". . . a republic, if you can keep it."
Ron Paul commenting on the Fed’s recent actions and questioning Bernanke:
Let’s not forget, Bernanke says “I don’t believe we’ll have an inflation problem in terms of consumer prices.” On one hand, I’m excited by what will soon be a demonstration of him being dead wrong. On the other, when hasn’t Bernanke been dead wrong?
Ron Paul: “The Federal Reserve is the culprit”
“The US is set to announce it will boycott the World Conference Against Racism, to be held in April in Geneva, Switzerland. Israel and Canada have already declared they would not be attending the conference. A number of European countries are expected to join the list of nations condemning the conference, predicted to include criticisms against Israel.” (Read more from ynetnews.com)
“Bernard Madoff is seeking to keep a $7 million Manhattan penthouse and an additional $62 million in assets, saying they are unrelated to the fraud that authorities say cost victims more than $50 billion. In court papers filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Madoff and his lawyer claim the apartment, $45 million in municipal bonds and $17 million more in a separate account all belong to Madoff’s wife, Ruth.” (Read more from news.yahoo.com)
by John Pilger
“When I returned from the war in Vietnam, I wrote a film script as an antidote to the myth that the war had been an ill-fated noble cause. The producer David Puttnam took the draft to Hollywood and offered it to the major studios, whose responses were favorable – well, almost. Each issued a report card in which the final category, ‘politics,’ included comments such as: ‘This is real, but are the American people ready for it? Maybe they’ll never be.’
By the late 1970s, Hollywood judged Americans ready for a different kind of Vietnam movie. The first was The Deer Hunter which, according to Time, ‘articulates the new patriotism.’ The film celebrated immigrant America, with Robert de Niro as a working class hero (‘liberal by instinct’) and the Vietnamese as sub-human Oriental barbarians and idiots, or ‘gooks.’ The dramatic peak was reached during recurring orgiastic scenes in which GIs were forced to play Russian roulette by their Vietnamese captors. This was made up by the director Michael Cimino, who also made up a story that he had served in Vietnam. ‘I have this insane feeling that I was there,’ he said. “Somehow… the line between reality and fiction has become blurred.’
The Deer Hunter was regarded virtually as documentary by ecstatic critics. ‘The film that could purge a nation’s guilt!’ said the Daily Mail. . . .
My own 2007 film The War on Democracy, which inverted the ‘war on terror’ in Latin America, was distributed in Britain, Australia and other countries but not in the United States. ‘You will need to make structural and political changes,’ said a major New York distributor. ‘Maybe get a star like Sean Penn to host it – he likes liberal causes – and tame those anti-Bush sequences.’ . . .
These are extraordinary times. Vicious colonial wars and political, economic and environmental corruption cry out for a place on the big screen. Yet, try to name one recent film that has dealt with these, honestly and powerfully, let alone satirically. Censorship by omission is virulent. We need another Wall Street, another Last Hurrah, another Dr. Strangelove.” (Read more from antiwar.com)
“About 220,000 stores may close this year in America, says our guest, retail consultant Howard Davidowitz of Davidowitz & Associates. As more Americans save and spend less, it’s clear there’s too much retail space. Just visit Web site deadmalls.com and track retail’s growing body count. And luxury retailers? They’re on ‘life support,’ Davidowitz says.
Among the brandname stores Davidowitz says are in trouble:
*Nordstrom
*Neiman Marcus
*Tiffany
*Jeweler Zale Corp.
*Saks
*J.C. Penney
*Sears”
By PATRICK COCKBURN:
“In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme.
‘I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad,’ said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003.
In one case, auditors working for SIGIR discovered that $57.8m was sent in ‘pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills’ to the US comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr, who had himself photographed standing with the mound of money. He is among the few US officials who were in Iraq to be convicted of fraud and money-laundering.
Despite the vast sums expended on rebuilding by the US since 2003, there have been no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline except those at work building a new US embassy and others rusting beside a half-built giant mosque that Saddam was constructing when he was overthrown. One of the few visible signs of government work on Baghdad’s infrastructure is a tireless attention to planting palm trees and flowers in the centre strip between main roads. Those are then dug up and replanted a few months later.
Iraqi leaders are convinced that the theft or waste of huge sums of US and Iraqi government money could have happened only if senior US officials were themselves involved in the corruption. In 2004-05, the entire Iraq military procurement budget of $1.3bn was siphoned off from the Iraqi Defense Ministry in return for 28-year-old Soviet helicopters too obsolete to fly and armored cars easily penetrated by rifle bullets. Iraqi officials were blamed for the theft, but US military officials were largely in control of the Defense Ministry at the time and must have been either highly negligent or participants in the fraud.
American federal investigators are now starting an inquiry into the actions of senior US officers involved in the program to rebuild Iraq, according to The New York Times, which cites interviews with senior government officials and court documents. Court records reveal that, in January, investigators subpoenaed the bank records of Colonel Anthony B Bell, now retired from the US Army, but who was previously responsible for contracting for the reconstruction effort in 2003 and 2004. Two federal officials are cited by the paper as saying that investigators are also looking at the activities of Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald W Hirtle of the US Air Force, who was senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004. It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, who have both said they have nothing to hide.
The end of the Bush administration which launched the war may give fresh impetus to investigations into frauds in which tens of billions of dollars were spent on reconstruction with little being built that could be used. In the early days of the occupation, well-connected Republicans were awarded jobs in Iraq, regardless of experience. A 24-year-old from a Republican family was put in charge of the Baghdad stock exchange which had to close down because he allegedly forgot to renew the lease on its building.
In the expanded inquiry by federal agencies, the evidence of a small-time US businessman called Dale C. Stoffel who was murdered after leaving the US base at Taiji north of Baghdad in 2004 is being re-examined. Before he was killed, Mr Stoffel, an arms dealer and contractor, was granted limited immunity from prosecution after he had provided information that a network of bribery – linking companies and US officials awarding contracts – existed within the US-run Green Zone in Baghdad. He said bribes of tens of thousands of dollars were regularly delivered in pizza boxes sent to US contracting officers.
So far, US officers who have been successfully prosecuted or unmasked have mostly been involved in small-scale corruption. Often sums paid out in cash were never recorded. In one case, an American soldier put in charge of reviving Iraqi boxing gambled away all the money but he could not be prosecuted because, although the money was certainly gone, nobody had recorded if it was $20,000 or $60,000. . . .
In many cases, contractors never started or finished facilities they were supposedly building. As security deteriorated in Iraq from the summer of 2003 it was difficult to check if a contract had been completed. But the failure to provide electricity, water and sewage disposal during the US occupation was crucial in alienating Iraqis from the post-Saddam regime. . . .” (Read more from counterpunch.org)