Saturday, January 1, 2011
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Pssst- Hey buddy, wanna buy $134B of U.S. bonds?
Two Japanese men were caught trying to smuggle $134B in U.S. bearer bonds into Switzerland.
This is a big story in Italy, but our mainstream media has been ignoring it all week. Bearer bonds are like cash, and they can come in huge denominations ($500M each, in this case), which makes them perfect for money laundering and tax evasion on massive scales. This is why the government stopped (officially) issuing them in 1982. There are supposed to be only $5.2B of U.S. government bearer bonds outstanding, each with its own serial number.
The first reaction is to say they are fake, but then who faked them? This stunt is juvenile even by Kim Jong Il's low standards. Just one of these bonds would raise eyebrows even in Switzerland, and could never be cashed. Perhaps they are legitimately owned by the Japanese government? Japan's finance minister is currently in Italy for the G8, and he said "Our trust in U.S. Treasuries is absolutely unshakeable". Translation: Japan is trying to dump T-bills at a good price. But if they belong to the Japanese government, they would have gone to Switzerland in an unsearchable diplomatic pouch.
My personal suspicion is that Bush secretly issued these bonds to fund assorted dirty jobs around the world. It might have happened before. When the CIA needs more influence than can be bought through smuggling cocaine and heroin into America, it probably gets these giant bearer bonds from the Treasury. The debt would remain off the books until the bonds are quietly cashed in Switzerland.
With this big seizure, any tin-pot dictator who hasn't already cashed his bearer bonds must be wondering if the US government has been cooking the books and effectively counterfeiting its own currency all along. These rats are going to start jumping from the sinking ship out of fear that America printed hundreds of billions of these bonds with no intention of honoring them. We might get an indication of how much CIA blood money is out there based on how much the dollar drops this month.
Update:
I just realized that the most likely conspiracy is a little more benign. The bonds are fake, and the mules were set up to get caught. This whole thing is a consipracy to get the world to spin conspiracies, thereby triggering the dollar panic a little early. This would also explain why there are $134.5B in bonds and $134.5B outstanding in the TARP fund at the end of first quarter (not that I would be surprised by outright fraud of this scale). Or maybe the bonds were forged by the cult of Queen Legaspi. They're screwy enough to try something like this, and Berlusconi is screwy enough to get a mafia bank to pretend the bonds are real so he can improve Italy's books by seizing 40% of the pretend value. Now we're getting somewhere!
This is a big story in Italy, but our mainstream media has been ignoring it all week. Bearer bonds are like cash, and they can come in huge denominations ($500M each, in this case), which makes them perfect for money laundering and tax evasion on massive scales. This is why the government stopped (officially) issuing them in 1982. There are supposed to be only $5.2B of U.S. government bearer bonds outstanding, each with its own serial number.
The first reaction is to say they are fake, but then who faked them? This stunt is juvenile even by Kim Jong Il's low standards. Just one of these bonds would raise eyebrows even in Switzerland, and could never be cashed. Perhaps they are legitimately owned by the Japanese government? Japan's finance minister is currently in Italy for the G8, and he said "Our trust in U.S. Treasuries is absolutely unshakeable". Translation: Japan is trying to dump T-bills at a good price. But if they belong to the Japanese government, they would have gone to Switzerland in an unsearchable diplomatic pouch.
My personal suspicion is that Bush secretly issued these bonds to fund assorted dirty jobs around the world. It might have happened before. When the CIA needs more influence than can be bought through smuggling cocaine and heroin into America, it probably gets these giant bearer bonds from the Treasury. The debt would remain off the books until the bonds are quietly cashed in Switzerland.
With this big seizure, any tin-pot dictator who hasn't already cashed his bearer bonds must be wondering if the US government has been cooking the books and effectively counterfeiting its own currency all along. These rats are going to start jumping from the sinking ship out of fear that America printed hundreds of billions of these bonds with no intention of honoring them. We might get an indication of how much CIA blood money is out there based on how much the dollar drops this month.
Update:
I just realized that the most likely conspiracy is a little more benign. The bonds are fake, and the mules were set up to get caught. This whole thing is a consipracy to get the world to spin conspiracies, thereby triggering the dollar panic a little early. This would also explain why there are $134.5B in bonds and $134.5B outstanding in the TARP fund at the end of first quarter (not that I would be surprised by outright fraud of this scale). Or maybe the bonds were forged by the cult of Queen Legaspi. They're screwy enough to try something like this, and Berlusconi is screwy enough to get a mafia bank to pretend the bonds are real so he can improve Italy's books by seizing 40% of the pretend value. Now we're getting somewhere!
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Geithner must go
News of Geithner's corruption and incompetence has been trickling in for a while now, and yet Obama still keeps him around. Bush might have honestly trusted Paulson to take a blank check and spend it in the way that was best for America, but Obama is smarter than that. The fact that Geithner is not in jail indicates that Obama has been bought and paid for by the oligarchy, just like every other president since (perhaps) Jimmy Carter. Here are some of Geithner's dubious achievements of the last few months:
He knew about the AIG bonuses long before the big stink about them in March. In fact, he helped write the loophole that allowed the AIG executives to keep their loot. Going along with the public outrage was just an act.
He helped set up middlemen to dodge other congressional rules about bonuses from bailed out companies.
He won praise from Obama for helping the IRS catch tax cheats. Because Geithner sure knows how to cheat on taxes.
The New York Times discusses how Geithner pushed for the government to guarantee ALL of Wall Street's bad debt, at taxpayer expense. They also discuss how well he looks after his many friends on Wall Street, helping them gain no-bid contracts, loot the Treasury, cover up derivatives problems and accounting irregularities, etc. He was in on Paulson's scam to launder bailout money through AIG to pay off his friends at Goldman Sachs. The piece is long, but this kind of investigative journalism is a lost art.
Geithner and Sumners created PPIP, a $2T scam to reinflate Wall Street's pyramid scheme for the benefit of the super-rich. Hedge funds get to use FDIC money to buy Wall Street's garbage. If the price goes up, they keep all the profits. If it crashes, either the responsible banks or the taxpayers will be left holding the bag.
He helped block regulatory reform and rig the stress tests so the banks would pass.
He refused to oversee how banks were using the bailout money or what collateral was given, thus guaranteeing massive fraud.
Geithner helped funnel most of the TARP funds to his friends on the Council on Foreign Relations. This shadowy organization was spawned by J.D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan in their quest for financial dictatorship.
He attended the recent meeting of the Bilderberg Group, another shadowy organization dedicated to a world government owned by bankers. What Bilderberg wants, Bilderberg gets- and right now they want economic mayhem, because it will be the perfect excuse to create international financial institutions. At a recent CFR speech, Geithner expressed support for using IMF special drawing rights as a new world fiat currency.
He knew about the AIG bonuses long before the big stink about them in March. In fact, he helped write the loophole that allowed the AIG executives to keep their loot. Going along with the public outrage was just an act.
He helped set up middlemen to dodge other congressional rules about bonuses from bailed out companies.
He won praise from Obama for helping the IRS catch tax cheats. Because Geithner sure knows how to cheat on taxes.
The New York Times discusses how Geithner pushed for the government to guarantee ALL of Wall Street's bad debt, at taxpayer expense. They also discuss how well he looks after his many friends on Wall Street, helping them gain no-bid contracts, loot the Treasury, cover up derivatives problems and accounting irregularities, etc. He was in on Paulson's scam to launder bailout money through AIG to pay off his friends at Goldman Sachs. The piece is long, but this kind of investigative journalism is a lost art.
Geithner and Sumners created PPIP, a $2T scam to reinflate Wall Street's pyramid scheme for the benefit of the super-rich. Hedge funds get to use FDIC money to buy Wall Street's garbage. If the price goes up, they keep all the profits. If it crashes, either the responsible banks or the taxpayers will be left holding the bag.
He helped block regulatory reform and rig the stress tests so the banks would pass.
He refused to oversee how banks were using the bailout money or what collateral was given, thus guaranteeing massive fraud.
Geithner helped funnel most of the TARP funds to his friends on the Council on Foreign Relations. This shadowy organization was spawned by J.D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan in their quest for financial dictatorship.
He attended the recent meeting of the Bilderberg Group, another shadowy organization dedicated to a world government owned by bankers. What Bilderberg wants, Bilderberg gets- and right now they want economic mayhem, because it will be the perfect excuse to create international financial institutions. At a recent CFR speech, Geithner expressed support for using IMF special drawing rights as a new world fiat currency.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Wow- I forgot what it was like to have a smart president
Science as stimulus: Obama proposes to increase science funding to 3% of GDP and create a new department of energy research. This is a great idea. (It would be even better if every science degree granted to a foreign student came with a free green card instead of a free body-cavity search). Last century, America led the world in science and then led economically by making "the next big thing". Right now the next big thing is probably renewable energy. Thanks in part to Bush, America isn't making the next big thing. Since about 50% of our GDP comes from high-tech industries, science is a long-term investment that will pay off much better than dodgy securities. Now, if the government would divert all the bailout money (~100%of GDP) into science we could have 100% renewable energy, a cure for aging, and a Mars colony by 2050. Despite my Libertarian bias, I believe these kinds of high-risk, high-reward science projects are perfectly suited to government financing and are a wise use of tax dollars. Fundamental science is one of the few positive things the government does well. With Obama calling himself "a science guy", there is some long-term hope- until the Republicans come back.
After the Republicans took over Congress in 1995 they closed the Office of Technology Assessment, which educated Congress about science issues. They complained about their microscopic $22M budget, but the real reason they closed the OTA was because they wanted ideology to drive the facts. So Congress gave itself a lobotomy as a way of saying "nyah nyah nyah, Reality, I can't hear you". Then Bush came in and stacked the whole government with ideologues. We went back to papal infallibility and truth by decree, and look where that got us.
Sentient people might have learned from their mistakes and realized there is an objective reality that we ignore at the country's peril, but these are Republicans. They're as stoopid as they wanna be, and proud of it. Susan Collins is one of the smarter ones (by Republican standards), but on her website she recently bragged about cutting pandemic preparedness funds. Bobby Jindal is a rising star because he's dumb even by Republican standards. In what was supposed to be a career-making speech, he attacked volcano monitoring right before Mt. Redoubt erupted. Good thing it was monitored- last time it blew, the ash destroyed all four engines on a jetliner. Incidents like this aren't even related to the science hostility and Ministry of Truth thinking we have come to expect from Republicans. They're fundamentally hostile to the idea of government serving anyone except their friends. Disaster mitigation is a legitimate use of taxpayer money, but don't expect Republicans to support it unless it involves scaring people into giving up their freedoms.
After the Republicans took over Congress in 1995 they closed the Office of Technology Assessment, which educated Congress about science issues. They complained about their microscopic $22M budget, but the real reason they closed the OTA was because they wanted ideology to drive the facts. So Congress gave itself a lobotomy as a way of saying "nyah nyah nyah, Reality, I can't hear you". Then Bush came in and stacked the whole government with ideologues. We went back to papal infallibility and truth by decree, and look where that got us.
Sentient people might have learned from their mistakes and realized there is an objective reality that we ignore at the country's peril, but these are Republicans. They're as stoopid as they wanna be, and proud of it. Susan Collins is one of the smarter ones (by Republican standards), but on her website she recently bragged about cutting pandemic preparedness funds. Bobby Jindal is a rising star because he's dumb even by Republican standards. In what was supposed to be a career-making speech, he attacked volcano monitoring right before Mt. Redoubt erupted. Good thing it was monitored- last time it blew, the ash destroyed all four engines on a jetliner. Incidents like this aren't even related to the science hostility and Ministry of Truth thinking we have come to expect from Republicans. They're fundamentally hostile to the idea of government serving anyone except their friends. Disaster mitigation is a legitimate use of taxpayer money, but don't expect Republicans to support it unless it involves scaring people into giving up their freedoms.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Who would Jesus torture?
Republicans and fundies are having some trouble with the whole torture=evil concept. Bush famously said "We don't torture"- we just veto laws banning torture, or get John Yoo to write a legal memo saying that it isn't really torture. If the President orders crushing a kid's testicles, or starving Kalid Sheikh Mohammed's kids and putting ants on them, then it is as Constitutional and all-American as secret gulags and killing random brown people. Trying to press the issue only leads Republicans to the standard tyrant's rationalization- that evil is necessary for the greater good. That's all we've been hearing from Cheney, Hannity, etc. Funny how it never works out that way. America deserves its collapse, in part, because of the torture that contributed to it.
Frank Rich is usually a tool of the establishment but in this case his take is accurate: Bush and Cheney wanted to invade Iraq before they took office, and they needed an excuse. After 9/11 they pressed the torturers to squeeze out something about Saddam and Bin Laden of working together, even though they knew this was a lie. People who were tortured for months told the torturers anything they wanted to hear, so the government's politicized delusions got reinforced in a feedback loop, and convenient public enemies got inflated to much larger than their actual threat. The government then acted on its delusions in a way which ultimately crippled the nation. Public enemy #1 turned out to be the government itself. This has happened to every single dictatorship, and now it has happened to America, because we let it become a de facto dictatorship. Most of us deserve our $10,000 fine for our share of the $3T war. It's a fine punishment for our willful stupidity in supporting George Bush and his evil. Still, nothing can compensate the thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians who lost everything.
Bush and his thugs also used bogus intelligence obtained through torture to browbeat critics at home and maintain a climate of fear for political purposes. For example, when they were attacked over 9/11 intelligence "failures", they tortured Abu Zubaydah into squealing about a string of phony terror plots which they paraded before the public. In a recent attempt to defend torture, the CIA cited the thoroughly discredited LA Library plot. Is this the best they can do?
This wasn't just "a few bad apples". The whole barrel was rotten, all the way to the top. The pressure coming down from the top was so intense that soldier Alyssa Peterson killed herself after being disciplined for refusing to torture. She is one of the few heroes in this sorry chapter of American history. Almost all Republicans, most Democrats and media talking heads, and half the voters are complicit in this evil.
Cheney keeps rearing his ugly head to remind us that alienating our friends, inspiring our enemies, crippling our military, and wasting $3T actually made us strong, and any attempt at justice will weaken us. The cowardly Democrats are still nodding in agreement because they have Stockholm syndrome or because they don't want their complicity revealed. But in order to avoid these mistakes in the future and salvage what remains of our national honor, we must expose and prosecute the entire chain of command. Bring on the Nuremberg trials.
Update:
We also need Nuremberg trials over America's prisons, where torture, rape, and slavery are institutionalized. This horrifying link is a must-read for anyone who thinks America is the Land of the Free. Where the sun doesn't shine, all corruption is inevitable.
Evangelicals are 50% more likely to support torture than atheists. Let's flush this whole "religion is necessary for a moral society" BS. Three of the most obsessively moral people I know are atheists who fought the degradation of America every step of the way. I know a Satanist who is nicer than most Christians. Religion inspired the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, terrorism, torture, and George Bush. Religion strangled the Greek renaissance, burned the Great Library, and tried to strangle the European renaissance. If the Greek renaissance had continued we would be spreading through the galaxy like swine flu right now, but we had to spend another two thousand years living nasty, brutish, and short lives without science. But hey, at least we kept gays and women in their place...
Frank Rich is usually a tool of the establishment but in this case his take is accurate: Bush and Cheney wanted to invade Iraq before they took office, and they needed an excuse. After 9/11 they pressed the torturers to squeeze out something about Saddam and Bin Laden of working together, even though they knew this was a lie. People who were tortured for months told the torturers anything they wanted to hear, so the government's politicized delusions got reinforced in a feedback loop, and convenient public enemies got inflated to much larger than their actual threat. The government then acted on its delusions in a way which ultimately crippled the nation. Public enemy #1 turned out to be the government itself. This has happened to every single dictatorship, and now it has happened to America, because we let it become a de facto dictatorship. Most of us deserve our $10,000 fine for our share of the $3T war. It's a fine punishment for our willful stupidity in supporting George Bush and his evil. Still, nothing can compensate the thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians who lost everything.
Bush and his thugs also used bogus intelligence obtained through torture to browbeat critics at home and maintain a climate of fear for political purposes. For example, when they were attacked over 9/11 intelligence "failures", they tortured Abu Zubaydah into squealing about a string of phony terror plots which they paraded before the public. In a recent attempt to defend torture, the CIA cited the thoroughly discredited LA Library plot. Is this the best they can do?
This wasn't just "a few bad apples". The whole barrel was rotten, all the way to the top. The pressure coming down from the top was so intense that soldier Alyssa Peterson killed herself after being disciplined for refusing to torture. She is one of the few heroes in this sorry chapter of American history. Almost all Republicans, most Democrats and media talking heads, and half the voters are complicit in this evil.
Cheney keeps rearing his ugly head to remind us that alienating our friends, inspiring our enemies, crippling our military, and wasting $3T actually made us strong, and any attempt at justice will weaken us. The cowardly Democrats are still nodding in agreement because they have Stockholm syndrome or because they don't want their complicity revealed. But in order to avoid these mistakes in the future and salvage what remains of our national honor, we must expose and prosecute the entire chain of command. Bring on the Nuremberg trials.
Update:
We also need Nuremberg trials over America's prisons, where torture, rape, and slavery are institutionalized. This horrifying link is a must-read for anyone who thinks America is the Land of the Free. Where the sun doesn't shine, all corruption is inevitable.
Evangelicals are 50% more likely to support torture than atheists. Let's flush this whole "religion is necessary for a moral society" BS. Three of the most obsessively moral people I know are atheists who fought the degradation of America every step of the way. I know a Satanist who is nicer than most Christians. Religion inspired the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, terrorism, torture, and George Bush. Religion strangled the Greek renaissance, burned the Great Library, and tried to strangle the European renaissance. If the Greek renaissance had continued we would be spreading through the galaxy like swine flu right now, but we had to spend another two thousand years living nasty, brutish, and short lives without science. But hey, at least we kept gays and women in their place...
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Tea parties
AIG, Goldman Sachs, torturers, and the police state all got a big fat goose egg from me this year. It will be goose eggs every year for as long as America is a quasi-fascist banana republic. Looks like I'll be spending many years down here in New Zealand, paying taxes for socialized medicine that actually works.
If I was back home I would have gone to one of the tea parties, and would probably have been disappointed. From what I hear, attendance was anemic and Libertarians were outnumbered by sore-loser Republicans. You know, the kind who had no interest in small government, fiscal responsibility or civil liberties as long as Bush was in power. I hope this liberty movement keeps growing faster than the deficit and the prison population, but the Republicans are unworthy of any leadership role. If they are to have any role in this movement let them fall in line, in their natural role as followers, behind someone like Ron Paul (who was right all along). And remember that most Republicans are unwise, easily maniuplated, intellecually dishonest, and responsible for the federal government becoming such a corrupt and oppressive monster. They will betray the liberty movement as soon as Rupert Murdoch and Karl Rove jerk their strings.
One tiny ray of hope: Obama has pledged to simplify the tax code on top of his promised tax cut for the middle class. This may have been related to the tea parties, so keep up the pressure- decades too late is better than never. Let's hope he removes a bunch of lobbyist-inspired custom loopholes for big corporations and the super-rich. It would also be best to fix the tax code before inflation comes, or things will get a lot more complicated for the middle class when they start crossing tax thresholds that are not adjusted for inflation. The most notorious of these is the alternative minimum tax.
If I was back home I would have gone to one of the tea parties, and would probably have been disappointed. From what I hear, attendance was anemic and Libertarians were outnumbered by sore-loser Republicans. You know, the kind who had no interest in small government, fiscal responsibility or civil liberties as long as Bush was in power. I hope this liberty movement keeps growing faster than the deficit and the prison population, but the Republicans are unworthy of any leadership role. If they are to have any role in this movement let them fall in line, in their natural role as followers, behind someone like Ron Paul (who was right all along). And remember that most Republicans are unwise, easily maniuplated, intellecually dishonest, and responsible for the federal government becoming such a corrupt and oppressive monster. They will betray the liberty movement as soon as Rupert Murdoch and Karl Rove jerk their strings.
One tiny ray of hope: Obama has pledged to simplify the tax code on top of his promised tax cut for the middle class. This may have been related to the tea parties, so keep up the pressure- decades too late is better than never. Let's hope he removes a bunch of lobbyist-inspired custom loopholes for big corporations and the super-rich. It would also be best to fix the tax code before inflation comes, or things will get a lot more complicated for the middle class when they start crossing tax thresholds that are not adjusted for inflation. The most notorious of these is the alternative minimum tax.
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