Now that's it's clear that the Friedman Chicago University NEOCON economic model is kaput, the Foxman parasite is on the propaganda warpath (mis labeling critics as anti-Semitic crying foul against the chosen people as usual) with Christian Amanpour (over compensating for being a Persian EX-PAT) & Co. (Kurtz is not Ashkenazi, RIGHT? HA! )

Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, says that what he calls "age-old canards" about Jews and money "are always just beneath the surface."
www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/articles/2008/10/03/economic_meltd...

U.S. approves $15.2 BILLION GIFT of 25 ea. F-35 STEALTH Fighter Jets to Israel
Oct 2, 2008
The Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) aircraft built by the Lockheed Martin Corp notified Congress about the proposed sale before lawmakers head back to their districts for the November election. Lawmakers now have 30 days to block the sales, but such an action would be UNPRECEDENTED considering how much love there is for Likudnics in DC.

The Pentagon agency said Israel wants to buy an initial 25 F-35s in the Conventional Take-Off and Landing (CTOL) configuration, with an option to buy an additional 50 ea. F-35 CTOL or Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL) aircraft.

All aircraft would be equipped with either the F-135 engine built by Pratt and Whitney, a unit of United Technologies, or the F-136 engine being developed by General Electric Co. and Britain's Rolls-Royce.

www.snipr.com/44oal haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtStEngPE.jhtml?itemNo=1025596&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&title='U.S.%20approves%20sale%20of%2025%20F-35%20fighter%20planes%20to%20Israel%20'&dyn_server=172.20.5.5

As in the political arena rapacious capitalists unify and engage in frontal offensive attack as the best defense, thus the henney penny sky is falling from Paulson coinciding with the gaggle of ex secretaries of state on CNN proposing diplomacy as the best means to proceed on all fronts, as opposed to the current execptionalism WORLD POLICE mantra that has been prevalent at least since the KOREAN WAR.

The end of the USA centric financial empire has arrived and will not cycle back this time since the age of scarcity has passed. With the US DOLLAR having been converted into a FOREX product itself that generates capital without producing any goods whatsoever, while creating ever increasing wealth for the ruling class, which is then used to exploit labor under the guise of FLAT EARTH theory as exemplified by capital flowing out of the financial sector on the long awaited demise of CDS (unregulated credit default swap instruments), into the food sector causing a global hunger crisis as an unintended consequence, there is no longer any doubt that hyperinflation will ensue.

The $700B BAILOUT won't even start to be implemented for at least a month and even then won't do shit to keep the dyke from suffering a catastrophic failure.

Kuby says that thanks to the "DEMOCRATIC" system there is always an avenue available other than terrorism that can be taken to affect the populous will via congressional legislation. WRONG!!! The overwhelming populous outcry against the bailout was and remains deafening, exacerbated by the $110B of additional PORK to make it fly with ZERO concessions to the schmucks at the bottom of the food chain while the sharks got a psychological feast which was instantly celebrated to excess per:

So lawmakers struck a deal on the bailout, but where was John McCain?

Was he part of the negotiations that he rushed back to Washington, DC to rescue? Was he valiantly battling the forces of the status quo to get something done for Main Street?

Well, it turns out that he wasn't. Instead, he indulged in a luxury dining experience at CityZen, an icon of haute cuisine in Washington, DC.

As his colleagues worked on the deal at the Capitol Saturday night, McCain and his wife, Cindy, dined with Sen. Joe Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, at CityZen, one of Washington's best restaurants.

The restaurant serves treats such as Monterey Bay Squid Ratatouille; Shaved Sashimi of Geoduck Clam; Basic Infused Lettuce; Fricassee of Summer Beans, Flageolets, and CityZen Chorizo; Fromage Blanc Soufle Glace with AN Almond Biscuit Navel Orange Salad and Orange-Licorice Emulsion. Starting with an amuse bouche of fried mushroom with truffle butter; moving on to a grilled pork jowl with marinated French green lentils, micro watercress, and shaved foie gras confit; and further on to the crispy skin filet of Atlantic black bass served with Rancho Gordo shelling beans, CityZen chorizo, and baby leeks -- every taste is exquisite and out of the ordinary. Waitstaff bring intermission refreshments, such as olive oil custard topped with infused butter or ginger sorbet in homemade root beer. Only a food artist would think to create sensations like the cardamom-dusted orange cruller with kumquat marmalade and African amber tea sorbet. The restaurant's 800-bottle wine selection concentrates on bordeaux, burgundy, and California cabernet.

www.snipr.com/44o9i huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/28/as-negotiators-struck-bai_n_129989.html?page=2#entry_12345

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!

These wars were not “mistakes” that were managed poorly, as stated by sections of the Democratic Party and media, but atrocious crimes for which the entire political establishment stands condemned.

Even as the election campaign season progresses, the US is carrying out further military actions. The US has begun bombing areas of Pakistan in opposition to the demands of Pakistan’s government. In its attempt to assert control of a key geo-strategic area in the Caucasus and undermine Russian influence in the region, the US supported a Georgian attack on South Ossetia. Both these operations have the full support of the Democrats and Republicans.

On the basis of the doctrine of “preemptive war,” the American ruling class has arrogated to itself the right to invade any country. It is responding to its declining economic position by seeking to leverage its main advantage against its rivals: the most powerful military in the world.

www.wsws.org/articles/2008/sep2008/elec-s13.shtml

Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics, a brave conservative critic, put it plainly: "The joyous reception from Congressional Democrats to Paulson's latest massive bailout proposal smells an awful lot like yet another corporatist lovefest between Washington's one-party government and the Sell Side investment banks."

A kindred critic, Josh Rosner of Graham Fisher in New York, defined the sponsors of this stampede to action: "Let us be clear, it is not citizen groups, private investors, equity investors or institutional investors broadly who are calling for this government purchase fund. It is almost exclusively being lobbied for by precisely those institutions that believed they were 'smarter than the rest of us,' institutions who need to get those assets off their balance sheet at an inflated value lest they be at risk of large losses or worse."

Let me be clear. The scandal is not that government is acting. The scandal is that government is not acting forcefully enough - using its ultimate emergency powers to take full control of the financial system and impose order on banks, firms and markets. Stop the music, so to speak, instead of allowing individual financiers and traders to take opportunistic moves to save themselves at the expense of the system. The step-by-step rescues that the Federal Reserve and Treasury have executed to date have failed utterly to reverse the flight of investors and banks worldwide from lending or buying in doubtful times. There is no obvious reason to assume this bailout proposal will change their minds, though it will certainly feel good to the financial houses that get to dump their bad paper on the government.

www.tinyurl.com/4gefcc truthout.org/article/paulson-bailout-plan-a-historic-swindle

Treasury bills are the I.O.U.s of the federal government. We the taxpayers are on the hook for the Fed’s "enhanced liquidity facilities," meaning the loans it has been making to everyone in sight, bank or non-bank, exercising obscure provisions in the Federal Reserve Act that may or may not say they can do it. What’s going on here? Why not let the free market work? Bankruptcy courts know how to sort out assets and reorganize companies so they can operate again. Why the extraordinary measures for Fannie, Freddie and AIG?

The answer may have less to do with saving the insurance business, the housing market, or the Chinese investors clamoring for a bailout than with the greatest Ponzi scheme in history, one that is holding up the entire private global banking system. What had to be saved at all costs was not housing or the dollar but the financial derivatives industry; and the precipice from which it had to be saved was an "event of default" that could have collapsed a quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble, a collapse that could take the entire global banking system down with it.

www.tinyurl.com/3t9cfl globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=10265

There are now rather fewer passengers heading back after work from New York to Greenwich, the upmarket Connecticut coastal town where faux English "manor" homes with manicured grounds are bought and sold with millions made in Manhattan.

And those making the journey last week were drowning their sorrows or toasting survival rather than planning how to spend the extravagant end-of-year bonuses that are normally the talk of the Bar Car when the autumn nights set in.

An unemployed former financial high-flyer was going home after the latest unsuccessful interview, an old friend confided to him that he also expected to lose his job this month, a third man wondered when a buyer would come in for the second home in the Hamptons on which he can no longer afford the mortgage.

www.tinyurl.com/3s3ye8 telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/3134576/Bail-out-bill--Wall-Street-tarnished-by-700bn-US-Congress-vote---financial-crisis.html

To put that €400 billion in perspective: it would be more than enough to eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015, according to World Bank estimates; or it could feed and educate the world's poor for seven years. It is the equivalent of more than €100,000 for every Irish man, woman and child and well over double Ireland's GDP

www.tinyurl.com/3gzc8w irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2008/1004/1222959337373.html?via=mr

Barney Frank Has locked horns with the administration in the past, but the relationship between the chairman of the House financial services committee and Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, is based on mutual respect and shared pragmatism. He is the most unlikely - but important - ally the White House has in Congress

Chuck Schumer The senior senator from New York has a tough act to balance. He will be loath to hinder the bail-out of Wall Street. But he is also in charge of the Democrats' push to win a wider Senate majority in this year's election. That may force him to take a tough line against the industry that has fed him for years

www.tinyurl.com/52q95a ft.com/cms/s/3cc4459c-89d2-11dd-8371-0000779fd18c,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F3cc4459c-89d2-11dd-8371-0000779fd18c.html%3Fnclick_check%3D1&_i_referer=&nclick_check=1

FOLLOW THE MONEY!!!

Here is a list of millionaires whose bonuses and GOLDEN PARACHUTES won't be touched SO HELP ME GOD (yep the same one that dialogs with the shrub on maters such as OPERATION IRAQI LIBERATION [OIL] ):

1. Lloyd Blankfein: Chairman & CEO of Goldman Sachs
2. Stephen Roach: Managing Director & Economist of Morgan Stanley
3. Martin Feldstein: Director of American International Group (AIG)
4. Alan Fishman: CEO of Washington Mutual (WaMu)

“we say that this ideology is failing, I beg to differ. I actually believe it has been enormously successful, enormously successful, just not on the terms that we learn about in University of Chicago textbooks, that I don’t think the project actually has been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won.

And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences.
- Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein spoke at the University of Chicago last week, invited by a group of faculty opposed to the creation of an economic research center called the Milton Friedman Institute. It has a $200 million endowment and is named after the University’s most famous economist, the leader of the neoliberal Chicago School of Economics.

NAOMI KLEIN: When Milton Friedman turned ninety, the Bush White House held a birthday party for him to honor him, to honor his legacy, in 2002, and everyone made speeches, including George Bush, but there was a really good speech that was given by Donald Rumsfeld. I have it on my website. My favorite quote in that speech from Rumsfeld is this: he said, “Milton is the embodiment of the truth that ideas have consequences.”

So, what I want to argue here is that, among other things, the economic chaos that we’re seeing right now on Wall Street and on Main Street and in Washington stems from many factors, of course, but among them are the ideas of Milton Friedman and many of his colleagues and students from this school. Ideas have consequences.

More than that, what we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology. It cannot simply be written off as corruption or greed, because what we have been living, since Reagan, is a policy of liberating the forces of greed to discard the idea of the government as regulator, of protecting citizens and consumers from the detrimental impact of greed, ideas that, of course, gained great currency after the market crash of 1929, but that really what we have been living is a liberation movement, indeed the most successful liberation movement of our time, which is the movement by capital to liberate itself from all constraints on its accumulation.

So, as we say that this ideology is failing, I beg to differ. I actually believe it has been enormously successful, enormously successful, just not on the terms that we learn about in University of Chicago textbooks, that I don’t think the project actually has been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences.

Now, people are enormously loyal to Milton Friedman, for a variety of reasons and from a variety of sectors. You know, in my cynical moments, I say Milton Friedman had a knack for thinking profitable thoughts. He did. His thoughts were enormously profitable. And he was rewarded. His work was rewarded. I don’t mean personally greedy. I mean that his work was supported at the university, at think tanks, in the production of a ten-part documentary series called Freedom to Choose, sponsored by FedEx and Pepsi; that the corporate world has been good to Milton Friedman, because his ideas were good for them. ...

• www.snipr.com/081006_090001dnMP3 archive.wbai.org/files/mp3/081006_090001dn.MP3
• www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/naomi_klein/#middle
• www.tinyurl.com/4s62c5 play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2008/oct/video/dnB20081006a.rm&proto=rtsp&start=10:52
• www.tinyurl.com/45ddsq rtsp://rxn-rbn-sea05.rbn.com/farm/*/demnow/demnow/demand/2008/oct/video/dnB20081006a.rm?start=10:52
• Milton Friedman Debates Naomi Klein
  • www.youtube.com/v/g2kTy7glZ9s
  • www.youtube.com/v/vVUFyEY3gmo
• www.democracynow.org/features/alan_greenspan_vs_naomi_klein

One of the most significant features of world growth and expansion over the past decade has been the deepening integration of the world capitalist economy. This is happening both on the level of production and trade—like the parts that go into an automobile being manufacturing in different factories around the world. And it is happening at the level of finance—where banks are more globally and tightly interlinked with one another through chains of borrowing and lending and even, as in the case of AIG, insuring the risks of borrowing and lending.

The rescue operation announced by the U.S. government was motivated, on the one hand, by the need to stanch the bleeding of the U.S. financial system; and, on the other, by the need to restore international confidence in the U.S. economy.

A particular matter of concern for U.S. rulers is the international strength of the dollar. When we think about the dollar, we mostly think about it in terms of buying and selling with dollars changing hands. But the dollar is also an investible commodity—major currencies are bought and sold and traded on international currency markets. The dollar rises and falls in value in relation to other currencies and in response to international political and economic developments.

The dollar is the world’s leading currency for settling transactions, clearing debts, and holding foreign exchange reserves (trade and investment earnings that become part of the reserves of foreign central banks).

The dollar has been a linchpin of U.S. global supremacy. And it is a linchpin of the whole current global economic order.

If foreign central banks and investors were to flee from dollar holdings, this could set off a global monetary crisis and/or strengthen the position of rivals to U.S. imperialism and rival currencies (like the euro in Western Europe).

The dollar has for the most part held firm over the past month. But this is perhaps the calm before the storm.

C). Uncharted Waters and the Needs of Empire

These are uncharted waters for imperialist policymakers. They are uncharted in terms of the scale and complexity of the crisis. They are uncharted in terms of the magnitude of the rescue operations required to prevent financial breakdown. And U.S. imperialism does not have unlimited maneuvering room.

The U.S. is already the largest debtor nation in the world. It is waging costly wars for greater empire in Iraq and Afghanistan. And neither John McCain nor Barack Obama has any serious intention of ending America’s global “war on terror”--the umbrella under which the U.S. is waging these “wars for empire.”

And here an important dialectic comes into play. “U.S. military dominance,” to quote Kenneth Rogoff, the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, “has been one of the linchpins of the dollar.”(Kenneth Rogoff, “America Will Need a $1,000bn Bail-Out,” Financial Times, September 17, 2008). But this military dominance and the wars the U.S. is waging have increasingly come to depend on the steady inflow of foreign capital into the U.S. economy, especially investments by foreign central banks in U.S. government debt (the U.S. Treasury sells bonds to cover the deficits). For this to continue requires that the U.S. economy and dollar remain stable. This is a major contradiction for U.S. imperialism.

When, since April, three of the five independent investment banks on Wall Street have gone bankrupt or been absorbed, when the U.S. government intervenes in the financial sector on the scale that it has…this has profound geopolitical implications.

At the same time, the world economy is not standing still. There are major shifts in global economic power. U.S. global economic dominance is declining. And U.S. imperialism is also facing new competitive challenges and the emergence of potential rival constellations of imperial and big powers.

D). The U.S. Ruling Class and Imperialist State Come Into View

As this financial crisis has unfolded, some of the realities of bourgeois rule came into sharper focus.

To begin with, while the jobs, homes, and futures of literally millions in this society are in jeopardy, what is the paramount concern of the ruling class? It is the protection of a financial system that sits atop a global system of exploitation. It is the bail-out of the owners and investor beneficiaries of that financial system.

There was no public debate over bailouts and loans for financial institutions. And the constant refrain from on-high was, “This is no time to assign blame.” Certainly, there is never a time, from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, to talk about capitalism and its exploitative and anarchic functioning.

Politically, the system operates in such a way that the masses of people are either conditioned to be passive bystanders, or mobilized under the wing of this or that bourgeois political party or bourgeois-led movements--or subject to repression when people engage in serious resistance.

And through the media, the politicians, and the official “experts,” people are trained to look at things through a certain ideological filter. When a crisis like this one hits, the problem is never presented as the system but rather as particular flaws and malpractices that can be corrected: “excessive greed,” “Wall Street irresponsibility,” “too much regulation” or “too little regulation.”

The truth is that this crisis has deep structural causes in the very nature and workings of global capitalism and the particular position of U.S. imperialism within that global framework.

Lenin once described bourgeois parliaments (like the U.S. Congress) as “talk shops.” This time, Congress did not even get a chance to “talk” first. It has been basically presented with an accomplished fact: a bailout program. Now the bailout will be debated around the edges, with vying bourgeois economic and political interests also being fought out.

There are key institutional mechanisms of bourgeois rule and of the imperialist state. They include the Federal Reserve Bank--which plays a decisive regulating and lubricating role in the U.S. economy and which also plays a special role in the world capitalist economy-- and the Department of Treasury. Several mainstream news stories described how the head of the Federal Reserve and of the Treasury, and major Wall Street figures, met to sort out the AIG situation, to come up with a plan to deal with this phase of the crisis, and then to act on it.

As for McCain and Obama, one of whom will be the next “commander in chief of empire,” their response to the crisis has been an amalgam of the absurd, the hypocritical, and sworn allegiance to the system. ...

www.tinyurl.com/4ovw59 countercurrents.org/lotta260908.htm

PS:
CLICK THIS LINK OR DIE!!! http://airamerica.com/node/87113/490866#comment-490866