National security implications of AIG bailout...

This just in from Big Don;(explaining why we taxpayers now own an insurance company)

Editor's Note #1: The Bailout of AIG, the CIA, and Covert Operations

By now you no doubt have heard about the AIG bailout. If not, just check out this thread at the LATOC Forum. There is, however, something you almost certainly haven't heard about which is that the insurance business is heavily involved in covert operations. Some of you may be thinking "Huh? Insurance companeis and covert operations?! Wow, this is some real nutballery, even for LATOC". Well if so then just consider the following excerpts from an article entitled "The Secret (Insurance) Agent Men" by Los Angeles Times staff writer Mark Fritz, originally published on September 22nd, 2000.

(Security is Number One...)

Lord Make a Way, Lord Make a Way.....,

The pastor whose prayer Sarah Palin says helped her to become governor of Alaska founded his ministry with a witchhunt against a Kenyan woman who he accused of causing car accidents through demonic spells.

At a speech at the Wasilla Assembly of God on June 8 this year, Mrs Palin described how Thomas Muthee had laid his hands on her when he visited the church as a guest preacher in late 2005, prior to her successful gubernatorial bid.

In video footage of the speech, she is seen saying: “As I was mayor and Pastor Muthee was here and he was praying over me, and you know how he speaks and he’s so bold. And he was praying “Lord make a way, Lord make a way.”

“And I’m thinking, this guy’s really bold, he doesn’t even know what I’m going to do, he doesn’t know what my plans are. And he’s praying not “oh Lord if it be your will may she become governor,” no, he just prayed for it. He said “Lord make a way and let her do this next step. And that’s exactly what happened.”

- Full monty at timeonline blog - Palin linked electoral success to prayer of Kenyan witchhunter. Apparently, Bishop Muthee vetted Palin to approximately the same extent as the McCain campaign did.

McCain's campaign has sent at least one dozen researchers and lawyers to Alaska to pore over Palin's background, ready to respond to questions about her tenure as governor and mayor of Wasilla, a small town outside Anchorage. Griffin has been leading the team in Alaska, which includes operatives of the Republican National Committee.

Republicans are rebutting what they describe as smears against Palin. Last week, McCain's campaign formed a "truth squad," which includes current and former GOP politicians who agree to speak with reporters. Heading up the effort from Arlington, Va., are Mark Paoletta and O'Callaghan, both Republican lawyers, and Brian Jones, a former communications director for McCain.

Of course now the McCain campaign is working feverishly to rectify or suppress the continuous hemorrhaging of idiosyncratic details about Paling, her background, beliefs, family, politics, etc...,

Why Even Cheaper Oil Is Grim News

According to Businessweek - the sharp drop in crude prices is further fallout from the Wall Street crisis and evidence of economic weakness;

Any other day, Wall Street would have cheered a 5.4% drop in oil prices. That decline for crude futures, however, was accompanied by a nearly 5% tumble for the Standard & Poor's 500 index on Sept. 15. Stocks—as was made painfully clear to investors—are no longer trading inversely with oil prices.

Analysts say that investors, who had been pouring funds into commodities as an alternative to creaky stock markets, are now pulling out of the market. The withdrawal reflects a fear that the economic picture will remain bleak, causing reduced demand in both developed and developing countries. The price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil slid $5.47, to settle at $95.71 on the New York Mercantile Exchange (CME). It was the first settlement below $100 per barrel in six months. "A weak economy and financial turmoil mean lower demand; that means lower [oil] prices," says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance and energy markets at the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston.

If lower oil prices are here to stay, will consumers return to old patterns of consuming more petroleum products? Many analysts think not. "The demand destruction is irreversible," says Schork. "It's a situation of once bitten, twice shy. Prices may be down for now, but consumers know they could eventually move high again."

Corporations

Click the image to view and hear the presentation.

Ignition, in T-Minus......,

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan's army said Tuesday that its forces have orders to open fire if U.S. troops launch another raid across the Afghan border, raising the stakes in a dispute over how to tackle militant havens in Pakistan's unruly border zone.

Pakistan's government has faced rising popular anger over a Sept. 3 ground attack by U.S. commandos into South Waziristan, a base for Taliban militants killing ever more U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Pakistan says about 15 people were killed, all of them civilians.

The new firing orders were disclosed by Pakistani army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.

Abbas said Pakistani field commanders have previously been tolerant about international forces crossing a short way into Pakistan because of the ill-defined and contested nature of the mountainous frontier.

"But after the (Sept. 3) incident, the orders are clear," Abbas said. "In case it happens again in this form, that there is a very significant detection, which is very definite, no ambiguity, across the border, on ground or in the air: open fire."

The Fundamentals of Our Economy are at Risk

There IS a Risk of a Bank Run...,

Thank goodness for browser histories. Otherwise this phenomenal link and video would have been lost in the slipstream. I could not find it by searching this afternoon. Roubini calls this the perfect storm of the century. We have not seen anything like this since the Great Depression. In spite of doing everything under the sun, the situation is not getting any better.

Americans are justified to be worried, says Nouriel Roubini, of NYU's Stern School and RGE Monitor, who notes there is already a "slow-motion run on retail banks" occurring nationwide.

That "run" could accelerate as people realize the FDIC fund has about $50 billion to "insure" about $1 trillion in assets at the nation's financial institutions, says Roubini. "They're going to run out of money" unless Congress acts soon to recapitalize the FDIC.

In addition, the recent spike in number of banks on the FDIC's "troubled list" is only through June, meaning even that inflated number understates the problem.

The intent here isn't to add to people's anxieties, but Roubini is one of the few market watchers to correctly predict the severity of this ongoing credit crisis. If nothing else, he says people with accounts exceeding $100,000 in value should spread their money - and the risk - among different firms.

There is no systemic approach to dealing with this problem. Plugging holes one after another and no end in sight.

Foreign Ownership of U.S. Debt?

A few months ago, I asked the semi-rhetorical question, "Will China be Mad?" if the U.S. financial crisis costs them a trillion dollars or so. Subsequently, I wondered if it really even matters. In any event, Nouriel Roubini discussed it with brutal candor yesterday in yet another Tech Ticker piece - Big Risk: Surging Debt Makes U.S. More Dependent on China, Russia, Gulf States.

The big risk is that foreign holders of Treasuries will no longer accept low interest rates to help fund U.S. debt spending, says Roubini, noting countries like China, Russia and oil-producing nations in the Middle East have becoming increasingly important holders of Treasuries. Should they demand higher rates to hold U.S. debt or, worse, dump their holdings, it could have profound ramifications on the U.S. economy and the value of the dollar.Roubini further notes the Federal Reserve has put its balance sheet -- and independence -- at risk via its intimate involvement in thus-far failed attempts to stem the crisis.

It's tempting to dismiss the notion of a "run" on the U.S. government as unthinkable and some bears have been warning for years, even decades, about such a worst-case scenario. But after the events of this weekend, much less the past six months, it's clear that (almost) anything is possible and no scenario too "outrageous" to seriously contemplate.

The demise of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Bear Stearns this year has investors contemplating the long-term outlook for other once-venerable institutions, including Dow members Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America. But there's an even bigger financial institution with greater debt and an increasing level of bad loans on its books: The U.S. government.

Not Very Interesting....,

It is now thought that as many as 1,000 people have died so far in Haiti, with one million made homeless out of a population of 8.7 million. Rescue groups were last week reported to be unable to reach many villages across the southern region or to Gonaives, Haiti's third-largest city, which was cut off with 300,000 homeless residents. The city's population has been stranded for days without food or drinking water.

Recent performance fits as part of a consistent bias in media reporting. In the latest NACLA Report on the Americas, Dan Beeton of the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research interviewed several US journalists who have reported from Haiti. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one described a common view among editors:

"Everyone knows the place [Haiti] is a mess, so what are you going to tell me that's new? What goes on there does not affect people in the US." (Beeton, 'Bad News From Haiti: U.S. Press Misses the Story,' September/October 2008, NACLA. See the full article here:)

This indifference has led to an appalling level of non-reporting, not just of the latest floods, but also of the killing of unarmed civilians by United Nations forces (Minustah), the Haitian National Police, and death squads.

Full Monty at MediaLens - "NOT VERY INTERESTING" - Haiti, New Orleans And Media Hypocrisy

The Fundamentals of the Economy are Strong

Even Karl Rove is Scared of Djinnis in Bottles....,

Bush's brain has begun offering unsolicited advice to the Obama campaign on how to deal with Gov. Paling;

In Denver two weeks ago, Mr. Obama said, "If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from." That's what he's trying to do, only the object of his painting is Sarah Palin, not John McCain.

In Mrs. Palin, Mr. Obama faces a political phenomenon who has altered the election's dynamics. Americans have rarely seen someone who immediately connects with large numbers of voters at such a visceral level.

In large measure, like Bill O'Reilly, Rove is pressed to this not only because he's on Rupert Murdoch's payroll, but also because Murdoch, Ailes, and others understand just how pernicious and uncontrollable the populist daemon that Paling embodies could turn out to be. In my time as an observer of political affairs, this is an unprecedented closing of establishment ranks around the objective of maintaining governance continuity in the face of a very serious threat.

Frank Rich goes more directly and explicitly (hat tip to Nanakwame) to the fascist threat represented by Gov. Paling.

WITH all due deference to lipstick, let’s advance the story. A week ago the question was: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? The question today: What kind of president would Sarah Palin be?

It’s an urgent matter, because if we’ve learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it’s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America’s chief executive. This unmentionable truth, more than race, is now the real elephant in the room of this election.

No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for “victory,” whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.

The ambitious Palin and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too. You can almost see them smacking their lips in anticipation, whether they’re wearing lipstick or not.

This was made clear in the most chilling passage of Palin’s acceptance speech. Aligning herself with “a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,” she read a quote from an unidentified writer who, she claimed, had praised Truman: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” Then Palin added a snide observation of her own: Such small-town Americans, she said, “run our factories” and “fight our wars” and are “always proud” of their country. As opposed to those lazy, shiftless, unproud Americans — she didn’t have to name names — who are none of the above.

There were several creepy subtexts at work here. The first was the choice of Truman. Most 20th-century vice presidents and presidents in both parties hailed from small towns, but she just happened to alight on a Democrat who ascended to the presidency when an ailing president died in office. Just as striking was the unnamed writer she quoted. He was identified by Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal as the now largely forgotten but once powerful right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler.

Palin, who lies with ease about her own record, misrepresented Pegler’s too. He decreed America was “done for” after Truman won a full term in 1948. For his part, Truman regarded the columnist as a “guttersnipe,” and with good reason. Pegler was a rabid Joe McCarthyite who loathed F.D.R. and Ike and tirelessly advanced the theory that American Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (“geese,” he called them) were all likely Communists.

Surely Palin knows no more about Pegler than she does about the Bush doctrine. But the people around her do, and they will be shaping a Palin presidency. That they would inject not just Pegler’s words but spirit into their candidate’s speech shows where they’re coming from. Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, said that the Palin-sparked convention created “a whole new Republican Party,” but what it actually did was exhume an old one from its crypt.

The specifics have changed in our new century, but the vitriolic animus of right-wing populism preached by Pegler and McCarthy and revived by the 1990s culture wars remains the same. The game is always to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay “cosmopolitan” urbanites (as the sometime cross-dresser Rudy Giuliani has it) who threaten to take away everything that small-town folk hold dear.

The racial component to this brand of politics was undisguised in St. Paul. Americans saw a virtually all-white audience yuk it up when Giuliani ridiculed Barack Obama’s “only in America” success as an affirmative-action fairy tale — and when he and Palin mocked Obama’s history as a community organizer in Chicago. Neither party has had so few black delegates (1.5 percent) in the 40 years since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies started keeping a record.

But race is just one manifestation of the emotion that defined the Palin rollout. That dominant emotion is fear — an abject fear of change. Fear of a demographical revolution that will put whites in the American minority by 2042. Fear of the technological revolution and globalization that have gutted those small towns and factories Palin apotheosized.

Thanks again to Nana for bringing the Rich article up in the comments. That was EXACTLY the frosting I was looking for as I puttered about the kitchen this morning trying to assemble a subrealist cake.

Explaining the Monoculture?

In which Jonathan Haidt examines what makes people vote Republican?

Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.

But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.

What's Happening in Bolivia and Venezuela?

The MSM informed me that Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president and staunch Morales ally, ordered the US ambassadors expelled from their countries last week, but I didn't hear any explanation of why this had happened. Did you? Al Jazeera summarizes;

Some provinces oppose Morales' push to empower the indigenous majority [AFP] Morales has offered no detailed evidence of Philip Goldberg's alleged conspiracy with the opposition, but has accused Goldberg of egging on anti-Morales forces through meetings with governors who have publicly called for the president to be removed.

But Goldberg denied the charge and called the decision to expel him a big mistake on Sunday in his first public comments on the matter.

"I would like to say that all the accusations made against me, against the embassy and against my nation are completely false and unjustified," he told reporters in La Paz as he prepared to leave.

The gravest challenge to Morales' nearly three years as Bolivia's first indigenous president stems from his struggle with the four eastern lowland provinces where the country's natural gas riches are concentrated and where his government has in effect lost control.

The provinces are seeking greater autonomy from Morales' leftist government and are insisting he cancel a December 7 referendum on a new constitution that would help him centralise power, run for a second consecutive term and transfer fallow terrain to landless peasants.

Morales says the new charter is needed to empower Bolivia's indigenous majority.

and venezuelanalysis.com elaborates in-depth - Magisterial Counter-Attack of the new Latin-American Political Class in Venezuela and Bolivia

End-Time Soldiers in God's Army

As I discuss in some detail in my soon-to-be-released book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, one of the most significant transformations of American domestic politics over the past three decades since the early 1970’s, when George H.W. Bush was head of the CIA, has been the deliberate manipulation of significant segments of the population, most of them undoubtedly sincere believing people, around the ideology of ‘born-again’ evangelical Christian Fundamentalism to create something known as the Christian Right. Within the broad spectrum of fundamentalist denominations there are some currents which are particularly alarming. Sarah Palin comes out of such a milieu.

The phenomenon of the rapid spread within the United States since the 1980’s of evangelical Pentecostalism is a political phenomenon which has become so influential that the two elections of George W. Bush as well as countless races for Senate or Congress often depend on the backing or lack of it from the organized Religious Right.

The spawning of some Christian Right sects also creates an ideology to drive the shock troops willing to literally ‘die for Christ’ in places such as Iraq or Afghanistan, Iran or elsewhere that the Pentagon needs their services. That ideology has been used to build a fanatical activist base within the Republican Party which backs a right-wing domestic agenda and a military foreign policy that sees Islam or other suitable opponents of the US power elite as Satanism incarnate. How does Sarah Palin fit into this?

William Engdahl discusses Christian Fundamentalism in the Republican Party and Sarah Palin’s links to the Christian Right

Tyranny on Display at the Republican Convention

According to Chris Hedges at TruthDig.com;

St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where, as one protester told me by phone, “people have been pepper-gassed, thrown on the ground by police who had drawn their weapons, had their documents seized and their tattoos photographed before being taken away to jail.” It is a future where illegal house raids are carried out. It is a future where vans containing heavily armed paramilitary units circle and film protesters. It is a future where, as the protester said, “people have been pulled from cars because their license plates were on a database and handcuffed, thrown in the back of a squad car and then watched as their vehicles were ransacked and their personal possessions from computers to literature seized.” It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism.

The rise of the corporate state means the rise of the surveillance state. The Janus-like face of America swings from packaged and canned spectacles, from nationalist slogans, from seas of flags and Christian crosses, from professions of faith and patriotism, to widespread surveillance, illegal mass detentions, informants, provocateurs and crude acts of repression and violence. We barrel toward a world filled with stupendous lies and blood.

Lehman and the Collapse of the Shadow Banking System

It is now clear that we are again – as we were in mid- March at the time of the Bear Stearns collapse – an epsilon away from a generalized run on most of the shadow banking system, especially the other major independent broker dealers (Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs). If Lehman does not find a buyer over the weekend and the counterparties of Lehman withdraw their credit lines on Monday (as they all will in the absence of a deal) you will have not only a collapse of Lehman but also the beginning of a run on the other independent broker dealers (Merrill Lynch first but also in sequence Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and possibly even those broker dealers that are part of a larger commercial bank, I.e. JP Morgan and Citigroup). Then this run would lead to a massive systemic meltdown of the financial system. That is the reason why the Fed has convened in emergency meetings the heads of all major Wall Street firms on Friday and again today to convince them not to pull the plug on Lehman and maintain their exposure to this distressed broker dealer.

Nouriel Roubini - let me elaborate in much detail on these issues…

Executive Experience

This morning's NYTimes does a big story on Gov. Paling - Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes;

Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.

But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.

Paling is a reformer. Not a typical Washington spend, corrupt, feather your own nest politician. Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal. You can take THAT to the bank.....,

McCain: Palin Is Top Energy Expert In US, Understands Russia

Preacher's Kid Syndrome

It is a challenge to raise a family in the public eye. Sometimes our kids demonstrate negative behavior, and it brings a form of shame to our ministry. How we respond makes all the difference in the world—and in what we are modeling for the child-raising parents of our congregations.

Our children require a great deal of love and attention from us, and often we feel the demands of church and ministry are overwhelming.

Through observations made in over 22 years of children’s ministry, my wife and I have found that when young children act up in public, it is usually because they are experiencing a lack of love and attention in the home. PKs and their parents have experienced these problems since Bible times. Read between the lines when studying the accounts of Absalom and David (2 Samuel 18:33), or Hophni and Phinehas and their dad, Eli the priest (1 Samuel 2:12–34). Think about the lack of child raising that brought about such tragedies. We have all seen the fallout in our day: The pastor whose grown daughter calls every weekend in a drunken stupor; the district official who, unable to sleep, goes out to a lonely field late at night and cries out to God for the life of his drug-dealing child.

There can be no doubt—our children require a great deal of love and attention from us, and often we feel the demands of church and ministry are overwhelming. Some pastoral families have dual-working parents; some pastors’ wives are also employed by the church. Church committees, ministry programs, and church office work take her time. How can we strike the balance between home and church that we advocate from our pulpits?

Perhaps taking a different approach will help. Most of us would agree that our children are on loan to us by God. They are not our possessions; we do not own them. We are to invest in them, and then disburse them into the kingdom of God. Like Jesus’ parable of the profitable and unprofitable servants, we are to invest that which He has entrusted to us for the growth and blessing of the Kingdom.

Our children are searching for love and attention. This means spending time with our children. The investment of time with our children pays rich and long-lasting dividends. When we are convinced that the investment of time in our children will pay these dividends—peace, joy, harmony, and clarity—we will take the steps necessary to achieve it.

Robb Dunham is an Assemblies of God family and children’s evangelist with a nationwide ministry called SuperKidz 4 Christ. He lives in Denver, Colorado. You can read more on this subject at the Assemblies of God USA Enrichment Journal.

Oxycontin Addiction?

The National Enquirer knows no bounds and shows no restraint in going after Gov. Paling's children;

The ENQUIRER has learned exclusively that Sarah's oldest son, Track, was addicted to the power drug OxyContin for nearly the past two years, snorting it, eating it, smoking it and even injecting it. And as Track, 19, heads to Iraq as part of the U.S. armed forces, Sarah and her husband Todd were powerless to stop his wild antics, detailed in the new issue of The ENQUIRER, which goes on sale today.

THE ENQUIRER also has exclusive details about Track's use of other drugs, including cocaine, and his involvement in a notorious local vandalism incident.

“I’ve partied with him (Track) for years,” a source disclosed. “I’ve seen him snort cocaine, snort and smoke OxyContin, drink booze and smoke weed.”

The source also divulged the girls would do anything for Track and he’d use his local celebrity status to manipulate other guys “to get them to steal things he wanted.”

“He finally did what a lot of troubled kids here do,” the source divulged. “You join the military.”

And as Gov. Palin has billed the state of Alaska for various expenses related to her children, as reported by The Washington Post, The ENQUIRER's investigation reveals that she was so incensed by 17-year-old Bristol's pregnancy that she banished her daughter from the house.

Another family friend revealed pre-prego Bristol was as much of a hard partier as Track was.

“Bristol was a huge stoner and drinker. I’ve seen her smoke pot and get drunk and make out with so many guys. All the guys would brag that the just made out with Bristol.”

When will this ferocious lambasting end? Is there no basic decency remaining in the zero-sum theatrics of American politics? What next, indecent scrutiny and reckless eyeballing of John McCain's physical limitations?