（俄羅斯‧莫斯科24日訊）俄羅斯總統梅德韋傑夫週五說，日本應該瞭解俄羅斯不會放棄南千島群島（日稱北方四島），他建議在該處建自由貿易區。他在年終接受電視訪問時稱，南千島群島全部屬於俄羅斯的領土。
他指出，兩國應該考慮聯合開發項目，可以建立自由貿易區，讓人人賺錢。
Saturday, December 25, 2010
« Video: Christmas Card From Bernanke, Geithner, Bush, Obama & Jim Cramer »
http://tinyurl.com/2cv9x9o
You pretty much just need to watch this one. Happy Holidays to Bail readers.
I posted this clip last year at Christmas, and one of our readers had the following caustic comment:
- I think Geithner as an elf is scary. He's too grumpy looking. What do you think he's doing in that toy shop? I think he dismembers dollies' limbs before boxing them up, bends up the axles on all the hot wheels cars, and purposefully doesn't sand down the wooden railroad track parts so children will get splinters. Yeah, that's what I think he does. Evil elf!
Thanks to SNK for the laugh.
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This is one of my favorite clips from 2010...
Video - Gin, a border collie that dances...backwards
« Tim Geithner - I Used Turbo Tax! »
http://dailybail.com/home/tim-geithner-i-used-turbo-tax.html
Blame it on TurboTax - A clip of Geithner playing the fool...
Congressional Video - Geithner explains why he "accidentally" missed paying taxes on his income from the IMF. I've never posted this before and thought today would be a good day to add it to the public record. Happy Holidays.
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The ballad of Timothy Geithner...
This is excellent...
Song - Lady Sings The Blues annihilates Geithner...
She's an accountant from Nashville.
Must See - Geithner was an 'utter failure' at the IMF...
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« Whitewash On Wall Street: How Henry Paulson Created The Financial Crisis That Brought Down The World »
This is a monster story and I'll wager that many of you have never heard of it. And I'm not blaming you, rather the mainstream financial press.
Paulson's role in a rarely-mentioned 2004 SEC decision...
Regular Bail readers know my thoughts on Krugman's god-forsaken love of useless government stimulus, and his hypocrisy on deficits - they only matter to him when the GOP runs the show - newsflash for Krugman - deficits always matter - but, he's been consistent and correct on the Wall Street heist, and so we post his latest op-ed.
We rejoin the Hank Paulson story below.
#
Reprinted with permission.
Wall Street Whitewash
By Paul Krugman
When the financial crisis struck, many people — myself included — considered it a teachable moment. Above all, we expected the crisis to remind everyone why banks need to be effectively regulated.
Which brings me to the case of the collapsing crisis commission.
The bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was established by law to “examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States.” The hope was that it would be a modern version of the Pecora investigation of the 1930s, which documented Wall Street abuses and helped pave the way for financial reform.
Instead, however, the commission has broken down along partisan lines, unable to agree on even the most basic points.
It’s not as if the story of the crisis is particularly obscure. First, there was a widely spread housing bubble, not just in the United States, but in Ireland, Spain, and other countries as well. This bubble was inflated by irresponsible lending, made possible both by bank deregulation and the failure to extend regulation to “shadow banks,” which weren’t covered by traditional regulation but nonetheless engaged in banking activities and created bank-type risks.
Then the bubble burst, with hugely disruptive consequences. It turned out that Wall Street had created a web of interconnection nobody understood, so that the failure of Lehman Brothers, a medium-size investment bank, could threaten to take down the whole world financial system.
It’s a straightforward story, but a story that the Republican members of the commission don’t want told. Literally. Last week, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, all four Republicans on the commission voted to exclude the following terms from the report: “deregulation,” “shadow banking,” “interconnection,” and, yes, “Wall Street.”
When Democratic members refused to go along with this insistence that the story of Hamlet be told without the prince, the Republicans went ahead and issued their own report, which did, indeed, avoid using any of the banned terms.
In the world according to the G.O.P. commissioners, it’s all the fault of government do-gooders, who used various levers — especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored loan-guarantee agencies — to promote loans to low-income borrowers. Wall Street — I mean, the private sector — erred only to the extent that it got suckered into going along with this government-created bubble.
It’s hard to overstate how wrongheaded all of this is. For one thing, as I’ve already noted, the housing bubble was international — and Fannie and Freddie weren’t guaranteeing mortgages in Latvia. Nor were they guaranteeing loans in commercial real estate, which also experienced a huge bubble.
Beyond that, the timing shows that private players weren’t suckered into a government-created bubble. It was the other way around. During the peak years of housing inflation, Fannie and Freddie were pushed to the sidelines; they only got into dubious lending late in the game, as they tried to regain market share.
But the G.O.P. commissioners are just doing their job, which is to sustain the conservative narrative. And a narrative that absolves the banks of any wrongdoing, that places all the blame on meddling politicians, is especially important now that Republicans are about to take over the House.
Last week, Spencer Bachus, the incoming G.O.P. chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told The Birmingham News that “in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”
He later tried to walk the remark back, but there’s no question that he and his colleagues will do everything they can to block effective regulation of the people and institutions responsible for the economic nightmare of recent years. So they need a cover story saying that it was all the government’s fault.
In the end, those of us who expected the crisis to provide a teachable moment were right, but not in the way we expected. Never mind relearning the case for bank regulation; what we learned, instead, is what happens when an ideology backed by vast wealth and immense power confronts inconvenient facts. And the answer is, the facts lose.
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Paulson's testimony is here...
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Ratigan goes off Paulson's rarely mentioned role in the crisis...
Awesome short clip. Runs 3 minutes.
Make sure to read the story below from the NY Times on Henry Paulson's role in the SEC rule change (2004) that allowed leverage to expand from 12:1 to 100:1 for only the 5 largest investment banks.
Besides Ratigan's occasional outburst, it is still the event most ignored by CNBC and the rest of the mainstream news media.
From the New York Times:
What was the most relevant factor in the blow-up.
Leverage.
Until 2004 U.S. investment banks had a leverage limit of 12:1. After Paulson led the multi-year effort to sway the SEC to drop these rules entirely, allowing 5 banks to utilize unlimited leverage, all 5 became effectively insolvent within 4 years.
It's the most important piece to understanding how this banking crisis was so devastating compared to previous blow-ups, and why it was so widespread -- European banks were (and remain) even more leveraged than our own.
And, it's the easiest part to fix. Just turn the rule back to pre-2004.
UPDATE - After some research, I confirmed that Dodd-Frank made no changes with regard to leverage; there are still no limits and the issue has been consigned to the Federal Reserve for further study.
Nice work. They blew up the world, and still avoided any adjustments to their leverage-based business models.
Latest Wikileaks Psyop Maneuver: Providing Israel With Another Useful Existential Threat
UPDATE: New Fake Israeli “leak” exonerates Israel, condemns North Korea (see end of original article)
UPDATE 2: From ridiculous to the sublime – Bradley wants you to wish the troops and his “torturers” a Merry Christmas
——
Julian Assange has stated on al Jazeera that he will release some 3,700 secret (and even “top-secret”) documents pertaining to Israel in 6 months.
Why would he wait if he had “truth” that needed to be revealed to the world?
What he is doing is providing an existential threat to the state of Israel; one that can and will be used by AIPAC to pressure members of the House of Representatives and the Senate to pass legislation effectively shutting down the open internet as we know it.
The 6 month pending deadline should be just enough time for Israel’s massive propaganda machine.
After Israel’s Dec. 2008-Jan. 2009 attack on Gaza, their more recent attack on the humanitarian aid flotilla, and the assassination of a Palestinian public official, their public opinion rating has taken a nose-dive. Their megaphoned apologists and their public relations efforts failed in the face of an open and uncensored internet.
Assange’s new, unexplainable, 6 month deadline creates just enough of a pending existential threat to the state of Israel to justify AIPAC influenced U.S. congressmen to pass a draconian internet censoring bill in the same vein as the U.S. Patriot Act.
This serves not only the state of Israel, but also the U.S. state department. After Hillary Clinton’s failed efforts to frame North Korea for the sinking of the Cheonan, it is in the best interest of the imperial U.S. that the freedom of the internet and the rapid exchange of information is curbed. This is ultimately the point of the Wikileaks psyop and at least now we have a definitive time-line.
(The following Julian Assange quotes taken from an interview on al Jazeera and published by Information Clearinghouse)
topic: holding “leaks” pertaining to Israel for 6 months
“There are 3,700 files related to Israel and the source of 2,700 files is Israel. In the next six months we intend to publish more files depending on our sources,”
“We will publish 3700 files and the source is the American embassy in Tel Aviv. Prime Minister Netanyahu was traveling to Paris to talk to the US ambassador there. You will see more information about that in six months.”
Why would Assange hold important leaks about Israel for 6 months while knowingly allowing establishment newspapers to publish misleading information about North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and nearly every other Middle East country immediately?
topic: Assange aware that papers he gave “leaks” to are filtering the truth about Israel
files pertaining to the 2006 Lebanon War (Condi Rice’s war) – ”Yes there is some information about that and these files were classified as top secret.
files pertaining to the assassination of a Palestinian leader - “Yes there are some indication to this and may be some special reports published by newspapers. Mossad agents used Australian, British and European passports to travel to Dubai and there are diplomatic files about that.”
“The Guardian, El-Pais and Le Monde have published only two percent of the files related to Israel due to the sensitive relations between Germany, France and Israel. Even New York Times could not publish more due to the sensitivities related to the Jewish community in the US,”
Assange is blaming these entities for filtering the “leaks” yet these cables are in his possession and he could do with them as he pleases. He’s allowing this to happen. Why? If getting out the “truth” is what Wikileaks is all about, why this convoluted and manipulated process?
topic: Official U.S. funding??!?
“We were the biggest institution receiving official funding from the US but after we released a video tape about killing people in cold blood in Iraq in 2007, the funding stopped and we had to depend on individuals for finance.”
What “official funding” is he talking about? Has this money been in place since even before Wikileaks started officially leaking anything? If you read the John Young emails, that would certainly seem to be the case.
Conclusion
It is my sincere hope that this latest ploy by Julian Assange finally exposes this Wikileaks psyop to journalists like Pilger and Greenwald.
By giving this arbitrary and pointless deadline, by creating an existential threat which can only benefit AIPAC lobbyists, Assange has finally exposed his purpose in such a way as there cannot be any more question as to what that purpose ultimately is: the end of the free and open internet.
——
UPDATE: A Raw Story headline completely misrepresents the substance of the article.
Israel destroyed Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007, leaked cable reveals
But the facts within the article show us how the Wikileaks psyop is still working to the advantage of Israel by promoting old, tired propaganda as “fact”.
“On September 6, 2007, Israel destroyed the nuclear reactor built by Syria secretly, apparently with North Korea’s help,” then US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice wrote in the cable published in Yediot Aharonot newspaper.
“Our intelligence experts are convinced that the attack targeted by the Israelis is in fact an atomic reactor of the same type built by North Korea in Yongbyon,” she wrote in the message dated April 2008.
“We have good reason to believe that the reactor was not built for peaceful purposes,” she said, adding the attack came only weeks before the reactor was to become operational. Raw Story
Here is some “truth” being revealed by Wikileaks - a statement by Condi Rice which exonerates Israel for the aggressive and illegal strike on a Syrian facility in 2007 which also serves the dual purpose of implicating North Korea at a time when the U.S. and South Korea are doing everything they can to create a reason to “regime change” that nation.
This cable exposes nothing that we didn’t already know about the 2007 attack on the Syrian facility and actually promotes the previously debunked U.S. and Israeli claim that it was a reactor being made for weapons manufacturing purposes.
Clearly this is just more pro-Israel, anti-North Korea propaganda.
UPDATE 2: This shit is so f*cing stupid, it must be being written by a 12-year-old. Now Manning the Magnanimous, is hoping that you will wish for a Happy Christmas for all the troops AND his captors at the detention center who, according to him, are torturing him. Gimmie a fucking break.
“I ask that everyone takes the time to remember those who are separated from their loved ones at this time due to deployment and important missions.
“Specifically, I am thinking of those that I deployed with and have not seen for the last seven months, and of the staff here at the Quantico Confinement Facility who will be spending their Christmas without their family.” Raw Story
I guess the propagandists writing this drivel figure they got everyone eating out of their hands because of writers like Greenwald and Pilger swallowing this shit hook line and sinker, so they might as well pepper all their sappy propaganda with even more sappy propaganda.
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