Monday, August 23, 2010

Grayson slams mosque ‘distraction’: Talk about admin that ‘let’ 9/11 happen instead

The debate over a planned Islamic community center several blocks from New York City's World Trade Center site is a "distraction," according to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL).

Instead, the debate should shift in focus to an examination of the administration which "let it happen."

'It,' of course, being the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The remark was made during a Friday appearance on MSNBC's The Ed Show with former liberal talk radio host Ed Schultz.

“If we are going to talk about 9/11, why don’t we talk about how not so much the people who died on 9/11 were disgraced by the possibility of an Islamic athletic center several blocks away; how about the fact that they were disgraced by a president who let it happen?" he asked. "Who went on vacation for the entire month of August after he was warned in writing that Osama bin Laden was actually finding targets in NYC and learning how to take these planes and do terrible things with them? The thing itself said ‘hijacking’ and they did nothing about it."

He called talk of the Islamic community center mere "distraction" from real issues facing Americans.

Unanswered questions

In its report on the devastating attacks, the 9/11 Commission wrote:

[President Bush] did not recall discussing the August 6 report with the Attorney General or whether Rice had done so. We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. ...Tenet does not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period. Domestic agencies did not know what to do, and no one gave them direction. The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law enforcement were not marshaled to augment the FBI’s efforts. The public was not warned.

In 2008, Philip Shenon, who covered the 9/11 Commission proceedings for the New York Times, published a book called, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, in which he revealed the uncomfortably close ties between the commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, and Bush advisers Karl Rove and Condoleezza Rice.

The following year it was revealed that the commission's crucial chapters, detailing the planning and execution of the attacks, was sourced namely on information obtained through torture.

9/11 Commission members Thomas Kean and Lee H. Hamilton wrote that although US President George W. Bush had ordered all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the probe, “recent revelations that the CIA destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot.”

“Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.”

They continued: “There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the CIA — or the White House — of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot.

“Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations,” Kean and Hamilton wrote.

Just four days ago, two tapes that were supposedly destroyed, depicting the interrogations of a Sept. 11 suspect, were discovered under a desk at the CIA. Dozens of other tapes that captured the waterboarding and torture of other prisoners were allegedly destroyed.

In a 2006 telephone survey of 1200 individuals, just 47% agreed that “the 9/11 attacks were thoroughly investigated and that any speculation about US government involvement is nonsense.” Almost as many, 45%, indicated they were more likely to agree “that so many unanswered questions about 9/11 remain that Congress or an International Tribunal should re-investigate the attacks, including whether any US government officials consciously allowed or helped facilitate their success.”

This video is from MSNBC's The Ed Show, as snipped by Mediaite.

With additional reporting by RAW STORY.

Toxic Contamination: Gulf Oil May Not Degrade for DECADES

As you might have heard, scientists are finding gigantic under oil plumes from the BP spill, including one that is more than 22 miles long, more than a mile wide and 650 feet deep.

On Thursday, Dr. Ian MacDonald and and Dr. Lisa Suatoni testified to a Congressional subcommittee that the oil will stay toxic, and will not degrade much further, for decades. MacDonald is an expert in deep-ocean extreme communities including natural hydrocarbon seeps, gas hydrates, and mud volcano systems, a former long-time NOAA scientist, and a professor of Biological Oceanography at Florida State University. Suatoni has a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Yale, and is Senior Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council's Oceans Program.

Dr. MacDonald told Congress that the oil has already degraded, emulsified and evaporated about as much as its going to, and it is going to very resistant for further biodegradation. The oil will be in the environment for a long-time, he said, and the imprint of the BP discharge will be detectable "for the rest of my life" (he's 58, and the average lifespan for American men is about 76; so that's some 18 years).

Dr. Suatoni told Congress that oil which goes into low-oxygen zones will remain in a full toxic form for decades.

Why isn't the oil degrading faster?

As National Georgraphic noted Thursday:

The oil plume's stability is "a little unexpected," study leader Richard Camilli, of WHOI's Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department, said at a Thursday press briefing in Washington, D.C.

"We don't have any clear indication as to why it set up at that depth."

It's unclear why the Gulf's microbes aren't eating the oil plume, but the organisms are infamous for being unpredictable, said study co-author Christopher Reddy, a marine chemist at WHOI.

***

Further studies are needed to figure out why the plume isn't degrading, Reddy said during the press briefing ....

Indeed, one of the world's leading experts on oil-eating bacteria told me yesterday that the main oil-eaters aren't even present in the underwater plumes he sampled.

Pharma Rep Confession

In striking shift, small investors flee stock markets

Renewed economic uncertainty is testing Americans’ generation-long love affair with the stock market.

Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.

If that pace continues, more money will be pulled out of these mutual funds in 2010 than in any year since the 1980s, with the exception of 2008, when the global financial crisis peaked.

Small investors are “losing their appetite for risk,” a Credit Suisse analyst, Doug Cliggott, said in a report to investors on Friday.

One of the phenomena of the last several decades has been the rise of the individual investor. As Americans have become more responsible for their own retirement, they have poured money into stocks with such faith that half of the country’s households now own shares directly or through mutual funds, which are by far the most popular way Americans invest in stocks. So the turnabout is striking.

So is the timing. After past recessions, ordinary investors have typically regained their enthusiasm for stocks, hoping to profit as the economy recovered. This time, even as corporate earnings have improved, Americans have become more guarded with their investments.

“At this stage in the economic cycle, $10 to $20 billion would normally be flowing into domestic equity funds” rather than the billions that are flowing out, said Brian K. Reid, chief economist of the investment institute. He added, “This is very unusual.”

Sponsored links
Advertisement | ad info
Advertisement | ad info

The notion that stocks tend to be safe and profitable investments over time seems to have been dented in much the same way that a decline in home values and in job stability the last few years has altered Americans’ sense of financial security.

It may take many years before it is clear whether this becomes a long-term shift in psychology. After technology and dot-com shares crashed in the early 2000s, for example, investors were quick to re-enter the stock market. Yet bigger economic calamities like the Great Depression affected people’s attitudes toward money for decades.

For now, though, mixed economic data is presenting a picture of an economy that is recovering feebly from recession.

“For a lot of ordinary people, the economic recovery does not feel real,” said Loren Fox, a senior analyst at Strategic Insight, a New York research and data firm. “People are not going to rush toward the stock market on a sustained basis until they feel more confident of employment growth and the sustainability of the economic recovery.”

One investor who has restructured his portfolio is Gary Olsen, 51, from Dallas. Over the past four years, he has adjusted the proportion of his investments from 65 percent equities and 35 percent bonds so that the $1.1 million he has invested is now evenly balanced.

He had worked as a portfolio liquidity manager for the local Federal Home Loan Bank and retired four years ago.

“Like everyone, I lost” during the recent market declines, he said. “I needed to have a more conservative allocation.”

To be sure, a lot of money is still flowing into the stock market from small investors, pension funds and other big institutional investors. But ordinary investors are reallocating their 401(k) retirement plans, according to Hewitt Associates, a consulting firm that tracks pension plans.

Until two years ago, 70 percent of the money in 401(k) accounts it tracks was invested in stock funds; that proportion fell to 49 percent by the start of 2009 as people rebalanced their portfolios toward bond investments following the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. It is now back at 57 percent, but almost all of that can be attributed to the rising price of stocks in recent years. People are still staying with bonds.

Another force at work is the aging of the baby-boomer generation. As they approach retirement, Americans are shifting some of their investments away from stocks to provide regular guaranteed income for the years when they are no longer working.

And the flight from stocks may also be driven by households that are no longer able to tap into home equity for cash and may simply need the money to pay for ordinary expenses.

On Friday, Fidelity Investments reported that a record number of people took so-called hardship withdrawals from their retirement accounts in the second quarter. These are early withdrawals intended to pay for needs like medical expenses.

Sponsored links
Advertisement | ad info
Advertisement | ad info

According to the Investment Company Institute, which surveys 4,000 households annually, the appetite for stock market risk among American investors of all ages has been declining steadily since it peaked around 2001, and the change is most pronounced in the under-35 age group.

For a few months at the start of this year, things were looking up for stock market investing. Optimistic about growth, investors were again putting their money into stocks. In March and April, when the stock market rose 8 percent, $8.1 billion flowed into domestic stock mutual funds.

But then came a grim reassessment of America’s economic prospects as unemployment remained stubbornly high and private sector job growth refused to take off.

Investors’ nerves were also frayed by the “flash crash” on May 6, when the Dow Jones industrial index fell 600 points in a matter of minutes. The authorities still do not know why.

Investors pulled $19.1 billion from domestic equity funds in May, the largest outflow since the height of the financial crisis in October 2008.

Over all, investors pulled $151.4 billion out of stock market mutual funds in 2008. But at that time the market was tanking in shocking fashion. The surprise this time around is that Americans are withdrawing money even when share prices are rallying.

The stock market rose 7 percent last month as corporate profits began rebounding, but even that increase was not enough to tempt ordinary investors. Instead, they withdrew $14.67 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in July, according to the investment institute’s estimates, the third straight month of withdrawals.

A big beneficiary has been bond funds, which offer regular fixed interest payments.

As investors pulled billions out of stocks, they plowed $185.31 billion into bond mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, and total bond fund investments for the year are on track to approach the record set in 2009.

Charles Biderman, chief executive of TrimTabs, a funds researcher, said it was no wonder people were putting their money in bonds given the dismal performance of equities over the past decade. The Dow Jones industrial average started the decade around 11,500 but closed on Friday at 10,213. “People have lost a lot of money over the last 10 years in the stock market, while there has been a bull market in bonds,” he said. “In the financial markets, there is one truism: flow follows performance.”

Ross Williams, 59, a community consultant from Grand Rapids, Minn., began to take profits from his stock funds when the market started to recover last year and invested the money in short-term bonds, afraid that stocks would again drop.

“We have a very volatile market, so we should be in bonds in case it goes down again,” he said. “If the market is moving up, I realized we should be taking this money and putting it into something more safe rather than leaving it at risk.”

The article, "In Striking Shift, Small Investors Flee Stock Market," first appeared in the New York Times.

Copyright © 2010 The New York Times

Fidelity sees record number raid their 401(k)s

In the wake of news about a spike in new applications for unemployment benefits comes another potentially troubling sign: A record number of workers made hardship withdrawals from their retirement accounts in the second quarter.

What's more, the number of workers borrowing from their accounts reached a 10-year high, according to a report issued Friday by Fidelity Investments.

The trends reflect the financial stress many workers find themselves in as the economy struggles to find sure footing, said Beth McHugh, Fidelity's vice president of marketing insight.

High unemployment and companies cutting back on overtime or overall hours have reduced the take-home pay of many workers.

"People tend to be taking home less," she said. "As a result the percentage of individuals initiating hardship distributions is one of the things we're concerned about."

Fidelity administers 17,000 plans, which represents 11 million participants. In the second quarter, some 62,000 workers initiated a hardship withdrawal. That's compared with 45,000 in the same period a year ago.

What's also eye-opening is that 45 percent of participants who took a hardship withdrawal a year ago took another one this year, McHugh said.

To be eligible for a 401(k) hardship withdrawal, individuals must demonstrate an immediate and heavy financial need, according to IRS regulations. Certain medical expenses; costs relating to the purchase of a primary home; tuition and education expenses; payments to prevent eviction or foreclosure on a primary home; burial or funeral expenses; and repair of damage to a primary home meet the IRS definition and are permitted by most 401(k) plans.

A key concern is that these withdrawals are just that, they are not loans. As a result there can be a significant impact on someone's overall retirement savings. If the worker is younger than 59½, they'll pay a 10 percent penalty for early withdrawal in addition to taxes.

The average age of the workers taking hardship withdrawals is between 35 and 55, their peak earning years. It's also often a time when competing financial challenges emerge, McHugh said.

The good news in the report was that the average 401(k) account balance as of the end of the second quarter was $61,800; up 15 percent from the same time last year, but down from the end of the first quarter of 2010.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Obama’s Delusions: The Economy and Iraq

If you’ve listened to recent speeches the President has given about the economy and the Iraq war, you’d think that two of the biggest social issues facing working Americans are improving. But facts are stubborn things.

Take for example the numbers of jobs lost in the last two months: 221,000 in June, 131,000 in July.

Instead of taking the drastic measures needed to stop the continued hemorrhaging, the President had this to say on August 5th:

“Even though it's going to take years to repair all the damage caused by this recession, I am absolutely convinced that this nation is finally headed in the right direction. Our economy is growing again. We are adding jobs again [!]. America is moving forward again…”

Since Obama has access to the above job numbers, we must assume that he is either delusional or lying. We also cannot attribute this comment to a one-time slip of the tongue, because Obama has essentially made the same speech several times while promoting Democratic candidates nationwide.

Contrary to his recent statements, Obama has not improved the economy. He has overseen a catastrophic destruction of jobs on a state-by-state basis, in part due to state budget crises and the pathetic lack of response on the national level: Obama’s first stimulus was under-funded and misdirected (too much emphasis on tax cuts for businesses, etc.), while Obama’s recent “stimulus”— only $26 billion — is simply farce.

The state budget crises are not over; many states are projecting long-term deficits in the billions of dollars that, if left untouched, will contribute further to the massive unemployment that continues to drive down wages for the employed workers.

In fact, the U.S. economy is in such sad shape, it was recently announced, that call center workers in India now make a similar wage to their U.S. counterparts, while autoworkers are being pressured to make 50 percent wage concessions.

When it comes to the Iraq war, Obama is equally off kilter. He recently announced the end of “combat operations” in Iraq, which we are meant to interpret as “mission accomplished.”

Meanwhile, we are told, 50,000 troops will stay in Iraq — along with unknown thousands of “private contractors”(mercenaries) — capable of conducting “counter-terrorism operations.” But the war has been advertised as one giant counter-terrorism operation for years, meaning, that very little has changed.

Obama’s Bush-style war propaganda will do nothing to impress the Iraqis, who still live in a war-torn hell-hole, with over a million dead, millions of refugees having fled the country, while the remaining inhabitants are left to rot in a destroyed economy lacking widespread access to jobs, water, sanitation, electricity, etc, etc.

Of course, the troops leaving Iraq will simply be shifted to Afghanistan, while the troops staying in Iraq will be there to prop up a government that functions in limbo, lacking all authority outside the violence it learns from the remaining U.S. “trainers and advisors.” Middle East Journalist Robert Fisk adds:

“[The U.S.] injected Iraq with corruption on a grand scale. They stamped the seal of torture on Abu Ghraib — a worthy successor to the same prison under Saddam's vile rule… They sectarianised a country that, for all its Saddamite brutality and corruption, had hitherto held its Sunnis and Shias together.”

In short, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has made things worse for Iraqis, and Obama is selling the war as a victory as he recklessly dashes over to Afghanistan to repeat the atrocity.

The hundreds of billions of dollars that Obama will use to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan could just as easily go to create jobs in the United States: public works could be financed by the government, as they were during the last Depression, that directly create jobs. The war money could also go to states suffering massive cutbacks in social services and public education. If working Americans sit idle, nothing will change, since power concedes nothing without a demand.

On October 2nd workers will directly confront the Obama administration over the above policies. Hopefully, these nationwide demonstrations, organized by the One Nation coalition, will begin a movement that challenges the corporate agenda we’ve suffered under for decades. Some in the coalition will attempt to channel the momentum to elect Democrats in November; the majority will demonstrate to challenge the policies of both the Democrats and Republicans. For more info: www.onenationworkingtogether.org


Animated unemployment map

Click this link ...... http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html

The facial recognition software that will put a name to every photograph in the internet

A software company is developing revolutionary software which provides the ability to identify people from photographs posted on the internet.

Face.com has produced technology that can identify individuals on social networking sites and online galleries by comparing their image against a known picture of them.

It means detailed profiles of individuals can be built up purely from online photographs and critics have said it could lead to exploitation by employers.

Privacy concerns: Face.com has made software available that can identify people from photographs on the internet through facial recognition technology (file picture)

Privacy concerns: Face.com has made software available that can identify people from photographs on the internet through facial recognition technology (file picture)

The software works be creating an algorithim of the face - a measurement of the arrangement of features including the eyes, nose and mouth.

The company says it is 90 per cent accurate when scanning typical images which appear on social networking sites.

Face.com has previously limited the availability of the software over concerns about invasion of privacy.

But it has now released the Photo Finder software to developers building applications allowing people to search for anyone on the internet.

Gil Hirsch, chief executive of Face.com, told The Sunday Times: 'We have launched a service that allows developers to take our facial recognition technology and apply it immediately to their own applications.

'The technology is already being used by 5,000 developers. You can basically search for people in any photo.

'You could search for family members on Flickr, in newspapers, or in videos on YouTube - but it would take a lot of processing power.'

The use of facial detection technology has only been used by the UK Border Agency.

Google has a tool - Picasa - which allows users to organise their photos by tagging matching faces and Facebook uses Photo Finder.

Supporters of the software, including the Red Cross, have said it could be used to track people lost in humanitarian disasters.

But there are strong concerns over the accuracy of the technology and its impact on privacy.

Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said: 'I think this will make many people very uneasy.

'The regulators have been hugely behind the curve of protecting people's privacy on the internet. We need to push for much tighter international rules.'

Without a Revolution Americans Are History

Paul Craig Roberts � V Dare.com August 16, 2010

The United States is running out of time to get its budget and trade deficits under control. Despite the urgency of the situation, 2010 has been wasted in hype about a non-existent recovery. As recently as August 2 Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner penned a New York Times Column, Welcome to the Recovery.

As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear on many occasions, an appearance of recovery was created by over-counting employment and undercounting inflation. Warnings by Williams, Gerald Celente, and myself have gone unheeded, but our warnings recently had echoes from Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff and from David Stockman, who excoriated the Republican Party for becoming big-spending Democrats.

It is encouraging to see a bit of realization that, this time, Washington cannot spend the economy out of recession. The deficits are already too large for the dollar to survive as reserve currency, and deficit spending cannot put Americans back to work in jobs that have been moved offshore.

However, the solutions offered by those who are beginning to recognize that there is a problem are discouraging. Kotlikoff thinks the solution is massive Social Security and Medicare cuts or massive tax increases or hyperinflation to destroy the massive debts.

Perhaps economists lack imagination, or perhaps they don抰 want to be cut off from Wall Street and corporate subsidies, but Social Security and Medicare are insufficient at their present levels, especially considering the erosion of private pensions by the dot com, derivative and real estate bubbles. Cuts in Social Security and Medicare, for which people have paid 15% of their earnings all their life, would result in starvation and deaths from curable diseases.

Tax increases make even less sense. It is widely acknowledged that the majority of households cannot survive on one job. Both husband and wife work and often one of the partners has two jobs in order to make ends meet. Raising taxes makes it harder to make ends meet梩hus more foreclosures, more food stamps, more homelessness. What kind of economist or humane person thinks this is a solution?

Ah, but we will tax the rich. The usual idiocy. The rich have enough money. They will simply stop earning.

Let抯 get real. Here is what the government is likely to do. Once the Washington idiots realize that the dollar is at risk and that they can no longer finance their wars by borrowing abroad, the government will either levy a tax on private pensions on the grounds that the pensions have accumulated tax-deferred, or the government will require pension fund managers to purchase Treasury debt with our pensions. This will buy the government a bit more time while pension accounts are loaded up with worthless paper.

The last Bush budget deficit (2008) was in the $400-500 billion range, about the size of the Chinese, Japanese, and OPEC trade surpluses with the US. Traditionally, these trade surpluses have been recycled to the US and finance the federal budget deficit. In 2009 and 2010 the federal deficit jumped to $1,400 billion, a back-to-back trillion dollar increase. There are not sufficient trade surpluses to finance a deficit this large. From where comes the money?

The answer is from individuals fleeing the stock market into "safe" Treasury bonds and from the bankster bailout, not so much the TARP money as the Federal Reserve抯 exchange of bank reserves for questionable financial paper such as subprime derivatives. The banks used their excess reserves to purchase Treasury debt.

These financing maneuvers are one-time tricks. Once people have fled stocks, that movement into Treasuries is over. The opposition to the bankster bailout likely precludes another. So where does the money come from the next time?

The Treasury was able to unload a lot of debt thanks to "the Greek crisis," which the New York banksters and hedge funds multiplied into "the euro crisis." The financial press served as a financing arm for the US Treasury by creating panic about European debt and the euro. Central banks and individuals who had taken refuge from the dollar in euros were panicked out of their euros, and they rushed into dollars by purchasing US Treasury debt.

This movement from euros to dollars weakened the alternative reserve currency to the dollar, halted the dollar抯 decline, and financed the massive US budget deficit a while longer.

Possibly the game can be replayed with Spanish debt, Irish debt, and whatever unlucky country swept in by the thoughtless expansion of the European Union.

But when no countries remain that can be destabilized by Wall Street investment banksters and hedge funds, what then finances the US budget deficit?

The only remaining financier is the Federal Reserve. When Treasury bonds brought to auction do not sell, the Federal Reserve must purchase them. The Federal Reserve purchases the bonds by creating new demand deposits, or checking accounts, for the Treasury. As the Treasury spends the proceeds of the new debt sales, the US money supply expands by the amount of the Federal Reserve抯 purchase of Treasury debt.

Do goods and services expand by the same amount? Imports will increase as US jobs have been offshored and given to foreigners, thus worsening the trade deficit. When the Federal Reserve purchases the Treasury抯 new debt issues, the money supply will increase by more than the supply of domestically produced goods and services. Prices are likely to rise.

How high will they rise? The longer money is created in order that government can pay its bills, the more likely hyperinflation will be the result.

The economy has not recovered. By the end of this year it will be obvious that the collapsing economy means a larger than $1.4 trillion budget deficit to finance. Will it be $2 trillion? Higher?

Whatever the size, the rest of the world will see that the dollar is being printed in such quantities that it cannot serve as reserve currency. At that point wholesale dumping of dollars will result as foreign central banks try to unload a worthless currency.

The collapse of the dollar will drive up the prices of imports and offshored goods on which Americans are dependent. Wal-Mart shoppers will think they have mistakenly gone into Neiman Marcus.

Domestic prices will also explode as a growing money supply chases the supply of goods and services still made in America by Americans.

The dollar as reserve currency cannot survive the conflagration. When the dollar goes the US cannot finance its trade deficit. Therefore, imports will fall sharply, thus adding to domestic inflation and, as the US is energy import-dependent, there will be transportation disruptions that will disrupt work and grocery store deliveries.

Panic will be the order of the day.

Will farms will be raided? Will those trapped in cities resort to riots and looting?

Is this the likely future that "our" government and "our patriotic" corporations have created for us?

To borrow from Lenin, "What can be done?"

Here is what can be done. The wars, which benefit no one but the military-security complex and Israel抯 territorial expansion, can be immediately ended. This would reduce the US budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars per year. More hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved by cutting the rest of the military budget, which in its present size, exceeds the budgets of all the serious military powers on earth combined.

US military spending reflects the unaffordable and unattainable crazed neoconservative goal of US Empire and world hegemony. What fool in Washington thinks that China is going to finance US hegemony over China?

The only way that the US will again have an economy is by bringing back the offshored jobs. The loss of these jobs impoverished Americans while producing over-sized gains for Wall Street, shareholders, and corporate executives. These jobs can be brought home where they belong by taxing corporations according to where value is added to their product. If value is added to their goods and services in China, corporations would have a high tax rate. If value is added to their goods and services in the US, corporations would have a low tax rate.

This change in corporate taxation would offset the cheap foreign labor that has sucked jobs out of America, and it would rebuild the ladders of upward mobility that made America an opportunity society.

If the wars are not immediately stopped and the jobs brought back to America, the US is relegated to the trash bin of history.

Obviously, the corporations and Wall Street would use their financial power and campaign contributions to block any legislation that would reduce short-term earnings and bonuses by bringing jobs back to Americans. Americans have no greater enemies than Wall Street and the corporations and their prostitutes in Congress and the White House.

The neocons allied with Israel, who control both parties and much of the media, are strung out on the ecstasy of Empire.

The United States and the welfare of its 300 million people cannot be restored unless the neocons, Wall Street, the corporations, and their servile slaves in Congress and the White House can be defeated.

Without a revolution, Americans are history.
http://vdare.com/roberts/100816_americans_are_history.htm

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan抯 first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand.

Ashamed to be American? Ex-patriots give up on US

Globalized Business Cares Little About Left or Right

Chrystia Freeland
Reuters

Here's the good news about China's emergence as the world's second largest economy -- US business has figured it out. And here's the bad news -- while US companies can go global, most US citizens can't. The result, in this age of globalization, is a growing tension between the interests of America's business leaders and the interests of much of its middle class. Indeed, the most important fault-line in American politics may not be between Democrats and Republicans, it is between those businesses and business people who are succeeding in the global economy and those who are not.

This clash of values and interests up-ends our usual ideas of left and right. Consider immigrants -- it is no accident that Mike Bloomberg and Silicon Valley's bosses are squarely on the side of the lower Manhattan mosque and of liberal immigration laws. But CEOs are less thrilled about the Democrat-driven imposition of more regulation and the promise of higher taxes.

The irony is that the globalization of American business is surely a good thing -- imagine how much worse things would be if US companies hadn't figured out how to play and win on the world stage. But the equally important truth is that the twin revolutions of globalization and technological change are disproportionately benefiting the global super-class and the middle class in emerging markets like China and India -- while leaving much of America behind. America's business leaders need to figure out how to help America's middle class join the global economic party -- or face a populist backlash which will make Barack Obama look like Milton Friedman.

Ground Zero Mosque Imam Is Globalist Stooge

CFR member receives financial backing from who’s who of global corporate elite

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
Friday, Aug 20th, 2010

Ground Zero Mosque Imam Is Globalist Stooge 200810ImamThe Imam of the now infamous “ground zero mosque” is a member of the ultra elitist Council On Foreign Relations and receives financial backing from powerful globalist sources including the Rockefellers, the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation.

This information provides a compelling backdrop to the theory that the move to establish the mosque is a deliberate attempt to further stoke religious tensions and divert attention away from the real enemy of free humanity, the corporate globalist elite who continue to profit from global war and division.

The proposed mosque, to be known as Cordoba House is the project of the Cordoba Initiative, an organisation founded by ‘Imam’ Feisal Abdul Rauf (pictured above), who, in addition to being a member of the World Economic Forum’s Council of 100, is an active member of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Religious Advisory Committee.

The Cordoba Initiative’s website cites “Christian support for the Cordoba House” in the form of Christian publication, “Sojourners”, which is owned by evangelical Christian writer and political activist Jim Wallis, also coincidentally a sitting member of the CFR’s Religious Advisory Committee.

The CFR, as regular readers know, is populated exclusively by major players with the biggest corporations, banks and defence contractors in the world – all of whom are making vast profits and securing more power from continued global conflict. The CFR also exerts far reaching influence over the U.S. government.

Tony Cartalucci at landdestroyer blog breaks down the fact that every single leading player in both the neocon infested Bush administration and the “change” gang under Barrack Obama is a CFR luminary. Cartalucci also provides further stunning research relating to Cordoba House and its CFR Imam, which breaks down as follows.

Feisal Abdul Rauf also heads up the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA) which enjoys a partnership with the Cordoba Initiative and provided $100 million to secure the site close to ground zero for the mosque to be built.

That $100 million came directly from the back pockets of ASMA’s financial backers.

According to ASMA’s website they include the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers, Rockefeller Philanthropy, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund – essentially the tip of the pyramid of the international globalist elite.

ORIGIONAL ARTICLE