I asked my good friend Marshall Auerback, an investment advisor and lawyer by training and a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, to evaluate Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s claim that TARP has been a stunning success. Geithner made this claim in a 10 October op-ed in the Washington Post, entitled, “Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tackles five myths about TARP,” which is contained below as Attachment 2 beneath Auerback’s critique [Attachment 1]. To those of you who would sanitize these loose ends as a lingering “moral hazard,” I would urge you to think again.
Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the “good guys” spreading “democracy” and “liberty” around the world. It just ain't so.
October 8, 2010
Peter Dale Scott, Robert Parry / Consortium News
Alter.Net Editor's Note: Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the “good guys” spreading “democracy” and “liberty” around the world. When the United States inflicts unnecessary death and destruction, it's viewed as a mistake or an aberration.
In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a “mistake” nor an “aberration” but rather conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the “dark side.”
For a number of years I reported on the monthly nonfarm payroll jobs data. The data did not support the praises economists were singing to the “New Economy.” The “New Economy” consisted, allegedly, of financial services, innovation, and high-tech services.
This economy was taking the place of the old “dirty fingernail” economy of industry and manufacturing. Education would retrain the workforce, and we would move on to a higher level of prosperity.
Time after time I reported that there was no sign of the “New Economy” jobs, but that the old economy jobs were disappearing. The only net new jobs were in lowly paid domestic services such as waitresses and bartenders, retail clerks, health care and social assistance (mainly ambulatory health care services), and, before the bubble burst, construction.
The facts, issued monthly by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, had no impact on the ”New Economy” propaganda. Economists continued to wax eloquently about how globalism was a boon for our future.
. . . . . .
The wage and salary cost savings obtained by giving Americans’ jobs to Chinese and Indians have enriched corporate CEOs, shareholders, and Wall Street at the expense of the middle class and America’s consumer economy.
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press.
In his book, “NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe,” Daniele Ganser described their clandestine Cold War operations, run by European secret services, collaborating with NATO, the CIA and Britain's MI6 and Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) against a possible Soviet invasion, internal communist takeovers, or others on the political left gaining power.
EXTRACT:
In Italy, against both communist and socialist parties, it was claimed they wanted to weaken NATO “from within,” Italian judge, Felice Casson, learning that right-wing terrorists carried out bombings against civilians, blamed them on the left, neo-fascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra explaining the scheme as follows:
“The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”
In 2000, the Italian Senate was more explicit, saying:
“Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as had been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence,” meaning CIA mainly.
Former director William Colby admitted in his memoirs that covert western armies were a major CIA initiative, begun post-WW II, and restricted “to the smallest possible coterie of the most reliable people, in Washington (and) NATO” to keep the initiative secret.
Phi Beta Iota: CIA's importation of 100 Nazis a year after WWII (and probably many more, it has always considered itself above the law, both domestic and foreign) fueled a truly psychopathic perception of communism that led to policies and programs that today are clearly seen to be crimes against humanity, but back in the day were seen as “collateral damage” essential to contain communism while maintaining “control” over key governments.
The Huffington Post is doing a very fine job of raising key issues, but in isolation and out of context. Here is one story they have brought forward. As Cleveland found out when they had to raze to the ground 11,000 abandoned units, foreclosures come with very heavy social and financial costs. It is not to late to stop all foreclosures and evictions as we recommended in October 2008, to no effect. America is going through a multi-dimensional crisis without any leadership whatsoever. One way to understand the crisis is to study the Revolution Matrix and the Negative Book List. The Positive Book List requires some semblance of leadership and legitimacy, at this time not to be found in America, outside of the Virtual Cabinet at The Huffington Post, which does not really exist–it could, but it does not.
These two article together reveal just how uninformed Obama is, how unprofessional his staff is, and how much his blind groveling to Israel is costing the US taxpayer while perpetuating the ignored pathos of the Palestinian people in their own land.
The Obama administration must understand that the Israeli prime minister is essentially a right-wing Republican.
By MJ Rosenberg
October 02, 2010 “Al-Jazeera” — The Obama administration's attempts at seducing Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, are getting embarrassing. Netanyahu has made it very clear he is not interested.
The below linked article in the 2 October 2010 edition of the New York Times [Attachment 1] is a good example of the pro-Israeli bias in the US mainstream media when it comes to portraying Israel's relations with the Palestinians.
Note the paragraph I marked in bold which says unequivocally that “Israel halted most settlement construction for 10 months last November …” This statement is clearly central to the reader's understanding of the questions of whether or not Israel has been negotiating with good will and who is responsible for the crisis in the peace talks. It is also outrageously wrong, and that crucial fact was known at least five days before it was written. That this is indisputably true can be seen in Attachment 2 beneath it, a 28 September 2010 report in Ha'aretz, perhaps Israel's most prestigious newpaper — ironically, Ha'aretz is often referred as the New York Times of Israel. Ha'aretz tells the reader that the Israeli government's own official statistics show that the settlement freeze was barely a slowdown.
There is no way the author of the NYT report, Ethan Bonner, the senior New York Times reporter based in Israel, could have been unaware of the Ha'aretz report, and his (or his editor's) countenancing such an unequivocal statement, without at least a caveat, can only be construed to be a deliberate attempt to mislead the reader with respect to the nature of the settlement freeze, and by extension, the good will in Israel's negotiating stance vis a vis that of the Palestinians. His biased outlook becomes transparently clear when one compares the tone and context to the two reports.
To those readers, who think I am nitpicking, I would urge them to think about the wisdom embodied in the following two quotes: The first is by James Madison, the father of the US Constitution, describing the importance of popular information to effective functioning of a representative democracy. The second is Edward Gibbon's assessment of how ignorance and fanaticism sapped the cognitive faculties of the Roman peoople:
“A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” – James Madison, from a letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822
”Their credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.” – Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinian leadership said Saturday that four-week-old direct talks with Israel should be suspended if Jewish settlement construction resumed in the West Bank. It called on the international community to pressure Israel to stop the building but withheld a final decision on the talks until an Arab League meeting on Friday.
What took place in the past few months is, in the best case scenario, not more than a negligible decrease in the number of housing units that were built in settlements.
By Dror Etkes, Ha’aretz, 28 Sept 2010
The official statistics supplied by the Central Bureau of Statistics describe the story behind the 10-month construction moratorium in the West Bank. The story can be called many things but “freeze” is certainly not one of them. What took place in the past few months is, in the best case scenario, not more than a negligible decrease in the number of housing units that were built in settlements.
Phi Beta Iota: Apart from facts in isolation, context matters. The Israeli settlements are unsustainabile in relation to available water and the continuing atrocities against the Palestinian people on their own land is an ongoing crime against humanity that is easily, in today's context, as terrible as the Holocaust was in Hitler's time. None of this has entered the human consciousness of the US public because their leaders lack integrity, as do the corporate media led by the New York Times.
UPDATE 02: Guatemalan president ‘very angry' at US tests (BBC short video). Note reference to this probably happening in other countries. We sense a need for–and recommend–a global investigation.
U.S. Government Apologizes for 1940s STD Testing on Guatemalans
The U.S. government apologized Friday for a secret program conducted more than 40 years ago in which prisoners and mental hospital patients in Guatemala were intentionally infected with gonorrhea, syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases.
The “unethical” and “reprehensible” program was discovered after a professor documented how U.S. scientists intentionally infected people in the Central American country with sexually transmitted diseases.
Susan Reverby, a women's studies professor at Wellesley College, published a paper detailing the joint research program between the U.S. and Guatemalan governments. From 1946-1948, doctors enabled men in prison to be infected with syphilis or gonorrhea by allowing prostitutes carrying the disease to visit them. From there, they studied inoculation techniques. The tests, which also involved mental hospital patients, involved about 1,500 subjects, according to the study.
