Banksters

Done your laundry?

” Depending on which international agency you ask, criminals launder anywhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion worldwide every year. The global effect is staggering in social, economic and security terms.
. . .
Developing countries often bear the brunt of modern money laundering because the governments are still in the process of establishing regulations for their newly privatized financial sectors. This makes them a prime target. ”

Rumors relating to money laundering and connections between the fallen banks and the Russian mob continue. It is told that these are so ’embarrassing’ and reach so high up in the ranks and across boarders, that it will be about the last ‘material’ to be uncovered, – if at all.

In the meantime, low-level bank-employees are being investigated where the sums of money allegedly embezzled are in the range normal people can identify with.

No wonder that people delighted in the story about Tony Musulin – Best Thief of the Year 2009.

Meltdown Iceland
How Money Laundering Works

No Such Thing as a Random Sample

Opinion Makers are preparing a “National Assembly” (whole 0.3%) to flash out ideas of how we should mark our future after the horrific failure in our past.

At first look this appears to be a grand idea, Democracy at Work, – finally.

The selection process has been trumpeted as random sample out of the National Registry, i.e “having no definite aim or purpose; not sent or guided in a particular direction; made, done, occurring, etc., without method or conscious choice; haphazard”.

To start off, large sections of people have opted out of being included in ‘samples’ of any kind and the rest just don’t bother or have no knowledge of the possibility. People of foreign nationality although legible to vote in local elections automatically drop out, a primitive ‘random’ record collector is used, and there are many more limitations on the ‘randomness’.

Then there is the simple question of the organizers, who are they (Chamber of Commerce?), and the question who decided on those, who are the specially preselected representatives of special interests, and who decided on the general framework of the meting (consumer panels)?

So we are back to the “Propaganda model”, Agenda Setting by Predetermine, Select, Shape, Control and Restrict by: Selection of Topics, Distribution of Concerns, Emphasis, Framing of Issues, Filtering of Information and Bounding of Debate

Bankers in the Selling Role

The Engineering of Consent

To each according to his greed

“The only truly surprising thing about the 2008 financial meltdown is how easily the idea was accepted that its happening was unpredictable. Recall the demonstrations that throughout the last decade regularly accompanied meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank: the protesters’ complaints encompassed not only the usual antiglobalization motifs (the growing exploitation of Third World countries, etc.) but also how the banks were creating the illusion of growth by playing with fictional money and how this would all have to end in a crash. It was not only economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz who warned of the dangers ahead and made it clear that those who promised continuous growth did not really understand what was going on under their noses. In Washington in 2000, so many people demonstrated about the danger of a financial collapse that the city had to mobilize 3,500 local policemen. What ensued was tear–gassing, clubbing, and mass arrests. The police were used to stifle the truth.” – Slavoj Zizek – Democracy Now! & Harper’s Magazine

Opposite Land

Now that the banks that were created by and for fishermen, farmers, small industry and shopkeepers are no longer in our hands it is interesting to listen to the rhetoric.
The echo-chamber parrots the mantra about the benevolent foreign investor/creditor as being our heavenly Saviour and the mercy-full grace that we should be so lucky to have them.
In 1984 as in 2009; War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength

The new rules of news – Dan Gillmor

“You may have noticed – you could hardly miss it – the blizzard of anniversary stories last month about the fall of Lehman Brothers, an event that helped spark last year’s financial meltdown. The coverage reminded me that journalists failed to do their jobs before last year’s crisis emerged, and have continued to fail since then.

It also reminds me of a few pet peeves about the way traditional journalists operate. So here’s a list of 22 things, not in any particular order, that I’d insist upon if I ran a news organization.” guardian.co.uk

Who pays for corporate welfare?

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Surviving the Cataclysm

Webster Griffin Tarpley predicted our current economic meltdown in his book Surviving the Cataclysm (1999). In this second edition he continues his analysis of the “globalized hot money casino run by a tiny financier oligarchy”.

Tarpley calls for “wiping out derivatives, banning foreclosures, and nationalizing the failed Federal Reserve System”.

tarpley.net

The Silence of the Web

The latest trend in our ‘democratic’ and ‘crime free’ society is the hostility expressed towards bloggers / reporters. The self appointed ‘elite’, financial or otherwise, id est those who have acceptable opinions are mightily indignant over inappropriate comments and leaks in the blogger sphere and want it stopped. The old tools they are so grief-stricken for are the mass media, proper academics and of course their legal technicians (as they are now called).

I my self find Chomsky’s explanations illuminating when he writes: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

Joseph Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz will be here over the weekend.

Is he a true insider convert from the past or is he just trying to restore faith in his masters? – The Central bank didn’t listen to him in 2001, maybe it should have?

Until then take a look at this.
“Market Fundamentalism Is Dead”
Or this Greg Palast report for BBC Newsnight

Finally his lecture here (not omf)

Bold Riders or corporate swindlers, their bankers and politicians.

We have been living a nightmare, almost every day after the rapture, new information of fraud and financial misconduct has surfaced that is just unbelievable. After months of horrors, people are blocking their senses just to survive. From all of this the question arises, – is bankrupting a nation a crime or just a minor mishap?

The old formula of privatizing profits and nationalizing costs and losses is right at work. So ingrained is this ‘tradition’ that the nation is going to pay for bankers that went plundering around the world, committing criminal acts the people knew nothing about and were never consulted for, – not to speak of gains and profits (just the usual contempt). And how are we going to pay? – Out of lost moms and papas businesses, out of lost savings and pensions, lost homes, lowered salaries, increased prices and taxes and with our unemployment benefits? – You won’t get any prices for spotting the obvious alternative.

The untouchables strut around the world continuing their luxurious life stiles, taking up residencies in tax havens, where their kind is welcomed, out of reach of justice, – which in it self has lost all meaning.

What have the juristic and police authorities been doing about the scam and sleaze at the top? Investigating? Star advocates are seeing opportunities ahead defending the business bosses, advertising their services by vilifying their potential counterparts and I suppose judges are preparing the usual no verdict to their own upper echelons, nothing else is to be expected, after all the bosses have been writing their own laws for decades. Yes fighting the good fight against lower class crime continues unabated, police tirelessly go around greenhouses cutting ‘grass’, chasing children out of derelict houses they try to occupy, arresting drunks for peeing in the sea, etc. – What glory.

So is nothing of this current crisis our own fault? Yes of course, we bought into massive propaganda and public manipulation, into “sound” economic doctrines (junk science) taught in schools and academia, or in short a cult asserting that we were living in ideal conditions, actually the best of all worlds. Now that our social contract has been broken it will take much to convince us that things will ever be even tolerable.

New Government, new Governors in the Central Bank, new Governor at the Financial Supervisory Authority (already in place), even a new Constitutional Assembly (promised by some) will not do it. Swift Justice over the architects of this system, over the financiers the thirty men and three woman who are said to be responsible for the collapse of the country and their political cronies – just might.

However, swift is already very, very late, the shredders have long since gone quiet, – the Nazgûls of our world are recuperating.

Thankfully we are not alone, many countries if not all, have lived or are living under the same conditions. The Swindler’s List is endless, but the colossal propaganda on the behalf of the “Dark” (sorry) “Bold Riders” only doing much needed and proper business is faulting. Many people have thought long and hard about why we are here in the middle of an utterly unnecessary crisis, they have come here, shared their experience, their knowledge, and much valued expertise.

– Thanks to you all.

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