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LE Online EXCLUSIVE (May 21, 2005) :
The May 5th Congressional Memo Delivered to George Bush (723 KB PDF)How to float like a stone
May 11, 2005
The GuardianWhat goes up no longer has to come down. British scientists have developed an antigravity machine that can float heavy stones, coins and lumps of metal in mid-air. Based around a powerful magnet, the device levitates objects in a similar way to how a maglev train runs above its tracks.
Peter King, a physics professor at Nottingham University, said: "We can take an object and float it in mid-air because the magnetic forces on the object are enough to balance gravity."
The device exploits diamagnetism. Place non-magnetic objects inside a strong enough magnetic field and they are forced to act like weak magnets themselves. Generate a field that is stronger below and weaker above, and the resulting upward magnetic force cancels out gravity.
Scientists have used diamagnetism to make wood, strawberries and, famously, a living frog fly. "That force is strong enough to float things with a density similar to water, but not things with the density of rocks," Prof King said. To make their machine more powerful, the team added an oxygen and nitrogen mixture, a paramagnetic fluid. Inside the magnet, the mixture helps objects to float.
The researchers, who announce their results today in the New Journal of Physics, are working with Rio Tinto to develop the technique to sort precious stones from soil. The US space agency Nasa is also interested as it offers a cheaper way for zero gravity research.
Scientists levitate heaviest elements with help from cold oxygen
11 May 2005Scientists at the University of Nottingham have successfully levitated diamond and some of the heaviest elements, including lead and platinum. Using liquid oxygen to increase the buoyancy created by a specially designed superconducting magnet, they could now levitate a hypothetical object with a density 15 times larger than that of the densest known material, osmium. This research is published today (11th May 2005) in the New Journal of Physics co-owned by the Institute of Physics and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (the German Physical Society).
Writing in the New Journal of Physics, the team led by Professor Laurence Eaves and Professor Peter King, describes for the first time how mixtures of oxygen and nitrogen in the liquid and gaseous states provide sufficient buoyancy to levitate a wide variety of objects including diamonds, a £1 coin, and heavy metals such as gold, silver, lead and platinum.
Some materials, called diamagnetic, tend to become magnetized in a direction opposite to the magnetic field being applied to them. Magnetic levitation occurs when the force on such an object is strong enough to balance the weight of the object itself. If the object is immersed in a fluid such as gaseous oxygen, the levitation can be enhanced by the effect of buoyancy caused by the “magneto-Archimedes” effect.
Liquid oxygen, the main component in many rocket fuels, is highly combustible. It is potentially dangerous to use but makes it much easier to float dense objects using commercially available magnets because it boosts the buoyancy effect due to the inherent magnetism of each molecule of oxygen. This allows you to float objects as heavy as gold with relatively low-power magnets. Eaves and King and their co-workers have now investigated the use of a safer mixture of liquid nitrogen and oxygen, and found the optimum mixture for floating heavy objects in safety, making commercial applications of this technology possible.
Levitating heavy objects in this way has a variety of potential applications, especially in the mining and pharmaceutical industries. In mining for precious stones such as diamonds, a method for accurately filtering the gems you want from the surrounding rock and soil is worth its weight in gold.
Peter King explains: “You can use this technology to accurately sort minerals. Under vibration you throw crushed ore into the air and in the magnet the different components experience different effective gravity. They therefore tend to land at different times and after a short while the vibration sorts them into bands according to their density. The method can discriminate between components with very small differences in density enabling you to extract the precious parts you require.”
Their research lab is also the only facility in the UK specializing in zero-gravity experiments, and is currently being used by various research groups including one studying how plants germinate and grow in zero-gravity conditions, essential knowledge for long-haul space flights. Their work is supported by the Basic Technology Scheme of Research Councils UK.
The paper ‘Cryogenically enhanced magneto-Archimedes Levitation’ by A. Catherall, P.Lopez-Alcaraz, K. A. Benedict, P. J. King and L. Eaves was published in the New Journal of Physics (www.njp.org) on Wednesday 11th May.
Real ID
Bruce Schneier
May 09, 2005The United States is getting a national ID card. The REAL ID Act (text of the bill and the Congressional Research Services analysis of the bill) establishes uniform standards for state driver's licenses, effectively creating a national ID card. It's a bad idea, and is going to make us all less safe. It's also very expensive. And it's all happening without any serious debate in Congress.
I've already written about national IDs. I've written about the fallacies of identification as a security tool. I'm not going to repeat myself here, and I urge everyone who is interested to read those two essays (and even this older essay). A national ID is a lousy security trade-off, and everyone needs to understand why.
Aside from those generalities, there are specifics about REAL ID that make for bad security.
The REAL ID Act requires driver's licenses to include a "common machine-readable technology." This will, of course, make identity theft easier. Assume that this information will be collected by bars and other businesses, and that it will be resold to companies like ChoicePoint and Acxiom. It actually doesn't matter how well the states and federal government protect the data on driver's licenses, as there will be parallel commercial databases with the same information.
Even worse, the same specification for RFID chips embedded in passports includes details about embedding RFID chips in driver's licenses. I expect the federal government will require states to do this, with all of the associated security problems (e.g., surreptitious access).
REAL ID requires that driver's licenses contain actual addresses, and no post office boxes. There are no exceptions made for judges or police -- even undercover police officers. This seems like a major unnecessary security risk.
REAL ID also prohibits states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal aliens. This makes no sense, and will only result in these illegal aliens driving without licenses -- which isn't going to help anyone's security. (This is an interesting insecurity, and is a direct result of trying to take a document that is a specific permission to drive an automobile, and turning it into a general identification device.)
REAL ID is expensive. It's an unfunded mandate: the federal government is forcing the states to spend their own money to comply with the act. I've seen estimates that the cost to the states of complying with REAL ID will be $120 million. That's $120 million that can't be spent on actual security.
And the wackiest thing is that none of this is required. In October 2004, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 was signed into law. That law included stronger security measures for driver's licenses, the security measures recommended by the 9/11 Commission Report. That's already done. It's already law.
REAL ID goes way beyond that. It's a huge power-grab by the federal government over the states' systems for issuing driver's licenses.
REAL ID doesn't go into effect until three years after it becomes law, but I expect things to be much worse by then. One of my fears is that this new uniform driver's license will bring a new level of "show me your papers" checks by the government. Already you can't fly without an ID, even though no one has ever explained how that ID check makes airplane terrorism any harder. I have previously written about Secure Flight, another lousy security system that tries to match airline passengers against terrorist watch lists. I've already heard rumblings about requiring states to check identities against "government databases" before issuing driver's licenses. I'm sure Secure Flight will be used for cruise ships, trains, and possibly even subways. Combine REAL ID with Secure Flight and you have an unprecedented system for broad surveillance of the population.
Is there anyone who would feel safer under this kind of police state?
Americans overwhelmingly reject national IDs in general, and there's an enormous amount of opposition to the REAL ID Act. This is from the EPIC page on REAL ID and National IDs:
More than 600 organizations have expressed opposition to the Real ID Act. Only two groups--Coalition for a Secure Driver's License and Numbers USA--support the controversial national ID plan. Organizations such as the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, National Association of Evangelicals, American Library Association, Association for Computing Machinery (pdf), National Council of State Legislatures, American Immigration Lawyers Association (pdf), and National Governors Association are among those against the legislation.
And this site is trying to coordinate individual action against the REAL ID Act, although time is running short. It's already passed in the House, and the Senate votes tomorrow.
If you haven't heard much about REAL ID in the newspapers, that's not an accident. The politics of REAL ID is almost surreal. It was voted down last fall, but has been reintroduced and attached to legislation that funds military actions in Iraq. This is a "must-pass" piece of legislation, which means that there has been no debate on REAL ID. No hearings, no debates in committees, no debates on the floor. Nothing.
Near as I can tell, this whole thing is being pushed by Wisconsin Rep. Sensenbrenner primarily as an anti-immigration measure. The huge insecurities this will cause to everyone else in the United States seem to be collateral damage.
Unfortunately, I think this is a done deal. The legislation REAL ID is attached to must pass, and it will pass. Which means REAL ID will become law. But it can be fought in other ways: via funding, in the courts, etc. Those seriously interested in this issue are invited to attend an EPIC-sponsored event in Washington, DC, on the topic on June 6th. I'll be there.
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The Lethal Science Of Splenda - A Poisonous Chlorocarbon
By James Bowen, M.D.
5-8-5James Bowen, M.D., A physician, biochemist, and survivor of aspartame poisoning warns about yet another synthetic sweetener, Splenda.
HAWAII -- The chemical sucralose, marketed as "Splenda", has replaced aspartame as the #1 artificial sweetener in foods and beverages. Aspartame has been forced out by increasing public awareness that it is both a neurotoxin and an underlying cause of chronic illness worldwide. Dr. James Bowen, Researcher and biochemist, reports:
"Splenda/sucralose is simply chlorinated sugar; a chlorocarbon. Common chlorocarbons include carbon tetrachloride, trichlorethelene and methylene chloride, all deadly. Chlorine is nature's Doberman attack dog, a highly excitable, ferocious atomic element employed as a biocide in bleach, disinfectants, insecticide, WWI poison gas and hydrochloric acid.
"Sucralose is a molecule of sugar chemically manipulated to surrender three hydroxyl groups (hydrogen + oxygen) and replace them with three chlorine atoms. Natural sugar is a hydrocarbon built around 12 carbon atoms. When turned into Splenda it becomes a chlorocarbon, in the family of Chlorodane, Lindane and DDT,
"It is logical to ask why table salt, which also contains chlorine, is safe while Splenda/sucralose is toxic? Because salt isn't a chlorocarbon. When molecular chemistry binds sodium to chlorine to make salt carbon isn't included. Sucralose and salt are as different as oil and water.
"Unlike sodium chloride, chlorocarbons are never nutritionally compatible with our metabolic processes and are wholly incompatible with normal human metabolic functioning. When chlorine is chemically reacted into carbon-structured organic compounds to make chlorocarbons, the carbon and chlorine atoms bind to each other by mutually sharing electrons in their outer shells. This arrangement adversely affects human metabolism because our mitochondrial and cellular enzyme systems are designed to completely utilize organic molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and other compatible nutritional elements.
"By this process chlorocarbons such as sucralose deliver chlorine directly into our cells through normal metabolization. This makes them effective insecticides and preservatives. Preservatives must kill anything alive to prevent bacterial decomposition."
Dr. Bowen believes ingested chlorocarbon damage continues with the formation of other toxins: "Any chlorocarbons not directly excreted from the body intact can cause immense damage to the processes of human metabolism and, eventually, our internal organs. The liver is a detoxification organ which deals with ingested poisons. Chlorocarbons damage the hepatocytes, the liver's metabolic cells, and destroy them. In test animals Splenda produced swollen livers, as do all chlorocarbon poisons, and also calcified the kidneys of test animals in toxicity studies. The brain and nervous system are highly subject to metabolic toxicities and solvency damages by these chemicals. Their high solvency attacks the human nervous system and many other body systems including genetics and the immune function. Thus, chlorocarbon poisoning can cause cancer, birth defects, and immune system destruction. These are well known effects of Dioxin and PCBs which are known deadly chlorocarbons."
Dr. Bowen continues: "Just like aspartame, which achieved marketplace approval by the Food and Drug Administration when animal studies clearly demonstrated its toxicity, sucralose also failed in clinical trials with animals. Aspartame created brain tumors in rats. Sucralose has been found to shrink thymus glands (the biological seat of immunity) and produce liver inflammation in rats and mice.
"In the coming months we can expect to see a river of media hype expounding the virtues of Splenda/sucralose. We should not be fooled again into accepting the safety of a toxic chemical on the blessing of the FDA and saturation advertising. In terms of potential long-term human toxicity we should regard sucralose with its chemical cousin DDT, the insecticide now outlawed because of its horrendous long term toxicities at even minute trace levels in human, avian, and mammalian tissues.
"Synthetic chemical sweeteners are generally unsafe for human consumption. This toxin was given the chemical name "sucralose" which is a play on the technical name of natural sugar, sucrose. One is not the other. One is food, the other is toxic; don't be deceived."
Dr. Bowen also calls attention to another seldom recognized and deadly permanent effect of these chemicals: "Aspartame, sold as NutraSweet, Equal, E951, Canderel, Benevia and under other names, is a hypersensitization agent which causes Polychemical Sensitivity syndrome. Chlorocarbons strongly induce uncurable hypersensitivity diseases which are now becoming rampant." (James Bowen, M.D.)
Doctor Bowen has spent 20 years researching artificial sweeteners after his use of aspartame resulted in being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. Dr Bowen's intention is to warn the world of the toxicity of tabletop poisons like aspartame, Splenda and Neotame.
For more information on aspartame and Splenda click on the Aspartame Information List on http://www.wnho.net. Dr. Bowen can be seen in the movie "Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World" For the movie call 1 818 349 8822 or email cori@soundandfuryproductions.com See how aspartame was approved by clicking onhttp://www.soundandfury.tv/pages/Rumsfeld2.html
Dr. Betty Martini says "the controversy rages over Splenda (sucralose). Is it safe and natural like sugar or is it a chlorinated hydrocarbon? As lawsuits fly, consider the chemistry of this artificial compound."
She adds: "The FDA denied approval of aspartame for 16 years, then caved in to political/economic pressure when Don Rumsfeld, CEO of the manufacturer, was brought to Washington by Ronald Reagan. A new FDA Commissioner was appointed to approve it then became a consultant for NutraSweet's public relations firm for $1,000/day on a 10 year contract. Forthcoming has been a global epidemic of disability and death. One might expect FDA to be more cautious next time, yet FDA approved the toxic chlorocarbon Splenda without hesitation and without any long term testing on human subjects."
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Chertoff Moves For Total Personal Information Control
DHS Chief Floats Idea Of Collecting Data On Private Citizens
Call It Total Information Awareness, Homeland-Style.
By Siobhan Gorman
National Journal.com
5-5-5Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff this week floated an idea to start a nonprofit group that would collect information on private citizens, flag suspicious activity, and send names of suspicious people to his department.
The idea, which Chertoff tossed out at an April 27 meeting with security-industry officials, is reminiscent of the Defense Department's now-dead Total Information Awareness program that sought to sift though heaps of foreign intelligence information to root out potential terrorist activity.
According to one techie who attended the April 27 meeting, Chertoff told the group, "Maybe we can create a nonprofit and track people's activities, and an algorithm could red-flag individuals. Then, the nonprofit could give us the names."
Chertoff also suggested that private industry form a group to collect proprietary information about cyber- and other infrastructure-security breaches from companies; scrub it of identifying information; aggregate it; and pass it along to the department. The financial services industry already has such a group.
"The secretary was responding to a hypothetical question with a hypothetical answer," said Homeland Security Department press secretary Brian Roehrkasse. "He did not offer specific programmatic content or discuss any specific proposed approach. Rather, he was discussing, in general terms, the importance of this issue of balancing security and privacy."
Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, organized the gathering of about 50 security-industry executives from companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Verizon. Reached by phone at the meeting, he characterized the event as "an organizational meeting to discuss how the [information-technology] industry can work more effectively with each other" and with the Homeland Security Department.
Because the meeting was closed to the press, Miller would not discuss Chertoff's comments.One meeting participant said that Chertoff told the group that having a nonprofit collect names rather than the government "would alleviate some of the concerns people have." Not so for this participant: "This is what made me sort of shift in my seat. It sounds like investigating every person for no reason." He was particularly concerned that an unknown formula created by this new group would determine the red flags. Story Link
911 and American Denial
Author Unknown
4-22-5In this post 9/11 era, most Americans are unable even to consider the possibility of US government complicity in the attacks on our nation even when confronted with a mountain of evidence. In contrast, many of these same people accept far less believable scenarios simply on the basis of faith and without a single shred of evidence such as believing in the existence of a God. Tragically, they seem to have the exact same blind trust in the Bush administration.
At close inspection, the official version of 9/11 is outrageously full of holes. When those of us who are knowledgeable discuss the evidence that has unearthed about that day, there is so much to reveal that we don’t know where to start or where to stop. When tapped for what we know, we have so much to expose that the torrent of information that rushes can sound like the meaningless rant of a lunatic. Regardless of how credible or tangible the evidence, when rolled out in front of the public, it often sounds too far fetched or irrational to believe.
The facts that have come out about 9/11 differ so greatly from the official story that they almost defy validity. On the contrary, the official version is so simple as to be perfectly believable. It places the entire blame on the work of a handful of terrorists who hated us for our freedom. Case closed.
It is important to keep in mind that the 9/11 issue is not simply a question of whose version of a story is correct. This is a case in which millions of people would be taking a great risk. They would have to consider that the very government they have trusted and supported for more than four years may have participated in an unthinkable atrocity. That, in itself, may be impossible. By opening their minds to an objective examination of what has been discovered about the 9/11 attacks, millions of Americans would have to abandon their blind faith in this administration, and reject the mistaken belief that those in charge of our nation can do no wrong. That, too, may be impossible.
Herein lies the paradox. If the American people want truth they must acknowledge that they have been deceived. If that were to happen, and if they were to accept the facts that have been uncovered by the independent 9/11 research community, their faith in their government would be irreparably destroyed. In the long run, it is far easier to maintain one’s faith in a deceptive government than to deal with the painful details of that deception.
The consequence of such denial is that people end up believing what they must, rather than what is true. As time passes, they totally erase the distinction between fact and fiction in order to believe in their government, and they find themselves living in the America of 2005.
They greater tragedy of course, is the nature of the deception that has been accepted. There are lies, and there are lies. There are deceptions, and there are horrendous deceptions that alter history. .It is one thing for Jeffery to have gone unpunished for throwing his own books around so he could claim the crown of class clown. Thirty years after the fact, our mutual friends now believe the truth, and we can laugh at what went on.
It would have been another thing altogether to have allowed Jeffery to perpetrate a Columbine-like massacre to claim that same crown. There is no way that could have resulted in denial, and there is no way that any one would have dared to laugh.
BOTTOM LINE
Ironically, it’s almost funny when the fact-based 9/11 research community gathers to discuss the events of that day. The official government version of what happened loses so much credibility in the light of the available facts, films, testimony & chronicled history that it is almost impossible not to laugh in disbelief when we start to share what we know. The evidence that has been amassed is so persuasive as to rip the official version of 9/11 to shreds. And still, there is no one but ourselves to hear us.
We go on and on and on like people obsessed because as responsible citizens of the world we have assigned ourselves the task of exposing the truth. But we also have to accept the obstacles we face. We must understand how and why people refuse to believe what we say despite all the evidence in our possession. To explain that phenomenon I think about my friend Jeffery and his book launch. He did something no one believed he could possibly have done. As a result, he carried it off.
The people who were responsible for the attacks of 9/11 did something so unbelievable that most people would not believe they did it, even if presented with conclusive evidence of their guilt. As a result, they also carried it off, and the evidence be damned.
In the end, there is always the comment by those who would discredit the research and the evidence that has been uncovered. The defenders of the official version of 9/11 inevitably ask how so many people could keep a secret. "Wouldn't someone have blown the whistle by now?" is the constant challenge by the champions of denial. How naïve they are.
At the higher levels of government the issue is no longer about secrecy, but about survival. The extent of the 9/11 crimes are so great that a very real scenario of self preservation has arisen. Exposing the truth about 9/11 would virtually mean the end of the United States of America as a viable power. If the good people in our government and in our intelligence community exposed the truth, America would never ever regain its credibility in the world. We would never again be respected or trusted. We would immediately relinquish our leadership position in the world and sink to the position of a rogue nation that had committed an unforgivable atrocity against its own people for political purposes. We would expose the huge betrayal of trust that has been developed and nurtured over our 230 year history as a nation.
The minute any ranking government official was charged with complicity in 9/11, this nation would be no more. We would never recover. The people who were involved in 9/11 know this. They know that there is more at stake than their exposure. They know that once they did what they did, they would never be held accountable. As I did with Jeffery, let me be the first to admit that these folks committed the perfect crime. Not in the sense that they would not be discovered, but in the sense they knew it would do more harm to the country to expose them than it would to play along with them.
The perpetrators of 9/11 knew they were they protected by the blind loyalty of the American people who would refuse to believe they could have been involved. But they had another ace in the hole as well. They knew that no one who cared for the nation would reveal the truth, for to seek justice would in essence bring down the nation.
Bottom line: the truth is out there, the evidence is real. But there are none so blind as those who will not see. Think about that, and weep for us all.
FBI Tells 911 Rescue Worker To 'Shut Up' Over Finding Airplane 'Black Boxes'
By Greg Szymanski
4-17-5Two ground zero workers go public about finding cockpit and flight data recorders from Flight 11 and 175. Government claims 'black boxes' from the doomed 911 flights were never found. 911 Commission ignores information and fails to interview rescue workers. A 911 rescue worker said this week he was told by FBI agents to "keep his mouth shut" about one of the "black boxes" found at ground zero, contradicting the official story that none of the flight and cockpit data recorders were ever recovered in the WTC wreckage. Honorary firefighter Mike Bellone claims he was approached by unknown bureau agents a short time after he and his partner Nicholas DeMasi, a retired New York firefighter, found three of the four "black boxes" among the WTC rubble before January 2002.
The pair first claimed to find the data recorders in an August 2003 book entitled "Behind The Scene: Ground Zero" when DeMasi said the "black boxes" were found while he traversed ground zero in his ATV with three federal agents. FBI and New York fire officials have denied ever finding the voice and data recorders. Now Bellone claims agents were adamant about keeping the discovery a secret. "They confronted me and told me to not to say anything," recalls Bellone, referring to one of three reddish-orange boxes with two white stripes he saw in the back of DeMasi's ATV. "I said give me a good reason? When they couldn't, I told them I wouldn't shut up about it.
"Why should I? I have nothing to hide and nothing to gain. It's the truth and Nick and I are sticking to our story as we always have." Bellone said he and DeMasi were not the only 911 rescue workers to see the black boxes. He said there were several other witnesses and knows first hand they have been silenced by federal agents. "I know two or three others saw what went down, but they are not talking," added Bellone. "They got to those guys after they talked to me. The only reason I can figure they are trying to hide the truth is that the government knows it screwed up and the recorders would prove it."
Asked to give names of the other witnesses, he said he wouldn't break a fellow-worker's confidence, privacy and firm desire to remain anonymous. "I can tell you this, though, it was all very strange. I worked on the spaceship Columbia clean-up and you know when something important is found and when something is not" he recalled, saying the day the 'black boxes' were secretly carted away agents acted like "something big was going down." Bellone also recalled never learning the FBI names as this type of personal contact and information wasn't exchanged between the civilian workers and government officials working side-by-side at ground zero. "We worked together, but nobody knew their names," added Bellone. "They had on their FBI jackets, but I'm sure I could pick them out of a line-up or recognize their pictures."
The pair's bombshell accusations blows a big hole in the official story as well as the findings in the recent 911 Commission report. In Chapter 1, footnote 76, there is the sole but definitive reference to the airline "black boxes":
"The CVR's and the FDR's (voice and flight data recorders) from American 11 and United 175 were not found."
Asked if DeMasi and Bellone were questioned or subpoenaed, Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said:
"I can't tell you now if he was is one of the 1,200 people we interviewed or if the book was one of the countless ones we researched. We explored every lead, but I will try to find out if we talked with him and get back to you" However, Bellone said he and DeMasi never were contacted by Commission members or asked to appear regarding their statements even though the book was published well before the hearings commenced.
And it's amazing with a story of such importance that in over a year since the book surfaced almost nobody else has called them either. It's hard to imagine a story with such magnitude has not been thoroughly checked out unless the mainstream press purposely ignored it. "I have been contacted by only one newspaper reporter from the Philadelphia Daily News. That's it," he said, referring to an October 2004 story by reporter William Bunch, recapping DeMasi's book statements as well as the usual official denials. Those close to the 911 investigation said the recovery of the "black boxes" is important, holding vital clues and leading to the truth of what really happened on the morning of 911. The cockpit voice recorder uses a pair of microphones to capture all cockpit sounds for the last 30 minutes of a doomed flight. The flight date recorder is also significant since it records altitude, heading and airspeed. Both recorders are designed to withstand enormous impact and heat. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) officials said they should have withstood the conditions at the WTC. And finding the boxes after a crash seems to be standard procedure, according to the NTSB.
"It's extremely rare that we don't get the recorders back,' said NTSB spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz. "I can't remember another case which we did not recover the recorders." Bellone is retired and was made an honorary New York fireman for his efforts after 911. DeMasi also recently retired from Engine Co. 261, nicknamed the "Flaming Skulls," after serving a brief stint after 911 with the fire department's marine unit.UK Government Hiding True Level Of Crime
By Daniel Foggo and Carl Fellstrom
The Telegraph - UK
4-17-5The Government is misleading the public on the true level of crime in Britain by instructing police forces not to record many offences, while simultaneously logging crimes in which nobody is convicted or even taken to court as "detected". This week the Government will release its latest quarterly figures for recorded crime in England and Wales, the last such release before the general election. But regardless of whether they show an overall fall or rise, they will give a highly distorted picture. A detailed analysis by The Telegraph of the Home Office's "counting rules" - the instructions that are given to all forces each April telling them how to compile their official crime statistics - has revealed that the Government has expanded the range of "get-outs" that allow officers to ignore many crimes while taking credit for solving others that have not resulted in successful prosecutions.
In some instances, even if the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which usually has the last word in deciding whether someone should be charged, declares that there is no evidence at all to sustain a prosecution, the police are allowed to claim that they have "detected" the relevant crimes. In this way, a police force that has problems with proper evidence gathering and whose prosecutions have a tendency to collapse can still present a glowing "detection" record. In the last prime minister's questions before the election campaign began, Mr Blair boasted: "It's a well established fact that crime has been falling for years." In February he said: "The important thing is crime is actually down, not up. However, that is no consolation if you are a victim of crime. There are also record numbers of police but people don't always see them out on the street."
The revelations on the "counting rules" put into stark relief the Government's claim that it has recently broadened the criteria by which crimes are logged, resulting in a rise in recorded incidents. In fact, under a sub-clause in the counting rules, the police are allowed to record only "one crime per person". In an incident where several crimes are committed by the same person against the same victim, only the most serious single crime is recorded. An example given is that "a house is entered [burglary], the female occupant is raped [rape] and her car is stolen from the driveway [vehicle theft]". The statistics must overlook the burglary and car theft, the Government has ordered. The record should read only: "One crime of rape."
In another get-out, police are also told to log multiple offences as only one crime if they are all reported at the same time.
The rules make it clear that any number of crimes can be distilled down to a single figure simply according to the timing of when they are reported. One example states: "[If] A threatens B on three occasions [and] B reports the threats to the police on each occasion a threat is made [it is] three crimes. [If] B reports the three occurrences at the same time [it is] one crime."
The counting rules also stipulate how police forces must record "detected" crime. Most members of the public would understand the term detected to mean solved, or cleared up. In fact, under the counting rules definition, it means only that the police have an idea of who may have carried out the crime and usually have enough evidence to charge him or her. It does not correspond to the number of people convicted, or even to those appearing in court. As the rules state, a crime is detected if someone is charged or summonsed "irrespective of any subsequent acquittal". Despite this revelation, the last annual published figures showed "detection rates" across England and Wales of only 24 per cent. The rules on penalty charges, which since last year have been used by all of Britain's police forces to deal with low-level "nuisance" crime, such as shoplifting and public disorder, also enable the police to claim better results than they are achieving. Offences for which a penalty notice has been issued can be logged as detected", even if the CPS subsequently decides there is not enough - or, indeed, any - evidence to support it.
If an alleged offender contests a penalty notice, the case is referred to a magistrates' court. Before going to trial, the prosecution must be approved by the CPS, who may decide there is insufficient evidence to proceed. Yet for the purposes of the official crime statistics, the police can ignore such a finding by the CPS, simply by having one of the force's "designated decision makers" (DDM) - usually an officer of the rank of sergeant - state that he is happy with the issuing of the penalty notice. Although the penalty notice goes no further, the alleged crime is still registered as "detected".
In all other crimes, from murder downwards, if the case is dropped before or during a trial because the police have not gathered enough evidence, it is still logged as "detected". The rules state: "If the case is discontinued on evidential grounds, then the detection should not be cancelled if a DDM still stands by the reasons for charging." Norman Brennan, a serving police officer and the director of the Victims of Crime Trust, a charity that supports people affected by serious crime, said that most people would imagine that "detection" rates related to those convicted. "We in the police know that detection rates are nothing of the sort, but the public do not" he said. "If we recorded crime accurately the public would be astounded. Violence against the person is up by 90 per cent over the last five years but the true figure is four times that.'' David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, welcomed the analysis. "This goes some way to explaining why the Government's attempt to convince people that crime is going down is completely at odds with the observations and perceptions of the public," he said. "Yet again we see the Government using statistics for the purpose of spin rather than information."Mossad - The Israeli Connection To 911
By Christopher Bollyn
Exclusive to American Free Press
4-14-5U.S. investigators and the controlled media have ignored a preponderance of evidence pointing to Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, being involved in the terror attacks of 9/11. From the very morning aircraft smashed into the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon, news reports have indicated Israeli intelligence being involved in the events of 9/11 - and the planting of "false flags" to blame Arab terrorists and mold public opinion to support the pre-planned "war on terror."
Shortly after the destruction of the twin towers, radio news reports described five "Middle Eastern men" being arrested in New Jersey after having been seen videotaping and celebrating the explosive "collapses" of the WTC. These men, from a phony moving company in Weehawken, N.J., turned out to be agents of Israeli military intelligence, Mossad. Furthermore, their "moving van" tested positive for explosives. Dominic Suter, the Israeli owner of Urban Moving Systems, the phony "moving company," fled in haste, or was allowed to escape, to Israel before FBI agents could interrogate him. The Israeli agents were later returned to Israel on minor visa violations.
The Assistant Attorney General in charge of criminal investigations at the time was Michael Chertoff, the current head of the Dept. of Homeland Security. Chertoff, the son of the first hostess of Israel's national air carrier, El Al, is thought to be an Israeli national.
One of the Israeli agents later told Israeli radio that they had been sent to "document the event" - the event which took the lives of some 3,000 Americans. Despite the fact that the Israelis arrested in New Jersey evidently had prior knowledge or were involved in the planning of 9/11, the U.S. mainstream media has never even broached the question of Israeli complicity in the attacks.
ISRAELIS FOREWARNED
On September 12, 2001, the Internet edition of The Jerusalem Post reported, "The Israeli foreign ministry has collected the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attack." Yet only one Israeli was killed at the WTC and two were reportedly killed on the "hijacked" aircraft.
Although a total of three Israeli lives were reportedly lost on 9/11, speechwriters for President George W. Bush grossly inflated the number of Israeli dead to 130 in the president's address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001.
The fact that only one Israeli died at the WTC, while 4,000 Israelis were thought to have been at the scene of the attacks on 9/11 naturally led to a widespread rumor, blamed on Arabic sources, that Israelis had been forewarned to stay away that day."Whether this story was the origin of the rumor," Bret Stephens, the Post's editor-in-chief wrote in 2003, "I cannot say. What I can say is that there was no mistake in our reporting."
ODIGO INSTANT MESSAGES
Evidence that Israelis had been forewarned several hours before the attacks surfaced at an Israeli instant messaging service, known as Odigo. This story, clear evidence of Israeli prior knowledge, was reported only briefly in the U.S. media - and quickly forgotten. At least two Israel-based employees of Odigo received warnings of an imminent attack in New York City more than two hours before the first plane hit the WTC. Odigo had its U.S. headquarters two blocks from the WTC. The Odigo employees, however, did not pass the warning on to the authorities in New York City, a move that could have saved thousands of lives.
Odigo has a feature called People Finder that allows users to seek out and contact others based on certain demographics, such as Israeli nationality. Two weeks after 9/11, Alex Diamandis, Odigo's vice president, reportedly said, "It was possible that the attack warning was broadcast to other Odigo members, but the company has not received reports of other recipients of the message."
The Internet address of the sender was given to the FBI, and two months later it was reported that the FBI was still investigating the matter. There have been no media reports since.
Odigo, like many Israeli software companies, is based and has its Research and Development (R&D) center in Herzliya, Israel, the small town north of Tel Aviv, which happens to be where Mossad's headquarters are located.
Shortly after 9/11, Odigo was taken over by Comverse Technology, another Israeli company. Within a year, five executives from Comverse were reported to have profited by more than $267 million from "insider trading."Through Israeli "venture capital" (VC) investment funds, Mossad spawns and sponsors scores of software companies currently doing business in the United States. These Israel-based companies are sponsored by Mossad funding sources such as Cedar Fund, Stage One Ventures, Veritas Venture Partners, and others.
As one might expect, the portfolios of these Mossad-linked funding companies contain only Israeli-based companies, such as Odigo. Reading through the strikingly similar websites of these Israeli "VC" funds and their portfolio companies, one can't help but notice that the key "team" players share a common profile and are often former members of "Israel's Intelligence Corps" and veterans of the R&D Department of the Israel Air Force or another branch of the military. Most are graduates of Israel's "Technion" school in Haifa, Mossad's Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, or a military program for software development.
The IDC, a private, non-profit university, is closely tied to the Mossad. The IDC has a "research institute" headed by Shabtai Shavit, former head of the Mossad from 1989 to 1996, called the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism.
The IDC also has a "Marc Rich Center for the Study of Commodities, Trading and Financial Markets" and a "Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy." The cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder, who is a supporter of Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his far-right Likud Party, founded the Lauder school. Lauder, president of the Jewish National Fund and former chairman of New York Governor George Pataki's Commission on Privatization, is the key individual who pushed the privatization of the WTC and former Stewart AFB, where the flight paths of the two planes that hit the twin towers oddly converged. Ronald Lauder played a significant, albeit unreported, role in the preparation for 9/11.
Pataki's wife, Libby, has been on Lauder's payroll since at least 2002 and reportedly earned $100,000 as a consultant in 2004. According to The Village Voice, between 1994 and 1998, Gov. Pataki earned some $70,000 for speaking to groups affiliated with Lauder.THE PTECH CUTOUT
Ptech, a mysterious software company has been tied with the events of 9/11. The Quincy, Massachusetts-based company was supposedly connected to "the Muslim Brotherhood" and Arab financiers of terrorism.
The firm's suspected links with terrorism resulted in a consensual examination by the FBI in December 2002, which was immediately leaked to the media. The media reports of the FBI "raid" on Ptech soon led to the demise of the company.
Ptech "produced software that derived from PROMIS, had an artificial intelligence core, and was installed on virtually every computer system of the U.S. government and its military agencies on September 11, 2001," according to Michael Ruppert's From the Wilderness (FTW) website."This included the White House, Treasury Dept. (Secret Service), Air Force, FAA, CIA, FBI, both houses of Congress, Navy, Dept. of Energy, IRS, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM, Enron and more," FTW reported.
"Whoever plotted 9/11 definitely viewed the FAA as the enemy that morning. Overriding FAA systems would be the most effective way to ensure the attacks were successful," FTW reported. "To do this, the FAA needed an evolution of PROMIS software installed on their systems and Ptech was just that; the White House and Secret Service had the same software on their systems - likely a superior modified version capable of 'surveillance and intervention' systems."
But did the U.S. government unwittingly load software capable of "surveillance and intervention" operations and produced by a company linked to terrorism onto its most sensitive computer networks, or was Ptech simply a Mossad "cutout" company?Oussama Ziade, a Lebanese Muslim immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1985, founded Ptech in 1994. But the company's original manager of marketing and information systems was Michael S. Goff, whose PR firm, Goff Communications, currently represents Guardium, a Mossad-linked software company.
And Goff comes from a well-to-do line of Jewish Masons who have belonged to Worcester's Commonwealth Lodge 600 of B'nai Brith for decades. So, why would a recently graduated Juris Doctor in Law leave a promising law career to join forces with a Lebanese Muslim's upstart company sponsored with dodgy funders in Saudi Arabia?
"As information systems manager [for Ptech], Michael handled design, deployment and management of its Windows and Macintosh, data, and voice networks," Goff's website says. "Michael also performed employee training and handled all procurement for software, systems and peripherals."
AFP asked Goff, who left the Worcester law firm of Seder & Chandler in 1994, how he wound up working at Ptech. "Through a temp agency," Goff said. Asked for the name of the agency, Goff said he could not remember.
Could it be Mossad Temps, or maybe Sayan Placement Agency?Goff, the original marketing manager for Ptech software, said he did not know who had written the code that Ptech sold to many government agencies. Is this believable?
Goff leaves a legal practice in his home town to take a job, through a temp agency, with a Lebanese Muslim immigrant who is selling software, and he doesn't know who even wrote the code?
AFP contacted the government agencies that reportedly have Ptech software on their computers, and IBM, to ask if they could identify who had written the source code of the Ptech software.
By press time, only Lt. Commander Ron Steiner of the U.S. Navy's Naval Network Warfare Command had responded. Steiner said he had checked with an analyst and been told that none of the Ptech software has been approved for the Navy's enterprise networks.
Nichols Implicates FBI Informant In OKC Bombing
Amazing New Evidence
By Pat Shannan
American Free Press
4-10-5A recent raid on the one-time home of Terry Nichols has uncovered more evidence implicating federal agents in the bombing of Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995.
A source has told AFP that bomb components discovered at the former home of the OKC bombing accomplice have been linked to a federal informant who investigators believe lied during the trial of Timothy McVeigh, who was executed after his conviction in the bombing.
There are now serious allegations that the FBI, using an informer as a conduit, supplied McVeigh and Nichols with the blasting components the two used to construct explosive devices, one of which may have been employed in the tragic Oklahoma City bombing.
Although there was much recent media hoopla surrounding the March 31 FBI raid on Nichols's vacant home in Herington, Kan., the entire story, which is not being told by the mainstream media, suggests evidence of federal government complicity in events leading up to the OKC tragedy.
While the media reported that previously undiscovered explosives were found on the raid at Nichols's home, adding further fuel to widespread public belief that Nichols-and McVeigh-were solely responsible for the OKC bombing, there's much more to the story than meets the eye.
In fact, AFP has learned that Nichols himself apparently leaked the information about the previously undiscovered cache in his Kansas home.
Why Nichols did so is the real story behind the story that the media seems to be keeping under wraps. Nichols's apparent goal in sharing this information was to provide information not only to bust the man who allegedly supplied the material, an FBI informant named Roger Moore-Nichols being certain that Moore's fingerprints would be on the material-but also to expose the FBI's role in supplying Moore the material in the first place.
Those familiar with the details of the case say Nichols has evidently come to conclude-as have many independent investigators-that he (Nichols) and McVeigh were being manipulated prior to the bombing by federal authorities in what was intended to be a "sting" the feds would use as "proof" of their skill in tackling domestic "terrorist threats" from "radical right wing extremists."
However, it is believed, the sting went awry, possibly manipulated by others outside the loop, and the bombing occurred.
Now, in prison for life, Nichols evidently hopes to expose the role that Moore and his live-in girlfriend, Karen Anderson, played in the events.
Moore and Anderson gave testimony in the federal trial, helping to convict Nichols. But independent investigators have said all along-contradicting the FBI's reliance on Moore and Anderson-that their testimony was obviously perjured.
The problem for Nichols, though, is that the record has shown that Moore was an admitted FBI informant as long as a decade ago and may be still protected.
Moore, a Royal, Ark. gun dealer, claimed to have been robbed by McVeigh and Nichols of some 66 guns, cash and gold coins in November 1994. The FBI and federal prosecutors claimed that the proceeds were used to finance the OKC operation.
However, the defense team undermined that theory by producing a signed motel receipt proving McVeigh was in Akron, Ohio, on the date in question. This did not keep either the prosecutors or the news media from repeating the robbery story. It is still widely believed.
Moore, who used the alias "Bob Miller," according to Nichols, later changed his story and said that it definitely was not McVeigh and Nichols who had robbed him, but he apparently was attempting to plant the opposite impression at the time. Townspeople remembered Moore going from barroom to barbershop the week of the alleged robbery, describing McVeigh and asking if anyone had seen him in the area.
At the time, Moore was a confidential informant for two FBI agents named Ross and Hayes, out of the Hot Springs office. The two were the same agents who discovered the "stolen" guns in a sack behind the house trailer of Michael Fortier in Kingman, Ariz., a few days after the bombing.
Fortier was later implicated in the conspiracy and is serving a 20-year sentence.
AFP has learned that the FBI had the information as early as March 1. Agents had received this information purportedly from the mouth of Nichols through an oftused informant named Gregory Scarpa, who is a convicted mobster serving a long stretch with Nichols in Florence, Colo.
At first, FBI officials scoffed at the idea, but then sent a polygraph expert to the prison on March 4. He concluded that Scarpa was lying.
Scarpa then called private investigators he had worked with in the past and, during a seven-hour meeting on March 10, showed a letter in Nichols's handwriting attesting to his claim.
Not trusting the FBI, the investigators worked through a contact, who had high-level Homeland Security connections.
Then, on March 11, Scarpa provided the authorities with the address of the house and detailed descriptions of the location of the explosives.
Nichols had allegedly told Scarpa that he hid this second cache 10 years ago to be used as a follow-up to the Oklahoma City blast.
On March 31, the FBI finally made its move-calling in the Topeka bomb squad, evacuating the immediate neighborhood, and cordoning off a three-block area.
They worked through the night and into the next day.
The FBI would not confirm that its agents found anything, but mainstream news organizations were told by Oklahoma City's FBI office that explosive devices were found. What little surfaced in a period of predictable news frenzy, was that the FBI was embarrassed for not having found this material 10 years ago.
The Pope Who Revived the Office of the Inquisition
An American Catholic Reflects on Papacy of John Paul II
By JIM CONNOLLY
9 April 2005This week you will be inundated with honorific obituaries to Karol Wojtila, Pope John Paul II. I am writing not to honor Wojtila; he will (quite frankly) receive more honor in the next week than any individual mortal deserves. I write as a witness to the damage this man did during his 26 years as Roman pontiff to the causes of liberty and peace throughout the world.
There will be few voices such as mine raised on the occasion of Wojtila's death, but someone must speak the truth. Much of what I say here will be new (perhaps even surprising) to non-Catholics. To Catholics, I write to remind them of what each of them knows but seldom acknowledges. Karol Wojtila forced the best minds out of the Catholic Church, or at least to the extreme margins of the Church. Wojtila sanctified the baroque reproductive/sexual bugaboos that infest the Catholic Church while striving to ideologically lobotomize the Catholic clergy and laity. Although he was a fine ambassador of good will to Protestants, Jews, and Muslims, Wojtila degraded the richness of Catholic faith and tradition into mindless displays of loyalty. An archaic organization that had shown signs of serious promise as a refreshed (and even potentially progressive) social force under Popes John XXIII and Paul VI was methodically and ruthlessly drubbed into the mold of ideological and cultural reaction. The record shows that Karol Wojtila was a charming man and a master of international public relations, but he was a political and cultural reactionary to his core
Remember that I and many others did not become Catholics by reason of our voluntary decisions. Long centuries before my birth, complex systems of custom and loyalty and political alliances led the Irish and Bavarian peasants who made up the bulk of my ancestors to become cemented within the Roman Catholic Church. As an infant, my family inducted me into the Catholic Church by way of the rite of baptism. As a young child, I was educated in Catholic schools. In my childhood, loyalty to family and Church stood much higher than loyalty to nation. Even as I have defined myself as an individual in a secular society, the ties of ancestry, ethnicity, early experience and schooling leave me thoroughly "Catholic" in many senses.
Largely because of the actions of Karol Wojtila, it is unlikely that my grandchildren will be raised as Catholics. For many years I vowed that I would not cede the Catholic Church to the vile reaction induced and symbolized by Pope John Paul II. I strove for many years to be one of those who kept alive the fine things within the rich Catholic religious and cultural tradition, but in the last two years I have had to acknowledge that this quest can no longer reasonably be pursued within the current institution of the Roman Catholic Church. In death, Wojtila's reaction is likely to entirely prevail, since he transformed the Church itself by promoting only the most rigid and automoton-like of clerics to positions of responsibility.
Ignore the press hype about kissing the ground while globetrotting and recognizing Israel. Forget the ridiculous lie that John Paul II favored "human rights." Ignore the canned media obituary coverage that strives to show you that Wojtila (like Nixon, Reagan, Bob Hope, and (soon) Margaret Thatcher) were "great" international figures. Here is part of the damage wrought by this arch-reactionary and the regressive forces he unleashed in the Catholic Church:
1. Among Wojtila's first actions as Pope was to attack freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech in Catholic universities. Progressive theology, feminist thought, and "liberation theology" were driven from accepted Catholic discourse. Catholic universities in Europe and North America have lost their best scholars in the humanities and have sunk into being miserable intellectual ghettoes with respect to history, philosophy, theology, and related fields.
2. Wojtila revived and strengthened the Office of the Inquisition under the infamous Cardinal Ratziger. The "Holy Office" was near abolition under the two previous pontiffs, but Wojtila wielded the Inquisition as his special shock troops in a relentless campaign to silence all varieties of opinion other than his own. Repression of thought at the level of the diocese and parish became commonplace again after a blessed reprieve in the 1960s and 1970s.
3. Pursuing his lifelong dedication to fanatic anti-communism, Wojtila pressured the reluctant Christian Democrats of Italy, Germany, and Holland to accede to the placement of US cruise missiles in Europe in the early 1980's. As a result of this provocative action by the United States, nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union came even closer than during the Cunan Missile Crisis. The result might have been the nuclear annihilation of the planet. No credit to Wojtila, the planet survived. Wojtila's claims as an advocate of peace are false to their core.
4. Wojtila has intervened repeatedly in the electoral politics of his homeland, Poland, since the late 1980s to bring about government by socially conservative politicians who pass papal muster on women's rights and abortion and "anti-materialism" (opposition to the introduction of consumerism). Despite some cultural and economic promise in the late 1980s, Poland has become stultified with vast out-migration of educated Poles and economic paralysis. When they are being honest, migrating Poles will tell you that Wojtila and the power of the Polish Catholic Church are destroying their homeland.
5. Wojtila badgered the progressive Latin American bishops and archbishops (yes, there used to be several of them!) to abandon support of cooperatives, peasant political initiatives, and community organizing in his infamous campaign to eliminate "liberation theology." Only safe, traditional, right-wing candidates were promoted into the Catholic hierarchy. Wojtila denounced "liberation theology" and drove its proponents in Nicaragua and many other places out of the Catholic Church.
6. In the United States, Wojtila in 1980 forced Father Robert Drinan, one of the nation's leading elected progressive politicians, to resign from Congress (under penalty of being forced to leave the priesthood). At the same time, Wojtila fostered the alliance of right-wing American Catholic bishops with the "Christian right" on the issues of abortion, women's rights, and homosexuality. In North America and beyond, a double standard has been applied by Wojtila for Catholic clergy involvement in political causes. Advocating for progressive causes has been forbidden as impermissibly "political" while advocacy and alliances against abortion, contraception, and women's rights has been approved as necessary "witnessing" to Catholic values.
7. Wojtila has systematically purged what were previously culturally and politically progressive religious orders such as the Jesuits and Franciscans. These worldwide purges of the orders have been carried out by appointees Wojtila has made as heads of the various orders. In some cases, progressive leaders in the religious orders were forced to retire early so that his handpicked reactionaries could take command.
8. Wojtila has refused to acknowledge what had been a central role of women in the Catholic Church. He not only opposed the elevation of women to ministry (despite powerful evidence that women performed such roles in the early Christian Church), he refused to allow the many orders of nuns to creatively adapt to modern conditions. As a result, the Catholic sisterhoods are virtually defunct, and the clerical personnel of the Catholic Church has been turned into an all-male private club.
9. Wojtila has forbidden the use of indigenous cultural forms in worship services in non-Western countries. Gone are the marvelous masses and hymns from Africa and Latin America that inspired Christian worship in the 1960s and 1970s. In Western countries, he has insisted on restricting the use of Catholic church buildings to specifically religious purposes despite their great value as venues for concerts, art exhibits, and community activities. Multiple uses of churches was a tradition carried down from the Middle Ages. The great cathedrals of Europe were designed on the assumption of multiple uses.
10. Despite painfully obvious need and institutional commitments made during the Second Vatican Council, Wojtila refused to modernize working conditions for the Catholic clergy. Catholic priests remain the most underpaid and overworked of denominational Christian ministers. In addition, the input of priests into promotion processes within the clergy, which traditionally acted as a counterweight to hierarchical oppression, has been reduced by Wojtila to a nullity.
11. Flying in the face of historical precedent and the most basic common sense, Wojtila refused to consider issues of clerical celibacy and the upgrading of the diaconate to the central functions of the ministry. Clerical celibacy is (quite frankly) a custom originating in the early middle ages for purposes of property consolidation, and it has always been "honored more in the breach than the observance." Furthermore, deacons performed sacramental functions until modern times. The restriction of sacramental functions to a celibate priesthood was not even an official ideal of the Catholic Church until the sixteenth century. Wojtila's refusal to even permit discussion of issues concerning clerical celibacy and full sacramental functions for the diaconate has created a vast shortage of Catholic clergy and turned the most energetic and talented Catholics away from ministry within their own Church.
12. The ancient tradition of partial autonomy of the "nationes" within the Catholic Church has been broken by Wojtila. Traditionally, the national councils of Catholic bishops within each country had considerable leeway in governing the local churches. Wojtila, unlike any of his modern predecessors, regularly intervened and overturned decisions by the national councils concerning details of religious customs and personnel decisions.
13. Wojtila deepened and intensified the reproductive doctrinal fetishes of his most reactionary predecessors. Official "Catholic" positions on contraception and abortion are creations of deservedly obscure, personally bizarre, and sexually twisted theologians resident in the Roman theological colleges during the nineteenth century. They have no basis whatsoever in the beliefs and practices of either the ancient or medieval Church. Because of Wojtila's use of the Catholic Church's influence in international organizations and its alliance with the "Religious Right" in the USA, international birth control programs have been starved and gutted over the last two decades. As a result, tens of millions of African, Asian and Latin American infants and children have lived and died in misery!
14. Despite Wojtila's external reputation as some sort of "liberal," Catholics know that Wojtila is the close ally of the extremist and highly secretive Catholic movement known as Opus Dei. Wojtila has welcomed and blessed the practices of Opus Dei, which is a kind of "Church within the Church." He has promoted clergy who are affiliated with Opus Dei to the highest of positions within the Church. Opus Dei members congregate in secret in KKK-like costumes and engage in practices which include wearing hairshirts and self-flagellation. They maintain a network of secret monasteries and houses where young Catholics (especially those from wealthy and prominent families) are taken for intensive indoctrination sessions. Opus Dei members have been reliably reported by deprogrammed former members to favor re-ghettoization of Jews and international military crusades against Islam. US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a key member of Opus Dei in North America. The most likely successor to John Paul II is the ultra reactionary Archbishop of Milan, Dionigi Tettamanzi (known in Italy as the "Beast of Milan") who is reputedly one of the maximum leaders of the secretive cult of Opus Dei.
15. Wojtila methodically purged the College of Cardinals of any creative or free-thinking members, and almost all members of the current College of Cardinals, which will now choose Wojtila's successor, are rightwing clerical robots appointed by Wojtila himself. The Catholic Church is now guaranteed to have a self-perpetuating reactionary leadership for the indefinite future.
16. All initiatives for democratization of governance of the Catholic Church which began in the 1960s and 1970s were stopped in their tracks by Wojtila. American Catholics no longer talk about lay input into major decisions of the Church. The many talented laymen and laywomen who run the day-to-day operations of Catholic parishes and diocese are treated with highhanded disrespect, and the most talented have left or are in the process of leaving.
17. Wojtila cruelly abandoned the Catholics of Northern Ireland to a fate of political oppression and denial of their basic human rights. The Catholics of Northern Ireland are the only European Catholics still undergoing systematic persecution for their religious beliefs. One might have thought that Pope John Paul II would have championed the human rights of Northern Irish Catholics. Instead, Wojtila never spoke out against the horrendous oppression of his coreligionists in Northern Ireland. His sole contribution to the discussion of Northern Ireland was to condemn IRA violence (without any corresponding condemnation of British Army or loyalist violence) and demand a cessation of IRA activities, which would simply have left the Catholics in Northern Ireland completely helpless to their oppressors.
18. Last but not least, Karol Wojtila proved his utter moral bankruptcy in his horrendous mishandling of the pedophile scandals in the Catholic Churches of the United States, Canada, Ireland, Britain, and several other nations. Wojtila could never bring himself to a clear apology or an acknowledgement of wrongdoing or institutional responsibility for the Catholic Church's practices of abuse, intimidation, and rape of tens of thousands of children and adolescents. Most reprehensibly, Wojtila removed the independent power of the United States Catholic bishops to discipline pedophile priests while attributing the horror and filth within the American Catholic Church to some sort of American cultural malady.
Visiting a synagogue and a mosque, issuing a few statements about Iraq and Palestine, opposition to capital punishment as an isolated issue--Sorry, but these and some other (mainly symbolic) "proofs" of John Paul's "humanity" and his "apostolate of peace" ring very, very hollow to this American Catholic who has had his tradition and his Church wrenched from him by an Eastern European rightwing fanatic in Pope's clothes.
The Invisible Hand of the U.S. Government in Financial Markets
by Robert Bell
April 3, 2005Summary: The U.S. government is manipulating all major U.S. financial marketsstocks, treasuries, currencies. This article shows how it is possible and how it is done, why it is done, who specifically is doing it, when they do it, and where they get the money to do it.
Most people probably believe that the major capital markets in the U.S. are basically true markets with, occasionally, maybe very occasionally, a little bit of rigging here and there. But evidence shows that the opposite is the casethe rigging is fundamental with a little bit of true markets here and there. I have discussed how this works concerning U.S. and some other stock markets in an earlier article.[1] Here I will primarily discuss the rigging of currency and U.S. Treasury markets.
Perhaps the main reason for the urban legend that major markets are not generally rigged is that they are assumed to be too big; the millions of independent buyers and sellers, worldwide because of globalization, make effective and sustained coordination impossible. The implicit assumption is that any market could be systematically rigged if it were small enough, or at least small enough at some critical choke point.
Little Markets
In the case of the market for U.S. Treasuries, the Financial Times summed up exactly how small it really is in two major stories, one just under the masthead on page one, on 24 January 2005. One story began, “During the past few years the US has become dependent, not so much on millions of investors around the globe but on a few individuals in a few of the world’s central banks.”[2] In 2003 these central bankers bought enough treasuries to cover 83% of the U.S. current account deficit, and 86% of those purchases came from Asian central banks.
The two main sources of money for U.S. Treasuries are the central banks of Japan and China. Japan held about $715 billion in U.S. Treasuries, as of November 2004, and China held about $191 billion.[3] All the other nations’ central banks hold altogether, about the same amount again, roughly another trillion.
As the total of all obligations is about $4 trillion, two central banks obviously hold about one quarter of the total. They are in the position to pump or dump the Treasury market all by themselves. They can sell what they have or simply stop buying when the Treasury sells.
Since the money comes from a handful of foreign central banks, the possible rigging of the Treasury market equals the possible rigging of the foreign exchange markets. These central banks have to buy dollars before they buy Treasuries. Even Alan Greenspan has acknowledged that the two go together, admitting that Asian central banks “may be supporting the dollar and U.S. Treasury prices somewhat.”[4]
U.S. stock markets are also capable of being systematically rigged, and for the same reasona handful of players can dominate if they coordinate their actions. The key choke point is in the number of mutual funds, which themselves hold about 20% of all the stock in the major markets. Of the over 8000 all-stock mutual funds, a mere 497 hold roughly three-fourths of the stock. This is easily a small enough number to pump the market, whether through coordinated buying disguised as programmed trading, or simply a follow-the-leader mechanism. All the other thousands of funds and the millions of individuals around the globe putting their money into these markets can do little more than follow the momentum. No major U.S. stock market writer, advisor or player seems to publicly acknowledge this, as far as I know. But the CEO (PDG) of the French insurance giant AXA has acknowledged it: Claude Bebear wrote in his 2003 book Ils vont tuer le capitalisme (They are going to kill capitalism):
“… today, shareholders are relegated to the role of quasi-spectators. The small shareholders that are now called ‘individual investors’ know that they have little weight. All together, they only represent a small percent of capital because the investments of households are more and more in the form of mutual funds, pension funds (fonds communs de placement) or life insurance funds. The shareholders today are thus the institutional investors.”[i] [5]
Bebear, in charge of one of the world’s biggest stock portfolios, adds:
“We are no more, in effect, in a world that one reads in the economic text books, with innumerable investors of various characterizations, choosing each in his own way the stocks that he’ll put in his portfolio; the results of their millions of decisions generating a sort of changing market equilibrium, but a stable one. The truth is that for several years, the reasoned investment on a stock has almost disappeared in favor of more and more mechanical behavior.”[ii] [6]
Plunge Protection
Programmed trading in an utterly concentrated stock market pretty much guarantees the possibility of systematic and continual market rigging. But to accomplish this, and coordinate it with the currency and Treasury markets, some sort of orchestrating mechanism would need to exist. It does; it is known as the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, occasionally referred to in the business press as the Plunge Protection Team. Then President Ronald Reagan signed it into existence on 18 March 1988, with the specific intension to avoid another stock market crash such as that of 19 October 1987. The Working Group’s existence is no mystery. See for yourself. Go to Google and type in Executive Order 12631. You will find the Executive Order, and even a 14 November 2003 statement from Secretary of the Treasury John Snow giving a brief history of the Working Group, describing its policy advisory activities, and concluding with these words: “It also is a forum used to exchange information during market turmoil through ad hoc conference calls and meetings.”
Presumably Plunge Protection doesn’t hold these ad hoc conference calls and meetings just to be passive bystanders. Executive Order 12631 specifically authorizes them to coordinate buying: “The Working Group shall consult, as appropriate, with representatives of the various exchanges, clearinghouses, self-regulatory bodies, and with major market participants to determine private sector solutions wherever possible.”
So not only is the fix in, it is legal.
In a 1989 Wall Street Journal article, then Federal Reserve board member Robert Heller even suggested a market intervention strategy: “Instead of flooding the entire economy with liquidity, and thereby increasing the danger of inflation, the Fed could support the stock market directly by buying market averages in the futures market, thus stabilizing the market as a whole.”
Guess Whose Money is Used to Buy Stock Market Insurance?
There is even a potentially unlimited source of money to do this pumping. Federal government contractors operate under a special law, CAS, in their defined benefits pension plans. This gives them stock portfolio insurance, something which small fry players would obviously like to get, but can’t find anyone willing to issue. Should the pension funds of the federal government contractors lose money in their investments to the degree that they fall below minimum reserve requirements imposed by other federal laws, they can simply make up the difference by adding it on pro-rata to subsequent items sold to the federal government. The vast sums of federal tax money devoted to plugging the holes in the pension fund for the largest Pentagon contractor, Lockheed Martin, were discovered by Ken Pedeleose, an analyst at the Defense Contract Management Agency. He was concerned about staggering cost increases for the C-130J transport but a chart he made public showed the mind boggling per plane cost increases for a number of Lockheed Martin airplanes. The chart amounted to a Rosetta Stone for the military-industrial complex. It showed, essentially, how the military-industrial complex linked to the stock market through the Lockheed Martin pension fund, and by extension through all the others covered by the same law.
Is there a corresponding source of tax money to pump the currency and Treasury markets? There is an official one for currency, the Exchange Stabilization Fund. It was established in 1934 to prop up the dollar in foreign exchange markets. But it can be used for any purpose determined by the Secretary of the Treasury. In mid-1995, the fund contained $42 billion.[iii] The actual amount varies depending on how well the Treasury does on its currency transactions. The money originally came from the sale of U.S. government gold, but the Treasury kept the money as a private fund, not under Congressional control. Since it is a finite amount of money, not appropriated by Congress, it probably is not often used to pump the stock market or even the market for Treasuries.
The markets for Treasuries, and also currency, are being pumped using the tax code and pension fund laws. But to understand this we have to first look at why pumping might be necessary.
Treasuries Exchanged for Jobs
The U.S. Treasury holdings of Japan and China are essentially a consequence of a trade imbalance between the U.S. and these two countries, with the balance heavily tilted to the latter. To maintain the imbalance, which they both clearly want to do, both countries must keep their currency pegged against the dollar at a lower rate than it might otherwise be. If they did not do that, the Toshiba computers, Toyota cars and other quality items made in Japan would be more expensive, and so Japan wouldn’t sell as many of them in the U.S. A similar case holds for vast numbers of Chinese manufactured items sold pretty much everywhere, but notoriously at Wal-Mart. To keep the items relatively cheap, the central banks of those countries keep their currencies cheap by buying a corresponding amount of dollars, thus supporting the dollar against their currencies. The dollar may essentially collapse against the euro, but not against the yen and the yuan.
With the dollars the Japanese and Chinese central banks have bought, they can buy something denominated in U.S. dollars; the item of choice is U.S. Treasuries since it is like holding dollars that pay interest. So this has the effect of pumping the price of Treasuries too. Because the items made in China and Japan are cheaper than those of corresponding quality made in the U.S. (in the case of many Japanese items, there may not be U.S. items of similar quality), the effect is to create manufacturing jobs in those countries while simultaneously losing them in the U.S. In effect the jobs are exported and foreign currency is imported to buy dollars and then Treasuries.
This has an advantage for the Bush administration, which has the ruinously ridiculous policies of simultaneously cutting taxes and waging wars or building up for them. In effect, the basic racket is: the Bush administration exports jobs to these countries, and in turn they finance Bush’s fiscal deficit so he can continue his wars and cut taxes for his friends. The deficit for 2005 will be at least $400 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.[7] The Pentagon budget for 2005 was about $400 billion. Add in two supplemental requests for the costs of his Iraq war and the Pentagon figure is roughly $500 billion. “It is interesting to note that the military budget is about the same order of magnitude as the fiscal deficit,” said veteran Pentagon waste fighter Ernest Fitzgerald.
The tax cuts were at least in part intended to stimulate spendingthe purchase of all those Toshibas, Toyotas and Chinese whatnots. So the fiscal deficit is intimately linked to the current account deficit. If the money had been taxed away to pay for Bush’s current war and arms build-up for future ones, it would not be in people’s pockets to pay even for the down payments on the Toyotas.
But won’t the Japanese and Chinese central banks ultimately get burned by holding vast quantities of dollar denominated assets? Sure, if the dollar ever collapses against their currencies too. The dollar having fallen roughly 30% against the euro since the beginning of the war in Iraq, the same fate or worse could await these Asian currencies. With currently issued Treasuries paying a coupon rate of no more than 4%, they would be materially shafted on their investments in U.S. Treasuries. Then why don’t they bail out?
The Emperors’ Revenge
For the Chinese, the basic racket is too delicious and too ironical. They industrialize their country at the expense of the de-industrialization of the U.S. Not only is it sweet revenge for more than a hundred years of humiliation at the hands of Europeans and Americans, but also at the end they are relatively strong and the U.S. is relatively not. What do they care if the deal isn’t quite as good as it would be in a perfect world and they lose a third, half, two-thirds of their savings in U.S. Treasuries? Besides, in an even mildly less imperfect world, the U.S. President would not make such a blatantly corrupt bargain against the people of the U.S. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett calls this system of indebting U.S. citizens to foreign governments “a sharecropper’s society,” to distinguish it from Bush’s supposed “ownership society.”
No wonder Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan told a press interviewer at the time of the G-7 session in London in early February, “now is not the time” to revalue his currency, the yuan.[8] Of course it is not. He is clearly not stupid. The time to revalue is after China has sucked all the remaining jobs out of the U.S. that it can or just before the U.S. gets a less dishonest government. For the Japanese, the basic sweetness of the deal plus geopolitical strategic reasons may keep them tied to the U.S. There is also the spirit of J. Paul Getty’s famous line: “If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.” Some Japanese clearly think they have a problem. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said on 11 March 2005 concerning his government’s U.S. dollar holdings, “I believe diversification is necessary.” This instantly shook the currency markets, causing the director of the Japanese finance ministry’s foreign exchange division, Mastatsugu Asakawa, to blurt out, “We have never thought about currency diversification.”[9]
Mr. Asakawa has been kept busy making this point. On 23 February 2005 he had already stated, “We have no plans to change the composition of currency holdings in the foreign reserves and we are not thinking about expanding our euro holdings.”[10] He added, “Valuation loss is not our primary concern. My opinion is that I don’t have to care seriously about that.”[11]
There are, of course, other major single party buyers of dollars and Treasuries besides the central banks of Japan and China. In fact Mr. Asakawa’s earlier remark was precipitated by a market panicking statement on 22 February from the Bank of Korea. They indicated they were considering diversifying some of their $200 billion in currency reserves, 70% of which were in dollars. The dollar plunged 1.2% against both the yen and the euro. Part of this was due to programmed trading which kicked in with sell orders after the dollar hit a threshold of $1.3210 to the euro.[12] After the dollar suddenly fell, South Korean officials quickly announced they wouldn’t sell any of their existing dollar reserves, leaving open the possibility of putting new reserves into other currencies.
South Korea, presumably, can be muscled. Other central banks are less susceptible to pressure. On 5 February 2005 Russia announced that it would no longer peg the ruble to the dollar, but instead to a shifting weighting of dollars and euros. Russia had been selling dollars and buying euros since October 2004, during which time the U.S. dollar had tumbled significantly against the euro.[13] This of course corresponded to the period when Bush was seen to be back in power for another four years.
The overwhelming consensus of financial writers was that both the dollar and Treasuries would really hit the skids in the new year, 2005. The consensus was global. For example, the French financial paper, Les Echos wrote in its edition of 21-22 January: “Until now, it was a question of the great bet adopted nearly unanimously by foreign exchange tradersthe dollar will fall in 2005.”[14]
Of course, as implied by the quote, the dollar did not fall. Nor, of course, did its fat twin, U.S. Treasuries, which are little more than interest paying dollars. Is this because the trade deficit improved? Not really, although it showed a slight gain in early February, long after the dollar and Treasuries had materially improved. The dollar had gone up 3.6% from 1 January 2005 until 22 February 2005. Why? Did Bush raise taxes, thereby erasing some of the fiscal deficit? Not at all. On the contrary, he cut taxesas usual for a select groupand that’s why the dollar rebounded.
Plunge Protection’s New Cash
In late October 2004, the U.S. public was looking the other way when the tax cut was passed. Most people were obsessing over who would win the presidential election. Few were paying much attention to what the Republicans in Congress were doing, which was giving billions in tax cuts to U.S. corporations which had profits parked in tax havens around the world, such as in Ireland or Singapore. Bush signed the law enabling this tax giveaway on 22 October 2004. The tax changes were noted by a few at the time, even before the law changed. But the general level of financial journalism is so bad that they got no real echo in the press. Most people speculating against the dollar had no idea they were about to get stung. Obviously a few knew what the implications of the tax law were. They made out, more or less literally, like bandits. But one cannot legitimately claim insider trading since the tax law changes were publicly available knowledge, and even made it to the internet on various accountant websites in October. But they don’t seem to have gone much beyond these specialists. On 15 January 2005, I had a long talk in Paris with a top European stock market guru. Well connected and with a devoted following which he obviously did not want to burn, he had in all sincerity advocated buying gold to a gathering of thousands of his devotees a couple of months earlier, in November, after the passage of the U.S. tax law.
Most speculators were caught unaware on this source of currency pumping money, so it is unreasonable to assume that there will not be other surprises, which will be announced in due course.
The law Bush signed in late October 2004 goes by the obscenely false name, the American Jobs Creation Act. If there is one thing it will not do is to create jobs. It will instead create takeovers, which nearly always produce losses in jobsin the name of synergy. Takeovers are on the limited menu of activities companies are permitted to do with the money they can “repatriate” under this law. Not that the limited menu makes much difference, since the money brought in does not have to be fenced off in any way. So if $10 billion were spent by a company on takeovers, that frees up another $10 billion to do whatever was prohibited under the law, such as paying dividends, buying back stock, or filling the pockets of executives with extra bonuses. Normally such profits earned in foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies would be subject to a tax rate of 35% if they were brought home, which is why the money had stayed parked in the tax havens. But the law gives companies a one-year window for the “repatriation” of this cash at a tax rate of only 5.25%. Nobody knows how much will be brought in. When the law was passed in October, the general expectation reportedly was that the figure would be about $135 billion.[15] But one player has estimated it at $319 billion. “This has some investment bankers salivating,” wrote David Wells in the Financial Times.[16] But how much would be converted into dollars from other currencies? According to two different investment banks, the figure is somewhere around $100 billion.[17] That would be the minimum available from this source to pump the dollar for one year. Recall that the Exchange Stabilization Fund has less than half that for eternity.
The Bush administration’s use of repatriated foreign profits to pump domestic markets shows that they are not going to let “thin ice” signs stifle their version of the economy, at least not without a fight. However, the underlying weakness of the economy because of the twin deficits remains, so basically all that Bush and his Plunge Protection team are doing is moving the “thin ice” sign out onto thinner and thinner ice. The weight of the Bush team will eventually crash through that ice into exceedingly cold water.
But what about those drooling investment bankers? They will claim that this harvested money used in takeovers will eventually produce U.S. jobs, despite initial job losses due to the takeovers themselves. Investment bankers, who engineer many if not most takeovers, nearly always argue that the takeovers ultimately create jobs in the long term. The investment banks themselves, however, nearly always insist on being paid substantially in the short term through the transaction fees. Their employees, the investment bankers, are also substantially paid short term through annual salaries and bonuses. They get paid now; others can wait for the long term.
Panic Buying
One short-term thing the money has already done is to pump the dollar. The mechanism by which this is accomplished is quite simple and is signature Plunge Protection. It is the device of the short covering rally. This is what happens when speculators sell an assetstocks, Treasuries or dollarsshort. With stocks, this means that they sell the asset without actually owning it. They borrow the shares they sell, betting the stock will fall. They then buy it at the reduced price and return those shares. Another way to accomplish essentially the same thing is through options. The risk in a short sale is that the stock will not go down but instead go up. The short seller literally is exposed to unlimited losses in this case. This is the basis for a short covering rally. Non-shorters buy in sufficient volume to force up the price. The price rise scares the shorters into buying right away before the price goes too high and they lose too much. This results in panic buying as large numbers of short sellers feel compelled to buy to limit their losses. Often when the stock market suddenly blasts up out of a long slide for little or no reason, we are watching a short covering rally. There have been several such rallies in the currency and Treasuries markets so far this year, and there will probably be quite a few more.
According to a J.P. Morgan survey, the year 2005 began with most U.S. and international speculators holding short positions on U.S. bond markets.[18] Obviously this is because they had foolishly looked at the underlying economic reality, and failed to understand the profound import of the American Jobs Creation Act. Most people were utterly unaware of it until at least January 13, when the U.S. Treasury, under whose direction the Plunge Protection team works, announced the specifics of what the grand skim could and could not be spent on. As noted, the list included stock market pumperstakeovers.
The $100 billion (minimum) that will be brought in is not petty cash. One currency strategist at ABN Amro, Greg Anderson, has been quoted as saying, “The U.S. trade deficit is probably $600 billion in 2005, so this flow will be financing a sixth of the deficit all by itself.”[19] Thus this amount is clearly enough to have some impact on currency markets, especially if used to trigger short covering rallies.
Whatever is the actual amount that is brought in, it is exceedingly unlikely to be all brought in at about the same time. The companies have full discretion as to when to bring it in, and Plunge Protection is there to make sure they don’t do it at the wrong time. Various of the “ad hoc conference calls” referred to above by Secretary Snow could include fund managers and Chief Financial Officers of companies with chunks of cash lined up to bring in. Would this incestuous network of essentially insider traders be legal? It would be very difficult to prosecute without impeaching the President himself. As cited above, Section 2b of Executive Order 12631 states: “The Working Group shall consult, as appropriate, … with major market participants to determine private sector solutions wherever possible. (emphasis added)” Obviously a major currency plunge is exactly what Plunge Protection is charged with avoiding.
The major market participants involved in these money pumping rackets would not only be making money, but would view each other as true patriots. They would simultaneously serve themselves and serve the national interest. And, if the story ever got out, they would be unlikely to serve any time. They would also get the reputation for being currency-timing geniuses. Each time they brought in cash from euros or pounds, the foreign currency subsequently fell. Their timing would appear impeccable. Never mind that they and some government officials are creating the timing.
How big are these chunks of cash? Johnson & Johnson announced in February that they would bring in $11 billion.[20] Pfizer put its planned figure at $37.6 billion.[21] But are these figures big enough to pump the dollar? You bet. An ABN Amro currency strategist, Aziz McMahon, has been quoted as saying, “The sums are so large that if even a small proportion is transferred from other currencies, the positive impact on the dollar could be substantial.” According to that bank’s calculations, each $20 billion pumped in from other currencies pumps the dollar against a broad index of currencies about 1%.[22] So the announced amounts would be sufficient to trigger both momentum trading in the dollar and trigger short covering rallies which themselves would trigger further momentum trading.
Even the announcements of the currency repatriations can trigger short covering rallies. ABN’s McMahon added, “The psychological impact a wave of announcements could have on structural short-dollar positions should also not be underestimated.”[23]
Just Printing Money to Pump Markets
Short covering rallies certainly played a role in the prolonged stock market run up which followed an initial Iraqi War bombing rally in March 2003. But there is more. A respected gold market analyst, Michael Bolser, has shown how the Fed quite simply pumped money into the markets during this period, with massive cash injections often timed at local stock market bottoms. His article, “Repurchase agreements and the Dow,” should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand rigged markets.[24] According to Bolser’s analysis, the Fed was simply flooding the economy with liquidity just before and during that rally. Using data available on the Fed website, Bolser plotted the injections of cash from the Fed when it bought Treasuries on the open market, which means buying them from the 22 banks that deal directly with the Fed. The simple buying of existing Treasuries by the Fed is called a “Permanent Open Market Operation” (POMO). By contrast, buying back a certificate with a specific repurchase (buy-back) date is called a “Temporary Open Market Operation” (TOMO). Bolser observes, “There were four closely spaced Permanent Open Market Operations just prior to the 1,000-point mid-March DOW launch. In addition, there was another POMO on March 13th of $710 Million coupled with a net TOMO injection of $3.25 Billion which resulted in a 303 point DOW gain on that day.”
Bolser also clarifies the relative market impacts of these cash injections: “Permanent Open Market Operations [POMOs] are usually much smaller in magnitude than Temporary operations but have a far greater effect on the market. Experts have suggested that there is a nine times market multiplier effect inherent in permanent open market operations.”
Stuffing Wads of Treasuries into Pension Fund Holes
But what about all those billions that are already parked in dollar denominated tax havens, such as Puerto Rico? Among the Treasury Department permitted uses of the repatriated cash, is benefit plans, including pension benefits. Most of these plans are nowhere near recovery from losses suffered during the late 1990’s bubble. Normally, the repatriated money would go straight into the stock market, thus pumping it--except for one thing. A number of companies do not have sufficient money in the reserves of their defined benefits pension funds to meet their contractual obligations to their retirees. If a pension fund goes broke, a federal agency, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) takes on some of the obligationstypically pensioners collect 25 cents on the dollar. But the PBGC is itself broke, with companies defaulting or threatening to do so. For example, the PBGC has moved to take over the defined benefits pension funds of United Airlines.[25] And this is probably just the start of many such takeovers. By November 2004, the plans PBGC insured were under-funded $450 billion, an increase of $100 billion in just one year. Companies whose debt was evaluated at less than investment grade (a group that could soon include General Motors) were under-funded by $96 billion, an increase of $12 billion from the previous year.
So the PBGC could require another gigantic federal bailout, “Some have compared this to the savings and loan crisis of the early nineties,” said James Moore, who is in charge of pension products at a major bond fund, Pimco.[26]
But the U.S. government is also brokebecause of Bush’s pro-war, anti-tax policy combination. Are there solutions? Sort of. One is just to fake the numbers, reducing the required reserves in these pension funds. Bush also plans to change the rules for investing for defined benefits pension plans in a way to reduce their likelihood of defaulting. Stocks can be down when pension payout demands are up. The right kind of bond could deliver the money at the right time. The new rules have not yet been announced, but seem certain to encourage the buying of Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) by the depleted pension funds. Some funds are already jumping in to avoid even higher prices later. With the long dated TIPS pumped, the dollar looks less unattractive to Chinese and Japanese central banks and others. Masayuki Yoshihara, who manages, with others, over $9 billion at Japan’s fourth biggest life insurance company, Sumitomo Life Insurance Company, said “Pension funds will continue to be overweight the long-end of the curve. We expect the yield curve to flatten even more,” [27] What? Translating from finance-ese, he says that pension funds will keep buying long dated Treasuries, which will pump up their price and thus reduce their effective interest yield. (The interest is fixed, literally printed on the bond. So if buyers pay more to get the same printed interest rate, their effective yield goes down.) With long term interest rates falling and short term ones rising, the graph which represents these rates is becoming more and more of a flat straight line.
So there are a lot of relatively new sources of money for official manipulation of markets: federal contractor pension fund money, nicely insured under CAS; POMO and TOMO money, freshly printed by the Fed; the American Jobs Creation Act money, conveniently parked off shore; trading “partner” money, sometimes willingly given, sometimes extorted.
One nice thing about rigged markets is that they permit updating trite stock market axioms, such as “Buy on the rumor, sell on the news.” For Treasuries, this has now become, “Buy on the rumor, buy again on the news, and then sell it to the Chinese or Japanese central banks.”
All who imagine that the mythical market forces will prevail seem to deliberately avoid actually looking at what the so called markets really are, including their concentrations, Plunge Protection mechanisms, and Plunge Protection’s extensive access to a variety of pools of other people’s money. The mechanisms and the market concentrations permit the Bush administration to systematically sell off U.S. assets to pay for its more wars/less taxes policies. The Bush administration is comparable to a group of corrupt trustees for the family fortune of a lazy and incompetent heir. They siphon the money out by selling off the inheritance while the heir is too stupid or drunk to notice. He still has his mansion, his fleet of big cars and his monthly check, and he doesn’t notice that the assets are shrinking. He may not for a while. This family’s fortune is big and there are a lot of assets still to sell off.
REFERENCES
[1] See “The U.S. Government’s Bubble Blowing Machine.”
[2] “U.S. Dollar Becomes Dependent on Handful of Central Banks,” Financial Times, 24 January 2005, p. 2
[3] “Treasuries Drop Before U.S. Begins Auctioning $51 Billion of Debt,” Bloomberg.com, 8 February 2005
[4] “U.S. 10-Year Treasury Note Rises on Optimism For Tame Inflation,” Bloomberg.com, 7 February 2005
[5] “…aujourd’hui, les actionnaires sont cantonnes das un role de quasi-spectateur. Les petits actionnaires – que l’on appelle aujourd’hui << actionnaires individuals >> savent qu’ils ont peu de poids. Tous ensemble, ils ne representent que quelques pour cent du capital car l’investissement des ménages est de plus en plus sous forme de Sicav, de fonds communs de placement ou d’assurance vie. Les acctionnaires, aujourd’hui, ce swont donc les investisseurs institutionnels.” (p. 187)
[6] “Nous ne sommes plus, en effet, dans le monde que l’on decrit dans les manuels d’economie, avec des investisseurs innombrables aux determinismes varies, choisissant chacun a sa maniere les titres qu’il va mettre en portefeuille – la resultante de leurs millions de decisions generant une sorte d’equilibre de marche changeant, mais stable ! La verite, c’est que, depuis quelques annees, l’investissement raisonne sur une valeur a presque disparue au profit de comportements de plus en plus mecaniques.” (p. 122)
[7] “$1.3 trillion deficits forecast over decade,” latimes.com 25 January 2005
[8] “Dollar Rises Versus Yen; Chin’s Zhou Says Yuan Not Undervalued,” Bloomberg.com 7 February 2005.
[9] “Koizumi puts markets in spin,” Financial Times, 11 March 2005, p. 1
[10] “Feisty Greenback Inches Ahead,” Financial times, 24 February 2005, p. 30
[11] “Central Banks Seek to Calm Dollar Fears,” Financial Times 24 February 2005, p.7
[12] “Dollar Has Weekly Decline on Concern Banks May Slow Purchases,” Bloomberg.com 26 Feb 2005
[13] “Russia Ends De Facto Dollar Peg and Moves to Align Ruble With Euro,” Financial Times, 6 Feb 2005
[14] “Jusqu’a present, il s’agisait du grand pari adopte par la quasi unanimite des cambistes: le dollar baissera en 2005.”
[15] “U.S. Tax Amnesty Could Rake in $100 Billion,” Financial Times, 31 January 2005, p. 17
[16] “Repatriated Cash Raises M&A Hopes,” Financial Times, 31 January 2005
[17] “U.S. Tax Amnesty Could Rake in $100 Billion,” Financial Times 31 January 2005, p. 17
[18] Andrew Coggan, “The Short View,” Financial Times 12 February 2005, p. 15
[19] “U.S. Tax Amnesty Could Rake in $100 Billion,” Financial Times 31 January 2005, p. 17
[20] “Repatriated Cash Raises M&A Hopes,” Financial Times 2005
[21] “U.S. Tax Amnesty Could Rake in $100 Billion,” Financial Times, 31 January 2005, p. 17
[22] “Positive Signs For Dollar Emerge,” Financial Times, 21 January 2005, p. 28
[23] “Positive Signs For Dollar Emerge,” Financial Times, 21 January 2005, p. 28
[24] http://financialsense.com/editorials/bolser/2003/0602.htm
[25] “Battle over United pension plans heats up,” Financial Times, 12-13 March 2005, p. 8
[26] “A Case of Pension Deficit Disorder,” Financial Times, 24 February 2005, p. 31
[27] “Treasuries May Fall Amid Concern Demand Will Fall At Auctions,” Bloomberg.com, 9 February 2005
[i] Claude Bebear, Ils vont tuer le capitalism, Plon, Paris 2003, p. 186
[ii] Claude Bebear, Ils vont tuer le capitalism, Plon, Paris 2003, p. 122 (translated from the French by R. Bell)
[iii] “The Exchange Stabilization Fund: How It Works,” Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, December 1999
Mites Killing Off California Bees
25 March 2005
Devastation could have broad effect on agriculture.The buzz from honeybees has been zapped in Marin and across the state because of the resurgence of a pesky mite, which is killing off the insects in large numbers. "We first started to see it last spring," said Spencer Marshall, co-owner of Marshall's Farm Honey, who has about 100 hives spread across Marin. "It can wipe out up to 50 percent of hives. Imagine a farmer seeing 50 percent of his cows go down."
Experts believe Varroa mites might have arrived in the mid-1980s from Asia, where they coexisted with local honeybees. In their years in North America, the eight-legged pests have devastated wild bee colonies and radically altered beekeeping. The pinhead-sized mite feeds on honeybees and their larvae. The mites also have developed a resistance to pesticides - a trait they've been able to spread to their progeny faster than scientists have been able to develop new compounds to fight them off. Marshall said some beekeepers were lazy and would hang pesticide strips near hives, giving long term exposure to mites, allowing them to build resistance.
"We do it a bit differently and only use the pesticides when we see the problem," he said.
The effect of the Varroa mite was thought to have been weakening just two years ago when swarms of honey bees in search of new homes were turning up throughout Marin and Northern California. Experts thought that was evidence of an apparent population boom and reflected the weakening of the impact of the parasitic mite. But that optimism is gone. "I think things will get worse before they get better," Marshall said.
Honeybees pollinate about a third of the human diet and dozens of agricultural crops, including almonds. The state produces 80 percent of the world's almond supply. "It's simple. We can't produce almonds without bees," said Scott Hunter, an almond farmer near Merced who's getting ready to lay 2,500 hives among the bare branches of his Butte and Padre trees. A $1 billion-a-year crop, the nuts have become the state's top agricultural export, ahead of wine and cotton. With California's 550,000 acres of almond orchards, the bee shortage is leading growers to offer beekeepers almost twice what they paid last year for their bees' services - up to $100 per hive. Growers have been riding a wave of good prices and strong demand, but they say the mite crisis is squeezing their profits.
In Marin, there are no large-scale agricultural producers that rely on bees to pollinate, but the effect of mites has affected amateur beekeepers who produce honey as well as backyard gardeners, said Stacy Carlsen, Marin's agricultural commissioner. "In terms of ag, not many rely on bees, but people rely on them for gardening," he said. "And for general ecology, it's nice to have a healthy bee population."
Plants fix genes with copies from ancestors
Still-mysterious process likened to computer caching
By Rick Weiss
The Washington Post
March 23, 2005Plants inherit secret stashes of genetic information from their long-dead ancestors and can use them to correct errors in their own genes -- a startling capacity for DNA editing and self-repair wholly unanticipated by modern genetics, researchers said yesterday. The newly discovered phenomenon, which resembles the caching of early versions of a computer document for viewing later, allows plants to archive copies of genes from generations ago, long assumed to be lost forever. Then, in a move akin to choosing their parents, plants can apparently retrieve selected bits of code from that archive and use them to overwrite the genes they have inherited directly. The process could offer survival advantages to plants suddenly burdened with new mutations or facing environmental threats for which the older genes were better adapted. Scientists predicted that by harnessing the still-mysterious mechanism they would be able to control plant diseases and create novel varieties of crops. If the mechanism can be invoked in animals -- as some tantalized scientists venture may be possible -- it could also offer a revolutionary way to correct the genetic flaws that lead to cancer and other diseases.
"We think this demonstrates that there's this parallel path of inheritance that we've overlooked for 100 years, and that's pretty cool," said Robert E. Pruitt, a professor of botany and plant pathology at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., who oversaw the studies with co-worker Susan Lolle. The finding represents a "spectacular discovery," wrote German molecular biologists Detlef Weigel and Gerd Jurgens in a commentary accompanying the research in tomorrow's issue of the journal Nature, released yesterday. The existence of an unorthodox inheritance system does not overturn the basic rules of genetics worked out by Austrian monk Gregor Mendel in the 1800s, they noted. But like a newly discovered room in a mansion of treasures, it opens up a mind-boggling world of possibilities and proves that genetics is still a young science.
"It adds a level of biological complexity and flexibility we hadn't appreciated," said Lolle, who is on a leave from Purdue to serve at the National Science Foundation, which funded the work. The Purdue team began to suspect that something strange was afoot while studying a mutation in the mustard family weed Arabidopsis thaliana, a popular workhorse of plant genetics. The mutation was in a gene known as hothead -- one of many related genes, including fiddlehead, airhead, pothead and deadhead, that when mutated cause abnormalities in stems and flowers.
Arabidopsis plants typically self-fertilize. So when both copies of a gene are mutated in a plant, its offspring is bound to be similarly flawed -- in hothead's case, exhibiting the parent's mutant flowers. Yet in the Pruitt-Lolle lab, a small but steady percentage of hothead offspring had normal flowers, like their grandparents'. Somehow the mutation -- a single misspelled "letter" of genetic code in a gene made of 1,782 molecular letters -- was being repaired. "At first, we assumed there had to be a simple explanati
