Pope Benny Calls For "New World Financial Order"

Hal Turner Shows The New AMERO Currency

What Is A Financial Derivative?

It seems that the evil derivative is one of the main causes of our current financial woes.

As you can see by clicking the link above, derivatives make money out of NOTHING. Derivatives produce NOTHING. Derivatives should have the tax burden upon them, not wages...yet, this is what we have.

How did this happen? Someone thought that it was okay to let the foxes run the henhouse...touting their "free market" mantra...but that turned out to be a fantasy - GAMING THE SYSTEM is the rule of law in finance, apparently.

Farmers should be the richest people in America...yet, the Forbes 400 is indunated with slackers, tools and assholes.

Notice, also, how it is that WE THE PEOPLE must be shouldered with this burden, when we were never allowed to share in its profits?

And imagine that some companies wished to continue with foreclosures? Scumbags.

Let It Collapse! -- by Christopher Ketcham

So the tax-payer hand-out will “save” Wall Street from its own predations. Any reasonable man, of course, would wish the pig-fuckers to fry in their own feces. Let the free market carry out their corpses to the gutter. And mine too, perhaps, for as a magazine writer I depend on the thoughtlessness and blind-mole cupidity of credit-card consumerism – the credit system now imploding – to feed the ad-market that feeds the magazines that pay my bills. Without dumb blondes buying Manohlo Blahniks and metrosexuals fawning over prawns in overpriced restaurants, my paycheck turns to dust.

But the fact is that our economic system is a lunatic and suicidal system, and it deserves to go down. Why lunatic and suicidal? It is predicated on the delusion, accepted on every level in every modern society, that unlimited Mahnolo Blahniks are possible on a planet of limited resources. Growth without horizon is simply not possible, but the delusion remains in force, a mass glue-huff and consensus trance hallucination. Endless growth on planet earth is by definition entropic; it implies its own end. Its pursuit is therefore suicidal.

What might replace the current insane system I couldn’t venture to say. Certainly, a lot of people will be hurt if we go down the rat-hole that appears our proper and fitting end. If events trend badly enough, a period of contraction, unemployment, economic depression, homelessness, tent cities, rising crime, boarded up storefronts, abandoned homes will be upon us faster than imaginable – the last five developments are already in our midst in the post-subprime wastelands of suburbia. Perhaps the crisis will bring about the devolution of the American living standard to something like sustainability. Perhaps it will only bring out a lot of pissed-off middle-classers who refuse to accept that the American way of life is sick and crazy and has no future. That kind of infantile resentment historically either leads to reform or fascism.

Gerald Celente, a self-described “trends forecaster” who last year predicted the “Economic 9/11” that hit this week, dropped me an e-mail the other day: “THE PANIC IS ON,” he wrote. “Depression to follow…” Celente, who has famously tended to be right, augurs that the big Wall Street failures will extend far beyond the financial sector. “In the coming weeks, months and years,” writes Celente, “we'll see a steady stream of banks, giant retailers, consumer product companies, manufacturers, leveraged buyout firms and home builders going under. The next economic shoe to drop,” he avers, “will be in the commercial real estate sector.”

Bring it on. I envision a trickle-down benefit here in Brooklyn, which when I was growing up in the 1980s served fine as a natal ground defined by burglaries, homelessness, murder, empty streets, and the pervasive sense that bad things could happen at any time, which tends to raise consciousness to a fever range, the kind of sharp-sword animal consciousness where the coyote and the rat operate. Empty streets, spartan and lean and dark – that’s what I most remember about old Brooklyn. The place had the feeling of desert. It was replete with open spaces. The “maggot called man,” in Nietzche’s memorable phrase, was not swarming in the foreground.

There was very little that was considered upscale – meaning you could afford the restaurants and bars, what few there were, without making $100,000 a year in the salary prisons of corporate Manhattan. When I was 19, in 1992, I rented an apartment in a neighborhood of old brownstones then known as Park Slope – hallucinating realtors in the New York land rush of the last 20 years have since divided the streets into a Babel of sub-markets. I paid $400 a month for two rooms and a bathroom that leaked shit-water and a fridge that shut off periodically to fill with cockroaches (they ate ham while I slept!). My girlfriend at the time, Carole-Anne, with whom I’d later have a daughter, had just gotten off a plane from Paris. One day I came home to find her crying. “A man – no head! La tete, la tete,” she said. She was hysterical. A man had been shotgunned around the corner and Carole-Anne had walked onto the crime scene minutes after the shoot-out, before the cops could sanitize. That was Brooklyn. And it was okay – well, not okay, but it was part of the facts of life in a city that warded off those who weren’t trained in that high keening consciousness to accept it. One night we borrowed my father’s Honda and took a midnight drive into a cliffy forested park at the northern tip of Manhattan, and a car came up behind us in the lightless road and tried to cut us off. A car-jacking. The men in the car screaming out the window, waving guns. Carole-Anne hysterical (poor girl, from the suburbs of Paris!). High-speed chase along the winding roads. The cars screeching. We escaped down a wrong-way road at 70 miles an hour – god save us we didn’t smash into someone coming the other way – and when we were home in Brooklyn, we were alive. Alive and overjoyed and it was a beautiful moment. That was New York.

This is all romanticized drivel, of course, and to be car-jacked or see a man shotgunned is not to be interpreted as normal or fun or desirable. But at least it was affordable. You didn’t have to work 60 hours a week to watch the cockroaches eat your dinner inside the fridge. You worked enough to pay the rent, and no more (I was a bike messenger, she worked as a secretary at a real estate office that I’m convinced was also trafficking narcotics). I think of the accounts I’ve read of primitive societies, in the sea-girt islands, say, of Micronesia, where perhaps three or four hours a day are lost to the work required for daily survival. The balance of waking is dedicated to nothing at all that could be construed as productive, which means it was for playing with the kids, it was for sex, for sleep, for lazing and going back to sleep. A little work, mostly play makes Jack a happy boy.

Today the same shit-house Carole-Anne and I lived in costs $1900 a month, and it probably still has a cockroach problem, but this is considered “character,” and the main avenues all around are swallowed in the caterwauling of commerce by which the newly-ripped-off resident is bombarded with the temptations of more junk than is affordable or desirable. Whereas on 5th Avenue in Park Slope in 1992 I used to be able to find a hooker and cocaine and run away from a fist-fight and learn Puerto Rican Spanish doing it, whereas I used to be able to find nothing at all on the street, no people, no rushing, nothing to buy or sell, just about every storefront today is taken over by the glad-handing smiley-face of the idiot consumer economy gone to its nth-degree madness. There is growth on all sides, it saturates, it feels like hysteria, and like hysteria it will end in collapse. There are too many amenities, there is too much foolery and surfeit disguised as worthiness and bottom-line necessity. The restaurants where crappy food, the same crappy food you might have gotten for a twentieth of the price ten years ago, is proferred as if it’s Jesus’ bread broken in your mouth – as with religious ritual, the profligate consumption bar/restaurant scene is as ritualized and hyperbolic as a funeral. Money is the password to all social relations. Bubble-economics on all sides: How many of the new jobs offered to the newly-rich in Brooklyn are based on anything more than the usual hallucinated sectors of finance, banking, media, fashion? Fashion, that New York engine of silliness, has for its purpose the slathering of rich people in expensive uselessness made by slave-wagers overseas – it is the industry of children playing at dress up. Once upon a time New Yorkers made their own clothing – right there in Manhattan, in the garment districts, where the art galleries of Soho now peddle emptiness on canvas. But emptiness is today our butter: entertainment, the “news cycle,” the so-called “arts,” the ever-increasing pestilence of a media that informs not at all. Are there any jobs in New York City that actually produce something other than a fart in the wind on a website or in the windows of mannequins at Saks Fifth Avenue or in the ledgers of bankers and brokers, the parasitic middlemen?

Which brings me back to the collapsing markets, the product of fart-in-the-wind economics. I can foresee on 5th Avenue in Park Slope a beautiful resurgence of shuttered shops, rotted storefronts, the end of money’s welcome in its hypocrite hug, the end of surfeit, a return to normalcy. No more strawberries in January at the store on the corner – the strawberries were never meant to be eaten in winter anyway. Perhaps we might even see a return to the city of people who manufacture something other than air. I will be driven out first – because this screed is all air! So be it!

Christopher Ketcham writes for Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s, and many other magazines. You can contact him at cketcham99@mindspring.com

A Tragi-Comic Cavalcade of Chicanery

A Tragi-Comic Cavalcade of Chicanery
Reflections on 'the daily panorama of private and communal folly'
by Justin Raimondo

I have to laugh – otherwise, I'll never stop crying. In perusing the headlines this morning , trying to decide which fresh disaster to focus on, I'm reminded of what H. L. Mencken had to say about America in the third volume of his Prejudices:

"Here, more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows."

Speaking of "governmental extortions and chicaneries," the Center for Responsive Politics has calculated that our congressional solons, collectively, have invested some $196 million in the military-industrial complex, i.e. in companies doing significant business with the Defense Department.

Conflict of interest, anyone?

This actually goes way beyond being a mere conflict of interest: it is more of a titanic collision. .Yet we don't usually hear much about it, even when the talk turns to mention of the military industrial complex.. This is, perhaps, why the original phrase, as first written by Dwight Eisenhower's speechwriters, was military-industrial-congressional complex. Ike edited it down to military-industrial for fear of offending Congress.

Yes, it took a Republican to warn us of the impending danger, although he waited until his farewell address to do it. Taking this partisan theme a bit further, it seems the "antiwar" Democrats are in deeper than the Republicans. As one news report puts it:

"The study found that more Republicans than Democrats hold stock in defense companies, but that the Democrats who are invested had significantly more money at stake. In 2006, for example, Democrats held at least $3.7 million in military-related investments, compared to Republican investments of $577,500."

If you wondered why the Democrats keep voting to fund a war they ostensibly oppose – well, now you know at least part of the reason.

The biggest congressional war profiteers are Joe Lieberman (no surprise there!), John Kerry (he was against it before he looked at his bank balance), and House Republican whip Roy Blunt (no surprise there, either). According to the study, "forty-seven current members of Congress (or 9 percent of all members of the House and Senate) were invested in 2006 in companies that are primarily in the defense sector, for a total investment of between $4.2 million and $8 million. The average share price of these corporations today is nearly twice what it was in 2004.."


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Yes, the Republicans are raking in the cash, but at least we know where they stand, because they don't make any bones about it. On the other hand, the Democrats are even more heavily invested in the "defense" sector: they're raking in more cash, per politico, including in the form of campaign contributions, as well as votes from grateful defense workers who get to keep their jobs while others are laid off. When Bush comes to Congress, hand outstretched, the Dems make a pro forma attempt to attach "conditions," the President threatens a veto, they cave – and why shouldn't they? "Antiwar" Senator John Kerry – with $38,209,020 in defense-related investments – is laughing all the way to the bank.

This should be illegal. Instead, it is routine. Just another indication that we've slipped into a Bizarro World alternate universe, where laws and morals are inverted and the sacred is regularly profaned. Members of Congress are not even required to report their specific holdings: instead, we are informed, they must merely indicate "the general range of their holdings." So we don't know who owns how much of what. Which means members of Congress are no doubt enriching themselves and their friends, at taxpayers' expense, while the rest of us face foreclosure and the worst economic climate since the last Great Depression.

If you're Bear-Stearns, you're home-free. If you're you, or me – forget it, pal. Just shut up, bend over, and kiss your ass goodbye.

Yes, the worst rise to the top – at home and abroad – in times such as these: evil times, to be sure. Take the case of Leonid Rozhetskin, former chief executive of Russia's Norilsk Nickel, the world's largest producer of nickel, dubbed an international man of mystery by the Independent. He was always a bit of an enigma – and much more so now that he's disappeared.

Like many of his fellow émigrés, the 41-year-old Rozhetskin made a dubious fortune in post-Communist Russia, was indicted for fraud, and fled to London with his ill-gotten gains, where real estate prices were driven up to unheard of levels. Flashy, a jet-setter, and lately an aspiring movie producer, the Independent describes him as follows:

"Mr. Rozhetskin was a Russian. Or an American. Or both. He was in the law, or mining, or venture capital, or mobile phones, or all of them (his investments also include the free London business paper City AM). He was murdered, or kidnapped, or went into hiding. He lived – or lives – in Los Angeles, or London, or Moscow, or Riga. Or in a £40,000 semi-detached bungalow in East Ayrshire, at an address where it was reported last week that the name of Leonid Rozhetskin appeared on the electoral register."

Rozhetskin was last seen in Jumala, Latvia, where he owns a mansion. Two men left his domicile in the early morning of March 16, and were taken by taxi to XXL, a club of a certain sort in nearby Riga. The next morning, his house was in disarray, there was blood all over the place, and Senor Rozhetskin was nowhere to be seen.

As if by magic, overnight, Rozhetskin, the shady character, has quickly morphed into Rozhetskin the "Putin critic" – which apparently now means any common criminal indicted in a Russian court. The Russia-haters in the British media had a field day, with the Daily Mail taking the lead: "My son was killed by Kremlin agents says mother of missing oligarch."

Even oligarchs have mothers, and they cry real tears – and yet there is some question as to whether her beloved son is really dead or feigning his demise. As the Latvian police officer in charge of the investigation put it: "We are working on three possibilities: Mr Rozhetskin was killed, he has been abducted or it is all theatre." Perhaps the cop's peevish tone can be attributed to annoyance at Rozhetskin's fake Latvian passport, or just maybe there's more to it than that. Given the rather suspect series of events preceding Rozhetskin's disappearance – only on the second police visit to his house was anything untoward discovered – and that Flying Dutchman in the skies over Europe, something about the disappearance of this "Putin critic" seems just a bit odd, to say the least.

More – or less – than foul play seems to be a work here, because, you see, Rozhetskin's private jet departed from Riga hours after he disappeared. Originally bound for London, the flight plan was changed at the last minute. Reports of the plane's appearance throughout Europe are popping up, like sightings of a ghost ship, manned with a skeleton crew.

The key to the mystery man's "disappearance" is in the movements of his Challenger 604 jet: the Daily Mailreports "it has zigzagged around the world in the fortnight since the tycoon vanished." From Riga to Vienna, on to Geneva, and from there all the way to Newfoundland, then back to Geneva. The jet was last seen taking off from Stavanger, Norway, where two men with coats draped over their heads boarded, headed for points unknown …. a comic moment, capturing the absurdity of the charade, caught by an intrepid Daily Mail photographer. The same paper runs stories with headlines like "KGB plot fears as London oligarch vanishes and traces of blood are found in his mansion." A good deal of these stories are illustrated with photos of Rozhetskin's wife, a comely blonde model.

Interestingly, even after the discovery of the blood, the overturned furniture, and Rozhetskin's extended absence, the Telegraphreports: "However the US embassy in Latvia have indicated that they believe Mr. Rozhetskin, who emigrated to America as a teenage boy, was alive." The first news report in the English-speaking media, a Guardian story, reported the same belief.

That isn't stopping the faux-intelligence "specialists over at Stratfor from listing Rozhetskin on a roll call of the KGB's recent victims, including Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko. The far reaches of the neoconosphere proclaim: "Putin's Critics Used to Drop Dead – Now They Vanish."

Oh, the melodrama! Just what Mencken meant by "inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage."

Recording and commenting on "the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly," as Mencken put it, is journalism, but these days it seems more like the stuff of novels – bad novels, to be sure. The sort where the villains are a bit too villainous, and there are no heroes, only shades of evil, gray to pitch black.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

The new editor of Reason magazine, "warblogger" Matt Welch, continues his sustained assault on Ron Paul and the mainstream of the libertarian movement. Not content with having lost a lot of subscribers on account of his obsessive grudge, Welch's editorial – the first under his name in the print edition – adds fresh smears to his previous calumnies. He also extends his aim to include the late Murray Rothbard and his followers. I make mincemeat out of him here.
~ Justin Raimondo

The implication is clear - our "representatives" are doing NOTHING of the sort - they are abetting and aiding in the destruction of the United States of America as we know it.



Outfoxed (1-8) Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism


Speaking of chicanery...you MUST view the information on this website: Are YOU a Slave?

Are you angry yet? Well, feast your brain cells on this: The American Drug War