You've just been bought and sold: to a bank

Rescue for the Few, Debt Slavery for the Many

By MICHAEL HUDSON

We are now entering the financial End Time. Bailout “Plan A” (buy the junk mortgages) has failed, “Plan B” (buy ersatz stocks in the banks to recapitalize them without wiping out current mismanagers) is fizzling, and the debts still can’t be paid. That is the reality Wall Street avoids confronting. “First they ignore you, then they denounce you, and then they say that they knew what you were saying all the time,” said Gandhi. The same might be said of today’s overhang of debts in excess of the economy’s ability to pay. First the policy makers pretend that they can be paid, then they denounce the pessimists as spreading panic, and then they say that of course students have been taught for four thousand years now how the “magic of compound interest” keeps on doubling and redoubling debts faster than the economy can squeeze out an economic surplus to pay.

What has ended is the idea that “the magic of compound interest” can make economies rich without having to work and without industry. I hope we have seen the end of derivatives formulae seeking to make money by playing in a zero-sum game. A debt overhang always ends either in foreclosure of the debtor’s property, or in a debt annulment to preserve the economy’s overall freedom and equity.

This means that the postmodern economy as we know it must end – either in financial polarization and debt peonage to a new oligarchic elite, or in a debt cancellation, a Jubilee Year to rescue society. But when the government says that it is reviewing “all” the options, this reality is not one of them. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s first option was to buy packages of junk mortgages (collateralized debt obligations, CDOs) to save the wealthiest institutional investors from having to take a loss on their bad bets. When this was not enough, he came up with “Plan B,” to give money to banks. But whereas Britain and European countries talked of nationalizing banks or at least taking a controlling interest, Mr. Paulson gave in to his Wall Street cronies and promised that the government’s stock purchases would not be real. There would be no dilution of existing shareholders, and the government’s investment would be non-voting. To cap the giveaway to his cronies, Mr. Paulson even agreed not to ask executives to give up their golden parachutes, exorbitant annual bonuses or salaries.

Plan A (the $700 billion to buy mortgage-backed junk that the private sector will not buy) failed partly because it let financial institutions avoid putting a fair value on the debt packages they were selling. Instead of telling the truth about their financial position by marking assets to market prices), they can “mark to model,” Enron-style. We have seen the result: A solid week of plunging stock market prices. The public media call this a panic, but there is nothing irrational about it. Who in their right mind would buy securities or buy into a bank without knowing what the securities were worth? Faith in junk mathematical models has ended.

So we still await a public response to the problem of how to write down debts. Whose economic interest will have to give: that of debtors, as increasingly has been the case over the past eight centuries; or that of creditors, which have fought back to create a neoliberal economy controlled by the FIRE sector?

It is not too late to decide which road to take, but Wall Street bankers and creditors have taken the lead in positioning themselves. Seeing which way the political winds were blowing, they moved to empty out the Treasury before the November 3 elections much like medieval citizens fleeing a horde of Mongolian raiders under Genghis Khan. “We’re moving. Clean out the cupboards,” much as Lehman Brothers emptied out their foreign bank accounts in Britain and elsewhere just before declaring bankruptcy, taking what they could and steering it to their best friends.

The pretense was that a bailout was needed to restore confidence. But the ensuing week showed that the claims were false. It didn’t turn the stock market around as promised. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2,200 points from Wednesday, October 1 through the following Friday October 10 – eight straight trading days, not even pausing for the usual zigzags. Friday’s plunge was 100 points a minute for the first seven minutes – a 690 point drop to under 8000. Each 100 points was more than a 1 percent drop, which was reflected on the NASDAQ. Nothing could withstand the pressure of so many Americans cashing in their mutual funds overnight and so many foreigners in earlier time zones putting in sell-at-market orders.

Short sellers made one of the largest and quickest fortunes ever, and then covered their positions by buying back the stocks they had pre-sold. This pushed prices up even into positive territory just before 10:30 AM when George Bush began to speak. Half the financial stocks showed gains – a sign that the Plunge Protection Team had jumped in. But Mr. Bush said nothing helpful and stocks went back into freefall, ending down another 128 points despite the upcoming weekend G7 meeting. There was no talk at all of reducing debt levels – only of giving more money to banks, insurance companies and other money managers, as if “pushing on a string” somehow would lead them to lend yet more to an already debt-ridden economy.

If Congress really wanted to restore confidence, here’s what it might have done: First, mark to market, not to model. Investors no longer believe America’s Enron-style accounting, debt rating agencies or monoline risk insurers. They don’t trust U.S. banks to be honest about their financial positions. They worry about the fraud charges brought by attorneys general in eleven states against predatory lenders such as Countrywide and Wachovia that Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America were so eager to buy.

So is it too late for Congress to change its mind and repeal the giveaway? If the $700 billion handout didn’t stabilize the unsalvageable for small investors, pension funds and even the financial sector itself, what did it do?

What the Fed has been doing while the media have not been looking?

Let’s put the giveaway in perspective. While Senators and Congressmen subject to voters’ choice were debating $700 billion for the major Wall Street contributors to both parties (admittedly only for starters, Mr. Paulson explained), the Federal Reserve already had given even more, without any public discussion and without the major media noticing. Since Bear Stearns failed in March, the Federal Reserve has used the small print of its charter to go outside its normal customers (which are supposed to be commercial banks), to give investment banks, brokerage houses and now large corporations almost indiscriminately some $875 billion in “cash for trash” swaps. (The statistics are released each week in the Fed’s H41 report.) Like Aladdin offering new lamps for old, the Fed has exchanged Treasury securities for junk mortgages and other securities that brokerage houses and investment banks did not have time to pawn off onto OPEC, Asian sovereign wealth funds or other investors.

The press lauds Mr. Bernanke as “a student of the Great Depression.” If he were, he should know that what led to the 1929 collapse were harsh U.S. Government creditor policies toward its World War I Allied governments. This created a situation where the Federal Reserve had to provide easy credit to hold interest rates artificially low so as to encourage U.S. investors to lend to Britain and Germany, which would use these dollar inflows to pay their Inter-Ally arms and reparations debts. Mr. Bernanke’s predecessor, Alan Greenspan, promoted easy credit simply for ideological reasons, to enrich Wall Street by enabling it to sell more debt.

A student of the Great Depression would understand the conflicts of interest between retail commercial banking and wholesale investment banking and money management that led Congress to pass the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933 – conflicts unleashed once again when Pres. Clinton backed then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Republican leader (and McCain hero) Senator Phil Gramm in leading the repeal of this act, opening up the floodgates to today’s financial double-dealing that has cost the American economy so much.

If Mr. Bernanke does know this history, his behavior is simply that of an opportunistic student of the art of political self-advancement, toadying to Wall Street in campaigning for one last great rip-off before the Bush Administration goes out of business. The Fed has given Wall Street newly minted Treasury bonds, added to the national debt out of thin air. It has done this without feeling any need to rationalize it by drawing absurd public-relations pictures about how the government may “make a profit for taxpayers.”

The Fed Chairman is not elected democratically. He traditionally is designated by the Wall Street financial sector that the Fed is supposed to regulate, acting as its lobbyist for creditor interests – the top 10 percent of the population – against that of the indebted “bottom 90 percent.” This “independence of the central bank” is trumpeted as a hallmark of democracy. But it is undemocratic, precisely by being isolated from public control.
The Age of Oligarchy

Treasury Secretary Paulson has no such luxury. The Treasury is supposed to represent the national interest, not that of bankers – even though its head these days is drawn from Wall Street and acts as its lobbyist. Mr. Paulson presented his almost totalitarian giveaway gruffly to Congress on a take-it-or-leave it basis, announcing that if Congress did not save Wall Street from taking losses on its mountain of bad loans, the banks were willing to crash the economy out of spite. “Please don’t make us wreck the economy,” he said in effect. As Margaret Thatcher used to say while selling off the British government’s crown jewels in the 1980s, TINA: There is no alternative.

In making this bold threat Mr. Paulson behaved as arrogantly as Lehman’s CEO Richard Fuld did when he tried to bluff Korea and other prospective investors into paying the full, fictitiously high book value for his company. (His bluff failed and Lehman went bankrupt, wiping out its shareholders, including the employees and managers who held 30 percent of its stock.) There turned out to be an alternative after all. Responding to the loudest public condemnation in memory, Congress called Mr. Paulson’s bluff.

What made his $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) so much more visible to the media than the Fed’s actions is that Congress is involved, and this is an election year. The level of deception and false argument is therefore enormous – along with a few tradeoffs and tax cuts to distract attention. Erstwhile Republican opponent Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama came right out and said that “This bill has been packaged with a lot of very popular things to give it even more momentum,” so that (as The New York Times explained), “instead of siding with a $700 billion bailout, lawmakers could now say they voted for increased protection for deposits at the neighborhood bank, income tax relief for middle-class taxpayers and aid for schools in rural areas where the federal government owns much of the land.”

Left behind while Wall Street’s believers in the rapture of free markets were swept up to heaven by “socialism for the rich” have been mortgage debtors, student-loan debtors, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC, some $25 billion short), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC, about $40 billion short), as well as Social Security which, we are warned, may run up a trillion dollar deficit thirty or forty years down the line. Only the wealthiest have been beneficiaries, not voters, homeowners and other debtors.

Still, Congress was panicked into acting on Friday, October 3, because a week earlier, September 26, stocks fell 777 points after Congressmen responded to an unprecedented volume of voter protest against the bailout. “This sucker could go down,” Pres. Bush warned as Wall Street’s lobbyists blamed the market downturn to the failure of Congress to preserve the “monetary system,” and specifically the banks and insurance companies that already had lost their net worth and were plunging deeper into Negative Equity territory. Democratic leaders Barney Frank and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, in effect, “Look what you’ve done! You irresponsible politicians are grandstanding on principle, and wiping out peoples’ stock market savings and threatening their pension funds. If you don’t give Wall Street firms enough money to cover their losses so that everyone wins, they’ll kill the economy until they get their way.” Well, they didn’t quite say this, but that was basically their message. It certainly was Wall Street’s message: “Wall Street to Economy: Your money or your life.”

So Congress gave in. Democrats ran like lemmings to “save the economy.” Yet the stock market fell a few hundred points, and kept on plunging all week long, much worse and much faster than had occurred right after Congress had initially defeated the bill.

The “Reality Problem”

What did the “free market” theory underlying the giveaway leave out of account? For starters, “the monetary system” turns out to be a euphemism for the fortunes of financial gamblers using junk mathematics (the Merton-Scholes derivatives formula) based on junk economics (blessed with Nobel Prizes) to buy, speculate and even to insure junk mortgages, junk bonds and junk commercial paper and derivatives based on their relative prices. So what is left out first of all was full knowledge of the value of what is being bought and sold. Mark-to-market models leave the price up to the investment bankers. If trust existed and there really was honor among these thieves, a government bailout would not be necessary, because “the market” could clear.

“Free market” ideology assumes that each party will act in his or her self-interest. If this is so, why should foreign governments accumulate more dollar claims on the U.S. Treasury, which already owes their central banks $4 trillion? When there hardly were enough Treasury securities to go around even as the United States ran unprecedented federal budget deficits, U.S. officials urged these banks and sovereign wealth funds to buy packaged mortgages yielding a higher rate of return. And at least by buying these bonds, foreign governments would not be accused of funding America’s war in Iraq that most of their voters opposed. But investors made a fatal mistake in believing U.S. representations of the value of their junk-mortgage packages. This trust has now been lost, all the more so since the bailout’s permission to keep on “marking to market.”

Congress thought that its $700 billion would distract attention at least until the November 4 election. But to no avail. Markets fell 157 points on Giveaway Friday, and kept on going down another 800 points on Monday, October 6 (to about 9500) before bouncing 500 points off the floor, only to fall even more through Friday. So the giveaway failed in its stated purpose to rescue stock market investors (“peoples’ capitalism”) or their pension funds. But that was not its real purpose. The time simply had come to clear out and take whatever one could.

Making banks and insurers in the zero-sum derivative game whole, so that winners can collect their bets while losers can sell their bad investments to the Treasury, is supposed to re-inflate the credit pyramid. The idea is to solve the debt problem with yet more debt to prop up housing prices once again to unaffordable levels! This is not a long-term solution, but it would give insiders enough time to arrange a do-over and get out of the game more quickly, to sell out their junk mortgages and junk bonds to the proverbial “greater fool” – in this case, the “greater fool of last resort,” the U.S. Treasury, as long as it can be run by Mr. Paulson or, under Mr. Obama, perhaps the former Goldman-Sachs official Robert Rubin.

The banks are to “earn” their way out of their negative equity position by selling more of their product – credit – to increase the economy’s debt levels and hence receive more interest payments. The problem is that most families are already “loaned up.” They have no more discretionary income to pledge to carry more debt. Without writing down their debts, there will be no fresh lending, and hence no source of credit and purchasing power for new autos, appliances, goods and services in general. Debt deflation is being imposed on the “real” economy. Creditors and speculators alone are to be made whole.

If no revenue was available for future Social Security, public health care and repair the nation’s depleted infrastructure before this giveaway, think of how bare the cupboard must be now that the government has run up the recent trillions of dollars in new debt rather than writing off a penny of the bad mortgage debts being blamed for causing the debacle.

We can see where this is leading. The wealthiest 1 percent of the population will come into possession of even more returns to wealth than the 57 percent that they are now taking. In contrast to the Statue of Liberty’s inscription “give me your poor … yearning to breathe free,” the Fed – and now the Treasury, with Congressional blessing – is taking from the public purse and giving to America’s wealthiest investors and insiders. This “Robin Hood in Reverse” program is being done without strings, without asking banks to stop paying dividends, exorbitant executive salaries and golden parachutes, and without taking over banks with negative net worth of the kind that many homeowners are experiencing.

Nobody is talking about a debt write-down or moratorium. The subprime mortgage problem could have been solved by writing down just $1 or $2 trillion of the face value and interest rates of predatory loans. Instead, the $10+ trillion in financial-sector damage in recent weeks reflects Wall Street’s fraudulent packaging and sale of junk mortgages at unrealistically high prices, using junk mathematics to calculate junk derivatives and sell them to gullible investors who believe that the pretenses these mathematics, credit ratings and projected income have a basis in reality.

The amazing feature of today’s crash is how many Wall Street firms actually believed that the game of musical financial chairs could go on before they had to stop dancing and indeed, escape from the room. I remember one day back in the 1970s when I warned Frank Zarb of Lazard Freres about the likelihood of Third World debt defaults, and suggested that the firm should do an ability-to-pay analysis. “We don’t have to do any such thing,” he replied. “We have the schedule of what they owe right here in this IMF report.” It was a thick printout of the scheduled debt service for an African country that soon became insolvent. But Wall Street’s mentalité was that of Herbert Hoover on the eve of the Great Depression: A debt is a debt, and that is that. The response is to blame the victim, as if the irresponsibility lies with debtors rather than creditors.

No reversal of the Bush tax cuts is offered to re-inflate the economy, no move toward more progressive taxation of Wall Street speculators who pay only a 15 percent “capital gains” tax rate instead of the much higher income-tax and FICA withholding rates that wage-earners pay. (Wall Street has its own golden parachute program, so why should it pay for Social Security for the rest of society?) There is to be no reduction in the special tax benefits for real estate, whose tax favoritism led to the crisis by “freeing” more income from the tax collector to be pledged to mortgage bankers as interest. The Bubble Economy is to be re-inflated by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA lending to help buyers bid up housing and commercial office prices once again to a rate that promises to impose debt peonage on homeowners.

The budget deficit will soar, without any prosecution of tax evasion scams by UBS or KPMG. Instead of a fiscal or regulatory comet driving these dinosaurs to extinction, the climate has turned more conducive to their proliferation. Our Age of Deception is to be locked in even more tightly. The Congressional bailout’s suspension of mark-to-market rules to rely on Wall Street’s “self-regulation” should win a prize for Oxymoron of 2008 as investors have no clue as to what financial assets are worth. No wonder lending has dried up, especially to banks themselves.

Just as financial victims fail to vote and support their self-interest, predators also turn out to pursue self-defeating “free market” strategies. The financial sector’s short-termism is the greatest enemy to its survival. It has translated its wealth into a fatal political control of its legal climate, blocking [with the explicit support of Barack Obama, Editors] Congressional efforts to rewrite the oppressive bankruptcy laws that credit-card banks lobbied so hard to pass, [with vital help from Joe Biden, the senior senator from credit card company HQ, the state of Delaware, Editors] crucial. These hard bankruptcy terms prevent the courts from renegotiating homeowner debts to keep property occupied, accelerating the real estate price collapse. The result is today’s negative equity, posing the question of just who is to bear the cost of bring debts back in line with the economy’s ability to pay. Will it be the financial institutions that sponsored asset-price inflation and lobbied for deregulation of lenders? Or, will it be the debtors who thought they were riding the wave to get an inflationary free lunch?

Instead of requiring creditors to absorb losses on the excess of debts over what can be paid, the debts are being kept in place, not scaled back to what the economy can pay. The government is to make creditors and computerized derivatives speculators whole – and will act as collecting agent for the overhead of bad debts the economy has run up.

Today we can see the debt-fueled bubble of asset-price inflation that Alan Greenspan trumpeted as real wealth creation for what it really is – credit creation to bid up real estate, stock market and packaged-debt prices. Tangible capital formation has been left out of account, as if postindustrial economies no longer need it.

Will voters see the asymmetry in Congress’s failure to offer debt relief for homeowners as real estate prices plunge below the mortgages that are owed? Will its members be blamed for not rewriting the nation’s bankruptcy laws to free families from debt peonage – and free housing markets from the price declines that result from today’s proliferation of foreclosure sales? For that matter, will there be no relief for corporations having to cut back investment in order to service their junk bonds and other debts with which Wall Street’s corporate raiders and “shareholder activists” have loaded then down?

Evidently not.

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist specializing in the balance of payments and real estate at the Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase & Co.), Arthur Anderson, and later at the Hudson Institute (no relation). In 1990 he helped established the world’s first sovereign debt fund for Scudder Stevens & Clark. Dr. Hudson was Dennis Kucinich’s Chief Economic Advisor in the recent Democratic primary presidential campaign, and has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments, as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com

Original article posted here.

Updated Zeitgeist

The Moron threatening martial law

A few brave Congresspeople stand up for atrocious and fraudulent looting of Americans

Congresswoman: Criminal Insiders Behind Bailout Bill

Rep. Kaptur: Normal legislative process has been shut down, high financial crimes committed, Republican Michael Burgess says “martial law” has been announced

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Monday, September 29, 2008

Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur boldly slammed the bailout bill this past weekend as the work of criminal insiders who have shut down the normal legislative process to commit “high financial crimes” and defraud the American people, while Rep. Michael Burgess warns that “martial law” has been declared.

The two Congress members are part of a growing minority of representatives sounding the alarm about the dictatorial nature of the bailout bill, which is expected to be up for a vote in the House today, with most in Congress having not had the opportunity to even read the legislation.

The bill is expected to reach the Senate on Wednesday as a raft of outraged politicians cry foul about being strong-armed and accused of being unpatriotic for opposing the carte-blanche passage of a piece of legislation that fundamentally centralizes control of the financial infrastructure of the country into the hands of the government and the Federal Reserve.

“We are Constitutionally sworn to protect and defend this Republic against all enemies foreign and domestic. And my friends there are enemies,” Kaptur told the House floor.

“The people pushing this deal are the very ones who are responsible for the implosion on Wall Street. They were fraudulent then and they are fraudulent now.”

“My message to the American people don’t let Congress seal this deal. High financial crimes have been committed,” added the Democrat from Ohio.

“The normal legislative process has been shelved. Only a few insiders are doing the dealing, sounds like insider trading to me. These criminals have so much political power than can shut down the normal legislative process of the highest law making body of this land,” Kaptur concluded.

Elsewhere, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) said that the only information he had received about the bailout was what talking points to use on the American people and that he had been thrown out of meetings for not blindly supporting the bill.

Ominously, Burgess also comments, “Mr. Speaker I understand we are under Martial Law as declared by the speaker last night.”

Absent any proper hearings concerning the legislation, Burgess called for the legislation to at least be posted on the Internet for 24 hours so that the American people could “see what we have done in the dark of night.”

Watch the comments of Burgess followed by Kaptur.

Original article posted here.

Formal fascism perhaps not far (within two weeks, possibly) away

(An earlier video discussing presidential powers)

Looming fascism

Pre-election Militarization of the North American Homeland. US Combat Troops in Iraq repatriated to " help with civil unrest"

by Michel Chossudovsky

The Army Times reports that the 3rd Infantry’s 1st Brigade Combat Team is returning from Iraq to defend the Homeland, as "an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks." The BCT unit has been attached to US Army North, the Army's component of US Northern Command (USNORTHCOM). (See Gina Cavallaro, Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1, Army Times, September 8, 2008).

"Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. ...

But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one.

The command is at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo., but the soldiers with 1st BCT, who returned in April after 15 months in Iraq, will operate out of their home post at Fort Stewart, Ga.,

...

The 1st of the 3rd is still scheduled to deploy to either Iraq or Afghanistan in early 2010, which means the soldiers will have been home a minimum of 20 months by the time they ship out.

In the meantime, they’ll learn new skills, use some of the ones they acquired in the war zone and more than likely will not be shot at while doing any of it. (ibid)

The BCT is an army combat unit designed to confront an enemy within a war theater.

With US forces overstretched in Iraq, why would the Pentagon decide to undertake this redeployment within the USA, barely one month before the presidential elections?

The new mission of the 1st Brigade on US soil is to participate in "defense" efforts as well as provide "support to civilian authorities".

What is significant in this redeployment of a US infantry unit is the presumption that North America could, in the case of a natgional emergency, constitute a "war theater" thereby justifying the deployment of combat units..

The new skills to be imparted consists in training 1st BCT in repressing civil unrest, a task normally assumed by civilian law enforcement.

What we are dealing with is a militarization of civilian police activities in derogation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

The prevailing FISA emergency procedures envisage the enactment of martial law in the case of a terrorist attack. The 1st BCT and other combat units would be called upon to perform specific military functions:

They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.

Training for homeland scenarios has already begun at Fort Stewart and includes specialty tasks such as knowing how to use the “jaws of life” to extract a person from a mangled vehicle; extra medical training for a CBRNE incident; and working with U.S. Forestry Service experts on how to go in with chainsaws and cut and clear trees to clear a road or area.

The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.

“It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they’re fielding. They’ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it.”

The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.

Civil unrest resulting from from the financial meltdown is a distinct possibility, given the broad impacts of financial collapse on lifelong savings, pension funds, homeownership, etc.

The timing of this planned militarization is crucial: how will it affect the presidential elections scheduled for Tuesday November 4.

The brigade in its domestic homeland activities will be designated as the Consequence Management Response Force ( CCMRF) (pronounced “sea-smurf”).

What " Consequences" are being envisaged?

In a conference held under NorthCom last February, the mission of CCMRFF was defined as follows;

"How to protect communities from terrorist and biological attacks topped the agenda last week for more than 100 service members and civilians gathered at Joint Task Force Civil Support headquarters at Fort Monroe, Va.

The U.S. Northern Command Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and High-Yield Explosive Commanders’ Conference, held Feb. 21-23, brought JTF-CS subordinate task force and unit commanders here to discuss common concerns regarding operational requirements of the CBRNE Consequence Management mission and to begin preparations for Exercise Ardent Sentry 2007.

“We’re giving operationally focused briefs to our CCMRF ( CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force) units to help them prepare and successfully deploy for a CBRNE mission in the continental United States, its territories and possessions,” said JTF-CS Current Operations Specialist Hawley Waterman, who helped organized the conference. “This is also an opportunity to get acquainted and establish better relationships with (subordinate commanders).”(NorthCom, March 2007)

What is envisaged is the possibility of a (false flag) terrorist attack on America, which could be used as a justification for retaliatory or preemptive military action overseas (e.g. Iran) as well actions on the domestic front. The ultimate objective of this deployment of 1st BCT is to apply combat experience in the Homeland:

“I can’t think of a more noble mission than this,” said Cloutier, who took command in July. “We’ve been all over the world during this time of conflict, but now our mission is to take care of citizens at home ... and depending on where an event occurred, you’re going home to take care of your home town, your loved ones.”

While soldiers’ combat training is applicable, he said, some nuances don’t apply.

The operation officially has an emergency mandate to "help American citizens on American soil, to save lives, provide critical life support, help clear debris", but it also implies the running of military style operations. :in fact it would appear that the emergency tasks helping civilians is a cover-up. This is a combat unit, which is trained and equipped to kill people:

Some brigade elements will be on call around the clock, during which time they’ll do their regular marksmanship, gunnery and other deployment training. That’s because the unit will continue to train and reset for the next deployment, even as it serves in its CCMRF mission.

Should personnel be needed at an earthquake in California, for example, all or part of the brigade could be scrambled there, depending on the extent of the need and the specialties involved.

Other branches included The active Army’s new dwell-time mission is part of a NorthCom and DOD response package.

Active-duty soldiers will be part of a force that includes elements from other military branches and dedicated National Guard Weapons of Mass Destruction-Civil Support Teams.

A final mission rehearsal exercise is scheduled for mid-September at Fort Stewart and will be run by Joint Task Force Civil Support, a unit based out of Fort Monroe, Va., that will coordinate and evaluate the interservice event.

In addition to 1st BCT, other Army units will take part in the two-week training exercise, including elements of the 1st Medical Brigade out of Fort Hood, Texas, and the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade from Fort Bragg, N.C.

There also will be Air Force engineer and medical units, the Marine Corps Chemical, Biological Initial Reaction Force, a Navy weather team and members of the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

One of the things Vogler said they’ll be looking at is communications capabilities between the services.

“It is a concern, and we’re trying to check that and one of the ways we do that is by having these sorts of exercises. Leading up to this, we are going to rehearse and set up some of the communications systems to make sure we have interoperability,” he said.

A national emergency could be triggered. "[H]orrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive [attack]" or a so-called CBRNE type scenario. One assumes that this is some form of domestic attack, allegedly by terrorists.

But at the same time, the Bush administration may be seeking a justification to establish martial law and intervene militarily within the USA.

“I don’t know what America’s overall plan is — I just know that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that are standing by to come and help if they’re called,” Cloutier said. “It makes me feel good as an American to know that my country has dedicated a force to come in and help the people at home.” (Army Times, op cit , emphasis added)

"This type of planning and coordination and training is a priority both in our headquarters and at NORTHCOM, as we understand our responsibilities to be ready should the requirement arise, God forbid," (Army News Service Sept 15m 2008)

Original article posted here.

The full force of fascism in America

Glenn Greenwald

Massive police raids on suspected protesters in Minneapolis

[updated below (with video) - Update II - Update III - Update IV]

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning -- one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided. Each of the raided houses is known by neighbors as a "hippie house," where 5-10 college-aged individuals live in a communal setting, and everyone we spoke with said that there had never been any problems of any kind in those houses, that they were filled with "peaceful kids" who are politically active but entirely unthreatening and friendly. Posted below is the video of the scene, including various interviews, which convey a very clear sense of what is actually going on here.

In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs. The 10 or so individuals in the house all said that though they found the experience very jarring, they still intended to protest against the GOP Convention, and several said that being subjected to raids of that sort made them more emboldened than ever to do so.

Several of those who were arrested are being represented by Bruce Nestor, the President of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers' Guild. Nestor said that last night's raid involved a meeting of a group calling itself the "RNC Welcoming Committee", and that this morning's raids appeared to target members of "Food Not Bombs," which he described as an anti-war, anti-authoritarian protest group. There was not a single act of violence or illegality that has taken place, Nestor said. Instead, the raids were purely anticipatory in nature, and clearly designed to frighten people contemplating taking part in any unauthorized protests.

Nestor indicated that only 2 or 3 of the 50 individuals who were handcuffed this morning at the 2 houses were actually arrested and charged with a crime, and the crime they were charged with is "conspiracy to commit riot." Nestor, who has practiced law in Minnesota for many years, said that he had never before heard of that statute being used for anything, and that its parameters are so self-evidently vague, designed to allow pre-emeptive arrests of those who are peacefully protesting, that it is almost certainly unconstitutional, though because it had never been invoked (until now), its constitutionality had not been tested.

There is clearly an intent on the part of law enforcement authorities here to engage in extreme and highly intimidating raids against those who are planning to protest the Convention. The DNC in Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether. Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined.

UPDATE: Here is the first of the videos, from the house that had just been raided:

Jane Hamsher has more here, and The Minnesota Independent has a report on another one of the raided houses, here.

UPDATE II: Here is the video we took from the second house as the raid was occurring. We were barred from entering but spoke with neighbors outside as well as with Bruce Nestor, the President of the Minnesota Lawyer's Guild, regarding these raids:



Over at FDL, Lindsay Beyerstein spoke with the property owner whose house -- the fourth one we now know of -- was being raided while the raid was in progress, and Lindsay has details here ("About an hour and a half ago 20 to 30 heavily armed police officers surrounded the house. One of my roommates said 'I want to see a warrant' and she was immediately detained"). Meanwhile, Indy Media of Twin Cities -- an association of independent journalists in the area -- just told me that several of their journalists have been detained while trying to cover these raids. Their site, with ongoing updates, is here.

The Uptake also has several reports of the various raids, including video of the raid at the property whose owner Bernstein spoke with as the raid occurred. That video includes an interview with a lawyer from the National Lawyer's Guild who was detained and put in handcufffs, explaining that the surrounded house is one where various journalists are staying. Additionally, a photojournalist with Democracy Now was detained at that house as well. So, both journalists and lawyers -- in addition to protesters -- have been detained and arrested even though not a single violent or criminal act has occurred.

UPDATE III: FDL has the transcript of part of my discussion about these raids with the National Lawyer Guild's Minnesota President -- here.

The Uptake has this amazing video interview with the Democracy Now producer who was detained today. As the DN producer explains, she was present at a meeting of a group called "I-Witness" -- which videotaped police behavior at the 2004 GOP Convention in New York and helped get charges dismissed against hundreds of protesters who were arrested. The police surrounded the St. Paul house where they were meeting even though they had no warrant, told them that anyone who exited the house would be arrested, and then -- even though they finally, after several hours, obtained a warrant only for the house next door -- basically broke into the house, pointed weapons at everyone inside, handcuffed them, searched the house, and then left. Here is a blog post from one of the members of I-Witness asking for help during the time when they were forced to stay inside the house (see the second post -- it reads like a note from a hostage crying out for help). This is truly repugnant, extreme police behavior designed to intimidate protesters, police critics and others, and it ought to infuriate anyone and everyone who cares about basic liberties.

Original article posted here.

Fascism strikes at the RNC scooping up Amy Goodman and producers of Democracy (Gone)

When a picture says it all . . .

Click on pick for larger image

While weazl doesn't care about bedroom activities, it does seem that O'Bummer and Biden are playing hardball with Larry Sinclair

Both Sinclair Obama Sites
Blocked On Eve Of DNC

From Lawrence Sinclair
8-24-8

One day before the start of the Democratic National Convention, www.larrysinclair0926.com and www.larryinclairbarackobama.com have been suspended by Startlogic.
Upon contacting of Startlogic, their reasons for the suspension of these web sites sounds insincere.

Startlogic claims that the sites have been suspended due to an unforeseen amount of traffice and strain on the server and that Startlogic cannot unsuspend the account nor can they allow me to access any of the files from the sites.
I find the statements by Startlogic to be complete BS.
So, folks, until I can figure out how to set up the site on a VPS private server, I guess the Obama/Biden camp have won for the day, anyway.



Thank You,

Larry Sinclair

http://Larrysinclair0926.com
http://Larrysinclair.org
http://Larrysinclairbarackobama.com

Preparing the minions for the next false flag and the assault on the last bastion of freedom

U.S. at risk of cyberattacks, experts say

(CNN) -- The next large-scale military or terrorist attack on the United States, if and when it happens, may not involve airplanes or bombs or even intruders breaching American borders.

Cyberattackers shut down one Georgian government site and defaced another with images of Adolf Hitler.

Instead, such an assault may be carried out in cyberspace by shadowy hackers half a world a way. And Internet security experts believe that it could be just as devastating to the U.S.'s economy and infrastructure as a deadly bombing.

Experts say last week's attack on the former Soviet republic of Georgia, in which a Russian military offensive was preceded by an Internet assault that overwhelmed Georgian government Web sites, signals a new kind of cyberwar, one for which the United States is not fully prepared.

"Nobody's come up with a way to prevent this from happening, even here in the U.S.," said Tom Burling, acting chief executive of Tulip Systems, an Atlanta, Georgia, Web-hosting firm that volunteered its Internet servers to protect the nation of Georgia's Web sites from malicious traffic.

"The U.S. is probably more Internet-dependent than any place in the world. So to that extent, we're more vulnerable than any place in the world to this kind of attack," Burling added. "So much of what we're doing [in the United States] is out there on the Internet, and all of that can be taken down at once." Watch experts discuss threat »

"This is such a crucial issue. At every level, our security now is dependent on computers," said Scott Borg, director of the United States Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit research institute. "It's a whole new era. Political and military conflicts now will almost always have a cyber component. The chief targets will be critical infrastructure, and the attacks will emerge from within our own computer systems."

Hackers mounted coordinated assaults on Georgian government, media, banking and transportation sites in the weeks before Russian troops invaded. Known as distributed denial of service, the attacks employ multiple computers to flood networks with millions of simultaneous requests, overwhelming servers and crippling Web sites.

Hackers shut down the Web site of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, for 24 hours and defaced the Georgian parliament site with images of Adolf Hitler. Saakashvili blamed Russia for the attacks, although the Russian government said it was not involved.

Web sites and computer networks have been targeted by hackers for decades, although large-scale, coordinated cyberattacks are still a relatively new phenomenon. Some Internet-security experts believe that the Georgia conflict marks the first time a known cyberattack has coincided with a ground war, but others said that similar computer attacks have accompanied military operations in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The challenge to U.S. security experts is that such attacks can be mounted anonymously, and relatively cheaply, from anywhere in the world. Georgia's attackers employed "botnets," or malicious automated programs that take root undetected in far-flung computers and barrage their targets with useless data. By last Friday, some of those botnets were originating from Comcast Internet addresses in the United States, Burling said.

"It only takes a couple of experts; it doesn't take a whole cyber infantry division to pull something like this off," said Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence for SecureWorks, an Atlanta-based computer security firm. "For a very small investment in resources, you can have a huge impact."

In the United States, government computer networks parry millions of attempted intrusions every day, Internet-security experts say. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security created a National Cybersecurity Center this year to coordinate federal cyberdefense efforts and quicken responsiveness. However, a recent Homeland Security Department intelligence report, obtained by The Associated Press, concluded that there are no effective means to prevent a coordinated attack on U.S. Web sites.

"When it comes to our government IT security, we're pretty strong in protecting against [attacks]," Homeland Security spokesman William R. Knocke told CNN. "But I wouldn't say ... we're 100 percent impenetrable."

So what would a cyberattack on the United States look like? And where is the U.S. most vulnerable? It depends on who you talk to.

Borg does not believe that the U.S. is susceptible to the kind of attacks launched at Georgia.

"We can command so much bandwidth that it's hard to overwhelm our servers," he said. "We are vulnerable to more sophisticated attacks, but right now most of the people who want to do us harm don't have those capabilities."

The Web sites of key government security agencies, such as the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, are difficult to bring down, experts said. So are the computer networks of large American banks. But experts say a successful, large-scale attack on U.S. computer systems could hobble electric-power grids, transportation networks and industrial-supply chains.

"You'd see some disruption of essential services, like electricity. You'd definitely see espionage," said James A. Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "Would it be decisive? No. Nobody's going to win a conflict with the United States in cyberspace. But would it be disruptive and irritating? Yes."

Federal researchers who launched an experimental cyberattack last year in Idaho caused a generator to self-destruct, prompting fears about the effect of a real attack on the nation's electrical supply.

And a May report by the Government Accountability Office found that the Tennessee Valley Authority, which supplies power to almost 9 million people in the southeastern U.S., had not installed sufficient cybersecurity measures. Spokesman Jim Allen said the TVA, the nation's largest publicly owned utility company, is "on track" to correct the problems.

What frustrates computer-security experts is that the features that make the Internet such an invaluable resource -- its openness and interconnectedness -- also make it easier for hackers to do harm. As a staple of 21st-century warfare, cyberattacks will become increasingly sophisticated, forcing governments and private industry to build ever-stronger firewalls and other defenses, experts said.

Also, vague international laws and a lack of accountability will continue to make tracking down and prosecuting cyberattackers difficult.

"We don't know quite what the rules are for this kind of conflict. If it's spying, it's illegal. But is it an act of war? And who do you arrest?" Lewis asked. "We're much safer [in the U.S.] than we were a year ago. But we still have a long way to go."

Original article posted here.

Another strange death, many unanswered questions. Weazl doesn't believe this is the culprit, but rather was driven mad

The Biowar Story Not Told In The Aftermath Of A Scientist's Suicide

Danny Schechter
News Dissector

It is Saturday morning, and as the skies darken, and the rains threaten, I am reading about biowar investigator Bruce E. Ivins who is said to have taken his life with a fatal cocktail of codeine and other drugs just as he was about to be arrested and charged with five cases of murder in connection with the still fully unsolved anthrax attacks of 2001.

The naming of Mr. Ivins, born in Lebanon (Ohio), not the Middle East, and a veteran employee at the U.S. Government’s massive US Army bio weapons lab at Ft. Detrick, MD at least suggests, as many have long contended, that this was a domestic crime, not a foreign terrorist act.

The story, broken by the LA Times Friday got the full card monte coverage treatment by the New York Times on Saturday with acres of print. Is there any reason to conclude that we now know all the facts, or that the case is closed or even that Ivins was the guilty party?

The last man accused by the FBI Dr Stephen Hatfill went to Court and won a $4.6 million settlement in his suit against the FBI for violating his rights. His law suit against the NY Times reporting on the issue failed when the Judge ruled he could not prove the newspaper knowingly published false information. Clearly, the information was false then. How credible is the reporting now?

Ivins’ lawyer Paul Kemp insists that it was FBI harassment and humiliation that led to the suicide. He also contends that Ivins would have been exonerated if his case went to trial. Obviously he was facing a long and costly legal ordeal contributing to his anxieties. One report said he did not have the money to properly defend himself.

The Washington Post reports that other scientists at the lab are skeptical about suggestions that Ivins is the man described in the NY Post as “DR DOOM.”

Yet, colleagues and friends of the vaccine specialist remained convinced that Ivins was innocent: They contended that he had neither the motive nor the means to create the fine, lethal powder that was sent by mail to news outlets and congressional offices in the late summer and fall of 2001. Mindful of previous FBI mistakes in fingering others in the case, many are deeply skeptical that the bureau has gotten it right this time.

“I really don’t think he’s the guy. I say to the FBI, ‘Show me your evidence,’ ” said Jeffrey J. Adamovicz, former director of the bacteriology division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, on the grounds of the sprawling Army fort in Frederick. “A lot of the tactics they used were designed to isolate him from his support. The FBI just continued to push his buttons.”

Investigators are so confident of Ivins’s involvement that they have been debating since Friday whether and how to close the seven-year-old anthrax investigation. That would involve disbanding a grand jury in the District and unsealing scores of documents that form the basis of the government’s case against Ivins.

Congressman Rush Holt does not trust the FBI either. In a statement buried at the end of the Times story on page A10, rather than in the lead on page l where it belonged, he said, “What we learn will not change the fact that this has been a poorly handled investigation that has lasted 6 years and already has resulted in a trail of embarrassment and personal tragedy.”

According to another report, FBI investigators had conducted 9100 interviews, sent out 6000 grand jury subpoenas and conducted 67 searches. They also traveled to “many” unnamed countries. They would not disclose their case against the late Mr. Ivins. He saw himself as a fall guy or patsy. Was he? Who else and what else was behind this attack on news outlets, US Senators and the postal service employees who died.

UNASKED QUESTIONS

The Brad Blog noted that “it’s curious — if hardly surprising — that none of the major outlets reporting the news bothered to note that the attacks were all made on perceived “liberals”.

Even a parade of reporters contacting Ivins family today, failed to bring up the topic.

We called Ivins oldest brother Thomas today, to ask if he had any idea of Bruce’s political leanings, and he told us “No, I didn’t. I didn’t know what his affiliations where. And that’s a good question.”

He was surprised by the question and though he said he’d been speaking with reporters all day, “one after another,” he told The BRAD BLOG, none of the other reporters, not one of them, had asked him about his brother’s political affiliations, leanings or beliefs….”

No reporters have also brought up a crazy angle on the case: a reported at the time JLO connection.

FBI AND MEDIA FLAWED

So both the FBI probe and the media coverage has been flawed but there is one rather large and dangerous aspect of this that has also so far escaped much notice. In the Times accounts, one story suggested that Ivins may have acted to “raise an alarm about the bio terrorism threat.” Another suggested that Ivins had bought a bullet proof vest and gun and contemplated killing co-workers at the Army research lab “to take everyone else out with him.”

Was he a nut, another lone maniac, or is it possible that his motives were more nuanced?

The NY POST reduced his motive to making money, although he never made any as a result of his still unproven role in the anthrax attacks:

The suicidal scientist revealed as the likely culprit behind the 2001 anthrax mailings was part of a megamillion-dollar deal to have his own vaccine mass produced in the wake of those biological attacks and the national panic they created.

Bruce Ivins, 62, was the co-owner of a patent on what was seen as a cure to the terrifying threat.

Before the attacks, the vaccine developed by Ivins - who killed himself last week as a seven-year federal investigation closed in on indicting him for five murders - garnered little attention. But the deadly post-9/11 mailings brought $50 billion in government funding to the field of bioterror prevention.

An $877.5 million contract was inked with biotech firm VaxGen to provide Ivins’ vaccine in a deal in which he stood to profit, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. One estimate put the potential windfall in the tens of thousands of dollars.

A VaxGen executive said his company did not have a profit-sharing agreement with Ivins personally, and he had no knowledge of what arrangement Ivins had with his employers.

A former senior official at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases - the high-security lab in Maryland where Ivins worked for 36 years - believed the mad researcher mailed the anthrax-laced letters to move government resources to his field.

“It had to have been a motive,” the official told the LA Times. “I don’t think he ever intended to kill anybody. He just wanted to prove ‘Look, this is possible.’ He probably had no clue that it would aerosolize through those envelopes and kill those postal workers.”

The Associated Press quoted a therapist who suggested the scientist was a homocidal killer. This angle will no doubt interest Hollywood. Watch for the HBO Special later this year:

Social worker Jean Duley testified at a court hearing in Frederick on July 24 in a successful bid for a protective order from Ivins — who five days later committed suicide — that he “actually attempted to murder several other people.”

Ivins took a fatal dose of acetaminophen, the active drug in Tylenol, as federal authorities monitored his movements and prepared to charge him with the murder of five people who died from anthrax poisoning in the weeks after the Sept. 2001 terror attacks.

An audio recording of the court session was obtained by The New York Times and posted it on its Web site.

“As far back as the year 2000, the respondent has actually attempted to murder several other people, either through poisoning. He is a revenge killer. When he feels that he’s been slighted or has had — especially toward women — he plots and actually tries to carry out revenge killings,” Duley said.

Another possible motive: could it be that the threat he saw, from his own insider experience, was not overseas, but here at home, inside the military for whom he worked, not from some cave in Afghanistan? He was a vaccine man in a world that was increasingly moving in a more military mode. Maybe that is what he wanted to “take out!”

WHERE IS THE REAL THREAT?

If so, he would not be the only scientist worried about the direction bio research was taking and this new threat. And what could that threat be? Perhaps it was not necessarily one fabricated bio attack but rather the covert development of a bio war industry through which the US government is reviving its bio war capacity for aggressive use, not domestic protection. In fact, many researchers in this field share this concern.

Reported the Times about his work, ”the work became even more intense in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attack, as the field grew tremendously with BILLIONS (my caps) in new federal support for research on anthrax AND OTHER POTENTIAL BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS (my caps) and to buy new drugs or vaccines to handle a possible future attack.”

The Times might have added this line had they conducted their own investigation into the controversy over the proliferating U.S. bio war INDUSTRY: “and to create new weapons for use in a possible future attack by the US military.”

Bear in mind that it was the US and Germany who sold Saddam the bioweapons he used on the Kurds. Also remember the Operation Tailwind Story suppressed by CNN alleging bio-weapons (ie. nerve gas) use in Vietnam by the US. When the producers fired by CNN later sued, demanding access to documents and information on the pressure the network came under for their story, CNN settled and paid the producers large sums of money as long as they signed a gag order and refused to disclose the amount they were paid and other information. I covered this issue extensively on Mediachannel.org

That industry is, of course, sold to the public entirely as a defensive response and public health necessity. In the same way that the attack on Iraq was sold to the US to protect us from attack, using the 911 attack as its rationale, the far less public expansion of the Bio war industry had a similar rationale.

The anthrax attack was a 9/11 for the expansion of the biowar industry.

INVESTIGATING THE BIO WAR INDUSTRY

I know a bit about this because three years ago, I was working with a team to find funding for an investigative film about this issue. We begged funders for help, writing:

While most of our media is focused on covering the war on terror and the conflict in Iraq, another Administration initiative could easily turn into another arena of conflict with truly frightening implications.

I am referring to a massive and under-reported Bush Administration initiative to spend six BILLION dollars on a new “Bio-Defense” program that is building as many as 20 BL-4 labs equipped to handle the deadliest pathogens known to man. Without a public debate or media scrutiny this program is attacking serious criticism from the scientific community and community groups opposed to siting these labs in densely populated urban areas

The International Center for Global Communications Foundation is seeking support for a Globalvision investigative documentary on the dangers posed by this Initiative. “WHEN BIO SAFELY BECOMES A BIO THREAT” (TENTATIVE TITLE) will examine this program which major medical schools and the National Institute of Health has embraced while community groups and top scientists involved in arms control oppose.

The response: ZERO, ZIP, NADA!

We first learned about this story because of opposition in Boston to the construction of a level containment 4 lab (top security), for use with major pathogens, at Boston University. When the university announced it was to be built in the black community of Roxbury, community groups there became concerned.

They were pissed that they were not consulted, but and, also, soon worried about how any accident at the lab might put the community at risk. Their initial fears were predictably dismissed until reports came out of an unplanned release of a dangerous rabbit virus at a nearby level 2 lab. Suddenly, their concerns could not downplayed as a hysterical or paranoid reaction.

The organization Roxbury Safety Net contacted Globalvision and we started looking into the issue. So did a Boston area anti-war organization. What we found was that the Boston lab was part of a national program run out of the National Institute of Health and coordinated by an ex CIA official with a budget of billions. The NIH, at the direction of the Bush Administration and with funding provided by Congress, escalating bio research will cutting back on funding for other diseases and research,

Slowly, opposition to more labs emerged in other parts of the country, at the Livermore Labs in the Bay Area and even at Ft Detrich in Maryland. Some were defeated. Across the country, citizen researchers dug out documents and soon scientists expressed alarm.

WHEN DEFENSE BECOMES OFFENSE

I spoke with a top researcher at Rutger’s University who explained how easily a “defensive” program could become an offensive one even as the flouted international treaties and American law. (Richard Nixon ended the US bio war program, but many in the military objected in part because the Soviet Union had its own massive and secret facility for many years. And yes,there had been accidents.)

This became a media story, or rather anon media story, when we could not find any money to fund our investigation and film. Thank you media consolidation and caution at all the foundations for the fear to challenge the government’s national security obsession.

Despite its importance, despite the unsolved anthrax attacks, and despite the obvious public concern, fear of terrorism and worries about public safety, we struck out. Our film has yet to be made. It is painful for a journalist to have a big story and not be able to interest any outlet or funder in it.

Most of the media was once again asleep at the switch, Perhaps with this suicide, some media outlets will pursue the story and the larger context that has been missing. I am also trying to get back in touch with activists at Ft Detrich who have been monitoring this story and have additional information missing in most press reports.

SAFETY CONCERNS RAISED

Most media outlets have yet to discuss the potential for a revival of our bio-war program but are raising deeper questions. The Houston Chronicle asked this weekend:

“Has the unprecedented boom in biodefense research made the country less secure by multiplying the places and people with access to dangerous germs?

“We are putting America at more risk, not less risk,” said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of a House panel that has investigated recent safety lapses at biolabs.”

But the proliferation of biodefense research laboratories presents real threats, too, congressional investigators recently warned.

More people in more places handling toxic agents create more opportunities for an accident or intentional misuse by an insider, Keith Rhodes, an investigator with the Government Accountability Office, said at a congressional hearing in October.

Nationwide, there are an estimated 14,000 people working at about 400 laboratories who have permission to work with so-called “select agents” — which could be used in a bioterror attack — although a much smaller amount of this research involves the most dangerous materials, like anthrax.

With so many people involved, there is insufficient federal oversight of biodefense facilities, Rhodes testified.

Heightening the concern has been a string of accidents at certain new or expanded biodefense laboratories, several of which were not properly reported to the authorities when they first took place.

One of the first accidents was in Ivins’ laboratory in late 2001, when he and his colleagues were aiding the federal investigation of the anthrax attacks and spores accidentally spilled outside the secure area.

He failed to report the event to his superiors and instead tried to disinfect the contaminated areas, according to an Army report, which concluded, “Adherence to institute safety procedures by laboratory personnel is lax.”

In early 2006, at Texas A&M University, a worker was infected with Brucella bacteria, a pathogen common in livestock that can cause flulike symptoms like fever, fatigue and joint pain, although it is rarely fatal. Later, three researchers at the same lab were infected with Q fever, another cattle-borne disease that can cause serious but generally not fatal illness in humans.

After the two incidents belatedly became public, federal officials temporarily shut down the laboratory, citing a series of safety shortcomings.

This story originally came from the NY Times. It also raises a related question: have tens of millions poured into bio research presumably investigating various new threats, led to funding cutbacks of serious other health crises?

“Apart from the threat from insiders, some public health experts believe money being used to study obscure pathogens that are not a major disease problem could be better directed to study known killers like influenza or AIDS.”

Original article posted here.

Further explanation of what is in our skies

What Chemtrails Really Are
by CAROLYN WILLIAMS PALIT

What are they ultimately trying to do up there -- is create charged-particle, plasma beam weapons.

Chemtrails are the medium - GWEN pulse radars, the various HAARPs, and space-based lasers are the method, or more simply:

Chemtrails are the medium. Directed energy is the method.

Spray and Zap.

This system appears to be in Russia, Canada, the United States, and all of Europe. Exotic weapons can be mobile, stationary, land-based, aerial, or satellite.

It is an offensive and defensive system against EM attacks and missiles. It uses ionospheric particle shells as defense mechanisms [like a bug-zapper shell]* against missiles and EM attacks. That means they spray and then pump up the spray with electromagnetics.

When these shells are created using the oscillating, electromagnetic, gyrotron stations, it "excludes" and displaces the background magnetic field. These shells can be layered one above another in a canopy fashion for extra protection from missiles.

The chemtrail sprays have various elements in them like carbon which can used to absorb microwaves. Some of these sprays have metal flakes in them that make aerial craft invisible to radar. Spoofer sprays. Sprays like these can be used to create colorful, magnetized plasmas to cloak fighter jets.

There are satellite weapons involved. Activists are using meters and are getting readings of microwaves, x-rays, and some other kind of emission that they are not sure of, maybe a low-intensity laser.

They are also photographing gas plasma generation due to the heating of chemtrails by electromagnetics. The technical names for vertical and horizontal plasma columns are columnar focal lenses and horizontal drift plasma antennas.

Various size of gas plasma orbs are associated with this technology. These orbs can be used as transmitters and receivers because they have great, refractory and optical properties. They also are capable of transmitting digital or analog sound. Barium, in fact, is very refractive -- more refractive than glass.

What does that mean? Someone or someones are very involved in unconstitutional, domestic spying and the entrained plasma orbs carried on electromagnetic beams can be used for mind control programming. The satellites can be programmed to track and monitor various frequencies on different parts of your body.

These electromagnetic beams carrying the gas plasma orbs stick due magnetic polarity and frequency mapping and tracking to people's eyes, ears, temples, and private parts. A beam with entrained orbs carries pictures in each orb just like the different frames in a movie. It is a particle beam that is also a frequency weapon.

The satellites download holographic mind control movies, pictures, sounds, and sensations to people through this technology. The Air Force has stated in "Air Force 2025" that their goal is to develop virtual and augmented reality mind control. Depending on the how the computer is programmed or depending on the mood or intent of the person interfacing with the technology, you can be probed, bothered, gaslighted, frightened, manipulated, electronically raped, or tortured. It scans your brain frequencies and deciphers your thoughts. The satellites track you by mapping your bioenergetic signature [body biometrics] and constantly scanning an area to find you.

We are the lab rats for this technology and something is very wrong in the military or intelligence branches somewhere. Because developmental projects in government and military are often so compartmentalized, I suppose someone could be using and developing this technology secretly and without authorization. Then again, behavioral and mind control programs were an authorized policy under MKULTRA. Our country has a history of experimenting on its citizens. We are talking about satellite charged-particle frequency weapons attacking a person 24 hours a day. Psychotronic weapons are considered weapons of mass destruction by the U.N.

"HAARPs" can create earthquakes and can also x-ray the earth to find underground military bases, gold, or oil reserves. These ionospheric heaters can also operate as an over-the-horizon or under-the-ocean communications system. This system can control the weather or create disasters. Taken together with the aurora keyhole through-your-roof satellite surveillance system, Echelon electronic computer/phone sweeps, plasma-cloaked DOD Drug War helicopters and stealths, implants, and cameras on the street, it constitutes one, big global and space control grid.

These weapons involve beams. Two beams overlapped will couple into a particle-ion beam that will bounce off of a remote target and send a holographic image back to the satellite for remote spying operations. When you cross two strong beams, you can supposedly* create scalar energies. These energies can be used as untraceable weapons for nuclear size explosions or for defense. These crossed-energies can be used to cause a person's physical electrical system to fail or with a lower frequency, administer a kind of remote electro-shock. Visualize touching a positive and negative electric cable to each other on top of your head. Scalar energies can be utilized in hand-held military guns and on tanks. They can dud-out electronics or cause large, electrical blackouts. Scalar energies are practically impossible to shield against. You need lead, ceramics, and a deep underground facility to not be affected by these weapons. Or, you need to be up and above the field of battle.

People who are working on these issues hear tones and hums. If you hear persistent tones and static; have body vibrations, burning sensations, "bangs" to the head, neurological damage, or immune system damage; are hearing electronic voices or hearing the sound of a plasma; suffering from pains deep in your organs or constant headaches; or experiencing other anomalous activity then you may be being targeted by directed energy, mind control weapons. These weapons could be on helicopters, jets, stealth fighters, or on satellites. Directed energy beams and electromagnetic waves can be sent to you via hand-held devices or piggy-backed in on cell phone and satellite towers.

Is it possible that someone(s) are very afraid of coming famines and riots due to the ongoing, man-induced failure of the ecological system, and they are saturating the earth with chemtrails for large-scale, gas plasma mind control? Is this the last grasp for the world's resources? Or, are they just control freaks and money mongers? Someone would like to get to that oil under the melting [due to chemtrail-trapped EM heat] Artic. And, I guess the Third World is not a part of this system. I don't think that the developed nations are going to let them in on this either.

Any country that joins this NATO system will become mind-controlled and diseased due to the associated, intense, oscillating, electromagnetic fields, electromagnetic soup, and the poisonous, toxic chemtrails. Our DNA will break. We risk the earth's spin and tilt becoming messed up due to mucking around with the magnetic fields through this military technology. Maybe, it is already messed up.

It constitutes U.S. global domination via NATO and the erosion of civil rights. According to Charlotte Iserbyt and Al Martin, there are ex-KGB and ex-STASI advising our new Office of Total Information Awareness. They are the ones creating our new internal passports [national ID]. And under "The Treaty on Open Skies," we have overflights by Russian and German military. Who exactly is flying those plasma-cloaked craft that are seen all over this country and mistaken for UFOs by people who do not know about this aerial deception technology? Obviously, we have another "Project Paperclip" in the making. We can add the new thugs to the 2,000 Iraqi brought into country by Daddy Bush who are now living in Nebraska.

The elitist corporate government is going to hold the rest of us hostage with directed energy weapons in space, if the Policy for a New American Century group - PNAC - Bush and cronie think tank has their way, along with directed energy attacks against any country or citizen that they decide they do not like. These weapons can create climate war, weather war, mind war, cyber war, disease war, disaster war, and undetectable war. Taken together they can create economic war.

If this system is not stopped, it will kill billions due to aluminum and barium poisoning. It will kill billions due to crop failures and world-wide famine. It will cause heart attacks, strokes, and cancers. It will cause stillbirths, miscarriages, and infertility. The chemtrail sprays often have fungi, bacteria, viruses, dessicated red blood cells, crystalline substances, carbon, metal cations, lithium, other chemicals, heavy metals, and God knows what - probably smart dust, or nanocrap. Years of biowarfare testing on the American public is no big secret anymore. Spraying germs in the sky where they mutate due to the ultra-violet light -- brillant plan, my man. Are we acceptable losses or is this by design?

I know that many of the major players have big investments in pharmaceutical companies, GM seeds [seeds that can grow in an electromagnetic soup], weapons and directed energy development contracts, oil contracts, genetic research, and mind control research. Some of these people have had a familial history of financial and policy support for population control, eugenics, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Marx, Pinochet, Hussein, and various other dictators. Some of the major players were the masterminds of the death squads in Central and South America. They stand to make a big profit on our death and disease. Just take a look at Rumsfield and Tamiflu.

I assume that they know the dangers of this system and that they take care to stay in their shielded, air-filtered offices, homes, bases, and cars. I assume they take chelating substances to remove the barium and aluminum from their bodies and minds. If not, then they really do not understand the far-ranging implications of this destructive system. Congress may not understand just what a terrible weapons system and control grid they are funding.

As I understand it, Tesla towers attached to deep-earth, free-energy taps are to be created over the 10-12 magnetic poles and the GWEN system phased-out. Has this already been done? This should allow total control of the earth through giant, Tesla death ray-guns. This natural, electromagnetic earth was not meant to be an un-natural dynamo to power man's weapons or his utility companies.

Over-unity systems [Tesla devices]* are as of yet, another unexplored and probably not understood man-made energy. We should be very suspect of free energy.

As we can see, the forms of man-made energy that have been created and used in the past have not been good for this planet. Maybe it is time to reconsider the options available to us through the development of crops for fuel, wind, solar, and water power. We need world-wide, different, more holistic, renewable, energy programs.

Is there any good news? Yes. There has been tons of particulate dumping through the spray operations for 8 years over the Americas, Europe, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and from what I can find out, over Russia.

And, what goes around blows around, right? So, these substances are probably actually global. It sure makes a ton of sense to spray poisonous elements in 24 NATO countries and let the substances be carried around the earth on the jet streams to poison yourself, your enemies, and all neutral and non-combatent countries. Talk about making more enemies.

The water, air, and soil of all of these countries is so saturated with metal cations that these weapons freaks should be able to zap and mind f--k each other quite well now and as often as they wish. Once they have clobbered each other with light-saber beams for a few years and razed and scorched sections of the earth, they may start to realize that this foreign policy will lead to a defective human race and a rotten economy. Do you think they will have knocked some sense into each other by then and will decide that non-proliferation and arms reduction is the more civilized and mature direction to take in world affairs? I doubt it, cause only idiots would have developed horrific, planet-killer weapons like these. But, I'll bet the rest of the planet will finally rise up and tell these juvenile delinquents to quit playing with those rayguns right this second.

After further thought on Bearden + -- a big over-unity and free energy proponent of Tesla technology that makes energy off of boiling the ionosphere or stealing electricity from the mis-named "vacumn" called Life, I have decided that Bearden is telling us some, if not most, of the truth. Same for Eastlund.

Original article posted here.