The excessively casual banter with Kroft on 60min last weekend was taxing to the constitution of anybody who is accustomed to a code of respect that excludes referring to serious investigative reporters or anybody other than dinking buddies, in the familiar as "MAN." Being overly selfdeprecating may be a consequence of squatting at the side of his overachiever supermom wife (1stBL: FIRST African slave descendent LADY of the USA), during the interview. If that's the side effect STOP THAT!

It's not as bad as Paulson and Bernanke sharing LOL moments at the start of hearings before congressional committees, followed by their doomsday threats if oversight stipulations are included in the TRILLION DOLLAR bailout blackmail ultimatum, but serves up a comparable insult to populace sensibilities toward the nation's dire situation thanks to their cronies securities fraud, as well as to our intelligence.

As far as the Lincolnesque transition team, cabinet appointments and senior advisor selection including the very individuals responsible for hawking PREEMPTIVE 1% DOCTRINE war, rendition and extrajudicial preventive detention, besides advocating against a 9/11 investigation tacitly or otherwise, who are now working behind the scenes for EO44 with access to evidence that would be used against them if impeachment and criminal prosecution were to occur for WAR CRIMES, this is RIDICULOUS!!!

Melvin Goodman, Former CIA and State Department analyst. He is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and director of the Center's National Security Project. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. He is also co-author of the book, Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk.

Heading BHO's transition efforts on intelligence policy: John Brennan and Jami Miscik, both former intelligence officials under George Tenet, are leading the review of intelligence agencies and helping make recommendations to the new administration. Brennan has supported warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition, and Miscik was involved with the politicized intelligence alleging weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the war on Iraq. ...
www.democracynow.org/2008/11/17/obama_taps_ex_cia_officials_tied#middle

The Wall Street bailout looks a lot like Iraq — a "free-fraud zone" where private contractors cash in on the mess they helped create.

See if any of this sounds familiar: As soon as the bailout was announced, it became clear that Treasury officials would hire outsiders to perform their jobs for them — at a profit. ...
www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/24012700/the_new_trough/print

Bloomberg News has requested details of the Fed bailout under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure since they have no idea where the money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return. ...
www.tinyurl.com/69y4kb latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2008/11/should-the-fede.html

In a moment of high panic in late September, the US Treasury unilaterally pushed through a radical change in how bank mergers are taxed--a change long sought by the industry. Despite the fact that this move will deprive the government of as much as $140 billion in tax revenue, lawmakers found out only after the fact. According to the Washington Post, more than a dozen tax attorneys agree that "Treasury had no authority to issue the [tax change] notice."

Of equally dubious legality are the equity deals Treasury has negotiated with many of the country's banks. According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals, "Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending--for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions, etc.--is a violation of the act." Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used.

Then there is the nearly $2 trillion the Federal Reserve has handed out in emergency loans. Incredibly, the Fed will not reveal which corporations have received these loans or what it has accepted as collateral. Bloomberg News believes that this secrecy

I suspect that the real reason the Democrats are so far failing to act has less to do with presidential protocol than with fear: fear that the stock market, which has the temperament of an overindulged 2-year-old, will throw one of its world-shaking tantrums. Disclosing the truth about who is receiving federal loans, we are told, could cause the cranky market to bet against those banks. Question the legality of equity deals and the same thing will happen. Challenge the $140 billion tax giveaway and mergers could fall through. "None of us wants to be blamed for ruining these mergers and creating a new Great Depression," explained one unnamed Congressional aide.
www.thenation.com/doc/20081201/klein/print

The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington’s handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal

There’s a few elements now that are being described as illegal that we’re finding out. First of all, the equity deals that were negotiated with the largest banks and also some smaller banks, representing $250 billion worth of the bailout money, this is the deal to inject equity into the banks in—to inject capital into the banks in exchange for equity. The idea was to address the so-called credit crunch to get banks lending again. The legislation that enabled this was quite explicit that it had to encourage lending. Barney Frank, who was one of the architects of that legislation, has said that it violates the act if the money is not going to that purpose and is instead going to bonuses, is instead going to dividends, going to salaries, going to mergers. He said that violates the acts, i.e. it’s illegal.

But what we know is that it’s going precisely to those purposes. It is going to bonuses. It is going to shareholders. And it is not going to lending. The banks have been quite explicit about this. Citibank has talked about using the money to buy other banks.

Then there’s other aspects of this that are borderline illegal. We found out that in the midst of the crisis, the Bush—the Treasury Department pushed through a tax windfall for the banks, a piece of legislation that allows the banks to save a huge amount of money when they merge with each other. And the estimate is that this represents a loss of $140 billion worth of tax revenue for the US government. Many tax attorneys who were interviewed by the Washington Post said that they felt that the way in which the Treasury Department went about this by unilaterally changing the tax code was illegal, that this had to be—this had to include Congress. Congress only found out about it after the fact.

There’s another piece of this puzzle that is also borderline illegal, which is that in addition to the $700 billion that we are discussing, the $700 billion bailout, there’s another $2 trillion that’s been handed out by the Federal Reserve in emergency loans to financial institutions, to banks, that actually we don’t really know who they’re handing the money out to, because, apparently, it’s a secret. They could be handing it out to a range of other corporations—I think they are—but they’re saying that they won’t disclose who has received these taxpayer loans, because it could cause a run on the banks, it could cause the market to lose confidence in the institutions that have taken these loans. Once again, that represents an additional $2 trillion.

The other thing that the Fed won’t disclose is what they have accepted as collateral in exchange for these loans. This is a really key point, because, of course, at the heart of the financial crisis is—are these so- called distressed assets. The value of these assets is enormously controversial. They may be worth very little. So if the Fed has accepted distressed assets as collateral in exchange for these loans, there’s a very good chance the taxpayers aren’t going to be getting this money back.

So Bloomberg News has launched a lawsuit in federal court to find out who has received the loans and what has been accepted as collateral, because they believe that this lack of transparency is illegal. So that’s why we’re calling this the “trillion-dollar crime scene” or the “multi-trillion-dollar crime scene.” ...

Thirty-three banks are set to receive some $163 billion in government bailouts; half of that sum will go to paying off shareholders over the next three years.

Barack Obama turned his election campaign into a referendum on the mania for deregulation and free trade and really less trickle-down economics. He said the idea of giving more and more to the people at the top and waiting for it to trickle down to the people below, and that really resonated with voters, and they elected him on that platform. His campaign turned around when the economic crisis really hit Wall Street. He was losing ground to McCain when the crisis hit Wall Street, and Obama started using this language of really putting the ideology of deregulation on trial. That’s when his numbers turned around. That’s when he went on his winning streak that took him all the way to Election Day. And so, I think that there has been this assumption that, OK, now we’re going to fix it.

But if we look at what just came out of the G20 summit, it’s really been a reassertion of the very ideology of deregulation. ...

PBS's Charlie Rose examined this last Friday with WaPo's Pearlstein who noted that there is NO VALUE in the current version of "financial capitalism"


They also illustrated the metrics that place the USA 25th of 30 nations qualifying us as a 2nd world country if not 3rd world in many areas.

Jeffrey Sachs: "Alan Greenspan and deregulation are the root cause of 3 BUBBLES IN A ROW."
NAILED IT!!!

• www.charlierose.com/view/clip/9571
• www.youtube.com/v/3fXePyUxZHs
• www.video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-8625501111595699688

• www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9552
• www.video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=3753239389079682517%3A188000...
• itpc://www.charlierose.com/view/itunes/9552

This bailout is really not a bailout at all; it’s a parting gift to the people that the Bush—that George Bush once referred to jokingly as “my base.” You know, in one of my columns recently, I likened it to what European colonial rulers used to do when they finally realized they had to hand over power; they would loot the treasury on the way out the door. ...

There has been this dramatic change in policy just in recent days, where Henry Paulson has said, “OK, well, we’re not going to do what we originally had said at all,” which is use the bailout money to buy distressed assets, to buy bad debts, “Now we’re going to go from these equity deals with the banks to bailing out credit card companies”—the reason for that is that first $250 billion was essentially money down the drain. They are admitting that it didn’t do what it was supposed to do, which was increase lending. So, now they’re making it up as they go along. It’s take three, take four, take five.

But we’re supposed to somehow not notice that $250 billion, an astronomical sum, was just wasted, going to bonuses, going to shareholder payouts, going to CEO salaries. And now they’re trying another method to get lending going. But it really was the parting gift.

• www.democracynow.org/2008/11/17/naomi_klein_on_the_bailout_profiteers#mi...
• www.tinyurl.com/071101dnMP3 archive.wbai.org/files/mp3/071101_090001dn.MP3

BTW:
Regarding the best of replay regarding LOOSE NUKES

A series of court rulings, legal changes, and new security and secrecy policies have made it easier than at any time since the Nixon era to punish whistleblowers; the climate has deteriorated in recent years with the Bush administration's emphasis on plugging leaks and locking down government information. ...

It's come to the point where some advocates now counsel federal employees against coming forward, period. "When people call me and ask about blowing the whistle, I always tell them, 'Don't do it, because your life will be destroyed,'" says William Weaver, a professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and a senior adviser to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. "You'll lose your career; you're probably going to lose your family if you have one; you're probably going to lose all your friends because they're associated through work; you'll wind up squandering your life savings on attorneys; and you'll come out the other end of this process working at McDonald's." ...

Banished to the Basement
Richard Levernier
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Department of Energy
ALLEGATION: Nuclear weapons sites wide open to terror attacks
REWARD: Security clearance pulled, demoted
UPSHOT: Retired from dead-end job

Code Talker
Russ Tice
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Defense Intelligence Agency
ALLEGATION: Agency infiltrated by spies
REWARD: Fired
UPSHOT: Went on to expose nsa domestic spying

The president himself told reporters that leaking the nsa program had been "a shameful act" and said "the fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy." More documents than ever before are now being shielded from public view—the number of classifications nearly quadrupled from 1995 to 2005, from 3.6 million to 14.2 million.

Hung Out to Dry
Joseph Darby
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Fellow soldiers at Abu Ghraib
ALLEGATION: Torture
REWARD: Death threats
UPSHOT: Still fears for his life

Red Team Alert
Bogdan Dzakovic
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: Federal Aviation Administration
ALLEGATION: Lousy airport security (pre-9/11)
REWARD: Demotion
UPSHOT: Still sidelined

Life as a State Secret
Sibel Edmonds
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: FBI
ALLEGATION: Bureau infiltrated by spy that failed to report goverment links to 9/11
REWARD: Fired
UPSHOT: $285,000 legal bill

www.tinyurl.com/57f79x motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/05/dont_whistle_while_you_work.html

1. Do pirates really make people walk the plank?
2. How do pirates do with chicks?
3. Do you have to be able to swim to become a pirate?
4. Can you get in trouble for hijacking a Saudi Oil Tanker?
5. The Saudis have so much oil, would they even miss one measely tanker? And why are they making such a big deal out of it?
6. Would it be a defense that the pirates made a mistake and boarded the wrong vessel after returning from a Norwegian Cruise Lines excursion to Saudi Disney?
7. What's the deal with eye patches, black tri corner hats and skull and cross bones, did that shit ever exist?
8. Who the hell are these guys, and what do they want ?

Hey Ron, why are you not on the air america cruise

http://www.newsdesk.org/archives/005754.html. In Greenland the prisons are "something" else. Read on.