Rep. Brad Sherman: Prosecute US citizens involved with Gaza flotilla!

Flipping unbelievable! Attacking a boat in international waters is an act of war, terrorism or piracy.

Robert Fisk: The Truth Behind The Israeli Propaganda (Independent)

One American, 19-year-old, named as Fulkan Dogan, cannot be prosecuted anymore because Israeli terrorists/murderers shot him five times from less than 45cm, in the face, in the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back.

See this report for more information:

Autopsy Results Reveal That Gaza Flotilla Activists Were Shot In Head At Close Range (Guardian)

Here is TRAITOR Rep. Brad Sherman in 2006:
brad-sherman
Congressman Brad Sherman argues that “we have to hammer it home again and again that the current Israeli response is not just a response to one incident one week ago, but to continued terrorist activity against Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas and their masters in Tehran.”

Brad Sherman also denies that there was a “hunger crisis” or “humanitarian crisis” in the Gaza Strip:

“The health circumstances in Gaza are better than they are in many American cities,” he added later.

Oh, really? Then why are the majority of babies in Gaza anaemic?

Gaza families eat grass as Israel locks border (Times)
(Work yourself through the related articles.)

Some of you maybe thought that this cannot be true, but now you know that Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is right:

Paul Craig Roberts: ‘AIPAC Owns The US Puppet Government’

Mr. Sherman you are a TRAITOR to the American people which you (still) represent.


Rep. Sherman: prosecute U.S. citizens involved with Gaza flotilla

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On a press call hosted by a pro-Israel organization, Rep. Brad Sherman, Democrat of California, told reporters that he intends seek the prosecution of any U.S. citizens who were aboard or involved with the Freedom Flotilla.

“The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 [PDF] makes it absolutely illegal for any American to give food, money, school supplies, paper clips, concrete or weapons to Hamas or any of its officials,” Sherman said on the Israel Project call, conflating Hamas and Gaza’s civilian population. “And so I will be asking the Attorney General to prosecute any American involved in what was clearly an effort to give items of value to a terrorist organization.”

Sherman also said that he plans on working with the Department of Homeland Security to make sure that any non-U.S. citizen involved with or aboard the Flotilla are excluded from entering the U.S.

Hamas, considered a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and has held de facto rule over the Gaza Strip since it took the area by force in 2007 in anticipation of an impending U.S.-backed coup d’etat by the rival Fatah faction.

The Freedom Flotilla was organized by the Free Gaza Movement to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza – in place since Hamas’s takeover – and deliver tons of food aid, medical and school supplies and building materials to repair buildings damaged in the month-long Israeli assault of Gaza in Dec. 2008 and Jan. 2009. The Flotilla was raided by Israeli commandos in international waters during the early hours of Monday morning, leaving at least nine people, including one U.S. citizen, dead.

Though the nine were killed by the IDF, Sherman criticized the Obama administration for not directly blaming Hamas, using the logic that the militant movement brought the blockade on itself: “I think the U.S. could be better now about condemning Hamas as responsible for those nine deaths.”

The blockade and the land siege (by Israel and Egypt) have, by international consensus (leaving out Israel and its hard-line American allies) caused a humanitarian crisis among Gaza’s civilian population.

The Congressman, known as a pro-Israel stalwart who has, in the past, joined as the sole Democrat on Republican criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy toward Israel, denied that there was a “hunger crisis” or “humanitarian crisis” in the Gaza Strip. “The health circumstances in Gaza are better than they are in many American cities,” he added later.

Questions about the legality of the Israeli blockade and its enforcement in international waters were quickly dismissed by Sherman, who said that the U.S. had itself blockaded Germany in both World Wars, Japan in the Second, Cuba during the missile crisis, and, curiously, the Confederacy during the Civil War.

(A naval blockade is an act of war Mr. Sherman. Only Gaza cannot defend itself against a blockade by Israel, but it has the right to do so.)

Read moreRep. Brad Sherman: Prosecute US citizens involved with Gaza flotilla!

Matt Taibbi: Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle

Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren’t just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy – they’re re-creating the conditions for another crash

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On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America’s pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman’s role in precipitating the global financial crisis.

The bank had already set aside a tidy $16.2 billion for salaries and bonuses – meaning that Goldman employees were each set to take home an average of $498,246, a number roughly commensurate with what they received during the bubble years. Still, the troops were worried: There were rumors that Dr. Ballsachs, bowing to political pressure, might be forced to scale the number back. After all, the country was broke, 14.8 million Americans were stranded on the unemployment line, and Barack Obama and the Democrats were trying to recover the populist high ground after their bitch-whipping in Massachusetts by calling for a “bailout tax” on banks. Maybe this wasn’t the right time for Goldman to be throwing its annual Roman bonus orgy.

Not to worry, Blankfein reassured employees. “In a year that proved to have no shortage of story lines,” he said, “I believe very strongly that performance is the ultimate narrative.”

Translation: We made a shitload of money last year because we’re so amazing at our jobs, so fuck all those people who want us to reduce our bonuses.

Goldman wasn’t alone. The nation’s six largest banks – all committed to this balls-out, I drink your milkshake! strategy of flagrantly gorging themselves as America goes hungry – set aside a whopping $140 billion for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007. In a gesture of self-sacrifice, Blankfein himself took a humiliatingly low bonus of $9 million, less than the 2009 pay of elephantine New York Knicks washout Eddy Curry. But in reality, not much had changed. “What is the state of our moral being when Lloyd Blankfein taking a $9 million bonus is viewed as this great act of contrition, when every penny of it was a direct transfer from the taxpayer?” asks Eliot Spitzer, who tried to hold Wall Street accountable during his own ill-fated stint as governor of New York.

Beyond a few such bleats of outrage, however, the huge payout was met, by and large, with a collective sigh of resignation. Because beneath America’s populist veneer, on a more subtle strata of the national psyche, there remains a strong temptation to not really give a shit. The rich, after all, have always made way too much money; what’s the difference if some fat cat in New York pockets $20 million instead of $10 million?

The only reason such apathy exists, however, is because there’s still a widespread misunderstanding of how exactly Wall Street “earns” its money, with emphasis on the quotation marks around “earns.” The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits – Goldman reported $13.4 billion in profits last year, after paying out that $16.2 billion in bonuses and compensation – is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street’s eye-popping profits come from, exactly? Did Goldman go from bailout city to $13.4 billion in the black because, as Blankfein suggests, its “performance” was just that awesome? A year and a half after they were minutes away from bankruptcy, how are these assholes not only back on their feet again, but hauling in bonuses at the same rate they were during the bubble?

The answer to that question is basically twofold: They raped the taxpayer, and they raped their clients.

Read moreMatt Taibbi: Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle

Obama’s Big Sellout (Rolling Stone Magazine)

The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway

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Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we’ve been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?

Whatever the president’s real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial “reforms” that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street’s political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer’s role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama’s top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.

How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed.

‘Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal,” says one leading Democratic consultant. “Just look at it. It’s fucking amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it.”

Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and inexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency. In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout — to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama’s election.

Read moreObama’s Big Sellout (Rolling Stone Magazine)

Rep. Brad Sherman: Geithner rejects $1 trillion limit on bailout power (Section 1204 is unlimited in dollar amount!)

Even TARP was limited. This is more than criminal!

‘Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren,” Obama said in a 2006 floor speech that preceded a Senate vote to extend the debt limit. “America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.”
– Barack Obama

Exactly right.

But more than that the US government and the Fed are bankrupting America and destroying the US dollar.

In case you haven’t seen this yet:
Fall Of The Republic – The Presidency Of Barack H. Obama (The Full Movie HQ)
The Obama Deception

The Obama administration is a lot worse than even the Bush administration.

Change!



By Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.)

In my questioning of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner before the Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, I focused on the new bailout authority included in the 618-page legislative proposal submitted by the Treasury Department.

In my opinion, Geithner’s proposal is “TARP on steroids.”  Section 1204 of the proposal allows the executive branch to use taxpayer money to make loans to, or invest in, the largest financial institutions to avoid a systemic risk to the economy.

Geithner’s proposal reminds me of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the $700 billion Wall Street bailout adopted last year, but the TARP was limited to two years, and to a maximum of $700 billion.

Section 1204 is unlimited in dollar amount and is a permanent grant of power to the executive branch. TARP contained some limits on executive compensation and an array of special oversight authorities. Section 1204 contains absolutely no limits on executive compensation and no special oversight.

When I asked Geithner whether he would accept a $1 trillion limit on the new bailout authority (if the executive branch wanted to spend more, it would have to come back to Congress), he rejected a $1 trillion limit, insisting that the executive branch be able to respond without coming back to Congress.

Read moreRep. Brad Sherman: Geithner rejects $1 trillion limit on bailout power (Section 1204 is unlimited in dollar amount!)

Fall Of The Republic – The Presidency Of Barack H. Obama (The Full Movie HQ)

“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
– Benjamin Franklin


Added: 22. October 2009

Fall Of The Republic documents how an offshore corporate cartel is bankrupting the US economy by design. Leaders are now declaring that world government has arrived and that the dollar will be replaced by a new global currency.

President Obama has brazenly violated Article 1 Section 9 of the US Constitution by seating himself at the head of United Nations’ Security Council, thus becoming the first US president to chair the world body.

A scientific dictatorship is in its final stages of completion, and laws protecting basic human rights are being abolished worldwide; an iron curtain of high-tech tyranny is now descending over the planet.

A worldwide regime controlled by an unelected corporate elite is implementing a planetary carbon tax system that will dominate all human activity and establish a system of neo-feudal slavery.

Read moreFall Of The Republic – The Presidency Of Barack H. Obama (The Full Movie HQ)

The US Government: Bought and Paid For

What a coincidence that Ron Paul, , Marcy Kaptur, Dennis Kucinich, Alan Grayson and Brad Sherman are also on my short list of politicians that I find trustworthy.  🙂


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Lobbyists from the financial industry have paid hundreds of millions to Congress and the Obama administration. They have bought virtually all of the key congress members and senators on committees overseeing finances and banking.

This is easy to confirm in black-and-white. See for yourself: here, here, here, here, here and here.

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Nicole Gelinas says:

The too-big-to-fail financial industry has been good to elected officials and former elected officials of both parties over its 25-year life span

And economic historian Niall Ferguson says:

Guess which institutions are among the biggest lobbyists and campaign-finance contributors? Surprise! None other than the TBTFs [too big to fails].

No wonder two powerful congressmen said that banks run Congress.

No wonder two leading IMF officials, the former Vice President of the Dallas Federal Reserve, and the the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City have all said that the United States is controlled by an oligarchy.

With the exception of a handful couple of Congress members who have the American people’s interest in mind, Congress is bought and paid for.

Note: A friend on the Hill made an important point to me by email.

Maxine Waters and Ron Paul get almost nothing [from the financial lobby. Sherman, Kucinich, Grayson and Kaptur are some other congress members who have not been bought and paid for].

Read moreThe US Government: Bought and Paid For

How the crooked bailout was passed by Congress

Fraud, bribery and threats of violence

Congressman Sherman’s entire presentation

The Wall Street Welfare Act

There was a simple solution the banking crisis:

Guarantee ALL normal banking deposits. That’s what European countries are doing.

With bank deposit guarantees, individuals and real businesses would have access to their money and to normal credit.

But the White House took a different path…

A multi-trillion dollar “no string attached” checkbook controlled by the White House through the Treasury Department to buy the toxic assets of Wall Street and other reckless investors.

Who will pay?

The US tax payers who are footing the bill.

Who will benefit?

Wall Street CEOs and their deep pocket clients and members of the Bush regime.

What will the US do in the future when it needs money to prepair crumbling infrastructure, take care of public health, and deal with natural and man made catastrophes?

The answer will to all these problems will be simple and consistent: We have no money.

How did this insane legislation get passed?

Congressman Brad Sherman lays it out:

* fraud (fake phone calls from paid stooges in support of the bill),
* bribery (hundreds of pages of pork added to the bill by the Senate at the last minute), and
* threats of violence (the claim that without the bailout martial law was a certainty.)

Source: Brasscheck TV