Address On Iceland &The IMF, Debt Moratorium, And Tobin Tax
Webster Tarpley Infowars October 22, 2009
Delivered by Birgitta Jónsdóttir of The Movement in the Icelandic Parliament, October 5, 2009.
Madam President. Dear countrymen. We have a choice to make. We are never faced with just one way, one solution. To assert so is a testimony to incredible tunnel vision on the reality that we live in. We are far from being the first and only nation that has had to deal with crisis and economic collapse. Perhaps what makes our position unique is that we are in an economic war a war with nations that are using their positions of power to get what they want. Does that mean that all other avenues are closed? Are there perhaps other possibilities than chaining us with the burdens of foreign debt far into the future?
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We now need to make decisions based on hope, justice, and the resurrection of pride which comes from living in a country which many people believe is almost uninhabitable. We can and should seek all possible ways to find common solutions. Britain declared war on our nation when they labeled us as terrorists the British authorities have used economic terrorism against us by misusing the IMF, and using our EU membership application as leverage in order to extort from us what they want in the Icesave [1] debate. It is morally wrong to lay debts on the shoulders of the public which it had nothing to do with in the first place.
Phi Beta Iota: We salute the gentle lady from Iceland, who has a great deal more integrity and common sense than anyone we know now making bad policy in the absence of good public intelligence in the public interest. This speech is IMPORTANT–it is time to bring down the false economy of scaracity and secrecy, and implement Open Money and all other things Open (see our keytone, Open Everything.
During his talk, Jim suggested that snake oil purveyors in the supply risk market fall into a number of categories, including “existing vendors with incomplete or partial solutions (spun as the real-deal), market information packaged and resold as real-time intelligence (which it's not), dashboards from larger enterprise software providers (which leave it up to you to fill in the blanks or pay an army of consultants to populate)” and, my personal favorite, “the one hit wonder — any service provider deliverable that takes the form of a Microsoft Office document, spreadsheet or presentation”. Not only is Jim dead-on in this analysis — he's putting a stake in the ground that someone should have posited a long time ago. Namely, that a good many of the self-proclaimed supply risk emperors out there really have no clothes.
ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF DETECTION about Jules Kroll and corporate intelligence. In 1972, Jules Kroll launched J. Kroll Associates, which eventually became Kroll, Inc., the world’s preëminent detective agency, with three thousand employees, countless subcontractors, and offices in sixty cities in more than thirty-five countries. Last October, Kroll, aged sixty-eight, spoke to a crowd of students and faculty at Cornell, his alma mater. According to the history professor who introduced Kroll that day, Kroll, Inc., specializes in “pursuing crime, particularly financial crime, across international borders.” And so Kroll told stories about recovering the wealth plundered by dictators, among them Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein, and Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier. Kroll’s stories were nearly all morality tales. But breaking up extortion rings, nailing dictators—that’s the Marvel Comics version of Jules Kroll’s career. Kroll really made his living, and his name, on Wall Street.
How Moody's sold its ratings – and sold out investors
Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy Newspapers
October 21, 2009
A McClatchy investigation has found that Moody's punished executives who questioned why the company was risking its reputation by putting its profits ahead of providing trustworthy ratings for investment offerings.
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“The story at Moody's doesn't start in 2007; it starts in 2000,” said Mark Froeba, a Harvard-educated lawyer and senior vice president who joined Moody's structured finance group in 1997.
A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits
MATT TAIBBIPosted Oct 14, 2009
What really happened to Bear and Lehman is that an economic drought temporarily left the hyenas without any more middle-class victims — and so they started eating each other, using the exact same schemes they had been using for years to fleece the rest of the country. And in the forensic footprint left by those kills, we can see for the first time exactly how the scam worked — and how completely even the government regulators who are supposed to protect us have given up trying to stop it.
This was a brokered bloodletting, one in which the power of the state was used to help effect a monstrous consolidation of financial and political power. Heading into 2008, there were five major investment banks in the United States: Bear, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Today only Morgan Stanley and Goldman survive as independent firms, perched atop a restructured Wall Street hierarchy. And while the rest of the civilized world responded to last year's catastrophes with sweeping measures to rein in the corruption in their financial sectors, the United States invited the wolves into the government, with the popular new president, Barack Obama — elected amid promises to clean up the mess — filling his administration with Bear's and Lehman's conquerors, bestowing his papal blessing on a new era of robbery.
As a Harvard grad, former Princeton professor, and the son of a respected rabbi, Ethan Nadelmann might seem like an unlikely advocate for legalizing marijuana. But when you meet him, it all makes a lot of sense.
David Lyons, Newsweek, 15 October 2009
The idea is not that drugs are good but that prohibition is bad. Nadelmann argues that marijuana prohibition is as counterproductive as alcohol prohibition was in the 1920s, and that we'd all be better off if the government would just regulate and tax it. Ironically, this would give the government more control over the drug, not less.
In my opinion, it is now almost certain that Afghanistan will wreck the presidency of Barack Obama. As I feared, Mr. Obama has allowed the US military and its allies in the Democratic wing and Republican wing of the national-security apparat (there is no real difference between these wings) to ensnare him in the wreckage left by the Clinton/Blair/Bush not-so-grand strategy of “indispensable” power: coercive diplomacy punctuated by endless “[no-so] precision” warfare. Supporting Sources for this Comment at end of posting.
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