MSNBC Special on going to war in Iraq under false pretenses.

WATCH:

HUBRIS: The Selling of the Iraq War


So much to answer for......will they never be brought to justice?......and by "they" I mean the four horsemen of the apocalypse: Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld! 

They are the ones that ruined America and took the country right to the edge of collapse and for what?



All I can say is that I am quite thankful that I had the opportunity to leave the U.S. on 6 short months after the war began and feel good knowing that my tax dollars did NOT go into supporting this debacle. 

I only hope that America can get itself back on track and reverse the awful damage that has been done. The rule of law has all but collapsed in the country and even now, as much as I want to cheer for Obama and as much as I support him, he may be engaging in impeachable offenses by killing Americans without due process of law. Actually, the constitution applies due process to all "persons", not just citizens. The language of the 5th Amendment reads:  

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a 
presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval 
forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall 
any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor 
shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived 
of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." (Emphasis added).

It will take a long time to rebuild America and make things right, again. Let's hope that by admitting the failures of the past, Americans can come to the realization that things need to be reformed and it's former glory can be regained.

WATCH:

HUBRIS: The Selling of the Iraq War

BBC News - HK regulator in Ernst and Young China secrecy row

BBC News - HK regulator in Ernst and Young China secrecy row:

'via Blog this'

Is there justice for Goldman Sachs? - CNN.com

Is there justice for Goldman Sachs? - CNN.com:

'via Blog this'

Stock Markets -- The Real Ponzi Scheme

There has been a lot of rhetoric of late portraying Social Security as a "Ponzi Scheme". Republican presidential candidate, Rick Perry, and other right-wing radicals like Paul Ryan have taken it upon themselves to attempt to use the financial crisis and ensuing economic depression, which was purposefully created by their allies in the financial sector,  to dismantle all the safety nets and remaining vestiges of the New Deal. The latest is their attack on social security.  They claim that this system is a ponzi scheme instead of an insurance plan where people pay into a system of retirement now in order to receive an annuity at a later date.

To call such a system a ponzi scheme calls into question the entire rationale and basis of all insurance and annuity plans, yet you don't hear Perry and the gang calling for legislation to make such plans illegal. Quite to the contrary, they would prefer to increase the profits earned by their corporate insurance campaign supporters by requiring all retirement to be funded through the insurance providers because these entities pay significant campaign contributions. They are salivating at the idea that all the money currently held in the social security system, should be in the hands of campaign contributors. The sums of money the would be able to receive from their corporate supporters are staggering.

These screams and cries of ponzi scheme are completely misplaced. If they really cared about protecting society from the ravages of ponzi schemes and the unethical behavior of ponzi scheme fraudsters, they would do better to take aim at the many stock markets around the world that facilitate the transfer of funds from the general public into the hands of a few bankers, at the expense of the general public and without any guarantee of a return of any sort.

Most people do not understand how stock markets work nor stock ownership for that matter. First, a lesson on the difference between the primary and secondary markets in stock. When a company wants to issue stock to raise capital for use in the company, the company hires an investment bank which helps them through the listing process. When the company issues these shares to investors, know in financial parlance as  the initial public offering (IPO), the money actually goes from the initial investors to the company. The company is then able to use this money to expand its business by hiring more people and purchasing property, plants, equipment and other items needed to support this business expansion. In other words, the primary market in shares supports economic growth and expansion.

There is a very interesting and incredibly troubling aspect to the terms of these shares, namely, companies that issues these shares are NOT under any legal obligation to ever pay a dividend or to buy back the shares or return any money whatsoever to shareholders. This means investors have no means of ever recouping this initial investment from the company. The only way an initial investor can "make a profit" from the investment is to find and convince someone else to buy the shares from him at a higher price, and voila, the secondary market is born and a ponzi scheme is created.

Investors are duped into buying a worthless pieces of paper with no promise of a financial return, based solely on the hopes that they will be able to convince some other poor sucker into buying the same worthless piece of paper for a higher price in the future. The entire scheme is a house of cards based purely on the ability of one investor to convince another to purchase something that has no intrinsic value.

What most individual investors don't seem to realize is that when a person buys shares from another person, that money does not go to the company that issued the shares and has no direct impact on the business in which they believe they are investing. All such sales are merely a transfer of wealth from the buyer to the seller. This transaction creates no value for the economy. It actually locks up money that could otherwise go to companies for their use ("productive capital") and acts as a drain on the economy. The currently estimated "value" of shares globally is approximately $51 trillion, that's $51,000,000,000,000. If this money were not locked up in worthless shares, waiting for someone, anyone!, to pay a higher price for the worthless paper, this money could be used for productive activities and most of the world's current financial crises would be alleviated.

This system is the purest form of Ponzi Scheme that exists. In reality it is an even more insidious form of ponzi scheme in that it turns the investors in the scheme into crooks, as they are required to find new suckers to whom they will sale the worthless paper. It turns investors into ponzi scheme participants with full knowledge of their crimes. The crime thus becomes pervasive and with everyone involved.....no one can be blamed....and worst of all . . .

It's all government sanctioned, supported, encouraged and protected!

NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL A PONZI SCHEME!

The Debt Distraction

The recent fight over raising the debt ceiling is just a charade. The proposal to raise the national debt by $3 trillion is only a borrowing of less than $10,000 per person. Our current debt is $14 trillion, which is only about $45,000 per person.

The $3 trillion could be raised easily by increasing taxes by only 1%, yet while the overall effective tax rate in the US is only 24% of GDP, the fifth lowest among industrialized countries, Americans are so stressed by the economic crisis, they feel as though they should not have to pay any additional taxes and maybe they are right. That's why it should be the bankers who have to pay up.

The bankers and other rich investors were the beneficiaries of the fraudulent ponzi scheme of structured finance and if they are not going to be held to account for their illegal and fraudulent activities they should at a minimum be forced to disgorge their ill-gotten gains. This could be accomplished via raising taxes on the rich or even just the bankers by just 1%. They are not hurting and they can afford to transfer back to the society some of the money they accumulated from the general public via the mortgage backed security ponzi scheme.

Obama's main problem is that he is ever the legislator. He knows how to craft and negotiate legislation but is not an administrator. He approaches each problem from a legislative perspective and not from an administrative perspective. This explains why he never takes the Republicans to task and always starts the negotiation from what appears to be a middle of the road position instead of starting from a position of administrative and public strength. He has been sucked into one manufactured issue to another and is being led around by the nose by the Republicans.

All the wrangling over debt and other "non-matters" is part of a Republican plan to distract the President from making any progress on the economy and jobs. He needs to stop taking the bait and set the agenda instead of constantly responding to the Republican dog whistle, otherwise he will never win in the public's eyes and it's their opinion that matters in the end.

Is the Phone Hacking Scandal the UK's Watergate?

The recent mega-scandal over dodgy "journalistic practices" has exposed a rot so deep it borders on calamitous.  None of this will come as a surprise to long standing critics of Fox News, often jokingly referred to as "Fox Noise" or "Faux News". But this time the fish really does seem to be rotting from the head first, the Head of UK Government that is. British Prime Minister, David Cameron, appears to be in it up to his neck and trying very hard to place a fire-break between himself and the now disgraced and defunct NoW crew.

This past week has seen a flurry of developments as reported:

1) Sunday: The arrest of former Chief Executive, Rebekah Brooks means that she now has the ability to hide behind a "veil of silence" due to the pending criminal inquiry.

2) Monday: The "death" of NoW whistleblower, Sean Hoare,  means that whatever he knew about Andrew Coulson and his connection between Cameron and phone hacking have died with him. His most timely death raises major questions as to how far up the chain this all goes but it is looking more and more like Cameron wanted Coulson on his team because of his "expertise in journalistic practices", including one might surmise those currently under scrutiny.

3) Tuesday: The Murdochs testimony before the U.K. House of Commons where the elder Murdoch, looking sad and sullen, claimed he had no knowledge of the actual hacking, which is not surprising given that all CEO's claim to rarely know the details of the actual activities of their underlings. He is, after all, only the boss.

4) Wednesday: The PM's assertion that that he had not had "one inappropriate conversation"  with Murdoch's team at News Corp regarding the BSkyB deal, looks like an attempt to cover-up a quid-pro-quo.

5) Thursday: Accusations that the younger Murdoch had given apparently perjured testimony in his Tuesday appearance before the UK Parliament in an attempt to protect not only his father and his own inheritance but also it now appears, the current PM.

4) Friday: Revelations that Andy Coulson was being investigated for perjury, while serving under Mr. Cameron.

The plot changes, the rot from the top, the high level resignations of people around the PM, the back room dealings and the timely deaths of informants has all the earmarks of a scandal big enough to bring down a sitting head of state. It harkens back to our own Watergate and leaves one asking of the current PM the age old question, "What did he know and when did he know it"?

As we all know the Cover Up is always worse than the original crimes and it looks now as though David Cameron is running for cover wherever he can find it. Let's hope, for the sake of us all, that further investigation does not reveal that Cameron's team hacked into the phone mail of political adversaries, which now appears to be a real possibility, nor that murder is hidden under that dark cover!

Republicans Play a Dangerous Game

As the latest talks to raise the debt limit collapse at the hands of the dogmatic Republicans the public is not amused. As everyone is by now very much aware, failure to raise the debt limit would cause a catastrophic plunge into depression from which the US would be unlikely to escape any time soon. It would be devastating for the country, not to mention President Obama's reelection hopes. But the Republicans could find that their "No New Taxes" mantra could come back to haunt them should they take back the White House in 2012.

This entire financial collapse was caused by an unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the hard working middle class to the wealthy capitalists via a government sanctioned ponzi-scheme, namely, the US securities markets. Securities markets create nothing of value but merely act as an intermediary between those with excess capital (savers/investors) and capital seekers. What seems to be lost in the shuffle (or cleverly hidden therein) is that capital seekers are not just corporations looking to grow or expand their business but they are also wealthy individuals, who by their very nature consume more than middle class folks and need exorbitant amounts capital to support their excessive lifestyles.

Thus, a significant portion of all the money earned by hard working individuals from production of goods and services is redistributed up to the Titans of Finance and their friends through deceptive inventions such as 401K's and other retirement and investment vehicles. These markets make people rich but not by adding anything to the economy or producing something of real value. It is only by taking the money from real producers and concentrating it into their own hands that they become rich. They live off the hard work of others and provide nothing of real value to the community. For Republicans to now say they are not willing to have a fair and balanced redistribution of these assets back into the hands of those who created them is nothing short of pure greed and upper-class arrogance!

The Republicans are intentionally trying to ruin the economic recovery merely to recapture the White House and further erode the middle-class for their capitalist patrons. Their experiment in right wing social engineering, which began under Reagan, has led to the collapse of the US both economically and socially. Now they want to take it even further down the path of destruction.

If the Republicans push the US over the proverbial cliff by not raising the debt ceiling and forcing the US into economic ruin, they will have let al-Qaeda and Osama-bin-Laden win the war against the US. Osama and his team learned from the US, that the way to cause the collapse of the Soviet Union was to bleed them dry financially through impossible military adventures. They took this lesson to heart and used it against the US and now it looks as though they may actually succeed in bringing down the US via the same tactics. This is evident in the resurgence of state government divisiveness and disrespect for federal power that has plagued several of the US states over the past few years.

What is one to do?

Republicans need to learn a new mantra. They would do well to remember the words to the preamble of the US Federal Constitution, which they love to quite so often:

     "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Democrats need to flex a little muscle and push the Republicans hard. The American public knows exactly who is to blame for a do nothing Congress. Democrats hold the winning hand they just have to be willing to play it.

Both parties need to stop playing games with peoples lives and livelihoods and work together in order to avoid delivering the US into the hands of its enemies.

Failure to do so would truly be a shame on both houses!