The following ads are courtesy of Rense.com, PrisonPlanet.com & WhatReallyHappened.com
http://www.44power.com/whatreallyhappened/
How to Generate Home Renewable Energy
24th November, 2008
Installing a home energy kit is proven to LOWER your power bill and help the environment.
But, up until recently, it was also pretty expensive - the only way to install a home solar or wind energy generators was to get it done professionally, which could cost as much as $2,000. Even stand-alone conversion kits can sell for as much as $500.
Luckily, the last six months has seen a crop of conversion kits and guides, which show how to generate electricity using the natural earth resources, with low cost materials, which can be completed even if you have little or no technical knowledge .
We decided to sit down and review these new guides - our key criteria were ease-of-use, affordability of materials, power savings, and speed of installation.
Overall, we were pleasantly surprised with the results - the technology evidently does work, and if you pick the right guide, you could well be up and running in a few hours.
We reviewed 11 Home Energy kits- only 3 met our criteria:
Sizeable Power Savings - at least 40% more power efficiency
Fast and Easy Setup - in only a few hours, even for novices
Affordable Set-Up Cost (well under $100)
Our Choice
Home Made Energy
HomeMadeEnergy.com
Rating 9.8/10
"Still the best Home Energy Kit in 2008..."
Home Made Energy
By far the easiest-to-follow guide we came across - our own experience says you should set aside maybe half a day to buy the parts and get it fully installed. This kit includes information for generating energy using solar panels and wind turbines.
This is the only guide that assumes absolutely no knowledge about power engineering. Impressively, our support ticket was responded to in under an hour (although it could take a little longer at weekends), and there is an unconditional 8 week money-back guarantee.
Best of all, the technology required is readily available and cheap - we were able to access all the parts needed for well under $100. Given that its proven to decrease the power bill by as much as 80%, in some cases even completely, you could well recoup your investment in under two weeks.
The installation of this kit can be done on any kind of house or building. Home Made Energy is aimed squarely at electricity "novices", and it is still our top pick for 2008.
October 2008 Update : there is now a promotion running on the site, and it is temporarily available for $49 instead of $297 - as such, we recommend ordering sooner rather than later.
The Verdict: Fast and easy setup; works for complete novices; proven power savings of up to 80% - our top pick
2. Earth For Energy
Earth4Energy.com
Rating 8.5/10
Our second pick uses a similar technology as our top pick - and again, we were impressed by the fast support, money-back guarantee and low setup costs.
This kit includes comprehensive information on how to set up home solar panels with cheap materials, explained in a simplistic easy to understand manner.
All in all, it's a fairly decent package which means you can be enjoying solid energy savings for very little, very quickly. So why only four stars?
Well, perhaps we were spoiled by our top pick, but we found the directions a little harder to follow - and since ease of use is so important, we decided to knock off a star. But this product contains a good information about wind power generators, as well as solar panels.
3. DIY Home Solar Power
DIYHomeSolarPower.com
Rating 7.5/10
DIY Home Solar Power is our third and final pick, and it actually includes 2 separate courses to help you create your own Home Solar System.
They report up to 50% reduction in the power bill - however the guide wasn't so easy to follow, because it required some technical knowledge
When a support ticket was submitted in order to inquire about some technical difficulties with the installation process, our support ticket was not responded to. A full, hands-on support system is vital if a relative "novice" is to install the technology, and here unfortunately it just wasn't there.
Overall this is a decent product, but unlike our top pick, it includes only information about Home Solar Panels, without including sufficient information on Wind Power Generation.
These days everyone needs solar energy.
Why?
Gas prices so high.. Electricity is so expensive..
Save your Money - Just think about it:
Don't pay for your electricity any longer...
Instead, the power company will pay YOU...
***
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http://www.goldworthfinancial.com/what_really_happened.php
Its no secret!... Our Economy and Financial markets are facing tumultuous times due to: Crashing Credit and Real Estate Markets, Plummeting U.S. Dollar, Inflation, High Energy Prices and Irresponsible Government spending...
Ask Yourself…
How bad is it going to get and what can I do to protect myself.....
Due to the Patriot Act, the Privacy that was guaranteed by the 4th Amendment in the U.S. Constitution has for the most part disappeared in the area of investments. Today just about every asset and investment can be traced; is reportable and visible by the watchful eyes of the Federal Government.
Except!...for “Private” Gold & Silver, one of the Last Private investments in our “Monetary system”.
Discover how Physical Gold & Silver have been utilized by this nations’ wealthiest families in order to Pass down Wealth from generation to generation…. Under the radar… and.. Legally!
Learn why Gold & Silver will be the only “barter” instrument in the coming Economic Collapse--Depression!
How Government Cartels manipulate the gold market through bullion banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.
What effect the Amero, the new currency of the North American Union, will have on your retirement accounts and savings.
Why the devaluation of the U.S. Dollar, is necessary in order to introduce the Amero, resulting in the destruction of the middle class in America.
Why NAFTA and the International Super Highway are the beginning of the end of America...and your rights.
Complete the form for rush delivery and online access to......
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Take the opportunity to educate and empower yourself, before it’s too late!
The Gold & Silver Protection Guide Includes......
What Really drives Gold & Silver Prices
The 2008 Gold and Precious Metals Forecast
The Pros & Cons of the most popular American and Foreign coins.
How much premium should be paid over the spot market price; so you do not over pay dealer commissions—mark ups.
The misconception of what defines numismatics, bullion, graded, certified proofs, and semi-numismatic coins.
Which Gold and Silver coins qualify as private investments; are exempt from dealer reporting (no 1099’s) and Government confiscation--under the 1933 Gold Confiscation Act. & Federal Register.
How to place Gold and other Precious Metals in your 401K or IRA without incurring penalties and tax consequences.
and much more.....
***
http://www.topsecrettaxsavings.com/?lecode=ggconsp121007&gclid=CKazlJ2bmJcCFQdNgwod7F6LIw
Learn How To Drastically Lower Your Taxes - Free!
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You can also call us at: 888-695-2765
Secure & Confidential: Privacy Policy
Your information will never be rented, traded or sold. We guarantee your confidentiality.
How Much Longer Do You Want to Overpay your taxes?
Dear Taxpayer,
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The Tax Savings Attorney™
How Wall Street Is Siphoning Off Your Savings And Ruining Your Retirement
There are two very different tax systems in this country - the educated and the uneducated tax systems. The difference between the two can be tens of thousands of dollars every year!
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Drew presents practical strategies which will help you save thousands of dollars in taxes. He also is able to help you build wealth and protect it for your retirement and your family's future. His teleseminars are an excellent adjunct to his valuable programs.
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Copyright © 2003-2008 Pathfinder Business Strategies LLC, 10305 102nd Terrace, Suite 102, Sebastian, FL 32958
***
http://www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com/sign_up/THCrense.html
“6 months ago, I was constantly fatigued, overweight, and heading toward diabetes. Today, I’m healthy, energetic, and can fit into jeans I wore before I gave birth to three kids….”
Record Numbers of Patients Avoid Cancer, Arthritis, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Other Devastating Illness … for Decades …
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Dear Health Conscious Reader,
Are you sick and tired of feeling sick and tired?
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I’m a 46-year-old mother of three young kids ages 3 to 9.
As the CEO of a $25 million publishing company, I juggle motherhood with a rewarding but stressful executive career.
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Being tired all the time made me irritable. I constantly fought with my husband … blew my stack with my staff … and snapped at my children all the time.
I was going to the gym for an hour every morning. But it didn’t boost my energy. Worse, I had gained lots of weight … and could not lose a pound.
Then one evening, I ate a dinner that resolved all my health problems -- and utterly changed my life forever.
It wasn’t the food on the plate.
It was one of my dinner companions, one of the country's foremost medical experts-- let’s call him “JL” for now -- who listened attentively to my tales of woe as I complained how stressed, tired, and miserable I felt.
JL handed me a business card and told me: “Make an appointment to see me at my clinic. We can help you get better.”
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Saving Ryan's Life: Cracking the Healing Code
When I arrived there, I discovered that over 7,000 patients have already been treated at this clinic by JL and his team of medical experts.
My name is Mary Ellen Tribby, and I am the Executive Publisher of Early to Rise an online health, wealth and success newsletter reaching over 400,000 readers.
I’m writing to you today to tell you that JL’s innovative approach to healing has changed my life for the better.
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You can review this special report absolutely risk-free and also receive a complimentary subscription to Total Health Breakthroughs --a twice a week health and wellness email newsletter offering alternative solutions for the mind, body and soul.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
What we know about the Mumbai attacks
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/11/27/mumbai.investigation
What we know about the Mumbai attacks
11-27-8
Story Highlights
Gunmen arrived by boats, split into at least three groups, authorities say
British authorities: Indian navy probing ship where boats may have originated
More than 120 people killed in Mumbai attacks since Wednesday
Gunmen still believed to be in two hotels, Jewish residence on Friday morning
(CNN) -- Gunmen who arrived by boats launched attacks on at least seven locations in Mumbai, India, on Wednesday night, killing more than 120 people, authorities say.
By Friday morning, authorities believed militants still were in two luxury hotels and a Jewish center in the city.
The following is what is known about the attacks:
• Gunmen arrived by boats at the Mumbai waterfront near the Gateway of India monument on Wednesday night, police said. The gunmen hijacked cars, including a police van, and split into at least three groups to carry out the attacks, according to police.
• One group headed toward the Cafe Leopold, a popular hangout for Western tourists, firing indiscriminately at passers-by on the street. The group then opened fire and lobbed grenades at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station, authorities said.
• As police rushed to the scene of the attacks, gunmen attacked the Cama Hospital for women and infants. Several people were killed at the hospital, and a standoff there lasted until Thursday morning.
• Two other groups attacked the Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels, taking hostages there, police said.
• Gunmen also took hostages at the Chabad House, where several Jewish families live, police said. Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, the city's envoy for the community, was being held inside with his wife, a member of the Hasidic Jewish movement said. Gunmen and hostages still were believed to be in the house Friday morning.
• Police said gunmen fired indiscriminately from the Chabad House. Stray bullets killed a couple in their home and a 16-year-old boy who stepped outside, police said. Two women and a child escaped from the building Thursday, a government official says.
• At the hotels, hostages or people who were trapped left at various times Thursday and Friday. Commandos entered both hotels, trying to flush out militants and rescue others.
• By 12:30 a.m. IT on Friday, two gunmen remained at the Oberoi hotel, the director-general of the National Security Guards said. At 1 a.m., one gunman was killed at the Oberoi hotel, the official said. He said he couldn't say for sure how many gunmen were still at the Oberoi.
• Early Friday, an Indian general told reporters that two or three gunmen, one of whom was wounded, remained inside the Taj hotel.
• An undetermined number of nonmilitants remained inside the hotels Friday morning, NSG director-general J.K. Dutt said. "There are some of them inside the rooms, and they are not prepared to open the doors," he said. "Probably they are fearing that it might not be an innocent."
• Fire brigades battled fires at both hotels. By early Friday, it appeared what had been a major fire at the Oberoi had been extinguished.
• By Friday morning, 125 had been killed in the attacks, including at least six foreigners, authorities said. An Italian and a Briton were among the confirmed dead. Another 327 people were wounded, including seven Britons, three Americans and two Australians. Watch theories on who may have carried out the attacks »
• At least nine gunmen were killed in fighting with police by Friday morning. Also among the dead were 14 police officers and the chief of the Mumbai police anti-terror squad.
• CNN's sister network in India, CNN-IBN, quoted police sources as saying there were about 26 gunmen.
• Authorities found 8 kilograms (17 pounds) of RDX, one of the most powerful kinds of military explosives, at a restaurant near the Taj, indicating that the attackers may have been planning more violence.
• The Indian navy, stepping up patrols on the country's western coast after the attack, was questioning the crew of the MV Alpha, a ship detained with the help of the Indian coast guard, British authorities said. The authorities said they believe the attackers' boats came from this ship, and that they believe the ship is from Karachi, Pakistan.
• Karachi police say they have no evidence the attackers departed from their city.
• Several Indian news outlets report a group called the Deccan Mujahideen e-mailed them to claim responsibility. Intelligence officials say little is known about the group. U.S. officials and security analysts say the sophistication of the attacks may indicate a more-established group is responsible.
• State media Press Trust of India, citing Union Cabinet Minister Kapil Sibal, reported the gunmen had worked for months to prepare, even setting up "control rooms" in the two luxury hotels that were targeted.
India • Terrorism • Mumbai
What we know about the Mumbai attacks
11-27-8
Story Highlights
Gunmen arrived by boats, split into at least three groups, authorities say
British authorities: Indian navy probing ship where boats may have originated
More than 120 people killed in Mumbai attacks since Wednesday
Gunmen still believed to be in two hotels, Jewish residence on Friday morning
(CNN) -- Gunmen who arrived by boats launched attacks on at least seven locations in Mumbai, India, on Wednesday night, killing more than 120 people, authorities say.
By Friday morning, authorities believed militants still were in two luxury hotels and a Jewish center in the city.
The following is what is known about the attacks:
• Gunmen arrived by boats at the Mumbai waterfront near the Gateway of India monument on Wednesday night, police said. The gunmen hijacked cars, including a police van, and split into at least three groups to carry out the attacks, according to police.
• One group headed toward the Cafe Leopold, a popular hangout for Western tourists, firing indiscriminately at passers-by on the street. The group then opened fire and lobbed grenades at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station, authorities said.
• As police rushed to the scene of the attacks, gunmen attacked the Cama Hospital for women and infants. Several people were killed at the hospital, and a standoff there lasted until Thursday morning.
• Two other groups attacked the Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels, taking hostages there, police said.
• Gunmen also took hostages at the Chabad House, where several Jewish families live, police said. Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, the city's envoy for the community, was being held inside with his wife, a member of the Hasidic Jewish movement said. Gunmen and hostages still were believed to be in the house Friday morning.
• Police said gunmen fired indiscriminately from the Chabad House. Stray bullets killed a couple in their home and a 16-year-old boy who stepped outside, police said. Two women and a child escaped from the building Thursday, a government official says.
• At the hotels, hostages or people who were trapped left at various times Thursday and Friday. Commandos entered both hotels, trying to flush out militants and rescue others.
• By 12:30 a.m. IT on Friday, two gunmen remained at the Oberoi hotel, the director-general of the National Security Guards said. At 1 a.m., one gunman was killed at the Oberoi hotel, the official said. He said he couldn't say for sure how many gunmen were still at the Oberoi.
• Early Friday, an Indian general told reporters that two or three gunmen, one of whom was wounded, remained inside the Taj hotel.
• An undetermined number of nonmilitants remained inside the hotels Friday morning, NSG director-general J.K. Dutt said. "There are some of them inside the rooms, and they are not prepared to open the doors," he said. "Probably they are fearing that it might not be an innocent."
• Fire brigades battled fires at both hotels. By early Friday, it appeared what had been a major fire at the Oberoi had been extinguished.
• By Friday morning, 125 had been killed in the attacks, including at least six foreigners, authorities said. An Italian and a Briton were among the confirmed dead. Another 327 people were wounded, including seven Britons, three Americans and two Australians. Watch theories on who may have carried out the attacks »
• At least nine gunmen were killed in fighting with police by Friday morning. Also among the dead were 14 police officers and the chief of the Mumbai police anti-terror squad.
• CNN's sister network in India, CNN-IBN, quoted police sources as saying there were about 26 gunmen.
• Authorities found 8 kilograms (17 pounds) of RDX, one of the most powerful kinds of military explosives, at a restaurant near the Taj, indicating that the attackers may have been planning more violence.
• The Indian navy, stepping up patrols on the country's western coast after the attack, was questioning the crew of the MV Alpha, a ship detained with the help of the Indian coast guard, British authorities said. The authorities said they believe the attackers' boats came from this ship, and that they believe the ship is from Karachi, Pakistan.
• Karachi police say they have no evidence the attackers departed from their city.
• Several Indian news outlets report a group called the Deccan Mujahideen e-mailed them to claim responsibility. Intelligence officials say little is known about the group. U.S. officials and security analysts say the sophistication of the attacks may indicate a more-established group is responsible.
• State media Press Trust of India, citing Union Cabinet Minister Kapil Sibal, reported the gunmen had worked for months to prepare, even setting up "control rooms" in the two luxury hotels that were targeted.
India • Terrorism • Mumbai
Sophisticated Attacks, but by Whom?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/world/asia/28group.html
November 28, 2008
Sophisticated Attacks, but by Whom?
By ALAN COWELL and SOUAD MEKHENNET
PARIS — A day after the terror attacks in Mumbai that killed over 100 people, one question remained as impenetrable as the smoke that still billowed from two of the city’s landmark hotels: who carried out the attacks?
The Indian authorities say they captured some of the attackers, so some answers may emerge soon. But for now, their identities remain a mystery. Surviving witnesses recalled the gunmen as masked young men in unremarkable T-shirts and jeans, some heavily armed, wearing backpacks filled with weapons. The only claim of responsibility came from a group that may not even exist.
The assaults represented a marked departure in scope and ambition from other recent terrorist attacks in India, which have singled out local people rather than foreigners and hit single rather than multiple targets.
The Mumbai assault, by contrast, was seemed directed at foreigners, involved hostage taking and was aimed at multiple and highly symbolic targets.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India said the attacks probably had “external linkages,” reflecting calculations among Indian officials that the level of planning, preparation and coordination could not have been achieved without help from experienced terrorists. But some security experts insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims, with a domestic agenda.
The e-mail message taking responsibility that was sent to Indian media outlets on Wednesday night said the attackers were from a group called Deccan Mujahedeen. Deccan is a neighborhood of the Indian city of Hyderabad. The word also describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahedeen is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters.
But security experts drew a blank on any such organization. Sajjan Gohel, a security expert in London, called it a “front name” and said the group was “nonexistent.”
An Indian security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified said the name suggested ties to a group called Indian Mujahedeen, which has been implicated in a string of bombing attacks in India killing about 200 people this year alone.
On Sept. 15, an e-mail message published in Indian newspapers and said to have been sent by representatives of Indian Mujahedeen threatened potential “deadly attacks” in Mumbai. The message warned counterterrorism officials in the city that “you are already on our hit-list and this time very, very seriously.”
Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the antiterrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were, indeed, reported killed in the attacks in Mumbai.
With relations long strained between India and Pakistan, particularly over the disputed territory of Kashmir, suspicions turned toward Al Qaeda or Pakistani militants. The Indian security official said the attackers likely had ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a guerrilla group run by Pakistani intelligence in the conflict with India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. On Thursday, the group denied involved in the Mumbai attacks. India also blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba for a suicide assault on its Parliament by gunmen in December 2001 that led to a perilous military standoff with Pakistan.
The Indian official also suggested the foot-soldiers in the attack might have emerged from an outlawed militant group of Islamic students. Photographs from security cameras showed some youthful attackers carrying assault rifles and smiling as they began the operation.
Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she pointed to India’s domestic problems, and long tensions between Hindus, who make up about 80 percent of India’s population of 1.13 billion, and Muslims, who make up 13.4 percent.
“There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India,” Ms. Fair said. “The economic disparities are startling and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India.
“The public political face of India says, ‘Our Muslims have not been radicalized,’ she said. “But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that’s not true. India’s Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad.”
“Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda,” she said. “But this is a domestic issue. This is not India’s 9/11.”
Alan Cowell reported from Paris, and Souad Mekhennet from Frankfurt. Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan.
November 28, 2008
Sophisticated Attacks, but by Whom?
By ALAN COWELL and SOUAD MEKHENNET
PARIS — A day after the terror attacks in Mumbai that killed over 100 people, one question remained as impenetrable as the smoke that still billowed from two of the city’s landmark hotels: who carried out the attacks?
The Indian authorities say they captured some of the attackers, so some answers may emerge soon. But for now, their identities remain a mystery. Surviving witnesses recalled the gunmen as masked young men in unremarkable T-shirts and jeans, some heavily armed, wearing backpacks filled with weapons. The only claim of responsibility came from a group that may not even exist.
The assaults represented a marked departure in scope and ambition from other recent terrorist attacks in India, which have singled out local people rather than foreigners and hit single rather than multiple targets.
The Mumbai assault, by contrast, was seemed directed at foreigners, involved hostage taking and was aimed at multiple and highly symbolic targets.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India said the attacks probably had “external linkages,” reflecting calculations among Indian officials that the level of planning, preparation and coordination could not have been achieved without help from experienced terrorists. But some security experts insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims, with a domestic agenda.
The e-mail message taking responsibility that was sent to Indian media outlets on Wednesday night said the attackers were from a group called Deccan Mujahedeen. Deccan is a neighborhood of the Indian city of Hyderabad. The word also describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahedeen is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters.
But security experts drew a blank on any such organization. Sajjan Gohel, a security expert in London, called it a “front name” and said the group was “nonexistent.”
An Indian security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified said the name suggested ties to a group called Indian Mujahedeen, which has been implicated in a string of bombing attacks in India killing about 200 people this year alone.
On Sept. 15, an e-mail message published in Indian newspapers and said to have been sent by representatives of Indian Mujahedeen threatened potential “deadly attacks” in Mumbai. The message warned counterterrorism officials in the city that “you are already on our hit-list and this time very, very seriously.”
Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the antiterrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were, indeed, reported killed in the attacks in Mumbai.
With relations long strained between India and Pakistan, particularly over the disputed territory of Kashmir, suspicions turned toward Al Qaeda or Pakistani militants. The Indian security official said the attackers likely had ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a guerrilla group run by Pakistani intelligence in the conflict with India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. On Thursday, the group denied involved in the Mumbai attacks. India also blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba for a suicide assault on its Parliament by gunmen in December 2001 that led to a perilous military standoff with Pakistan.
The Indian official also suggested the foot-soldiers in the attack might have emerged from an outlawed militant group of Islamic students. Photographs from security cameras showed some youthful attackers carrying assault rifles and smiling as they began the operation.
Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she pointed to India’s domestic problems, and long tensions between Hindus, who make up about 80 percent of India’s population of 1.13 billion, and Muslims, who make up 13.4 percent.
“There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India,” Ms. Fair said. “The economic disparities are startling and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India.
“The public political face of India says, ‘Our Muslims have not been radicalized,’ she said. “But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that’s not true. India’s Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad.”
“Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda,” she said. “But this is a domestic issue. This is not India’s 9/11.”
Alan Cowell reported from Paris, and Souad Mekhennet from Frankfurt. Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan.
Experts doubt Qaeda link in Mumbai attacks
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/28group.php
Experts doubt Qaeda link in Mumbai attacks
By Mark McDonald
Thursday, November 27, 2008
HONG KONG: The men came wearing black hoods, firing automatic weapons and throwing grenades, taking hostages, attacking two hotels, a cinema, a café, a train station and other popular and undefended "soft targets."
An e-mail message to Indian media outlets that claimed responsibility for the bloody attacks in Mumbai on Wednesday night said the militants were from the Deccan Mujahideen.
Global terrorism experts said Thursday they had never heard of the group. And based on its tactics, they said, it was probably not a cell or group linked to Al Qaeda.
"It's even unclear whether it's a real group or not," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the author of the book "Inside Terrorism." "It could be a cover name for another group, or a name adopted just for this particular incident."
Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested that the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims - and not linked to Al Qaeda or the violent South Asian terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
"There's absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it," she said of the attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don't do hostage taking, and they don't do grenades."
Hoffman agreed that the assault was "not exactly Al Qaeda's modus operandi, which is suicide attacks."
But he said the timed attacks, which he called "tactical, sophisticated and coordinated," perhaps pointed to a broader organization behind the perpetrators. Fair also noted that the fact the group had not proclaimed its ideology in a manifesto was "not at all unusual."
"You don't see these types of terrorist operations very often, if at all," Hoffman said. "These aren't just a bunch of radical guys coming together to cause mayhem.
"This takes a different skill set. It doesn't take much skill to make a bomb. This is not just pressing a button as a suicide bomber and dying. You don't learn this over the Internet."
The word Deccan describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahideen, of course, is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters. The very name - if it is a real group - suggests a domestic islamist agenda.
"It's maybe not so much a group as a cell that will take on a name for a specific operation," said Fair. "In India you hear these unusual names."
Fair did not agree that the attacks on Wednesday necessarily required deep planning and training.
"This wasn't something that required a logistical mastermind," she said. "These were not hardened targets. A huge train station with zero security. Two hotels with no security, both owned by Indians. Leopold's Café. How hard is it, really? It's not rocket science."
Fair believes the attacks could be "yet another manifestation of domestic terrorism" that has its genesis in a longstanding institutional discrimination against Muslims.
"There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India," she said, "The economic disparities are startling, and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India."
The CIA puts the population of India at 1.15 billion, with Hindus making up about 80 percent of the total and Muslims 13.4 percent.
Fair said one incident - "a watershed event" - that continues to anger Muslims were the riots that swept nearby Gujarat State in 2002. The violence killed between 1,000 and 2,000 people, most of them Muslims.
"The public political face of India says, 'Our Muslims have not been radicalized.' But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that's not true. India's Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad.
"Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. 'Al Qaeda's in your toilet!' But this is a domestic issue. This is not India's 9/11."
For Hoffman, who has studied terrorism for more than 30 years, the Mumbai attacks are "alarming on a number of levels."
"It's not often that things in terrorism alarm me. So much is a repeat of what we see almost every day, like suicide bombings. There's no real innovation in terrorism, which is why 9/11 was so terrifying, because it was so innovative and heinously clever.
"But these attacks show how a handful of men, basically using weapons off the shelf, can paralyze a city and frustrate highly trained security forces. These attacks were calculated to spread alarm and anxiety - to put it quite frankly, to unhinge things - and that's exactly what they've done."
Experts doubt Qaeda link in Mumbai attacks
By Mark McDonald
Thursday, November 27, 2008
HONG KONG: The men came wearing black hoods, firing automatic weapons and throwing grenades, taking hostages, attacking two hotels, a cinema, a café, a train station and other popular and undefended "soft targets."
An e-mail message to Indian media outlets that claimed responsibility for the bloody attacks in Mumbai on Wednesday night said the militants were from the Deccan Mujahideen.
Global terrorism experts said Thursday they had never heard of the group. And based on its tactics, they said, it was probably not a cell or group linked to Al Qaeda.
"It's even unclear whether it's a real group or not," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the author of the book "Inside Terrorism." "It could be a cover name for another group, or a name adopted just for this particular incident."
Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested that the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims - and not linked to Al Qaeda or the violent South Asian terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
"There's absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it," she said of the attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don't do hostage taking, and they don't do grenades."
Hoffman agreed that the assault was "not exactly Al Qaeda's modus operandi, which is suicide attacks."
But he said the timed attacks, which he called "tactical, sophisticated and coordinated," perhaps pointed to a broader organization behind the perpetrators. Fair also noted that the fact the group had not proclaimed its ideology in a manifesto was "not at all unusual."
"You don't see these types of terrorist operations very often, if at all," Hoffman said. "These aren't just a bunch of radical guys coming together to cause mayhem.
"This takes a different skill set. It doesn't take much skill to make a bomb. This is not just pressing a button as a suicide bomber and dying. You don't learn this over the Internet."
The word Deccan describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahideen, of course, is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters. The very name - if it is a real group - suggests a domestic islamist agenda.
"It's maybe not so much a group as a cell that will take on a name for a specific operation," said Fair. "In India you hear these unusual names."
Fair did not agree that the attacks on Wednesday necessarily required deep planning and training.
"This wasn't something that required a logistical mastermind," she said. "These were not hardened targets. A huge train station with zero security. Two hotels with no security, both owned by Indians. Leopold's Café. How hard is it, really? It's not rocket science."
Fair believes the attacks could be "yet another manifestation of domestic terrorism" that has its genesis in a longstanding institutional discrimination against Muslims.
"There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India," she said, "The economic disparities are startling, and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India."
The CIA puts the population of India at 1.15 billion, with Hindus making up about 80 percent of the total and Muslims 13.4 percent.
Fair said one incident - "a watershed event" - that continues to anger Muslims were the riots that swept nearby Gujarat State in 2002. The violence killed between 1,000 and 2,000 people, most of them Muslims.
"The public political face of India says, 'Our Muslims have not been radicalized.' But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that's not true. India's Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad.
"Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. 'Al Qaeda's in your toilet!' But this is a domestic issue. This is not India's 9/11."
For Hoffman, who has studied terrorism for more than 30 years, the Mumbai attacks are "alarming on a number of levels."
"It's not often that things in terrorism alarm me. So much is a repeat of what we see almost every day, like suicide bombings. There's no real innovation in terrorism, which is why 9/11 was so terrifying, because it was so innovative and heinously clever.
"But these attacks show how a handful of men, basically using weapons off the shelf, can paralyze a city and frustrate highly trained security forces. These attacks were calculated to spread alarm and anxiety - to put it quite frankly, to unhinge things - and that's exactly what they've done."
Why the Taj Mahal Hotel was chosen
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/3529804/Bombay-terror-attacks-Why-the-Taj-Mahal-Hotel-was-chosen.html
Bombay terror attacks: Why the Taj Mahal Hotel was chosen
By choosing to attack Bombay's most opulent and iconic hotel, the Islamist terrorists have sent a powerful message to India's leaders, foreign investors and tourists as well as the country's new economic elite.
By Peter Foster
27 Nov 2008
With the possible exception of the "floating" Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur which was made famous by the James Bond film Octopussy, the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel in Bombay is India's best-known and best-loved hotel.
For any serious foreign investor, businessman or wealthy tourist visiting India's commercial capital, "The Taj", as it is universally known by the cognoscenti, is always the first choice.
With best rooms in the superior old wing costing more than £250 per night - more than 250 millions Indians can expect to earn in a year - the hotel offers a world of secluded luxury, away from the grinding poverty and infrastructural decay of Mumbai.
Legend has it that its creator, a Parsi industrialist called Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, commissioned the building after being refused entry to the now-defunct Apollo Hotel, which had a strict Europeans-only policy.
However with its colonnades of shops stuffed with the world's most expensive brands, what Bombay's rich set consider the ultimate in cosmopolitan luxury, would equally be perceived by Islamist ideologues as a symbol of Western decadence.
Over the years guests have included The Queen, the former Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser and the Beatle John Lennon, to name but a few of the notable personalities to have checked in to the magnificent old wing.
More recently the hotel hosted the guests for Bombay leg of Liz Hurley's two-week extravaganza of a wedding, with guests dashing straight from the front door to waiting motor launches to take them to the privacy of waiting super-yachts in the harbour beyond.
To have pictures of burning Taj Hotel broadcast around the world will have a deeper impact than even perhaps the terrorists intended, striking a blow against a symbol of Indian wealth and progress and sending shivers down the spine of some of the richest and most powerful people on the planet.
Bombay terror attacks: Why the Taj Mahal Hotel was chosen
By choosing to attack Bombay's most opulent and iconic hotel, the Islamist terrorists have sent a powerful message to India's leaders, foreign investors and tourists as well as the country's new economic elite.
By Peter Foster
27 Nov 2008
With the possible exception of the "floating" Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur which was made famous by the James Bond film Octopussy, the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel in Bombay is India's best-known and best-loved hotel.
For any serious foreign investor, businessman or wealthy tourist visiting India's commercial capital, "The Taj", as it is universally known by the cognoscenti, is always the first choice.
With best rooms in the superior old wing costing more than £250 per night - more than 250 millions Indians can expect to earn in a year - the hotel offers a world of secluded luxury, away from the grinding poverty and infrastructural decay of Mumbai.
Legend has it that its creator, a Parsi industrialist called Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, commissioned the building after being refused entry to the now-defunct Apollo Hotel, which had a strict Europeans-only policy.
However with its colonnades of shops stuffed with the world's most expensive brands, what Bombay's rich set consider the ultimate in cosmopolitan luxury, would equally be perceived by Islamist ideologues as a symbol of Western decadence.
Over the years guests have included The Queen, the former Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser and the Beatle John Lennon, to name but a few of the notable personalities to have checked in to the magnificent old wing.
More recently the hotel hosted the guests for Bombay leg of Liz Hurley's two-week extravaganza of a wedding, with guests dashing straight from the front door to waiting motor launches to take them to the privacy of waiting super-yachts in the harbour beyond.
To have pictures of burning Taj Hotel broadcast around the world will have a deeper impact than even perhaps the terrorists intended, striking a blow against a symbol of Indian wealth and progress and sending shivers down the spine of some of the richest and most powerful people on the planet.
Deepak Chopra on Mumbai
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-haimoff/deepak-chopra-on-mumbai-t_b_146837.html
Michelle Haimoff
November 27, 2008
Deepak Chopra on Mumbai: Too Controversial for CNN?
Read More: Auto Industry, Big Oil, Cars, Chevrolet, Cnn, Deepak Chopra, Deepak Chopra Cnn, Deepak Chopra Mumbai, India, Larry King, Mumbai, Mumbai Attacks, Mumbai Deaths, Mumbai Hotel Shootings, Mumbai Terrorist Attacks, Oil, Oil Industry, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism, War On Terror, Politics News
A CNN journalist interviewed Deepak Chopra last night about his take on the Mumbai attacks and how to prevent similar attacks in the future, but it looked like producers cut Chopra off when he started to get too controversial.
Chopra: What we have seen in Mumbai has been brewing for a long time, and the war on terrorism and the attack on Iraq compounded the situation. What we call "collateral damage" and going after the wrong people actually turns moderates into extremists, and that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay. Now the worst thing that could happen is there's a backlash on the Muslims from the fundamental Hindus in India, which then will perpetuate the problem. Inflammation will create more inflammation.
CNN: Let me jump in on that because you're presuming something very important, which is that it's Muslims who have carried out these attacks and, in some cases, with Washington in their sights.
Chopra: Ultimately the message is always toward Washington because it's also the perception that Washington, in their way, directly or indirectly funds both sides of the war on terror. They fund our side, then our petrol dollars going to Saudi Arabia through Pakistan and ultimately these terrorist groups, which are very organized. You know Jonathan, it takes a lot of money to do this. It takes a lot of organization to do this. Where's the money coming from, you know? The money is coming from the vested interests. I'm not talking about conspiracy theories, but what happens is, our policies, our foreign policies, actually perpetuate this problem. Because, you know, 25% of the world's population is Muslim and they're the fastest growing segment of the population of the world. The more we alienate the Muslim population, the more the moderates are likely to become extremists.
CNN: I hope you're - you've - (CNN edits out the rest and inserts him concluding the interview saying "Indian physician and philosopher Deepak Chopra.")
I don't know why CNN wrapped the Chopra interview so hastily, but perhaps it was because the network had a Chevrolet ad to run. Chevrolet. Which is a manufacturer of automobiles. Which are propelled by gasoline. Which comes from oil rich countries like Saudi Arabia. Which fund Islamic fundamentalists. Which do things like attack hotels in India.
As Thomas L. Friedman has been saying for years, "the price of oil and the pace of freedom are inversely correlated." When oil prices are high, anti-democratic regimes become richer and more powerful, terrorists get funding and the world is unsafe. When oil prices are low, the "petroauthoritarian regimes [have] to open themselves to foreign investment and educate and empower their people more in order to earn income." When there is no demand for oil at all, there is simply no money with which to fund terrorists.
I hope that CNN producers didn't edit the end of the Chopra interview in deference to their car company advertisers. Chopra touched on similar topics with Larry King earlier in the day, so perhaps cutting the interview off was just a formatting decision. I'm going to pretend that it's that. Because if I thought that a news network in a democratic country was censoring the connection between oil dependence and terrorism for fear of upsetting advertisers I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
Michelle Haimoff
November 27, 2008
Deepak Chopra on Mumbai: Too Controversial for CNN?
Read More: Auto Industry, Big Oil, Cars, Chevrolet, Cnn, Deepak Chopra, Deepak Chopra Cnn, Deepak Chopra Mumbai, India, Larry King, Mumbai, Mumbai Attacks, Mumbai Deaths, Mumbai Hotel Shootings, Mumbai Terrorist Attacks, Oil, Oil Industry, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism, War On Terror, Politics News
A CNN journalist interviewed Deepak Chopra last night about his take on the Mumbai attacks and how to prevent similar attacks in the future, but it looked like producers cut Chopra off when he started to get too controversial.
Chopra: What we have seen in Mumbai has been brewing for a long time, and the war on terrorism and the attack on Iraq compounded the situation. What we call "collateral damage" and going after the wrong people actually turns moderates into extremists, and that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay. Now the worst thing that could happen is there's a backlash on the Muslims from the fundamental Hindus in India, which then will perpetuate the problem. Inflammation will create more inflammation.
CNN: Let me jump in on that because you're presuming something very important, which is that it's Muslims who have carried out these attacks and, in some cases, with Washington in their sights.
Chopra: Ultimately the message is always toward Washington because it's also the perception that Washington, in their way, directly or indirectly funds both sides of the war on terror. They fund our side, then our petrol dollars going to Saudi Arabia through Pakistan and ultimately these terrorist groups, which are very organized. You know Jonathan, it takes a lot of money to do this. It takes a lot of organization to do this. Where's the money coming from, you know? The money is coming from the vested interests. I'm not talking about conspiracy theories, but what happens is, our policies, our foreign policies, actually perpetuate this problem. Because, you know, 25% of the world's population is Muslim and they're the fastest growing segment of the population of the world. The more we alienate the Muslim population, the more the moderates are likely to become extremists.
CNN: I hope you're - you've - (CNN edits out the rest and inserts him concluding the interview saying "Indian physician and philosopher Deepak Chopra.")
I don't know why CNN wrapped the Chopra interview so hastily, but perhaps it was because the network had a Chevrolet ad to run. Chevrolet. Which is a manufacturer of automobiles. Which are propelled by gasoline. Which comes from oil rich countries like Saudi Arabia. Which fund Islamic fundamentalists. Which do things like attack hotels in India.
As Thomas L. Friedman has been saying for years, "the price of oil and the pace of freedom are inversely correlated." When oil prices are high, anti-democratic regimes become richer and more powerful, terrorists get funding and the world is unsafe. When oil prices are low, the "petroauthoritarian regimes [have] to open themselves to foreign investment and educate and empower their people more in order to earn income." When there is no demand for oil at all, there is simply no money with which to fund terrorists.
I hope that CNN producers didn't edit the end of the Chopra interview in deference to their car company advertisers. Chopra touched on similar topics with Larry King earlier in the day, so perhaps cutting the interview off was just a formatting decision. I'm going to pretend that it's that. Because if I thought that a news network in a democratic country was censoring the connection between oil dependence and terrorism for fear of upsetting advertisers I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
The truth behind the Citigroup nationalization
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4062.shtml
The truth behind the Citigroup nationalization
By F. William Engdahl
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Nov 27, 2008
On Friday, November 21, the world came within a hair’s breadth of the most colossal financial collapse in history, according to bankers on the inside of events with whom we have contact.
The trigger was the bank which only two years ago was America’s largest, Citigroup. The size of the US government de facto nationalization of the $2 trillion banking institution is an indication of shocks yet to come in other major US and perhaps European banks thought to be ‘too big to fail.’
The clumsy way in which US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, himself not a banker but a Wall Street ‘investment banker,’ whose experience has been in the quite different world of buying and selling stocks or bonds or underwriting and selling same, has handled the unfolding crisis has been worse than incompetent. It has made a grave situation into a globally alarming one.
‘Spitting into the wind’
A case in point is the secretive manner in which Paulson has used the $700 billion in taxpayer funds voted him by a pliable Congress in September. Early on, Paulson put $125 billion into the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for his old firm, Goldman Sachs. However, if we compare the value of the equity share that $125 billion bought with the market price of those banks’ stock, US taxpayers have paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could have bought for $62.5 billion, according to a detailed analysis from Ron W. Bloom, economist with the United Steelworkers union, whose members as well as pension fund face devastating losses were GM to fail.
That means half of the public’s money was a gift to Paulson’s Wall Street cronies. Now, only weeks later, the Treasury is forced to intervene to de facto nationalize Citigroup. It won’t be the last.
Paulson demanded, and got from a pliable US Congress, Democrats as well as Republicans, sole discretion over how and where he can invest the $700 billion, to date with no effective oversight. It amounts to the Treasury secretary in effect ‘spitting into the wind’ in terms of resolving the fundamental crisis.
It should be clear to any serious analyst by now that the September decision by Paulson to defer to rigid financial ideology and let the fourth largest US investment bank, Lehman Brothers fail, was the proximate trigger for the present global crisis. Lehman Brothers’ surprise collapse triggered the current global crisis of confidence. It was simply not clear to the rest of the banking world which US financial institution bank might be saved and which not, after the government had earlier saved the far smaller Bear Stearns, while letting the larger, far more strategic Lehman Brothers fail.
Some Citigroup details
The most alarming aspect of the crisis is the fact that we are in an inter-regnum period when the next president has been elected but cannot act on the situation until after January 20, 2009, when he is sworn in.
Consider the details of the latest Citigroup government de facto nationalization (for ideological reasons Paulson and the Bush administration hysterically avoid admitting they are in the process of nationalizing key banks). Citigroup has more than $2 trillion of assets, dwarfing companies such as American International Group Inc. that got some $150 billion in US taxpayer funds in the past two months. Ironically, only eight weeks before, the government had designated Citigroup to take over the failing Wachovia Bank. Normally, authorities have an ailing bank absorbed by a stronger one. In this instance the opposite seems to have been the case. Now it is clear that the Citigroup was in deeper trouble than Wachovia. In a matter of hours in the week before the US government nationalization was announced, the stock value of Citibank plunged to $3.77 in New York, giving the company a market value of about $21 billion. The market value of Citigroup stock in December 2006 had been $247 billion. Two days before the bank’s nationalization, the CEO, Vikram Pandit, had announced a huge 52,000 job slashing plan. It did nothing to stop the slide.
The scale of the hidden losses of perhaps the 20 largest US banks is so enormous that if not before, the first presidential decree of President Barack Obama will likely have to be declaration of a US ‘Bank Holiday’ and the full nationalization of the major banks, taking on the toxic assets and losses until the economy can again function with credit flowing to industry once more.
Citigroup and the government have identified a pool of about $306 billion in troubled assets. Citigroup will absorb the first $29 billion in losses. After that, remaining losses will be split between Citigroup and the government, with the bank absorbing 10 percent and the government absorbing 90 percent. The US Treasury Department will use its $700 billion TARP or Troubled Asset Recovery Program bailout fund, to assume up to $5 billion of losses. If necessary, the government’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) will bear the next $10 billion of losses. Beyond that, the Federal Reserve will guarantee any additional losses. The measures are without precedent in US financial history. It’s by no means certain they will salvage the dollar system.
The situation is so intertwined, with six US major banks holding the vast bulk of worldwide financial derivatives exposure, that the failure of a single major US financial institution could result in losses to the OTC derivatives market of $300-$400 billion, a new IMF working paper finds. What’s more, since such a failure would likely cause cascading failures of other institutions. total global financial system losses could exceed another $1,500 billion according to an IMF study by Singh and Segoviano.
The madness over a Detroit GM rescue deal
The health of Citigroup is not the only gripping crisis that must be dealt with. At this point, political and ideological bickering in the US Congress has so far prevented a simple emergency $25 billion loan extension to General Motors and others of the US Big Three automakers -- Ford and Chrysler. The absurd spectacle of US congressmen attacking the chairmen of the Big Three for flying to the emergency congressional hearings on a rescue loan in their private company jets, while largely ignoring the issue of consequences to the economy of a GM failure underscores the utter lack of touch with reality that has overwhelmed Washington in recent years.
For GM to go into bankruptcy risks a disaster of colossal proportions. Although Lehman Brothers, the biggest bankruptcy in US history, appears to have had an orderly settlement of its credit defaults swaps, the disruption occurred beforehand, as protection writers had to post additional collateral prior to settlement. That was a major factor in the dramatic global market selloff in October. GM is bigger by far, meaning bigger collateral damage, and this would take place when the financial system is even weaker than when Lehman failed.
In addition, a second, and potentially far more damaging issue, has been largely ignored. The advocates of letting GM go bankrupt argue that it can go into Chapter 11 just like other big companies that get themselves in trouble. That may not happen however, and a Chapter 7 or liquidation of GM that would then result would be a tectonic event.
The problem is that under Chapter 11, it takes time for the company to get the protection of a bankruptcy court. Until that time, which may be weeks or months, the company would need urgently ‘bridge financing’ to continue operating. This is known as ‘Debtor-in-Possession’ or DIP financing. DIP is essential for most Chapter 11 bankruptcies, as it takes time to get the plan of reorganization approved by creditors and the courts. Most companies, like GM today, go to bankruptcy court when they are at the end of their liquidity.
DIP is specifically for companies in, or on the verge of bankruptcy, and the debt is generally senior to other outstanding creditor claims. So it is actually very low risk, as the amount spent is usually not large, relatively speaking. But DIP lending is being severely curtailed right now, just when it is most needed, as healthier banks drastically curtail loans in the severe credit crunch situation.
Without access to DIP bridge financing, GM would be forced into a partial, or even a full liquidation. The ramifications are horrendous. Aside from loss of 125,000 US jobs at GM itself, GM is critical to keeping many US auto suppliers in business. If GM failed, soon most, possibly even all, of the US and even foreign auto suppliers will go under. Those parts suppliers are important to other automakers. Many foreign car factories would be forced to close due to loss of suppliers. Some analysts put 2009 job losses from a GM failure as high as 2.5 million jobs due to the follow-on effects. If the impact of that 2.5 million job loss is seen in terms of the overall losses to the economy of non-auto jobs such as services, home foreclosures caused and such, some estimate total impact would be more than 15 million jobs.
So far in the face of this staggering prospect, the members of the US Congress have chosen to focus on the fact the GM chief, Rick Wagoner, flew in his private company jet to Washington. The congressional charade conjures up the image of Nero playing his fiddle as Rome goes up in flames. It should not be surprising that at the recent EU-Asian Summit in Beijing, Chinese officials floated the idea of trading between the EU and Asian nations such as China in euros, renminbi, yen or other national currencies other than the dollar. The Citigroup bailout and GM debacle has confirmed the death of the post-1944 Bretton Woods Dollar System.
The truth behind Citigroup bailout
What neither Paulson nor anyone in Washington is willing to reveal is the truth behind the Citigroup bailout. By his and the Republican Bush administration’s adamant earlier refusal to take an initial resolute action to immediately nationalize the nine or so largest troubled banks, he has created the present debacle. By refusing, on ideological grounds, to instead reorganize the banks’ assets into some form of ‘good bank’ and ‘bad bank,’ similar to what the government of Sweden did with what it called Securum, during its banking crisis in the early 1990s, Paulson and company have created a global financial structure on the brink.
A Securum or similar temporary nationalization would have allowed the healthy banks to continue lending to the real economy so the economy could continue operating, while the state merely sat on the undervalued real estate assets of the Swedish banks for some months until the recovering economy made the assets again marketable to the private sector. Instead, Paulson and his ‘crony capitalists’ in Washington have turned a bad situation into a globally catastrophic one.
His apparent realization of the error of his initial refusal to nationalize came too late. When Paulson reversed policy on September 19 and presented the nine largest banks with an ultimatum to accept partial government equity ownership, abandoning his original bizarre plan to merely buy up the toxic waste asset-backed securities of the banks with his $700 billion TARP taxpayer money, he never revealed why.
Under the original Paulson Plan, as Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and L. Randall Wray of the Jerome Levy Institute at Bard College in New York point out, Paulson sought to create a situation in which the US ‘Treasury would become an owner of troubled financial institutions in exchange for a capital injection -- but without exercising any ownership rights, such as replacing the management that created the mess. The bailout would be used as an opportunity to consolidate control of the nation’s financial system in the hands of a few large [Wall Street] banks, with government funds subsidizing purchases of troubled banks by “healthy” ones.’
Paulson soon realized the scale of crisis, largely triggered by his inept handling of the Lehman Brothers case, had created an impossible situation. Were Paulson to use the $700 billion to buy up toxic waste ABS from the select banks at today’s market price, the $700 billion would be far too little to take an estimated $2 trillion ($2,000 billion) in Asset Backed Securities off the books of the banks.
The Levy Economics Institute economists state, ‘It is probable that many and perhaps most financial institutions are insolvent today -- with a black hole of negative net worth that would swallow Paulson’s entire $700 billion in one gulp.’
That reality is the real reason Paulson was forced to abandon his original ‘crony bailout’ TARP plan and opt to use some of his money to buy equity shares in the nine largest banks.
That scheme as well is ‘dead on arrival,’ as the latest Citigroup nationalization scheme underscores. The dilemma Paulson has created with his inept handling of the crisis is simple: If the US government paid the true value for these nearly worthless assets, the banks would have to write down huge losses, and, as Levy economists put it, ‘announce to the world that they are insolvent.’ On the other hand, if Paulson raised the toxic waste purchase price high enough to protect the banks from losses, $700 billion ‘will buy only a tiny fraction of the ‘troubled’ assets.’ That is what the latest nationalization of Citigroup is about.
It is only the beginning. The 2009 year will be one of titanic shocks and changes to the global order of a scale perhaps not experienced in the past five centuries. This is why we should speak of the end of the American Century and its Dollar System.
How destructive that process will be to the citizens of the United States who are the prime victims of Paulson’s crony capitalists, as well as to the rest of the world, depends now on the urgency and resoluteness with which heads of national governments in Germany, the EU, China, Russia and the rest of the non-US world react. It is no time for ideological sentimentality and nostalgia of the postwar old order. That collapsed this past September along with Lehman Brothers and the Republican presidency. Waiting for a ‘miracle’ from an Obama presidency is no longer an option for the rest of the world.
F. William Engdahl is author of the book, ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.’ He is completing work on a new book, ‘Power of Money: The Rise and Decline of the American Century’ due to be released in late Spring 2009. He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
The truth behind the Citigroup nationalization
By F. William Engdahl
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Nov 27, 2008
On Friday, November 21, the world came within a hair’s breadth of the most colossal financial collapse in history, according to bankers on the inside of events with whom we have contact.
The trigger was the bank which only two years ago was America’s largest, Citigroup. The size of the US government de facto nationalization of the $2 trillion banking institution is an indication of shocks yet to come in other major US and perhaps European banks thought to be ‘too big to fail.’
The clumsy way in which US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, himself not a banker but a Wall Street ‘investment banker,’ whose experience has been in the quite different world of buying and selling stocks or bonds or underwriting and selling same, has handled the unfolding crisis has been worse than incompetent. It has made a grave situation into a globally alarming one.
‘Spitting into the wind’
A case in point is the secretive manner in which Paulson has used the $700 billion in taxpayer funds voted him by a pliable Congress in September. Early on, Paulson put $125 billion into the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for his old firm, Goldman Sachs. However, if we compare the value of the equity share that $125 billion bought with the market price of those banks’ stock, US taxpayers have paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could have bought for $62.5 billion, according to a detailed analysis from Ron W. Bloom, economist with the United Steelworkers union, whose members as well as pension fund face devastating losses were GM to fail.
That means half of the public’s money was a gift to Paulson’s Wall Street cronies. Now, only weeks later, the Treasury is forced to intervene to de facto nationalize Citigroup. It won’t be the last.
Paulson demanded, and got from a pliable US Congress, Democrats as well as Republicans, sole discretion over how and where he can invest the $700 billion, to date with no effective oversight. It amounts to the Treasury secretary in effect ‘spitting into the wind’ in terms of resolving the fundamental crisis.
It should be clear to any serious analyst by now that the September decision by Paulson to defer to rigid financial ideology and let the fourth largest US investment bank, Lehman Brothers fail, was the proximate trigger for the present global crisis. Lehman Brothers’ surprise collapse triggered the current global crisis of confidence. It was simply not clear to the rest of the banking world which US financial institution bank might be saved and which not, after the government had earlier saved the far smaller Bear Stearns, while letting the larger, far more strategic Lehman Brothers fail.
Some Citigroup details
The most alarming aspect of the crisis is the fact that we are in an inter-regnum period when the next president has been elected but cannot act on the situation until after January 20, 2009, when he is sworn in.
Consider the details of the latest Citigroup government de facto nationalization (for ideological reasons Paulson and the Bush administration hysterically avoid admitting they are in the process of nationalizing key banks). Citigroup has more than $2 trillion of assets, dwarfing companies such as American International Group Inc. that got some $150 billion in US taxpayer funds in the past two months. Ironically, only eight weeks before, the government had designated Citigroup to take over the failing Wachovia Bank. Normally, authorities have an ailing bank absorbed by a stronger one. In this instance the opposite seems to have been the case. Now it is clear that the Citigroup was in deeper trouble than Wachovia. In a matter of hours in the week before the US government nationalization was announced, the stock value of Citibank plunged to $3.77 in New York, giving the company a market value of about $21 billion. The market value of Citigroup stock in December 2006 had been $247 billion. Two days before the bank’s nationalization, the CEO, Vikram Pandit, had announced a huge 52,000 job slashing plan. It did nothing to stop the slide.
The scale of the hidden losses of perhaps the 20 largest US banks is so enormous that if not before, the first presidential decree of President Barack Obama will likely have to be declaration of a US ‘Bank Holiday’ and the full nationalization of the major banks, taking on the toxic assets and losses until the economy can again function with credit flowing to industry once more.
Citigroup and the government have identified a pool of about $306 billion in troubled assets. Citigroup will absorb the first $29 billion in losses. After that, remaining losses will be split between Citigroup and the government, with the bank absorbing 10 percent and the government absorbing 90 percent. The US Treasury Department will use its $700 billion TARP or Troubled Asset Recovery Program bailout fund, to assume up to $5 billion of losses. If necessary, the government’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) will bear the next $10 billion of losses. Beyond that, the Federal Reserve will guarantee any additional losses. The measures are without precedent in US financial history. It’s by no means certain they will salvage the dollar system.
The situation is so intertwined, with six US major banks holding the vast bulk of worldwide financial derivatives exposure, that the failure of a single major US financial institution could result in losses to the OTC derivatives market of $300-$400 billion, a new IMF working paper finds. What’s more, since such a failure would likely cause cascading failures of other institutions. total global financial system losses could exceed another $1,500 billion according to an IMF study by Singh and Segoviano.
The madness over a Detroit GM rescue deal
The health of Citigroup is not the only gripping crisis that must be dealt with. At this point, political and ideological bickering in the US Congress has so far prevented a simple emergency $25 billion loan extension to General Motors and others of the US Big Three automakers -- Ford and Chrysler. The absurd spectacle of US congressmen attacking the chairmen of the Big Three for flying to the emergency congressional hearings on a rescue loan in their private company jets, while largely ignoring the issue of consequences to the economy of a GM failure underscores the utter lack of touch with reality that has overwhelmed Washington in recent years.
For GM to go into bankruptcy risks a disaster of colossal proportions. Although Lehman Brothers, the biggest bankruptcy in US history, appears to have had an orderly settlement of its credit defaults swaps, the disruption occurred beforehand, as protection writers had to post additional collateral prior to settlement. That was a major factor in the dramatic global market selloff in October. GM is bigger by far, meaning bigger collateral damage, and this would take place when the financial system is even weaker than when Lehman failed.
In addition, a second, and potentially far more damaging issue, has been largely ignored. The advocates of letting GM go bankrupt argue that it can go into Chapter 11 just like other big companies that get themselves in trouble. That may not happen however, and a Chapter 7 or liquidation of GM that would then result would be a tectonic event.
The problem is that under Chapter 11, it takes time for the company to get the protection of a bankruptcy court. Until that time, which may be weeks or months, the company would need urgently ‘bridge financing’ to continue operating. This is known as ‘Debtor-in-Possession’ or DIP financing. DIP is essential for most Chapter 11 bankruptcies, as it takes time to get the plan of reorganization approved by creditors and the courts. Most companies, like GM today, go to bankruptcy court when they are at the end of their liquidity.
DIP is specifically for companies in, or on the verge of bankruptcy, and the debt is generally senior to other outstanding creditor claims. So it is actually very low risk, as the amount spent is usually not large, relatively speaking. But DIP lending is being severely curtailed right now, just when it is most needed, as healthier banks drastically curtail loans in the severe credit crunch situation.
Without access to DIP bridge financing, GM would be forced into a partial, or even a full liquidation. The ramifications are horrendous. Aside from loss of 125,000 US jobs at GM itself, GM is critical to keeping many US auto suppliers in business. If GM failed, soon most, possibly even all, of the US and even foreign auto suppliers will go under. Those parts suppliers are important to other automakers. Many foreign car factories would be forced to close due to loss of suppliers. Some analysts put 2009 job losses from a GM failure as high as 2.5 million jobs due to the follow-on effects. If the impact of that 2.5 million job loss is seen in terms of the overall losses to the economy of non-auto jobs such as services, home foreclosures caused and such, some estimate total impact would be more than 15 million jobs.
So far in the face of this staggering prospect, the members of the US Congress have chosen to focus on the fact the GM chief, Rick Wagoner, flew in his private company jet to Washington. The congressional charade conjures up the image of Nero playing his fiddle as Rome goes up in flames. It should not be surprising that at the recent EU-Asian Summit in Beijing, Chinese officials floated the idea of trading between the EU and Asian nations such as China in euros, renminbi, yen or other national currencies other than the dollar. The Citigroup bailout and GM debacle has confirmed the death of the post-1944 Bretton Woods Dollar System.
The truth behind Citigroup bailout
What neither Paulson nor anyone in Washington is willing to reveal is the truth behind the Citigroup bailout. By his and the Republican Bush administration’s adamant earlier refusal to take an initial resolute action to immediately nationalize the nine or so largest troubled banks, he has created the present debacle. By refusing, on ideological grounds, to instead reorganize the banks’ assets into some form of ‘good bank’ and ‘bad bank,’ similar to what the government of Sweden did with what it called Securum, during its banking crisis in the early 1990s, Paulson and company have created a global financial structure on the brink.
A Securum or similar temporary nationalization would have allowed the healthy banks to continue lending to the real economy so the economy could continue operating, while the state merely sat on the undervalued real estate assets of the Swedish banks for some months until the recovering economy made the assets again marketable to the private sector. Instead, Paulson and his ‘crony capitalists’ in Washington have turned a bad situation into a globally catastrophic one.
His apparent realization of the error of his initial refusal to nationalize came too late. When Paulson reversed policy on September 19 and presented the nine largest banks with an ultimatum to accept partial government equity ownership, abandoning his original bizarre plan to merely buy up the toxic waste asset-backed securities of the banks with his $700 billion TARP taxpayer money, he never revealed why.
Under the original Paulson Plan, as Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and L. Randall Wray of the Jerome Levy Institute at Bard College in New York point out, Paulson sought to create a situation in which the US ‘Treasury would become an owner of troubled financial institutions in exchange for a capital injection -- but without exercising any ownership rights, such as replacing the management that created the mess. The bailout would be used as an opportunity to consolidate control of the nation’s financial system in the hands of a few large [Wall Street] banks, with government funds subsidizing purchases of troubled banks by “healthy” ones.’
Paulson soon realized the scale of crisis, largely triggered by his inept handling of the Lehman Brothers case, had created an impossible situation. Were Paulson to use the $700 billion to buy up toxic waste ABS from the select banks at today’s market price, the $700 billion would be far too little to take an estimated $2 trillion ($2,000 billion) in Asset Backed Securities off the books of the banks.
The Levy Economics Institute economists state, ‘It is probable that many and perhaps most financial institutions are insolvent today -- with a black hole of negative net worth that would swallow Paulson’s entire $700 billion in one gulp.’
That reality is the real reason Paulson was forced to abandon his original ‘crony bailout’ TARP plan and opt to use some of his money to buy equity shares in the nine largest banks.
That scheme as well is ‘dead on arrival,’ as the latest Citigroup nationalization scheme underscores. The dilemma Paulson has created with his inept handling of the crisis is simple: If the US government paid the true value for these nearly worthless assets, the banks would have to write down huge losses, and, as Levy economists put it, ‘announce to the world that they are insolvent.’ On the other hand, if Paulson raised the toxic waste purchase price high enough to protect the banks from losses, $700 billion ‘will buy only a tiny fraction of the ‘troubled’ assets.’ That is what the latest nationalization of Citigroup is about.
It is only the beginning. The 2009 year will be one of titanic shocks and changes to the global order of a scale perhaps not experienced in the past five centuries. This is why we should speak of the end of the American Century and its Dollar System.
How destructive that process will be to the citizens of the United States who are the prime victims of Paulson’s crony capitalists, as well as to the rest of the world, depends now on the urgency and resoluteness with which heads of national governments in Germany, the EU, China, Russia and the rest of the non-US world react. It is no time for ideological sentimentality and nostalgia of the postwar old order. That collapsed this past September along with Lehman Brothers and the Republican presidency. Waiting for a ‘miracle’ from an Obama presidency is no longer an option for the rest of the world.
F. William Engdahl is author of the book, ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.’ He is completing work on a new book, ‘Power of Money: The Rise and Decline of the American Century’ due to be released in late Spring 2009. He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
Misuse of state data: 'Joe the Plumber'
http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/12/05/copy/vanessa.ART_ART_12-05-08_A1_NQC4TEM.html?sid=101
Misuse of state data
Worker says 'Joe the Plumber' cover-up was forced upon her
Friday, December 5, 2008
By Catherine Candisky
The state worker who unwittingly ran an improper child-support check on the man known as Joe the Plumber told lawmakers yesterday that a deputy director later "dictated" how she was supposed to cover it up.
Vanessa Niekamp, an administrator for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services' Office of Child Support and a 15-year state employee, said that when Deputy Director Doug Thompson came into her office, "He appeared very upset, his neck was bright red, and he was shaking. He closed my door."
Thompson told her she must write an e-mail to the agency's information-security officer, and then "dictated word for word" what she wrote, Niekamp said. He also reminded her that she could be fired at any time, she said.
"Within an hour, I took the rest of the day off -- again using my vacation time -- and went directly to the office of the inspector general. I told them everything I knew about what happened."
Niekamp took another day of vacation yesterday to testify before the House State Government and Elections Committee about legislation that calls for the firing of any unclassified state employee who improperly accesses confidential personal information.
Rep. Shannon Jones, a Springboro Republican sponsoring House Bill 648, said she introduced the measure because she thinks that high-ranking officials such as Job and Family Services Director Helen Jones-Kelley weren't punished enough.
"The systematic misuse of government databases and the governor's woeful under-reaction to state government workers engaging in this outrageous behavior make House Bill 648 necessary," she told the committee.
Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat, placed Jones-Kelley on a one-month unpaid suspension last month after Inspector General Thomas P. Charles found she authorized the check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, for no legitimate government purpose.
Thompson also was suspended for a month after Charles found that he participated in directing the check and instructed Niekamp to send a deceptive e-mail about it. Three others received lesser punishment.
The checks came the day after Republican presidential nominee John McCain talked about Wurzelbacher in his final presidential debate Oct. 15 with Democrat Barack Obama.
The next day, Niekamp said, Assistant Deputy Director Carri Brown asked her to check the state child-support computer system for Wurzelbacher.
Brown "claimed that he had contacted our agency with a dispute about how much child support he owed," Niekamp said.
Niekamp, who did not recognize the name, said Brown took some notes, thanked her and left.
A week later, Thompson came to her office with a different explanation -- that he, Jones-Kelley and assistant director Fred Williams had requested the check.
"Doug told me that the person Carri had asked me to look up was Joe the Plumber -- the one who was talked about in the national news. He said he needed my help explaining something," Niekamp said.
"Doug then told me I must write an e-mail to our agency's information-security officer to explain why the file had been accessed. He turned my computer screen so he could see it and dictated word for word what he wanted me to write. ...
"He then told me that we needed to make sure that we answer questions about what happened the same way, so that our versions were not different from each other. Before he said that, he reminded me that I was an unclassified employee -- which, as you may know, is someone who can be fired without cause."
Niekamp said she knew the checks were improper because the staff undergoes training and must read and sign a form explaining when they can access confidential and personal information maintained by the department.
"Both Doug and Carri can access the (child-support) system and could have accessed a file without my involvement," Niekamp said. "To this day, I do not understand why they asked me to look at this information when they could have easily done this themselves."
ccandisky@dispatch.com
Misuse of state data
Worker says 'Joe the Plumber' cover-up was forced upon her
Friday, December 5, 2008
By Catherine Candisky
The state worker who unwittingly ran an improper child-support check on the man known as Joe the Plumber told lawmakers yesterday that a deputy director later "dictated" how she was supposed to cover it up.
Vanessa Niekamp, an administrator for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services' Office of Child Support and a 15-year state employee, said that when Deputy Director Doug Thompson came into her office, "He appeared very upset, his neck was bright red, and he was shaking. He closed my door."
Thompson told her she must write an e-mail to the agency's information-security officer, and then "dictated word for word" what she wrote, Niekamp said. He also reminded her that she could be fired at any time, she said.
"Within an hour, I took the rest of the day off -- again using my vacation time -- and went directly to the office of the inspector general. I told them everything I knew about what happened."
Niekamp took another day of vacation yesterday to testify before the House State Government and Elections Committee about legislation that calls for the firing of any unclassified state employee who improperly accesses confidential personal information.
Rep. Shannon Jones, a Springboro Republican sponsoring House Bill 648, said she introduced the measure because she thinks that high-ranking officials such as Job and Family Services Director Helen Jones-Kelley weren't punished enough.
"The systematic misuse of government databases and the governor's woeful under-reaction to state government workers engaging in this outrageous behavior make House Bill 648 necessary," she told the committee.
Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat, placed Jones-Kelley on a one-month unpaid suspension last month after Inspector General Thomas P. Charles found she authorized the check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, for no legitimate government purpose.
Thompson also was suspended for a month after Charles found that he participated in directing the check and instructed Niekamp to send a deceptive e-mail about it. Three others received lesser punishment.
The checks came the day after Republican presidential nominee John McCain talked about Wurzelbacher in his final presidential debate Oct. 15 with Democrat Barack Obama.
The next day, Niekamp said, Assistant Deputy Director Carri Brown asked her to check the state child-support computer system for Wurzelbacher.
Brown "claimed that he had contacted our agency with a dispute about how much child support he owed," Niekamp said.
Niekamp, who did not recognize the name, said Brown took some notes, thanked her and left.
A week later, Thompson came to her office with a different explanation -- that he, Jones-Kelley and assistant director Fred Williams had requested the check.
"Doug told me that the person Carri had asked me to look up was Joe the Plumber -- the one who was talked about in the national news. He said he needed my help explaining something," Niekamp said.
"Doug then told me I must write an e-mail to our agency's information-security officer to explain why the file had been accessed. He turned my computer screen so he could see it and dictated word for word what he wanted me to write. ...
"He then told me that we needed to make sure that we answer questions about what happened the same way, so that our versions were not different from each other. Before he said that, he reminded me that I was an unclassified employee -- which, as you may know, is someone who can be fired without cause."
Niekamp said she knew the checks were improper because the staff undergoes training and must read and sign a form explaining when they can access confidential and personal information maintained by the department.
"Both Doug and Carri can access the (child-support) system and could have accessed a file without my involvement," Niekamp said. "To this day, I do not understand why they asked me to look at this information when they could have easily done this themselves."
ccandisky@dispatch.com
Cheney, Gonzales indictments dropped
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Cheney_Gonzales_indictments_dropped_1201.html
Cheney, Gonzales indictments dropped
RAW STORY
Published: Monday December 1, 2008
A judge in Raymondville, Texas has dropped indictments against Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Judge Manuel Banales, after surviving a motion to have him removed from the case, threw out eight of the indictments brought by Willacy County District Attorney Juan Guerra, including those against two special prosecutors, two district judges, and a district clerk.
Judge Banales ruled the grand jury returned the indictments against Cheney and Gonzales unlawfully. Banales also tossed an indictment for corruption against State Senator Eddie Lucio Jr., a Democrat.
Charges were brought against Vice President Cheney and former AG Gonzales for blocking the investigation into a prisoner's murder in a private prison in Raymondville.
Cheney, Gonzales indictments dropped
RAW STORY
Published: Monday December 1, 2008
A judge in Raymondville, Texas has dropped indictments against Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Judge Manuel Banales, after surviving a motion to have him removed from the case, threw out eight of the indictments brought by Willacy County District Attorney Juan Guerra, including those against two special prosecutors, two district judges, and a district clerk.
Judge Banales ruled the grand jury returned the indictments against Cheney and Gonzales unlawfully. Banales also tossed an indictment for corruption against State Senator Eddie Lucio Jr., a Democrat.
Charges were brought against Vice President Cheney and former AG Gonzales for blocking the investigation into a prisoner's murder in a private prison in Raymondville.
On the Charts: Kanye Fights Off Axl
http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2008/12/03/on-the-charts-kanye-fights-off-axl-taylor-swift-gets-black-friday-boost/
On the Charts: Kanye Fights Off Axl, Taylor Swift Gets Black Friday Boost
12/3/08
The Big News: 16 years of anticipation wasn’t enough to get Guns N’ Roses back atop the charts as Axl Rose’s opus Chinese Democracy disappointed the music industry with only 261,000 exclusive-to-Best Buy copies sold, good for third place in the most competitive sales week of 2008. Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak also came in below estimated sales figures, but his 450,000 in debut sales were enough to pry the top spot away from Beyoncé’s I Am…Sasha Fierce, which fell to four. Here’s where things get wacky: At number two, ahead of Chinese Democracy and new albums by the Killers and Ludacris, was Taylor Swift’s Fearless, which surged up from four last week thanks to a 23% sales increase. Fearless also crossed the platinum barrier after only three weeks.
Debuts: Ludacris’ Theater of the Mind grabbed number five, coming in ahead of the Killers’ Day & Age at six. Coldplay’s Prospekt’s March EP entered at 15, one slot behind Barry Manilow’s Greatest Songs of the 80s. Paul McCartney side project the Fireman’s Electric Arguments slotted at 67, Scott Weiland's Happy In Galoshes settled in at 96 and Rivers Cuomo’s Alone 2 bowed at 174.
Last Week’s Heroes: It’s no secret that this week’s slate of major releases disappointed at the cash register as Black Friday music sales were down substantially from last year. Among those who also under whelmed were Nickelback’s Dark Horse, which stumbled from two to seven in its second week, and David Cook, whose self-titled album fell from three down to ten. Next week, we’ll find out if Britney Spears’ Circus can muster up the sales to reclaim the apex of the charts.
Daniel Kreps
On the Charts: Kanye Fights Off Axl, Taylor Swift Gets Black Friday Boost
12/3/08
The Big News: 16 years of anticipation wasn’t enough to get Guns N’ Roses back atop the charts as Axl Rose’s opus Chinese Democracy disappointed the music industry with only 261,000 exclusive-to-Best Buy copies sold, good for third place in the most competitive sales week of 2008. Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak also came in below estimated sales figures, but his 450,000 in debut sales were enough to pry the top spot away from Beyoncé’s I Am…Sasha Fierce, which fell to four. Here’s where things get wacky: At number two, ahead of Chinese Democracy and new albums by the Killers and Ludacris, was Taylor Swift’s Fearless, which surged up from four last week thanks to a 23% sales increase. Fearless also crossed the platinum barrier after only three weeks.
Debuts: Ludacris’ Theater of the Mind grabbed number five, coming in ahead of the Killers’ Day & Age at six. Coldplay’s Prospekt’s March EP entered at 15, one slot behind Barry Manilow’s Greatest Songs of the 80s. Paul McCartney side project the Fireman’s Electric Arguments slotted at 67, Scott Weiland's Happy In Galoshes settled in at 96 and Rivers Cuomo’s Alone 2 bowed at 174.
Last Week’s Heroes: It’s no secret that this week’s slate of major releases disappointed at the cash register as Black Friday music sales were down substantially from last year. Among those who also under whelmed were Nickelback’s Dark Horse, which stumbled from two to seven in its second week, and David Cook, whose self-titled album fell from three down to ten. Next week, we’ll find out if Britney Spears’ Circus can muster up the sales to reclaim the apex of the charts.
Daniel Kreps
Clinton, Gates on Obama national security team
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-national-security2-2008dec02,0,2022463.story
Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates on Obama national security team
The president-elect formally announces he will nominate Clinton as secretary of State and retain Gates in his current Defense post. Obama, Clinton speak of might as well as diplomacy.
By Rick Pearson
December 1, 2008
Reporting from Chicago -- President-elect Barack Obama unveiled his national security team today, including formally announcing his intention to nominate his onetime rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, as the next secretary of State.
Obama also announced his intention to keep current Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his post, likely for at least a year in the new administration. The president-elect also said he would nominate Susan Rice as ambassador to the United Nations, retired Marine Gen. James Jones as his national security adviser, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano as homeland security director and Eric Holder as attorney general.
"The national security challenges we face are just as grave, and just as urgent, as our economic crisis," Obama said during a Chicago news conference where he was surrounded by his newly chosen team. "We are fighting two wars. Old conflicts remain unresolved, and newly assertive powers have put strains on the international system. The spread of nuclear weapons raises the peril that the world's deadliest technology could fall into dangerous hands. Our dependence on foreign oil empowers authoritarian governments and endangers our planet."
Obama said he, his security team and the American people believe "now is the time for us to regain American leadership in all of its dimensions" as he sought to strike a balance between "maintaining the strongest military on the planet" and employing "the wisdom of our diplomacy."
All of Obama's nominees appeared in Chicago as did the vice president-elect, Joe Biden.
The nomination of Clinton comes only months after a hard-fought and often caustic Democratic primary in which the former first lady, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, questioned Obama's experience on the world stage and his credentials to become commander in chief in contrast to herself and Republican nominee John McCain.
But Obama called Clinton "a friend, a colleague, a source of counsel" and "a tough campaign opponent."
"She is an American of tremendous stature who will have my complete confidence, who knows many of the world's leaders, who will command respect in every capitol, and who will clearly have the ability to advance our interests around the world," Obama said, adding that her appointment was "a sign to friend and foe of the seriousness of my commitment to renew American diplomacy and restore our alliances."
Clinton said it was "very difficult" to leave her Senate seat of eight years but said her service prepared her for the job since "New Yorkers aren't afraid to speak their minds and do so in every language."
She called Obama's election a signal that the American people have demanded not only a new direction on domestic affairs, but in foreign relations as well, in which "vigorous diplomacy" is balanced with military might.
Clinton's nomination comes after her husband, former President Bill Clinton, agreed to curtail his foreign speechmaking and acceptance of money for his Clinton Global Initiative charitable conference. The former president also agreed to disclose the names of all contributors to his charitable foundation and submit his speech schedule for review by the State Department and the White House counsel.
In a statement, former President Clinton said his wife was the "right person for the job of helping to restore American's image abroad, end the war in Iraq" and "advance peace and increase our security."
"She has already earned the respect of foreign leaders and diplomats through her work to promote human rights and the empowerment of women through access to education, healthcare and economic opportunity," the former president said. "And Americans know from her leadership in the Senate on national security that she will always put the security, values and the interests of our people first."
But Republicans were quick to pounce on the appointment, noting that during the Democratic primary campaign Obama's camp said Clinton was never a "player" on foreign policy and did not do "any heavy lifting with foreign governments" during her time in her husband's White House.
Obama said he knew it was "fun for the press" to contrast the statements from the campaign trail to today's announcement.
"Look, if you look at the statements that Hillary Clinton and I have made outside of the heat of a campaign, we share a view that America has to be safe and secure, and in order to do that we have to combine military power with strengthened diplomacy," Obama said.
Gates has been secretary of Defense for nearly two years. He previously served as deputy CIA director and was a deputy National Security Agency adviser for President George H.W. Bush. His role for the Obama White House is viewed as transitional.
Jones rose from the Marines to become the supreme allied commander for NATO and has held a number of posts under Democrats in Congress and in the State Department under Republicans. He was said to be on the vetting list as a possible Obama running mate.
Napolitano is a former U.S. attorney and former Arizona attorney general. She was among the first governors to call for the use of the National Guard to patrol the country's borders, at federal expense, to address illegal immigration.
Holder was deputy attorney general in the Clinton White House. A top legal adviser to the Obama campaign, he also served on the team that vetted his potential running mates. Holder also was previously U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Rice was a leading foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign, on leave from her post as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She previously served in the Clinton White House as an assistant secretary of State for African affairs.
Obama said there was a common thread linking the nation's economic problems with foreign concerns: "Our destiny is shared with the world's."
"From our markets to our security, from our public health to our climate, we must act with the understanding that, now more than ever, we have a stake in what happens across the globe," he said.
Obama said he had spoken with current Secretary of State Condolezza Rice throughout the past weekend about the terrorist activities in Mumbai, India. And he used the attacks, which killed six Americans, to vow a diligent fight against extremists.
"Both myself and the team that stands beside me are absolutely committed to eliminating the threat of terrorism and that is true wherever it is found," he said. "We cannot tolerate a world in which innocents are being killed by extremists based on twisted ideologies."
Pearson is a writer for the Chicago Tribune
Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates on Obama national security team
The president-elect formally announces he will nominate Clinton as secretary of State and retain Gates in his current Defense post. Obama, Clinton speak of might as well as diplomacy.
By Rick Pearson
December 1, 2008
Reporting from Chicago -- President-elect Barack Obama unveiled his national security team today, including formally announcing his intention to nominate his onetime rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, as the next secretary of State.
Obama also announced his intention to keep current Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his post, likely for at least a year in the new administration. The president-elect also said he would nominate Susan Rice as ambassador to the United Nations, retired Marine Gen. James Jones as his national security adviser, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano as homeland security director and Eric Holder as attorney general.
"The national security challenges we face are just as grave, and just as urgent, as our economic crisis," Obama said during a Chicago news conference where he was surrounded by his newly chosen team. "We are fighting two wars. Old conflicts remain unresolved, and newly assertive powers have put strains on the international system. The spread of nuclear weapons raises the peril that the world's deadliest technology could fall into dangerous hands. Our dependence on foreign oil empowers authoritarian governments and endangers our planet."
Obama said he, his security team and the American people believe "now is the time for us to regain American leadership in all of its dimensions" as he sought to strike a balance between "maintaining the strongest military on the planet" and employing "the wisdom of our diplomacy."
All of Obama's nominees appeared in Chicago as did the vice president-elect, Joe Biden.
The nomination of Clinton comes only months after a hard-fought and often caustic Democratic primary in which the former first lady, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, questioned Obama's experience on the world stage and his credentials to become commander in chief in contrast to herself and Republican nominee John McCain.
But Obama called Clinton "a friend, a colleague, a source of counsel" and "a tough campaign opponent."
"She is an American of tremendous stature who will have my complete confidence, who knows many of the world's leaders, who will command respect in every capitol, and who will clearly have the ability to advance our interests around the world," Obama said, adding that her appointment was "a sign to friend and foe of the seriousness of my commitment to renew American diplomacy and restore our alliances."
Clinton said it was "very difficult" to leave her Senate seat of eight years but said her service prepared her for the job since "New Yorkers aren't afraid to speak their minds and do so in every language."
She called Obama's election a signal that the American people have demanded not only a new direction on domestic affairs, but in foreign relations as well, in which "vigorous diplomacy" is balanced with military might.
Clinton's nomination comes after her husband, former President Bill Clinton, agreed to curtail his foreign speechmaking and acceptance of money for his Clinton Global Initiative charitable conference. The former president also agreed to disclose the names of all contributors to his charitable foundation and submit his speech schedule for review by the State Department and the White House counsel.
In a statement, former President Clinton said his wife was the "right person for the job of helping to restore American's image abroad, end the war in Iraq" and "advance peace and increase our security."
"She has already earned the respect of foreign leaders and diplomats through her work to promote human rights and the empowerment of women through access to education, healthcare and economic opportunity," the former president said. "And Americans know from her leadership in the Senate on national security that she will always put the security, values and the interests of our people first."
But Republicans were quick to pounce on the appointment, noting that during the Democratic primary campaign Obama's camp said Clinton was never a "player" on foreign policy and did not do "any heavy lifting with foreign governments" during her time in her husband's White House.
Obama said he knew it was "fun for the press" to contrast the statements from the campaign trail to today's announcement.
"Look, if you look at the statements that Hillary Clinton and I have made outside of the heat of a campaign, we share a view that America has to be safe and secure, and in order to do that we have to combine military power with strengthened diplomacy," Obama said.
Gates has been secretary of Defense for nearly two years. He previously served as deputy CIA director and was a deputy National Security Agency adviser for President George H.W. Bush. His role for the Obama White House is viewed as transitional.
Jones rose from the Marines to become the supreme allied commander for NATO and has held a number of posts under Democrats in Congress and in the State Department under Republicans. He was said to be on the vetting list as a possible Obama running mate.
Napolitano is a former U.S. attorney and former Arizona attorney general. She was among the first governors to call for the use of the National Guard to patrol the country's borders, at federal expense, to address illegal immigration.
Holder was deputy attorney general in the Clinton White House. A top legal adviser to the Obama campaign, he also served on the team that vetted his potential running mates. Holder also was previously U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Rice was a leading foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign, on leave from her post as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She previously served in the Clinton White House as an assistant secretary of State for African affairs.
Obama said there was a common thread linking the nation's economic problems with foreign concerns: "Our destiny is shared with the world's."
"From our markets to our security, from our public health to our climate, we must act with the understanding that, now more than ever, we have a stake in what happens across the globe," he said.
Obama said he had spoken with current Secretary of State Condolezza Rice throughout the past weekend about the terrorist activities in Mumbai, India. And he used the attacks, which killed six Americans, to vow a diligent fight against extremists.
"Both myself and the team that stands beside me are absolutely committed to eliminating the threat of terrorism and that is true wherever it is found," he said. "We cannot tolerate a world in which innocents are being killed by extremists based on twisted ideologies."
Pearson is a writer for the Chicago Tribune
Zinn: 9/11 Truth Is For “Fanatics”
http://www.prisonplanet.com/zinn-911-truth-is-for-fanatics-has-no-practical-political-significance.html
Zinn: 9/11 Truth Is For “Fanatics”, Has “No Practical Political Significance”
New comments cause more outrage after leftist historian said he didn’t care about what really happened on 9/11
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Friday, Nov 21, 2008
Just days after left-wing anti-war icon Howard Zinn told an audience that he didn’t care if 9/11 was an inside job, he has repeated the sentiment, stating that questions regarding the attacks have “no practical political significance” and that 9/11 truth activists are “fanatics” who are wasting their time.
During a lecture at UQAM university in Montréal, Zinn was once again asked if he would support a new 9/11 investigation.
Zinn responded:
“I have said that what happened on 9/11 deserves to be investigated more than it has been because I don’t accept and believe official investigations and official reports.
But having said that, and I want to say that this has really annoyed a lot of people, but why not, and I will annoy more people by saying that I think there are many people who have become fanatics about 9/11. By fanatics I mean, they think we should drop everything and just concentrate our energies on finding out what happened on 9/11.
I don’t think the question of what really happened on 9/11 is the most important question we can ask.”
Zinn then took a direct swipe at the 9/11 truth movement by stating:
“To tell a movement of citizens in the United States that this is something that we really have to make an issue of, I don’t believe it because we don’t need what happened on 9/11, we don’t need that to tell us about the crimes of the Bush administration.
I believe there are certain things that happen in history and certainly questions that are asked that divert us from the important things that we have to do at hand.
The truth is I don’t think anyone will ever really know what happened on 9/11 just as I don’t think anyone will really know who killed John F. Kennedy, and there are a lot of people who wasted a huge amount of time working on something that did not have any practical political significance.”
Zinn then asserted that his previous comments at a lecture in Colorado has been distorted and that he never said he did not care about 9/11 or the fact that it was in the past.
Zinn’s exact words that day were “I don’t know enough about it (the 9/11 conspiracy) and the truth is I don’t much care, that’s past.”
In our previous article we analysed how other leftist luminaries such as Noam Chomsky have belittled the efforts of 9/11 truth activists and attempted to dismiss the political significance of asking questions and highlighting evidence of government complicity in the attacks, while at the same time clearly acknowledging that the truth remains covered up and withheld.
This cements commentators such as Zinn and Chomsky as intellectual cowards and allows them to be used as leftist gatekeepers by an establishment that even they admit has used 9/11 as a means to facilitate aggressive and monstrous foreign and domestic agendas.
What really happened on 9/11 is not a distraction, it is the key to everything:
Without 9/11 there would be no “war on terror”.
Without 9/11 there would be no “clash of civilizations”
Without 9/11 there would be no war in Afghanistan.
Without 9/11 there would be no war in Iraq.
Without 9/11 there would be no war in Iran.
Without 9/11 there would be no war in… (insert any country classified as part of the “axis of evil” or defined as being “with the terrorists”)
Without 9/11 thousands of U.S. troops would not have been sent to their deaths.
Without 9/11 hundreds of thousands of citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan would not have been sentenced to their deaths.
Without 9/11 there would be no inaction on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Without 9/11 there would be no civilian contractors in Iraq and the scandal that has followed them would have been averted.
Without 9/11 there would be no false military reporting (Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch), and no crack down on the freedom of the press (banning photographing the returning coffins).
Without 9/11 there would be no Patriot Act.
Without 9/11 there would be no NSA warrantless wiretapping program.
Without 9/11 there would be no Camp Delta and no Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay.
Without 9/11 there would be no Military Commissions Act and no coordinated program of extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention and torture of those defined as “enemy combatants”.
Without 9/11 there would be no vast increase in secrecy and complete militarization of intelligence under the newly created office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Without 9/11 there would not be thousands of dead and dying emergency workers who are suffering crippling and fatal respiratory illnesses.
Without 9/11 there would be no vast increase in military and security spending that goes arm in arm with huge cutbacks in other key social programs (such as levees in New Orleans).
Without 9/11 there would have been no total abandonment of fiscal restraint, which has contributed to plunging the nation into an abyss of debt and looks likely to tip the world into a deep recession if not a complete depression.
And on and on and on.
Perhaps most importantly, without 9/11 there would be no “post 9/11 society/mentality”.
The ongoing ignorance of official 9/11 lies will continue to feed the fear and hostility that this post 9/11 environment is founded upon. If it is “fanatical” to attempt to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, so to speak, then every member of the 9/11 truth movement should plead guilty.
The definition of a “fanatic” is, in this writer’s humble opinion, much closer to the actions of the fawning audience at both of Howard Zinn’s afore mentioned lectures, who proceeded to inanely cheer their hero no matter what came out of his mouth.
Much more fanatical are the kind of pocket radicals who latch on to one way of thinking, stick steadfastly to one political paradigm, completely close their minds to the wider picture, proceeding to repeat adfinum to their friends in the “coffee revolution” shops what Zinn, Chomsky, Vidal and their ilk have said, in between conversations about the finer points of Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness prose, their understanding of the term ‘multiculturalism’ and the origins of Che Guevara’s seminal manual on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare.
Such people can groan all they like when questions over 9/11 are raised, it doesn’t change the fact that every single significant action the Bush administration has taken over the last seven years, every attack on freedom and crime against humanity that they have committed stems from the events of 9/11.
Yes Mr Zinn, you have angered a great many politically minded people with your comments, but what do you expect when you state that you do not care about what really happened on the most historically significant day in our recent history, and in the lifetimes of many of us?
Indeed, this is the key to Zinn’s comments. To him, what really happened on 9/11 is not significant because it is HE who represents the past, it is HE who is wasting his time and it is HE who is politically insignificant.
Zinn: 9/11 Truth Is For “Fanatics”, Has “No Practical Political Significance”
New comments cause more outrage after leftist historian said he didn’t care about what really happened on 9/11
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Friday, Nov 21, 2008
Just days after left-wing anti-war icon Howard Zinn told an audience that he didn’t care if 9/11 was an inside job, he has repeated the sentiment, stating that questions regarding the attacks have “no practical political significance” and that 9/11 truth activists are “fanatics” who are wasting their time.
During a lecture at UQAM university in Montréal, Zinn was once again asked if he would support a new 9/11 investigation.
Zinn responded:
“I have said that what happened on 9/11 deserves to be investigated more than it has been because I don’t accept and believe official investigations and official reports.
But having said that, and I want to say that this has really annoyed a lot of people, but why not, and I will annoy more people by saying that I think there are many people who have become fanatics about 9/11. By fanatics I mean, they think we should drop everything and just concentrate our energies on finding out what happened on 9/11.
I don’t think the question of what really happened on 9/11 is the most important question we can ask.”
Zinn then took a direct swipe at the 9/11 truth movement by stating:
“To tell a movement of citizens in the United States that this is something that we really have to make an issue of, I don’t believe it because we don’t need what happened on 9/11, we don’t need that to tell us about the crimes of the Bush administration.
I believe there are certain things that happen in history and certainly questions that are asked that divert us from the important things that we have to do at hand.
The truth is I don’t think anyone will ever really know what happened on 9/11 just as I don’t think anyone will really know who killed John F. Kennedy, and there are a lot of people who wasted a huge amount of time working on something that did not have any practical political significance.”
Zinn then asserted that his previous comments at a lecture in Colorado has been distorted and that he never said he did not care about 9/11 or the fact that it was in the past.
Zinn’s exact words that day were “I don’t know enough about it (the 9/11 conspiracy) and the truth is I don’t much care, that’s past.”
In our previous article we analysed how other leftist luminaries such as Noam Chomsky have belittled the efforts of 9/11 truth activists and attempted to dismiss the political significance of asking questions and highlighting evidence of government complicity in the attacks, while at the same time clearly acknowledging that the truth remains covered up and withheld.
This cements commentators such as Zinn and Chomsky as intellectual cowards and allows them to be used as leftist gatekeepers by an establishment that even they admit has used 9/11 as a means to facilitate aggressive and monstrous foreign and domestic agendas.
What really happened on 9/11 is not a distraction, it is the key to everything:
Without 9/11 there would be no “war on terror”.
Without 9/11 there would be no “clash of civilizations”
Without 9/11 there would be no war in Afghanistan.
Without 9/11 there would be no war in Iraq.
Without 9/11 there would be no war in Iran.
Without 9/11 there would be no war in… (insert any country classified as part of the “axis of evil” or defined as being “with the terrorists”)
Without 9/11 thousands of U.S. troops would not have been sent to their deaths.
Without 9/11 hundreds of thousands of citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan would not have been sentenced to their deaths.
Without 9/11 there would be no inaction on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Without 9/11 there would be no civilian contractors in Iraq and the scandal that has followed them would have been averted.
Without 9/11 there would be no false military reporting (Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch), and no crack down on the freedom of the press (banning photographing the returning coffins).
Without 9/11 there would be no Patriot Act.
Without 9/11 there would be no NSA warrantless wiretapping program.
Without 9/11 there would be no Camp Delta and no Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay.
Without 9/11 there would be no Military Commissions Act and no coordinated program of extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention and torture of those defined as “enemy combatants”.
Without 9/11 there would be no vast increase in secrecy and complete militarization of intelligence under the newly created office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Without 9/11 there would not be thousands of dead and dying emergency workers who are suffering crippling and fatal respiratory illnesses.
Without 9/11 there would be no vast increase in military and security spending that goes arm in arm with huge cutbacks in other key social programs (such as levees in New Orleans).
Without 9/11 there would have been no total abandonment of fiscal restraint, which has contributed to plunging the nation into an abyss of debt and looks likely to tip the world into a deep recession if not a complete depression.
And on and on and on.
Perhaps most importantly, without 9/11 there would be no “post 9/11 society/mentality”.
The ongoing ignorance of official 9/11 lies will continue to feed the fear and hostility that this post 9/11 environment is founded upon. If it is “fanatical” to attempt to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, so to speak, then every member of the 9/11 truth movement should plead guilty.
The definition of a “fanatic” is, in this writer’s humble opinion, much closer to the actions of the fawning audience at both of Howard Zinn’s afore mentioned lectures, who proceeded to inanely cheer their hero no matter what came out of his mouth.
Much more fanatical are the kind of pocket radicals who latch on to one way of thinking, stick steadfastly to one political paradigm, completely close their minds to the wider picture, proceeding to repeat adfinum to their friends in the “coffee revolution” shops what Zinn, Chomsky, Vidal and their ilk have said, in between conversations about the finer points of Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness prose, their understanding of the term ‘multiculturalism’ and the origins of Che Guevara’s seminal manual on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare.
Such people can groan all they like when questions over 9/11 are raised, it doesn’t change the fact that every single significant action the Bush administration has taken over the last seven years, every attack on freedom and crime against humanity that they have committed stems from the events of 9/11.
Yes Mr Zinn, you have angered a great many politically minded people with your comments, but what do you expect when you state that you do not care about what really happened on the most historically significant day in our recent history, and in the lifetimes of many of us?
Indeed, this is the key to Zinn’s comments. To him, what really happened on 9/11 is not significant because it is HE who represents the past, it is HE who is wasting his time and it is HE who is politically insignificant.
Woody Guthrie: A little recession music, please
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4089.shtml
Woody Guthrie: A little recession music, please
By Mickey Z.
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Dec 5, 2008
If you were to open your mouth and belt out the words “this land is your land,” you could rest assured that someone nearby would add: “this land is my land.” The chorus to Woody Guthrie’s 1940 classic is common knowledge . . . as are the first couple of verses. But it ain’t until you get to the later verses—those often omitted from official versions -- that you start comprehendin’ what good ol’ Woody had in mind:
As I was walkin’ I saw a sign there
And that sign said “No tresspassin’”
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothin’
Now that side was made for you and me
In the squares of the city/In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office, I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me
Woody sez: “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, ‘cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
Let’s not forget that Guthrie penned “This Land is My Land” in response to Irving Berlin’s saccharine “God Bless America.”
And let’s not forget the words Woody scrawled on his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.”
Let’s also not forget the power and prescience of Guthrie’s lyrics, like this from “Jesus Christ”:
Jesus was a man who traveled through the land
A hard working man and brave
He said to the rich, “Give your money to the poor,”
But they laid Jesus Christ in His grave
And this from “Pretty Boy Floyd”:
Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen
And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home
Woody Guthrie laid the foundation for generations of American singer-songwriters to use their music and lyrics to challenge the prevailing platitudes of popular music . . . and to provide a Greek chorus of protest and outrage to keep us all more honest and aware.
With the stakes having never been higher and the denial never deeper, what we choose to do with this awareness and outrage -- right now -- is genuinely a matter of life and death . . .
Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at www.mickeyz.net.
Woody Guthrie: A little recession music, please
By Mickey Z.
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Dec 5, 2008
If you were to open your mouth and belt out the words “this land is your land,” you could rest assured that someone nearby would add: “this land is my land.” The chorus to Woody Guthrie’s 1940 classic is common knowledge . . . as are the first couple of verses. But it ain’t until you get to the later verses—those often omitted from official versions -- that you start comprehendin’ what good ol’ Woody had in mind:
As I was walkin’ I saw a sign there
And that sign said “No tresspassin’”
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothin’
Now that side was made for you and me
In the squares of the city/In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office, I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me
Woody sez: “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, ‘cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
Let’s not forget that Guthrie penned “This Land is My Land” in response to Irving Berlin’s saccharine “God Bless America.”
And let’s not forget the words Woody scrawled on his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.”
Let’s also not forget the power and prescience of Guthrie’s lyrics, like this from “Jesus Christ”:
Jesus was a man who traveled through the land
A hard working man and brave
He said to the rich, “Give your money to the poor,”
But they laid Jesus Christ in His grave
And this from “Pretty Boy Floyd”:
Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen
And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home
Woody Guthrie laid the foundation for generations of American singer-songwriters to use their music and lyrics to challenge the prevailing platitudes of popular music . . . and to provide a Greek chorus of protest and outrage to keep us all more honest and aware.
With the stakes having never been higher and the denial never deeper, what we choose to do with this awareness and outrage -- right now -- is genuinely a matter of life and death . . .
Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at www.mickeyz.net.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Robalini's College Bowl Plan - 2008
Robert Sterling
Last December, I proposed a plan to create a playoff system to decide who the NCAA college football champion is. A playoff, of course, is how every other major sport (professional and college) decides its annual champ. One year later, it is again becoming increasingly clear that the NCAA definitely needs one, as even President-elect Barack Obama has chimed in demanding one. To begin with, there are no two teams that clearly have established themselves as top of the pack, with four to six major college teams having an argument for being the best in the country. For another, even beyond these teams, there are three non-BCS conference teams that are undefeated. It is a crime a team could go through an entire season without losing and still not be able to be crowned national champ. And once again, the current BCS championship system turns the big four bowls into glorified exhibition games, rather than a rightful pathway to crowning the national champion.
This is why my plan, which I have modified slightly to answer thoughtful critiques, is still the best answer one year later. It meets the four main goals I laid out a year ago:
1. Respect the traditions of the big four bowl games as much as possible, even more so than the current system does;
2. Make sure that the big four bowls actually are a central part of crowning the championship;
3. Allow bowl games with notable histories of their own to be included in the mix; and, perhaps most important:
4. Create a playoff system that produces an actual season championship.
Taking this together, here are the basics of the plans...
Sixteen teams make the playoffs, consisting of the following:
Automatic bids:
* The top two teams from the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-10 and SEC
* The top team from the Big East
There will be five at large-teams, consisting of the following, in order:
* The top-ranked independent team (code word for Notre Dame) if it is in the top 10 of the AP poll
* Any other team which is undefeated
* Any other team that is in the top four of the AP poll
* Any of the other five conference champions who are in the top 25 of the AP poll
* Any other team that is in the top ten of the AP poll
* Any independent team that is in the top 25 of the AP poll
If there are any remaing slots, they would be filled according to AP ranking, with the caveat that a BCS conference already with a team filling an at-large slot (or any non-BCS conference with two at-large slots) would not be allowed to have a team make it that isn't in the top 10. Call it spreading the wealth.
(Granted, the AP has refused to be included in the current system, but in this theoretical example, the AP would agree simply because it would be less controversial.)
The end result: on the third Saturday of December (allowing teams to rest a week after regular season finale and to present the Heisman Trophy) The ACC, Big 12 and the SEC championships would be played, as part of the opening round of playoff bowl games. Under new banners as the Peach Bowl (ACC), the Cotton Bowl (Big 12) and the Liberty Bowl (SEC), these games would be joined by two new conference championship games: the Hall of Fame Bowl (Big Ten) and the Holiday Bowl (Pac-10.) A sixth bowl game, the Florida Citrus Bowl, would be hosted by the Big East champion. Two more bowl games, the Gator Bowl and the Sun Bowl, would round out the "Super Saturday" of eight bowl games that would knock off eight teams.
Here's how the opening round of my playoffs would look under my plan, as of December 1st:
Cotton Bowl (Dallas) Big 12 - Texas (3) - Missouri (19)
Florida Citrus Bowl (Orlando) Big East Host - Cincinnati (13) - Oklahoma (4)
Gator Bowl (Jacksonville) - Utah (7) - Ball State (12)
Hall of Fame Bowl (Tampa) Big Ten - Penn State (6) - Ohio State (10)
Holiday Bowl (San Diego) Pac-10 - USC (5) - Oregon (16)
Liberty Bowl (Memphis) SEC - Alabama (1) - Florida (2)
Peach Bowl (Atlanta) ACC - Boston College (18) - Virginia Tech (Unranked)
Sun Bowl (El Paso) - Texas Tech (8) - Boise State (9)
(Note that Texas is in the Big 12 championship over Oklahoma. That's because under my system, the BCS ranking system would be scrapped and replaced by the AP poll, which has proven itself more reliable over the years.)
Notice only three teams would not make the list in the top 16: TCU (a good team, but a decided second banana to Utah in the Mountain West), Oklahoma (a very good team, but clearly the fourth-best team in its own conference division) and Georgia Tech (probably the best team in the ACC, but a deserved victim of its own bad mistakes against unranked Virginia Tech.) Three good teams, indeed, but none who being excluded from the mix could be called an outrage.
The only possible changes to this list: if USC loses to UCLA in an upset, they would face number 25 Oregon instead of Oregon State; if Ball State should lose the Mid-American championship, they would be replaced by TCU; and if Tulsa should somehow crack the top 25 after winning the Conference USA championship, they would bump off either Texas Tech or TCU. (If Texas Tech should be dumped, tough luck, but your performace against Oklahoma pretty much makes you a weak entry to the mix anyway.)
So, let's make some predictions here: all three Big Twelve South teams win, USC trounces Oregon, Penn State beats Ohio State in another Buckeye big-game choke, Utah and Boston College are victorious, and number two Florida beats number one Alabama. Here's how the four major Bowl Games on January 1st and 2nd would look like:
Rose Bowl - USC (5, Pac-10) - Penn State (6, Big Ten)
Fiesta Bowl - Texas (3, Big 12) - Utah (7)
Orange Bowl - Boston College (18, ACC) - Oklahoma (4)
Sugar Bowl - Florida (2, SEC) - Texas Tech (8)
On January 8th and 9th, the two semifinal games would be played between the four big bowl champs. If there aren't any upsets, Florida would play Oklahoma on Thursday, and Texas would play USC on Friday.
This would lead to the college football championship game on January 17th, which would happen the day before the two NFL conference championships. Imagine what a weekend of football that would be: the college football title game followed by the two matchups leading to the Super Bowl. Be sure to stock up on beer!
Again, this system really works well. It strengthens the value of the traditional big four bowls. It strengthens the value of eight traditionally noted bowl games. It ensures the five major conferences have a place on the New Years Day bowl games. And it ultimately creates a playoff system that would likely boost college football television revenues substantially. That's probably the biggest key of all, and why I think my proposed system would be a smashing success.
In the meantime, there's one thing that would help make an inevitable playoff system a reality : it's time to boycott watching and discussing the big four bowl games and the bogus BCS championship game until they become part of a real playoff system. When the public refuses to legitimize the current system, college football will be forced to respond.
To read my orignal proposal from last year (not too different than this one) go to:
http://robalini.blogspot.com/2007/12/robalinis-college-bowl-plan.html
Last December, I proposed a plan to create a playoff system to decide who the NCAA college football champion is. A playoff, of course, is how every other major sport (professional and college) decides its annual champ. One year later, it is again becoming increasingly clear that the NCAA definitely needs one, as even President-elect Barack Obama has chimed in demanding one. To begin with, there are no two teams that clearly have established themselves as top of the pack, with four to six major college teams having an argument for being the best in the country. For another, even beyond these teams, there are three non-BCS conference teams that are undefeated. It is a crime a team could go through an entire season without losing and still not be able to be crowned national champ. And once again, the current BCS championship system turns the big four bowls into glorified exhibition games, rather than a rightful pathway to crowning the national champion.
This is why my plan, which I have modified slightly to answer thoughtful critiques, is still the best answer one year later. It meets the four main goals I laid out a year ago:
1. Respect the traditions of the big four bowl games as much as possible, even more so than the current system does;
2. Make sure that the big four bowls actually are a central part of crowning the championship;
3. Allow bowl games with notable histories of their own to be included in the mix; and, perhaps most important:
4. Create a playoff system that produces an actual season championship.
Taking this together, here are the basics of the plans...
Sixteen teams make the playoffs, consisting of the following:
Automatic bids:
* The top two teams from the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-10 and SEC
* The top team from the Big East
There will be five at large-teams, consisting of the following, in order:
* The top-ranked independent team (code word for Notre Dame) if it is in the top 10 of the AP poll
* Any other team which is undefeated
* Any other team that is in the top four of the AP poll
* Any of the other five conference champions who are in the top 25 of the AP poll
* Any other team that is in the top ten of the AP poll
* Any independent team that is in the top 25 of the AP poll
If there are any remaing slots, they would be filled according to AP ranking, with the caveat that a BCS conference already with a team filling an at-large slot (or any non-BCS conference with two at-large slots) would not be allowed to have a team make it that isn't in the top 10. Call it spreading the wealth.
(Granted, the AP has refused to be included in the current system, but in this theoretical example, the AP would agree simply because it would be less controversial.)
The end result: on the third Saturday of December (allowing teams to rest a week after regular season finale and to present the Heisman Trophy) The ACC, Big 12 and the SEC championships would be played, as part of the opening round of playoff bowl games. Under new banners as the Peach Bowl (ACC), the Cotton Bowl (Big 12) and the Liberty Bowl (SEC), these games would be joined by two new conference championship games: the Hall of Fame Bowl (Big Ten) and the Holiday Bowl (Pac-10.) A sixth bowl game, the Florida Citrus Bowl, would be hosted by the Big East champion. Two more bowl games, the Gator Bowl and the Sun Bowl, would round out the "Super Saturday" of eight bowl games that would knock off eight teams.
Here's how the opening round of my playoffs would look under my plan, as of December 1st:
Cotton Bowl (Dallas) Big 12 - Texas (3) - Missouri (19)
Florida Citrus Bowl (Orlando) Big East Host - Cincinnati (13) - Oklahoma (4)
Gator Bowl (Jacksonville) - Utah (7) - Ball State (12)
Hall of Fame Bowl (Tampa) Big Ten - Penn State (6) - Ohio State (10)
Holiday Bowl (San Diego) Pac-10 - USC (5) - Oregon (16)
Liberty Bowl (Memphis) SEC - Alabama (1) - Florida (2)
Peach Bowl (Atlanta) ACC - Boston College (18) - Virginia Tech (Unranked)
Sun Bowl (El Paso) - Texas Tech (8) - Boise State (9)
(Note that Texas is in the Big 12 championship over Oklahoma. That's because under my system, the BCS ranking system would be scrapped and replaced by the AP poll, which has proven itself more reliable over the years.)
Notice only three teams would not make the list in the top 16: TCU (a good team, but a decided second banana to Utah in the Mountain West), Oklahoma (a very good team, but clearly the fourth-best team in its own conference division) and Georgia Tech (probably the best team in the ACC, but a deserved victim of its own bad mistakes against unranked Virginia Tech.) Three good teams, indeed, but none who being excluded from the mix could be called an outrage.
The only possible changes to this list: if USC loses to UCLA in an upset, they would face number 25 Oregon instead of Oregon State; if Ball State should lose the Mid-American championship, they would be replaced by TCU; and if Tulsa should somehow crack the top 25 after winning the Conference USA championship, they would bump off either Texas Tech or TCU. (If Texas Tech should be dumped, tough luck, but your performace against Oklahoma pretty much makes you a weak entry to the mix anyway.)
So, let's make some predictions here: all three Big Twelve South teams win, USC trounces Oregon, Penn State beats Ohio State in another Buckeye big-game choke, Utah and Boston College are victorious, and number two Florida beats number one Alabama. Here's how the four major Bowl Games on January 1st and 2nd would look like:
Rose Bowl - USC (5, Pac-10) - Penn State (6, Big Ten)
Fiesta Bowl - Texas (3, Big 12) - Utah (7)
Orange Bowl - Boston College (18, ACC) - Oklahoma (4)
Sugar Bowl - Florida (2, SEC) - Texas Tech (8)
On January 8th and 9th, the two semifinal games would be played between the four big bowl champs. If there aren't any upsets, Florida would play Oklahoma on Thursday, and Texas would play USC on Friday.
This would lead to the college football championship game on January 17th, which would happen the day before the two NFL conference championships. Imagine what a weekend of football that would be: the college football title game followed by the two matchups leading to the Super Bowl. Be sure to stock up on beer!
Again, this system really works well. It strengthens the value of the traditional big four bowls. It strengthens the value of eight traditionally noted bowl games. It ensures the five major conferences have a place on the New Years Day bowl games. And it ultimately creates a playoff system that would likely boost college football television revenues substantially. That's probably the biggest key of all, and why I think my proposed system would be a smashing success.
In the meantime, there's one thing that would help make an inevitable playoff system a reality : it's time to boycott watching and discussing the big four bowl games and the bogus BCS championship game until they become part of a real playoff system. When the public refuses to legitimize the current system, college football will be forced to respond.
To read my orignal proposal from last year (not too different than this one) go to:
http://robalini.blogspot.com/2007/12/robalinis-college-bowl-plan.html
Uncle Fats' Tasty Meal of the Week
Here's what I made yesterday and it was the best chili I've ever made, according to my wife. We had it with a little shredded cheddar and Tostito Baked Scoops. I cut the beef up into pretty small chunks (as Carroll Shelby says on his Chili Mix, which is quite good "about the size of your pinky toe.") It's very fun to make, and the moment of truth is when you throw all the meat back in the post and stir in all the spices. Wow. Enough for 2+ meals around here.
Beef, Black Bean, and Chorizo Chili
Cooking Light, NOVEMBER 2007
Serve with classic condiments such as sour cream, chopped green onions, and shredded cheddar cheese. For a thinner chili, cook covered the whole time. You can prepare it a day ahead and refrigerate, or up to two weeks ahead and freeze (be sure to thaw the chili overnight in the refrigerator). Look for masa harina, the corn flour used to make tortillas, in the Latin foods aisle at the supermarket, or substitute fine-ground cornmeal. Use kitchen shears to cut up the tomatoes in the can.
2 links Spanish chorizo sausage (about 6 1/2 ounces), thinly sliced
1 1/2 pounds beef stew meat
1 1/2 cups chopped onion
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 (7-ounce) can chipotle chiles in adobo sauce
3 tablespoons tomato paste
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons unsweetened cocoa
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 cup dry red wine
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
2 (14-ounce) cans less-sodium beef broth
1 (28-ounce) can whole tomatoes, undrained and chopped
2 tablespoons masa harina
2 (15-ounce) cans pinto beans, rinsed and drained
1 (15-ounce) can black beans, rinsed and drained
Heat a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add chorizo to pan; sauté 3 minutes or until browned. Remove chorizo from pan. Add half of beef to pan; sauté 5 minutes or until browned. Remove beef from pan. Repeat procedure with remaining beef. Add onion and garlic to pan; sauté 3 minutes.
Remove 4 chipotle chiles from can, and chop. Reserve remaining chiles and sauce for another use. Add chorizo, beef, chopped chiles, tomato paste, and next 6 ingredients (through ground cumin) to pan, and cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Stir in red wine, lime juice, beef broth, and tomatoes; bring to a boil. Reduce heat, and simmer for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.
Gradually stir in masa harina. Add pinto beans and black beans; bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 30 minutes.
Yield: 10 servings (serving size: about 1 cup chili)
CALORIES 325 (30% from fat); FAT 11g (sat 3.8g,mono 4.7g,poly 1g); IRON 4.7mg; CHOLESTEROL 53mg; CALCIUM 104mg; CARBOHYDRATE 31.4g; SODIUM 898mg; PROTEIN 25g; FIBER 8.4g
Beef, Black Bean, and Chorizo Chili
Cooking Light, NOVEMBER 2007
Serve with classic condiments such as sour cream, chopped green onions, and shredded cheddar cheese. For a thinner chili, cook covered the whole time. You can prepare it a day ahead and refrigerate, or up to two weeks ahead and freeze (be sure to thaw the chili overnight in the refrigerator). Look for masa harina, the corn flour used to make tortillas, in the Latin foods aisle at the supermarket, or substitute fine-ground cornmeal. Use kitchen shears to cut up the tomatoes in the can.
2 links Spanish chorizo sausage (about 6 1/2 ounces), thinly sliced
1 1/2 pounds beef stew meat
1 1/2 cups chopped onion
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 (7-ounce) can chipotle chiles in adobo sauce
3 tablespoons tomato paste
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons unsweetened cocoa
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 cup dry red wine
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
2 (14-ounce) cans less-sodium beef broth
1 (28-ounce) can whole tomatoes, undrained and chopped
2 tablespoons masa harina
2 (15-ounce) cans pinto beans, rinsed and drained
1 (15-ounce) can black beans, rinsed and drained
Heat a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add chorizo to pan; sauté 3 minutes or until browned. Remove chorizo from pan. Add half of beef to pan; sauté 5 minutes or until browned. Remove beef from pan. Repeat procedure with remaining beef. Add onion and garlic to pan; sauté 3 minutes.
Remove 4 chipotle chiles from can, and chop. Reserve remaining chiles and sauce for another use. Add chorizo, beef, chopped chiles, tomato paste, and next 6 ingredients (through ground cumin) to pan, and cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Stir in red wine, lime juice, beef broth, and tomatoes; bring to a boil. Reduce heat, and simmer for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.
Gradually stir in masa harina. Add pinto beans and black beans; bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 30 minutes.
Yield: 10 servings (serving size: about 1 cup chili)
CALORIES 325 (30% from fat); FAT 11g (sat 3.8g,mono 4.7g,poly 1g); IRON 4.7mg; CHOLESTEROL 53mg; CALCIUM 104mg; CARBOHYDRATE 31.4g; SODIUM 898mg; PROTEIN 25g; FIBER 8.4g
Axl Rose Gunning for Dr Pepper
http://www.tmz.com/2008/11/27/axl-roses-guns-aimed-at-dr-pepper/Axl Rose Gunning for Dr Pepper
Nov 27th 2008
Axl Rose is accusing Dr Pepper of doing the same thing he did for nearly 17 years: Screwing people out of what they were promised.
Rose is accusing Pepper of profiting off the Guns N' Roses name, after the soda company's website malfunctioned during their free Dr Pepper giveaway on Sunday. The 20 oz. handouts were a promise made by Pepper if "Chinese Democracy" ever hit the shelves.
Axl's lawyers are demanding full-page apologies in four major newspapers, an extended period of time to collect on the free suds and payment for unauthorized use the G'N'R name.
Mumbai Attacks To Be Blamed On Pakistan?
http://www.prisonplanet.com/mumbai-attacks-to-be-linked-to-obama-target-pakistan.html
Mumbai Attacks To Be Blamed On Pakistan?
Up to 100 dead in coordinated terror, India blamed previous attacks on Pakistan
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Coordinated attacks across Mumbai, India’s financial capital, which have killed up to a hundred people and injured hundreds more, are likely to be blamed on a terrorist organization linked to the Pakistani ISI, providing further justification for controversial U.S. bombings inside Pakistani territory and heightened rhetoric against Pakistan on behalf of President elect Barack Obama.
Terrorists armed with AK-47’s and grenades conduced a series of rampages on hotels, restaurants and public transport facilities today, killing around 80 and injuring over 250 people. Initial reports that terrorists had seized western hostages were later dismissed by Indian government officials.
With the corporate media desperate to pin the blame in order to score much needed propaganda points for the ailing war on terror, suspicion is likely to fall on Pakistan, a country that President elect Barack Obama openly threatened during his presidential campaign.
The bombings in Mumbai will also likely silence questions about controversial U.S. bombing raids inside Pakistani territory aimed at terrorists, strikes that have repeatedly killed innocent civilians.
It is commonly asserted that the Pakistani ISI helps fund and train terrorists.
Journalist Stephen Schwartz notes that several terrorist and criminal groups are “backed by senior officers in the Pakistani army, the country’s ISI intelligence establishment and other armed bodies of the state.” Author Daniel Byman states, “Pakistan is probably today’s most active sponsor of terrorism.”
Indeed, Indian police claimed that the Pakistani ISI directed the July 2006 train bombing in Mumbai which killed 186 people, which was blamed on the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba, an organization based in Pakistan. Look for the same organization or an affiliated group to be blamed for today’s attacks.
As Bloomberg reports today, “The government has previously blamed terrorist attacks on organizations linked to foreign powers, without offering evidence or making arrests. Local media often blame the attacks on groups backed by Pakistan or Bangladesh, without identifying the security officials who provided the information.”
With shrill corporate media outfits begging for a scapegoat to be used as war on terror propaganda, it won’t be long before an Al-Qaeda-Pakistan link is claimed. Indeed, early reports already state that the attacks are “thought to be linked to Al-Qaeda,” offering no evidence and in spite of the fact that an unknown group, Deccan Mujahideen, has clamed responsibility for the massacre. The Deccan Plateau is a large plateau in India, suggesting this is where the terrorist group was based.
The Collapse of '09 - Top Trends 2009
RHINEBECK, NY 27 November 2008 -- In November 2007, we predicted "The Panic of '08" as a Top Trend for 2008. We were so sure of our forecast that we secured the domain name, Panicof08.com in November of 2007.
This November we predict "The Collapse of '09" as a Top Trend for 2009. We are so sure of this forecast that we have recently secured the domain name, Collapseof09.com.
When we contacted you last year with our Top Trends list we wrote:
In 2008, Americans will wake up to the worst economic times that anyone alive has ever seen. And they won't know what hit them. Just as they were in a state of shock on 9/11, they'll be frozen in fear when the Economic 9/11 strikes at the heart of Wall Street.
The "Panic of 08" hit as predicted, and so did the Economic 9/11 we had forecast when Lehman Brothers went bust, Merrill Lynch crashed, and A.I.G. was nationalized this past September.
Last year we wrote:
Dismiss this trend forecast at your own peril. If you believe everything will be all right, and that the ship of state is sailing along just fine, toss this out and go about your business.
There is still time to prepare for "The Collapse of 09" that trend seer Gerald Celente predicts, and there is still time to plan for how to best survive the aftermath that will follow. Forewarned is forearmed.
To schedule an interview with Gerald Celente, Founder & Director of The Trends Research Institute, contact:
Meri Puccio
Media Relations
mpuccio@trendsresearch.com
845.876.6700 Ext. 1
Trends Research P.O. Box 660 Rhinebeck, NY 12572
This November we predict "The Collapse of '09" as a Top Trend for 2009. We are so sure of this forecast that we have recently secured the domain name, Collapseof09.com.
When we contacted you last year with our Top Trends list we wrote:
In 2008, Americans will wake up to the worst economic times that anyone alive has ever seen. And they won't know what hit them. Just as they were in a state of shock on 9/11, they'll be frozen in fear when the Economic 9/11 strikes at the heart of Wall Street.
The "Panic of 08" hit as predicted, and so did the Economic 9/11 we had forecast when Lehman Brothers went bust, Merrill Lynch crashed, and A.I.G. was nationalized this past September.
Last year we wrote:
Dismiss this trend forecast at your own peril. If you believe everything will be all right, and that the ship of state is sailing along just fine, toss this out and go about your business.
There is still time to prepare for "The Collapse of 09" that trend seer Gerald Celente predicts, and there is still time to plan for how to best survive the aftermath that will follow. Forewarned is forearmed.
To schedule an interview with Gerald Celente, Founder & Director of The Trends Research Institute, contact:
Meri Puccio
Media Relations
mpuccio@trendsresearch.com
845.876.6700 Ext. 1
Trends Research P.O. Box 660 Rhinebeck, NY 12572
The $70-an-hour autoworker Myth
http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/detroits-70-hour-autoworker-myth
The $70-an-hour autoworker Myth
By John Amato
Tuesday Nov 25, 2008
During the Automotive crisis that has erupted in the last few weeks, many false narratives are being implanted by the right wing thugs that helped push our economy off the cliff. Eric Boehlert tackles this latest smear that our media is ignoring. Don't you think it would be important for our media to actually do some in depth reporting on this issue instead of reciting misleading, conservative talking points?
Indeed, that $70-an-hour meme, actively promoted by the anti-union conservative media, has ricocheted around the traditional press as well as the political landscape, where it was picked up by congressional critics last week during hearings and used to argue against aiding GM, Ford, and Chrysler.
But what's obvious to me is that it's harmful to public discourse when the press, on such a central issue facing our country, fails to clearly state the facts and instead perpetuates misinformation with sloppy reporting -- reporting that seems to hold blue-collar workers to a different standard than their white-collar counterparts.
But having the media echo conservative misinformation and bandy about urban-myth salary figures about allegedly high-on-the-hog GM workers does not constitute a careful review of the facts.
Question: Is the press just being sloppy on this issue of supposedly pampered autoworkers, or are there other elements in play? Because honestly, I've had trouble escaping the not-very-subtle elitist, get-a-load-of-this tone that has run through the media's misinformation on the topic; i.e., "These autoworkers get paid that?!"
Answer: No, they don't, so please stop reporting it. (And why has the press been so reticent to note that Big Three autoworkers recently made significant concessions to management?)
Make no mistake: The $70-an-hour claim represents a classic case of conservative misinformation. It's also a very dangerous one. The falsehood about autoworkers is being spread at a crucial time, when a make-or-break public debate is taking place, a debate that could affect millions of American workers...read on
And as Jane says, the UAW has done a terrible job in handling their side of the PR battle:
This is largely because the UAW has, without question, executed the worst, most non-existent public relations campaign ever. It's just shocking how bad they are at this, leaving everyone to scramble in their defense. Tying their fate to the automakers and leaving it to the CEOs to present their case seems fraught with risk. (If I was Gettlefinger I'd be on a plane to China looking for buyers to save my members' pensions, but nobody asked me.)
The $70-an-hour autoworker Myth
By John Amato
Tuesday Nov 25, 2008
During the Automotive crisis that has erupted in the last few weeks, many false narratives are being implanted by the right wing thugs that helped push our economy off the cliff. Eric Boehlert tackles this latest smear that our media is ignoring. Don't you think it would be important for our media to actually do some in depth reporting on this issue instead of reciting misleading, conservative talking points?
Indeed, that $70-an-hour meme, actively promoted by the anti-union conservative media, has ricocheted around the traditional press as well as the political landscape, where it was picked up by congressional critics last week during hearings and used to argue against aiding GM, Ford, and Chrysler.
But what's obvious to me is that it's harmful to public discourse when the press, on such a central issue facing our country, fails to clearly state the facts and instead perpetuates misinformation with sloppy reporting -- reporting that seems to hold blue-collar workers to a different standard than their white-collar counterparts.
But having the media echo conservative misinformation and bandy about urban-myth salary figures about allegedly high-on-the-hog GM workers does not constitute a careful review of the facts.
Question: Is the press just being sloppy on this issue of supposedly pampered autoworkers, or are there other elements in play? Because honestly, I've had trouble escaping the not-very-subtle elitist, get-a-load-of-this tone that has run through the media's misinformation on the topic; i.e., "These autoworkers get paid that?!"
Answer: No, they don't, so please stop reporting it. (And why has the press been so reticent to note that Big Three autoworkers recently made significant concessions to management?)
Make no mistake: The $70-an-hour claim represents a classic case of conservative misinformation. It's also a very dangerous one. The falsehood about autoworkers is being spread at a crucial time, when a make-or-break public debate is taking place, a debate that could affect millions of American workers...read on
And as Jane says, the UAW has done a terrible job in handling their side of the PR battle:
This is largely because the UAW has, without question, executed the worst, most non-existent public relations campaign ever. It's just shocking how bad they are at this, leaving everyone to scramble in their defense. Tying their fate to the automakers and leaving it to the CEOs to present their case seems fraught with risk. (If I was Gettlefinger I'd be on a plane to China looking for buyers to save my members' pensions, but nobody asked me.)
Air Cars: A New Wind for America's Roads?
http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/106040/Air-Cars:-A-New-Wind-for-America's-Roads?
Air Cars: A New Wind for America's Roads?
by Jim Ostroff
Thursday, October 30, 2008
A new carmaker has a plan for cheap, environmentally friendly cars to be built all over the country
An air-powered car? It may be available sooner than you think at a price tag that will hardly be a budget buster. The vehicle may not run like a speed racer on back road highways, but developer Zero Pollution Motors is betting consumers will be willing to fork over $20,000 for a vehicle that can motor around all day on nothing but air and a splash of salad oil, alcohol or possibly a pint of gasoline.
The expertise needed to build a compressed air car, or CAV, is not rocket science, either. Years-old, off-the-shelf technology uses compressed air to drive old-fashioned car engine pistons instead of combusting gas or diesel fuel to create a burst of air to do the same thing. Indian carmaker Tata has no qualms about the technology. It has already bought the rights to make the car for the huge Indian market.
The air car can tool along at a top speed of 35 mph for some 60 miles or so on a tank of compressed air, a sufficient distance for 80% of consumers to commute to work and back and complete daily chores.
On highways, the CAV can cruise at interstate speeds for nearly 800 miles with a small motor that compresses outside air to keep the tank filled. The motor isn't finicky about fuel. It will burn gasoline or diesel as well as biodiesel, ethanol or vegetable oil.
This car leaves the highest-mpg vehicles you can buy right now in the dust. Even if it used only regular gasoline, the air car would average 106 mpg, more than double today's fuel sipping champ, the Toyota Prius. The air tank also can be refilled when it's not in use by being plugged into a wall socket and recharged with electricity as the motor compresses air.
Automakers aren't quite ready yet to gear up huge assembly line operations churning out air cars or set up glitzy dealer showrooms where you can ooh and aah over the color or style. But the vehicles will be built in factories that will make up to 8,000 vehicles a year, likely starting in 2011, and be sold directly to consumers.
There will be plants in nearly every state, based on the number of drivers in the state. California will have as many as 17 air car manufacturing plants, and there'll be around 12 in Florida, eight in New York, four in Georgia, while two in Connecticut will serve that state and Rhode Island.
The technology goes back decades, but is coming together courtesy of two converging forces. First, new laws are likely to be enacted in a few years that will limit carbon dioxide emissions and force automakers to develop ultra-high mileage cars and those that emit minuscule amounts of or no gases linked with global warming. Plug-in electric hybrids will slash these emissions, but they'll be pricey at around $40,000 each and require some changes in infrastructure -- such as widespread recharge stations -- to be practical. Fuel cells that burn hydrogen to produce only water vapor still face daunting technical challenges.
Second, the relatively high cost of gas has expedited the air car's development. Yes, pump prices have plunged since July from record levels, but remain way higher than just a few years ago and continue to take a bite out of disposable income. Refiners will face carbon emission restraints, too, and steeply higher costs will be passed along at the pump.
Zero Pollution Motors doesn't plan to produce the cars in the U.S. Instead, it plans to charge $15 million for the rights to the technology, a fully built turnkey auto assembly plant, tools, machinery, training and rights to use trademarks.
The CAV has a big hurdle: proving it can pass federal crash tests. Shiva Vencat, president and CEO of Zero Pollution Motors, says he's not worried. "The requirements can be modeled [on a computer] before anything is built and adjusted to ensure that the cars will pass" the crash tests. Vencat also is a vice president of MDI Inc., a French company that developed the air car.
The inventor of this technology is Mr. Guy Negre, who is the founder and CEO of MDI SA, a company headquartered in Luxembourg with its R and D in Nice, France.
Air Cars: A New Wind for America's Roads?
by Jim Ostroff
Thursday, October 30, 2008
A new carmaker has a plan for cheap, environmentally friendly cars to be built all over the country
An air-powered car? It may be available sooner than you think at a price tag that will hardly be a budget buster. The vehicle may not run like a speed racer on back road highways, but developer Zero Pollution Motors is betting consumers will be willing to fork over $20,000 for a vehicle that can motor around all day on nothing but air and a splash of salad oil, alcohol or possibly a pint of gasoline.
The expertise needed to build a compressed air car, or CAV, is not rocket science, either. Years-old, off-the-shelf technology uses compressed air to drive old-fashioned car engine pistons instead of combusting gas or diesel fuel to create a burst of air to do the same thing. Indian carmaker Tata has no qualms about the technology. It has already bought the rights to make the car for the huge Indian market.
The air car can tool along at a top speed of 35 mph for some 60 miles or so on a tank of compressed air, a sufficient distance for 80% of consumers to commute to work and back and complete daily chores.
On highways, the CAV can cruise at interstate speeds for nearly 800 miles with a small motor that compresses outside air to keep the tank filled. The motor isn't finicky about fuel. It will burn gasoline or diesel as well as biodiesel, ethanol or vegetable oil.
This car leaves the highest-mpg vehicles you can buy right now in the dust. Even if it used only regular gasoline, the air car would average 106 mpg, more than double today's fuel sipping champ, the Toyota Prius. The air tank also can be refilled when it's not in use by being plugged into a wall socket and recharged with electricity as the motor compresses air.
Automakers aren't quite ready yet to gear up huge assembly line operations churning out air cars or set up glitzy dealer showrooms where you can ooh and aah over the color or style. But the vehicles will be built in factories that will make up to 8,000 vehicles a year, likely starting in 2011, and be sold directly to consumers.
There will be plants in nearly every state, based on the number of drivers in the state. California will have as many as 17 air car manufacturing plants, and there'll be around 12 in Florida, eight in New York, four in Georgia, while two in Connecticut will serve that state and Rhode Island.
The technology goes back decades, but is coming together courtesy of two converging forces. First, new laws are likely to be enacted in a few years that will limit carbon dioxide emissions and force automakers to develop ultra-high mileage cars and those that emit minuscule amounts of or no gases linked with global warming. Plug-in electric hybrids will slash these emissions, but they'll be pricey at around $40,000 each and require some changes in infrastructure -- such as widespread recharge stations -- to be practical. Fuel cells that burn hydrogen to produce only water vapor still face daunting technical challenges.
Second, the relatively high cost of gas has expedited the air car's development. Yes, pump prices have plunged since July from record levels, but remain way higher than just a few years ago and continue to take a bite out of disposable income. Refiners will face carbon emission restraints, too, and steeply higher costs will be passed along at the pump.
Zero Pollution Motors doesn't plan to produce the cars in the U.S. Instead, it plans to charge $15 million for the rights to the technology, a fully built turnkey auto assembly plant, tools, machinery, training and rights to use trademarks.
The CAV has a big hurdle: proving it can pass federal crash tests. Shiva Vencat, president and CEO of Zero Pollution Motors, says he's not worried. "The requirements can be modeled [on a computer] before anything is built and adjusted to ensure that the cars will pass" the crash tests. Vencat also is a vice president of MDI Inc., a French company that developed the air car.
The inventor of this technology is Mr. Guy Negre, who is the founder and CEO of MDI SA, a company headquartered in Luxembourg with its R and D in Nice, France.
Kool Website of the Week: GoldenAgeStories.com
http://www.goldenagestories.com
Robalini's Review: Whatever the merits of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard was sure one hell of pulp writer. Check out this site for a treasure trove of resources for fans of Hubbard's classic pre-Dianetics fictional yarns...
L. Ron Hubbard Pulp Fiction Books and Stories from the Golden Age: Book Video, Books Online, Audio Books
Read book excerpts, watch video clips, get free book cover posters, listen to old time radio show audio book story clips, and buy L. Ron Hubbard fiction book titles in the Golden Age Stories Science Fiction, Western, Mystery and Adventure book series by New York Times best selling author L. Ron Hubbard. Explore the Interactive Pulp Fiction Universe Flash site and online book store, join the book club, register for the Itunes Book Podcast.
Robalini's Review: Whatever the merits of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard was sure one hell of pulp writer. Check out this site for a treasure trove of resources for fans of Hubbard's classic pre-Dianetics fictional yarns...
L. Ron Hubbard Pulp Fiction Books and Stories from the Golden Age: Book Video, Books Online, Audio Books
Read book excerpts, watch video clips, get free book cover posters, listen to old time radio show audio book story clips, and buy L. Ron Hubbard fiction book titles in the Golden Age Stories Science Fiction, Western, Mystery and Adventure book series by New York Times best selling author L. Ron Hubbard. Explore the Interactive Pulp Fiction Universe Flash site and online book store, join the book club, register for the Itunes Book Podcast.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Article of the Month
From Instant Genius
THE NORTH CELESTIAL POLE
If you stood exactly on the spot that is Earth's geographic North Pole and looked straight up into the sky, you would be looking at what astronomers refer to as the North Celestial Pole (NCP).
• Very near to that imaginary pole in the sky, with a little variation due to Earth's rotational tilt, you would find the star Polaris, also known as the "North Star" or the "Pole Star." It's part of the constellation Ursa Minor, the "Little Bear," also known as the "Little Dipper." (Polaris is the last star in the dipper's handle.)
• Because of its location relative to Earth's rotation, Polaris appears to us to stay in the same spot all night long, every night (in the daytime, too, if we could see it). And because, from our perspective, Earth rotates clockwise relative to that pole star, all the other stars in the sky seem to move around it in a counterclockwise direction. That phenomenon is known as diurnal motion-from the Latin for "daily" (and it can be seen graphically in time-lapse photography).
• This made Polaris extremely useful for ancient navigators (it still does), since no matter where you are, if you draw a line down from Polaris to the horizon-that point is almost exactly north. It is, however, only visible from the Northern Hemisphere.
• Polaris was not always nor will it always be our North Star. For various reasons concerning the movement of celestial bodies, our positional relationship to the stars changes on an approximately 25,765-year cycle. Two thousand years from now, the star known as Gamma Cephei will become our North Star. And about 3,000 years after that, Iota Cephei will take its place.
• To find Polaris, first locate the Big Dipper (Ursa Major, which is often easier to spot than the Little Dipper). The two stars that make up the front of the cup (farthest from the handle) are known as the "pointer stars." Follow them out from the cup, and the next bright star you see is Polaris.
*******************************************************************************
BRI CONTACT INFO
*******************************************************************************
As always, we're here for you.
The Bathroom Readers' Institute
PO Box 1117
Ashland, OR 97520
phone: (888) 488-4642
fax: (541) 482-6159
For order inquiries: orders@bathroomreader.com
For general correspondence: mail@bathroomreader.com
www.bathroomreader.com
*******************************************************************************
THE BOTTOM LINE
*******************************************************************************
From Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Jingle Bell Christmas
Bah Humbug!
Here are some nominees for Scrooge of the Year.
• A dentist gave a $30 gift certificate to his dental assistant for Christmas. She found the certificate could only be redeemed at an upscale boutique owned by the dentist's wife that carried nothing even close to $30.
• The Great Dickens Christmas Fair in San Francisco decided not to hand out cash bonuses to its employees at Christmas. Instead, each employee received a white painter's cap with the words "Bah Humbug" printed on it.
• Every year, a consumer electronics company in the English town of Grimsby gives its workers the same Christmas bonus: a sack of potatoes. (The owner's cousin owns a potato farm.)
• Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, became notorious for his "Scrooge Memo," in which he pointedly reminded employees of their obligation to work a full day on Christmas Eve-or else.
• Richard Martin, a 71-year-old apartment manager in Bay Ridge, New York, got upset one year when someone tore down the Christmas decorations he'd put up in the lobby of his apartment building. So he wrote the following note and sent it to all his tenants: "Dear scumbag: If I catch you, I will kill you where you are. You don't want to f*** with the Irish."
• Colin Wood hated Christmas so much that he rented a fallout shelter for $600 so he could lock himself away for the holidays. He said Christmas provoked too many family arguments and he preferred to avoid the whole thing. His brother gave him a copy of Dickens' A Christmas Carol to read while underground.
THE NORTH CELESTIAL POLE
If you stood exactly on the spot that is Earth's geographic North Pole and looked straight up into the sky, you would be looking at what astronomers refer to as the North Celestial Pole (NCP).
• Very near to that imaginary pole in the sky, with a little variation due to Earth's rotational tilt, you would find the star Polaris, also known as the "North Star" or the "Pole Star." It's part of the constellation Ursa Minor, the "Little Bear," also known as the "Little Dipper." (Polaris is the last star in the dipper's handle.)
• Because of its location relative to Earth's rotation, Polaris appears to us to stay in the same spot all night long, every night (in the daytime, too, if we could see it). And because, from our perspective, Earth rotates clockwise relative to that pole star, all the other stars in the sky seem to move around it in a counterclockwise direction. That phenomenon is known as diurnal motion-from the Latin for "daily" (and it can be seen graphically in time-lapse photography).
• This made Polaris extremely useful for ancient navigators (it still does), since no matter where you are, if you draw a line down from Polaris to the horizon-that point is almost exactly north. It is, however, only visible from the Northern Hemisphere.
• Polaris was not always nor will it always be our North Star. For various reasons concerning the movement of celestial bodies, our positional relationship to the stars changes on an approximately 25,765-year cycle. Two thousand years from now, the star known as Gamma Cephei will become our North Star. And about 3,000 years after that, Iota Cephei will take its place.
• To find Polaris, first locate the Big Dipper (Ursa Major, which is often easier to spot than the Little Dipper). The two stars that make up the front of the cup (farthest from the handle) are known as the "pointer stars." Follow them out from the cup, and the next bright star you see is Polaris.
*******************************************************************************
BRI CONTACT INFO
*******************************************************************************
As always, we're here for you.
The Bathroom Readers' Institute
PO Box 1117
Ashland, OR 97520
phone: (888) 488-4642
fax: (541) 482-6159
For order inquiries: orders@bathroomreader.com
For general correspondence: mail@bathroomreader.com
www.bathroomreader.com
*******************************************************************************
THE BOTTOM LINE
*******************************************************************************
From Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Jingle Bell Christmas
Bah Humbug!
Here are some nominees for Scrooge of the Year.
• A dentist gave a $30 gift certificate to his dental assistant for Christmas. She found the certificate could only be redeemed at an upscale boutique owned by the dentist's wife that carried nothing even close to $30.
• The Great Dickens Christmas Fair in San Francisco decided not to hand out cash bonuses to its employees at Christmas. Instead, each employee received a white painter's cap with the words "Bah Humbug" printed on it.
• Every year, a consumer electronics company in the English town of Grimsby gives its workers the same Christmas bonus: a sack of potatoes. (The owner's cousin owns a potato farm.)
• Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, became notorious for his "Scrooge Memo," in which he pointedly reminded employees of their obligation to work a full day on Christmas Eve-or else.
• Richard Martin, a 71-year-old apartment manager in Bay Ridge, New York, got upset one year when someone tore down the Christmas decorations he'd put up in the lobby of his apartment building. So he wrote the following note and sent it to all his tenants: "Dear scumbag: If I catch you, I will kill you where you are. You don't want to f*** with the Irish."
• Colin Wood hated Christmas so much that he rented a fallout shelter for $600 so he could lock himself away for the holidays. He said Christmas provoked too many family arguments and he preferred to avoid the whole thing. His brother gave him a copy of Dickens' A Christmas Carol to read while underground.
Volcker will head new Obama board
Robalini's Note: Volcker & Goolsbee as Obama's chief "economic recovery" advisors. Who saw that one coming?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20081126/pl_politico/15997
Volcker will head new Obama board
Mike Allen
Wed Nov 26, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday will announce the creation of a president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, to provide outside advice from heavyweight thinkers, officials said.
Obama, who will be the sixth president Volcker has served, plans to make the announcement in Chicago at his third news conference on the economy in three days, allowing him to dominate news coverage during Thanksgiving week.
The officials said the idea came from Obama, who wanted to preserve the advisory structure he had come to appreciate over the course of the campaign. The new body also reflects the magnitude of the nation’s economic problems, which Obama wants to solve in an integrated way – not just through attention to markets, but also to jobs, wages and housing foreclosure.
The economic recovery board’s staff director and chief economist will be Austan Goolsbee, who was senior economic adviser to the Obama campaign and will also be a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
The other board members – eight to 16 people of a caliber of Eric E. Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google Inc. – will be named later.
The board initially will exist for two years, but might well be extended for longer. Transition advisers expect it might meet roughly once a month.
Obama’s plans for the board were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Volcker’s official bio says he “was chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from August 1979 to August 1987. He is credited with playing the leading role in ending a period of high and rising inflation and restoring a base for sustained growth. Initially appointed to that position by President Carter for a four-year term, he was reappointed in 1983 by President Reagan. On the completion of his second term as chairman, Mr. Volcker returned to private life, becoming chairman of the firm of James D. Wolfensohn, Inc., a company concentrating on the provision of investment banking services to a limited number of large domestic and international organizations. He retired as chairman and chief executive officer of Wolfensohn when that firm merged with Bankers Trust Company in 1996. In the course of his career, Mr. Volcker worked in the federal government for almost 30 years, serving in office under five presidents—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan.”
From Goolsbee’s official bio: “He is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a Fulbright Scholar. … He [formerly wrote] the ‘Economic Scene’ column for the New York Times and was the Lead Editor for the Journal of Law and Economics from 2001 to 2004. The Financial Times named him one of the six Gurus of the Future/Best Under 40 in 2005, and the World Economic Forum in Switzerland chose him one as one of the 2005 Young Global Leaders. He received his Master's Degree in Economics from Yale in 1991 and his Ph.D. in the same subject in 1995 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20081126/pl_politico/15997
Volcker will head new Obama board
Mike Allen
Wed Nov 26, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday will announce the creation of a president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, to provide outside advice from heavyweight thinkers, officials said.
Obama, who will be the sixth president Volcker has served, plans to make the announcement in Chicago at his third news conference on the economy in three days, allowing him to dominate news coverage during Thanksgiving week.
The officials said the idea came from Obama, who wanted to preserve the advisory structure he had come to appreciate over the course of the campaign. The new body also reflects the magnitude of the nation’s economic problems, which Obama wants to solve in an integrated way – not just through attention to markets, but also to jobs, wages and housing foreclosure.
The economic recovery board’s staff director and chief economist will be Austan Goolsbee, who was senior economic adviser to the Obama campaign and will also be a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
The other board members – eight to 16 people of a caliber of Eric E. Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google Inc. – will be named later.
The board initially will exist for two years, but might well be extended for longer. Transition advisers expect it might meet roughly once a month.
Obama’s plans for the board were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Volcker’s official bio says he “was chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from August 1979 to August 1987. He is credited with playing the leading role in ending a period of high and rising inflation and restoring a base for sustained growth. Initially appointed to that position by President Carter for a four-year term, he was reappointed in 1983 by President Reagan. On the completion of his second term as chairman, Mr. Volcker returned to private life, becoming chairman of the firm of James D. Wolfensohn, Inc., a company concentrating on the provision of investment banking services to a limited number of large domestic and international organizations. He retired as chairman and chief executive officer of Wolfensohn when that firm merged with Bankers Trust Company in 1996. In the course of his career, Mr. Volcker worked in the federal government for almost 30 years, serving in office under five presidents—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan.”
From Goolsbee’s official bio: “He is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a Fulbright Scholar. … He [formerly wrote] the ‘Economic Scene’ column for the New York Times and was the Lead Editor for the Journal of Law and Economics from 2001 to 2004. The Financial Times named him one of the six Gurus of the Future/Best Under 40 in 2005, and the World Economic Forum in Switzerland chose him one as one of the 2005 Young Global Leaders. He received his Master's Degree in Economics from Yale in 1991 and his Ph.D. in the same subject in 1995 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
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