when extraordinary men undertake extraordinary feats, there's intense emotion no matter what the result. And when ordinary men who have settled for an ordinary life with an ordinary job, an overweight wife, etc, all their feeble brains can do is hurl baseless insults.

TRADE FUCKING ADRIAN PETERSEN AT HALFTIME

all the hype about him is bullshit... Petersen is shit! keep Chester Taylor and trade this fumbling bumbling motherfuckin fool at halftime get rid of him

and where the fuck is big money fucking Jared Allen?

prancing around in his jorts with skinny chicken legs not sacking quarterbacks!!!!!!!!!!

saints to crush vikings and help heal all the crying eyes at fox sports over katrina

I could fuckin puke listening to all these asshats wimper about Katrina and the resilience of the city of new Orleans and a football match up.

fuck me runnin what if they happen to fuckin lose this upcoming rigged contest? does that mean that they deserved to win because of Katrina and got screwed by the gods? I say its NFL rigged to allow the bullshit story line as a bullshit diversion ...............

carbon billionaires and their useful idiot allies on the Left — are running the biggest fraud in human history.

Go Vikings, run up the score! 34-3 asswhoppin!

Its in our fight song so fuck off all you dallas ballsack lickin bitches....and Troy Aikman



Skol Vikings, let's win this game, Skol Vikings, honor your name, Go get that first down, Then get a touchdown. Rock 'em . . . Sock 'em Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Go Vikings, run up the score, You'll hear us yell for more. . . V-I-K-I-N-G-S Skol, Vikings, let's go!

Shut up Troy Aikman, Brett!!!!

Bilderbergs of the world unite!

Strategic Culture Foundation, January 15, 2010

"In Post-War Iraq, Use Military Forces to Secure Vital U.S. Interests, Not for Nation-Building" — The Heritage Foundation

And just in case you still haven’t got the point, the same Heritage Foundation document, dated 25 September, 2002 went on to tell us,

"Protect Iraq’s energy infrastructure against internal sabotage or foreign attack to return Iraq to global energy markets and ensure that U.S. and world energy markets have access to its resources." [1]

Anything that says otherwise in the corporate or state press is just propaganda and/or lies. Period.

Oiling the cogs of capitalism

The turning point when oil took centre stage came significantly as the 20th century began with the world’s most powerful imperial navies, the German and British switching from burning coal to burning oil. From that point on the destinies of Persia and the Arab world irrevocably became central to Western imperial ambitions, so much so that to this day we are living (and dying) with the results, most notably the Palestinians and the Iraqis, not to mention two World Wars where oil was central for all the combatants, not only to fight with but to control.

"Rarely discussed, however, is the fact that the strategic geopolitical objectives of Britain, well before 1914, included not merely the crushing of its greatest industrial rival, Germany, but, through the conquest of war, the securing of unchallenged British control over the precious resource which, by 1919, had proved itself as the strategic raw material of future economic development—petroleum." — 'A Century of War’, F William Engdahl, p.38.[2]

Oil extended the range of imperial navies to encompass the globe without the need to refuel, enabling Britain’s navy to take complete control of the world’s oceans and trade routes. One of WWI’s objectives was to deny Germany access to the newly discovered oil fields in what is now Iran. This meant controlling access to the Middle East where British control of the Suez Canal ('stolen’ from the French) eventually determined the destiny of the people of Palestine and indeed the entire Middle East.

Of course oil is only one component but without it nothing else functions, least of all a mechanized military. No oil, no anything the modern world depends on.

'The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon’s aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world. At the time, the U.S. Navy had 285 combat and support ships and around 4,000 operational aircraft. The U.S. Army had 28,000 armored vehicles, 140,000 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles, more than 4,000 combat helicopters, several hundred fixed-wing aircraft and 187,493 fleet vehicles. Except for 80 nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which spread radioactive pollution, all their other vehicles run on oil.’ [3]

The corporate media would have you believe that anyone who cries 'Oil!’ when Iraq comes up is some kind of nut, akin to alien abductees, a 'conspiracist’ no less.

In 2003 when the USUK invaded Iraq I was struck by the desperate pleas in the corporate press that the invasion had nothing to do with oil, accusing those who asserted that oil had everything to do with the invasion were nutty conspiracists living no doubt in Area 51.

"Conspiracy theories abound…. Others claim it was inspired by oil…. [This] theor[y] [is] largely nonsense." — The Independent, April 16, 2003.

By contrast, the oil companies were not backward in coming forward concerning the central role of oil in the invasion of Iraq, echoing what the suits over at the Heritage Foundation were saying:

"I would say that especially the U.S. oil companies…look forward to the idea that Iraq will be open for business [after the overthrow of Saddam]," says an executive from one of the world’s largest oil companies."

"What they [the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration] have in mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies…. We take over Iraq, install our regime, produce oil at the maximum rate and tell Saudi Arabia to go to hell." James E. Akins, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

"It’s probably going to spell the end of OPEC." Shoshana Bryen, director of special projects for JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs), "After the fall of Iraq and the privatisation of its oil, that is."

"American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," Ahmed Chalabi in the Washington Post.

In "The Future of a Post-Saddam Iraq: A Blueprint for American Involvement," a series of Heritage Foundation documents, sets out a plan for the privatisation of Iraq’s oil and indeed the privatisation of its entire economy. [4]

Is it a conspiracy? Well it depends what you mean by the word. The dictionary definitions are as follows:

1. the act of conspiring.

2. an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons;

3. a combination of persons for a secret, unlawful, or evil purpose.

4. Law. an agreement by two or more persons to commit a crime, fraud, or other wrongful act.

5. any concurrence in action; combination in bringing about a given result.

I would have thought that collectively all fit the description of the invasion of Iraq, after all Bush and Blair conspired to deceive the world by fabricating evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in order to illegally invade the country. They conspired (with others) to destroy a country and steal its resources, ergo: a conspiracy.

That said, there are those who go much, much further, asserting that there is a global conspiracy extending back at least one hundred years and consisting of the political classes of the US and the UK who along with powerful banking and energy conglomerates have sought to control the planet, its resources, markets and labour. But is it a conspiracy or merely imperialism doing what it does best; plunder, murder and colonize? In other words, do we need a conspiracy to explain events? And what if it is a global conspiracy extending back well over a century? It doesn’t change anything, we are still confronted with the same forces.

The proper question to ask is: Why does the corporate/state media insist on using the word conspiracy to pour derision on anyone who questions the prevailing orthodoxy? The answer is immediately obvious: the word conspiracy has been distorted to mean not its dictionary definition but any and all who challenge the reasons supplied by our political masters as to why things happen.

History is littered with all manner of state and/or corporate conspiracies from the Reichstag Fire to the Tonkin Gulf provocation, to the CIA/ITT’s overthrow of Allende in Chile, to Iraq’s non-existent WMD, hence the need to decouple oil and Iraq/Iran/Afghanistan just in case people come to the right conclusions as to why things happen.

Thus language is mutilated to serve the objectives of the corporate class and it’s aided by the real conspiracy nuts who see everything as a conspiracy, sometimes stretching back centuries and involving secret cabals of one kind or another. Connecting the left to this crew serves to degrade our argument and surely this is the objective.

There is no doubt that the international criminal class liase, plot and plan, this is what the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is all about as is Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs), the UK equivalent and both organizations were setup in the opening decades of the 20th century as the 'Anglo-Saxon Alliance’ firmed up. A roll call of CFR members illustrates the fact that major Western governments are all effectively servants of Big Capital.

Likewise with the Bilderberg group, composed of international 'captains of industry’ and key policy makers of the political classes of the leading capitalist states. But is it a conspiracy? On one level no, after all, it’s quite legitimate for the ruling classes to plan and organize, this is why Washington DC is bursting at the seams with all manner of 'Foundations’ and 'Think Tanks’. Since the end of WWII billions of dollars of public and private finance has poured into these organizations. Their objective? To spread the 'free market’ and to counter all opposition by fair means or foul.

"…the most powerful men in the world met for the first time" in Oosterbeek, Netherlands [over fifty years ago], "debated the future of the world," and decided to meet annually in secret. They called themselves the Bilderberg Group with a membership representing a who's who of world power elites, mostly from America, Canada, and Western Europe with familiar names like David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Lloyd Blankfein, George Soros, Donald Rumsfeld, Rupert Murdoch, other heads of state, influential senators, congressmen and parliamentarians, Pentagon and NATO brass, members of European royalty, selected media figures, and invited others - some quietly by some accounts like Barack Obama and many of his top officials." — 'The True Story of the Bilderberg Group’ By Daniel Estulin.[5]

It is clear that modern capitalism has evolved over several overlapping generations with all the appearance of a conspiracy in the broadest sense and of the most sophisticated kind, employing a vast army of operatives that include key elements of the media, academia, business and policymakers both within and outside government. A 'conspiracy’ to maintain capitalism as the only permissible form of society, how could it be otherwise? There is simply too much at stake and for proof of this we need only look at how this powerful international business/government/media elite conspired to kill COP15 regardless of the consequences.

Family, education and business ties—with the state as 'mediator’—have created what is now an international network that connects the ruling classes of the most powerful capitalist states, that’s why they have a Bilderberg Group, it’s where business heads, the political class, selected media and academics can meet and formulate strategies and tactics, necessary in a world where communications are now virtually instantaneous. It won’t do to have governments making statements that are out of line with the 'consensus’, as happens from time to time and illusion briefly shattered.

In a world where the dominant economic forces are a couple of hundred or so major corporations, corporations that de facto, ensure that their respective governments enact policies favourable to their survival and increasing prosperity for the major shareholders, the logical thing to do is to combine over issues that affect them all. I would be extremely surprised if the Bilderberg Group or something like it, didn’t exist.

And the issues are plain to see: Access to and control/ownership of resources; access to cheap labour; free movement of capital; and last but not least, neutralizing challenges to the rule of capital wherever they appear.

Arrayed against us, the people, is a vast apparatus of control and manipulation that embraces governmental, 'non’-governmental, private foundations, the media, state and corporate, 'entertainment’ in all it’s wondrous forms, think tanks, institutes, foundations, academia, formal and informal bodies, both national and transnational, associations, ngos and 'ngos’, charities and 'charities’, all of which are heavily subsidized by the state and / or corporations. Who needs 'The Illuminati’ when we have all this arrayed against us?

Notes

1. See 'In Post-War Iraq, Use Military Forces to Secure Vital U.S. Interests, Not for Nation-Building’ by Baker Spring and Jack Spencer, Backgrounder #1589, September 25, 2002.

"The Administration should make it clear that a U.S. military presence in post-war Iraq will be deployed to secure vital U.S. interests, not as an exercise in so-called nation-building—the Clinton Administration’s open-ended policy of sending American troops into troubled regions where vital U.S. security interests were not directly threatened."

2. I think the best (and most succinct) analysis of this period has been made by F. William Engdahl in his 'A Century of War’ Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order’, see my review of it here. Buy the book here at Pluto Books.

3. See 'Pentagon’s Role in Global Catastrophe: Add Climate Havoc to War Crimes’ By Sara Flounders for data on the gigantic oil appetite of the US Military.

And here’s the source, 'US military oil pains’ by Sohbet Karbuz, Energy Bulletin, 17 February, 2007. It should be noted that the figures used in the article are over two years old and far from complete, as they only include oil bought directly by the DoD. Whatever the figure it’s staggering, probably as high as $30 billion annually with no sign of any kind of reduction on the horizon, at least according to the DoD:

""In fiscal 2005, DESC will buy about 128 million barrels of fuel at a cost of $8.5 billion, and Jet fuel constitutes nearly 70% of DoD’s petroleum product purchases."

"For some, this is not enough though. "Because DOD’s consumption of oil represents the highest priority of all uses, there will be no fundamental limits to DOD’s fuel supply for many, many decades."" — 'United States Department of Defense … or Empire of Defense?’ By Sohbet Karbuz, 6 February, 2006

4. http://www.heritage.org/Research/MiddleEast/bg1632.cfm, http://www.heritage.org/Research/MiddleEast/bg1633.cfm

5. See 'The True Story of the Bilderberg Group and What They May Be Planning Now.’ A Review of Daniel Estulin's book by Stephen Lendman

:: Article nr. 62205 sent on 15-jan-2010 19:10 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=62205

Scott Ritter = Dumbass

I BROKE THE DAM

Robert Anton Wilson

Wilson: I regard myself and my friends as the power elite. That way I don't have to worry if someone else is manipulating me. They're trying, but we're outsmarting them every step of the way. Most people want to believe somebody else is in charge. Then they don't have to take responsibility. Then they have the supreme pleasure of perpetually complaining that somebody else is in charge, and it would be better if only they were in charge. As long as I think I'm in charge, I've got nothing to complain about. I've got to take the responsibility for all of it. How can I go on? (laughs) Well, some of us have more balls than others. I'm sixty years old. In any traditional society I would have been hanged long ago.

Wilson: And I won't worry about the ozone layer. It'll fix itself, or we'll learn how to fix it. I'm not going to ruin the rest of what I've got left

what happened to the ozone hole that was going to kill us all in our sleep?

I have not been on the juice!

Thought i would just clear the air here as People have been wondering and whispering behind my back about my alleged Roid use in concocting this blog.

It seems some folks think increased content means i must be on the juice as i never produced before.

well i never produced ever, i steal content as the whim hits me. not juice up and then start producing original content on my own.

so now that's cleared up lets get down to biddness, still unemployed and need a fookun job or a shitpile of donations!?

The Military-Industrial Compex is Ruining the Economy

The Military-Industrial Compex is Ruining the Economy

Washington's blog

January 10, 2010 Everyone knows that the too big to fails and their dishonest and footsy-playing regulators and politicians are largely responsible for trashing the economy. But the military-industrial complex shares much of the blame. Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says that the Iraq war will cost $3-5 trillion dollars. Sure, experts say that the Iraq war has increased the threat of terrorism. See this, this, this, this, this, this and this. And we launched the Iraq war based on the false linkage of Saddam and 9/11, and knowingly false claims that Saddam had WMDs. And top British officials, former CIA director George Tenet, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and many others say that the Iraq war was planned before 9/11. But this essay is about dollars and cents. America is also spending a pretty penny in Afghanistan. The U.S. admits there are only a small handful of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. As ABC notes: U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country. With 100,000 troops in Afghanistan at an estimated yearly cost of $30 billion, it means that for every one al Qaeda fighter, the U.S. will commit 1,000 troops and $300 million a year. Sure, the government apparently planned the Afghanistan war before 9/11 (see this and this). And the Taliban offered to turn over Bin Laden (see this and this). And we could have easily killed Bin Laden in 2001 and again in 2007, but chose not to, even though that would have saved the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars in costs in prosecuting the Afghanistan war. But this essay is about dollars and cents. Increasing the Debt Burden of a Nation Sinking In Debt All of the spending on unnecessary wars adds up. The U.S. is adding trillions to its debt burden to finance its multiple wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc. Two top American economists - Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff - show that the more indebted a country is, with a government debt/GDP ratio of 0.9, and external debt/GDP of 0.6 being critical thresholds, the more GDP growth drops materially. Specifically, Reinhart and Rogoff write: The relationship between government debt and real GDP growth is weak for debt/GDP ratios below a threshold of 90 percent of GDP. Above 90 percent, median growth rates fall by one percent, and average growth falls considerably more. We find that the threshold for public debt is similar in advanced and emerging economies... Indeed, it should be obvious to anyone who looks at the issue that deficits do matter. A PhD economist told me: War always causes recession. Well, if it is a very short war, then it may stimulate the economy in the short-run. But if there is not a quick victory and it drags on, then wars always put the nation waging war into a recession and hurt its economy. You know about America's unemployment problem. You may have even heard that the U.S. may very well have suffered a permanent destruction of jobs. But did you know that the defense employment sector is booming? As I pointed out in August, public sector spending - and mainly defense spending - has accounted for virtually all of the new job creation in the past 10 years: The U.S. has largely been financing job creation for ten years. Specifically, as the chief economist for BusinessWeek, Michael Mandel, points out, public spending has accounted for virtually all new job creation in the past 1o years: Private sector job growth was almost non-existent over the past ten years. Take a look at this horrifying chart: Between May 1999 and May 2009, employment in the private sector sector only rose by 1.1%, by far the lowest 10-year increase in the post-depression period. It’s impossible to overstate how bad this is. Basically speaking, the private sector job machine has almost completely stalled over the past ten years. Take a look at this chart: Over the past 10 years, the private sector has generated roughly 1.1 million additional jobs, or about 100K per year. The public sector created about 2.4 million jobs. But even that gives the private sector too much credit. Remember that the private sector includes health care, social assistance, and education, all areas which receive a lot of government support. *** Most of the industries which had positive job growth over the past ten years were in the HealthEdGov sector. In fact, financial job growth was nearly nonexistent once we take out the health insurers. Let me finish with a final chart. Without a decade of growing government support from rising health and education spending and soaring budget deficits, the labor market would have been flat on its back. [120] Raw Story argues that the U.S. is building a largely military economy: The use of the military-industrial complex as a quick, if dubious, way of jump-starting the economy is nothing new, but what is amazing is the divergence between the military economy and the civilian economy, as shown by this New York Times chart. In the past nine years, non-industrial production in the US has declined by some 19 percent. It took about four years for manufacturing to return to levels seen before the 2001 recession -- and all those gains were wiped out in the current recession. By contrast, military manufacturing is now 123 percent greater than it was in 2000 -- it has more than doubled while the rest of the manufacturing sector has been shrinking... It's important to note the trajectory -- the military economy is nearly three times as large, proportionally to the rest of the economy, as it was at the beginning of the Bush administration. And it is the only manufacturing sector showing any growth. Extrapolate that trend, and what do you get? The change in leadership in Washington does not appear to be abating that trend...[121] So most of the job creation has been by the public sector. But because the job creation has been financed with loans from China and private banks, trillions in unnecessary interest charges have been incurred by the U.S. So we're running up our debt (which will eventually decrease economic growth), but the only jobs we're creating are military and other public sector jobs. PhD economist Dean Baker points out that America's massive military spending on unnecessary and unpopular wars lowers economic growth and increases unemployment: Defense spending means that the government is pulling away resources from the uses determined by the market and instead using them to buy weapons and supplies and to pay for soldiers and other military personnel. In standard economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth and costing jobs. A few years ago, the Center for Economic and Policy Research commissioned Global Insight, one of the leading economic modeling firms, to project the impact of a sustained increase in defense spending equal to 1.0 percentage point of GDP. This was roughly equal to the cost of the Iraq War. Global Insight’s model projected that after 20 years the economy would be about 0.6 percentage points smaller as a result of the additional defense spending. Slower growth would imply a loss of almost 700,000 jobs compared to a situation in which defense spending had not been increased. Construction and manufacturing were especially big job losers in the projections, losing 210,000 and 90,000 jobs, respectively. The scenario we asked Global Insight [recognized as the most consistently accurate forecasting company in the world] to model turned out to have vastly underestimated the increase in defense spending associated with current policy. In the most recent quarter, defense spending was equal to 5.6 percent of GDP. By comparison, before the September 11th attacks, the Congressional Budget Office projected that defense spending in 2009 would be equal to just 2.4 percent of GDP. Our post-September 11th build-up was equal to 3.2 percentage points of GDP compared to the pre-attack baseline. This means that the Global Insight projections of job loss are far too low... The projected job loss from this increase in defense spending would be close to 2 million. In other words, the standard economic models that project job loss from efforts to stem global warming also project that the increase in defense spending since 2000 will cost the economy close to 2 million jobs in the long run. The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst has also shown that non-military spending creates more jobs than military spending. So we're running up our debt - which will eventually decrease economic growth - and creating many fewer jobs than if we spent the money on non-military purposes. But the War on Terror is Urgent for Our National Security, Isn't It? For those who still think that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are necessary to fight terrorism, remember that a leading advisor to the U.S. military - the very hawkish and pro-war Rand Corporation - released a study in 2008 called "How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa'ida". The report confirms that the war on terror is actually weakening national security. As a press release about the study states: "Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests that there is no battlefield solution to terrorism." Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told the Senate that the war on terror is "a mythical historical narrative". And Newsweek has now admitted that the war on terror is wholly unnecessary. In fact, starting right after 9/11 -- at the latest -- the goal has always been to create "regime change" and instability in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Lebanon; the goal was never really to destroy Al Qaeda. As American reporter Gareth Porter writes in Asia Times: Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith's recently published account of the Iraq war decisions. Feith's account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country's top military leaders. Feith's book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a series of states... *** General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia [and Lebanon]. *** When this writer asked Feith . . . which of the six regimes on the Clark list were included in the Rumsfeld paper, he replied, "All of them." *** The Defense Department guidance document made it clear that US military aims in regard to those states would go well beyond any ties to terrorism. The document said the Defense Department would also seek to isolate and weaken those states and to "disrupt, damage or destroy" their military capacities - not necessarily limited to weapons of mass destruction (WMD)... Rumsfeld's paper was given to the White House only two weeks after Bush had approved a US military operation in Afghanistan directed against bin Laden and the Taliban regime. Despite that decision, Rumsfeld's proposal called explicitly for postponing indefinitely US airstrikes and the use of ground forces in support of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in order to try to catch bin Laden. Instead, the Rumsfeld paper argued that the US should target states that had supported anti-Israel forces such as Hezbollah and Hamas. *** After the bombing of two US embassies in East Africa [in 1988] by al-Qaeda operatives, State Department counter-terrorism official Michael Sheehan proposed supporting the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against bin Laden's sponsor, the Taliban regime. However, senior US military leaders "refused to consider it", according to a 2004 account by Richard H Shultz, Junior, a military specialist at Tufts University. A senior officer on the Joint Staff told State Department counter-terrorism director Sheehan he had heard terrorist strikes characterized more than once by colleagues as a "small price to pay for being a superpower". If you still believe that the war on terror is necessary, please read this. Torture is Bad for the Economy For those who still think torture is a necessary evil, you might be interested to learn that top experts in interrogation say that, actually: Torture doesn't work in providing information which will keep us safe Torture actually reduces our national security and creates new terrorists Most of those tortured were innocent Indeed, historians tell us that torture has been used throughout history - not to gain information - but as a form of intimidation, to terrorize people into obedience. In other words, at its core, torture is a form of terrorism. Moreover, the type of torture used by the U.S. in the last 10 years is of a special type. Senator Levin revealed that the the U.S. used torture techniques aimed at extracting false confessions. McClatchy subsequently filled in some of the details: Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration... For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there." It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document... When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued."Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . . A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq. "While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results." "I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist." Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred. In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage. See also this and this. Paul Krugman eloquently summarized the truth about the type of torture used: Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link. There’s a word for this: it’s evil. But since this essay in on dollars and cents, the important point is that terrorism is bad for the economy. Specifically, a study by Harvard and NBER points out: From an economic standpoint, terrorism has been described to have four main effects (see, e.g., US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, 2002). First, the capital stock (human and physical) of a country is reduced as a result of terrorist attacks. Second, the terrorist threat induces higher levels of uncertainty. Third, terrorism promotes increases in counter-terrorism expenditures, drawing resources from productive sectors for use in security. Fourth, terrorism is known to affect negatively specific industries such as tourism. The Harvard/NBER concludes: In accordance with the predictions of the model, higher levels of terrorist risks are associated with lower levels of net foreign direct investment positions, even after controlling for other types of country risks. On average, a standard deviation increase in the terrorist risk is associated with a fall in the net foreign direct investment position of about 5 percent of GDP. So the more unnecessary wars American launches, the more innocent civilians we kill, and the more people we torture, the less foreign investment in America, the more destruction to our capital stock, the higher the level of uncertainty, the more counter-terrorism expenditures and the less expenditures in more productive sectors, and the greater the hit to tourism and some other industries. Moreover: Terrorism has contributed to a decline in the global economy (for example, European Commission, 2001). So military adventurism and torture, which increase terrorism, hurt the world economy. And see this. For the foregoing reasons, the military-industrial complex is ruining the economy.

:: Article nr. 62026 sent on 10-jan-2010 18:54 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=62026

Link: www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/01/military-industrial-compex-is-ruining.html

Vikings Lose to Dallas Next Week

Woe is you Tiger Woods

The law is the means by which the state corrals its subjects, keeps them under control, and forbids them from acting in ways that the overlords might

perceive as threatening. In brief, today, in these glorious United States, the law is not your friend.

The Lie of Law: Courts Bow to State's Raw Power

Written by Chris Floyd

Wednesday, 06 January 2010 16:47

I. It is often forgotten how "legal" the Nazi regime in Germany really was. It did not take power in a violent revolution, but entered government through the entirely "legal" procedures of the time. The "legal" vote of the "legally" elected Reichstag gave Adolf Hitler the powers to rule by decree, thus imparting strict "legality" to the actions of his government. Indeed, there were several cases when those who felt the government had overstepped the bounds of law in a particular instance actually took the Nazi regime to court, and won. Why? Because the government was bound by "the rule of law." And the fact is, almost the entire pre-Nazi judicial system of the German state remained intact and operational throughout Hitler's reign. The "rule of law" carried on. Of course, as the Nazi regime plowed forward with its racist, militarist, imperialist agenda, this "rule of law" became increasingly elastic, countenancing a range of actions and policies that would have been considered heinous atrocities only a few years before. This trend was greatly accelerated after the Regime -- claiming "self-defense" following an alleged "invasion" by a small band of raiders -- launched a war which soon engulfed the world. Naturally, in such unusual and perilous circumstances, jurists were inclined to give the widest possible lee-way to the war powers of the state. After all, as one prominent judge declared, the war had pushed the nation “past the leading edge of a new and frightening paradigm, one that demands new rules be written. War is a challenge to law, and the law must adjust." -- No, wait. I must apologize for my mistake. That last quote was not, in fact, from a German jurist during the Nazi regime, but from a ruling issued this week by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit -- one of the highest courts in the land. The quoted opinion -- written by the legally appointed Judge Janice Rogers Brown -- was part of a sweeping ruling that greatly magnified the powers of the government to seize foreigners and hold them indefinitely without charges or legal appeal. The court denied the appeal of Ghaleb Nassar al-Bihani, who has been held in captivity for more than eight years. What was his crime? He served as a non-combatant clerk for a unit on one side of the long-running Afghan civil war. This war was fought largely between factions of violent extremists; Bihani had the misfortune to be serving in the army of the "wrong" faction when the United States intervened on behalf of the opposing extremists in 2001. Jason Ditz summarizes the case well at Antiwar.com: Bihani was a cook for a pro-Taliban faction fighting against the Northern Alliance before the 2001 US invasion, and his unit surrendered during the initial invasion. The Yemeni citizen is accused of “hostilities against the United States” even though he arrived in Afghanistan nearly six months before the US invasion. Not only did his unit never fight against American forces, he was a cook who doesn’t appear to have ever participated in any combat at all. Despite this, he was declared an enemy combatant. Let's underscore the salient fact: Bihani never took up arms against the United States, was involved in no combat against the United States (or anyone else, apparently), played no part in any attack on the United States. Yet the court ruled that the United States can arbitrarily declare Bihani an "enemy combatant" and hold him captive for the rest of his life. But the eminent judges did not stop there in their entirely "legal" ruling. As the New York Times reports, they went to declare that "the presidential war power to detain those suspected of terrorism is not limited even by international law of war." And later: "the majority’s argument [is] that the president’s war powers are not bound by the international laws of war." Think of that. Let it sink in. The president's war powers cannot be constrained by the international laws of war. Whatever the Leader (no points for translating this term into German) decides to do in the course of a war is thus rendered entirely "legal." He cannot be accused of international war crimes because such things do not apply to him. With this ruling -- which is all of a piece with many more that have preceded it -- we are well and truly "past the leading edge of a new and frightening paradigm." What is most frightening, of course, is the obscene philosophy of machtpolitik -- the craven kowtowing to the demands of brute force -- that is embodied in Judge Brown's chilling words: "War is a challenge to law, and the law must adjust." Again, remember the context of this ruling. It deals with the Leader's power over foreign citizens in lands that the Leader's armies are occupying. The judicial "reasoning" expressed by Judge Brown could apply, without the slightest alteration, to the Nazi regime's various programs of mass killing and "indefinite detention" of "enemy" foreigners in occupied lands. The "resettlement" of Eastern Europe -- in order to provide for the "national security" of the German people and the preservation of their "way of life" -- did indeed require a pathbreaking advance into a "new paradigm" on the part of the law. The exigencies and challenges of the war demanded, as Judge Brown would put it, that "new rules be written." And so they were. Under the duly, officially, formally constituted German "law" of the time -- as interpreted and applied by obsequious jurists in the mold of Judge Brown and her fellow war power expander, Judge Brett Kavanaugh -- there was little or nothing that was "illegal" in the vast catalogue of Nazi wartime atrocities, including the Holocaust itself. The perpetrators were "only following orders," which had been issued by "legal" entities, acting through "legal" processes, under the direction of the "legal" executive authority, whose unrestrained war powers had been established and upheld by the "rule of law." Now this legal philosophy -- the primacy of raw, unaccountable power -- is being openly established by the highest courts of the United States. President Barack Obama, whose legal minions fought so ferociously to deny the appeal of the non-combatant captive, has been an ardent proponent and practitioner of this philosophy since his first days in office. His administration has proclaimed that the torturers of the Bush administration will not be prosecuted, because they were just following orders -- orders which had been issued by legal entities, acting through legal processes, under the direction of the legal executive authority, whose unrestrained war powers had been established and upheld by the "rule of law." II. It was not always thus. A few years ago, when writing of the "constitutional and moral issues raised by Bush's liberty-gutting 'unitary executive' dictatorship" (which Obama has enthusiastically continued and expanded), I ran across a Supreme Court ruling from December 1866 -- more than 140 years ago: Ex Parte Milligan. In this ruling, which grew out of the wartime excesses of the Lincoln Administration, the Court -- dominated by five Lincoln appointees -- was unequivocal: Constitutional protections not only apply "equally in war and peace" but also – in a dramatic extension of this legal shield – to "all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances." No emergency – not even open civil war – warrants their suspension. Even in wartime, the President's powers, though expanded, are still restrained: "he is controlled by law, and has his appropriate sphere of duty, which is to execute, not to make, the laws." As I noted earlier in the piece: It was a decisive ruling against a government that had far overreached its powers, stripping away essential liberties in the name of national security. The Justice who authored the majority opinion was a Republican, an old friend and political crony of the president who had appointed him. Even so, his ruling struck hard at the abuses set in train by his patron. He stood upon the law, he stood upon the Constitution, even in the aftermath of a shattering blow that had killed more than 600,000 Americans and almost destroyed the nation itself. This is what the Court decided: "The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence." The author was Justice David Davis, an Illinois lawyer appointed by Abraham Lincoln after helping run the campaign that gave his old colleague the presidency in the fateful 1860 election. (Davis was also, by a strange quirk of history, the second cousin of George W. Bush's great-grandfather.) By the time the Court issued its ruling, Lincoln was dead, but the after-effects of his ever-expanding suspension of civil liberties during wartime were still roiling through the courts, and through America's fractured society. The Milligan ruling was, in the words of legal scholar John P. Frank, "one of the truly great documents of the American Constitution," a "bulwark" for civil liberties, expansive and exacting in the Constitutional protections it spelled out. The ruling acknowledged that there are times when the writ of habeas corpus may have to be suspended in an area where hostilities are directly taking place – but even this power, they noted, was highly circumscribed and specifically delegated to Congress, not the president. Lincoln exceeded this authority on numerous occasions, increasing the scope of his powers until the entire Union was essentially under martial law, and anyone arbitrarily deemed guilty of never-defined "disloyal practices" could be arrested or silenced – in the latter case by having their newspaper shut down, for instance. (Lincoln would sometimes – but not always – seek ex post facto Congressional authorization for these acts.) Some parts of the Union that the Lincoln administration thought particularly disloyal were officially put under martial law -- such as southern Indiana, where anti-war agitator Lambdin Milligan and four others were accused of a plot to free Confederate prisoners, and were summarily tried and sentenced to death by a military tribunal. It was this case that the Court – five of whom were Lincoln appointees – overturned in such a decided fashion. As noted, that ruling was made in a nation still reeling from a savage, titanic war fought on its own territory. Even in the midst of such turmoil, the idea that "the laws must adjust" to the exigencies of war -- even the extremity of ruinous civil war -- was considered anathema, even to conservative jurists with close ties to the government. But no longer. Although, unlike a civil war, even the worst terrorist attack imaginable would pose no existential threat to the nation, today the merest whisper of the possibility of a limited terrorist incident shakes the United States to its foundations -- and people willingly line up to be stripped naked by machines, while courts crawl on their bellies before the terrible majesty of unrestrained executive power. Be assured: the "rule of law" means nothing, protects nothing, sustains nothing. It can always be twisted and stretched by cowards, courtiers and power-seekers. Arthur Silber, as he does so often, cuts to heart of the matter in this powerful essay from 2009, "Concerning the State, the Law, and Show Trials": The law is not some Platonic Form plucked from the skies by the Pure in Heart. Laws are written by men, men who have particular interests, particular constituencies, particular donors, and particular friends. ... Laws are the particular means by which the state implements and executes its vast powers. When an increasingly authoritarian state passes a certain critical point in its development, the law is no longer the protector of individual rights and individual liberty. The law becomes the weapon of the state itself -- to protect, not you, but the state from threats to its own powers. We passed that critical point some decades ago. The law is the means by which the state corrals its subjects, keeps them under control, and forbids them from acting in ways that the overlords might perceive as threatening. In brief, today, in these glorious United States, the law is not your friend. Indeed it is not. In our "low dishonest" century, the "rule of law" has become the "lie of Authority" that Auden speaks of. It will not save us. What matters -- as always -- is moral courage in the face of power's encroachments. Sometimes this can be found within an institutional framework, as in the Supreme Court's bold expansion of legal rights to all people, "at all times, and under all circumstances" back in 1866; and of course it can be found in the lives and actions of individuals, acting singly or in concert. Auden again: Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

Can you imagine buying information on Islamic terrorism from an Israeli whose father was executed as a spy by Arabs?

Is Israel Controlling Phony Terror News?

Veterans Today | January 5, 2010

Who says Al Qaeda takes credit for a bombing? Rita Katz. Who gets us bin Laden tapes? Rita Katz. Who gets us prettymuch all information telling us Muslims are bad? Rita Katz? Rita Katz is the Director of Site Intelligence, primary source for intelligence used by news services, Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA. What is her qualification? She served in the Israeli Defense Force. She has a college degree and most investigative journalists believe the Mossad “helps” her with her information. We find no evidence of any qualification whatsoever of any kind. A bartender has more intelligence gathering experience.

Nobody verifies her claims. SITE says Al Qaeda did it, it hits the papers. SITE says Israel didn’t do it, that hits the papers too. What does SITE really do? They check the internet for “information,” almost invariably information that Israel wants reported and it is sold as news, seen on American TV, reported in our papers and passed around the internet almost as though it were actually true. Amazing.

Do we know if the information reported comes from a teenager in Seattle or a terror cell in Jakarta? No, of course not, we don’t have a clue. Can you imagine buying information on Islamic terrorism from an Israeli whose father was executed as a spy by Arabs?

It is quite likely that everything you think you know about terror attacks such as the one in Detroit or whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead comes from Rita Katz. Does she make it all up? We don’t know, nobody knows, nobody checks, they simply buy it, print it, say it comes from Site Intelligence and simply forget to tell us that this is not only a highly biased organization but also an extremely amateur one also.

Is any of this her fault, Ritas? No. She is herself, selling her work. The blame is not Site Intelligence, it is the people who pass on the information under misleading circumstances.

Imagine if a paper carried a story like this:

Reports that Al Qaeda was responsible for bombing the mosque and train station were given to us by an Israeli woman who says she found it on the internet.

This is fair. Everyone should be able to earn a living and information that comes from Israel could be without bias but the chances aren’t very good. In fact, any news organization, and most use this service, that fails to indicate that the sources they use are “rumored” to be a foreign intelligence service with a long history of lying beyond human measure, is not to be taken seriously.

Can we prove that SITE Intelligence is the Mossad? No. Would a reasonable person assume it is? Yes.

Would a reasonable person believe anything from this source involving Islam or the Middle East? No, they would not.

SITE’s primary claim to fame other than bin Laden videos with odd technical faults is their close relationship with Blackwater. Blackwater has found SITE useful. Blackwater no longer exists as they had to change their name because of utter lack of credibility.

What can be learned by examining where our news comes from? Perhaps we could start being realistic and begin seeing much of our own news as the childish propaganda it really is.

Propaganda does two things:

1. It makes up phony reasons to justify acts of barbaric cruelty or insane greed.

2. It blames people for things they didn’t do because the people doing the blaming really did it themselves. We call these things “false flag/USS Liberty” incidents.

Next time you see dancing Palestinians and someone tells you they are celebrating a terror attack, it is more likely they are attending a birthday party. This is what we have learned, perhaps this is what we had best remember.

From an AFP article on Site Intelligence:

Rita Katz and S.I.T.E. are set to release yet another “Al-Qaeda” tape

Despite a massive manhunt by the world’s intelligence agencies, OBL seems to evade their combined efforts, staying on the run. But he still has time to drop into his recording studio and cook up a fresh tape for the likes of Rita Katz and her outfit called S.I.T.E. SITE is staffed by TWO people, Katz and a Josh Devon.

WASHINGTON (AFP) The head of the al-Qaeda network Osama bin Laden is expected to release a taped message on Iraq, a group monitoring extremist online forums said Thursday. The 56-minute tape by the hunted militant is addressed to Iraq and an extremist organization based there, the Islamic State of Iraq, said the US-based SITE monitoring institute, citing announcements on “jihadist forums.”

It said the release was “impending” but did not say whether the message was an audio or video tape. Despite a massive manhunt and a 25-million-dollar bounty on his head, he has evaded capture and has regularly taunted the United States and its allies through warnings issued on video and audio cassettes.

Source: ME Times

Yes, despite a massive manhunt by the world’s intelligence agencies, OBL seems to evade their combined efforts, staying on the run. But he still has time to drop into his recording studio and cook up a fresh tape for the likes of Rita Katz and her outfit called S.I.T.E. SITE is staffed by TWO people, Katz and a Josh Devon.

Yet these two individuals manage to do what the ENTIRE combined assets of the world’s Western intelligence can’t:

Be the first to obtain fresh video and audio tapes from aL-Qaeda with Bin Laden making threats and issuing various other comments. If OBL appears a bit “stiff” in the latest release, that’s because he is real stiff, as in dead.

How is it that a Jewish owned group like S.I.T.E. can outperform the world’s best and brightest in the intelligence field and be the first to know that a group like al-Qaeda is getting ready to release another tape?

How is it possible that Rita Katz and S.I.T.E. can work this magic? Maybe looking at Katz’s background will help:

Rita Katz is Director and co-founder of the SITE Institute. Born in Iraq, her father was tried and executed as an Israeli spy, whereupon her family moved to Israel [the move has been described as both an escape and an emigration in different sources]. She received a degree from the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University, and is fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. She emigrated to the US in 1997.

Katz was called as a witness in the trial, but the government didn’t claim she was a terrorism expert. During the trial it was discovered that Katz herself had worked in violation of her visa agreement when she first arrived in America in 1997.

She also admitted to receiving more than $130,000 for her work as an FBI consultant on the case.

Source

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Who buys up the spoils?

After all these controlled demolitions of the economies around the world who picks up the pieces and consolidates the assets ?

What companies profit most from these controlled demolitions of companies, home mortgages, farm mortgages, natural resources?

open question, you think amongst yourselves awhile....

ban the assbump!!

score a touchdown jump up do an ass bump!?
I'm putting that annoying display on notice!
invent something less annoying

shut up you jared allen

DE Jared Allen when asked if the team needed a game like this (44-7 win) heading into the playoffs: "To come out and win the way we did against a New York team, hopefully we can shut some of the naysayers up."


that game won nuttin, squanto zilch, and btw where were you last 6 weeks? a better man up yer biddness wise ass? you aint shuttin us up untill you win something, not just the giants don't give a fuck bowl

an economic 9-11 against us.

How Goldman Sachs Made Tens Of Billions Of Dollars From The Economic Collapse Of America In Four Easy Steps

Investment banking giant Goldman Sachs has become perhaps the most prominent symbol for everything that is wrong with the U.S. financial system, but most Americans cannot even begin to explain what they do or how they have made tens of billions of dollars from the economic collapse of America. The truth is that what Goldman Sachs did was fairly simple, and there may not have even been anything "illegal" about it (although they are now being investigated by the SEC among others).

The following is how Goldman Sachs made tens of billions of dollars from the economic collapse of America in four easy steps....

Step 1: Sell mortgage-related securities that are absolute junk to trusting clients at vastly overinflated prices.

Step 2: Bet against those same mortgage-related securities and make massive bets against the U.S. housing market so that your firm will make massive profits when the U.S. economy collapses.

Step 3: Have ex-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the U.S. government so that bailout money can be funneled to entities such as AIG that Goldman has made these bets with so that they can get paid after they win their bets.

Step 4: Collect the profits - Goldman Sachs is having their "most successful year" and will end up reporting approximately $50 billion in revenue for 2009.

So is it right for the biggest fish on Wall Street to make tens of billions of dollars by betting that the U.S. housing market will collapse?

You see, when you are talking about a financial giant the size of Goldman Sachs, the line between "betting that something will happen" and "making something happen" gets blurred very quickly.

Not that Goldman Sachs was the only one betting against the housing market.

According to the New York Times, firms like Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley also created mortgage-related securities and then bet that they would fail.....

Goldman was not the only firm that peddled these complex securities — known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s — and then made financial bets against them, called selling short in Wall Street parlance. Others that created similar securities and then bet they would fail, according to Wall Street traders, include Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, as well as smaller firms like Tricadia Inc.

But certainly Goldman Sachs was the most prominent financial player involved in this type of activity.

In fact, without mentioning specifics, Goldman has even admitted publicly to wrongdoing. On November 17th, 2008 Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein even issued a public apology....

"We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret."

But complicated financial transactions are something that most Americans simply do not understand, so the public outrage towards Goldman Sachs and others has been somewhat limited. But that does not change the very serious nature of the activities that Goldman was involved in....

"The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen," Sylvain Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York, recently told The New York Times. "When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson."

But the sad thing is that many Americans do not even understand what Goldman Sachs is. Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869 and has forged a reputation as one of the elite financial institutions in the entire world. They only hire "the best and the brightest" and Ivy League graduates flock to the firm. Of the five major investment banks that dominated Wall Street before the crash, only Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have survived. Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns were severely damaged by the crash and ended up being purchased by retail banks and Lehman Brothers ended up folding.

There are persistent rumors that Goldman played a major role in the collapse of Bear Stearns and that ex-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson could have done much more to bail out Lehman Brothers, but perhaps nobody will ever know the full truth. All we do know is that at the end of the crash several of Goldman's competitors were destroyed and Goldman found itself in a more dominant position than ever.

The truth is that Goldman is a financial shark and they do not apologize for it.

An article in Rolling Stone recently put it this way....

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

So how did Goldman Sachs prosper so greatly in an environment that destroyed their competitors?

The following is an extended breakdown of just how Goldman Sachs was able to reap tens of billions of dollars in profits from the collapse of the U.S. housing market....

Step 1: Sell mortgage-related securities that are absolute junk to trusting clients at vastly overinflated prices.

In late 2006, Goldman Sachs made some fundamental changes in the way that they were approaching the U.S. housing market. According to a McClatchy report, Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally said that the firm decided at that time to reduce its mortgage risks by selling off subprime mortgage-related securities and by purchasing credit-default swaps to hedge against a serious downturn in the U.S. housing market.

The key moment came in December 2006. After "10 straight days of losses" in Goldman's mortgage business, Chief Financial Officer David Viniar called a meeting of key Goldman personnel.

Vanity Fair described the results of that meeting this way....

After a now famous meeting in David Viniar’s office on December 14, 2006, Goldman’s traders began to protect the firm against further declines in the market. Just as you can short the S&P 500, the traders took short positions in an index that tracked the price of mortgage-backed securities. They also either sold assets they owned to others at losses or dramatically marked down the price on their own books. In the aftermath of the crisis, criticism erupted that Goldman had continued to sell mortgage-backed securities to its clients while betting against those very securities for its own account. Clearly, in the simplest terms possible, this is true: while Goldman was never the biggest underwriter of C.D.O.’s (collateralized debt obligations—Wall Street’s vehicle of choice for mortgage-backed securities), the firm did remain in the top five until the summer of 2007, when the market crashed to a halt.

So Goldman Sachs proceeded to sell approxmiately $39 billion of its own mortgage securities in 2006 and 2007 and they sold at least $17 billion more mortgage securities for others, but they never told the buyers of those securities that Goldman was secretly betting that a significant drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those mortgage securities plummeting.

These sales and the massive clandestine wagers placed by Goldman enabled the firm to pass most of its potential losses on to others prior to the collapse of the U.S. housing market.

But many of the investors who got the short end of the stick were not pleased. When they discovered that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were actually a bunch of garbage, many of them were absolutely furious.

"The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion," said Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff. "This is fraud and should be prosecuted."

One of the victims of this fraud was the state of Mississippi....

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, whose state has lost $5 million of the $6 million it invested in Goldman's subprime mortgage-backed bonds in 2006, said the state's funds are likely to lose "hundreds of millions of dollars" on those and similar bonds.

Another one of the victims of this fraud was California's retirement system for public employees....

California's huge public employees' retirement system, known as CALPERS, purchased $64.4 million in subprime mortgage-backed bonds from Goldman on March 1, 2007. While that represented a tiny percentage of the fund's holdings, in July CALPERS listed the bonds' value at $16.6 million, a drop of nearly 75 percent, according to documents obtained through a state public records request.

So who is left holding the bag in cases such as these?

The taxpayers.

And that is just fine with Goldman Sachs. Just as long as they keep raking in huge profits.

Vanity Fair was even more blunt regarding this injustice....

"Goldman’s management team was almost flawless in its execution. But how many people needed government help because of the things Goldman sold them?"

The truth is that a lot of people needed help because of the things Goldman sold them, but up until now Goldman has completely gotten away with it.

Step 2: Bet against those same mortgage-related securities and make massive bets against the U.S. housing market so that your firm will make massive profits when the U.S. economy collapses.

Not only did Goldman sell mortgage-related securities that were absolute junk to investors at vastly overinflated prices, they also placed massive bets that the U.S. housing market would absolutely collapse.

The New York Times recently described how Goldman used a new index known as the ABX to make many of these bets....

A handful of investors and Wall Street traders, however, anticipated the crisis. In 2006, Wall Street had introduced a new index, called the ABX, that became a way to invest in the direction of mortgage securities. The index allowed traders to bet on or against pools of mortgages with different risk characteristics, just as stock indexes enable traders to bet on whether the overall stock market, or technology stocks or bank stocks, will go up or down.

Goldman, among others on Wall Street, has said since the collapse that it made big money by using the ABX to bet against the housing market. Worried about a housing bubble, top Goldman executives decided in December 2006 to change the firm’s overall stance on the mortgage market, from positive to negative, though it did not disclose that publicly.

These bets would only make money for Goldman Sachs if the U.S. housing market declined.

So if the biggest giant on Wall Street has a huge financial incentive to see the U.S. housing market fail, what do you think the odds are that they are going to do anything to support it?

Step 3: Have ex-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the U.S. government so that bailout money can be funneled to entities such as AIG that Goldman has made these bets with so that they could get paid.

For years, Goldman Sachs has encouraged executives to serve in U.S. government positions. Now they are world famous for the amount of influence their former employees have over government policy.

For example, according to the New York Times, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (also a former Goldman CEO) spoke with the current CEO of Goldman Sachs about two dozen times during the week of the bailout, although Paulson says that he obtained an "ethics waiver" before doing so.

So does an "ethics waiver" make everything okay?

But the sad thing is that is not an isolated example.

It turns out that Goldman benefited greatly from a number of decisions made by their former CEO while he was Treasury Secretary....

*Goldman greatly benefited when Paulson elected not to save rival Lehman Brothers from collapse. Paulson certainly stepped in to help Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG, but apparently had no problem with letting Lehman Brothers fall apart.

*Under Paulson's direction, Goldman ended up receiving bailout money (which they may or may not have needed) from the U.S. government and has since paid back much of that money with interest. So why didn't Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers get the bailout funds that they needed?

*Goldman greatly benefitted when Paulson organized a massive rescue of American International Group while in constant telephone contact with Goldman CEO Blankfein. AIG ultimately ended up using $12.9 billion taxpayer dollars to pay off every single penny that it owed to Goldman.

But it is not just Paulson who has had significant influence in Washington.

On October 16th, Adam Storch, a Goldman Sachs vice president, was named managing executive of the SEC's enforcement division. What do you think the odds are that he will crack down hard on Goldman?

In addition, former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson is the chief of staff for current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

In fact, ex-Goldman employees are seemingly everywhere. According to Vanity Fair, at one G-7 meeting an anonymous source identified at least 24 out of 32 finance officials in attendance as ex-Goldman employees.

The influence of Goldman Sachs even reaches to the White House. Goldman was Barack Obama's number one campaign donor, and its employees gave $981,000 to his campaign.

If you don't think that kind of money does not buy influence then you are delusional.

Goldman used some of that powerful influence to get the U.S. government to bail out AIG so that AIG could pay off the bets that Goldman had made with them. In a recent article, Vanity Fair described part of what went down....

After the government bailout of A.I.G., in order to end the collateral calls on the insurance giant, the New York Federal Reserve—whose chairman at the time was former Goldman chairman Steve Friedman—decided to purchase a slew of the securities that A.I.G. had insured, including $14 billion of those on which Goldman had purchased insurance. The government—meaning taxpayers—did so at full price, although according to a recent Bloomberg story, there had been negotiations with A.I.G. to do so at a 40 percent discount. Goldman says that the New York Fed broached the topic of a discount only once. The firm’s response: a flat no. While no one will ever know what would have happened had A.I.G. gone under, the essence of what did happen is perfectly clear. As a recent report by the Office of the Special Inspector General for tarpput it, the decision to pay full price “effectively transferred tens of billions of dollars of cash from the Government to A.I.G.’s counterparties.” Or to put it another way: because Goldman felt it was owed its billions by A.I.G., the firm took it from taxpayers instead.

So what about all of the thousands of small businesses that are failing and what about the millions of Americans that are losing their jobs and homes?

Do they get bailouts?

Of course not.

But the U.S. government definitely made sure that AIG and Goldman were taken care of.

Step 4: Collect the profits - Goldman Sachs is having their "most successful year" and will end up reporting approximately $50 billion in revenue for 2009.

Goldman Sachs ranks #1 in annual net income when compared with 86 peers in the investment services sector. They are on course for their best year ever.

Yes, they are having a really good "crisis".

Goldman Sachs is on course to surpass $50 billion in revenue in 2009 and to pay its employees more than $20 billion in year-end bonuses.

20 billion just in bonuses?

That would mean that the average bonus for all Goldman employees would be over $700,000.

No wonder everyone wants to work for them.

It's good to be on the winning side.

So just how are they making so much money?

In their recent article, Vanity Fair described it this way....

But because so many of Goldman’s competitors were gone or disabled, spreads—the difference between the price at which you sell and buy a variety of securities—were wider than they had been in years, meaning that Goldman could practically mint money. By acting at the moment it did, with Lehman out and Merrill Lynch down for the count, the government enabled this situation.

The other reason for Goldman’s profits is that the government has flooded the system with money, not just the money it used to rescue the financial system but hundreds of billions more in stimulus, in support of the housing market, and in the Federal Reserve’s purchases of securities.

But all of this success has not come without controversy. In fact, Goldman executives are very much aware of the growing backlash against the firm.

Senior officials at Goldman Sachs have reportedly loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a "populist uprising" against the bank.

In addition, Goldman Sachs employees are now not allowed to gather in groups of 12 or more outside the office. The firm very much discouraged "holiday parties" as they most definitely did not want to be seen as celebrating the downfall of the U.S. economy.

But the truth is that Goldman Sachs won because so many others lost.

In his very revealing article on Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi described how Goldman keeps making money from the bursting of these economic bubbles....

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

The truth is that in this latest economic collapse there were millions of losers and just a few winners.

Goldman Sachs was one of those winners.

So will they lose next time?

Not likely.

In their recent article, Vanity Fair quoted an anonymous source in the financial industry as saying the following....

"Are they the Yankees? No, the Yankees actually lose! Goldman never loses."