In the aftermath of the Massachusetts Senate vote last Tuesday, we now have a concrete fighting chance to block the reappointment of Wall Street puppet Ben Bernanke as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors by preventing his Senate confirmation next week. This afternoon, Bernanke’s support was eroding hour by hour. The defections from the Bernanke camp feature Democratic senators who are up for reelection this coming November. They have read the tea leaves from Massachusetts, and they know the pitchforks are out, so their response is a mad rush to acquire economic populist and anti-Wall Street cover. The obvious way to do this is to turn against Bernanke and defeat him in the upcoming confirmation vote. Leading the charge late today were Senator Barbara Boxer of California and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, both endangered Democrats. GOP Senator Corker of Tennessee is now waffling about whether or not he will support Bernanke. The pressure is building on self-styled Democratic economic populists like Sherrod Brown of Ohio to prove that they are worth something. What will Senator-elect Scott Brown do? If he votes for Bernanke, he will have betrayed his voters in less than a week, and will not survive his own re-election campaign in 3 years. Democratic majority leader Harry Reid, succumbing to overwhelming pressure from the Obama White House, announced late this afternoon that he will fall on his sword for Helicopter Ben, but this self-destructive pledge may not survive a weekend in Nevada, where the economic populist pitchforks are as finely honed as anywhere. It is therefore time for all responsible citizens and all persons of good will to mobilize in the days ahead to secure the defeat of Bernanke. Such an event would symbolize the turn of the tide against Wall Street in the struggle to decide who will pay for the current depression — the people or the bankers and hedge fund hyenas.
We stress that this is a battle which can be won. Two senators, Bunning of Kentucky and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have placed holds on the Bernanke nomination. This means that a supermajority of 60 votes will be required to bring Helicopter Ben’s nomination to the Senate floor. As of now, no one can know whether these votes will be forthcoming. Republicans have little reason to favor Bernanke over their own careers. The Obama White House, despite its most recent efforts to re-create a populist persona for the chief executive, is foolishly supporting Bernanke — a move which undermines all other economic populist posturing Obama might engage in. Individual Democrats, especially those facing the hour of truth in November, know very well how much Bernanke and his Federal Reserve elitists are hated by Americans. For the moment, this game is therefore out of control and highly vulnerable to the application of mass-based political pressure. If Bernanke can be defeated, the Wall Street-Federal Reserve lockstep will be momentarily broken, and the path to auditing the Fed and, more importantly, nationalizing it as a bureau of the Treasury will be wide open. Continue reading Mobilize Now to Oust Bernanke as Fed Chair
Washington DC, January 19, 2010 — Today’s stunning defeat of the colorless hack Martha Coakley by the Republican challenger in Massachusetts must be interpreted as crucial proof that the American electorate is hungry for populism in the midst of a worsening world economic depression. The kind of populism Massachusetts voters really wanted was New Deal economic populism in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, meaning concrete measures to break the power of Wall Street and deliver economic benefits to the broad middle class and working people generally. This was the kind of economic populism which was nowhere in sight. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, and Barney Frank is a party of Wall Street shills and puppets. Since no economic populists were in sight, Massachusetts voters settled for second best in the form of cultural populism as represented by the Republican Scott Brown, whose main claim to fame was that he drove a truck with 200,000 miles on it. That is the demagogic essence of cultural populism, the only kind of populism of which Republicans and reactionaries in general are capable. Cultural populism is what Rush Limbaugh sells on the radio every day, mocking the elitist cultural pretensions of politically correct Democrats. Cultural populism is the stock in trade of Sarah Palin, who uses it to try to make Tea Party supporters forget her warm support for the Bush-Paulson $700 billion bailout of Wall Street in October 2008, when Palin was running for vice president. Coakley, by contrast, was a prim elitist who showed her contempt for Joe Sixpack by going on a two-week vacation in the middle of her alleged Senate campaign. Continue reading The Massachusetts Senate Race: A Populist Protest Vote Against Wall Street Puppets
Washington, January 18, 2010 — In an interview with Dina Gusovsky of Russia Today, Webster Tarpley pointed out that the escalating clash between Google and the People’s Republic of China comes in the context of rapidly deteriorating relations between the two countries on a broad front. Google is part of a cartel of Internet companies which notoriously works closely with the US intelligence community for political purposes, including the subversion and overthrow of foreign governments. We need only recall the central role of Twitter in the CIA’s attempted coup d’état in Iran last summer. Political manipulation by means of the Internet is an indispensable part of the CIA’s recipe for color revolutions, velvet revolutions, people power coups, and postmodern coups. When the Internet is introduced into previously authoritarian countries, it is often possible to dupe, manipulate, and stampede large numbers of enthusiastic young people who are not politically sophisticated. The results are often disastrous. In Georgia, a color revolution installed into power the madman Sakaashvili, who has already started one war. Yushenko, the beneficiary of the Orange Revolution of 2004, has just been massively repudiated by voters after a catastrophic presidency. The hangover of disillusionment surrounding Obama is related to the fact that he took power in something of the same way. The Chinese government therefore feels that there are valid reasons to prevent Western intelligence agencies from massively pumping black propaganda into China using the Internet. This is in any case a purely domestic Chinese issue, and Americans in particular ought to focus on putting their own house in order before starting to give lectures to the rest of the world. Continue reading Google Attacks China as Washington-Beijing Hostility Deepens
Just over five days or 120 hours after a major earthquake hit the area of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, it is increasingly clear that the US approach to organizing the delivery of emergency assistance and supplies is so ineffective that the general directing the distribution of emergency aid needs to be fired without further delay. The catastrophic blunder involved is the decision by the US military in the person of Gen. Ken Keen to insist on routing all external aid through a single substandard, inadequate, and partially destroyed landing field, the Toussaint L‘Ouverture airport. This airport has a single runway, and room to park only about half a dozen medium to long range aircraft. The result is that once six aircraft are parked in the unloading area, all incoming traffic must be waved off until one of the six planes has taken off again, as a colonel on the ground explained in a press conference broadcast on C-SPAN radio here this afternoon. The control tower, radar, and other facilities have been destroyed by the earthquake. Even once cargo has been offloaded, it has been tending to build up at the airport because the streets and roads leading from the airport towards the main population concentrations are blocked by collapsed buildings and other debris. The result is an agonizing slowness in delivering vital supplies upon which the immediate survival of up to 3 million Haitians now depends.
The Single Airport as Bottleneck
This single airport approach fulfills the textbook definitions of a logistical bottleneck and logistical nightmare. It was a fatal mistake to ever decide to make this single runway the only supply line for the stricken populations around the Haitian capital. The officer who is said to be running the US logistical effort on the ground is Lieutenant General P.K. “Ken” Keen, second in command of the US Southern Command. Interviewed today by Brit Hume on Fox News Sunday, General Keen stated: “ Well, we had a very good day yesterday, Brit. Paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne division who have only arrived within the last day or two delivered over 70,000 bottles of water and 130,000 rations.” General Keane was referring to Saturday, January 16, three days and 96 hours after the earthquake. This statement is comparable to the recent remark of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano to the effect that, although an airplane had almost been blown up aloft, “The system worked.” General Keen, like Secretary Napolitano, appears incapable of recognizing defeat and failure when they are staring him in the face, and human lives have already been lost as a result of his incompetence. Gen. Keen is well on his way to becoming the new Brownie of the Haitian crisis, surpassing in ineptitude the infamous Bush FEMA director who received the accolade of “heckuva job, Brownie” at the height of the 2005 debacle. Continue reading To Save Haiti, Fire Gen. “Brownie” Keen, Start Air Drops, Cancel the Debt, and Kick Out The IMF
[Note: Birgitta Jónsdóttir is the leader of The Movement, a group within the Icelandic Parliament which has emerged from the mass struggle of Icelanders against the financial blackmail brought to bear against their country by the governments in London and The Hague, with the backing of the IMF, in the wake of the insolvency of three large Icelandic banks in the midst of the Lehman Brothers-AIG world financial panic of September-October2008. Birgitta Jónsdóttir is a courageous leader in the fight for national sovereignty, independence, dignity, and the economic well-being and future of her country.]
January 5, 2010 is a historical day for Icelanders. The Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson had a tough decision to make, and difficult choices to make. To listen to the 23% of the nation that signed a petition calling on him to put the state guarantee for 5.4 billion dollars to be paid to the British and Dutch governments to a national referendum. Or to ignore the nation and sign the bill for the government, after the bill had been passed through the parliament with a narrow vote on December 30, 2009 after months of acrimonious debate, tainted with secrecy and dishonesty on the part of the government. Every day throughout the debate, new information would emerge and documents would leak to local media or wikileaks. Yesterday, the people of Iceland finally had a chance to have something to say about their fate, because if the state guarantee is accepted it will mean that Iceland will become like a third world country, spending its GDP largely on paying interest on foreign debt. Last summer, a bill for a state guarantee was passed that had a significant meaning not only for Iceland, but also for other nations around the world facing the same problems of private debt being forced on taxpayers. The bill included a reasonable and fair way of handling the interest and the debt: Icelanders would pay, but only a certain percentage of their GDP, and if there were to be another financial black hole, they would not pay during that time. Thus it comes as no surprise that the Dutch and British governments reacted so swiftly with a condemnation of Iceland’s citizens for having the audacity to think they have the right to exercise their democratic rights in deciding for themselves what is in the best economic interests of their nation.
Let’s also put this debt into perspective: 320.000 people live in Iceland, each and every person on the island, including children and the elderly, the disabled and the poor, would have to pay around $30,000 under the bill. The danger if Icelanders will accept this enormous burden is that the entire welfare system would simply collapse with no money to run it. On January 5th the Icelandic president had the courage, backed up by his nation, to place the interest of the people before that of the banks.
Of course there has been an incredible spin by the government controlled media, attacking the nation and the president for this simple and fair demand. The UK and Dutch media were also full of misleading news, saying the nation had demanded not to pay, and that we would become isolated and there were even suggestions that the British navy should flex its muscles against this nation which has no military. As if the terrorist act they imposed on us was not enough during the darkest hour of our crises to bring us further down!
The spin is failing because people around the world are finally starting to hear our side of the story, and other suppressed nations have perhaps seen this as a sign that they can also rise up against the corpocracy in our world where those with the money have as a rule always won. Let’s hope the nation will not been coaxed into fear of isolation and let’s hope the people of the world will join in this experiment of letting the interest of the peoples rise above the interests of banks, corporations, and international bullies such as the IMF. We need your support. I will soon issue a comprehensive report on the entire Icesave saga.
Love and rage from Iceland
Birgitta Jónsdóttir
Party group chairman for The Movement in the Icelandic Parliament
Documentation: I append links to the files about Icesave that were leaked to wikileaks, and which show how the EU member states blackmailed Iceland into the same corner the government helped push into by accepting the Icesave bill. This file also contains letters between the main financial adviser to the Iceland Finance Minister and Mark Flanagan of the IMF:
Washington DC , January 5, 2010 — Obama’s speech this afternoon was an incongruous performance. On the one hand, he angrily detailed a catastrophic breakdown in US intelligence procedures leading to the near-massacre of hundreds of airline passengers in the skies over Detroit on Christmas Day. On the other hand, there was no purge of the corrupt, complicit, and incompetent officials who had made this incident possible. No firings were announced. No heads rolled. The rogue network or invisible government of treasonous and subversive moles inside the US government which is behind the Detroit incident, and so many other incidents, remained untouched once again.
Wolffe on MSNBC: “Cock-Up Or Conspiracy?”
The expectation that Obama might actually do something to combat the rogue network across US government institutions which inflicts terrorism on the American people and the world had been raised the night before in an interview by Washington journalist Richard Wolffe on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC Countdown program. Wolffe, citing high-level White House officials, had reported that there was an investigation into whether the security lapses leading to the Detroit Christmas incident had been intentional and deliberate, and thus the products of conscious sabotage. Wolffe had stated: “It seems that the president is leaning very much towards thinking this was a systemic failure by individuals who maybe had an alternative agenda.The question there is again, cock up or conspiracy. Was there a reason these agencies were at war with each other that prevented that intelligence from being shared?” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#34694889) The goal, summarized Olbermann, was either a “turf war” or else the desire “to make somebody [Obama] look bad.” In reality, the goals involve a domestic police state and foreign geopolitical adventures. Continue reading Obama Flubs His First Bay Of Pigs Moment As Terror Moles Escape Purge
Washington DC, Jan. 4, 2010 — Officials in the Obama White House are considering the possibility that the Christmas day attempt by Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Mutallab to blow up an airliner about to land in Detroit was deliberately and intentionally facilitated by unnamed networks inside the US intelligence community. This was the gist of a report by Richard Wolffe delivered in this evening’s edition of cable network MSNBC’s Countdown program, hosted by Keith Olbermann: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#34694889. This report comes on the eve of a special White House interagency conference convoked by Obama to deal with the massive systemic failure of US intelligence in allowing the Yemen alumnus Mutallab to board the Amsterdam to Detroit flight while allegedly carrying a PETN explosive device on his person. Continue reading Obama White House Probing Rogue Network of Moles Behind Christmas Detroit Patsy Fiasco, Reports Richard Wolffe on MSNBC
Tarpley tells RT that the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is not a matter of unconnected dots, but rather that of a protected patsy or puppet deliberately used by the US intelligence community for a Christmas Day provocation designed to facilitate US meddling in the civil war in Yemen, which is where Umar Farouk allegedly trained and was given his PETN device. Banker’s son Umar Farouk had been denied an entrance visa to Great Britain , and had been denounced to the US Embassy in Lagos, Nigeria as a possible terrorist by his own father in mid-November. His one-way ticket to Detroit was bought in Ghana for cash, and he reportedly entered Nigeria illegally. In Amsterdam , he was assisted at the Northwest Airlines gate by a “well-dressed Indian” who explained that Umar Farouk had no passport. He did have PETN, the same substance supposedly used by the mentally impaired shoe bomber Richard Reid in his abortive attack of eight years ago. In spite of all this, Umar Farouk’s US entry visa was never revoked, he never made it onto the no-fly list, and he was never thoroughly searched. These egregious lapses in normal procedure show that Umar Farouk was part of an orchestration sponsored by the CIA, which has now yielded 4 solid days of media hysteria. Obama has formulated his new version of the Axis of Evil, composed of Afghanistan-Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. In Yemen, a civil war pits the Saudi-backed central government against the Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi rebels, whom the US has bombed at least twice this month. The goal here is to play Iran against Saudi Arabia so as to weaken both the pro-Moscow Achmadinejad government in Iran, and also those Saudi forces that are fed up with their status as a US protectorate. The US is openly now sponsoring a regroupment of “al Qaeda” (the CIA Moslem legion) in Yemen , including by sending fighters direct from Guantanamo . The new CIA-promoted entity synthetic entity is “Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula or AQAP, a gaggle of US patsies, dupes, and fanatics which is claiming credit for the Umar Farouk incident. The US hopes to further dominate the exit from the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, while also easing pressure on the battered US dollar by jacking up the price of oil in an atmosphere of tension on the Arabian peninsula. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is now Totalitariano to the left, and Incompetano to the right. Rather than harassing travelers, she should resign or be fired along with the other corrupt, bungling, or complicit officials of the Obama administration involved in this false flag provocation.
Lithuania provided all the necessary conditions for operating a CIA secret prison for terror detainees, a parliamentary investigation has confirmed.
In light of the report, Lithuania’s prime minister has called for a crackdown on corruption in the country’s security services.
… historian and investigative journalist Webster Tarpley says that now that the official probe has proven the allegations true, the official US media is trying to cover the story up.
‘This is a very bitter pill [for Lithuania],’ Tarpley told RT. ‘It is clear that as a price for NATO membership, Lithuania was forced to let the CIA run wild with kidnappings, secret prisons and no charges, no due process, no notifications to the International Red Cross – none of this stuff.’
Obama’s West Point speech of December 1 represents far more than the obvious brutal escalation in Afghanistan — it is nothing less than a declaration of all-out war by the United States against Pakistan. This is a brand-new war, a much wider war now targeting Pakistan, a country of 160 million people armed with nuclear weapons. In the process, Afghanistan is scheduled to be broken up. This is no longer the Bush Cheney Afghan war we have known in the past. This is something immensely bigger: the attempt to destroy the Pakistani central government in Islamabad and to sink that country into a chaos of civil war, Balkanization, subdivision and general mayhem. The chosen strategy is to massively export the Afghan civil war into Pakistan and beyond, fracturing Pakistan along ethnic lines. It is an oblique war using fourth-generation or guerrilla warfare techniques to assail a country which the United States and its associates in aggression are far too weak to attack directly. In this war, the Taliban are employed as US proxies. This aggression against Pakistan is Obama’s attempt to wage the Great Game against the hub of Central Asia and Eurasia or more generally. Continue reading Obama Declares War on Pakistan
