Wall Street Plan to Own Europe, Face of Fraud

Marion Tupy
Ezra Klein

"Honesty may be the best policy, but it's important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy." - George Carlin

"If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little." - George Carlin

more than greek to me...

We haven't heard the gory details here, but in the newspapers in Europe and Germany, they're pissed. Turns out that Wall Street banks and financial institutions like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs created "financial instruments" that helped put countries like Greece into over $300 billion in debt, and enabled them to hide it from investigators: "financial derivatives played a role in the run-up of Greek debt. Instruments developed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and a wide range of other banks enabled politicians to mask additional borrowing in Greece, Italy and possibly elsewhere.


In dozens of deals across the Continent, banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books. Greece, for example, traded away the rights to airport fees and lottery proceeds in years to come. Critics say that such deals, because they are not recorded as loans, mislead investors and regulators about the depth of a country’s liabilities." Imagine that, you buy a Greek lottery ticket these days and the money goes directly to Goldman Sachs...

Goldman Sachs had been doing things like this for awhile. As far back as: "2001, just after Greece was admitted to Europe’s monetary union, Goldman helped the government quietly borrow billions, people familiar with the transaction said. That deal, hidden from public view because it was treated as a currency trade rather than a loan, helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means."

If the US Congress won't create some regulations required for our aggressive financial institutions, it looks like the rest of the world soon will... unless they collapse under the weight of debt they now owe JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs... makes you feel so proud and patriotic... Of course, this could all be a CIA economic plot to bring Europe to its knees, then letting the state of Israel move out of Palestine and take over the first to fall, then we'd have to give Goldman Sachs a patriotic medal instead of stricter regulations...


the face of fraud the world over...
There is an opinion piece in the Moscow Times that begins: "Elections in Ukraine as well as in Russia have shown that impoverished people are incapable of making sober decisions and voting responsibly in a popular election." The recent election for prime minister of this august country ended with the Russian sympathizer Victor F Yukonovitch winning. Maybe.

How did the current prime minister react? By claiming massive fraud during the election, even though it was praised by European election monitors as being fair and free. “Yanukovich is not our president,” Ms. Tymoshenko said in a televised address to the nation. “He will never become the legitimate elected president of Ukraine under any circumstances.” Gotta love a prime minister who can say that, and won't let the gavel go until it's pried from her cold fingers...

This current crop of world figures sure seems to cling to power a lot, there's no dignified acceptance of losing. I mean, the government of Iran seemed to put a third of its young people in jail before the last birthday party for the islamic republic, and beat the crap out of any who were left over. Because raiding a family in the middle of the night to take a loved one away to a secret prison is something you would expect more in Afghanistan than Tehran... There is a worldwide trend here, from the halls of Afghanistan and Iran, where there really was fraud, to India, Honduras, and Florida. I expect the Texas governor Rick Perry to do the same, except he might kick it up a notch and secede from the Union if he loses... But the worst gonif must be the president of the Ivory Coast. This old rat's presidential term ended in 2005, and an attempt to hold an election has been made every year since. And every single year he declares the election committee a fraud and dissolves the parliament, which he did again last week.

“It runs in the face of all the peace accords we’ve signed since 2004, that today the president thinks he has the powers to do this gives the impression that we’ve gone back 20 years into the past.”

Of course, the situation is a bit more complex, they also have been trying to determine for the past five years who is considered to be a citizen and who should be eligible to vote, in a nation that is largely composed of immigrants: "Before its brief civil war, Ivory Coast was one of Africa’s economic stars, luring tens of thousands of immigrants from poorer neighboring nations. At least a quarter of the nation’s 20 million people have been disqualified from voting based on the electoral law’s convoluted definition for determining eligibility." But I wonder how many more years Laurent Gbagbo thinks he can keep up the pretense, especially since every other political party in the country has announced they no longer consider him to be president... I wonder if this will be one of the countries that the African Union has agreed to send some Haitians, to stir up the pot even more...


India - Pakistan summit...

On February 25, India and Pakistan will meet and try to relaunch talks over subjects that concern them. The bombings in Mumbai had a strange way of ending any dialogue after 2008. The US will play a part being the scapegoat for various political groups, who get to accuse both governments of bowing down to   pressure from America to resume communicating. Their has been an escalation of bombings in India of late, the most recent one at a bakery popular with western tourists. The German Bakery is near the ashram of that dead old fake, Osho, who changed his name from Bagwan Rajneesh after he was kicked out of the US on tax evasion and gun charges. It's possible that the Oshoites were a target, but a nearby Jewish Center claimed that, hey, they just as easily could have been the target since they heard the bomb too, and nothing will deter them from their crucial mission... It's hoped that the talks can lower the paranoia level in this part of Asia before another nuclear arms race develops, what with India, Pakistan, Iran and Russia all in the market for a newer generation of lethal toys.


Finally, Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority had to let one of his top aides go because of a sex scandal. Who knew that Palestinians had a sex life?