As we’ve noted for years, the entire strategy of Washington towards the economy is to cover up the fraud which caused the financial crisis … even though prosecuting fraud and re-establishing the rule of law is the only way to get out of this depression.
One major front in Washington’s cover-up effort has been to settle fraud cases with the big banks for pennies on the dollar. This is a backdoor bailout for the banks, encourages them to commit more fraud, and fails to plug the basic holes in the economy which are preventing a recovery.
Why are we bringing this up now?
Because Obama is making a giant push to pressure the states attorneys general to settle all of their mortgage-related fraud claims against the banks for pennies on the dollar.
Yves Smith – who has an ear to the ground on this – warns that a settlement which hurts consumers and the economy will happen very quickly if people don’t raise a ruckus.
Everything said about KEYSTONE is a lie. It is about refining and exporting the dirtiest most expensive source possible, at great externalized cost to the public and future generations (including water needed to flush the tar). FURTHERMORE, not a single person running for the presidency–including Ron Paul who dismisses General Welfare in the Preamble to the Constitution–is being honest about the fact that we have a 22.4% unemployment rate.
Thanks be to Tony Blair and Bill Clinton for giving us the Kosovo narco statelet — a gift that keeps on giving. Think of the opportunities after achieving the near-term options discussed below: Occitania and Bretagnia, Flemishia and Walloonia, and then to the big game: Schleswigia, Bavaria, Thuringia, Pomerania, Silesia, Prussia and the endless opportunities to the east and south.
Spain is standing in the way of Scotland's ambitions to become an independent nation within the European Union because of fears that it could spark the break-up of the Spanish state.
Spanish officials have registered concerns with counterparts in the United Kingdom over the Scottish government's independence blueprint, senior Whitehall sources confirmed yesterday.
Spain has indicated it could block an independent Scotland's accession to the European Union, sources said. It has already refused to recognise Kosovo's existence as an independent state. Madrid fears such moves will encourage separatist ambitions in Spanish regions, particularly Catalonia and the Basque region. Spain's refusal to recognise Kosovo has frustrated the former Serbian province's ambitions to enter the union.
Phi Beta Iota: Brother Spinney is wrong on this one. There are 5,000 separatist movements in the world, 27 of them in the USA. 2012 is the tipping point year when “big” and “concentrated” die, and the original indigenous approach of “many small” begins to reinstate itself. It is not possible to micro-manage complexity. As Cambridge professor Philip Allott shows so well in The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State, it was the colonial powers that distorted the centuries old balance among smaller tribes, natural resources, and geographic distribution. The people, not the state, are the center of gravity. The fastest way for any failing state to restore resilience is to embrace separatism. An Alert Reader sends in the following:
I would call it Devolution–perhaps in our own history, a re-look at the concepts contained in the Articles of Confederation (absent the bows to the preservation of slavery)–instead of Separation, but you hit it.
#whilewewatch is a gripping look at the media revolution that emerged from Zuccoti Park in New York City to the world. It is the story of how many people came together in the sun and rain, day and night, broke and loaded with energy and hope to get their story out to the world. #OWS has galvanized the world. #whilewewatch is the real inside story of great people who have no fear. They don’t back down from the police, big business or a city government that tried to dismiss them. When regular media paid no attention to this movement they decided to tell the world their story.
#whilewewatch is the real experience of what democracy looks like. We hear it from their voices, pain, energy and honesty.
Circulating among senior retired military officers.
Let me get this straight . . .. We're going to be “gifted” with a health careplan we are forced to purchase
And fined if we don't, Which purportedly covers at least ten million more people,
without adding a single new doctor,
but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman
says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that didn't read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a [REDACTED] President who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, for which we'll be taxed for four years before any
benefits take effect, by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a surgeon general
who is obese, andfinanced by a country that's broke!!!!!
Personally, I have always disliked Israel, because I have always disliked injustice. But until recent years, this was not a high-priority issue for me. Now, after watching one Zionist outrage after another – the most important being the neocon-Zionist coup d’etat on 9/11/2001 and the ensuing war on Islam for Israel – I am committed to putting an end to Zionism.
Andrew Adler’s suggestion in the Atlanta Jewish Times that Israel assassinate President Obama is a blot both on Israel and on American Jews.
. . . . . . .
I know, and most of you know, that Adler’s crazy and criminal suggestions are not the ranting of some loony-tune individual and were not taken out of thin air – but are the inevitable result of the inordinate volume of repugnant venom that some of Obama’s political rivals, Jews and non-Jews included, have been spewing for the last three years.
The Secret Service said it is looking into a recent op-ed from an Atlanta publisher that floated the idea of green-lighting Israeli Mossad agents to assassinate President Obama in order to improve Israel's security against enemies like Iran.
Phi Beta Iota: The neo-fascist amoral government of Israel has created this monstrous diaspora of Jews who hate and act without thought–to distinguish them from loyal and thoughtful Jews we call them Zionists. That mob appears to be going out of control. We have always known of the naked amorality of the Israeli government–the atrocities committed against the USS Liberty will forever diminish every Jew and every US politician that participated in the cover-up. We certainly hope the Secret Service and the State of Georgia bring the full power of the law against this criminal [he is at a minimum guilty of criminal solicitation to commit murder], but we also hope this opens the eyes of every US citizen–we have a cancer in our midst called Zionism. It is–together with our corrupt Congress–a far greater threat than terrorism (a tactic) or Iranian nuclear weapons (a long way off) or cyber-war (a manufactured threat).
