Untitled Document

3-23-09

Obama Forms His Own Personal Republican Guard, a 175,000 Person Secrete Service Death Squads

Barack Obama said , "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that is just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded," Yuck. Sounds like the makings of a Republican Guard, SS, Secrete Service, Death Squads to me, and the US House gave him his 175,000 person personal Death Squad army on March 18, 2009. A major problem with this bill is its secrecy. There is not much in the news about this program. If Rothschilds/Rockefellers/Obama did not have something evil up his/their sleeve(s), this program would be in the news. To my mind Obama needs to be impeached yesterday. He is making war on America, and forming a 175,000 army is the force he needs to implement his war on America at home. Since the inception of this country we have never given the president a 175,000 man army to do what the president wants done. This 175,000 army could easily become Obama's Republican Guard. What is the state of Obama's presidential power now? Well Obama has the power to declare Americans terrorists, held indefinitely without charges, no US Constitutional rights. Has Obama done anything to give this illegal power back to the people? Nope. Actually Obama has worked from his first day in Office to protect this violation of the US Constitution, the president's right to call Americans terrorists and do with them what suits the president. What if Obama has a hatred of America? Obama is not eligible to be president because both his parents were not US citizens, the requirement of a president to be a natural born American. We know Obama would not be president if the bad guys, Rothschilds and Rockefellers, had not made Obama president. The Rothschilds and Rockefellers have deliberately destroyed the US banking system and destroyed the wealth of many middle class Americans with it. If the Rothschilds and Rockefellers are this common and hate America this much that they deliberately destroyed the US banking system, a banking system entrusted to them, logic dictates, their man in Office, Obama, has got horribly evil plans for America. The Rothschilds and Rockefellers stole our banking system originally in 1913, so we can expect they never respected it or cared for it as something given to them in trust. Obama said the US economic meltdown spelled opportunity. Opportunity for what? Opportunity to make the USA a bigger communi$t economy? If you are a communi$t and hate America and you are given an economy in ruin, a 175,000 person personal army to do with what you want, then opportunity may be in that person's mind a chance to destroy the US economy more and send your personal army door to door killing Americans just as Stalin did in Russia.

Obama calling the destruction of the US banking system an opportunity, Obama forming his own personal 175,000 man army to do with what he chooses, Obama letting stand the legal precedent that the president may declare Americans of his choosing terrorists and lock them up indefinitely without legal rights, and the fact the US has 600 hundred secrete prisons, on military bases, fully manned waiting for prisoners, is troubling, but the propaganda, lies and activities concerning Mexico may be more upsetting. The communi$t propaganda media says US gun shops are selling guns, ammunitions, and grenades to murderers in Mexico and these murderers are traveling between Mexico and the USA with ease. Do you believe this? Do you believe 911 happened the way the 911 Commission said it happened? Nope and Nope. The USA has the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, ask the Branch Dividians if the ATF do not play for real, and they have a billion dollar budget or so to make sure US gun shops sell to people legally able to buy guns. The ATF has shut down thousands of gun shops all over the USA and to say the ATF is not doing their job and letting murderers in Mexico buy guns is simply a communi$t propaganda lie. The Border Patrol is another billion dollar plus Federally funded organization and there job is to make sure contraband does travel between Mexico and the USA. Now for a US citizen to go to Mexico one must have a Passport. The Border Patrol is completely computerized and every vehicle is checked. Note that the communi$t media does not tell us how much contraband the Border Patrol seizes, but its huge. Now the communi$t$ are blaming the murdering in Mexico on Mexico becoming more Democratic. Good grief. Mexico is becoming more violent because of John Negroponte operatives in Mexico, not Mexican democracy. If Mexican murderers wanted guns they can buy guns from Israel or from 60 or so other countries around the world. I have never seen or heard of a live grenade sold in the USA. Period. So the question becomes, why is our communi$t directed media lying to us?

Well the US media lies to the American people when they have something bad planned for us that the truth will mess up. My guess is the Obama Administration is making war on the USA and they have plans to put us in a communi$t police state ruled by Martial law. The guys making war on us plan to start killing us and they do not want Americans to be able to flee their, communi$t$' terror, by running to Mexico. So the lies concerning Mexico pertain to the communi$t$' creating an Iron Curtain between Mexico and the USA to keep us locked up in the USA. Ask yourself a three questions. Did 911 make sense? Does Obama as president make sense? Does Mexico having a drug war with murderers buying their guns freely from the USA make sense? Nope. We are being who doed. Hustled. Scammed.

To combat the southbound flow of guns, ammunition and grenades at border checkpoints, the government may deploy new equipment, such as scales to weigh vehicles and automated license-plate readers linked to databases, as well as other surveillance technology, she said.

To an extent, Calderón's campaign against traffickers has struggled because, as Mexico has become more democratic, the police and judicial apparatus of the old authoritarian system has crumbled -- but has yet to be replaced by a professional law-enforcement system.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/18/house-readies-passage-volunteerism-critics-pricey-forced-service/

House Passes Volunteerism Bill Critics Call Pricey, Forced Service
The legislation will expand the1993 AmeriCorps program to match the renewed interest in national service since President Obama's election, which backers say is crucial in tough economic times.
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

FOXNews.com

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

The Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act, known as the GIVE Act -- sponsored by Reps. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y, and George Miller, D-Calif. -- was approved by a 321-105 vote and now goes to the Senate.

The legislation, slated to cost $6 billion over five years, would create 175,000 "new service opportunities" under AmeriCorps, bringing the number of participants in the national volunteer program to 250,000. It would also create additional "corps" to expand the reach of volunteerism into new sectors, including a Clean Energy Corps, Education Corps, Healthy Futures Corps and Veterans Service Corps, and it expands the National Civilian Community Corps to focus on additional areas like disaster relief and energy conservation.

It is the first time the AmeriCorps program, which was created by President Clinton in 1993, will be reauthorized, and supporters say it will have additional funding to match the renewed interest in national service since President Obama's election and the acute need for volunteerism and charity in tough economic times.

"National and community service can help make Americans a part of the solution to get our country through this economic crisis. I hope the House and Senate will join us in moving as quickly as possible to help President Obama sign this critical bill into law," Miller, chairman of the education committee, said after the bill was passed.

But the bill's opponents -- and there are only a few in Congress -- say it could cram ideology down the throats of young "volunteers," many of whom could be forced into service since the bill creates a "Congressional Commission on Civic Service."

The bipartisan commission will be tasked with exploring a number of topics, including "whether a workable, fair and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the nation."

"We contribute our time and money under no government coercion on a scale the rest of the world doesn't emulate and probably can't imagine," said Luke Sheahan, contributing editor for the Family Security Foundation. "The idea that government should order its people to perform acts of charity is contrary to the idea of charity and it removes the responsibility for charity from the people to the government, destroying private initiative."

House committee staff insist the GIVE Act will not change the voluntary nature of service.

"Its ridiculous to suggest that our bill includes any effort to make service a mandatory requirement. All of the opportunities our bill provides to Americans are voluntary. Americans are proud of their service and volunteering and their interest in it is only growing, especially in the face of this crisis. Our legislation recognizes that more Americans than ever want to serve and give back and provides them with more opportunities to be able to do so," Miller spokeswoman Rachel Racusen said in an e-mail to FOXNews.com.

Others say they are concerned that the increased funding will be used to promote one ideology over another.

"It's allowing taxpayer funding of the left-wing organizations," said Larry Hart, director of government relations for the American Conservative Union.

"I think this is a problem that is rife throughout the federal government. When you dramatically expand the program, then you dramatically expand the ability for these left-wing advocacy organizations to get more funding. I don't see a lot of attention being paid to that, even from those who are critical. That's where the focus should be. Republicans tend to say its not that they oppose the program, they just want to spend less money. It's the program that's bad."

South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson was one of three Republicans to oppose the legislation in committee. Wilson questioned the utility of the cash-strapped federal government making such huge investments in what he says should be community-inspired projects and programs.

"Volunteerism is part of the American spirit of generosity, and we all stand in support of those who will share their time," said Wilson, who was voted against the bill with Minnesota Rep. John Kline and California Rep. Tom McClintock.

"However, while our economy and our government is in financial trouble, it is not the best use of taxpayer dollars to spend the level of money on new and existing programs included in this bill."

Aides to Miller say they are awaiting estimates from the Congressional Budget Office on how much the GIVE Act would ultimately cost. In addition to all of the funding that goes to organizations in the forms of grants and administrative costs, AmeriCorps volunteers typically receive stipends and college scholarships when they complete one of the several available programs.

For example, a participant in the National Civilian Community Corps, which is a 10-month residential commitment, now receives $4,000 in living expenses and a $4,475 in money toward school. That conceivably would increase under the new legislation.

But regardless of the budget estimate, the financial benefits outweigh the cost, Racusen said.

"The millions of Americans who volunteered in 2007 generated benefits worth $158 billion," Racusen said. "A cost-benefit analysis of AmeriCorps, for example, shows that every dollar invested in the programs yields almost $4 in direct, measurable benefits. Investing in service helps low-income students achieve in school, prepares future workers for green jobs, provides assistance to veterans returning from war, and rebuilds homes and communities after disasters."

Many of the provisions in the GIVE Act can be found in Obama's 2010 fiscal year budget blueprint issued in February. The administration proposes $1.3 billion for the Corporation for National and Community Service, which administers AmeriCorps. CNCS received an estimated $260 million in fiscal 2009.

But some critics on the right suggest that the president's push for national service goes too far, and the recent congressional steps toward expanding the federal role in volunteerism and "civilian service" smacks of a larger agenda. They point to a campaign speech the president made last July in which he suggested national security could be entrusted to a civilian force.

"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that is just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded," Obama, who worked as a community organizer in Chicago early in his career, said during a Colorado Springs rally.

At the time, Obama was discussing expanding the USA Freedom Corps -- created by President George W. Bush in 2002 -- Peace Corps and AmeriCorps, as well as beefing up the cadre of foreign service officers abroad and programs in which veterans help veterans back home.

"This will empower more Americans to craft their own service agenda and make their own change from the bottom up," Obama said in the speech.

"Senator Obama aims to tap into the already active volunteerism of millions of Americans and recruit them to become cogs in a gigantic government machine grinding out his social re-engineering agenda," Lee Cary of the conservative American Thinker wrote at the time about Obama's remarks.

"(His words) were about turning America into one, giant, community organizer's sandbox at enormous cost to taxpayers," Cary wrote.

Supporters say critics are a minority who prefer to agitate than assist.

"Resistance to expanded public service programs can be expected from the ideologically sclerotic, those who occupy the negative ground between government as the problem and government as our enemy," former Democratic Colorado Sen. Gary Hart wrote in a recent op-ed on the Huffington Post Web site.

The Senate is mulling over a similar piece of legislation, the "Serve America Act," sponsored by Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. It was given a special endorsement by the president in his address before Congress on Feb. 24.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/21/AR2009032102247_pf.html

Anti-Drug Effort at Border Is Readied
Obama Plans to Send Agents, Equipment To Aid Mexican Fight

By Spencer S. Hsu and Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 22, 2009; A01

President Obama is finalizing plans to move federal agents, equipment and other resources to the border with Mexico to support Mexican President Felipe Calderón's campaign against violent drug cartels, according to U.S. security officials.

In Obama's first major domestic security initiative, administration officials are expected to announce as early as this week a crackdown on the supply of weapons and cash moving from the United States into Mexico that helps sustain that country's narco-traffickers, officials said.

The announcement sets the stage for Mexico City visits by three Cabinet members, beginning Wednesday with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and followed next week by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Napolitano, designated by Obama to convene a multi-agency security plan for the border, said the government is preparing plans to send more agents and intensify its investigation and prosecution of cartel-related activity in the United States. In addition, she said, the government may expand efforts to trace the sources of guns that move from the United States into Mexico.

Government officials are discussing how to increase intelligence sharing and military cooperation with Mexico, following a visit there this month by Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the administration could employ tools used to track terrorist financing to follow the flow of funds within the estimated $65 billion North American drug trade. Funds -- estimated at $18 billion to $39 billion a year -- move through wire transfers as well as cash smuggled into Mexico in planes and vehicles and by human "mules."

Obama, who plans to visit Mexico in mid-April and has said he will have a "comprehensive policy" on border security in place within months, has elevated to the top of the agenda a subject that did not receive significant attention in the presidential campaign. His focus on Mexico follows a sharp increase in drug-related killings in Mexican cities along the border, prompting fears in the United States of destabilization in the populous neighbor. Since the beginning of 2008, more than 7,200 people have died in drug-related violence, according to Mexican authorities.

Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said Obama's security and foreign policy aides have spent the past two months reordering their priorities as "snowballing" concern in Congress pushed Mexico "to the front burner" alongside the economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama's efforts mark a shift from the homeland security priorities of the Bush administration, targeted mainly at the threat of Islamist terrorists overseas and illegal immigration at home. While the new president has vowed to maintain counter-terrorism efforts, the addition of fighting Mexican drug trafficking as well human smuggling networks represents a new emphasis.

While a Pentagon study in November concluded that the sudden collapses of Mexico and Pakistan into failed states "bear consideration" as potential worst-case threats over 25 years, several senior U.S. intelligence officials disputed that analysis and said they do not believe the cartels will deliberately target U.S. government personnel, interests or civilians in the United States in the near-term.

"The ongoing violence is a concern, but not a national security threat to the United States," said Mike Hammer, spokesman for the National Security Council, who said it has largely resulted from Calderón's "determined and courageous" effort to dismantle the cartels.

Spillover violence in the United States is primarily cartel-on-cartel crime, such as kidnappings, Napolitano said. Phoenix, for example, reported 700 kidnappings in the past two years, mostly as human smugglers extorted fees from their clients.

Still, the long-term national security threat both in the United States and in Mexico would be real if Mexican authorities are forced to resume a de facto coexistence with narco-traffickers. Intelligence analysts argue that freedom for transnational crime organizations to operate in large parts of the country could undo Mexico's progress toward democratization and open markets, and erode U.S. influence.

"This is what people miss when they analyze Mexico. Drug trafficking feeds on a country that has a very precarious, if not nonexistent, rule of law," said Denise Dresser, a Mexican political scientist.

The U.S. anti-smuggling effort may make only a dent in the southbound flow of cash and weapons, but could ease the way for further U.S.-Mexican cooperation and help Calderón mobilize public support, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University and a Brookings Institution fellow.

A wave of violence in Mexico last year prompted urgent calls by Calderón for U.S. government action, aimed in part to bolster his weakened political standing ahead of crucial legislative elections in July, analysts say. At the same time, dire reports in the U.S. news media whipped up concern among key lawmakers here.

Bloodletting has taken on new degrees of savagery since Calderón began his assault against the cartels two years ago. The cartels beheaded about 200 people last year, staged grenade attacks in public places and conducted hours-long firefights in border cities.

Calderón's administration has pressed officials in Washington to do more to target U.S. demand for drugs and step up the delivery of promised assistance.

Last year the Bush administration pushed through Congress the Merida Initiative, a three-year, $1.4 billion counter-trafficking aid package for Mexico and Central America that includes training, military hardware, scanning technology and security database improvements. But Congress has approved only $300 million of the $450 million sought for Mexico in 2009, and delivery of some key equipment, helicopters and surveillance aircraft is not expected until 2011 at the earliest, officials say.

Meanwhile, Congress has held eight hearings on the issue under pressure from those on the right who seek to limit immigration and engagement with Mexico and those on the left who want to decriminalize drugs and tighten gun-control laws. The subject presents a test and an opportunity for Obama officials.

"A Democratic administration more than a Republican administration is going to be sensitive to any notion that it is not serious about a growing national security issue," said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

On the other hand, he added, "I don't think the administration wants to play into the hands of those who take a rather xenophobic stance with regard to immigration."

Staff writers Carrie Johnson, R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Financial_Tsunami/AIG/aig.html

AIG, Larry Summers and the Politics of Deflection

By F. William Engdahl, 18 March 2009

Finally US authorities have gotten ‘tough’ with the predator financial institutions. The world has been waiting for such decisive intervention since an unending series of Government bailouts of financial institutions began early in 2008 amounting to now trillions of taxpayer dollars. Now, with the world’s largest insurance giant, AIG, the White House Economic Council chairman, Larry Summers has expressed ‘outrage.’ President Obama himself has entered the fray to promise ‘justice.’ US Senators have threatened a law to change the injustice. The only problem is they are all exercising ‘politics of deflection,’ taking attention away from the real problem, the fraudulent bailout.

The issue is over AIG announcing it was obligated to pay its traders in its high-risk London unit a sales bonus totaling $165 million for the year. Obama Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner has announced a novel strategy for ‘justice.’ AIG will ‘reimburse’ the taxpayers up to $165 million for bonuses the company is giving employees. AIG will pay the Treasury an amount equal to the bonuses, and the Treasury will deduct that amount from the $30 billion in government (taxpayer) assistance that will soon go to the company. But he said that the Obama administration hasn't given up on efforts to recoup the money from the employees who got the bonuses. Good luck.

Larry Summers is the man directly responsible for the mess. As Clinton Treasury Secretary from 1999-January 2001 he shaped and pushed the financial deregulation that unleashed the present crisis. He was Treasury Secretary after July 1999 when his boss, Robert Rubin left to become Vice Chairman of Citigroup, where Rubin went on to advance the colossal agenda of deregulated finance directly.

As Treasury Secretary in 1999 Summers played a decisive role in pushing through the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act of 1933 that was instituted to guard against just the kind of banking abuses taxpayers now are having to bail out. Not only Glass-Steagall repeal. In 2000 Summers backed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that incredibly mandated that financial derivatives, including in energy, could be traded between financial institutions completely without government oversight, ‘Over-the-Counter’ as in where the taxpayer is now being dragged. Credit default Swaps, at the center of the current storm, would not have been possible without Larry Summers and the Commodity Modernization Act of 2000. He is now the White House Economic Council chairman, mandated to find a solution to the crisis he helped make along with Tim Geithner, his friend who is Treasury chief. Foxes should never be asked to guard the henhouse.

Theatre of the absurd or deflection?

This all makes great food for tabloid headlines and popular outrage. They can write that elected politicians are finally acting in taxpayer interests. Until we look a bit more closely. Paying $165 million in employee bonuses or any amount for a company that is in the middle of a multi-trillion dollar fraud that is bringing the world economy down with it is ‘outrageous.’

The problem is the tax bailout haemmorrhage will go on. The reason is the Obama Administration like its predecessor refuses to take consequent action with AIG, despite the fact today the US Government owns at least 80% of AIG stock, bought for $180 billion of, yes, taxpayer dollars. To demand AIG ‘pay back the government’ is absurd as the government is in effect demanding it pay itself back with its own money. The latest claim that the Treasury will subtract the $165 million bonus money from the next $30 billion tranche it will give AIG says it all.

Preserving the CDS bubble

The political ‘outrage’ expressed by the Obama Administration is an example of ‘perception management.’ The population is being slylyduped into believing their officials are working in their interest. In reality the officials are channeling growing popular outrage over endless bank bailouts away from the real problem to an entirely tertiary one. The US Government has injected $180 billion since September 2008 to keep the ‘brain dead’ AIG in business and honoring its Credit Default Swap obligations. In effect, they are propping up the casino to continue endless gambling with taxpayer dollars.

The rise of a market in derivatives or ‘swaps’ contracts supposedly to ‘insure’ against a company going into default and not being able to honor its debts, the Credit Default Swaps market, is at the heart of the global financial catastrophe. The market was ‘invented’ by a young economist at JP MorganChase, interestingly enough one of the few big banks recording profit today.

As noted, CDS trading was created free from US Government regulation by President Clinton when he signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 that mandated that financial derivatives not be under government regulation scrutiny. Enron crony and UBS bank adviser, Texas good ‘ol boy Congressman Phil Gramm helped pass the laws at a time his wife, Wendy headed the putative regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC). That gave the green light to a derivatives market nominally worth more than $62 trillion in 2008. No one knows the exact size because this is a ‘phantom banking market’ completely private and between banks, so-called OTC for Over-The-Counter, ‘just between us.’

Michael Greenberger who headed the CFTC Division of Trading and Markets in the late 1990’s at the time of the financial deregulation acts, says that banks and hedge funds"were betting the subprimes would pay off and they would not need the capital to support their bets." The unregulated Credit Default Swaps, he says, have been at "the heart of the subprime meltdown. In 1998 Greenberger proposed regulating the growing derivatives market. At the prospect, he says, "all hell broke loose. The lobbyists for major commercial banks and investment banks and hedge funds went wild. They all wanted to be trading without the government looking over their shoulder."

The confidence between banks, the ‘just between us,’ collapsed after the ill-conceived decision by the US Government on September 15 2008 not to save the world’s fourth largest investment bank, Lehman Brothers. By then, there was no alternative but to nationalize and then sort out the mess. Bankruptcy, as the world now realizes, was not an option. But neither was the Henry Paulson TARP ‘casino rescue plan’ and Geithner’s continuation any option.

At the point the Government let Lehman Bros go down only months after saving the far smaller Bear Stearns and also AIG, not even a bank, there was no clear idea who would be saved and who not. No bank could afford to trust any other bank not to be holding just as risky loans as they. The crisis became a global systemic crisis. Notably, the man who participated in the decision to let Lehman Bros fail ‘to teach a lesson’ was then President of the New York Federal Reserve, US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

The US Government has stated that AIG cannot be allowed to fail, that, to use the jargon, AIG is ‘too big to fail.’ The reason the Government says it can’t let AIG fail is that if the company defaulted, hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Credit-Default Swaps (CDS) would ‘blow up,’ and US and European banks whose toxic assets are supposedly insured by AIG would suddenly be sitting on immense losses. Quite the contrary, AIG is ‘too big to save’ under current rules of the game that have been written by Wall Street and the privately-owned Federal Reserve, Treasury Secretary Geithner’s former employer.

The CDS fraud

Credit Default Swaps purported, in theory, to let banks remove loan risk from their balance sheet onto others such as AIG, an insurer. It was based on a colossal fraud using flawed mathematical risk models.

AIG went big into the selling Credit Default Swaps with banks around the world, from its London ‘Financial Practices’ unit. AIG in effect issued pseudo ‘insurance’ for the hundreds of billions of dollars in new Asset Backed Securities (ABS) that Wall Street firms and banks like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Barclays were issuing, including Sub-prime Mortgage Backed Securities.

It was a huge Ponzi scheme built by AIG that depended on the fact the world’s largest insurance company held a rare AAA credit rating from Moody’s and S&P rating agencies. That meant AIG could borrow more cheaply than other companies with lower ratings

AIG issuing of CDS contracts acted as a form of insurance for the various exotic Asset Backed Securities (ABS) securities being issued by Wall Street and London banks. AIG was saying ‘if, by some remote chance’ those mortgage-backed securities suffered losses, AIG would pay the loss, not the banks.

Then it got really wild. Because credit-default swaps were not regulated, not even classed as a traditional insurance product, AIG didn’t have to set aside loss reserves! And it didn’t. So when housing prices started falling, and losses started piling up, it had no way to pay off.

AIG then issued of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of CDS instruments to allow banks to make their balance sheets look safer than they really were. Banks were able to get their loan risk low not by owning safer assets. They simply bought AIG’s credit-default swaps. The swaps meant that the risk of loss was transferred to AIG, making the bank portfolios look absolutely risk-free. That gave banks the legal illusion of BIS minimum capital requirements, so they could increase their leverage and buy yet more ‘risk-free’ assets.

How could that be allowed? The level of venal corruption in the Clinton and then Bush Administration rivals that of the last days of Rome before its fall from the internal rot of corruption. Banks invested billions in lobbying Washington politicians to get their way.

What can be done?

Fortunately there is a simple way out of the AIG debacle. The US Government can step in and fully nationalize AIG, 100%, kick out responsible management, declare AIG’s CDS contracts null and void and let holders sue the US government to regain value for what were in reality lottery gambles not loans to the real economy . They own 80% so the step is small to 100%. Doing that would end the global market in CDS and open the door for countless legal challenges. But AIG’s counterparties, as we begin to learn, were exactly the big Wall Street players like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, even Deutsche Bank. They have gotten enough taxpayer bailouts to cover their risk in CDS. Let them recognize risk is the heart of banking, not the opposite.

Myron Scholes, the ‘father’ of financial derivatives, who won a Nobel Prize in economics in 1997 for inventing the stock options model that led to financial derivatives back in the 1970’s, has declared that derivatives and Credit Default Swaps have gotten so dangerously out of hand that authorities must ‘blow up’ the market.

http://www.examiner.com/x-536-Civil-Liberties-Examiner~y2009m3d16-Theyre-not-enemy-combatants-anymore-but-Obama-will-still-detain-them-without-charges

They're not 'enemy combatants' anymore, but Obama will still detain them without charges
March 16, 12:11 PM · 4 comments
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President Obama isn't George W. Bush -- Bush wasn't
this cynical. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)They're not called "enemy combatants" anymore, but that may be the Obama administration's only real change in policy with regards to military detainees. Whatever they're called, anybody said by the U.S. government to give "substantial" support to al Qaeda or the Taliban will still be held without charges or a trial in which American authorities have to prove their accusations.

Rather than rejecting the Bush administration's ill-conceived notion of a 'war on terror,' the Obama administration's position on detainees has merely tinkered with its form."
--Human Rights Watch
In a statement accompanying a filing with the federal district court for the District of Columbia, administration officials said:

[T]he Department of Justice submitted a new standard for the government’s authority to hold detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility. The definition does not rely on the President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief independent of Congress’s specific authorization. It draws on the international laws of war to inform the statutory authority conferred by Congress. It provides that individuals who supported al Qaeda or the Taliban are detainable only if the support was substantial. And it does not employ the phrase "enemy combatant."

Essentially, then, the administration is dropping a single bit of terminology, retaining the previous administration's claim to have a right to hold people seized around the world without charges, and shifting the basis of its assertion of that authority from a nebulous appeal to executive authority to a tendentious interpretation of congressional actions as viewed through an equally questionable spin on international law.

In the formal document filed with the court, Respondents’ Memorandum Regarding the Government's Detention Authority Relative to Detainees Held at Guantanamo Bay (PDF), the Justice department argues that habeas corpus petitions by detainees should be viewed in light of the administration's position regarding suspected terrorists:

The President has the authority to detain persons that the President determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and persons who harbored those responsible for those attacks. The President also has the authority to detain persons who were part of, or substantially supported, Taliban or al-Qaida forces or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act, or has directly supported hostilities, in aid of such enemy armed forces.

The problem, of course, is that, in the absence of specific charges and trials, the government never has to prove its claims that the people it locks up ever truly "engaged in hostilities against the United States." It simply makes assertions against people it doesn't like and locks the cell door.

This position is essentially indistinguishable from the one taken by the Bush administration. In the memorandum, Obama administration officials cite the same precedents (Ex parte Quirin) dredged up by their predecessors.

In fact, the old Bush position still applies beyond the gates of Guantanamo. As Lyle Denniston, writing for SCOTUSBlog, notes:

The memorandum expressly noted that the new definition would only apply to individuals now held at Guantanamo Bay. That leaves out, among other detention sites, the U.S. military jail operated at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Earlier, the Obama Administration told Judge Bates that it was not changing the Bush Administration view that the Bagram detainees have no rights to challenge their captivity there.

No wonder Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU, responded, "It is deeply troubling that the Justice Department continues to use an overly broad interpretation of the laws of war that would permit military detention of individuals who were picked up far from an actual battlefield or who didn't engage in hostilities against the United States."

Human Rights Watch objects, "Rather than rejecting the Bush administration's ill-conceived notion of a 'war on terror,' the Obama administration's position on detainees has merely tinkered with its form."

Coupled with the Obama administration's adoption of the Bush administration's "state secrets" position to shield government misdeeds from public scrutiny or legal challenge, Attorney General Eric Holder's assertion that the Guantanamo detention facility is "well run," the dispatch of additional troops to Afghanistan and the continuation of economic policies based on bailouts and massive government spending, President Barack Obama is starting to look an awful lot like President George W. Bush, with fewer smirks and more friends in the press.