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Tag: debt crisis

  • Osama Bin Laden: As Pakistan Oppresses Ethnic Minorities, US Resumes Aid

    Two and a half years after the widely publicized US Navy Seal raid, which killed Osama bin-Laden at his hideout in the heart of Pakistan’s military-political establishment, Washington DC has quietly resumed overt foreign aid to Islamabad.

    The decision to resume billions of dollars in aid comes in the face of crushing unemployment, worsening inflation, and a tsunami of $100+ trillion debt staring at American people. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exY6D497on0

    Despite growing but muted opposition to foreign aid, a paralyzed and pliant America has resigned itself to decisions crafted by policy makers in Washington DC. Declining standards of living over last several decades have led to a situation where an aging and bankrupt US, with below replacement fertility, is boosting the finances of Pakistan with explosive fertility and rapidly multiplying population.

    Pakistan’s ethnic minorities, which are deeply resentful of Islamabad’s oppressive rule, are bracing for further attacks on their communities and dignity, as White House revealed plans to transfer more than $1.6 billion to Pakistan, including $305 million in “security” assistance.

    Newly elected Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Punjab is scheduled to meet with White House staff and US Congressional leaders, where plans for future aid will be elaborated.

    “As part of our annual funding process, throughout the course of this past summer the State Department notified Congress of how it planned to program funds from several different accounts for various programs in Pakistan…While this is part of a long process of restarting security assistance cooperation after implementation was slowed during the bilateral challenges of 2011 and 2012, civilian assistance has continued uninterrupted throughout,”

    State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said in an email.

    Tens of billions in security aid to Pakistan’s military over last several decades has strengthened its grip on restive minorities, including Balochis and Sindhis, who have sought independence with varying degrees of intensity.

    Last month, the ethnic conflict between Baloch minority and Punjabi majority came under international glare in the aftermath of powerful earthquake in the province of Balochistan, that took 400 lives and displaced more than 300,000. US congressional hearings on Balochistan have revealed the extent to which American aid to Pakistan has been used to suppress Balochistan’s freedom struggle and right to self determination.

    Following the lead of Balochistan, separatists in Pakistan’s Sindh province have redoubled their efforts towards political independence from Pakistan, as American foreign aid enriches the Punjab province, home to Pakistani military-political-financial establishment.

    It remains to be seen if American people’s opposition to foreign aid can be channeled into political action, so that the cycle of oppression, death and destruction of Pakistan’s ethnic minorities, followed by ever increasing aid by Washington DC, can be broken.

    [image from wikimedia]

  • JP Morgan Chase and US Justice Department Cut $13 Billion Deal as America Suffers

    The ongoing Kabuki theater between Big Government and Big Finance took a new turn on Saturday, when it was announced that JPMorgan Chase & Co, one of the top 10 banks in the world, has struck a preliminary $13 billion deal with the US Justice Department.

    The deal will quietly mothball Federal investigations into hyper-destructive mortgage loans the bank sold to investors throughout the Bush regime, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis. To keep the chattering classes busy, the deal will not explicitly let the bank off the hook from criminal liability related to its mortgage finance operations that were re-packaged into AAA rated bonds before sale to investors.

    While the overall inflationary monetary system under the monopoly of Federal Reserve remains unscathed, in order to soothe the public at large, the bank will continue to cooperate in criminal investigations of some JP Morgan employees who were involved in the mortgage operations. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR-gJ5N014o

    Authorities at JP Morgan and Justice Department did not respond to Reuters request for comments, but some sources say that the details behind the agreement are still being hashed out away from full public view or the glare of 24/7 C-SPAN cameras.

    The $13 billion settlement is peanuts for the 800-lb gorilla of global finance, which sits on a cool $2.4 Trillion in worldwide assets, larger than the economies of all but the top 7 countries globally.

    The settlement will make many of JP Morgan’s legal troubles go away, even as the bank disclosed this month that it had set aside $23 billion in reserves for the deal with Washington DC and other legal expenses to be paid to expensive DC lawyers to patch up further scrutiny over its conduct before and after the 2008 financial implosion.

    Attorney General Eric Holder and JP Morgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon enjoyed phone conversations on Friday evening to finalize the broad outlines of the deal. Long trumpeted by the media as one of the most well run banks, JP Morgan is no longer able to hide the skeletons in its cupboard while maintaining an image of world esteem.

    With foreign governments and financial giants relentlessly infiltrating the highly unstable American banking system, the Justice Department was threatening to sue the bank over complex mortgage backed securities it sold to questionable investors, leading to more than doubling of home prices until the September 2008 crash.

    Some of the criminal liabilities are carry overs from the now defunct Washington Mutual (WaMu) and investment bank Bear Stearns, which were absorbed by JP Morgan with Federal Reserve’s backing behind the scenes. Together, Bear Stearns and JP Morgan were able to extract more than $1.2 Trillion from tax-payers as unemployment soared and millions of Americans lost their life-time savings.

    [image from youtube and government accountability office]

  • Robert Redford Talks Government Shutdown

    What do you call a person who uses belligerent language and demagogy to demonize and stigmatize the opposition while contributing zero ideas to solve the tsunami of American debt?

    What do you call a person who lectures the 99% to cough up more of their hard earned money to finance the parasites in Washington DC, while sitting on a cool $170 million?

    You call this person Robert Redford. Just when you thought the actor could not say something more inflammatory, Redford doubled down on his own venomous tirades on CNN today on the causes and consequences of government shutdown:

    According to Redford, bigotry and politics of personal attacks against President Barack Obama have paralyzed the U.S. government, not the determination to protect future generations from dollar crisis and hyperinflation.

    So when a bipartisan group of lawmakers want to stop the White House campaign to bleed and bankrupt America by inaugurating new wars to support Sunni Islamists in Syria, Turkey and Yemen, it is nothing but tea-party bigotry. When a bipartisan group of tea-party and progressive lawmakers want to Audit the Pentagon, Audit the Federal Reserve, despite intense hostility against transparency by White House, that is all bigotry and hate.

    According to Redford, women and young people will solve all the problems in Washington, if they are given the reins. “Give them the reins…I think they can do better than we have,” said Redford. Of course, the hypocritical actor did not offer to give the reins of all the $170 million he is hoarding, to poor people, struggling women and needy children.

    This is exactly why many who oppose the size and power of Federal Government are so disgusted at holier than thou celebrities who masquerade as moral judges over the 99% masses, while hoarding all their wealth in off-shore accounts to avoid paying taxes they vociferously support.

    Redford pontificated further on the events surrounding the ongoing tussle in Washington over government shutdown:

    “It’s so divided now with the people that are so narrow and so limited that they would take us back into the past…And I was trying to figure out, why are these people behaving so stupidly? Why are they behaving so horribly that it’s crippling our whole country? …And I think it has to do with fear. I think it’s a group of people that are so afraid of change, and they’re so narrow-minded that some people — when they see change coming — get so threatened by change, they get angry and they get terrorized, and then they get vicious. I think that’s who these people are. They’re so afraid of change that they’re behaving miserably.

    Obama is “a compassionate man who can’t function. It is so decrepit, it is so paralyzed, and the worst of it is it is paralyzed by intention…There is a body of congressional people that wants to paralyze the system. I think what sits underneath it, unfortunately, is there’s probably some racism involved, which is really awful…because their determination was to destroy this person…They wanted, if it meant destroying the government, anything to keep him from succeeding…I think just the idea of giving credit to this President, giving him credit for anything, is abhorrent to them, so they’ll go against it. Never mind that it’s the better good of the people, never mind that they’re supposed to be in office representing the interest of the public. They’re representing their own self-interests, which is very narrow and in some cases bigoted.”

    To polish his image further, Redford ranted again,

    “Susan Collins, who is a Republican (Senator from Maine), is saying: ‘Enough of this. This is not the job I signed up for. I’ve got to do something,’ …So she’s bringing a bipartisan group together of women. I think the future should belong more to women and young people….a lot of men that were in control were behaving stupidly…I mean, sometimes you say: ‘Can we actually be this dumbed down, or am I actually hearing what I’m hearing from some of these people? Are they really, is that really happening?’ It’s sad.”

    [image from youtube]