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This was never more obvious than with the Wall Street bailout, whereby the very corporations that caused the collapse of our economy were rewarded with taxpayer dollars. So arrogant, so smug were they that, without a moment’s hesitation, they took our money — yours and mine — to pay their executives multimillion-dollar bonuses, something they continue doing to this very day. They have no shame. They don’t care what you and I think about them. Henry Kissinger refers to us as “useless eaters.”

But, you say, we have elected a candidate of change. To which I respond: Do these words of President Obama sound like change?

“A culture of irresponsibility took root, from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street.”
There it is. Right there. We are Main Street. We must, according to our president, share the blame. He went on to say: “And a regulatory regime basically crafted in the wake of a 20th-century economic crisis — the Great Depression — was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st-century global economy.”

This is nonsense.

The reason Wall Street was able to game the system the way it did — knowing that they would become rich at the expense of the American people (oh, yes, they most certainly knew that) — was because the financial elite had bribed our legislators to roll back the protections enacted after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Congress gutted the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial lending banks from investment banks, and passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed for self-regulation with no oversight. The Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently revised its rules to allow for even less oversight — and we’ve all seen how well that worked out. To date, no serious legislation has been offered by the Obama administration to correct these problems.

Instead, Obama wants to increase the oversight power of the Federal Reserve. Never mind that it already had significant oversight power before our most recent economic meltdown, yet failed to take action. Never mind that the Fed is not a government agency but a cartel of private bankers that cannot be held accountable by Washington. Whatever the Fed does with these supposed new oversight powers will be behind closed doors.

Obama’s failure to act sends one message loud and clear: He cannot stand up to the powerful Wall Street interests that supplied the bulk of his campaign money for the 2008 election. Nor, for that matter, can Congress, for much the same reason.

Consider what multibillionaire banker David Rockefeller wrote in his 2002 memoirs:

“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

Read Rockefeller’s words again. He actually admits to working against the “best interests of the United States.”

This idea of identifying crucial biochemical pathways, and then designing compounds to disrupt them is a leap from the traditional model of biological-agent development. It expands the options: there are likely to be thousands of potential molecular targets and numerous ways of disrupting each one.
Frontiers of concern

Concerns about this kind of expansion of biochemical threats have since been reiterated by scientific and medical communities. For example, in 2006, the US National Academies produced a report called Globalization, Biosecurity, and the Future of the Life Sciences. The authors argued that recent advances in our understanding of how bioregulatory compounds work, of signalling processes and of the regulation of human gene expression — combined with developments in chemistry, synthetic biology and in technologies such as nanotechnology — have “opened up new and exceedingly challenging frontiers of concern”.

More recently, a 2008 US National Academies report entitled Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies, similarly argued that in cases in which ‘agonists’ of a particular system have been found to enhance some cognitive trait, an ‘antagonist’ might be developed that could reduce it and vice versa. If dopamine agonists enhance attention, say, so dopamine antagonists might disrupt it. They also warned, among other things, that nanotechnologies could overcome the blood–brain barrier and “exploit existing transport mechanisms to transmit substances into the brain in analogy with the Trojan horse”.

Some researchers are actively facilitating the development of new chemical weapons. For example, a research group from Pennsylvania State University in University Park has identified several drug classes as potential non-lethal agents or ‘calmatives’, including benzodiazepines and alpha2-adrenoreceptor agonists, as well as individual drugs such as diazepam and dexmedetomidine.

…

The lack of engagement with this issue among life scientists in general is alarming. Some companies are already marketing oxytocin on the back of studies showing that a nasal squirt of the hormone increases trust in humans. Even though the effectiveness of commercial sprays is doubtful, such research opens up the possibility of a drug that could be used to manipulate people’s emotions in a military context. Discussions with more than 2,000 practising life scientists in 13 countries over the past few years have taught me that few have considered such possible uses of their work.

…

Four, of course. Calling a tail a leg wouldn’t make it a leg, as Abraham Lincoln famously said.

Nor does calling an expense an asset make it an asset. This brings us to the odd accounting rules for the insurance industry, including Lincoln National Corp., which uses Honest Abe as its corporate mascot.

Look at the asset side of Lincoln National’s balance sheet, and you’ll see a $10.5 billion item called “deferred acquisition costs,” without which the company’s shareholder equity of $9.1 billion would disappear. The figure also is larger than the company’s stock-market value, now at $7 billion.

These costs are just that — costs. They include sales commissions and other expenses related to acquiring and renewing customers’ insurance-policy contracts. At most companies, such costs would have to be recorded as expenses when they are incurred, hitting earnings immediately.

Because it’s an insurance company selling policies that may last a long time, however, Lincoln is allowed to put them on its books as an asset and write them down slowly — over periods as long as 30 years in some cases — under a decades-old set of accounting rules written exclusively for the industry.

Rule Overhaul

Megrahi’s early release from prison on compassionate grounds.

Lawyers for the bomber were to argue that an “elusive” terrorist codenamed Abu Elias planted the bomb in December 1988, causing the deaths of 270 innocent people.

Megrahi is now expected to identify the man behind this alias.

The ?Scottish?Sunday?Express tracked this man down to his home in the US, and he strongly denied having anything to do with the atrocity.

However, we can reveal that he has connections to at least two international?terrorists?and?a Palestinian terror group, as well as links to the US intelligence services.

The man, who works as a schools engineer for the US government, was to become the central figure in Megrahi’s aborted appeal.

‘Elias’, a commander in a Palestinian terror organisation, was identified as the CIA’s primary Lockerbie suspect but was never caught.

Sources close to Megrahi believe he may actually have been a double agent working for the FBI or the CIA.

Last night the man, who we have chosen not to name, said: “Sorry, I don’t think that I can help in this case. It is a clear case of either mistaken identity and/or fabrication.

“I don’t wish my name to be mentioned in any capacity in the press. I am sure you understand the sensitivity of this matter since I have a family and children.”

However, Christine Grahame MSP, who visited Megrahi in Greenock prison and campaigned for his release, is believed to be considering naming the man in the Scottish Parliament

She said: “It is apparent that US intelligence has known or must have known the primary suspect of the Lockerbie bombing was alive and living safely in Washington.

“There has been a suggestion made that he is in some way an ‘intelligence asset’ for the US and that is why he has been allowed to live in peace.

“He must be deeply relieved that Megrahi was forced to drop his appeal and that he will never face justice for this atrocity.”

Yesterday, Megrahi promised that before he dies he will present new evidence gathered for the appeal which will exonerate him. He said he will call on the British and Scottish people “to be the jury”.

The man Megrahi believes was Abu Elias now lives in a suburban neighbourhood near Washington’s Dulles airport, just a few miles from the White House and the Lockerbie memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. He even has his own Facebook social network page.

He is the nephew of Syrian terror warlord Ahmed Jibril, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).

Jibril was allegedly paid $10million by Iran to bomb an American passenger jet in retaliation for the US Navy accidentally shooting down an Iranian plane earlier in 1988, killing all 298 pilgrims on board.

The man is also related to Nezar Hindawi, a Syrian currently serving a 45-year?sentence?in?Whitemoor high-security?prison?in Cambridgeshire for plotting to blow up an Israeli jet flying from Heathrow to Tel Aviv in 1986.

A document submitted to the appeal court by Megrahi’s lawyers states: “The FBI had apparently investigated ‘X’ and knew he was the nephew of Ahmed Jibril.

“Once again, the hand of the US government appeared to be guiding matters behind the scenes.”

‘Elias’ was also connected to Mohammed Abu Talb, an Egyptian?named?by Dumfries and Galloway Police as their chief suspect less than a year after the bombing. The true identity of ‘Elias’ first came to light during a closed hearing at the Lockerbie trial in Holland in 2001, which led to Megrahi’s conviction.

However, the defence claim that attempts to investigate further were dismissed as a “fishing” exercise by the then Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd.

There is further evidence to link the PFLP-GC to the disaster, as first reported by the Scottish Sunday Express in 2004.

In October 1988, following a tip-off from the CIA, German police raided a PFLP-GC safe house in Neuss and discovered a bomb in a Toshiba cassette player, identical to the one which exploded on board Flight 103, as well as a Pan Am timetable.

Codenamed Autumn Leaves, the raid resulted in 16 arrests including that of cell leader Hafez Dalkamoni, later convicted for a bombing campaign on German railways,?and ­Marwan Khreesat, a double agent for the Jordanian intelligence service.

Khreesat said in an interview with an FBI agent that he had been introduced to a man called Abu Elias, an explosives and airline security expert who had been “giving orders”.

Another member of the terror cell, Mobdi Goben, later disclosed Elias’s true identity in a deathbed confession which became known as the Goben Memorandum during the Camp Zeist trial. Goben claimed ‘Elias’ placed a bomb in the luggage of Khaled Jafar, a Lebanese/American from Detroit who died on board Pan Am Flight 103.

A source close to Megrahi said yesterday that ‘Elias’ could have been spying for the Americans.

The source said: “Not only was Abu Elias known to the Americans, but what if he was working for them? The guy comes into the US from the former Soviet Union, he’s the nephew of Ahmed Jibril – the Bin Laden of his day – and he just strolls into the US?

“I think they turned him, and I think he operated as a double agent.

“Khreeshat said if they had waited one more day they would have got Elias in the Autumn Leaves raid.Goben says Elias put the bomb into Jafar’s case without his knowledge.

Boemio specializes in short selling, in a particularly Vegas way. Basically, she finds clients who owe more on their house than the house is worth (and that’s about 60% of homeowners in Las Vegas) and sells them a new house similar to the one they’ve been living in at half the price they paid for their old house. Then she tells them to stop paying the mortgage on their old place until the bank becomes so fed up that it’s willing to let the owner sell the house at a huge loss rather than dragging everyone through foreclosure. Since that takes about nine months, many of the owners even rent out their old house in the interim, pocketing a profit. (See pictures of modernist houses available for rent.)

Tons of people were doing this, but there were consequences. Renters were being evicted, through no fault of theirs, with a couple of days’ notice when the house finally went on the market. People are now paying a premium to live in apartment buildings, which in Vegas are almost always owned by a corporation. Sure, short selling damages the sellers’ credit rating, but they just bought a new house, so they don’t care.

Branches of Guaranty in Texas and California tomorrow will become offices of Birmingham, Alabama-based BBVA Compass, the U.S. affiliate of the Spanish bank, in a transaction brokered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the regulator said today. State and federal regulators also seized two banks in Georgia and a 10-branch lender in Alabama with $927 million in assets.

Guaranty had $13.5 billion in assets and $12 billion in deposits and “was in an unsafe and unsound condition because of the deteriorating quality of its loan portfolio, critically deficient earnings, capital insolvency and strained liquidity position,” the Office of Thrift Supervision, the lender’s regulator, said in a statement.

The collapse is the 11th biggest U.S. bank failure as regulators shut lenders at the fastest pace since 1992, when more than 120 institutions were seized. Of banks closed this year, three had assets exceeding $10 billion: Guaranty, Alabama’s Colonial BancGroup Inc., seized Aug. 14, and Florida’s BankUnited Financial Corp., closed May 21. BB&T Corp. bought Colonial and private-equity firms bought BankUnited.

The higher deficit figure, based on updated economic data, brings the White House budget office into line with outside estimates and gives further fuel to President Barack Obama’s opponents, who say his spending plans are too expensive in light of budget shortfalls.

The White House took heat for sticking with its $7.108 trillion forecast earlier this year after the Congressional Budget Office forecast that deficits between 2010 and 2019 would total $9.1 trillion.

“The new forecasts are based on new data that reflect how severe the economic downturn was in the late fall of last year and the winter of this year,” said the administration official, who is familiar with the budget mid-session review that is slated to be released next week.

—City of Victorville Economic Development Dept., 2006

Yes, a lot more… In just three years, it’s developed one of the highest unemployment rates in California, a respectably high crime rate, twice the number of parolee residents than any other city in the county, a half-dozen jails and penitentiaries, the worst high school dropout rate in the country and a whole lot of liquor stores.