxpayers if the process bogs down.

Monday, GM said it will shutter 17 factories and parts centers by the end of 2011, including seven factories in Michigan and plants in Ohio, Indiana and Tennessee. Two of the closures had been previously announced, including a castings factory in Massena, N.Y., which closed May 1. Three of the facilities to close are parts centers and three factories could reopen if market demand rebounds.

GM’s restructuring has been carefully planned by the company itself and the Treasury Department, but it faces some uncertainty now that its fate is in the hands of a bankruptcy judge. The judge chosen to handle the case will have a major impact on the outcome of the case, especially if dissident bondholders mount a legal challenge to the restructuring. There’s also the risk that consumers will be scared off by the company’s Chapter 11 filing, causing sales to fall even further.

And unknown is how the cost of restructuring both GM and Chrysler LLC would have compared with the cost of letting both companies fail in terms of lost wages, disruptions among car-parts makers and the broader economic fallout. Chrysler, which could emerge from bankruptcy as soon as Monday, will be controlled by Italy’s Fiat SpA under its own risky revamping.

Bankruptcy should allow GM to pull off one of the most expedient downsizings in the industry’s 120-year history. Long hampered by laws, union strife and management practices that kept it from fast action to fix problems, GM plans to eliminate almost all of its debt, halve its U.S. brands, shutter 2,600 dealers and rewrite labor contracts almost overnight.

Emerging sometime this summer would be a GM with a cleaner balance sheet and slimmer operations than the company that has posted deep losses since 2005. GM has burned through $33.6 billion in cash the past four years. Under its restructuring plan, GM will shed more than $79 billion in debt, gain work-force savings worth billions of dollars a year, close unneeded facilities and reduce its dealer network by 40%.

“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough money to buy it back again.

However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money.“

- Sir Josiah Stamp
Former Director of the Bank of England

Hersh on CNN discussing covert ops in Iran

Dawn
May 29, 2009

Iranian officials Friday accused the US of hiring those behind a suicide bombing of a Shiite mosque in southeastern Iran that killed 23 people and linked the attack to next month’s presidential vote.

‘Three people involved with the terrorist incident were arrested,’ Jalal Sayah, deputy provincial governor of the Sistan-Baluchistan province that borders Pakistan and Afghanistan, told Fars news agency.

‘According to the information obtained they were hired by America and the agents of the arrogance,’ Sayah said. Iranian officials usually use the term ‘global arrogance’ in reference to Iran’s arch-foe the United States.

The suicide attack during Thursday evening prayers at the Shiite Amir al-Momenin mosque in Zahedan, the restive capital of Sistan-Baluchistan, killed 23 people and wounded 125 others.

‘This catastrophe was a suicide terrorist attack,’ Zahedan MP Payman Foroozesh told ILNA news agency.

Provincial justice chief Ebrahim Hamidi said the attacker ‘had stood in the last line of male worshippers during the evening prayer, carried out the bombing and died.’

Hamidi told ISNA news agency that one person had been arrested for the bombing and ‘charged with armed opposition and acting against national security. But his motive cannot be presented for the moment.’

He said most attacks in the restive province were carried out by a Sunni rebel group headed by ring leader Abdolmalek Rigi, but he could not confirm whether the group could be blamed for Thursday’s bombing.

Iran’s former premier and presidential hopeful Mir Hossein Mousavi too blamed ‘foreign forces’ for Thursday’s attack.

Mousavi at a media conference with journalists from international news networks said incidents such as the mosque bombing ‘have either been influenced or supported by foreign forces.’

‘The fewer foreign forces in the region, the more security there is. They provoke extremism in the region such as the incident in Zahedan,’ said Mousavi, one of four candidates standing in the June 12 presidential election.