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Friday, July 06, 2012

Robert Scheer on Libor: Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen - on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend

how massive does the fraud have to be, how many trillions of dollars does it have to involve, how many millions of people have to be ripped off, and how many more of these mega-crimes have to surface before these global criminals are stopped, and by stopped, i mean arrested, indicted, convicted and put away...?

robert scheer in truthdig...
The current Libor interest rate scandal, involving hundreds of trillions in international derivatives trade, shows how the really big boys play. And these guys will most likely not do the time because their kind rewrites the law before committing the crime.

Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen. Or, indeed, imagined. The scandal over Libor—short for London interbank offered rate—has resulted in a huge fine for Barclays Bank and threatens to ensnare some of the world’s top financiers. It reveals that behind the world’s financial edifice lies a reeking cesspool of unprecedented corruption. The modern-day robber barons pillage with a destructive abandon totally unfettered by law or conscience and on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend.

here's more from al jazeera...



and here's a longer treatment of the scandal from al jazeera's inside story with economist bill black making a guest appearance...




and, finally, this from current tv's viewpoint...


"Viewpoint" host Eliot Spitzer, Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone contributing editor, and Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, analyze the Libor interest rate--rigging scandal engulfing the banking industry.

Barclays CEO Bob Diamond recently resigned after the bank was fined $453 million for its part in the scandal, which involved manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), a key global benchmark for interest rates, by essentially "faking their credit scores," according to Taibbi. And as Taibbi explains, Barclays couldn't have acted alone.

"It can't just be Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland. In fact, it can't even be four banks or even five banks," he says. "Really, in the end it's probably going to come out that it's going to be all of them ... involved in this. And that's what's critical for people to understand: that this is a cartel-style corruption."

Kelleher argues that the Libor scandal is proof that the financial industry "is corrupt and rotten to its core." "The same executives [using] the same business model that crashed the entire financial system in '08 are still running these banks," he says.

 

why does accountability and the rule of law only apply to the peasants...?

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Thursday, May 31, 2012

Rapper Immortal Technique on Al Jazeera: The emcee of the voiceless

worth watching...
This episode of the Al Jazeera English show "The Stream" features an interview with rapper Immortal Technique about Occupy Wall Street, his lyrics and career, hip hop activism and more.  He is posed questions from The Stream's online community live from Twitter and Google Plus, and discusses his views towards gay marriage and his work in Afghanistan.

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Saturday, April 21, 2012

Is capitalism in fact bankrupt?

from al jazeera...
With a world-wide financial crisis, towering government debt and the public outrage of the 99 per cent it is suggested that the free market is not free enough. Is capitalism in fact bankrupt?

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Friday, April 06, 2012

The prison-industrial complex in the U.S.

from al jazeera via common dreams...
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world at 760 people per 100,000. Between 1999-2010 the use of private prisons increased by 40 percent at the state level and by 784 percent in the federal prison system. This rapid expansion of the private prison industry is the subject of much debate in the US, and has been termed the "Prison-Industrial Complex."

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Saturday, March 31, 2012

Occupy - surviving the winter

more from al jazeera's fault lines, chronicling the occupy movement...

Occupy Wall Street: Surviving the Winter


Fault Lines follows key Occupy organisers through the winter as they continue to build a movement even after violent evictions across the country.


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Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Al Jazeera starts its series on the history of Occupy

from al jazeera's program, fault lines...

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Monday, October 17, 2011

AL Jazeera devotes a half-hour program overviewing the global Occupy movement

al jazeera...



meanwhile, in the u.s., former obama confidant cornel west was arrested yesterday on the steps of the supreme court...

russia today...


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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Meltdown: The Men Who Crashed the World

al jazeera english is running a four-part series...

part 1...



In the first episode of Meltdown, we hear about four men who brought down the global economy: a billionaire mortgage-seller who fooled millions; a high-rolling banker with a fatal weakness; a ferocious Wall Street predator; and the power behind the throne.

The crash of September 2008 brought the largest bankruptcies in world history, pushing more than 30 million people into unemployment and bringing many countries to the edge of insolvency. Wall Street turned back the clock to 1929.

But how did it all go so wrong?

Lack of government regulation; easy lending in the US housing market meant anyone could qualify for a home loan with no government regulations in place.

Also, London was competing with New York as the banking capital of the world. Gordon Brown, the British finance minister at the time, introduced 'light touch regulation' - giving bankers a free hand in the marketplace.

All this, and with key players making the wrong financial decisions, saw the world's biggest financial collapse.

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Friday, August 05, 2011

The richest 1% of the US population controls 40% of the wealth

from the al jazeera fault lines news magazine that aired august 2, 2011...
The richest 1% of US Americans earn nearly a quarter of the country's income and control an astonishing 40% of its wealth. Inequality in the US is more extreme than it's been in almost a century — and the gap between the super rich and the poor and middle class people has widened drastically over the last 30 years.

Meanwhile, in Washington, a bitter partisan debate over how to cut deficit spending and reduce the US' 14.3 trillion dollar debt is underway. As low and middle class wages stagnate and unemployment remains above 9%, Republicans and Democrats are tussling over whether to slash funding for the medical and retirement programs that are the backbone of the US's social safety net, and whether to raise taxes — or to cut them further.

The budget debate and the economy are the battleground on which the 2012 presidential election race will be fought. And the United States has never seemed so divided — both politically and economically.

How did the gap grow so wide, and so quickly? And how are the convictions, campaign contributions and charitable donations of the top 1% impacting the other 99% of Americans?

pretty pathetic, eh...?

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Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Helen Thomas on Al Jazeera [UPDATE & BUMPED]

[originally posted on 3/21/11]

i'm watching riz khan interviewing helen thomas right now on al jazeera english... it's very good... you can watch here... i will post the youtube video as soon as it's put up...

[UPDATE]

i've been looking and looking for the al jazeera youtube clip and i can't come up with it... what i did manage to find is this clip from the real news in which she says pretty much what i saw her say on al jazeera... i'll keep looking for the al jazeera clip...

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Friday, February 11, 2011

Crossing the "fear barrier"

listening to rania, a human rights activist, speaking to al jazeera from the 6th of october bridge in cairo... she says that once the egyptian people crossed the "fear barrier," there was no stopping them...

i've said all along that fear is the principal tool used by our overlords to keep us in our place... if you look at just how much fear gets stoked on a daily basis - terrorists, swine flu, home foreclosure, crime, even losing one's job - we are mercilessly manipulated on a daily basis...

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Thursday, February 10, 2011

The Egyptian regime has tested positive for cancer but Mubarak and Suleiman think they only have a migraine

on al jazeera live...

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This isn't just about Egypt [UPDATE] [UPDATE II]

it's about ALL of us and we would all do well to pay attention... the tectonic plates are shifting and this will have ripple effects around the world in ways that we can only guess at...

obama is scheduled to take the stage in michigan in about 10 minutes and i suspect that mubarak will be making his appearance at about the same time...

watch al jazeera here...


[UPDATE]

guessed wrong... obama mentioned that we "witnessing history unfold", his usual non-committal statement...

[UPDATE II]

egyptian state television says mubarak will address the nation within the hour... it's currently 11:04 a.m., u.s. pacific time, 9:04 p.m., egyptian time...

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Wednesday, February 09, 2011

The universal obsession with identifying a "leader" for a self-organizing system - the anti-government protesters in Egypt

it would be laughable if it wasn't so sad... even the most comprehensive and generally straightforward reporting (yes, i believe that would be al jazeera), seemingly can't get past the fact that no leader has yet emerged to be anointed as the spokesperson for the protesters in tahrir square... nobody can quite grasp that truly empowered people - as the demonstrators have consistently shown themselves to be - don't NEED a goddam leader...

the correct technical term for what's happening in egypt is a phenomenon that is an element of complexity theory - the "emergent properties" of "self-organizing systems," to be specific - a phenomenon that has only recently been identified and studied, principally through the efforts of the santa fe institute... i can't do it justice in attempting to describe it here, but basically it means that, if the various independent actors in a system - in this case, the protesters - are sufficiently well-connected and in agreement on what they're all about, they don't NEED a leader...

as you can imagine, the entire concept of a group involved in changing the dynamics in an entire region, upending the power structure and insisting on being recognized and dealt with that doesn't either HAVE or NEED a leader scares the ever-loving shit out of our super-rich elites and their bought and paid-for governmental puppets...

p.s. i can't tell you how many times i've been looked at like i'm crazy when i say that empowered, informed, well-intended, decent people don't need a leader... the persistent myth is that there HAS to be a leader, a myth that's as strong and as durable an article of faith as the myth of "if there's a winner, there HAS to be a loser"...

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Tuesday, February 08, 2011

More people in Tahrir Square than ever before

watch al jazeera live feed here...

meanwhile, mubarak, israel and the u.s. are still angling to keep the status quo...

mubarak remains defiant...

Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians have poured into Cairo's Tahrir Square for the latest protest calling for Hosni Mubarak's government to step down.

The BBC's Jim Muir, in the Egyptian capital, says it is the biggest demonstration since the protests began on 25 January.

It comes despite the government's announcement of its plans for a peaceful transfer of power.

President Mubarak has said he will stay until elections in September.

In Tahrir Square, attempts by the army to check the identity cards of those joining the demonstration were abandoned because of the sheer weight of numbers.

and wikileaks diplomatic cables show that israel the u.s. israel the u.s. israel would like to see the cia operative torturer vice president suleiman step in...
Hosni Mubarak, the current president, according to a leaked diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website, and published by the UK daily, The Telegraph.

The August 2008 cable said David Hacham, a senior adviser at the Israeli ministry of defence (MoD), told US officials the Israelis expected Suleiman, spelt Soliman in some cables, to take over.

"Hacham noted that the Israelis believe Soliman is likely to serve as at least an interim president if Mubarak dies or is incapacitated," the cable sent from the US embassy in Tel Aviv said.

"We defer to Embassy Cairo for analysis of Egyptian succession scenarios, but there is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of Omar Soliman," the memo cited US diplomats as saying.

i am so impressed with the peaceful determination of the egyptian people in their desire to get rid of their corrupt and vicious overlords...

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Sunday, February 06, 2011

Al Jazeera reporter Ayman Mohyeldin detained by Egyptian Army [UPDATE]

this happened just a few hours ago and they don't know where he's been taken... reporters without borders is on the case...

watch here...


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[UPDATE & BUMPED]

good news...
Ayman Mohyeldin, an Al Jazeera correspondent who was detained while covering the unrest in Egypt, has been released.

He was seized by the Egyptian military near Tahrir Square in Cairo on Sunday, but was freed seven hours later following a concerted appeal by the network and supporters of Mohyeldin.

There had been many calls on Twitter for the release of Mohyeldin, who has more than 20,000 followers on his page.

Dozens of journalists have been detained, injured and threatened while covering events in Egypt, where hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets calling for an end to the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, the president.

Nadia el-Awady, president of the World Federation of Science Journalists, told Al Jazeera that both foreign and Egyptian media workers were being specifically targeted during the protests.

Speaking about her experiences reporting from Tahrir Square, she said: "There were pro-Mubarak civilian-clothed people planted within the square that were trying to instigate other protesters to get angry.

"They tried to create this kind of mob mentality among protesters to get angry at the journalists."

classic strategy of the super-rich elites and their puppets - incite, divide, polarize, provoke violence, and conquer...

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Friday, February 04, 2011

This is what happens these days when you attempt to present "un-spun" news

Al Jazeera’s Cairo office burned down by pro-Mubarak ‘thugs’

Al Jazeera's office in Cairo was stormed by a "gang of thugs" and set on fire along with all the equipment inside it, the Arab news network said Friday.

"It appears to be the latest attempt by the Egyptian regime or its supporters to hinder Al Jazeera's coverage of events in the country," the news network said in a statement.

"In the last week its bureau was forcibly closed, all its journalists had press credentials revoked, and nine journalists were detained at various stages. Al Jazeera has also faced unprecedented levels of interference in its broadcast signal as well as persistent and repeated attempts to bring down its websites."

"We are grateful for the support we have received from across the world for our coverage in Egypt and can assure everyone that we will continue our work undeterred," the statement added.

Al Jazeera also said its website "has been under relentless attack since the onset of the uprisings in Egypt." A banner advertisment on the news network's Arabic-language website was hacked Friday and replaced with a slogan reading, "Together for the collapse of Egypt." The banner linked to a page critical of the network.

you can go to this link to register your desire to see al jazeera offered on u.s. cable and satellite tv services...

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Read the caption on this Al Jazeera screen shot from their coverage of Egypt today [UPDATE]

i'm tellin' ya, it's still giving me chills... i've been waiting to see stuff like this my whole life...

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all walks of life, regardless of age, gender or religion... wow...!


[UPDATE]

i'm stuck overnight here in frankfurt after missing a connecting flight back to the u.s. so i'm cooling my heels in a hotel room... i'm watching cnn international on the tv side-by-side with al jazeera streaming on my laptop... the difference in the coverage of egypt couldn't be more dramatic... cnn keeps talking about "to see what's happening in egypt, stay with cnn" but keeps running endless ads and super bowl fluff stories while al jazeera never flinches... it's a stunning comparison...

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Thursday, February 03, 2011

Egyptian state media journalist resigns: "I'm not going to be part of the propaganda machine"

"i'm relieved," she says...

shahira amin resigned her job with egyptian state media - nile television - today because it's not presenting the reality of what's happening...

watch on al jazeera...

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Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Anti-Mubarak protesters have re-taken Tahrir Square

and more people are joining them, bringing food and medicine... is this amazing or what...?

watch here...

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