Norman Finkelstein’s Website “Suspended” – (Now its Back Up)

***UPDATE***NOW THAT’S RESULTS! No sooner had I posted this, but a reader went to the site and it’s back up. That’s right… that’s right…. I got JUICE, BABY… who da man? who da man?

I just noticed that Norman Finkelstein’s website is “suspended”.  I wonder how that is… he owns the site, www.normanfinkelstein.com.  It looks like a company called cgi-sys might manage the site for him, perhaps they shut it down due to pressure over his latest comments on Democracy NOW! about Israel and the Goldstone report.

If anyone has any info on this, please let me know. This is interesting. If they can shut him down and he owns the site, what else can they just arbitrarily erase?

Well, his site is back up. That’s good. I wonder why they put up the “site suspended” notification? Who knows… check out this video from his site…

Finally, Neda’s Staged “Killing” Exposed

by Scott Creighton

On June 24, 2009 I wrote an article called “Compare and Contrast: One is Real the Other is Fake” which explained how I thought the Neda killing in Iran was a staged attempt to ferment indignation in Iran and the rest of the world against the ruling party that had just won the election. It was yet another example of an attempt to overthrow a regime that was unfriendly to U.S. corporations and bankers probably devised by the CIA like so many in the past. I have done several stories on the Iranian Election Propaganda campaign that was designed to give cause to overthrow Iran.

Well, even some of my regulars here thought I had gone overboard on that one. But now there is a documentary out now showing clearer images of the entire thing and you can see it’s an obviously staged event. She’s got the tube of fake blood in her left hand and you can see her apply it to her own face after it squirts out a bit and runs down her hand and down her arm. She then drops the tube of fake blood and the doctor who helped stage the event tries to push it under her so the camera won’t see it. 

Then they had to restage the propaganda “money shot” sometime later and they screwed that up in a rushed effort to get it out and on the front page of every newspaper in the world while the story was breaking. Of course they had no real concern about it being an accurate recreation of the scenen since they already knew “journalists” like Andrew Sullivan were already in the bag.

Looting Main Street:How the nation’s biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

excerpt…

The city of Birmingham was founded in 1871, at the dawn of the Southern industrial boom, for the express purpose of attracting Northern capital — it was even named after a famous British steel town to burnish its entrepreneurial cred. There’s a gruesome irony in it now lying sacked and looted by financial vandals from the North. The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens. These guys aren’t number-crunching whizzes making smart investments; what they do is find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive. In a complete subversion of free-market principles, they take no risk, score deals based on political influence rather than competition, keep consumers in the dark — and walk away with big money. “It’s not high finance,” says Taylor, the former bond regulator. “It’s low finance.” And even if the regulators manage to catch up with them billions of dollars later, the banks just pay a small fine and move on to the next scam. This isn’t capitalism. It’s nomadic thievery.

 

[read the full article after the break]

THE GREAT CON JOB – DYLAN RATIGAN

(Though Dylan is still doing a good job on this story, he still seems to miss (or ignore) the real motive behind the story… the fact that they deliberately orchistrated this in order to create this economic atmosphere so that they could impose the IMF type neoliberal structural reforms.)

Part 1

Is the Fed Helping the Big Banks to Cook the Books?

by Mike Whitney, Information Clearinghouse

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal revealed details of a cover up by the nations largest banks that have been engaged in potentially-criminal accounting activities to conceal the amount of debt on their balance sheets. The SEC has been notified of the allegations and has launched a probe to determine whether further action is needed. Among the banks implicated, are Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Citigroup. According to the WSJ: 

  “Major banks have masked their risk levels in the past five quarters by temporarily lowering their debt just before reporting it to the public, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A group of 18 banks….understated the debt levels used to fund securities trades by lowering them an average of 42% at the end of each of the past five quarterly periods, the data show. The banks, which publicly release debt data each quarter, then boosted the debt levels in the middle of successive quarters.” (“Big Banks Mask Risk Levels”, Kate Kelly, Tom McGinty, Dan Fitzpatrick, Wall Street Journal)

  The article, titled “Big Banks Mask Risk Levels”, has set off alarm bells on Wall Street because of the similarity between Lehman Bros. “repo 105″ transactions and these new signs of obfuscation by other large banks.  “Repo 105″ is an arcane accounting device that Lehman used to hide $50 billion in debt off its balance sheet in an attempt to mislead investors about the true condition of its financial health. The WSJ story suggests that the practice may be more widespread than originally thought. The “repo 105″ scandal is further complicated by suspicions that Lehman was assisted in its effort by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York which, at the time, was headed by Timothy Geithner. Here is a short recap of what transpired between the Geithner’s NY Fed and Lehman according to ex-regulator William Black and former NY governor Eliot Spitzer from an article on Huffington Post: 

Washington nuclear conference promotes US campaign against Iran, North Korea

by Patrick Martin, WSWS

President Barack Obama opened the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington Monday, a two-day event that, in the guise of promoting disarmament and opposing terrorism, seeks to line up international support for the US campaign to isolate, pressure and ultimately overthrow the governments of Iran and North Korea.

Far from representing a break from the aggressive approach of the preceding Bush administration, the Obama policy is an effort to accomplish the same goal—US military domination of the Middle East, Central Asia and the world—using different language and somewhat altered tactics.