Links March 24 09 – Moon of Alabama

March 24, 2009

Links March 24 09

Blackmail: Obama Dials Down Wall Street Criticism because the banksters are miffed.

The banks' message: If you want our help to get credit flowing again to consumers and businesses, stop the rush to penalize our bonuses.

The Treasury wants powers to seize non-bank financial companies like AIG and to break their contracts. Maybe time to update your insurances?

Secretary of the Treasury is Timothy Franz Geithner. The name Geithner is of south-German origin. The original spelling is Geissner or Geißner as the English 'th' is the consonance to the German sharp double-s also written as 'ß'. A 'Geiss' or 'Geiß' in south-German dialect is a goat. The 'Geissner' is the one who herds the goats.

Krugman rulez: The NYT editors come out in favor of bank 'nationalization'.

The great hope for democracy, Georgia's Saakashvili, is busy arresting opposition politicians.

Baghdad blogger Salam Pax is posting some of his notes from five years ago in a series of blog flashbacks.

A Pakistani muses about dangerous US plans for Baluchistan: Why aren’t we acting now?

Afghan leaders are condeming corruption. Don't worry folks, Richard Holbrooke will clear up the AfPak mess and especially the corruption problems. He has great experience as former AIG board member, as a former Lehman Brothers managing director and as a recipient of a cheap mortgage through the 'friends of Angelo' program. If that does not qualify …

Roger Cohen recently wrote a series of NYT columns with a positive view on Iran. Now the Israel lobby is out to get him fired.

The Guardian has a series of videos showing Israeli war-crimes.

Please add your remarks and links of the day in the comments.

Posted by b on March 24, 2009 at 06:29 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Jeeze, here is my stinkly little link:
You see, the world shaking news in the Happy Little Kingdom is that that cogsugger Anders Fogh Rasmussen, aka to his anti-fans as “Bush Lite” is set to be the next NATO General Secretary. The USA has said “Okay”, so that about clinches it, unless Turkey drops a veto, which I don’t think they dare.
I figure what got the US is (perhaps) a left-hand assurance that the new fighters to replace the F16 will be the 5th generation F35, assuming they ever figure out how much the piece future scrap metal will cost…

Posted by: Chuck Cliff | Mar 24 2009 9:57 utc | 1

i love these daily updates b. Arshad Zaman’s baluchistan article is spot on. over @ salam pax’s homepage he reports hinterland travel is offering tours of iraq!

Look, I’m all for it. Bring on the tourists, it’ll be fun. But this piece on the BBC is just a bit odd. The footage is filmed in front of Saddam’s old parade ground which is in the middle of the green zone. Normal folk, or should I just say it.. Iraqis, have no way of getting there unescorted. And they talk of visiting the ancient city of Babylon.. the last I heard is that an US army unit uses it as a base……..And just in case you were wondering.. yes, I am a little bit jealous. Sour grapes and all that.

the travel agent even offers an the afghan road tour, khyber pass! wonders never cease.

Posted by: annie | Mar 24 2009 10:54 utc | 2

Jerome finds that CDS are the biggest problem in the banking system.
Uhmmm welcome, better late than never …

Posted by: b | Mar 24 2009 12:30 utc | 3

“Tours of Iraq”? Jesus fucking Christ, is there no depravity we wont stoop too? Of course, that response is rhetorical, these craven jackals always go lower, there is no bottom for them. Case in point: Imagine, “There’s culture shock, and then there’s the culture shock of moving to a country that started a war in your home.” Words fail….

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Mar 24 2009 14:03 utc | 4

Seems like our friend, Richard Holbrooke, has been outed as lying about the immunity deal with Karadzic…
Holbrooke offered Karadzic immunity

Posted by: SimplyLurking | Mar 24 2009 15:14 utc | 5

Obama, Mexico, and free trade.
It seems Obama, by ending a Bush era Mexican trucking pilot program, is raising protectionist flags. now, what may have been a simple nod to teamsters, is having tariff ramifications as Mexico tries reminding Obama about that whole NAFTA thing.
an unvetted decision, planned provocation, or indication of a protectionist trend to placate labor as the economy continues to deteriorate?

Posted by: Lizard | Mar 24 2009 17:32 utc | 6

The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution:

[…] Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else’s financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its “pneumonia” was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn’t have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.
Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.
People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — “our partners in the government,” as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers. […]

Well worth reading the entire piece.

Posted by: Juan Moment | Mar 24 2009 17:59 utc | 7

not that we need any new evidence – but the venal barak want to be a vassal for the criminal benji – you know that the ‘leaders’ of this world are utterly without reflexion – anthing for power – even if that power is empty & only endures for a day or two
& the cross dressing warrior barak just wants more blood on his hands

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 24 2009 19:01 utc | 8

a higher morality

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 24 2009 19:09 utc | 9

a higher morality ll

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 24 2009 19:13 utc | 10

Juan 7) final paragraph think you meant “…turn the Fed (and Treasury as their tax collector and printing plant) into a deliberately impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of $T’s in unaudited unaccountable Fed credit window grift…”
The revolution is a Fed-Bilderberg coup over Government. The US Executive now answers to the Fed and the Bilderberg Group, or more accurately, the Executive pimps US proletariat and the peons on behalf of the Fed-Bilderberg Grp.
Meanwhile, our august MSM media print pan-dialectic choss to further the FBG’s GWOT: http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/03/24/1858150.aspx instead of publishing the home addresses of the bank executives of 12 FRB’s comprising the FBG coup makers.
What’r ya’ gonna’ do? Life is a casino always has, just pocket what you can.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108557/ “Beans, Herman, … with pork gravey.”

Posted by: Terence Michaels | Mar 24 2009 20:06 utc | 11

Keith Harmon Snow’s (5 March 2009) AFRICOM’S COVERT WAR IN SUDAN: The Winter of Bashir’s Discontent:

. . . the U.S. war for Sudan has always revolved around ‘humanitarian’ operations—purportedly neutral and presumably concerned only about protecting innocent human lives—that often provide cover for clandestine destabilizing activities and interventions.
Americans need to recognize that the Administration of President Barack Obama has begun to step up war for control of Sudan in keeping with the permanent warfare agenda of both Republicans and Democrats. The current destabilization of Sudan mirrors the illegal covert guerrilla war carried out in Rwanda—also launched and supplied from Uganda—from October 1990 to July 1994. The Rwandan Defense Forces (then called the Rwandan Patriotic Army) led by Major General Paul Kagame achieved the U.S. objective of a coup d’etat in Rwanda through that campaign, and President Kagame has been a key interlocutor in the covert warfare underway in Darfur, Sudan.
During the Presidency of George W. Bush the U.S. Government was involved with the intelligence apparatus of the Government of Sudan (GoS). At the same time, other U.S. political and corporate factions were pressing for a declaration of genocide against the GoS. Now, given the shift of power and the appointment of top Clinton officials formerly involved in covert operations in Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and Sudan during the Clinton years, pressure has been applied to heighten the campaign to destabilize the GoS, portrayed as a ‘terrorist” Arab regime, but an entity operating outside the U.S.-controlled banking system. The former campaign saw overt military action with the U.S. military missile attacks against the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (1998): this was an international war crime by the Clinton Administration and it involved officials now in power.

Posted by: Arcturus | Mar 24 2009 22:18 utc | 12

b, Dawn has removed Arshad Zaman’s baluchistan article off their website. luckily lots of other places copied the text like here.
it is an important article.

Posted by: annie | Apr 3 2009 18:34 utc | 13

Nice posting.. Good sharing, thanks 🙂

Posted by: Finance | May 24 2009 0:47 utc | 14

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