Criminal State

 
Copyright Korea Times

Had insurance giant A.I.G. collapsed, losses from its failed insurance coverage would have rippled through banks and investment banks worldwide, destabilizing the world economy.

Yet A.I.G. set aside no reserves to cover the risk of default on those securities it collected premiums to insure. Why should it? Securities rating agencies ranked even the riskiest of those securities akin to U.S.-government bonds with virtually no chance of default.

A.I.G. professed to insure high-risk loans packaged and resold as low-risk securities to unwary pension funds. In a financial markets version of musical chairs, A.I.G. could afford to be the last one standing, confident they were too big to fail. Let’s keep it simple: imagine the casino skim taken to global scale as players extracted fees at each step along the way.

A.I.G.’s lack of financial reserves did not inhibit its financial products unit from charging handsome fees while its insurance unit pocketed vast premiums. A.I.G.’s rare triple-A rating lent the firm an image of strength and stability even as it “insured” the riskiest securities backed by the least secure of subprime mortgages.

A.I.G.’s financial “creativity” induced A.I.G. clients to believe their premiums would cover the risk of default. Heads A.I.G. wins. Tails and we’re told that taxpayers must pay. A precedent was set with the massive savings and loan fraud of the late-1980s when policy changes enabled a similar financial “pump-and-dump.” As real estate prices soared, cash was skimmed at the top of the market to acquire assets cheaply at the fire-sale bottom.

The origins of this fraud can be traced to a “Chicago” mindset that likens unfettered financial freedom to personal freedom. The public interest, we’re assured, is best served by allowing money to freely work its will worldwide. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan reassured us that “financial creativity” would protect us from the very “irrational exuberance” that he enabled with a combination of easy money and free market ideology.

In a classic exercise in political distraction, the public is now incensed at a reported $165 million in incentive payments to the A.I.G. geniuses behind this financial creativity. In truth, their real bonus figure is closer to $450 million. Albeit outrageous, it totals less than one quarter of one percent of a taxpayer bailout for A.I.G. poised to top $200 billion.

Forced to disclose to which firms the first $85 billion in bailout funds were paid, A.I.G. conceded that 16 of the top 22 institutions were foreign-owned firms. Goldman Sachs, a key node in this transnational network of financial creativity, was paid $13 billon by A.I.G. That’s in addition to the $10 billion that Washington paid directly to Goldman last fall.

Obama adviser Larry Summers succeeded Goldman Sachs chair Robert Rubin as Treasury Secretary when key policies were changed that enabled this fraud. He also handpicked a Harvard advisory team who oversaw a similar fraud that financially pillaged the Russian economy. When Moscow hit the “reset” button in its shift from state to private ownership, a national scale fraud created an oligarchy that dominates the Russian economy.

As soon as Russia’s restructuring was complete, its beneficiaries cited sanctity of contract to protect the spoils of their massive fraud while a deceived Russian public was driven into poverty. There, a massive “loan for shares” fraud enabled financial sophisticates to emerge dominant. Here, a massive “funds for shares” program turned to hedge funds and private equity firms to rescue us from our Greenspan-enabled profligacy.

To facilitate an American-style “reset,” government debts will be secured by our full faith and credit to help financial sophisticates buy trashy debt securities from A.I.G.’s defrauded clients. That cost will reduce fiscal resources required to address the retirement needs of 78 million Baby Boomers whose pension funds were ravaged by this “Chicago” fraud.

As this cash-for-trash program proceeds, who will emerge as dominant owners of the nation’s distressed financial sector? Answer: the senior partners of hedge funds and private equity funds—who already dominate the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans.

As in Russia, debate is being framed around sanctity of contract to insulate from a deceived public a vast transfer of wealth into a few hands. Summers cited that sanctity to insist that A.I.G.’s financial products unit be allowed to keep their half-billion dollars in taxpayer-paid bonuses. Obama initially opposed the bonuses while an incensed House approved legislation imposing a 90% tax. Chicagoan Obama has since backed down. That tax could have set a precedent for a bilked public to recover other stolen wealth.

The real issues remain obscured in the outrage over executive pay while the entire economy is being “reset” in plain sight. The policy changes proposed by Summers & Co. will create a uniquely American-style oligarchy. As taxpayers are stuck with the mortgage, our creative financial sophisticates will get the house. Is this the future that Americans want?

Another intelligence “dot disconnect” may be in the works. While Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano cites our porous borders as the primary danger, intelligence agencies confirm that our weakened economy poses the top threat to national security.

How was U.S. security improved by enabling A.I.G. to make massive payments to foreign banks? How is our national interest served by taking us deeper into debt in order to bail out complicit bankers while creating a Russian-style oligarchy? If those simple questions were asked, the answers would lead us to those who orchestrated this greatest heist in history. And to those now enacting policies destined to make a bad situation worse.

March 24, 2009

For more background and a better understanding of the situation AT LARGE, please visit my website at http://www.criminalstate.com and have a quick peek at my book “Criminal State“.

Business, Criminal State A.I.G., aig crooks, aig fraud, Alan Greenspan, cash for trash, Chicago model, Department of Homeland Security, Forbes 400, Goldman Sachs, high risk loans, insurance fraud, Larry Summers, ponzi scheme, ponzi scheme aig, Robert Rubin, washington aig, Washington consensus

The Need for Alternative Media

Why does democracy need alternative media? An earlier blog on the Criminal State website (”The New Heretics”) chronicles the role that mainstream media routinely plays in waging war by way of deception.

Ambassador Charles Freeman withdrew his nomination last week as the newly appointed chair of the National Intelligence Council. The withering attack unleashed on him by the Israel lobby may awaken a long-deceived public to the perils posed by six decades of accommodating America’s entangled alliance with the Zionist state.

Guilt by Association, the first release in the Criminal State series, condenses the how of Zionism to its duplicitous essence by making the analysis generic and not dependent on any particular time, place or circumstance. At the core of its duplicity lies an oft-deployed modus operandi: the displacement of facts with what people can be deceived to believe.

That “m.o.” operates the same regardless whether it’s an induced belief in Iraqi WMD, a consensus faith in the infallibility of unfettered financial markets, or a shared opinion that Israel is an ally. When waging war in the shared mindset (where else could a “consensus” reside?), the power of association is deployed as a weapon to deceive “the mark”—us.

Thus the stature of Colin Powell was used to lend credence (believability) to the phony intelligence used to deceive the UN Security Council that Iraq had mobile biological weapons laboratories. Powell’s testimony made America look just like the Zionist state—a duplicitous government willing to deceive other governments to wage war on Israel’s behalf. Yet despite the consistency of this duplicity, we continue on with this entanglement, assured that this alliance is in America’s interest.

The Ancient Art of Deception

When deploying the power of association—whether to accredit or discredit—facts are irrelevant. In this case, the credibility of an honorable man was deployed to make a dishonorable case to invade Iraq for Greater Israel policy. For those who consider themselves above the law, the means justify the end. General Powell concedes he was used and has since rarely appeared in public. The result cost America untold amounts in blood, treasure and hard-earned credibility—the most essential capital of any legitimate nation state.

Those profiled in the Criminal State series wage war at the level of the mental state. All else flows downstream from what academics call the paradigm—the shared mindset. To target the public’s mental state is to wage war on informed consent, the foundation on which democracies depend. In today’s media-dependent politics, that’s where modern-day treason operates.

To address this systemic criminality requires tools of perception that enable the public to see this duplicity for themselves. The Israel lobby has so thoroughly intimidated the Congress and the Executive Branch that the battle to restore informed consent must now be fought from the bottom-up. In the media-dominated decision-making of the Information Age, this is what modern warfare looks like. Why would anyone expect otherwise?

This fact-displacing modus operandi depends on mainstream media to shape the shared mental state of the mark (us). Likewise when deceivers deploy the power of association. Both rely on a complicit media to manipulate opinions, impressions and emotions so that, in combination, fiction replaces facts as the basis for policy-making.

How long has U.S. policy been shaped by the criminal syndicate chronicled in Guilt By Association? Barack Obama is the tenth president covered by veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas. When, in his first press conference, she asked which nations in the Middle East have nuclear weapons, our commander-in-chief avoided an answer. That’s understandable.

According to his April 2007 filing with the Federal Elections Commission, Obama’s political career is traceable to the Chicago Outfit. Hotelier Penny Pritzker, Chicago’s Crown clan (defense contractors), and hedge fund billionaire George Soros were his top three contributors. The organized crime lineage of the Pritzker family dates from the Jewish syndicate of the 1920s. Soros represents a more modern vintage. Abner Mikva, former Clinton White House counsel, calls Obama “our first Jewish president” based on his roots in West Side Chicago politics.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and campaign manager David Axelrod were political activists in Chicago when the Israel lobby targeted Illinois Senator Chuck Percy for removal in 1984, two years after successfully targeting Illinois Congressman Paul Findley. Findley’s AIPAC-recruited replacement was Dick Durbin, now second in the Senate leadership. He shares a house in Washington with New York Senator Chuck Schumer who is third. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, from mobbed-up Nevada, is Mormon (aka the Lost Tribe of Israel).

Though comprising just 1.7% of the U.S. population, 15% of the Senate membership is Jewish. Add Mormons and Christian-Zionists (Jon Kyl, Lindsey Graham, et.al.) and where does the national security of America rank when compared to Israel—whose security Obama described as “sacrosanct”? As Freeman pointed out, the danger we now face is not only to the U.S. but also to the continued existence of Israel—particularly when the mark awakens to the common source of this deceit.

March 16, 2009

Politics Abner Mikva, aipac, Alternative Media, Barach Obama, Charles Freeman, Chas Freeman, Chuck Percy, Chuck Schumer, Colin Powell, Criminal State, David Axelrod, Dick Durbin, George Soros, Greater Israel, Guilt By Association, Harry Reid, Israel lobby, Jewish president, Jon Kyl, Lindsey Graham, Lost Tribe of Israel, Mormon, National Intelligence Council, New Heretic, Paul Findley, Penny Pritzker, Rahm Emanuel, UN Security Council, Zionism

The New Heretics

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
– George Santayana

How quickly we forget. With the abuses of the Inquisition still fresh in memory, the Founders embraced democracy to protect liberty from the manipulations of belief. That’s why facts were enshrined at the core of self-governance and the rule of law. The duplicity at the core of the U.S.-Israeli relationship has put that founding principle at risk.

For seven terrifying centuries, heretics were punished under canon law. In 1633, Italian astronomer Galileo was condemned for “grave suspicion of heresy” when he showed that the sun—not the crown—was the center of the universe. Since the merger of church and state in the Roman Empire of the 4th century, anyone who dared dispute papal authority—by challenging faith with facts—was condemned as both a heretic and an enemy of the state.

Today’s heretics are those who challenge our faith in the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States. To criticize Israel risks condemnation as an “anti-Semite.” Defenders of this relationship were forced to become more vigilant after Israeli troops used U.S.-provided arms and ammunition to kill 1,330 Palestinians in Gaza, including at least 346 children.

That attack, planned for more than a year, was scheduled between Christmas and the presidential inaugural. Within 48 hours of ending its assault, Israel had dispatched an army of bloggers to counter anti-Zionist websites. By early February, the Anti-Defamation League was bemoaning a “pandemic of anti-Semitism” as the massacre fueled outrage worldwide.

By early March, Israeli policy was being described as a threat to international peace and security, a violation of international human rights, a crime against humanity and a form of apartheid. By associating the U.S. with such behavior, this special relationship fueled anti-American hatred, fanned the flames of radicalization and set the stage for more terrorism.

At Hampshire College in Massachusetts, protesters urged that their school divest from firms whose operations support Israel’s four-decade siege of Palestine. When students compared Zionist policies to apartheid-era South Africa, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz condemned them as “rabidly anti-Israel” (enemies of the state).

At Ottawa College in Canada, debate was stifled when Students Against Israeli Apartheid were prohibited from displaying an anti-war poster condemning Zionist policies that president Jimmy Carter condemned in his 2007 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

The People In Between

Meanwhile Pope Benedict XVI attacked a cleric whose excommunication he had lifted. The Pontiff claimed he was unaware that Bishop Richard Williamson had challenged key facts of the Holocaust. When condemned by the Vatican, Williamson apologized. The Vatican insisted he recant. Critics claimed the high profile dispute was staged to distract attention from the carnage in Gaza.

Left unmentioned in mainstream media was the fact that this German Pope, the first since 1523, previously led the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a direct descendant of the Vatican’s 16th century tribunal, the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition.

The fiercest condemnation of the bishop’s reluctance to recant came not from Rome but from German Chancellor Angela Merkel. No media outlet reported that in 2003 Zionist media mogul Haim Saban acquired control of ProSiebenSat.1, Germany’s second largest broadcaster.

As a major opinion-shaping influence in the years preceding Merkel’s emergence as Germany’s first female chancellor, Saban described himself as an “Israeli-American” and “a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.” Steve Rattner, Saban’s financial adviser, explained the motive for his client’s acquisition six years ago: “He thinks Germany is critical to Israel.”

To put these media-fueled events in historical perspective requires a grasp of how—in the Information Age—warfare is waged not on a conventional battlefield but in the shared field of consciousness. In that mental domain—where consensus opinions are created, shaped and sustained—facts are routinely displaced by what people can be induced to believe.

Thus the threat to democracy when media-owning Zionists influence policy-making—as when Merkel threatened to arrest Williamson for Holocaust denial on an EU-wide warrant. Or when Zionists support a modern-day Inquisition—as when Williamson faced expulsion from Argentina, the site of a seminary he directed and home to the largest Jewish population in Latin America.

In October 2007, Defense Secretary Robert Gates coined a phrase to describe the most perilous combatants when waging unconventional warfare. A former C.I.A. Director, he called them “the people in between.” Between Galileo and the facts was Church doctrine determined to displace science with beliefs or, in media parlance, with consensus opinion.

To lend credence (believability) to the displacement of facts with faith requires that the mental environment be saturated with supportive impressions and emotions. Thus the curious correlation when seemingly unrelated events emerged in this same time frame to reinforce the prevailing pro-Israeli orthodoxy, including:

• The high profile suspension of U.K. diplomat Rowan Laxton for allegedly making anti-Semitic remarks while riding an exercise bike in a London gymnasium.

• The high profile protection provided in Dubai to Andy Ram, an Israeli tennis star.

• The announcement that the London Evening Standard’s new owner, Russian-Ashkenazi oligarch Alexander Lebedev, will expand his media empire with a new radio station in Moscow.

• The announcement that the Obama administration will boycott the 2009 World Conference Against Racism after successful lobbying by the Israel lobby who knew that the Zionist state’s treatment of Arabs would be portrayed as racist.

These impressions were reinforced by the release in 2008 of eight Holocaust-based films.

The Displacement of Informed Choice

The Framers envisioned democracy as a form of governance that resides not in a royal court but in a mindset shared by its participants. Where else could it reside? Thus the key role envisioned for media to ensure widespread participation in a system of informed consent. Absent widespread access to unbiased information, the blessings of liberty they knew would eventually succumb to those who prey on ignorance and beliefs.

Thus the risks to self-governance when freedom relies on broadcasters with an undisclosed bias. It is precisely those “people in between” that routinely displace facts with what an unsuspecting public can be deceived to believe.

That fact-displacing modus operandi works the same in modernity as in antiquity. The impact on informed consent is identical regardless whether the deceit is a belief in Iraqi WMD, a consensus faith in the infallibility of unfettered financial markets, or the widely shared opinion that the Zionist state is a democratic ally rather than an enemy within.

Faith-based treachery is as ancient as the use of canon law to silence critics of Church doctrine. The only modern component of this duplicity is the reach of contemporary media and its capacity to manipulate the shared mental state on an unprecedented scale. Freedom can no longer afford America’s entangled alliance with a nation known to routinely wage war by way of deception.

A 1578 handbook for inquisitors explained that its harsh penalties were “for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit.” The new Evil Doers are those who dare document the costs of the U.S.-Israel relationship in blood, treasure, insecurity and hard-earned credibility.

March 5, 2009

Politics Alexander Lebedev, Andy Ram, Angela Merkel, anti-Semitism, anti-Zionist, apartheid, Bishop Richard Williamson, Catholic Church, Doctine of the Faith, Evil Doers, Galileo, Gaza, Haim Saban, Hampshire College, Heretic, Holocaust, Inquisition, Jimmy Carter, London Evening Standard, Pope Benedict XVI, Robert Gates, Rowan Laxton, special relationship, Steve Rattner, Students Against Israeli Apartheid, the people in between, U.S.-Israel relationship, weapons of mass destruction, WMD, World Conference Against Racism, zionist