Will Americans Pay to Bailout Yet Another Foreign Bank … in Afghanistan?

Washington's Blog As I have repeatedly pointed out, American taxpayers have been bailing out foreign banks for years. For example, I noted in May: As the Wall Street Journal points out, the Federal Reserve might open up its "swap lines" again to bail out the Europeans: The Fed is considering whether to reopen a lending program put in place during the financial crisis in which it shipped dollars overseas through foreign central banks like the European Central Bank, Swiss National Bank and Bank of England. *** At a crescendo in the crisis in December 2008, the Fed had shipped ...

AP Issues Standards Memo: ‘Combat in Iraq is Not Over’

Jason Linkins Huffington Post At some point in the last two weeks, you may have been told by someone in the news that combat operations in Iraq were over, and that the last combat troop had left the country. Well, the Associated Press is not having any of it, and in a memo from their standards editor, Tom Kent, the law in this regard has been laid down, in no uncertain terms: "To begin with, combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials." If you recall, on August ...

State-Owned Banks as a Way to Rebuild the Housing and Real Estate Markets

Bruce B. Cahan Stanford University The financial literacy of America has improved markedly, nearly to college level, as a result of the global recession that started in 2007. What about state-owned banks, is the time ripe to explore that part of economic history? Americans, now economists, can fill a green chalkboard from left to right, with the familiar logic of our situation: our housing bubble, pumped up by loose underwriting and shadow finance, burst, this caused Americans' perceived real estate wealth to evaporate, consumers reduced spending, lacking demand, companies reduced employment, profitability and investments, the economic uncertainty increased the volatility of the stock markets, this ...

Bernanke: Shut Down Banks if They Threaten System

Marcy Gordon Associated Press Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told a panel investigating the financial crisis that regulators must be ready to shutter the largest institutions if they threaten to bring down the financial system. "If the crisis has a single lesson, it is that the too-big-to-fail problem must be solved," Bernanke said Thursday while testifying before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Bernanke also said it was impossible for the Fed to rescue Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy in 2008 because the Wall Street firm lacked sufficient collateral to secure a loan. Lehman's former chief executive told the panel a day earlier that the firm ...

Marijuana better than pharmaceuticals at treating chronic pain and improving mood

Jonathan Benson Natural News Experts from different persuasions often argue about the alleged benefits of using marijuana for pain relief, but a new study out of McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and McGill University (MU) has conclusively found that cannabis, the genus name for marijuana, is better than pharmaceutical drugs at relieving chronic neurological pain, and without all the harmful side effects. Appearing in the latest issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the study reveals that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in marijuana that gives it psychoactive and analgesic properties, is linked to relieving chronic pain, improving mood and inducing better sleep ...

Wikipedia Editing for Zionists

The New York Times This week in Jerusalem, two Israeli groups hoping to smite their online enemies, both domestic and foreign, began a course in the “Zionist editing” of Wikipedia entries. At the opening seminar, attended by about 80 activists, one of the organizers, Naftali Bennett, said that the aim of the course is to make sure that information in the online encyclopedia reflects the worldview of Zionist groups. For example, he said, “if someone searches [for] ‘the Gaza flotilla,’ we want to be there; to influence what is written there, how it’s written and ...

Where Blackwater comes from

Israeli says not guilty of ‘largest human trafficking case in U.S. history’

Natasha Mozgovaya Haaretz The Israeli head of a labor recruiting company accused of exploiting 400 workers from Thailand and forcing them to work on U.S. farms pleaded not guilty Friday, in part of what the Federal Bureau of Investigation calls the largest human-trafficking case U.S. history. Los Angeles-based Global Horizons Manpower CEO Mordechai Orian, 45, surrendered to federal authorities in Honolulu earlier Friday, a day after the FBI had tried to arrest him at his Southern California home but found he wasn't there. Although the FBI had been investigating Global Horizons for a number of ...

Pentagon declined to investigate hundreds of purchases of child pornography

John Cook Yahoo! News A 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation into the purchase of child pornography online turned up more than 250 civilian and military employees of the Defense Department -- including some with the highest available security clearance -- who  used credit cards or PayPal to purchase images of children in sexual situations. But the Pentagon investigated only a handful of the cases, Defense Department records show. The cases turned up during a 2006 ICE inquiry, called Project Flicker, which targeted overseas processing of child-porn payments. As part of the probe, ICE investigators ...

Flying the flag, faking the news

John Pilger My Catbird Seat Loud noises from Washington about a US pull-out from Iraq are a poor disguise for America’s determination to keep waging war.  And the same sort of spin is at work here in Britain Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda.  During the First World War, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe.  In his book Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that ...