Insiders Selling Stocks at Highest Level Since May 2008

(to my family members and friends; if you’re currently heavily invested in the market, get out, now. CNBC (read as the same guy who has already admitted he serves the monied class of Wall Street) analysts are telling you to buy, MSNBC is telling you to buy, Bloomburg, the Journal, they are all telling the little guys to buy… so that the insiders and the big Wall Street houses can sell… get out now.)

from Washington’s Blog

Best buying opportunity since the Great Depression?

TrimTabs is reporting that insiders know better:

Selling by corporate insiders in August has surged to $6.1 billion, the highest amount since May 2008. The ratio of insider selling to insider buying hit 30.6, the highest level since TrimTabs began tracking the data in 2004.

“The best-informed market participants are sending a clear signal that the party on Wall Street is going to end soon,” said Charles Biderman, CEO of TrimTabs.

TrimTabs explained that insider activity is not the only sign the rally is about to end. The TrimTabs Demand Index, which tracks 18 fund flow and sentiment indicators, has turned very bearish for the first time since March.

For example, short interest on NYSE stocks plummeted by 10.3% in the second half of July and margin debt on all US listed stocks spiked 5.9% in July, while 51.6% of advisors surveyed by Investors Intelligence are bullish, the highest
level since December 2007.

“When corporate insiders are bailing, the shorts are covering and investors are borrowing to buy, it generally pays to be a seller rather than a buyer of stock,” said Biderman.

TrimTabs also reports that the actions of U.S. public companies have been bearish. In the past four months, companies have been net sellers of a record $105.2 billion in shares.

“Investors who think the U.S. economy is recovering are going to get a big shock this fall,” said Biderman. “Companies and corporate insiders are signaling that the economy is in much worse shape than conventional wisdom believes.”

Cheney defends torture policy and CIA torturers

“The thing I keep coming back to time and time again, Chris, is the fact that we’ve gone for eight years without another attack. Now, how do you explain that?” Cheney

(Ultimately, it is ALL still centered around 9/11…. 9/11 will continue to be the justification for and the excuse offered for every single illegal and immoral act conducted by this country under the criminal Bush regime and subsequently the Obama regime.  The ONLY way to end this fascist shift we have been suffering over these past 20 or so years, is to expose 9/11 for what it is.)

by Patrick Martin, WSWS

In an interview broadcast Sunday, former vice president Dick Cheney defended the brutal interrogations carried out at CIA secret prisons under the direction of the Bush administration and denounced the proposed investigation of a handful of CIA agents for some of the most flagrant acts of torture.

Bill Maher Interviews Bill Moyers: The conscience of a nation

“I don’t want to live in a nation where I am in a hospital getting a treatment for $25,000 and a person just a few floors away is being denied the same treatment, because they have no money. What kind of civilization is that? What kind of moral order is that?”

Part 1

watch the rest of the interview after the break

partial transcript after the break as well (thanks to Glen Greenwald)…

US Soldiers Find Themselves Being Terrorists in Afghanistan

from Kenny’s SideShow…

The Secret Government

by Christopher Hayes, The Nation

It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered.

Though these words echo his famous endorsement of working “the dark side” in order to triumph in the “war on terror,” they were not, in fact, written by Dick Cheney. They come from the Doolittle Report, which was commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1954 to craft an intelligence strategy for winning the cold war. From a strategic perspective, the threat posed by global communism, headquartered in a massive, nuclear-armed superpower with almost 6 million men under arms, and Al Qaeda, a networked, globally distributed group of thousands of nonstate actors, could not be more different. But the national security state’s understanding of each as an existential threat was, and continues to be, nearly identical. The enemy is ingenious, relentless and unencumbered by the procedural and moral niceties that hamstring the bureaucrats of a liberal democracy. Victory–indeed, survival–requires us to become more like them.

And so: the CIA contracted a Mafia boss to murder Fidel Castro, sent biotoxins to the Republic of Congo with orders to poison Patrice Lumumba and tested LSD on unsuspecting citizens (one of whom jumped out of a window to his death). It fomented coups and bloodshed against democratically elected governments, while the National Security Agency, in coordination with the major telegram companies, read every single telegram coming in or going out of the country for three decades. The FBI infiltrated peaceful antiwar groups, breaking up marriages of activists with forged evidence of infidelity, while surveilling civil rights leaders with an assortment of bugs and break-ins. It even attempted to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into committing suicide, shipping him tapes of him midcoitus with a mistress and a note that said, “There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

We know all this (and much more) thanks to the work of the Church Committee.

Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

(Imagine that… a Rockefeller (read as “a senator from the most powerful banking/oil family in America“) drafting a “bipartisan” bill that would give the president the power to shut down sites on the internet that they deem potentially hazzardous to “national security” through their “comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy“.)

by Declan McCullagh, CNET

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

Washington’s double standard: The elections in Iran and Afghanistan

(After attempting to undermine the Iranian elections, based on ZERO evidence (that is if you don’t count anonymous TWEETS from Israel and PR firms using TruCast marketing software as “evidence”) the Obama administration is now holding up as “successful” the completely fraudulent sham that laughingly passed as an “election” in Afghanistan…)

by Patrick Martin, WSWS

Despite the increasing evidence of systematic and massive vote fraud, the Obama administration and the American media are still seeking to sustain the pretense that Afghanistan’s August 20 presidential election was a basically democratic affair.

Obama reappoints Bernanke as Federal Reserve Chairman

(Obama, on his Banker’s Holiday at Martha’s Vineyard, is making it very clear who his base really is.  The same base George Bush served. In an unprecedented move, Obama just announced he would reappoint Ben Bernanke (Bush’s Fed Chairman) to yet another 4 year term.  He makes this announcement 5 month before Bernanke’s term was up.)

by Andre Damon, WSWS

US President Barack Obama announced Tuesday morning that he would reappoint Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Chairman. The nomination is expected to receive the required Senate approval.

Federal Reserve Seeks Delay in Disclosure of Emergency Lending

by Mark Pitmann, Bloomberg

The Federal Reserve asked a judge yesterday to delay enforcement of her decision requiring the central bank to identify companies in its emergency lending programs.

Chief U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska in Manhattan said on Aug. 24 that the Fed had until Aug. 31 to disclose daily reports on borrowing by banks and other financial institutions. The central bank wants Preska to stay her order, made in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, until the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York can act on an appeal that the Fed said it intends to file.

As Obama Golfs with UBS CEO Days After Firm Avoids Criminal Prosecution, UBS Whistleblower Given 40-Month Jail Term

from Democracy Now, video is here.

On the first day of his vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, President Obama spent five hours golfing with UBS executive Robert Wolf, an early financial backer of Obama’s presidential campaign. As the pair teed off, another UBS banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, had just been handed a forty-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to assisting a client evade taxes. It was the first sentence in a wider scandal that has seen UBS admit to helping wealthy Americans dodge their tax obligations. On his own initiative, Birkenfeld blew the whistle on UBS. His disclosure and cooperation with US authorities provided inside information into the bank’s conduct and sparked the massive federal investigation.

[full transcript after the break]

US Copter Loses Ballot Boxes as Afghan Vote Count Moves Slowly Forward

(Along the same line as “The dog ate my homework.” and “I just found it.  Really“.  The U.S. military in Afghanistan, an OCCUPYING FORCE presiding over an election of an OCCUPIED NATION is claiming they “accidentally dropped” 25 ballot boxes from a helicopter…)

Jason Ditz, AntiWar

As the count for Afghanistan’s hotly disputed election trudges along at a snail’s pace, a bit of excitement happened when the US military admitted that it had misplaced 25 ballot boxes it was shipping from Paroon to Kabul. Actually it didn’t so much misplace them as it dropped them, off a helicopter, into what officials are describing as “the rugged mountains of Nuristan.”

CIA Involvement: Police chief: Lockerbie evidence was faked

from Global Research

This report was published by the Scotesman exactly three years ago. “the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.”

A former Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated.

The retired officer – of assistant chief constable rank or higher – has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.

While Swine Flu Vaccine Has Been Declared “Safe”, Novel Adjuvants Will Be Used Before Any Meaningful Testing has been Conducted

from George Washington’s Blog

Dr. Meryl Nass is an expert on vaccines.

Over the years, I have found Dr. Nass to be reasonable, balanced and well grounded in science in her discussions about the anthrax attacks and the criminal investigations into Dr. Hatfield and Dr. Ivins. So I wanted to see what she thought about the safety of the swine flu vaccine.

Karzai’s Top Challenger Releases Videos Alleging Fraud

(“The elections in Afghanistan were a success.” Obama… yeah, I guess it was. If the intent was to steal the election and keep Bush’s Unical oil-man in place…)

Karzai Challenger Releases Videos Showing Election Fraud, as Early Results Trickle in

by Nick Schifrin, ABC News

As preliminary results from Afghanistan’s presidential election trickle in, President Hamid Karzai’s chief rival escalated his accusations of widespread fraud in the elections, showing reporters videos and materials that he said proved Karzai intended to “steal the verdict of the nation.”

The accusations came as early results showed a close race between Karzai and his main challenger, former Karzai minister Abdullah Abdullah.

Karzai had 212,927 votes to Abdulla’s 202,889 votes. Both men had about 40 percent of the votes tallied so far with other candidates trailing far behind. It was not clear how much of the vote had been counted when those figures were released, but were based on only 10 percent of the country’s polling centers.

The accusations — combined with low turnout — threaten the legitimacy of a vote the U.S. hoped would help stabilize a shaky state and give credibility to the next government.

Top Jundallah Figure Says US Ordered Attacks

(U.S. has been funding terrorist acts in Iran since 2003 in yet another of a long and still growing list of CIA covert destabilization programs.)

by Jason Ditz, AntiWar

In a high profile press conference in the city of Zahedan, Iran, international media gathered to hear a statement from Abdolhamid Rigi, a high ranking member of the Balochi separatist movement Jundallah who is awaiting execution by the Iranian government for his role in a series of murders.

Rigi, whose brother Abdolmalek Rigi is the leader of the militant group, addressed a wide variety of topics and made several claims regarding long-suspected links the group has to various international organizations.

In particular, Rigi confirmed that Jundallah previously had ties with al-Qaeda for operations in Pakistan, and that the groups split in 2003 over differences of opinion about strategy in Iran. Not long after severing its ties with al-Qaeda, the group started a relationship with the United States government.

That fact has never been disputed, indeed US officials have repeatedly confirmed that the government has secretly encouraged and advised Jundallah as it fights the Iranian government. But Rigi insisted the US ties went well beyond encouragement.