EVENTS IN TIME (BIBLE PROPHECY LITERALLY FULFILLED)(BY GOD)

I WRITE NEWS ABOUT AND PUT NEWS ARTICLES ABOUT ISRAEL AND JERUSALEM PERTAINING TO BIBLE PROPHESY HAPPENINGS.JOEL 3:20 But Judah (ISRAEL) shall dwell for ever, and Jerusalem from generation to generation.(THATS ISRAEL-JERUSALEM WILL NEVER BE DESTROYED AGAIN)-WE CHRISTIANS ARE ALL WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THE PRE-TRIBULATION RAPTURE TO OCCUR.SO WE CAN GO TO JESUS AND GET OUR NEVER DYING BODIES.SO WE CAN RULE OVER CITIES OURSELVES.WHILE JESUS RULES FROM DAVIDS THRONE FOREVER IN JERUSALEM.

Monday, March 23, 2009

THE BANKER POWER GRAB TAKEOVER

EU DICTATOR (WORLD LEADER)

REVELATION 17:12-13
12 And the ten horns (NATIONS) which thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast.
13 These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.

REVELATION 6:1-2
1 And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.
2 And I saw, and behold a white horse:(PEACE) and he that sat on him had a bow;(EU DICTATOR) and a crown was given unto him:(PRESIDENT OF THE EU) and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.(MILITARY GENIUS)

REVELATION 13:1-10
1 And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.(THE EU AND ITS DICTATOR IS GODLESS)
2 And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.(DICTATOR COMES FROM NEW AGE OR OCCULT)
3 And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death;(MURDERERD) and his deadly wound was healed:(COMES BACK TO LIFE) and all the world wondered after the beast.(THE WORLD THINKS ITS GOD IN THE FLESH, MESSIAH TO ISRAEL)
4 And they worshipped the dragon (SATAN) which gave power unto the beast:(JEWISH EU DICTATOR) and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?(FALSE RESURRECTION,SATAN BRINGS HIM TO LIFE)
5 And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.(GIVEN WORLD CONTROL FOR 3 1/2YRS)
6 And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God,(HES A GOD HATER) to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven.(HES A LIBERAL OR DEMOCRAT,WILL PUT ANYTHING ABOUT GOD DOWN)
7 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints,(BEHEAD THEM) and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.(WORLD DOMINATION)
8 And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.(WORLD DICTATOR)
9 If any man have an ear, let him hear.
10 He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.(SAVED CHRISTIANS AND JEWS DIE FOR THEIR FAITH AT THIS TIME,NOW WE ARE SAVED BY GRACE BUT DURING THE 7 YEARS OF HELL ON EARTH, PEOPLE WILL BE PUT TO DEATH (BEHEADINGS) FOR THEIR BELIEF IN GOD (JESUS) OR THE BIBLE.

THE WEEK OF DANIEL 9:27 WE KNOW ITS 7 YRS

Heres the scripture 1 week = 7 yrs Genesis 29:27-29
27 Fulfil her week, and we will give thee this also for the service which thou shalt serve with me yet seven other years.
28 And Jacob did so, and fulfilled her week: and he gave him Rachel his daughter to wife also.
29 And Laban gave to Rachel his daughter Bilhah his handmaid to be her maid.

DANIEL 9:26-27
26 And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come (ROMANS IN AD 70) shall destroy the city and the sanctuary;(ROMANS DESTROYED THE 2ND TEMPLE) and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.
27 And he( EU ROMAN, JEWISH DICTATOR) shall confirm the covenant with many for one week:( 7 YEARS) and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease,( 3 1/2 YRS) and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.

WORLD GOVERNMENT

DANIEL 7:23-25
23 Thus he said, The fourth beast shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth, which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces.
24 And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise: and another shall rise after them; and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings.
25 And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time.

DANIEL 12:4,1
4 But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
1 And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.

REVELATION 13:1-3,7,8,12,16-18
1 And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
2 And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.
3 And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.
7 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.
8 And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
12 And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.
16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

REVELATION 17:3,7,9-10,12,18
3 So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.
7 And the angel said unto me, Wherefore didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns.
9 And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth.
10 And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space.
12 And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast.
18 And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.

CHARLIE ROSE FEDERAL RESERVE
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9221
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1908
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/2729
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/8995
RICHARD HAAS ON CHARLIE
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/975
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU ON CHARLIE
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/1452
http://www.charlierose.com/topic/current_affairs?keyword=Benjamin+Netanyahu
SHIMON PERES ON CHARLIE
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/144
YOSSI BEILIN
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/1527
EHUD BARACK ON CHARLIE
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/1169
JERUSALEM
http://www.charlierose.com/topic/current_affairs?keyword=Jerusalem
ARIEL SHARON
http://www.charlierose.com/topic/current_affairs?keyword=Ariel+Sharon
PEACE PROCESS
http://www.charlierose.com/topic/current_affairs?keyword=peace+process
JOSE MARIA AZNAR
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/1795
EUROPEAN UNION
http://www.charlierose.com/search/?text=European+Union
http://www.charlierose.com/search/?text=NATO
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/1125
http://www.charlierose.com/search/?text=France
UNITED NATIONS
http://www.charlierose.com/search/?text=United+Nations
GERMANY
http://www.charlierose.com/search/?text=Germany
HENRY PAULSON ON CHARLIE
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/1495
BARACK OBAMA ON CHARLIE
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/233
RAHM EMANUAL
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/71
HENRY KISSINGER ON CHARLIE
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/48
JIMMY CARTER
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/143
PETER MANDELSON
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/3211
TONY BLAIR
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/6463
http://www.charlierose.com/search/?text=Tony+Blair
THE EURO
http://www.charlierose.com/search/?text=Euro
MARTIN WOLF
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10058
MAHMOOD AHMADINEJAD
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/8707
CONDI RICE
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10154
ISRAEL
http://www.charlierose.com/topic/current_affairs?keyword=Israel
PALESTNE
http://www.charlierose.com/topic/current_affairs?keyword=Palestine
MIDEAST
http://www.charlierose.com/topic/current_affairs?keyword=Middle+East
ARAFAT
http://www.charlierose.com/topic/current_affairs?keyword=Yasser+Arafat
HAMAS
http://www.charlierose.com/topic/current_affairs?keyword=Hamas
ZBIGNIEW BRZESINSKI
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/119
THE OBAMA DECEPTION
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAaQNACwaLw

The Big Takeover ROLLINGSTONE The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution MATT TAIBBI Posted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now, he said. When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too.In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down.

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its pneumonia was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — our partners in the government,as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

I. PATIENT ZERO

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino.It's all about the regulatory environment,says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that.The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.

The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or tranche. They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating — meaning it has close to zero credit risk.Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.The problem was, none of this was based on reality. The banks knew they were selling crap, says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years,says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank.It was nuts.Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages — read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down — to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets — some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or warehousing CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in.

Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice Hank Greenberg, the head of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told senior management, You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do — leave me alone. Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative form of insurance to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS.The CDS was popularized by J.P. Morgan, in particular by a group of young, creative bankers who would later become known as the Morgan Mafia,as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the credit-default swap.In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job.When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators — from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.

What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan popularized into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, at least, there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your investments. Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the company promised to pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went bust. But as Cassano went on a selling spree, the deals he made differed from traditional insurance in several significant ways. First, the party selling CDS protection didn't have to post any money upfront. When a $100 corporate bond is sold, for example, someone has to show 100 actual dollars. But when you sell a $100 CDS guarantee, you don't have to show a dime. So Cassano could sell investment banks billions in guarantees without having any single asset to back it up.Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called naked CDS deals. In a naked CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope — it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come.Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; Cassano himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone made their money — and then it all went to shit.

II. THE REGULATORS

Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Sen. Phil Gramm — a grinning, laissez-faire ideologue from Texas — had finished engineering the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor Hien Tsung invented paper money in 806 A.D. For years, Washington had kept a watchful eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great Depression, commercial banks — those that kept money on deposit for individuals and businesses — had not been allowed to double as investment banks, which raise money by issuing and selling securities. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression, also prevented banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business.But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more business-friendly.Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared? The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Commercial banks — which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly with investment banks for customers — were driven to buy credit swaps to loosen capital in search of higher yields. By ruling that credit-default swaps were not gaming and not a security, the way was cleared for the growth of the market,said Eric Dinallo, head of the New York State Insurance Department.

The blanket exemption meant that Joe Cassano could now sell as many CDS contracts as he wanted, building up as huge a position as he wanted, without anyone in government saying a word. You have to remember, investment banks aren't in the business of making huge directional bets,says the government source involved in the AIG bailout. When investment banks write CDS deals, they hedge them. But insurance companies don't have to hedge. And that's what AIG did. They just bet massively long on the housing market,says the source.Billions and billions.In the biggest joke of all, Cassano's wheeling and dealing was regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency that would prove to be defiantly uninterested in keeping watch over his operations. How a behemoth like AIG came to be regulated by the little-known and relatively small OTS is yet another triumph of the deregulatory instinct. Under another law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their regulator, provided they owned one or more thrifts (better known as savings-and-loans). Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire operation.Making matters even more hilarious, AIGFP — a London-based subsidiary of an American insurance company — ought to have been regulated by one of Europe's more stringent regulators, like Britain's Financial Services Authority. But the OTS managed to convince the Europeans that it had the muscle to regulate these giant companies. By 2007, the EU had conferred legitimacy to OTS supervision of three mammoth firms — GE, AIG and Ameriprise.That same year, as the subprime crisis was exploding, the Government Accountability Office criticized the OTS, noting a disparity between the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees. Among other things, the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance specialist on staff — and this despite the fact that it was the primary regulator for the world's largest insurer! There's this notion that the regulators couldn't do anything to stop AIG, says a government official who was present during the bailout. That's bull----. What you have to understand is that these regulators have ultimate power. They can send you a letter and say, You don't exist anymore, and that's basically that. They don't even really need due process. The OTS could have said, We're going to pull your charter; we're going to pull your license; we're going to sue you. And getting sued by your primary regulator is the kiss of death.

When AIG finally blew up, the OTS regulator ostensibly in charge of overseeing the insurance giant — a guy named C.K. Lee — basically admitted that he had blown it. His mistake, Lee said, was that he believed all those credit swaps in Cassano's portfolio were fairly benign products. Why? Because the company told him so. The judgment the company was making was that there was no big credit risk, he explained. (Lee now works as Midwest region director of the OTS; the agency declined to make him available for an interview.)In early March, after the latest bailout of AIG, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took what seemed to be a thinly veiled shot at the OTS, calling AIG a huge, complex global insurance company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that was allowed to build up without any adult supervision.But even without that adult supervision,AIG might have been OK had it not been for a complete lack of internal controls. For six months before its meltdown, according to insiders, the company had been searching for a full-time chief financial officer and a chief risk-assessment officer, but never got around to hiring either. That meant that the 18th-largest company in the world had no one checking to make sure its balance sheet was safe and no one keeping track of how much cash and assets the firm had on hand. The situation was so bad that when outside consultants were called in a few weeks before the bailout, senior executives were unable to answer even the most basic questions about their company — like, for instance, how much exposure the firm had to the residential-mortgage market.

III. THE CRASH

Ironically, when reality finally caught up to Cassano, it wasn't because the housing market crapped but because of AIG itself. Before 2005, the company's debt was rated triple-A, meaning he didn't need to post much cash to sell CDS protection: The solid creditworthiness of AIG's name was guarantee enough. But the company's crummy accounting practices eventually caused its credit rating to be downgraded, triggering clauses in the CDS contracts that forced Cassano to post substantially more collateral to back his deals.By the fall of 2007, it was evident that AIGFP's portfolio had turned poisonous, but like every good Wall Street huckster, Cassano schemed to keep his insane, Earth-swallowing gamble hidden from public view. That August, balls bulging, he announced to investors on a conference call that it is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of those transactions. As he spoke, his CDS portfolio was racking up $352 million in losses. When the growing credit crunch prompted senior AIG executives to re-examine its liabilities, a company accountant named Joseph St. Denis became gravely concerned about the CDS deals and their potential for mass destruction. Cassano responded by personally forcing the poor sap out of the firm, telling him he was deliberately excluded from the financial review for fear that he might pollute the process.The following February, when AIG posted $11.5 billion in annual losses, it announced the resignation of Cassano as head of AIGFP, saying an auditor had found a material weakness in the CDS portfolio. But amazingly, the company not only allowed Cassano to keep $34 million in bonuses, it kept him on as a consultant for $1 million a month. In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his muf-ups. When asked in October why the company still retained Cassano at his $1 million-a-month rate despite his role in the probable downfall of Western civilization, CEO Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face that AIG wanted to retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had.(Cassano, who is apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London, could not be reached for comment.)

What sank AIG in the end was another credit downgrade. Cassano had written so many CDS deals that when the company was facing another downgrade to its credit rating last September, from AA to A, it needed to post billions in collateral — not only more cash than it had on its balance sheet but more cash than it could raise even if it sold off every single one of its liquid assets. Even so, management dithered for days, not believing the company was in serious trouble. AIG was a dried-up prune, sapped of any real value, and its top executives didn't even know it.On the weekend of September 13th, AIG's senior leaders were summoned to the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. Regulators from Dinallo's insurance office were there, as was Geithner, then chief of the New York Fed. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who spent most of the weekend preoccupied with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, came in and out. Also present, for reasons that would emerge later, was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. The only relevant government office that wasn't represented was the regulator that should have been there all along: the OTS.We sat down with Paulson, Geithner and Dinallo,says a person present at the negotiations. I didn't see the OTS even once.On September 14th, according to another person present, Treasury officials presented Blankfein and other bankers in attendance with an absurd proposal: They basically asked them to spend a day and check to see if they could raise the money privately.The laughably short time span to complete the mammoth task made the answer a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, the bankers came back and told the government officials, gee, we checked, but we can't raise that much. And the bailout was on.A short time later, it came out that AIG was planning to pay some $90 million in deferred compensation to former executives, and to accelerate the payout of $277 million in bonuses to others — a move the company insisted was necessary to retain key employees.When Congress balked, AIG canceled the $90 million in payments.Then, in January 2009, the company did it again. After all those years letting Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out insane bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano's old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly! Yes, that's right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the universe! We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats,AIG spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February.But didn't these highly expert people' basically destroy your company? I ask.Pretto protests, says this isn't fair. The employees at AIGFP have already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit's operations in an orderly fashion.The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can't even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs, says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding.They don't function well without them.

IV. THE POWER GRAB

So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people — to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG — are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation's top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm's fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone — then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee — collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America — and in turn helped those companies slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street firms with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulatory measures. We're moving to an oligopolistic situation,Kenneth Guenther, a top executive with the Independent Community Bankers of America, lamented after the Gramm measure was passed.The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and — with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson — made a pitch to George Bush's SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In exchange, they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The discussion about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not a single representative of a major media outlet there to record the fateful decision.Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU to drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, neither Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any regulating of the banks. They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five companies, whose combined assets came to total more than $4trillion. But in the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the group had no director and did not complete a single inspection. Great deal for the banks, which originally complained about being regulated by both Europe and the SEC, and ended up being regulated by no one.Once the capital requirements were gone, those top five banks went hog-wild, jumping ass-first into the then-raging housing bubble. One of those was Bear Stearns, which used its freedom to drown itself in bad mortgage loans. In the short period between the 2004 change and Bear's collapse, the firm's debt-to-equity ratio soared from 12-1 to an insane 33-1. Another culprit was Goldman Sachs, which also had the good fortune, around then, to see its CEO, a bald-headed Frankensteinian goon named Hank Paulson (who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government), ascend to Treasury secretary.Freed from all capital restraints, sitting pretty with its man running the Treasury, Goldman jumped into the housing craze just like everyone else on Wall Street. Although it famously scored an $11 billion coup in 2007 when one of its trading units smartly shorted the housing market, the move didn't tell the whole story. In truth, Goldman still had a huge exposure come that fateful summer of 2008 — to none other than Joe Cassano.

Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Cassano's biggest customer, with $20 billion of exposure in Cassano's CDS book. Which might explain why Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with ex-Goldmanite Hank Paulson that weekend of September 13th, when the federal government was supposedly bailing out AIG.When asked why Blankfein was there, one of the government officials who was in the meeting shrugs. One might say that it's because Goldman had so much exposure to AIGFP's portfolio, he says.You'll never prove that, but one might suppose.Market analyst Eric Salzman is more blunt. If AIG went down, he says, there was a good chance Goldman would not be able to collect. The AIG bailout, in effect, was Goldman bailing out Goldman.Eventually, Paulson went a step further, elevating another ex-Goldmanite named Edward Liddy to run AIG — a company whose bailout money would be coming, in part, from the newly created TARP program, administered by another Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari.

V. REPO MEN

There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs —a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression — was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word zero coupon bond in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize toxic risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.Some aspects of the bailout were secretive to the point of absurdity. In fact, if you look closely at just a few lines in the Federal Reserve's weekly public disclosures, you can literally see the moment where a big chunk of your money disappeared for good. The H4 report (called Factors Affecting Reserve Balances) summarizes the activities of the Fed each week. You can find it online, and it's pretty much the only thing the Fed ever tells the world about what it does. For the week ending February 18th, the number under the heading Repurchase Agreements on the table is zero. It's a significant number.Why? In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump $25 billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury bills, U.S. securities and even mortgage-backed securities from institutions like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, who would then repurchase them in a short period of time, usually one to seven days. This was the Fed's primary mechanism for controlling interest rates: Buying up securities gives banks more money to lend, which makes interest rates go down. Selling the securities back to the banks reduces the money available for lending, which makes interest rates go up.

If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, you start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit crunch, around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more Repos than usual — $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank reserves were dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started injecting even more cash than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By late December, the number was up to $58 billion; by the following March, around the time of the Bear Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped to $77 billion. In the week of May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 billion — out of control now, according to one congressional aide. For the rest of 2008, the numbers remained similarly in the stratosphere, the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of these short-term loans into the economy — until suddenly, at the start of this year, the number drops to nothing. Zero.The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.No one knows who's getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America's credit rating. Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions are even temporary at all — or whether they are being set up as permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders.They're supposed to be temporary,says Paul-Martin Foss, an aide to Rep. Ron Paul. But we keep getting notices every six months or so that they're being renewed. They just sort of quietly announce it.None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself — or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters.The exemption, as Foss notes, basically includes everything.According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.

VI. WINNERS AND LOSERS

Stevens isn't the only person in Congress to be given the finger by the Fed. In January, when Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida asked Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn where all the money went — only $1.2 trillion had vanished by then — Kohn gave Grayson a classic eye roll, saying he would be very hesitant to name names because it might discourage banks from taking the money.Has that ever happened? Grayson asked. Have people ever said, We will not take your $100 billion because people will find out about it? Well, we said we would not publish the names of the borrowers, so we have no test of that, Kohn answered, visibly annoyed with Grayson's meddling.Grayson pressed on, demanding to know on what terms the Fed was lending the money. Presumably it was buying assets and making loans, but no one knew how it was pricing those assets — in other words, no one knew what kind of deal it was striking on behalf of taxpayers. So when Grayson asked if the purchased assets were marked to market — a methodology that assigns a concrete value to assets, based on the market rate on the day they are traded — Kohn answered, mysteriously, The ones that have market values are marked to market.The implication was that the Fed was purchasing derivatives like credit swaps or other instruments that were basically impossible to value objectively — paying real money for God knows what.Well, how much of them don't have market values? asked Grayson.How much of them are worthless? None are worthless,Kohn snapped.Then why don't you mark them to market? Grayson demanded.Well, Kohn sighed, we are marking the ones to market that have market values.In essence, the Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts handle things. It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening the hood, and saying, I think it's fine, says Dan Fuss, an analyst with the investment firm Loomis Sayles. The salesman says,Don't worry about it. Trust me.It'll probably get us out of the lot, but how much farther? None of us knows.When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary — a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion,says Sen. Bernie Sanders.It is beyond comprehension.

Count Sanders among those who don't buy the argument that Wall Street firms shouldn't have to face being outed as recipients of public funds, that making this information public might cause investors to panic and dump their holdings in these firms. I guess if we made that public, they'd go on strike or something,he muses.And the Fed isn't the only arm of the bailout that has closed ranks. The Treasury, too, has maintained incredible secrecy surrounding its implementation even of the TARP program, which was mandated by Congress. To this date, no one knows exactly what criteria the Treasury Department used to determine which banks received bailout funds and which didn't — particularly the first $350 billion given out under Bush appointee Hank Paulson.The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout money, sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money to, Treasury responded — and this isn't a joke — by directing the panel to a copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly speechless by the response.Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. That's not what we had in mind.Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money,he says.This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away — remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency — many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications.

There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not,says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association.Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit, says Wheeless.At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking.Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called systemically important banks. It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers,says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.

In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive — to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren't such a nightmare.

VII. YOU DON'T GET IT

The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner — himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm — picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called bad bank that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets — the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. This is exactly what the financial system needs, said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.But wait a minute, you say to them. No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead? But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.[From Issue 1075 — April 2, 2009]ROLLINGSTONE.

TOXIC ASSETS COULD COST $1 TRILLION

EU DEFENCE MINISTERS PRESS CONFERENCE
http://www.eu2009.cz/en/media-service/video/*kopie-1:-press-conference-after-the-first-day-of-the-informal-meeting-of-defence-ministers-12436/
http://www.eu2009.cz/en/media-service/video/

Summit EU - USA Date: 5.4.2009
Venue: Prague - Czech Republic

Representatives of all EU Member States to take part in EU-USA Summit in Prague

After consulting the European Commission and the U.S. administration of President Barack Obama, Mirek Topolánek will invite the heads of states and governments of all 27 EU Member States to the EU-USA Summit.The Summit will take place on 5 April in Prague, i.e. immediately after the G-20 Summit on 2 April in London, which will address issues of global financial architecture and consequences of the financial crisis, and after the NATO Summit held in Strasbourg (France) and Baden-Baden and Kehl (Germany) on 3 - 4 April, which will engage in a debate on safety and military cooperation.The Prague Summit may thus address other foreign-policy topics, such as the issues of energy and climate,’ stated Mirek Topolánek in relation to the preparation of the Copenhagen Summit in the autumn.American President Barack Obama should also meet with the Czech Prime Minister for bilateral discussion already on the evening of 4 April.

Informal Meeting of Ministers for Economic and Financial Affairs
Date: 3.4.2009 — 4.4.2009 Venue: Prague - Czech Republic
Category: Informal Ministerial Meetings Theme: Economic and Financial Affairs

On 3 – 4 April the Prague Congress Centre will host an informal meeting of EU Ministers of Economy and Finance and the Governors of the European central banks.

The two-day programme starts on Friday 3 April for the Finance Ministers of the eurozone. Later on, the Finance Ministers of all 27 EU Member States will discuss implementation of the excessive deficit procedure as part of the Stability and Growth Pact. After the working lunch, which will be separate for the Ministers and Governors of the central banks respectively, the participants will debate the current economic and financial situation and the advantages and disadvantages of the biggest enlargement of the EU, five years after. The main subject of the meeting on Saturday will be the reform of the financial market supervision mechanisms in the EU. Both on Friday and on Saturday the meetings will be rounded off with a Presidency press conference.

Minister Nečas opens conference on flexible labour market and social security during crisis MAR 23,09

The representatives of the individual Member States will have an opportunity to exchange experiences and get new information about how to respond to labour market problems.The implementation of the strategy of flexicurity in the Member States of the European Union is the title of a conference on one of the priorities of the Czech Presidency in the area of employment which takes place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel Prague on 25 and 26 March. The concept of flexicurity implies a demand for greater flexibility on the labour market balanced by better social security. The conference will focus on the application of the general principle of flexicurity in relation to the current crisis.The plenary meeting on the first day will be dedicated to the question how to motivate the inactive labour force to enter the labour market as quickly as possible. It will primarily focus on mothers after maternity leave, young people, long-term unemployed and people over 50. Another important item on the agenda will be education. Attention will be paid to adult education through life-long learning, to greater incentives for employees and employers to invest in education and to elements of social protection offered to workers who want to join the labour market.

On the second day of the conference the focus will be on the interest of simplifying the transition of people from education to employment, from employment to another form of employment, from unemployment to getting back on the labour market and a gradual transition from employment to retirement. The implementation of the measures to ensure the transition must be fast and efficient. The session will be rounded off with a panel discussion.A press conference attended by Minister of Labour and Social Affairs Petr Nečas and European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities Vladimír Špidla is preliminarily scheduled for 10:45 at the Neklan lounge, Crowne Plaza Prague Hotel, Koulova 15, Prague 6. The conference on flexicurity will be followed by a meeting of the European Employment Committee (EMCO), which is an advisory body of the EU Council, on 26 – 27 March. This meeting will focus on the financial and economic crisis and its impact on employment. The topics of qualification and mobility will also be discussed. This meeting is for experts only and it is closed to the public.

GLOBAL WARMING HOAX
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQGftVwdfhM&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Epropagandamatrix%2Ecom%2Farticles%2Fmarch2009%2F032309%5Fglobal%5Fcurrency%2Ehtm&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQGftVwdfhM

JAY ROCKEFELLER INTERNET SHOULD NEVER EXISTED
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct9xzXUQLuY

INTERNET CENSORSHIP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGFHDHes4yo&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Epropagandamatrix%2Ecom%2Farticles%2Fmarch2009%2F032309%5Fglobal%5Fcurrency%2Ehtm&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGFHDHes4yo

ISN'T THIS INTERESTING THAT AMERICA SNUBBED AN ISRAEL LEADER,TELLS YOU HOW MUCH AMERICA IS TRYING TO GET OUT OF THE ISRAEL RELATIONSHIP LIKE THE BIBLE CLEARLY SAYS THE EUROPEAN UNION WILL BE THE ONES THAT GUARENTEE ISRAELS SECURITY IN THE FUTURE NOT AMERICA FOR THE 7 YEAR PEACE PLAN OF DANIEL 9:27.

Thursday, March 19, 2009 Update: Israel's chief of staff comes home early after doors close in Obama's Washington

WASHINGTON — Israeli Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi cut short his visit to Washington after getting an extraordinarily cool reception from the new U.S. administration.Last year, Israeli Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi had no problem setting up meetings with top officials in the U.S. government.On his current trip to Washington, Ashkenazi sought to meet the administration of President Barack Obama, but most officials were unavailable.A statement to WorldTribune.com by the Israel Defense Forces spokesman attempted to downplay the snubs. But diplomatic sources said Ashkenazi failed to obtain access to any Cabinet member, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The Israeli military chief, who sought to discuss the Iranian nuclear threat, was also unable meet his counterpart, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

[On March 19, the Israel Defense Forces spokesman e-mailed the following statement to WorldTribune.com: The schedule for the United States visit of the IDF Chief of the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, was preplanned according to requests made by American officials. Any meetings that were cancelled were substituted with telephone conference calls.] The IDF Internet site reported on March 17, that Ashkenazi cut short his trip to the United States in order to participate in a security cabinet meeting regarding the abducted soldier Gilad Shalit. The Chief of the General Staff wishes to send his sincere apologies to the 1500 senior donors of the Friends of the IDF in the United States, who will gather for their annual donation gala dinner in New York City on Tuesday night (Mar. 17), in which Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi was supposed to participate as a guest of honor,the IDF report stated. On March 12, Ashkenazi left for a five-day visit to the United States meant to lobby the Obama administration to abandon the planned U.S. dialogue with Iran, Middle East Newsline reported.

Ashkenazi, scheduled to meet with the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, was expected to have brought new Israeli intelligence on Iran's nuclear weapons and missile programs. But the diplomatic sources said the administration made it clear that nobody in a policy-making position was available to sit with Ashkenazi. This included the president, Vice President Joseph Biden, Gates, National Intelligence director Dennis Blair or Mullen.[With regards to a meeting with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one was not scheduled between Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi and Adm. Mullen,the IDF stated. Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi has met with Adm. Mullen five times in the past year.]The administration is sending a very clear message to Israel, and this is we want to talk about Palestine and not Iran, a diplomat who has been following U.S.-Israel relations said.Ashkenazi obtained an appointment with National Security Advisor James Jones. But the sources said the meeting was to focus on U.S. demands for Israel to ease military restrictions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.The Obama administration believes that Israel is as much or more of a problem as it is an ally, at least until Israel's disagreements with its neighbors are resolved, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, said.Bolton envisioned that the White House would pressure Israel to legitimize Hamas and Hizbullah. At the same time, he said, Obama would continue to woo Iran.Already, economic and diplomatic advisers to Obama have urged the president to launch a U.S. dialogue with Hamas. The US/Middle East Project, which includes such Obama supporters as former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Hagel, was said to have elicited a promise from Obama to listen to any proposals made by Hamas.The main gist is that you need to push hard on the Palestinian peace process, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft said. Don't move it to the end of your agenda and say you have too much to do. And the U.S. needs to have a position, not just hold their coats while they sit down.The Israeli chief of staff had also scheduled a session with Dennis Ross, the special adviser on Iran to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But the sources said Ross was not regarded as being in a policy-making role.

The diplomatic sources said the White House and the senior echelon of the Obama administration have refused a dialogue with Israel on the Iranian threat. They said Ms. Clinton, during her visit to Israel, was largely silent during briefings by Israeli intelligence on Iran's nuclear and missile programs.During her visit, Ms. Clinton received written recommendations on U.S. policy toward Iran from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. The U.S. secretary said the recommendations would be relayed to the White House.The Israeli government and military have been alarmed by the rapid and dramatic reversal in the U.S. policy toward Iran,the source said.This reversal took place without any consultation with Israel, Gulf Arab countries or even Congress.The sources said Israel has sought a U.S. commitment to limit its dialogue with Iran. Israel has also urged Obama to make it clear that the military option against Iran's nuclear program exists.But Obama and his top aides appear uninterested in hearing Israel's position. The sources said a key aim of Ashkenazi was to urge the administration to release weapons and systems long sought by Israel in the area of aerial refueling, air-to-ground weapons, sensors as well as the F-22 fighter-jet.In 2008, under the Bush administration, Gates and then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice blocked U.S. requests for these military systems. The sources said Gates and Ms. Rice concluded that Israel could use this equipment for an air strike on Iran's nuclear weapons facilities.Ashkenazi sees this U.S. refusal as what has been undermining Israeli deterrence toward Iran and boosting the confidence of the Teheran regime, the source said.The mullahs in regime have concluded that America has dropped the military option and won't allow such an option to Israel.

STORMS HURRICANES-TORNADOES

LUKE 21:25-26
25 And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity;(MASS CONFUSION) the sea and the waves roaring;(FIERCE WINDS)
26 Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.

Flooding threat still hangs over Manitoba residents who survived 1997 deluge
By Keith Bonnell, Canwest News Service March 21, 2009

Beneath the melting ice, the Red River is coming to life.It’s spring in Manitoba, when nervous eyes turn toward the massive waterway that has a long history of flooding its banks — sometimes with devastating results.This April is expected to see some of the worst flooding since 1997, when the province was hit by the so-called Flood of the Century. That deluge forced 28,000 residents from their homes and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.There’ll be farmers that will have to use boats to get around — that’s inevitable. The river gets to be many miles wide, said Manitoba’s senior flood forecaster, Alf Warkentin. There’ll be huge transportation problems. A lot of municipal roads will be underwater. . . . Provincial roads, like highways, will be underwater, too.Pete Derksen is among those watching the river that flows from Minnesota and North Dakota into southern Manitoba and right past his town of Ste. Agathe, about 40 kilometres south of Winnipeg.You couldn’t tell today, but his one-storey bungalow was one of the casualties of the 1997 flood.It was a complete disaster,recalls Derksen, a retired construction worker, who was one of the last residents to leave Ste. Agathe in 1997. A month after the water forced him from his home, he returned to find a scene, and a stench, he won’t soon forget.The town sewer got overwhelmed, and I got a full blast of sewer backup,he said.The dirty waste filled the basement of his home. It wasn’t water,the 70-year-old explained.He’d left his furnace on when he evacuated, and it kept running, heating up the stinking soup in his basement.The elements were heating this sewer stuff and it was coming up my ductwork into the main floor, he said.He remembers walking in the door for the first time.The blast of heat, the humidity, was just unreal, he said. The ceiling on the house looked like a manure spreader had been in here — just brown gunk all over everything.

But the 1997 flood was felt far beyond Ste. Agathe.

The Red River rose almost 7 1/2 metres, about half a metre beneath the level of the dikes in Winnipeg. The spreading waters were dubbed the Red Sea and covered an area of more than 1,800 square kilometres. This year’s flooding — expected in mid-April when the river crests — could be the worst flooding since the 1997 deluge, forecasters have said. But it’s unlikely to be as severe. Just how bad it gets could, in fact, be determined this weekend.A storm that’s expected to dump up to 25 millimetres of rain across southern Manitoba and North Dakota on Sunday and Monday could dramatically alter the flood forecast. Warkentin said there’s currently a one-in-10 chance waters could rise to flood-of-the-century levels. He said the soil across most of southern Manitoba is saturated from last summer’s rains and the past winter’s snowfall and the ground can’t absorb any more.Still, major evacuations aren’t expected.That’s partly because of steps the province has taken to flood-proof Red River Valley communities.In Winnipeg, a project has been underway since 2005 to double the capacity of the floodway channel that diverts excess water from the Red River around the city.The 48-kilometre Red River Floodway was first built as a response to another Red River flood.In 1950, an estimated 100,000 people were forced from their homes, and neighbourhoods in Winnipeg were swamped by flood waters for seven weeks. About 10,000 homes were destroyed, a state of emergency was declared and the Canadian Army was brought in to protect residents and property.At the time, it was one of the worst disasters in Canadian history.The bid to double the floodway’s capacity is to be completed in 2010, but it’s already more than enough to deal with any flooding this year, officials say.If we have a one-in-700-year flood, we’ll be ready in April,said Ernie Gilroy, CEO of the Manitoba Floodway Authority. They couldn’t deepen the floodway for fear of jeopardizing groundwater, so they expanded it, excavating 21 million cubic metres of dirt. But even with the floodway, there are low-lying areas in the city. Winnipeg officials say this year’s forecasted flood could require between 50,000 and 760,000 sandbags, which will be sent out to 292 homes to shore up flood defences. About 8.1 million sandbags were distributed by the city in 1997.Millions more have been spent fortifying rural communities. It’s also a nervous time in Selkirk, 35 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg. We’re happy to see winter heading its way out, but I think there’s always that little bit of trepidation with . . . not knowing what Mother Nature’s going to throw at us this year, Mayor David Bell said from his home overlooking the Red River.It was a surprise ice jam north of the city in 2007 that caused the river to back up over dikes and forced the evacuation of two seniors’ condos and damaged several buildings, including the Marine Museum of Manitoba.

This year, preparations are already being made.

Ice-cutting machines have been working on the river since Tuesday, trying to prevent jams. Light standards have been removed from the waterfront. Portable buildings and storage sheds have been removed from the park. Despite the fears, the mayor calls the power of the river awe-inspiring.Bell said two years ago, when the ice finally gave way, there was a tsunami of ice that roared past the community.He said residents are used to the yearly worries. It’s almost a rite of passage.With files from Winnipeg Free Press Canwest News Service.

EARTH DESTROYED WITH THE EARTH

GENESIS 6:11-13
11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.(WORLD TERRORISM,MURDERS)
12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence (TERRORISM) through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

MURDER

GENESIS 4:8-11 (THE FIRST MURDER)
8 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.
9 And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?
10 And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.
11 And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand;

GENESIS 6:11-13 (EARTH DESTROYED BECAUSE OF TERRORISM,MURDERS)
11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.
12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

EXODUS 20:13
13 Thou shalt not kill.(Murder)

REVELATION 9:20-21
20 And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils,(OCCULT) and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:
21 Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries,(DRUG ADDICTIONS) nor of their fornication,(SEX OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE) nor of their thefts.(STEALING)

LUKE 21:25
25 And there shall be signs in the sun,(OZONE DEPLETION) and in the moon,(FIRST MAN ON MOON) and in the stars;(JUPITER BOMBARDED ETC) and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity;(MASS CONFUSION) the sea and the waves roaring;
26 Men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.

Gunman kills 3 officers, wounds 4th in Oakland By TERRY COLLINS and LISA LEFF, Associated Press Writers MAR 22,09

OAKLAND, Calif. – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has ordered flags at California's state capitol flown at half-staff for the three Oakland police officers killed by a gunman.

Police said a parolee with an extensive criminal history opened fire at a routine traffic stop Saturday in the city and hours later gunned down members of a SWAT team who were searching for him.Schwarzenegger headed for a meeting with Oakland police on Sunday.A fourth police officer who was wounded Saturday is hospitalized and battling for his life.The gunman also was killed Saturday.The Oakland Police Department says it was the worst day in its history. Never before had three police officers been killed in the line of duty on the same day.

DOCTOR DOCTORIAN FROM ANGEL OF GOD
then the angel said, Financial crisis will come to Asia. I will shake the world.

JAMES 5:1-3
1 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.
3 Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.

REVELATION 18:10,17,19
10 Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.
17 For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off,
19 And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.

EZEKIEL 7:19
19 They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be removed: their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the LORD: they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels: because it is the stumblingblock of their iniquity.

REVELATION 13:16-18
16 And he(FALSE POPE) causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:(CHIP IMPLANT)
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.(6-6-6) A NUMBER SYSTEM

WORLD MARKET RESULTS
http://money.cnn.com/data/world_markets/

SPECIAL CONFERENCE MAR 23-24,2009,ALL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS WILL BE THERE,ALL THE EU MEMBERS WILL BE THERE,AND THE G-20 WILL BE THERE.THIS SAME GROUP OF EU,BANKERS,G-20 WILL ALSO BE IN LONDON IN APRIL TO LAY PLANS FOR THE NEW WORLD ORDER,ESPECIALLY THE G-20.https://futurefinance.wsj.com/index.php

HALF HOUR DOW RESULTS MON MAR 23,2009

09:30 AM +21.82
10:00 AM +190.04
10:30 AM +255.27
11:00 AM +296.05
11:30 AM +274.22
12:00 PM +313.65
12:30 PM +305.21
01:00 PM +318.19
01:30 PM +284.50
02:00 PM +274.30
02:30 PM +306.40
03:00 PM +368.21
03:30 PM +404.71
04:00 PM +497.48 7775.86

S&P 500 822.92 +54.38

NASDAQ 1555.77 +98.50

GOLD 938.80 -17.40

OIL 53.83 +1.76

TSE 300 8958.51 +452.16

CDNX 924.03 +22.23

S&P/TSX/60 546.64 +29.84

MORNING,NEWS,STATS

YEAR TO DATE PERFORMANCE
Dow -17.07%
S&P -14.91%
Nasdaq -7.59%
TSX Advances 655,declines 819,unchanged 286,Volume 3,173,449,154.
TSX Venture Exchange Advances 403,Declines 337,Unchanged 318,Volume 165,400,080.

Dow +152 points at 4 minutes of trading today.
Dow +21 points at low today.
Dow +313 points at high today so far.
GOLD opens at $948.90.OIL opens at $51.87 today.

Futures strong,but off highs on details of Geithner plan.
Banks +8%-16% at start of trading today.
Commodities up mid-single digits today so far.
Tiffany +6% after earnings beat expectations.
Tiffany total sales -20%,US. same store sales plunge -34%.
CF Industries raises bid for TERRA Industries to$30.50/share.
Nasdaq traded Regional Banks up sharply on Toxic assets plan today.
Natural gas price at 2 week high today.
RIG COUNT -47% from SEPT,2008 peak.
US DOLLAR WAS DOWN 10% LAST WEEK.

AFTERNOON,NEWS,STATS
Dow +21 points at low today so far.
Dow +325 points at high today so far.

DAY TODAY PERFORMANCE - 12:30PM STATS
NYSE Advances 3,258,declines 436,unchanged 50,New Highs 8,New Lows 61.
Volume 3,314,360,342.
NASDAQ Advances 2,107,declines 478,unchanged 99,New highs 7,New Lows 18.
Volume 707,459,061.
TSX Advances 923,declines 367,unchanged 273,Volume 1,219,048,150.
TSX Venture Exchange Advances 310,Declines 236,Unchanged 267,Volume 73,000,107.

TOXIC CLEANUP( TREASURY PARTNERSHIP PLAN )
-Buy up to $1 TRILLION in toxic assets.
-Purchase securities and loans from Banks.
-Create $500 BILLION in purchasing power.
-Funded with $75-$100 BILLION of TARP funds.

TREASURYS PPIP ($75 to $100 B of TARP CAPITAL)
Loans Program
-Public-private Capital.
-FDIC guarenteed debt.
Securities Program
-Public-Private Capital
-TALF/TARP Financing.

BLAIR ON TOXIC ASSET PLAN
-Public-Private program could be very profitable.
-Taxpayer protected by Private equity,Low prices.
-50/50 split could be adjusted after public comment.

WRAPUP,NEWS,STATS
Dow +21 points at low today.
Dow +501 points at high today.
Dow +6.84% today Volume 515,597,038.
Nasdaq +6.76% today Volume 2,097,468,634.
S&P 500 +7.08% today Volume N/A

A BOTTOMING TREND
Beating expectations:
-existing home sales,Philly FED,CPI,Housing starts,Retail sales.
THE RALLY
3 separate moves up:
1-Pre-open:Geithner plan pre-open.
2-Mid-morning:Better than expected home sales.
3-Republican Whip seeks 1 week delay on AIG bonus vote.

Dow on pace for best monthly precentage gain since OCTOBER 2002.
Dows best day this year.
Dow soars 497 points today.
Dows biggest one day gain since OCT 28,08.
Dows up 18.8% from MAR 9th closing low.
Dow nears 7800 points today.
All 30 dow stocks higher today.
S&P on pace for best monthly percentage gain since DEC 1991.
S&P back above 820 points.
S&P up 21.6% from MAR 09 closing low.
S&P biggest one day gain since OCT 28,2008.
S&P has best day of year so far.
Nasdaq on pace for best monthly percentage gain since OCT 2002.
Nasdaq up 22.6% from MAR low.
Nasdaq back above 1500 points.
Stocks end at days highs.
Highest close for major stock Indexes since early FEB.
Stocks rally on Treasury plans.
Stocks surge to 1 month highs.
OIL hits nearly 3 month highs.

RECORD LOWS DOW
-Sept 30,1996 5,882.17
-Oct 30,1996 5,993.23
-Nov 6,1996 6,177.71
-Dec 16,1996 6,268.35
-Apr 15,1997 6,587.16
-Apr 21,1997 6,660.21
-Apr 28,1997 6,783.02
-May 1,1997 6,976.48
-May 7,1997 7,085.65

RECORD LOWS S&P 500
-Sept 5,1996 649.44
-Sept 6,1996 655.68
-Sept 11,1996 667.28
-Sept 12,1996 671.13
-Oct 1,1996 689.08
-Oct 28,1996 697.26
-Nov 4,1996 706.73
-Nov 5,1996 714.14
-Dec 17,1996 726.04

China Voices Support For New Global Currency To Replace Dollar.Central bank gets behind move to empower IMF to implement new supranational system
Paul Joseph Watson Propaganda Matrix Monday, March 23, 2009

China has expressed support for Russia's proposal to hand the IMF the power to create a new supra-national global currency in response to the call for an alternative to the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency.Last week the Kremlin called for the creation of a supranational reserve currency to be issued by international institutions as part of a reform of the global financial system.The Russian proposal stated that the IMF should take the lead in establishing a superreserve currency accepted by the whole of the international community.China today expressed support for the initiative and said it was ready to discuss the proposal at the upcoming G20 meeting in London on April 2.Hu Xiaolian, vice governor of the country's Central Bank, said that China, which holds about $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, was prepared to debate the issue as the dollar's dominance and U.S. economic woes could entail considerable currency fluctuations and affect the world financial situation,reports RIA Novosti.The creation of a new supra-national global reserve currency to supplant the U.S. dollar would likely lead to a complete collapse of the greenback, of which trillions are held in in foreign exchange reserves by foreign countries such as China and Japan.As we have previously highlighted, the elite have exploited the problem that they created to push for increased regulation of the world economic system in the pursuit of a de-facto global financial dictatorship.

The swift and ruthless exploitation of the economic meltdown on behalf of globalists and central banks revolves around their drive to move towards a one world currency system and an unprecedented centralization of global financial power, a fact that financial analysts are finally beginning to realize.Earlier this month, Ben Bernanke told an elite gathering at the Council on Foreign Relations that a new overarching financial authority should be created and empowered with sweeping new regulatory responsibilities.British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, EU heads such as Joaquin Almunia and establishment media outlets like the Wall Street Journal amongst many others have all continually used the economic crisis as an excuse to argue for greater financial power, a new world economic order in which control is concentrated into fewer hands - with the IMF and the World Bank enjoying the spoils.UK Business Secretary and top Bilderberg member Peter Mandelson has also pushed for a Bretton Woods for this century, to help build the machinery of global economic governance.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy all made the same appeal at a conference in Paris on the future of capitalism earlier this year.Merkel called for the creation of a new global economic body under the UN, similar to the Security Council, to judge government policy.Sarkozy called for a new world, new capitalism during his speech, as he commented In capitalism of the 21st century, there is room for the state.Meanwhile, Blair called for a new financial order which he said should be constructed upon values other than the maximum short-term profit.The globalists’ call for a centralized global economic order has nothing to do with providing solutions to the crisis but everything to do with providing themselves with more power and control over the world's financial system.

Euro currency of choice as fed fasing devalues dollar MAR 23,09

Less than a month after lambasting European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet for failing to keep up with Ben S. Bernanke’s efforts to stem the recession, foreign-exchange traders are glad he’s behind the curve.The 16-nation currency strengthened 7.7 percent versus the dollar since February, after tumbling 9.3 percent in the first two months of the year. JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc. are advising investors to buy euros.Traders are looking past forecasts from Germany’s Kiel- based IFW institute for the European Union economy to shrink 3.3 percent this year, and snapping up currencies where central bankers are resisting calls to purchase debt securities as a way of lowering interest rates and pump cash into their financial systems. Those options are becoming scarce after Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke joined the Bank of England, Bank of Japan and Swiss National Bank in so-called quantitative easing.The dollar is a sell near term versus those currencies where quantitative easing is off the table, said John Normand, head of currency strategy at JPMorgan in London. The top on euro-dollar will come when the ECB looks likely to join the quantitative easing crowd. For now, it’s content to stay on the sidelines.The euro will probably rise 2.8 percent to $1.40 in a month after soaring 5.1 percent last week as long as the ECB refrains from purchasing assets, Normand predicted. The dollar will rebound to $1.30 by June, he said.

Euro Index

The Euro Index, which tracks the currency against the dollar, pound, yen, Swiss franc and Swedish krona, climbed 2.7 percent to 118.53 since March 16. The euro gained 0.5 percent today to $1.3652 as of 11:17 a.m. in London.The Fed said March 18 that it plans to expand its balance sheet by as much as $1.15 trillion as it buys up to $300 billion of U.S. government bonds and steps up purchases of mortgage securities. Bernanke’s goal is to reduce consumer borrowing rates such as those for mortgages and encourage banks to lend in an effort to boost the economy.The trade-weighted Dollar Index, measured against the euro, yen, pound, Canadian dollar, Swiss franc and Swedish krona, posted its biggest one-day drop since 1971, tumbling 2.69 percent, and fell 4.1 percent last week to 83.841. It was down 0.6 percent at 83.35 today.This is an historic moment -- the start of debasement of the world’s reserve currency, wrote Alan Ruskin, head of international currency strategy in North America at RBS Greenwich Capital Markets Inc. in Greenwich, Connecticut. It feels to many participants that in the grand sweep of history we are witnessing the end of Rome on the Potomac.

Shrinking Economy

U.S. gross domestic product shrank 6.2 percent last quarter, the most since 1982. The Congressional Budget Office said March 20 that President Barack Obama’s administration will generate a budget deficit of $1.85 trillion this year, and expenses will exceed revenue by a total $9.27 trillion between 2010 and 2019. That’s about $2.3 trillion more than the administration forecast. At 8.1 percent, the unemployment rate is the highest in more than a quarter century.The flood of dollars also increases the chances for quicker inflation in the global economy, spurring demand for commodities and currencies of raw materials producers. The Standard & Poor’s GSCI Index of commodities is up 22.4 percent since Feb. 18 to 375.5260, and last week posted its biggest gain in two months, rising 8.6 percent.

Commodity Currencies

Quantitative easing across the board will diminish the fiat currencies as a store of value,said Lee Hardman, a foreign-exchange strategist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in London.Investors may then seek refuge in harder currencies such as commodities.Hardman recommends Norway’s krone, the Australian dollar and New Zealand dollar. Demand for Australian coal, iron ore and wool drove 17 consecutive years of economic expansion. Norway is the world’s fifth-largest oil producer and New Zealand relies on sales of milk powder, butter, cheese and aluminum.Australia’s dollar climbed 4.4 percent last week to 68.69 U.S. cents, while the krone rallied 6.5 percent to 6.3773, the biggest gain since 1973 and the most among the 16 most-traded currencies. New Zealand’s dollar appreciated 6.4 percent to 55.87 U.S. cents. Melbourne-based BHP Billiton Ltd., the world’s largest mining company, climbed 1.6 percent to A$32.18 on the Australian stock exchange.Trichet, 66, took over the ECB from the Netherlands’ Wim Duisenberg in November 2003. Under his watch, the euro appreciated to a peak of $1.6038 in July 2008 from about $1.15.

Behind the Curve

The currency began to slide as the ECB waited until October 2008 to cut interest rates as the global economy slowed, more than a year after Bernanke began slashing borrowing costs. The ECB’s main rate is 1.5 percent, compared with a target range of zero to 0.25 percent for the Fed.A drop in two-year German bund yields in February to the lowest relative to longer-maturity debt since 1997 was a sign that the ECB needs to wake up to reality, Komal Sri-Kumar, chief global strategist at Los Angeles-based TCW Asset Management, which oversees about $118 billion, said last month.European policy makers are behind the curve, said Neil Mackinnon, chief economist and partner at ECU Group, a London- based hedge fund with about $1 billion in assets. The European economy will sink deeper into depression.While the ECB has refrained from quantitative easing, the European Union has taken other steps to bolster the economy. EU leaders said March 20 that they will double to 50 billion euros ($68 billion) a credit line for countries in financial distress.

Follow the Fed

Even Mackinnon says the euro rally may be short-lived as the ECB cuts its main refinancing rate close to zero. He expects the currency to depreciate to $1.245. None of the 53 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg forecast the currency will return to its previous high of $1.6038.All major central banks will have to follow the Fed and adopt quantitative easing, said Mackinnon, a former economist for the U.K. Treasury. If the European policy makers are hoping they will get a free ride on the U.S. stimulus, hoping they will look more prudent, they are deluding themselves.Trichet said March 17 in a speech to business leaders in Paris that his policy of loaning banks unlimited funds is sufficient for now.In the context of the euro area, guaranteeing firms and households a steady access to credit largely means ensuring the banking system has appropriate liquidity, Trichet said. In the euro area, it is natural for credit easing to be implemented primarily through the participation of banks.

Turning Point

In a March 19 report titled Sprint to Print, Morgan Stanley recommended selling the dollar against the euro, forecasting it will depreciate to $1.45 in a year.This move may mark the turning point for the dollar, wrote Morgan Stanley currency analysts led by Sophia Drossos and Ron Leven in New York. The Fed’s action exposes the dollar to its vulnerabilities, but this leaves the euro and the yen facing appreciation.

Citigroup’s London-based global head of currencies, Jim McCormick, said in a research report to clients last week that the euro may rise to $1.40. We’ve been selling dollars and we’re now adding to that short,he wrote in the report.Samarjit Shankar, a director of strategy for the global markets group in Boston at Bank of New York Mellon, which administers more than $23 trillion, also predicts $1.40.

Buying Euro Calls

You have Bernanke taking a page from Greenspan’s book and reflating assets, said Shankar. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan cut interest rates to 1 percent in 2003, the lowest level since World War II, to boost growth after the 2001 recession. The ECB takes a very orthodox, almost straitjacketed approach, he said.Werner Eppacher, head of foreign exchange at Deutsche Bank AG´s DWS Investment unit in Frankfurt, said he bought call options on the euro versus the dollar and used forwards to bet on the common currency gaining versus the greenback.Calls give the buyer the right to purchase an asset at a predetermined price, and forwards are agreements to trade a currency pair in the future.The U.S. is facing more structural problems than other regions, Eppacher said. As soon as we have some moderation in financial markets, the conversation will go back to U.S. households deleveraging and external deficits, fiscal deficits, money printing.He predicts the euro will rise to $1.40 in six months, and the Australian dollar will appreciate to 75 U.S. cents.The euro is not rising on its own merits, said Hans- Guenter Redeker, the London-based global head of currency strategy at BNP Paribas SA, France’s biggest bank. The U.S. is exporting its expansionary monetary conditions abroad, which ultimately is very positive for equity markers and is going to be very positive for risk takers.Source: http://www.bloomberg.com Publication date: 3/23/2009

Czech Presidency leads EU summit to agreement on anti-crisis measures MAR 23,09

After the negotiations in Brussels chaired by Czech PM Mirek Topolánek, the heads of state and government of the EU reached an agreement on measures that are to help the EU overcome the impacts of the financial and economic crisis.We can achieve that with three specific packages – with a budget of five, 50 and 75 billion euro, said President of the European Council Mirek Topolánek, explaining that: five billion has been allocated for specific projects that are to achieve specific goals – to increase the energy security of the EU and promote innovations; 50 billion has been earmarked to increase guarantees to help the countries that face difficulties with their balance of payments, and 75 billion euro represents the proposed voluntary loan to the credit fund of the International Monetary Fund.The Czech delegation, consisting of the Czech Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs Alexandr Vondra and Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, made sure that the joint statement of the summit include the commitment of the Member States to respect the principles of free market within the framework of the European Economic Recovery Plan, which will see 400 billion euro invested in 2009 and 2010, and to resume compliance with the Growth and Stability Pact as soon as possible.

We have prepared for the G20 summit in the spirit of solidarity, trust and unity, said President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso at the joint press conference with reference to the upcoming summit of economic powers, adding that our coordinated approach to the financial crisis is a contribution to the necessary global solution.The Czech Presidency has also pushed through crucial measures in the context of its other priorities – energy and external relations.200 million euro from the five-billion package will go to the Nabucco project, Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra specified the investments earmarked for securing access to energy resources from the Caspian region for European countries; this measure can be seen as a response to the recent gas crisis. We cannot rule out the possibility of its recurrence but the EU will be better prepared to deal with it.Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg appreciated the consensus which enabled the Czech Presidency to acquire mandate for the Eastern Partnership – the EU has set aside 600 million euro for this ambitious project devised to strengthen the relations with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldavia and Ukraine. Our great dream has come true, we have become united and that is an important progress and a great achievement,stated the leader of the Czech diplomacy.I would like to commend the Czech Presidency one more time because without it we would not have reached consensus on the Eastern Partnership programme,José Manuel Barroso revisited this issue.

South Korea and EU Enter Final Trade Deal Negotiations
By Kurt Achin Seoul 23 March 2009

South Korea and the European Union have started what they call their final round of talks in efforts to agree on a trade liberalization deal. The deal still faces serious opposition from South Korean farmers, and may require fine tuning on opening up the Korean auto market.South Korean Chief Trade Negotiator Lee Hye-min says he and his European Union counterpart Ignacio Garcia Bercero hope to conclude negotiations on a free trade deal this week.As a result of these efforts, now we are about to finishing our long journey ... Our deal has far reached many fields for the whole economy. Both Korean and European manufactures will benefit, he said.The two sides have held seven previous rounds of talks that began nearly two years ago. Signing and implementing a deal would remove tariffs and make it much easier to buy and sell goods and services to each other. By at least one estimate the deal stands to add about $11-billion to South Korea's economy.Opening the automotive and agricultural markets have been sticking points in previous sessions. Both sides view those markets as sensitive and politically difficult to stop protecting.South Korean farmers held protests in Seoul to condemn the deal, shouting that the FTA negotiations are killing Korean farmers. Agriculture, especially rice farming, is seen in South Korea as a matter of both food security and cultural heritage. Deals to allow foreign agriculture products in to the country have sparked emotional and occasionally violent demonstrations in the past.

If this week's negotiations are successful, South Korean officials say they hope to publicly declare the deal at next month's summit of advanced industrial nations in London.South Korea signed a free trade deal with the United States in June of 2007. But serious doubts remain as to whether it will be ratified. Left-leaning South Korean politicians have used sit-ins and civil disobedience to block the National Assembly in Seoul from advancing the vote process on the deal.In the United States, senior Democratic party leaders have expressed reservations about the deal's terms on automobile trade. Earlier this month, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said in a confirmation he thought the U.S. - South Korea deal just is not fair.

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Economic Partnership Agreements - remarks to European Parliament
Strasbourg, 23 March 2009

It is a pleasure to be addressing the plenary of the Parliament today on an issue of fundamental importance to the EU's relationship with the ACP. Before I go any further I'd like to make one thing very clear:I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in negotiating agreements with ACP countries that make any country poorer.You might think that that is an obvious statement. But my experience to date tells me that it is one that the Commission cannot assume has been widely understood. So today I'd like to make it crystal clear. And when you come to vote later on, I hope that you'll do so on the basis of the discussion we have had here today and the arguments that have been set out here rather than on the basis of any preconceptions you may have.

Today's plenary session is an important step forward on EPAs – you will be asked for your assent on the full EPA with the Caribbean and the interim EPA with Côte d'Ivoire. You have tabled no less than eight sets of draft resolutions and Oral Questions reflecting the strength of Parliamentary involvement and opinion on EPAs. I would like to pay tribute to the huge effort that the International Trade Committee and the Development Committee have put in to the debates on this issue. I have listened carefully to the views expressed. My aim is to set out the case for EPAs and to dispel the myths around them so that every member of this institution is able to cast an informed vote when the time comes.I believe that these are good agreements that support economic development and integration in the ACP and provide stability in these economically turbulent times. They are partnership agreements founded on the shared goal of development that make trade the servant of this objective not the reverse. Most of all, they are agreements that provide the opportunity for ACP states to lift their citizens out of poverty through the dignity of their own labour and the genius of their own ideas. There is a perception that in EPAs the EU is breaking with the past and unilaterally trying to redefine the EU- ACP partnership. It is true that EPAs are different from the Lomé and Cotonou Conventions that embodied the Union's relations with the ACP for thirty years. But the unilateral preferences that characterised those Conventions became open to challenge in the WTO by other developing countries. The dilemma that we faced was how to safeguard the development requirements of the ACP while respecting international rules. The answer was twofold: Everything But Arms for the Least Developed Countries and Economic Partnership Agreements for the developing countries in the ACP. The common theme stretching all the way back to the first Lomé Convention was trade. Trade has always been the defining factor of EU-ACP relations. And what was once confined to unilateral trade preferences for commodities and raw materials in the early days of Lomé has now been replaced by more diversified trade in manufactured goods, services and ideas in the 21st Century. EPAs offer the ACP the best ever access to EU markets and continue our commitment to provide opportunities for economic development.

Regional integration within and between ACP markets has also been a key objective of the EPA process and a subject that has attracted a lot of attention in oral questions. Our global economy means that size has become more important – a lesson that we have learned in the EU. By simplifying trade rules and replacing the complex maze of bilateral agreements with a small number of region-to-region trade relationships, the ACP can create bigger regional markets that are more attractive to the investment which developing markets need in order to create jobs and growth. I believe we have made some real progress on this front. EPAs are, of course, a two stage process – interim Agreements to ensure we do not face a WTO challenge, and to create some breathing space for the second stage: negotiation of full EPAs. The run-up to the December 2007 WTO deadline for interim EPAs has perhaps given rise to an impression of steamrollering of ACP concerns. But I'd like to reassure the Parliament that these interim agreements are only a temporary solution to safeguard and improve ACP access to EU markets. I inherited the EPAs file at an advanced stage of negotiations. Since then I have met a large number of ACP Ministers and representatives and other stakeholders in the EPA process. I have heard them and listened to them. One thing is clear: all put ACP development at the centre of the EPAs. EPAs are where trade meets development. This means development must be the foundation of our trading relationship, based on frank and open dialogue. And I firmly believe that EPAs will only succeed if they are anchored in an enduring partnership based on trust and mutual respect. But the key test of this partnership is whether we and our ACP partners have a shared vision of the future. In Southern Africa I see a region that took conflict about EPAs and turned it into dialogue and where we have now settled major issues of concern like export taxes, infant industry protection and food security. In the Caribbean I see a region that set down clearly its own ambitions for an innovation based economy. In West Africa I see an emerging regional market access position many thought impossible and in East Africa I see an emerging Customs Union that didn't exist when negotiations started and is now building an EPA around their own integration plans. That looks to me like the beginnings of a successful partnership.

Going forward, my vision for the negotiation of full EPAs is one where each negotiation reflects and respects the regional specificity of the parties to that Agreement – a flexible process. That means both looking at content – because the EPA has to work for its signatories but also the pace of negotiations. But it also means that EPAs should be dynamic not static – able to react to future events and to account for different regional interests and needs. In this process, the Commission will continue to inform and involve the European Parliament. And while we should be ambitious there must also be no imposed dialogue, which is why issues like government procurement have already been removed from some negotiations. We will also take the time – and provide support - to build up regional and national regulation as a prerequisite to further negotiation. Aid for trade and technical assistance will be key in that regard.And I can guarantee that there will be no opening of public services, no pressure for privatisation. The explicit right of the ACP to regulate their own markets will be recognised and there will be no limitation of access to essential medicines or collecting seed – in fact we would rather seek to strengthen than limit ACP rights and capacity in these areas.All of this is overlaid by our commitment that ACP regions can draw on provisions agreed in other EPAs so that each region can move ahead secure in the knowledge they will not be disadvantaged. This is a key aspect of flexibility and of allowing EPAs to replace an all ACP trade regime with one that matches regional solutions to regional needs without undermining ACP solidarity.The case for dynamic rather than static EPAs has been highlighted by the current crisis. We began EPA negotiations during a period of unprecedented expansion of investment, goods and services trade and soaring commodity prices. Few predicted that in a few years the global economy would fall into recession, dramatic price falls, exchange rate and market volatility and a credit drought that would strangle the trade finance exporters and importers need.So we do not need a fixed deal that is redundant by the time the ink dries on the paper. We need an agreement that establishes a relationship where institutions and monitoring can help identify and solve problems as they emerge. This will include safeguards and clauses that allow ACP countries to tackle any import surges, food price pressures and fiscal crises, rendezvous clauses for specific issues, regular review clauses and, as in the Caribbean EPA, a role for parliamentary oversight and monitoring.

To return to where I began, the Parliament has a historic opportunity today to give its assent to the first examples of a new generation of agreements that safeguard the EU's special relationship with the ACP. These agreements are based on a genuine partnership rather than paternalism, and harness trade as the motor of development. They promote and encourage the regional integration that will help ACP countries to prosper in a globalised world. They are flexible in terms of content and respectful of tradition. They are the latest manifestation of the longstanding trade relationship between the EU and the ACP. They are the right agreements at the right time. And I hope that from now on it goes without saying that they are most certainly not designed to make anyone poorer. In short, they are the future and I hope on that basis that Members will feel able to give their assent.

Speech of President Barroso at Conference on Modernisation of Ukraine’s Gas Transit System.Joint EU-Ukraine International Investment Conference on The Modernisation of Ukraine’s Gas Transit System Brussels, 23 March 2009

President Yuschenko, Prime Minister Timoshenko, Ministers, ladies and gentlemen.

Today’s conference comes at a time when our relations with Ukraine are closer than they have ever been. And I am glad to say that at the EU-Ukraine Summit in Paris last year, we made a firm commitment to develop our co-operation still further. We welcomed the fact that the new agreement between the European Union and Ukraine will be an Association Agreement, including a deep and comprehensive free trade area and a strong degree of regulatory approximation.Ukraine is a key strategic partner playing a critical regional role: we look to Ukraine as a flagship in driving forward the Eastern Partnership initiative, which is so important to us, and more generally in upholding and promoting the European values which we share.I am also pleased that Russia is represented here today. Russia is a key energy supplier and of course partner of the European Union and Ukraine in the supply of gas and will remain so for many years to come.The value of close relations for all of us is never more obvious than in times of difficulty. The economic and financial crisis is a reality for all of us. It is at the top of our agenda in the EU, just as it is in Ukraine. Indeed it was only last week here in Brussels that this issue was at the top of the agenda at the European Council.I want to assure you that in this crisis we have not forgotten our neighbours: we are deeply concerned at the impact on Ukraine’s economy, and above all at its impact on the lives of Ukrainian citizens.

I know that other partners of Ukraine, including the International Financial Institutions, share our concern. We want to help with all the instruments at our disposal – to find a way through the crisis and to provide a foundation for the sustained growth you need to maintain your recovery. Today’s conference should certainly be seen as part of a broader package.However, we need your help to make a difference. While sensitive to the need not to interfere in domestic politics, we ask for a united approach, from political leaders and key institutions, on the fundamental economic measures needed to address the present economic and financial crisis faced by Ukraine. That is going to be critical.While the financial crisis and economic downturn are uppermost in the minds of most people, we should keep in mind two urgent but longer term challenges – that of energy security and climate change.

This conference today is a key element in addressing the first of these – namely the imperative of ensuring the secure and reliable flow of energy across our common European continent that is so important to our economic and social well-being.The gas transit system across Ukraine is one of those vital energy arteries that keeps the European body functioning. It has been essential for many years and it will remain of strategic importance for the EU, Ukraine and Russia for decades to come.It is in the common interest of everyone here today therefore that this network functions efficiently, reliably and transparently into the future. It is a system which supplies gas to 16 European countries – 12 of which are EU Member States. We cannot afford for it to become – very frankly – an unreliable conduit, as it was for a few dark weeks in January.So although we have made some progress since my signature with Victor Yuschenko and Tony Blair of the Memorandum of Understanding on energy co-operation in December 2005 – we need to do more.So I am very glad to say that the Commission, the Government of Ukraine and representatives of three International Financial Institutions – the EIB, the EBRD and the World Bank – will shortly sign a joint declaration to move forward together on the key tasks of reforming the Ukrainian gas sector to bring it into the EU’s internal energy market and for modernising the Ukraine gas transit network.I am particularly pleased that Ukraine stands here today united in purpose and commitment. I have spoken personally with both President Yuschenko and Prime Minister Timoschenko on this issue and both are committed to the rapid implementation of this joint declaration. I have already confirmed to both of them that the Commission and the EU stand ready to assist Ukraine. I count also on the International Financial Institutions to support this process that will ensure that the maximum transparency prevails in our gas trade and transit.So ladies and gentlemen, in concluding, this is an auspicious and important day for Ukraine, and its gas supply industry. We now need to do as much as we can to ensure an auspicious future.

Press releaseEU banking supervision and ECB role discussed by MEPs and national MPs Economic and monetary affairs - 12-02-2009 - 12:57

The European Central Bank's potential role in helping to make Europe's fragmented system of financial supervision more effective was one of the key issues discussed over two days of debate between the Economics Committee and national MPs.
How the EU should act to safeguard jobs and growth in the European economy during the crisis was also on the agenda at the annual meeting on Wednesday and Thursday of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee with its counterparts from the national parliaments of the 27 Member States.

European system of banking supervisors…

Pervenche Berès (PES, FR), chair of the Economic and Monetary Affairs committee and co-chair of the meeting, stressed the importance of improving financial supervision at EU level: We, as Parliament, have more than once called for a strengthening of European cooperation as far as supervision is concerned. She proposed a system of European supervisors, on the model of the European System of Central Banks, allowing the necessary synergy between national expertise and European integration of the means to sanction.

or a supervisory role for the ECB?

European Central Bank Executive Board member Lorenzo Bini Smaghi argued that it was the ECB itself which should take on this supervisory role: Coordination in Europe is credible only if it is based on an institution which offers and ensure confidentiality, independence and efficient decision making. […] There is such an institution today. It performs this role in monetary policy and has performed it in areas associated with financial stability. It is the ECB and the Eurosystem, for the euro area.He added that this would not require a change in the Treaty, unlike the creation of a new body in charge of prudential supervision - and it would be irresponsible to wait for a Treaty change via the normal revision procedures to achieve a stronger supervisory framework if the same result could be achieved without it.Such a move, he said, would also ensure information synergies between central banking and supervision were exploited to the full.Ms Berès noted that the issue of how such a step would affect the balance of power between the EU institutions was a real one.

Evolution not revolution, says Czech Finance Minister

Ealier, Czech Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek had called for steps to improve the supervisory architecture, but warned against hasty political decisions on regulation which would do more harm than good.Revolutionary changes often lead to bad results. Let's go for an evolutionary approach.The interconnected nature of modern financial markets meant that global coordination was needed, but that did not mean nothing should be done until a worldwide consensus emerged, he said. Europe could lead the way.

Protectionism a road to hell

Mr Kalousek added: The challenge is to ensure Europe remains open. All protectionist measures should be rejected; they would only make the situation worse.Responding to the parliamentarians, he continued Protectionism is a huge risk. No one EU country can exist on its own consumption and demand alone.Populist politicians fall for the protectionist argument, but we must do the harder job, even to the detriment of our own popularity, by explaining that protectionism is the road to hell.

A healthy banking sector essential - pressure to lend to SMEs

Jan Hajda, Chair of the Committee on National Economy, Agriculture and Transport of the Czech Senate, the other co-chair of the meeting on Wednesday, stressed the importance of making the lives of small and medium-sized enterprises [SMEs] easier. He also emphasised the importance of innovation to boost employment and economic growth.Joaquín Almunia, Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, said it was essential to get restore the banking sector to health: We are convinced that if the financial markets do not function properly over the coming months, the efficiency of the Recovery Plan and monetary policies will be seriously affected.Philippe Maystadt, President of the European Investment Bank (EIB) said the objective was not to help banks per se. As far as the EIB's action was concerned, the aim was to providing SMEs with as much credit as possible. He said a condition applies for each bank receiving funds: For every euro we lend to a bank, it needs to prove that there two euros are made in new loans to an SME.The EIB President also stressed the need to keep the pressure on banks so they do lend to small businesses.

Stability Pact and creating positive expectations

Mr Almunia stressed that, despite some opinions to the contrary, the Stability and Growth Pact needs to be respected and enforced in this time of crisis. Its credibility is needed to finance public debt and consolidate public investments, he concluded.Oldřich Vojíř, Chair of the Committee on Economic Affairs of the Czech Chamber of Deputies, and co-chair of Thursday's session, said governments could do little about cyclical changes in GDP, but politicians have to do at least something to create positive expectations. If the left and the right could agree to proceed in a similar way that would already be a political victory.

Euro zone will not break up

Ms Berès also made clear that: Despite certain catastrophic statements, I do not believe that the Euro zone will break up. The cost of leaving the euro zone would in fact be so high for the country concerned and for the Economic and Monetary Union, that such a scenario is just not possible.REF. : 20090209IPR48764Contact

MONEYNETDAILY Fed's secrecy policy 2 years old tomorrow,In 2006, money suppliers stopped reporting publicly on money supply March 22, 2009 12:00 am Eastern
WorldNetDaily

WASHINGTON – As America's economy continues in freefall, tomorrow marks an auspicious two-year anniversary – the day the Federal Reserve announced, with little fanfare, its decision to stop reporting to the public the M3 money supply, the broadest measure of three standards of measurement. Federal Reserve is the non-government agency designated by Congress to control the nation's money supply, which directly impacts the value of the dollar and every investment held by Americans. Since 2006, Americans have seen their investments plummet in value and witnessed the shrinking buying power of their earnings. Why did the Fed make that decision two years ago? What was its rationale? The justification for the secrecy by the organization that prints money was cost. By not producing those numbers for the public, the Fed would save about $1.5 million annually. According to Jerry Robinson, author of the new book Bankruptcy of Our Nation, the $1.5 million savings by the Fed amounted to 0.00000699 percent of it annual net income of last year. You would think that such a broad economic and inflation indicator would be continually produced, analyzed and monitored, says Robinson. However, when the announcement came, it fell on deaf ears. This bold new move by the Fed caused some stir among economists, but it never received any real media coverage.

Just last Wednesday the Fed said it would flood the teetering financial system with an additional $1.2 trillion. The money will be used, the Fed said, to buy government bonds and mortgage-related securities in hopes of lowering the borrowing costs for home mortgages and other types of loans, thereby stimulating economic activity. In other words, the central bank will print more money to pay for the purchases. What the Fed does not explain publicly is how those kinds of infusions of money out of thin air, with nothing to back it, reduce the purchasing power and assets of all Americans by devaluing the dollar. The $1.2 trillion is in addition to hundreds of billions already added to the system since the beginning of the year and dwarfs even the biggest government bailouts to date. The decision was seen as an admission that the economy is much worse than it had forecast at the board's last meeting in January. Robinson predicted such moves in his new book. He saw the March 23, 2006, announcement by the Fed as a predicate to unprecedented emergency manipulations of the financial system in the future. You would think that there would have been some public outcry over the lack of transparency, he said. But the average person has no idea what M3 is, and it is probably just as likely that they do not care.Robinson says he was not surprised by the decision of the Fed two years ago to keep information about the expanding money supply from the very people it impacts. He says the Fed has never been known for its transparency.Instead, it is an organization shrouded in secrecy, he writes in Bankruptcy of Our Nation.

He points out it took from 1776 to 1983 to grow the M3 money supply by $2.5 trillion. But the supply increased by $2.5 trillion in the next 14 years. And then from 1997 to 2001 – only four years – it increased by that amount again. While the Federal Reserve has become less transparent in its actions than ever, we do know that right now, the printing presses are rolling and that the Federal Reserve is injecting massive amounts of currency into the U.S. economy,he explains. Scarcity of currency, he writes, stabilizes its value, but overproduction reduces its value. And is the value of the dollar falls, what does that do to the prices of consumer goods? he asks rhetorically.It drives them up.The Fed last week took consolation in a slight stock market rise in answer to its announcement about injecting $1.2 trillion more into the system. However, Robinson points out that rising stock prices don't actually mean increased wealth for those invested in those companies – simply because the dollar is not worth what it was before the infusion of capital into the system. Robinson says the actions of the Fed can only serve at best as a temporary fix – placing a Band-Aid on a severe laceration. And it will only serve to delay and enlarge the scope of the impending day of reckoning for the United States,he adds.

Treasury's toxic asset plan could cost $1 trillion By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer MAR 22,09

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration's latest attempt to tackle the banking crisis and get loans flowing to families and businesses rely on a new government entity, the Public Investment Corp. to help purchase as much as $1 trillion in toxic assets on banks' books.The plan that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner intends to announce Monday aims to use the resources of the $700 billion bank bailout fund, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.The initiative will seek to entice private investors, including big hedge funds, to participate by offering billions of dollars in low-interest loans to finance the purchases and also sharing risks if the assets fall further in value.When Geithner released the initial outlines of the administration's overhaul of the bank rescue program on Feb. 10, the markets took a nosedive. The Dow Jones industrial average plunged by 380 points as investors expressed disappointment about a lack of details.Christina Romer, head of the Council of Economic Advisers, said Sunday that it's important for investors to know that the administration is bringing a full array of programs to confront the problem.I don't think Wall Street is expecting the silver bullet, she said on CNN's State of the Union.This is one more piece. It's a crucial piece to get these toxic assets off, but it is just part of it and there will be more to come,she said.Also in the coming week Geithner is expected to disclose the administration's proposal to overhaul bank regulations to try to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis.

CAP health check not open for debate
ANDREW WILLIS Today MAR 23,09 @ 17:42 CET

European commissioner for agriculture Mariann Fischer Boel has issued a robust defence of reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) agreed last year - a series of changes Brussels calls the CAP 'health-check', saying the current crisis in the dairy sector was no excuse for a return to a more interventionist policy.I am not going to re-open the agreement that we made in the health-checK. I hope this is clear enough so we can stop this blurred discussion that is sending totally the wrong signal to the farmers, she said on Monday (23 March) after agriculture ministers met in Brussels to discuss falling milk prices. Farmers believe sometimes that one minister or another will be able to put pressure on the commission to re-open the whole discussion. This is not going to happen. It is actually dead, this idea.Earlier in the day, a note circulated around the commission and other national delegations in Brussels in which Austria, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia argued that unconventional approaches" were now needed to deal with the dire situation. However, Ms Fischer Boel said the commission had already acted, pointing to the temporary re-activation of export refunds for all dairy commodities as of the 23 January of this year.She also argued that the drop in dairy prices was due to the fall in global demand and not commission increases in milk production quotas agreed last year in an attempt to make the CAP more market-oriented. I hope ministers are brave enough [to explain this] when they go back into their countries and meet the farmers' organisations, Ms Fishel Boel said. So let's stop this purely political discussion and instead concentrate our efforts on what we can do to facilitate [a resolution of] the real economic problems.Czech agriculture minister Petr Gandalovic, who also attended the press conference, said the Czech presidency intended to step up the debate in the coming months on the future of the CAP post-2013, when the current spending period comes to an end.

Fall in exports

New figures released by Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, on Monday confirmed that falling exports are not just confined to the agricultural sector.Seasonally adjusted exports for the euro area fell in January by 10.7 per cent year on year, while imports for December dropped by a smaller 7.3 per cent, leading to a widening of the euro area's trade deficit. The sharp drop in January's exports was larger than many analysts had predicted, sparking fears that first quarter growth for 2009 is headed for a substantial contraction. The 10.7 percent fall in month-on-month exports is pretty dire. We knew it was going to be weak, but that really is scary, said Capital Economics analyst Ben May, according to Reuters. The reaction to Eurostat's weak data is in stark contrast to upbeat expectations for a conclusion to an EU-Korea free-trade deal on Monday evening.Recent hold-ups to securing the agreement, under negotiation since May 2007, have centred on the reluctance by the EU's automobile sector to lift import barriers on cars produced in South Korea.

Brussels cool on Bulgaria steering group idea
ELITSA VUCHEVA Today MAR 23,09 @ 17:38 CET

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – The Bulgarian government has asked EU member states to send experienced diplomats to hold key positions in the administration in order to help boost reforms in the country. But the unusual proposal has been rebuffed by European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, who said the Bulgarians should carry out the reforms themselves.The reforms in Bulgaria, in the Bulgarian administration, must be carried out by the Bulgarians themselves. Nothing can substitute your own efforts, Mr Barroso told Bulgarian daily Dnevnik in the margins of an EU summit in Brussels on Friday (20 March).We co-operate with you, we have increased the co-operation, but there is no way that we substitute the efforts that depend on the government, the administrations, and all levels of the Bulgarian state, he added.The Bulgarian government's proposal for specific co-operation schemes with other EU states was prepared in February by socialist prime minister Sergei Stanishev's advisory board, notably his European affairs advisor Maria Markes-Pinto.In order to better and fully achieve [needed reforms] the government of Bulgaria wishes to invite those member states that possess assessed and proven knowledge and experience in the fields pointed out and are ready to share it with the Bulgarian Institutions and Administrative structures responsible for the implementation of these reforms," the letter - seen by EUobserver - reads.

It pointed to five specific areas that need outside help – boosting the competitiveness of the business environment, implementing and monitoring legislation that regulates public procurement and conflict of interest, reform of the judiciary, management of EU funds, and training people in EU law.Three co-operation schemes are foreseen, including setting up concrete, well-targeted assistance missions from different member states,as well as appointing European experts to key positions within the Bulgarian administration.Key directive or management positions in the Central administration as well as in the depending Agencies or bodies ...should be occupied by the required highly qualified professionals from any of the member states, included Bulgaria, following open recruitment and selection procedures,says the proposal.

Cool reactions

The Bulgarian proposal has met with a cool reception beyond Brussels as well.

Bulgarian weekly Kapital reports that most EU diplomats consider an oversight mechanism already in place for the country as enough.The Co-operation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) was set up when Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU, on 1 January 2007, to monitor reforms in areas such as justice and home affairs, seen as a field where the two countries perform particularly badly.The member states have already tasked the European Commission with monitoring the situation, because this is how Europe works. The commission has the bureaucratic capacity, is not dependant on political messages and is handling its task very well,a senior diplomat told the paper.For his part, France's ambassador to Bulgaria, Etienne de Poncins, said that France backs the idea in principle, but underlined that the political will must come from the Bulgarian government, parliament and institutions.We cannot replace the Bulgarian authorities in the job they have to do.Besides the institutional imbroglio, the issue of who would pay the European experts' salaries is another question mark over the Bulgarian idea, with state administration employees in Bulgaria earning much less than most of their EU counterparts.

A last-ditch move

The Bulgarian government's initiative comes just a few months ahead of the general elections in the country, expected to take place in early summer.It is seen by some as a last-ditch attempt by the increasingly unpopular current coalition government to get some Brussels' praise before the elections.The government is already blamed for irreversibly losing €220 million of pre-accession EU funding last year over its persistent failure to tackle corruption, with millions more of EU money still frozen and at risk, unless Sofia delivers some results.Last November, the commission judged that most of the measures it has taken so far are only a promise for future action, and in an interim report in February it called for convincing and tangible results from Sofia.But regardless of the country's shortcomings, the Bulgarian approach sets a bad precedent, Bulgarian media comment.Letting the Europeans come because we can't make it on our own is a helpless position,Kapital wrote last week.

U.S. backs Danish PM as next NATO chief: diplomats By David Brunnstrom David Brunnstrom – Sat Mar 21, 12:35 pm ET

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The United States has told NATO allies it will back Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the next head of the alliance, NATO diplomats and a U.S. source said Saturday.Rasmussen already has the support of European heavyweights Germany, Britain and France for the post of NATO secretary-general, but Washington had been considering backing Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay.A U.S. source close to the administration of President Barack Obama said Washington had indicated its acceptance of Rasmussen after U.S. National Security Adviser General James Jones this month went to Denmark to visit him.Two senior NATO diplomats confirmed Washington had signaled to allies its acceptance of Rasmussen.There seems to be a general coalescence around Rasmussen, said one, adding that an announcement was expected at the April 3-4 NATO summit. The current secretary-general, Dutchman Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, steps down on July 31.Another NATO diplomat said Rasmussen's appointment still needed the backing of all 26 NATO allies -- including mostly Muslim Turkey, which has voiced misgivings over Rasmussen linked to the row over a cartoon in a Danish newspaper in 2006 depicting the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb in his turban.A senior NATO source predicted there would be no problems. Turkey doesn't want to be in a minority of one,the source said.(Additional reporting by Paul Taylor; editing by Mark John and Tim Pearce)

YOU CAN TELL BY OBAMAS MESSAGE HES NOT READING FROM A TELEPROMPTER ON THIS OCCASION,OBAMA IS WELL KNOWING THIS HOLIDAY IN IRAN.

OBAMAS MESSAGE TO HIS FELLOW IRANIANS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY_utC-hrjI

ARAB USES TERROR BY TRACTOR FOR FRIENDS OF MUSLIMS
http://wejew.com/media/3747/New_Terror_Tractor_Attack_Jerusalem_Live_Cam_Footage/

Israel's Peres sends holiday greeting to Iran By JOSEF FEDERMAN, Associated Press Writer – Fri Mar 20, 3:52 pm ET

JERUSALEM – Israeli President Shimon Peres sent a rare greeting to the people of Iran on Friday, praising what he called a great and ancient culture and saying they would be better off without their hard-line leadership.The greeting coincided with a video message sent by President Obama to Iran in which he said the U.S. is prepared to end years of strained relations if Tehran tones down its bellicose rhetoric.Peres, a Nobel peace laureate, talked of the warm ties that once existed between the two countries under the pro-U.S. shah, who was overthrown in 1979, and voiced hope that they could once again live in peace.I turn to the noble Iranian nation in the name of the ancient Jewish nation and wish that it return to its rightful place among developed nations, he said.But in an interview accompanying the greeting, Peres took a tougher tone toward Iran's leaders, branding the leaders who came to power in the 1979 Islamic revolution religious fanatics and predicting that Iranians would eventually overthrow them.I think the Iranian nation will topple these leaders. Leaders that do not serve the people will, in the end, the nation will get rid of them,Peres said in the interview.It's such a rich country with such a rich culture, he added. On the one hand I look at Iran with admiration because of its history and on the other hand with sorrow because of what's happened to it.Peres' blessing for the Persian Nowruz holiday was broadcast on the Farsi-language service of the Voice of Israel radio station. The station said the interview would air on Monday. The station claims to have several million listeners in Iran, though it was not immediately clear how many people had heard the message.Israel and Iran enjoyed close ties before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which toppled the U.S.-backed shah and brought to power a clerical leadership hostile to the Jewish state.

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel and questioned whether the Holocaust occurred. Israel also accuses Iran of supporting hostile Arab militant groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah, and says Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons.Peres took aim at Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial. Since when is he an expert on the Jewish Holocaust? Was he at Auschwitz? What does he know? All day he makes speeches and speeches, but they are destroying the nation. They won't so quickly destroy us.In his aired greeting, Peres turned his focus to the Iranian people and offered a Nowruz blessing.Our relations with the Iranian nation knew days of prosperity, even in modern times as we shared with you our experience in agriculture, industry, development of science and medicine and we developed with you the best relations possible, he said.To our dismay, our diplomatic relations are at a low point flowing from the desires leading the current leaders of your land to act in every way possible against the state of Israel and its people, but I am confident that the day we are hoping for is not far, when the good neighborly relations and the cooperation will flourish in all fields for the welfare of our nations and for the betterment of our common future.Peres spoke in Hebrew for most of the blessing, but then ended his address with a traditional Persian holiday greeting in Farsi: May your Nowruz be a victory, and every day be Nowruz! Meir Javedanfar, an independent Iranian-born analyst living in Israel, called Peres' statements very significant.He said both Peres and Obama were aware that Iran is preparing to hold a presidential election and are hopeful that they can encourage voters to choose a new moderate leadership.Iranian right-wingers thrive on demonizing the U.S. and Israel, he said. This is basically to counter that, with the hope that the people of Iran will vote against extremism.He said Peres also might be trying to encourage the people of Iran to embrace Obama's diplomatic overture.We should try not to allow the provocative messages of Ahmadinejad to destroy the rapprochement, he said. Farnoush Ram, a broadcaster at the Israeli radio station, said Peres' predecessor, Iranian-born Moshe Katsav, had also sent Nowruz messages to Iran in the past, but this was the first blessing since Ahmadinejad took office.

Iran's supreme leader dismisses Obama overtures By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer – Sat Mar 21, 11:42 am ET

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran's supreme leader rebuffed President Barack Obama's latest outreach on Saturday, saying Tehran was still waiting to see concrete changes in U.S. policy.Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was responding to a video message Obama released Friday in which he reached out to Iran on the occasion of Nowruz, the Persian new year, and expressed hopes for an improvement in nearly 30 years of strained relations.Khamenei holds the last word on major policy decisions, and how Iran ultimately responds to any concrete U.S. effort to engage the country will depend largely on his say.In his most direct assessment of Obama and prospects for better ties, Khamenei said there will be no change between the two countries unless the American president puts an end to U.S. hostility toward Iran and brings real changes in foreign policy.They chant the slogan of change but no change is seen in practice. We haven't seen any change, Khamenei said in a speech before a crowd of tens of thousands in the northeastern holy city of Mashhad.In his video message, Obama said the United States wants to engage Iran, but he also warned that a right place for Iran in the international community cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization.

Khamenei asked how Obama could congratulate Iranians on the new year and accuse the country of supporting terrorism and seeking nuclear weapons in the same message.

Khamenei said there has been no change even in Obama's language compared to that of his predecessor.He (Obama) insulted the Islamic Republic of Iran from the first day. If you are right that change has come, where is that change? What is the sign of that change? Make it clear for us what has changed.Still, Khamenei left the door open to better ties with America, saying should you change, our behavior will change too.

Diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Iran were cut after the U.S. Embassy hostage-taking after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which toppled the pro-U.S. shah and brought to power a government of Islamic clerics.The United States cooperated with Iran in late 2001 and 2002 in the Afghanistan conflict, but the promising contacts fizzled — and were extinguished completely when Bush branded Tehran part of the Axis of Evil.

Khamenei enumerated a long list of Iranian grievances against the United States over the past 30 years and said the U.S. was still interfering in Iranian affairs.He mentioned U.S. sanctions against Iran, U.S. support for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during his 1980-88 war against Iran and the downing of an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf in 1988.He also accused the U.S. of provoking ethnic tension in Iran and said Washington's accusations that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons are a sign of U.S. hostility. Iran says its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes, like energy production, not for building weapons.Have you released Iranian assets? Have you lifted oppressive sanctions? Have you given up mudslinging and making accusations against the great Iranian nation and its officials? Have you given up your unconditional support for the Zionist regime? Even the language remains unchanged, Khamenei said.Khamenei, wearing a black turban and dark robes, said America was hated around the world for its arrogance, as the crowd chanted Death to America.Prominent political analyst Saeed Leilaz said Khamenei's comments did not amount to a rejection of better ties with the Obama administration. Rather, Iran's current hard-line leaders need to publicly maintain some degree of anti-U.S. rhetoric to bolster their own position, especially with their conservative base, he said. Iran's ruling Islamic establishment needs to lessen tensions with the U.S. and at the same time maintain a controlled animosity with Washington,he said. Iran can't praise Obama all of a sudden.
Khamenei will also likely stand his ground as long as he remains concerned about the United States' ability to destabilize Iran, he said. For its part, the Obama administration must take practical steps such as lifting a ban on selling Iran spare parts for passenger aircraft or considering unfreezing Iranian assets in the U.S., Leilaz said.

Obama has signaled a willingness to speak directly with Iran about its nuclear program and hostility toward Israel, a key U.S. ally. At his inauguration last month, the president said his administration would reach out to rival states, declaring we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.They say we have stretched a hand toward Iran. ... If a hand is stretched covered with a velvet glove but it is cast iron inside, that makes no sense, Khamenei said.

Obama’s War Policies Worse than Bush’s, Anti-War Activist Says
Friday, March 20, 2009 By Josiah Ryan, Staff Writer

President Barack Obama’s war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan are criminal and worse than those of former President Bush, according to Adam Kokesh, who serves on the board of directors of the anti-war group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW).Kokesh and other members of the IVAW gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Thursday to call on Obama to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also launched a 24-hour vigil/demonstration called Operation No Change to mark the sixth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War (March 20, 2003).In some ways, Obama is worse than Bush, Kokesh told CNSNews.com. Bush wasn’t proposing a surge in Afghanistan – and Bush was talking about a quicker timeline for withdrawal than Obama.

That’s why we called this Operation No Change,said Kokesh. What Obama is doing with our foreign policy on a fundamental level is not change. Though we are going to re-label the troops non-combat troops, they are still out there, and clearly they are still fighting for American interests.Kokesh also said that he absolutely thinks Obama’s war policies are criminal and that he has not been surprised by Obama’s actions since he became president in January. I’m not disappointed because I never had any hope in him, said Kokesh.All of the predications of those of us who read the fine print about Obama have come true. During the primaries he sold himself very vaguely as a peace candidate and said he wanted to end the occupations. But when that congealed into something specific, I could see right away he really had no interest in reforming foreign policy or ending these occupations,Kokesh said.Tracy Harmon, however, who is an IVAW member, told CNSNews.com that while she has been disappointed in Obama’s actions since his inauguration, she thinks he is sincere about his intention to withdraw from Iraq.I do believe him, said Harmon. I think he wants to get us out but it has taken longer – he extended the pullout date by three months.

Harmon said that Obama’s decision to send a surge into Afghanistan demonstrates that he is not a peace president as many voters may have thought.For the most part, it is a disillusionment, she said. He is seen as an anti-war president, but he is starting a whole new war in Afghanistan.When it comes to war policy, there were a number of presidential candidates who would have been better than Obama, including 2008 candidates Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), said Kokesh.

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