Barack Obama’s chief of staff pushed the Governor of Illinois to appoint one of the President-elect’s closest friends to his vacant Senate seat, it has emerged.
Rahm Emanuel had conversations about the Senate seat with Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich Photo: AP
The leaked details of an internal transition team review of contacts with Gov Rod Blagojevich, who is accused of – but denies – trying to “sell” the seat, will open Mr Obama up to accusations of hypocrisy and cronyism because he had indicated he would not intervene in filling the vacancy.
Another $700bn that have to be financed and paid back. So in a way that package is only a promise of a tax increase in the future. Obama is really giving you a ‘credit’ that you and/or your children have to pay back in the future.
Barack Obama’s administration in waiting signalled yesterday that it was preparing the biggest economic stimulus in US history to avert mass unemployment in a stuttering economy that could face the toughest recession in half a century.
In a programme tinged with environmentally friendly initiatives, the US president-elect has set a new target of creating or safeguarding 3m jobs, up from a previous aim of 2.5m, by unleashing an avalanche of government spending and offering widespread tax rebates.
The Obama camp indicated that the package would be worth between $675bn and $775bn, easily eclipsing other packages unveiled in China, Japan and Britain. The cash will include programmes to transmit wind and solar energy across America and to put millions of medical records into digital format.
Obama’s vice-president elect, Joe Biden, yesterday said the stimulus was the “single most important thing” facing the new administration and warned that action was needed to prevent the economy from “absolutely tanking”.
“The economy is in much worse shape than we thought it was in,” Biden told ABC television. “We’ve got to begin to stem this bleeding, stop the loss of jobs and create new jobs.”
Admiral Mike Mullen — the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff
KABUL (AFP) – The United States plans to send between 20,000 and 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan by next summer, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said here Saturday.
General David McKiernan, the US commander in Afghanistan, has asked for more than 20,000 extra US soldiers to counter a rise in insurgent violence, seven years after US forces first invaded the country to oust the Taliban from power.
But the potential deployment of 30,000 extra troops discussed by Mullen — the highest-ranking US military officer — would nearly double the US military presence in Afghanistan, which currently stands at 31,000.
With such people in top positions around the world … prepare for the worst.
Thanks to their debt and inflation creating policies they have assured that “The whole society is going to suffer.” (IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn). They are creating the worst depression ever.
‘The whole society is going to suffer,’ warns IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Billions more will have to be pumped into the economy to avoid it spiralling into an even ‘darker’ recession, the head of the International Monetary Fund has warned.
Britain and other leading economies will need to double their economic bailout packages during 2009, which is shaping up to be a ‘really bad year’, according to Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
‘I’m specially concerned by the fact that our forecast, already very dark . . . will be even darker if not enough fiscal stimulus is implemented,’ Mr Strauss-Kahn told BBC Radio 4.
The IMF, which oversees the world’s economic system, is urging governments around the world to splurge a staggering £80trillion in a co-ordinated war against recession.
That would represent around 2 per cent of global annual economic output.
But Chancellor Alistair Darling’s stimulus package accounts for just 1 per cent of Britain’s national income.
The government has been accused of trampling on individual liberties by proposing wide-ranging new powers for bailiffs to break into homes and to use “reasonable force” against householders who try to protect their valuables.
Under the regulations, bailiffs for private firms would for the first time be given permission to restrain or pin down householders. They would also be able to force their way into homes to seize property to pay off debts, such as unpaid credit card bills and loans.
The government, which wants to crack down on people who evade debts, says the new powers would be overseen by a robust industry watchdog. However, the laws are being criticised as the latest erosion of the rights of the householder in his own home.
“These laws strip away tried and tested protections that make a person’s home his castle, and which have stood for centuries,” said Paul Nicolson, chairman of the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, a London-based welfare charity. “They could clearly lead to violent confrontations and undermine fundamental liberties.”
THE Irish government is in talks to bail out its three biggest banks, in a move that would see it take a stake of up to 80% in Anglo Irish Bank, which was last week rocked by a scandal over secret loans to its former chairman.
A total of up to €7 billion (£6.5 billion) will be injected into the three biggest banks, most of it through the government buying new preference shares in the institutions.
Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank, the country’s two largest banks, will get €2 billion each from the government, with shareholders able to invest another €1 billion in each. Anglo will receive €1 billion from the state.
Shareholders in Anglo have already been hard hit. The bank’s shares have lost 98% of their value in the past year, falling sharply last week with revelations that the chairman, Sean Fitzpatrick, had failed to disclose €87m of loans he had received from the bank.
Hedge funds will be allowed to borrow from the Federal Reserve for the first time under a landmark $200bn programme intended to support consumer credit.
The Fed said on Friday it would offer low-cost three-year funding to any US company investing in securitised consumer loans under the Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF).
This includes hedge funds, which have never been able to borrow from the US central bank before, although the Fed may not permit hedge funds to use offshore vehicles to conduct the transactions.
The asset-backed securities to be funded under the programme are pools of credit card receivables, automobile loans and student loans.
The idea is to increase the supply of these loans and reduce borrowing rates by ensuring that the companies that make the loans can sell them on to investors who have guaranteed access to low-cost funding from the Fed.
The TALF is a key plank of the unorthodox strategy set out by the Fed last week as it cut interest rates virtually to zero. Washington insiders expect the programme will be dramatically expanded next year with further capital support from Treasury once the Obama administration takes office.
A senior official in the outgoing Bush administration told the Financial Times it could also be broadened to include new commercial and residential mortgage-backed securities.
In an interview with Aljazeera today, former Chief of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq told the TV that he and the Head of the IAEA “Mohamed Al-Baradei” were subjected to direct threats from Dick Cheney before the war.
Blix said that Cheney threatened to defame both men’s reputations if they didn’t came with the “required” answers.
It’s the same story from everyone else – Bush and Cheney demanded pro-war lies under one threat or another – being defamed, getting fired, and even outing covert CIA operatives. The Bush Administration was nothing more than a mafia operation.
But here’s the good part:
Blix also added that he is ready to be a witness on the United States’ false allegations before an International tribunal.
UN fears irreversible damage is being done in Gaza as new statistics reveal the level of deprivation
Impoverished Palestinians on the Gaza Strip are being forced to scavenge for food on rubbish dumps to survive as Israel’s economic blockade risks causing irreversible damage, according to international observers.
Figures released last week by the UN Relief and Works Agency reveal that the economic blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza in July last year has had a devastating impact on the local population. Large numbers of Palestinians are unable to afford the high prices of food being smuggled through the Hamas-controlled tunnels to the Strip from Egypt and last week were confronted with the suspension of UN food and cash distribution as a result of the siege.
The figures collected by the UN agency show that 51.8% – an “unprecedentedly high” number of Gaza’s 1.5 million population – are now living below the poverty line. The agency announced last week that it had been forced to stop distributing food rations to the 750,000 people in need and had also suspended cash distributions to 94,000 of the most disadvantaged who were unable to afford the high prices being asked for smuggled food.
“Things have been getting worse and worse,” said Chris Gunness of the agency yesterday. “It is the first time we have been seeing people picking through the rubbish like this looking for things to eat. Things are particularly bad in Gaza City where the population is most dense.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Michael Connell, the Bush IT expert who has been directly implicated in the rigging of George Bush’s 2000 and 2004 elections, was killed last night when his single engine plane crashed three miles short of the Akron airport. Velvet Revolution (“VR”), a non-profit that has been investigating Mr. Connell’s activities for the past two years, can now reveal that a person close to Mr. Connell has recently been discussing with a VR investigator how he can tell all about his work for George Bush. Mr. Connell told a close associate that he was afraid that George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw [him] under the bus.”
A tipster close to the McCain campaign disclosed to VR in July that Mr. Connell’s life was in jeopardy and that Karl Rove had threatened him and his wife, Heather. VR’s attorney, Cliff Arnebeck, notified the United States Attorney General , Ohio law enforcement and the federal court about these threats and insisted that Mr. Connell be placed in protective custody. VR also told a close associate of Mr. Connell’s not to fly his plane because of another tip that the plane could be sabotaged. Mr. Connell, a very experienced pilot, has had to abandon at least two flights in the past two months because of suspicious problems with his plane. On December 18, 2008, Mr. Connell flew to a small airport outside of Washington DC to meet some people. It was on his return flight the next day that he crashed.
On October 31, Mr. Connell appeared before a federal judge in Ohio after being subpoenaed in a federal lawsuit investigating the rigging of the 2004 election under the direction of Karl Rove. The judge ordered Mr. Connell to testify under oath at a deposition on November 3rd, the day before the presidential election. Velvet Revolution received confidential information that the White House was extremely concerned about Mr. Connell talking about his illegal work for the White House and two Bush/Cheney 04 attorneys were dispatched to represent him.
You see, Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all “known” Karl Rove accounts.
In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened.
He has flown his private plane for years without incident. I know he was going to DC last night, but I don’t know why. He apparently (did not) ran out of gas, something I find hard to believe. (See Update 3 below). I am not saying that this was a hit nor am I resigned to this being simply an accident either. I am no expert on aviation and cannot provide an opinion on the matter. What I am saying, however, is that given the context, this event needs to be examined carefully. If you want to understand the context more broadly, I suggest you read this article I did a while back about the break-ins and arson cases that Siegelman and others have experienced.
As the departing Bush administration frantically attempts to shore up its place in history, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann stands ready to kick the props out from under it again. A renewed claim that “no one could have anticipated” the attacks of 9/11 attracted his scorn in particular on Thursday’s Countdown.
“This is a White House talking point still, even though your average three-year-old could disprove it using an etch-a-sketch.” Olbermann sneered on Thursday, over the heading, “Insult the Dead-gate.”
Olbermann’s specific target was White House press spokesman Tony Fratto, who responded to a Fox News interviewer’s suggestion on Wednesday that before 9/11, “nobody was thinking that there’d be terrorists flying 767s into buildings” by agreeing, “No one could have anticipated that kind of attack — or very few people.”
“Yeah, well, it ain’t true,” Olbermann remarked, with open contempt dripping from his words, “and out of respect for the people who died that day you damn well better stop saying it.”
Olbermann then ran through a list of pre-9/11 warnings of potential al Qaeda hijackings, noting, “A president’s daily brief as far back as December 1998 said bin Laden was ‘preparing to hijack US aircraft in hopes of trading hostages for jailed radicals.’ … The August 6, 2001 brief, of course, told President Bush — if he read it — that there were ‘patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.'”
Olbermann did not mention either the use of airplanes as weapons by the Japanese kamikaze suicide pilots during World War II or the abortive al Qaeda plot of the 1990’s known as Project Bojinka, which would have involved both blowing up airliners and crashing a plane into CIA headquarters in Virginia and which may have been the inspiration for 9/11.
“That Mr. Fratto’s employers might not have been expected to know the exact hour of these attacks,” concluded Olbermann, “does not give him or anybody else the right to perpetuate the lie that 9/11 was impossible to conceive. Clearly, many inside this nation’s government anticipated it. It was Mr. Bush and his gang who chose to ignore them.”
This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast Dec. 18, 2008.
Joe Biden, the future vice president, sits down with George Stephanopoulos exclusively Sunday, Dec. 21, in his first interview as vice president-elect. File photo: Biden applauds during the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Monday, Aug. 25, 2008. Collapse
(AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
Vice President-Elect Joe Biden said the U.S. economy is in danger of “absolutely tanking” and will need a second stimulus package in the $600-billion to $700-billion range.
“The economy is in much worse shape than we thought it was in,” Biden told me during an exclusive interview — his first since becoming vice president-elect– to air this Sunday on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
“There is no short run other than keeping the economy from absolutely tanking. That’s the only short run,” Biden told me.
Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) — California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today ordered all state workers to take two days of unpaid leave each month to conserve money amid a record budget deficit and a legislative impasse over how to fix it.
The furloughs will begin in February and will last through June 2010, Schwarzenegger said in an executive order. He also ordered all departments to cut 10 percent of their workforce costs, through firings if necessary.
“Every California family and business has been forced to cut back during these difficult economic times, and state government cannot be exempt from similar belt tightening,” Schwarzenegger said in a letter to state workers.
WASHINGTON – President Bush agreed to an emergency bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, giving them a few months to get their businesses in order, but left to President-elect Barack Obama the difficult political decision of ruling on their progress.
The president’s plan gives carmakers until March 31 to restructure.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
The plan pumps $13.4 billion by mid-January into the companies from the fund that Congress authorized to rescue the financial industry. But the two companies have until March 31 to produce a plan for long-term profitability, including concessions from unions, creditors, suppliers and dealers.
The bailout plan sets “targets” rather than concrete requirements about what those concessions may be, meaning that Mr. Obama and his advisers have enormous latitude to decide how to define long-term viability.
A huge bailout for Detroit was barely able to budge Wall Street on Friday.
Stock markets surged in early trading after President Bush announced plans to extend $13.4 billion in emergency loans to the troubled automakers General Motors and Chrysler. But Wall Street’s reaction cooled, the morning’s early gains eroded, and markets ended mixed.
In 1992 Gordon Brown himself said: “A weak currency arises from a weak economy which in turn is the result of a weak Government.”
The pound is suffering its worst slide since Britain was forced off the gold standard in 1931.
Sterling dipped closer to parity against the euro, with the single currency now worth more than 95p for the first time ever. The pound’s fall came amid fast-growing disquiet about the fate of the UK economy and consumer sentiment next year.
The pound has now fallen by 23pc against a basket of other currencies, according to figures from the Bank of England. The fall is sharper than the devaluations in 1992, after leaving the Exchange Rate Mechanism, 1976, when the International Monetary Fund was forced to intervene, and 1949, when a host of countries slumped against the dollar.
Just as Bernard Madoff is alleged to have relied on payments in from new investors to pay out returns and promote a $50 billion (£33 billion) fund that scarcely existed, our Government continues to issue promises which it hopes future generations will honour.
The biggest Ponzi scheme: Bernard Madoff’s or our Government’s? Photo: BLOOMBERG
Christmas came early this week for 95,000 public sector pensioners. After questioning in the House of Commons, Cabinet Office Minister Liam Byrne admitted that they had been overpaid a total of £126m since 1978 but emphasised that they would not be required to pay the money back.
Particularly at this time of year, it makes a pleasant change to see some pensioners actually gaining from the sort of bureaucratic bungling with which we are now so wearily familiar and utterly fed up. All things considered, most people will be willing to set aside any Scrooge-like tendency to ponder upon who is paying for the politician to pose as Father Christmas.
However, a slight chill is placed on this cheery scene when you consider the uncertainty which these pensioners now face over what they will have to live on next year after their incomes are cut to the correct level. Perhaps equally galling, from the point of view of the majority who live in England, is the news from Scotland that the minority who are in receipt of overpayments north of the border will continue to be overpaid for as long as they live.
As the printing presses for the bailouts run at full speed, those in power are no longer even pretending that the new giveaways will fix our problems. Now that we are used to rewarding failure with taxpayer-funded bailouts, we are being told that this is “just a start,” more funds will inevitably be needed for more industries, and that things would be much worse had we done nothing.
The updated total bailout commitments add up to over $8 trillion now. This translates into a monetary base increase of 75 percent over the last two months. This money does not come from some rainy day fund tucked away in the budget somewhere – it is created from thin air, and devalues every dollar in circulation. Dumping money on an economy, as they have been doing, is not the same as dumping wealth. In fact, it has quite the opposite effect.
One key attribute that gives money value is scarcity. If something that is used as money becomes too plentiful, it loses value. That is how inflation and hyperinflation happens. Giving a central bank the power to create fiat money out of thin air creates the tremendous risk of eventual hyperinflation. Most of the founding fathers did not want a central bank. Having just experienced the hyperinflation of the Continental dollar, they understood the power and the temptations inherent in that type of system. It gives one entity far too much power to control and destabilize the economy.
Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) — Japan’s government will buy as much as 20 trillion yen ($223 billion) of shares held by banks, the Cabinet Office said in a statement in Tokyo today.
The amount is part of a stimulus package totaling about 75 trillion yen, the statement said. An additional 10 trillion yen of the package will be devoted to making capital injections into banks.
Creating money out of thin air creates inflation. Even Bernanke admitted – questioned by Ron Paul – that inflation is a tax. So the government and the banksters want to tax you without you knowing it. They just want to keep the system afloat until ‘they are ready’ to let it fail. They are about to create the worst depression ever.
___________________________________________________________________________
Putting more money into the system – or ‘quantitative easing’ – is a move that may be adopted by central banks across the world
KEEP up at the back. The new big thing to save the world economy is “quantitative easing”. Not an upmarket euphemism for a massage, but the latest and most desperate measure yet by central banks to stop a severe recession turning into depression. And it may soon be adopted in the UK.
Quantitative easing is the elegant, sanitised term for the process by which a central bank fends off the threat of deflation by effectively printing new money, or increasing its supply.
A simple model would work like this: the government issues bonds and sells them, directly or otherwise, to the central bank. The bank creates new money for this purpose and pays the government for those bonds. The money is then used by the government to stimulate the economy through public works and infrastructure projects.
Magic new money: have we really walked into this Last Chance Saloon? Yes, we have.
In an extraordinary statement on Tuesday evening, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, announced he was cutting the Federal Funds rate, the bank’s key interest rate tool, to a record low of between zero and 0.25 per cent. That’s zero, as in nothing. Not even in the Great Depression were interest rates in the United States brought so low.
However, it was the accompanying statement that let the move to “quantitative easing” out of the bag. He said the Fed “will employ all available tools” and would buy “large quantities of agency debt and mortgage-backed securities to provide support to the mortgage and housing markets”. (“Agency debt” is a bond, issued by a US government-sponsored agency, such as the Federal National Mortgage Association, or Fannie Mae.)
He also let fall that the Fed would consider buying “longer term Treasury securities” – the government’s own debt. This would enable the Fed to bring down the long-term cost of money, thus bringing down US mortgage rates, to put more money into circulation and, not least, to bail out the government by soaking up some of its exploding deficit.
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