Lost But Now He Is Found, Poor Drunk Uncle Omar Obama

Corruption and Lies seem to be a tradition in the Obama family.

Every family has a “Black Sheep,” someone who embarrasses the family by getting drunk and in trouble. It’s possible some of us have relatives who are illegal aliens on the public dole and have repeatedly defied deportation orders: thankfully, not many of us fit into that category. However, not many drunk relatives tell arresting officers to call the White House, presumably before they do something stupid.

“Omar” or Onyango Obama is the long lost brother Kenyan half-brother of President Obama’s father. The same Uncle Omar mentioned by Bill Ayers in the best selling autobiography “Dreams From My Father”, the life story of President Obama as portrayed by the unrepentant terrorist, Bill Ayers. Although he was mentioned in the book, our president is wishing his drunken uncle would behave himself or live in the shadows.

Drunk Uncle Omar Obama was driving drunk after leaving the Chicken Bone Saloon and barely missed hitting a squad car. When he was pulled over, he demanded that he be allowed to call the White House in a belligerent manner. The cops didn’t find the drunk name dropper all that impressive; a drunk illegal alien with a long rap sheet had run down and killed a 23 year old Milford, Mass. man, two weeks earlier.

Open-borders and Open Society advocates of George Soros philosophy consider drunken Obamas to be “harmless”. However, drunken Uncle Omar has defied two court orders to leave the country. He also owes thousands in back taxes and has a fraudulent Social Security Card and has evaded authorities for 50 years.

The court policy that allows the drunk criminals like Omar Obama to simply stay in the country is the “voluntary departure” system that allows illegal aliens to evade the police and deportation for years. Omar lost his first deportation hearing in 1989, he lost a second time with the Board of Immigration Appeals in 1992.

Uncle Omar joined the ranks of an estimated 400,000 to 700,000 illegal aliens who give the law a one finger salute and look upon disregarding America’s Immigration Laws as a right or entitlement.

Drunk Uncle Omar will now be represented by the same Ohio law firm that fought the deportation of President Obama’s indigent welfare collecting aunt, Aunt Zeituni Onyango. Zeituni landed in the US in 2000 on a temporary visa and sought asylum in 2004. She was denied asylum and refused to leave. She hid with relatives in public housing for years before winning a second bid to stay in the US, a country she seems to despise.

Both parties play games with the immigration issues to win votes from the ever growing illegal demographic. Yes, illegals seem to be able to vote, have driver licenses, and Social Security numbers. Especially those who are here illegally and are related to our president.

Aunt Zeituni Onyango, Ward Of The State, Perpetual Welfare Recipient, President's Aunt, Former Illegal Alien

President Bush told Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stop deportations until after the 2008 election, when Aunt Zeituni was caught and identified as an Illegal Alien in October of 2008. Thank you former President Bush.

The question remains, how many more of these Obama welfare recipients are we going to be asked to support for the rest of their natural lives in a state of permanent Welfare and Public Housing. Our former inept and clueless President, Jimmy Carter, only had one embarrassing relative, Brother Billy, the one who inspired Billy Beer and became a cultural icon and a standing joke. At least, Billy was humorous; Zeituni and Omar are far from humorous.

We might remember the case of Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a Palestinian bomb builder by trade; he immigrated to the US illegally (considered legal by Napolitano and Obama) in 1996 through Canada. He claimed political asylum from alleged persecution by Israelis, was released on a $5,000 bond posted by another illegal, then skipped his asylum hearing. His lawyer dropped his asylum claim and a federal judge issued a laughable “voluntary departure order”. Obviously, illegal aliens who enter the country illegally or not interested in leaving the country voluntarily. He later joined a New York City group that was formulating a bombing plot and was arrested after his roommate tipped off local police. And once again we have another example of the DHS being on the ball and defending our country.

“Always remember. Never forget.” Words, just words.

A citizen is rebuffed by a judge for trying to unravel the nefarious facts concerning the president’s dubious Social Security Number.

Unfortunately for the plaintiff, today is not her lucky day.

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURTFOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA____________________________________)ORLY TAITZ, ))Plaintiff, ))v. )) Civil Action No. 11-402 (RCL)MICHAEL ASTRUE, )COMMISSIONER OF THE SOCIAL )SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, ))Defendant. )____________________________________)MEMORANDUM OPINION
Before the Court is defendant’s Motion for Summary Judgment [21]. Upon considerationof defendant’s motion, plaintiff’s opposition [31], the reply thereto [32], the entire record herein,and the applicable law, the Court will grant summary judgment in defendant’s favor for thereasons set forth below.
I.

BACKGROUND
Ever persistent, plaintiff has once again come before this Court in an effort to uncover“the biggest cover up in the history of this nation.” Pl.’s Opp’n to Mot. for Summ. J. 20 [31]. Shebelieves that the President is using a “fraudulently obtained” social security number and that theSocial Security Administration—among other agencies—is involved in a scheme to “cover[] upsocial security fraud, IRS fraud, elections fraud and possibly treason” committed by thePresident.
Id.
at 5–6, 13. As her numerous filings with the Court demonstrate, plaintiff will stopat nothing to get to the bottom of this alleged conspiracy. Unfortunately for plaintiff, today is nother lucky day.

In Sept, 2008, I penned the post, the US Economy: A Perfect Storm of Housing and Lending Events. This overview of how we managed to bring ourselves to the precarious cliff of a failed economy revealed it was not a single issue, but a combination of many events – including political pressure on lenders for homeownership, relaxing of GSE lending criteria, regulation/deregulation, and profit motivation by financial institutions – leading to an out of whack supply vs demand, driving up housing values to unsustainable and dangerous levels.

It never crossed my mind that financial terrorism could be another element to be factored in. So when the WA Times wrote of an unclassified Pentagon report by Kevin D. Freeman, my head perked up. (Read the Scribd version here.)

Since that time, I’ve tried to dissect what many here, and elsewhere, have dismissed as a report they consider simply a distraction from ill thought US fiscal policies and irresponsibility by both Congress and Wall Street alike, and fueled to a frenzy by irresponsible homeowners.

Be assured that the Freeman report does not dismiss irresponsibility for US fiscal policies and events. Rather, he frames his three Phrase hypothesis upon the premise that our self-induced fragile and unsustainable fiscal trajectory, combined with opaque global trading practices, was easily exploited for purposes of financial terrorism. And several out of the norm trading activities – such as an oil spike that wouldn’t traditionally happen, the bear runs at US financial institutions, and the disappearance of a hefty amount of money in the markets in a short time – were enough to raise suspicion.

It can be said that most conspiracy theories contain variations and glimmers of truth. So, to be as analytical as I can, without slinging political arrows, I offer you my thoughts on the first two of three Phases of the Freeman theory of Financial Terrorism as an element in the global 2008 economic crash.

Under normal conditions, an economic actor would seek to maximize returns and would therefore slow any price rise to reduce suspicion and minimize negative impacts on demand. A desire to spike prices may imply other intentions more in line with the oil as a weapon theory.

To summarize, the end goal of Phase 1 was simple… to generate enough excess wealth to launch Phase 2; bear raids on the markets. This starts with the assumption that the spike in oil prices in late 2007 and 2008 were not as a result of the usual supply/demand reasoning, but of speculation. Growth seemed to be leveling, and drilling activity had increased. So in hindsight, without disruption of crude, speculation was a likely explanation for a tripling of prices in a very short time.

Instead of using the more traditional hedge funds to drive up prices, a newer mechanism was flourishing… the Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs).

 “A Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) is a state-owned investment fund composed of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, or other financial instruments funded by foreign exchange assets. These assets can include: balance of payments surpluses, official foreign currency operations, the proceeds of privatizations, fiscal surpluses, and/or receipts resulting from commodity exports.‖

 “Since 2005, at least 17 sovereign wealth funds have been created. As other countries grow their currency reserves they will seek greater returns. Their growth has also been skyrocketed by rising commodity prices especially oil & gas, especially between the years of 2003 – 2008.

44% of all SWFs are in the Middle East, and 61% of the funding sources for these SWF’s are oil and gas related. These new power brokers have not only the motive to drive up oil prices, they have the means. According to Dr. Gal Luft, Executive Director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security – when testifying before House Committee on Foreign Affairs – they have been pouring billions into Western economies’ hedge funds, private equity funds, real estate and other natural western resources. They were estimated to hold approx $3.5 trillion in western assets at that hearing, and predicted to balloon to $10 to $15 trillion within a decade.

This is an amount equivalent to the entire US GDP.

Contrary to popular political beliefs, oil prices are out of our regulatory control. Instead, they are determined on a global basis, effected through non-transparent trading, and regulated outside the United States borders.

But one US corporation, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), founded by young entrepreneuer, Jeffrey Sprecher in 2000, has been taking the brunt of Congressional Dems blame, with accusations of oil speculation. Sen. Maria Cantwell, along with Maine’s Olympia Snow, had introduced legislation meant to give the CFTC more authority over the juggernaut that ICE has become since it’s creation. Before that, it was a Feinstein/Levin/Snow bill.

ICE was founded as an energy clearing house and online trading market for energy commodies, including partnering with Chicago Climate Exchange (and it’s links to Al Gore, Obama and Goldman Sachs) in 2006. In a letter to Sen. Feinstein, Sprecher protests Congressional charges about transparency, saying “Not only does ICE provide an audit trail but it provides one that cannot be replicated by other parts of the OTC marketplace (voice brokers, bilateral trading parties, etc.).”

But how much transparency is enough, when it comes to financial terrorist attacks? And is it energy clearing houses, such as ICE, that become unwitting (or witting) accomplices for SWFs putting excess revenues into hedge funds that positively speculate on increased oil prices?

Whalid Phares (pg 22 of the Freeman report), like Freeman, attributed much of the economic crisis to political pressure on Wall Street for risky loans, and Wall’s Streets willing participation in the risk. But Phares also sees a potential 3rd player in crisis – radical elements in OPEC nations…. Crumbling the US economic defense in a matter of months.

The thesis argue that combined Salafist-Wahabi and Muslim Brotherhood circles in the Gulf -with consent from the Iranian side on this particular issue, used the escalating pricing of Oil over the past year to push the financial crisis in the US over the cliff. The ‗high point‘ in this analysis is the timing between the skyrocketing of the prices at the pumps and the widening of the real estate crisis. In short the ―Oil-push‖ put the market out of balance hitting back at Wall Street.

~~~

Let‘s not underestimate the power of the Jihadi-oil lobby in America: it has decades of influence and it has long arms into the system, and it has powerful political allies. It knows when Americans are messing up their own system, and it knows very well how to push them over the cliff, into the abyss of economic calamity.

Jihad doesn’t care about economic destabilization in their backyard. And in fact, would welcome such an opportunity, as we witness with the current uprising in the ME countries. A political and economic vacuum translates to a jihad opportunity. How important is oil as a financial weapon to jihad? (excerpts from pgs 23 and 24 of the Freeman report)

―Sheikh Yussuf al Qardawi, Muslim Brotherhood ideologue and mentor of the Qatari-funded channel, spoke openly of Silah al Naft, i.e, ‗the weapon of oil.‘ Indeed, it was called a weapon – as in a warfare situation — and most likely it was used as such.

~~~

For years now, Salafist web sites and al Qaeda spokespersons have loudly called for an ‗oil Jihad against infidel America and its lackeys.‘ Online material is still circulating. But more revealing are the official speeches by Osama Bin Laden and his deputy on the ‗absolute necessity to use that weapon.‘

The second phase appears to have begun in 2008 with a series of bear raids targeting U.S. financial services firms that appeared to be systemically significant.

Motive of the market, for the most part, is profit. And to accomplish that, sometimes it behooves certain market participants to see a decline in stock values. Bear raids short a target stock… i.e. “borrow” shares in the hopes to cover/replace them with a cheaper price than the current rate. So bad news or rumors are spread to get the stock to drop.

Short selling, a similar process, is legit. But a bear raid is a rapid “short selling” process, involving violations of markets rules by using rumors or manipulation of perceived stock value. It is believed that it was such bear raids, conducted by Jesse “The Boy Plunger” Livermore, that lead to the 1929 US crash, and ushered in the creation of the SEC and the “uptick rule”. – the latter which would limit a short seller‘s ability to drive down a stock price simply from continual selling. Ironically, the uptick rule was eliminated by a Dem held Congress back in July 2007 – a year before the crash, and just months before the oil price run up began. Since 2009, debate and a reintroduction of it’s implementation began, but has not resulted in it’s reinstatement.

Not unlike politicians, campaigns and media rumors to negate their appeal, even a healthy business can fail when rumors abound. Such a case was Bear Sterms who failed not from lack of capital, but lack of confidence.

But the bear raid assault has been enhanced in sophistication with other more recent, tools. The success of a raid, using Credit Default Swaps, naked shorting*, Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), and option strategies increases considerably, plus affords appeal with the near impossibility in tracing their origins. Lehman Brothers was also the victim of a bear raid using a combination of these financial tools. (pg 27 of the Freeman study). Dr. Susan Trimbath estimated that failed trades from naked short sales could account for 30-70% of the decline in share values for both Bear Stearns and Lehman. Had the uptick rule, or more transparency for short selling been in place, it’s entirely possible that even the troubled accounting of LB may have been revivable within bankruptcy reorganizing.

Naked short selling occurs when shares are sold without first owning them or borrowing them. This practice is basically illegal with a few exceptions created to promote short-term liquidity. Unfortunately, provisions against naked short selling have had lax enforcement by regulatory authorities in recent years, creating a serious vulnerability in our financial markets.

Just as with Phase 1, where it’s obvious that the conditions did not warrant a run up of oil prices, finding out the How’s, Who’s and Why’s of those at the heart of the bear raids is important… however extremely difficult.

Per the Freeman theory, the “how’s” were obvious. Multiple bear raids were successfully conducted against major US financial institutions. After the collapse of LB, the credit market froze, and stocks collapsed. Amazing when you consider that LB’s collapse may have been averted if there were a restraint on the naked short selling. Thus the economic dominoes began to fall, with the chaos surrounding AIG, GS, Morgan Stanley, losses in Norway’s government pension funds and the Reserve Primary Fund falling below $1 a share for the 1st time in 14 years.

“Who” demands examining who benefited from this chaos? According to Freeman, only net short financial stocks, or the entire market in general. Considering what it would take to organize such chaos across such wide spans and participants, one might discount conspiracy from the overall stock market community, working in concert.

Not withstanding the lack of transparency in these type of illegal trades, most of this trading originated from behind the fronts of brokerage firms, hedge funds and client investor pools.

Regardless of the motive, the actors behind the bear raids not only prefer anonymity but most likely planned for it from the beginning. This suggests layer upon layer of secrecy through foreign shell corporations, feeder funds, and numerous other pass-through entities. Historically, hedge funds have disclosed nothing to the government and very little to the public. Even from a tax standpoint, there has been virtually no ability for governments to track investment results back to most clients.

With the increase of “dark pools” and hedge funds comes anonymity in trading…, which is ideal for the laundering and the use of terror funds as an economic weapon.

One scenario could be that a terror group could direct investments to a feeder hedge fund. That feeder fund would locate a Cayman Islands-based hedge fund on their behalf that was predisposed to sell short financial shares. With sufficient new money, the hedge fund would expand their short selling activity (naked and traditional) and trade through dark pools or with sponsored access.

At the same time, the same terror group might invest heavily in credit default swaps of the targeted short sales either directly, through foreign contacts, or hedge funds. This activity, focused initially on Bear Stearns would prove greatly profitable. The same activity refocused on Lehman Brothers could account for a significant portion of the 33 million failed-to-deliver (naked short) shares, providing the trigger for the market and economy to collapse. And, nearly all of it would occur without notice. In fact, the original investor could close out positions basically undetected.

What this means is that terrorists no longer need to fly buildings into heart of the US financial district. With substantial financial backing, and Internet connection from their caves, they need only set up several overseas hedge funds and, acting as a coordinated unit, dump U.S. stocks…all under the financial radar of virtually all countries.

But for those seeking the quintessential smoking gun, it will be impossible to prove jihad groups were behind the financial crash. As Freeman notes, the only reason to suspect financial terrorism at all is the existence of such unusual trading activity in the scope of the historical norm. Therefore, in order to speculate on the “who’s”, it becomes necessary to review the available trading in the stocks of the financial services firms that appeared subjects of bear raids.

Starting on pg 43 of the Freeman study is the mention of a 65 pg report to Congress, various law enforcement agencies and regulators, titled “Red Flags of Market Manipulation Causing a Collapse of the U.S. Economy”. The report was submitted by an anonymous author.

In this anonymous report, is the key point that there were two companies at the heart of this style of trading, and they consistently work in concert. Freeman deliberately withholds the names of these two companies from his study because “…trading data alone is insufficient to consider any accusations against them.”

Likely for this reason, I have not found this document on the Internet… nor do I suspect any of us will. But it would be an interesting FOIA request to put in. In case any of you find that some enterprising investigative journalist has successfully done so, please provide the links in the comments for the rest of us.

But with the breadcrumbs of clues Freeman left, we can deduce who these companies are *not*, based on the data provided for the anonymous author.

These firms became, virtually overnight, the largest traders in the U.S. financial markets. These companies provide a one-stop-shop for trade execution, back office clearing and bookkeeping that cater to hedge funds and small broker dealers. To give perspective, the amount of trading executed by these two firms in October 2008 exceeded the trading of securities firms Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch combined in the NASDAQ market participant reports.

This obviously leaves out the favored political target of Goldman Sachs, who enjoys the current POTUS on the end of their marionette strings. Whoever these firms are, they dwarf these immense US financial institutions.

But for those who may have a better grasp of the players in the global trading world, here are the other clues from “deep keyboard”, as I’ll call this author:

(From the anonymous report directly)

1) The firms have traded trillions of dollars worth of U.S. blue chip companies. They are the number one traders in all financial companies that collapsed or are now financially supported by the U.S. government. Trading by the firms has grown exponentially while the markets have lost trillions of dollars in value.

2) These firms appear to own few or no shares of blue chip companies they are number one traders in. There is no doubt that the magnitude of their trading impacted the marketplace. Since the direction of the market place has been in a severe downward trend, the impact from the firms has been and remains, negative to the marketplace.

~~~

(From Freeman’s summarized addition key findings)

 The two previously small broker dealers mentioned in the report are market makers for every major financial services firm under attack.
 These firms have a combined 76 different symbols under which they act as market maker (by contrast a major firm such as Citigroup has just 6).
 Both firms offer sponsored access.
 Both firms offer access to dark pools.
 From June through September 2008, the two firms appeared to concentrate on Lehman Brothers, trading 1.04 billion shares while the stock price collapsed from $33.83 to $0.21 on 15 September. This pattern seemed to repeat in every other major financial stock.
 The report estimates that the two firms completed as many as 641,000 trades per hour in October 2008 (based on market participation statistics and average trade size from the last available data).
 Total trading volume by month in the financial sector listed for these two firms grew from approximately 350,000 shares (less than 1% of all market participant trading) in September 2006 to approximately 600,000 shares in the sector (about 6% of all market participant trading) in September 2007, to over 8 billion shares in the sector (about 19% of all market participant trading) by September 2008. That‘s an increase of 2.4 million percent in two years.
 While both firms have been around for several decades, their rapid growth began in 2006 for one and 2007 for the other.
 Both firms seem to specialize in the same stocks at the same time, appearing to work in concert.
 Combined, the two firms traded 203 billion shares, mostly concentrated in major financial services companies. This compares to a total of 427 billion shares outstanding of all issues on the New York Stock Exchange.
 The report estimates trading of at least $5 trillion over the 25-month period ending in November 2008.
 The trading appears to represent new money to the marketplace by new participants.
 From July 2008 through September 2008, the two firms ―traded more shares of Fannie and Freddie than were issued‖ even as the share prices were collapsing.
 The firms were also the largest traders of the UltraShort funds as well as the ―financial spider‖ (symbol ―XLF‖) during the reporting period.
 The firms also became the largest traders of energy stocks.
 The two firms did not and do not hold major equity positions on their books

Whoever they are, they had to have sufficient capital to effect $5 trillion in trades in a very short period… whether domestic or foreign. And they used minor league brokers to focus on failed or failing US financial institutions.

This bring us to the “Why’s”…

Their motive comes down to two base choices… financial for profit, or subversive non-economic motives.

Another favorite target would be George Soros. Certainly the Soros Quantum Fund profited by $1.1 billion during this period. But then Soros was also an outspoken voice, warning of the danger of this bear raid activity. Therefore it’s also entirely possible that Soros, an astute businessman if not a likeable character, merely piggybacked wealth on the events out of his control.

Certainly hedge funds profited as well. Add to that, the naked short selling is a favorite of organized crime and the Russian Mafia. In this case, it will have to be a very greased palm for any of the potential mafias involved.

But then, when you consider greed, coupled with the chaos of the markets, you have to wonder if the quick fast profit, and potential destruction of the largest free market economy, is such a wise strategy. Would a manufacturer make a killing on a new invention right out of the gate, then burn down his factory and the potential to make even more?

Which brings me to those with non-economic motives. Barry Ritholtz, the head of research firm FusionIQ, made an interesting observation on his blog, The Big Picture, on Sept 19th, 2008. Ritholtz was discussing the absurdity of banning all short sales.

I have been trying to contextualize this, and I keep coming back to what seemed like a wild theory yesterday that seems a whole lot less wild today. During the day, I had an interesting phone conversation with Joe Besecker of Emerald Asset Management. (We used to do schtick together on Power Lunch, and made for an amusing financial comedy team).

But Joe is a good money manager, a great stock picker, and a thoughtful guy. He raised an intriguing issue: None of the many hedgies he knew were pressing their bets recently. The bear raids on the banks and brokers were NOT a case of piling on by US based hedge funds. And from what he was seeing and hearing about in terms of order flow, the vast majority of the financial short selling the past week or so were being done overseas. It appears that the lion’s share of shorting was coming out of overseas bourses such as London and Dubai.It may not be a coincidence that the financial short selling ban is both here and in London.

Then there is another coincidence: The huge increase in shorting of the financials occurred on the anniversary of 9/11. And on top of that, the same institutions attacked on 9/11/01 were the ones suffering in recent days.

This same financial terrorism theory, plus the date of the economic assault, was noted by Jim Cramer. But in the chaos of the moment, no follow up was done. To pile on to what may not be such a wild theory afterall, add Charles Duelfer and James Rickards in their co-authored NYTs op-ed on Dec 21, 2008, titled Financial Time Bombs.

In their examination of possible suspects, they note that China behaved appropriately during the fiscal crisis, being large holders of US debt. Russia was considered in the bailout of the GSE’s because they are also some of the largest holders of government agency debt. This seems to indicate these two are unlikely perps.

Al Qaeda, on the other hand, has declared that damage to the US economy is it’s 2nd priority, following only mass deaths. To emphasize the jihad focus on the US economy, we need only remember OBL’s words on Dec 21st, 2001.

…hitting the economic structure…is basic for the military power. If their economy is destroyed, they will be busy with their own affairs rather than enslaving the weak peoples. It is very important to concentrate on hitting the US economy through all possible means.”

AQ, acting alone, doesn’t have the financial resources for such an attack. However with their tentacles extending to the cash rich Taliban, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, China and the Arab states, their combined effort may be enough to do the trick. All sects of radical Islam share a common goal – that of replacing “..the ‘slavery’ of the Western international monetary system” with Shariah Compliant Financing (SCF) because it is then subject to Shariah Law.

According to Saudi and Muslim Brotherhood (MB) spiritual leader Hamud bin Uqla al-Shuaibi, “The importance of Financial Jihad [is]…more important…than self-sacrificing.”

There are documented ties between the Shariah Finance Compliance and the widely increased appearance of Sovereign Wealth Funds that have appeared on the scene in the past decade. Which again ties into Phase 1′s driving up the price of oil.

Altho there is no evidence that these SWFs have participated in bear raids, the Shariah-compliant SWF now has the ability to sell short either through SCF-compliant hedge funds or directly via the arboon short sale…. and all without transparency.

Yet none of the above bonding between jihad groups eliminates other likely suspects, such as Venezuela, Iran, Russia and China, as they are also abundant in wealthy SWFs. But, as mentioned above, Russia and China have more financial ties economically that would be negatively affected by a damaged US economy.

But renegade Chinese elements may indeed have their motives, and some of the involvement can be traced back to a Chinese individual, helping to launder money thru multiple global banks, aiding in Iran’s WMD program, presumably obtained from Russian sources. Some of Iran’s largest banks are believed to have played roles in illegal money movement.

Another axis of evil, engaging in illegal money movement has been North Korea, who was ID’d as creating and laundry’ing huge sums of counterfeit money.

The report says North Korea uses front companies and shell companies overseas to facilitate the illicit trafficking in supernotes. The use of fake companies increased after the Treasury Department barred U.S. companies from working with Banco Delta Asia.

To further hide the transactions from international financial authorities, the North Korean party office used a financial front company, set up in China in 2006, to make payments as part of the purchases, the report says. North Korea also set up a front company in the British Virgin Islands in the mid-2000s to take advantage of lax banking regulations and tax laws there, it says, and other branches of the front company were established for financial support activities in China, Russia and Southeast Asia.

However what may possibly be the largest indication that financial terrorism is at work is a 2009 story that was virtually swept under the rug by the MSM. The arrest of two Japanese nationals (or Asian men, as reported elsewhere) in Italy, trying to smuggle $134.5 billion in US Treasury bearer bonds into Switzerland. If they were real, it would constitute the largest financial smuggling operation in history. If fake, the quality of the counterfeiting was such high quality to be almost undistinguishable from the original.

At the time, Seeking Alpha pointed out the many strange inconsistencies in the story. Obvious points were their choice of transportation, where two affluent business men would have stood out like sore thumbs on a train filled with Italian common workers, and why the bearer bonds would have been hidden in a secret cache of an attaché case. If they were real, they could have been transported in a diplomatic pouch, exempt from customs scrutiny.

Another eyebrow raiser was the amount of the bearer bonds. The arrest of the Asian men took place early June of 2009. In March, 2009, US Treasury Department announced that USD $134.5 billion remained in TARP funds…, coincidently the same amount of the counterfeit bearer bonds.

The head scratching moments don’t end there. While doing an article about just how this attempt to smuggle bearer bonds could bring down the US economic, Contrarian Profits also points out who broke the story of this historic smuggling attempt… AsiaNews.it…, an obscure Vatican-sponsored news website.

This story has more holes than a Swiss cheese. We know from experience here at Notes (your co-editor spent two years working as an investigative reporter in his native Ireland) that there is rarely smoke without fire when it comes to news stories. But one aspect of this story still puzzles us… and it’s a part of the story nobody to date has questioned: What was an obscure Vatican-sponsored news outfit doing breaking the largest financial crime story all time?

As far as we can tell, AsiaNews.it broke the story on June 8. Major news services followed on with their own reports much later. Bloomberg, for instance, only got to it yesterday. So how did AsiaNews.it, a website linked to the Ponticial Institute for Foreign Missions and funded by the Vatican scoop the major news agencies on the bond story?

AsiaNews.it’s About Us page freely admits that it is an anti-Communist organ of the Roman Catholic Church, “nobly dedicated to China and her people.” The organization’s missionary zeal is not difficult to detect.

A smuggling operation of this magnitude demands a level of sophistication that is absent in this attempt in every fashion… from the strategic action to the media outlet who exposed it. It was almost as if they wanted to be caught.

Why? As Seeking Alpha notes, there’s no faster way to sabotage and usher in the death of a currency than to raise legitimate questions about its ability to withstand counterfeiting efforts. (as was done by the Nazis in WWII with Operation Bernhard)

Ironically, the Asian business men, arrested, were released. According to the Italian authorities, they were not caught using the fake bonds in the commission of fraud. Status of the bonds as real or counterfeit did not seem to enter the picture for prosecution.

As for the US Treasury, they declared them counterfeit. (linked from Cryptogon’s various updates on the story…)

“The whole thing is a total fraud,” Stephen Meyerhardt, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, said Thursday. “They don’t look anything like real securities, which in any case were never issued in any of those denominations.”

The highest denomination ever issued by the Treasury Department was $10,000, he said. The Italian financial police claimed some of the paper was “Kennedy bonds” from the 1930s, but no such bonds ever existed. And the total of Treasury bearer bonds still outstanding is a mere $105 million; the Treasury has been issuing bonds in electronic form since 1986.

Here’s the rub… the Treasury dept declared their counterfeit status not by in person inspection, but
by photos on the Internet. WTF? They appear to be so real as to fool Italian customs, yet can be so easily dismissed by shooting a photo or two thru cyberspace??

On the contrary, again the Vatican’ news arm, AsiaNew.it, linked above, gives reason to doubt the quick dismissal of authenticity.

One more element in favour of the bond’s authenticity is found in the securities, which in the June 4 statement, the GdF termed “Kennedy Bonds” with photos provided. These photos reveal that the securities under discussion are not bonds but Treasury Notes, because they are securities that can be immediately exchanged for their worth in goods or services and because they are devoid of interest coupons. One side carries a reproduction of the image of the American president, the reverse side that of a spaceship. From confidential, usually well-informed sources, AsiaNews has learned that this type of paper money was issued less than ten years ago (in 1998), although it is difficult to know whether those seized in Chiasso are authentic. But the fact that the release of this particular State Treasury was not completely in the public domain tends to exclude the possibility of counterfeiting. It highly unreasonable to suppose that a forger would reproduce a State Treasury not commonly in circulation and of which there is no public knowledge.

As Freeman notes in his report:

The sheer amount of the bonds takes the activity out of the role of the criminal and into the realm of financial terrorism and/or economic warfare.

Again, more questions than answers INRE motive, and players. But it’s obvious that financial terrorism is not a conspiracy theory to be lightly dismissed.

Coming next…. Phase 3, assault on the US dollar.

The People Of The Stables

The race track is a world within a world. It can be a dangerous place, injuries and death happen all too frequently, but you can make dear friends at the track; especially, if you work on the backside where the horses are stabled. Everyone on the backside can be divided into three groups: those who are addicted to gambling, those who are in love with the equine beast and those for whom the equine is merely a means to provide a job or for a few to make a fortune.

The gamblers are lost souls to be sure and only one out of 500 or maybe a thousand ever builds an estate with winnings; most gamblers funnel the memorable wins they score right back through the betting windows, but those wins become memories enshrined as gambling mythology and the efforts to duplicate those legendary wins become mystical like the search for the Holy Grail. Thus the gambler becomes one of many lost legions of forgotten people who exist solely to keep racing alive.

The horse lovers are in a precarious position; for they know deep inside that racing is one of the hardest sports of all for the equine and that injuries happen all to frequently and death is always waiting. They often choose to ignore the obvious contradictions and spend their time caring the horses and giving them comfort during their often all too short lives. Like concubines for gladiators, they willingly give their love to these superb athletes and move on when necessary. Sadly, these most dedicated of care givers end up hollow shells within a couple of decades, they are often bitter people who are dedicated cynics and view almost all other humans as lesser beings.

Of the people for whom the horse provides an income, a group that includes me, there are those who are born under the right star and make a fortune, but even these with luck and skill must be wary, for even the greatest can stumble and end up ruined and destroyed financially. For every successful jockey, vet, trainer, horseshoer; there are at least twelve or twenty more that are standing around hoping to get that one big break that will launch their career. Most of them will never get that break and of those that do, a large percentage will let that measure of success destroy them as surely as the moth flies into the flame. The temptations are never in short supply for those who enjoy a measure of success and the giving in to temptation helps to soothe the pain from years of rejection.

A Track Character

One of my favorites from the group for whom the race track provides a job was T Red Booker. He was an old man when I met him, a Black Cajun with a bright yellow color to his eyes. We hit it off right away, I suspect it was because of his rural upbringing in the woods of Louisiana and his interest in healing remedies and cooking. He was a groom for one of my big outfits from New Orleans. We talked for hours on cures for hoof rot, puncture wounds, poultices, shivers, fever fighters and then we would talk about our favorite cooking techniques. He liked to hear about my experiments smoking bacon and hams, my recipes for moose nose, elk liver, grizzly heart, and he told me about stuffed quail wrapped in bacon, snapping turtle fries, smoked alligator, and 20 varieties of poke salad.

He wasn’t interested in gambling and he knew he was at the terminal position in his station in life, so he was above all the desperate struggling of the average race tracker. T Red was content to watch the others struggle for their goals; consequently, he was an excellent mentor for me at this stage of my life.

I once asked him if the name T Red meant anything in Cajun or Coonasse as he would say. He said that as a lad that no one could outrun him for any distance between a quarter mile and a mile. He had once raced a famous stakes horse at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans for a quarter mile, even though the jockey was running too close to him in an effort to scare him. In their language the name meant Fast Red. In his younger days, his hair was a reddish color before turning gray, the name stuck. So he had been T Red Booker ever since, one of the few men that could outrun a horse.

Booker and I were like a lot of people I’ve met in the horse world; they were just born in the wrong period of history. They were much more comfortable with horses and all things associated with an earlier time of civilization than they were with mechanical and electronic things of more recent times. We are often left with the feelings that are probably accurate, that we just don’t really fit in with modern society, thus we congregate on race tracks, ranches, and farms. We ride, drive teams, pack, and work on horses to keep a dying culture alive for a few more generations, mainly because there really isn’t anything else that holds our interest. Oh, we are a varied bunch, every shape, size, and color; usually, we are a bit rough around the edges for sophisticated types; some are educated and others have ever been to school; there are friends and there are enemies, but the best among us can size up a horse or a rider within two strides and we all respect a gifted horseman for what he can do.

For several years, I looked for T Red’s outfit to pull into Chicago or Kentucky; we always had a homecoming of sorts and a period to catch up on the news of mutual acquaintances. On one of these occasions, I was sorry to see T Red was on light duty with a terrible limp. I asked him what was wrong and he said he had an ingrown toe nail that was giving him problems.

Unexpected Trouble

The next day, I had to shoe a gelding for T Red’s outfit and T Red was going to hold the horse. I was there about 10 AM and most of the track work was over for the day until the races started after lunch. T Red brought out a comfortable folding lawn chair and sat down while holding the horse. Between the relaxed nature of the two of us the horse was very cooperative.

T Red had an old shoe on his right foot and had cut out the leather around the area of his big toe, the toe was about three times bigger than normal and looked like it was ready to explode. T Red fell asleep with legs out in front of him, so I was real careful not to step on his sore foot while clinching the front shoes.

I was working away and noticed that T Red had dropped the leather lead shank on the ground. The horse was really easy to work with, but he was still a race horse and if he took off it would be trouble for T Red, so I wrapped the leather lead shank around the arm of the lawn chair, just in case, and went back to work.

I couldn’t help myself, I kept looking at that infected big toe; suddenly, just as I was finishing the hind shoes, I had a brilliant idea to help T Red. I lifted one of the horses front legs and brought it out in front of him with his knee locked straight. I aimed the hoof and brand new aluminum shoe with its steel toe grab right over that ingrown toe nail that needed to come off of that toe. I lifted the foot up and down several times to be sure of my aim and let it go. The steel toe grab was right on target with a couple of hundred pounds of force as it landed on the base of that toe nail. Immediately the corruption exploded out of that toe and T Red woke up emitting a loud roar that scared the horse back without picking up his hoof and that ripped the ingrown toe nail from the hoof and the toe was really draining well at this point.

There was one problem, I had forgotten that I had wrapped the lead shank around the chair arm earlier. The horse pulled back until the lead shank tightened, which was about the length of a millisecond and when he felt the weight of T Red in the chair he spun around to the right until he was behind T Red; who was making the situation worse by screaming blood curdling screams while reaching for his foot and then throwing his hands in the air. All of this strange behavior by T Red had the poor horse confused and he took off at a dead run. Thankfully, this made T Red quit screaming and he looked at me with this blank expression as the horse gained speed with the lawn chair and T Red bouncing along beside him. It was amazing how long the chair stayed in the upright position, because that horse was gaining speed with every stride, but when the chair started to tip over backwards, the lead shank came undone and the horse lost his curious load.

No one really understood how the accident happened and I didn’t want to tell them about T Red falling asleep on the job, so everyone figured it was just one of those race track accidents that are bound to happen now and then. T Red’s big toe healed up in a few days and felt better almost immediately. He received a few bumps and bruises when his lawn chair flipped on him, but all things considered, he did pretty well.

There is a lesson to learned from T Red’s complacency. We have a new treaty and we assume that everything will be perfect now; unfortunately, we tend to drift off into slumber while enjoying the security of a treaty that assures us that we will have peace in our time; unfortunately, there are often little irritants that tend to get out of control while we assume that it is safe enough to go to sleep; suddenly, we are bouncing along backwards in a lawn chair at forty miles an hour awaiting the inevitable crash.

Now that Chaves has purchased missiles from Iran, we can ill-afford to lean back in our lawn chair and how long will it be before the little weirdo from North Korea can purchase the long range missiles he needs to pinpoint Hawaii or the West Coast? A treaty with Russia is the least of our worries, it’s the strange little guys who want to make their mark in history that are the real problems and we have very little in the way of plans to prevent them from dropping the race shoe on our big toe.

Another celebrity romance falls to pieces:

By Guy Adams

Wednesday, 28 October 2009

He’s crossed swords, over the years, with all the usual right-wing suspects, from car-makers to gun owners to Wall Street executives, health companies, and George W Bush. Now Michael Moore has picked a fight with a hero of the international left.

The documentary-maker has caused outrage among Hugo Chavez’s supporters by using a late-night chat show to tell a humorous anecdote about meeting Venezuela’s socialist President in a luxury hotel suite during the recent Venice Film Festival.

His two-minute yarn, told to ABC host Jimmy Kimmel earlier this month, seemed harmless enough. Moore alleged that he and his wife had been woken at 2am by a racket coming from Mr Chavez’s room and ventured upstairs to ask him to quieten down.

“A bottle and a half of tequila later,” Moore claimed, he had helped the President to write the speech he recently delivered to the UN. “At the very least, the guy owes me a year’s worth of free gasoline!” he joked.

But there was a problem with the story. A big one. The meeting that Moore so confidently described never happened. And tequila certainly wasn’t consumed: Mr Chavez is teetotal.

The duo did meet in Venice, but only in the daytime. Moore, in town to launch his new film, Capitalism, sat with Mr Chavez, who was there to promote Oliver Stone’s documentary South of the Border, for three hours. The US press were excluded from the meeting.

Supporters of Mr Chavez now suspect that Moore fabricated his anecdote to gloss over the chummy nature of that encounter. They have taken to the airwaves in a Monty Python-style PR offensive, to accuse Moore of betraying a supposed comrade.

“Michael Moore is a most unfortunate coward,” declared blogger Eva Golinger. She dubbed him “the worst of yellow journalists, a liar and storyteller on the big screen”, and said his yarn was “offensive and insulting” and a clear sign of his “hypocrisy and lack of ethics”. Franz JT Lee, a Marxist academic and blogger, claimed that the film-maker’s comments were “part of the United States’ ‘war of ideas’” against Venezuela, and said similar “propaganda” led to the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany.

They didn’t just spark outrage on the left, though. Critics of Mr Chavez have called the level of invective against Moore – some of which was aired on Venezuelan state television – disproportionate. They believe his anecdote was intended to be a harmless, tongue-in-cheek joke. The socialist movement failed to grasp the nuances of his intended irony, they claim, because they lack a sense of humour.

Quite what the affair says about the integrity of Moore and his documentaries remains to be seen. The film-maker has declined to comment or apologise for misleading TV viewers, save for a brief message posted on his Twitter feed on Monday: “For the record, the President of Venezuela doesn’t drink.”

To go along with this break up, Moore’s office responded to Guy Adams’ article. Below is the following exchange of emails, according to Mr. Adams (to be updated, I’m sure):

Less than hour after that article had appeared on our internet site, I got an email from Mr Moore’s office. It is printed below (with email addresses and phone numbers redacted). My reply to that email is also carried in full.

“Hamdan, Basel” *****@michaelmoore.com 28/10/2009 00:49
To: “g.adams@independent.co.uk”
cc: “Weinrib, Eric”
Subject: Michael Moore

Hi Guy,

I’m Basel Hamdan, a producer in Michael Moore’s office. There is something inaccurate in the below piece:

The long meeting did, in fact, occur extremely late in the evening. I’m not sure who told you otherwise (daytime), but they are wrong. I was present, as was my colleague Eric Weinrib (cc’d).

Could you please correct the piece, if not retract it, as you use the time of day to question the veracity of the story. Please get back to me soon – we don’t want this falsehood to spread…

Thanks,
Basel Hamdan

———————
Basel Hamdan
Dog Eat Dog Films
Producer
231-922-**** X240

Guy Adams/Editorial/Independent News and Media 28/10/2009 02:02
To: “Hamdan, Basel”
cc: “Weinrib, Eric”
Subject: Re: Michael Moore

Hi Basel

It feels a little rich to be castigated for a very minor inaccuracy, given the extent of the whopper that Mr Moore has apparently told!

I will, however, happily clarify that element of the piece – on one condition.

In the interest of giving our readers a full and accurate picture of what actually went on, I would like either Mr Moore, or someone in his office, to offer an on-the-record explanation as to why he went on the Jimmy Kimmel show and claimed to have both drunk tequila with Mr Chavez and written a significant portion of his speech to the UN.

Provided you’re able to do this (and it would surely represent staggering hypocrisy if you were not) then I will of course make the correction you desire.

Yours
Guy

Guy Adams
Los Angeles Correspondent
The Independent

+1 310 396 ****

So, what happened? Well it may not surprise you to hear that I am still waiting for Mr Moore to agree to my request.

He is, we must therefore assume, happy to broadcast what appear to be substantive lies about someone, without ever explaining, apologizing or issuing proper clarification.

However journalists who write about him are expected to immediately correct any slight – and, I might add, alleged – inaccuracy in their piece, however minor. They are even invited to retract the entire article.

Mr Moore expects, therefore, to apply one rule for himself, and another for everyone else. This is surely the essence of hypocrisy. I can’t speak for what this tells us about his journalistic technique, or the reliability of his very moving documentaries. But (at risk of sounding like a tosser) I fear that it speaks volumes about his sense of entitlement.

UPDATE – Wednesday, 2pm GMT

Mr Moore’s office have emailed with what journalists among you will recognise as the “Alastair Campbell” response…

“Hamdan, Basel” *****@michaelmoor
Subject RE: Michael Moore

You are clearly not a journalist, so we will take the matter up with your editors.

Oh, that is just sooo rich!

Love at First Sight
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (R) greets Venezualan President Hugo Chavez in Tehran July 29, 2006. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi (IRAN)

Last November, MataHarley mentioned about how Russia was planning to help Hugo Chavez build a nuclear energy program. Of course, like the typical power-hungry dictator that he is, all he claims to want is to acquire nuclear power for clean energy and peaceful medical purposes.

At this point, they are still in the planning stages, with Chavez explaining, “not to worry, folks”:

“I say it before the world: Venezuela is going to start the process of developing nuclear energy, but we’re not going to make an atomic bomb, so don’t be bothering us afterward … (with) something like what they have against Iran,” Chavez said Sunday.

The socialist president is closely allied with Iran and defends its nuclear program while the U.S. and other countries accuse Tehran of having a secret nuclear weapons program.

What, what, whaaaat?! Countries accusing Tehran of ambitions to deceive the “international community” on nuclear programs? No way!

Iran’s deception (no surprises there) and the failure of the international community to curb its nuclear ambitions, is inspiring the Viper of Venezuela to emulate the defiance of Iran. Equally troubling, is news of nuclear collaboration by this budding “Axis of Unity“:

the label that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez have themselves chosen for their alliance. The rise of this partnership, according to Morgenthau, dates from Ahmadinejad’s election as president of Iran in 2005. At that point, said Morgenthau, what had been relatively routine ties between the two countries “changed dramatically.”

Over the past four years, the two despotic rulers have exchanged multiple visits, struck extensive military and business deals between their two countries, supported each other in cultivating policies and practices hostile to the U.S. and introduced each other to like-minded actors in their respective regions of Latin America and the Middle East.

Morgenthau cited reports that Iran has been building and running mysterious factories in parts of Venezuela so remote that they lack such basic amenities as restaurants and grocery stores. He added that since 2006, Iran has been embedding advisers with the Venezuelan military–which has thrown out its old U.S. army field manual and replaced it with instructions in asymmetric warfare as taught to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iranian-backed terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas.

Iran has also opened a bank in Venezuela, the Banco Internacional de Desarrollo, or BID. With Iran already under a long list of U.S. sanctions, as well as under a number of targeted sanctions by the United Nations, the U.S. Treasury last October added the BID to its blacklist. But Venezuela itself is under no broad sanctions. Its banks enjoy access to the U.S. financial system. Morgenthau warned that this is a “perfect” sanctions-busting setup for Venezuela to help Iran process dollar-denominated purchases of materials needed for making missiles, nuclear weapons and roadside bombs.

Morgenthau highlighted two investigations, publicly announced by his office this past year, that have uncovered “a pervasive system of deceitful and fraudulent practices employed by Iranian entities to move money all over the world without detection.”

One of these investigations, for which Morgenthau said further results may be announced within the next 30 days, already led to a deferred prosecution agreement this January. In that instance, a British bank, Lloyd’s TSB, agreed to $350 million in fines and forfeitures for stripping out details that would have identified as illegal more than $300 million worth of Iranian transactions running through the U.S. financial system. Another investigation led to the indictment this spring of a Chinese company, LIMMT, and its manager, Li Fang Wei, for using aliases and shell companies to get around U.S. sanctions meant to block payments involved in “shipment of banned missile, nuclear and so-called dual-use materials to subsidiaries of the Iranian Defense Industries Organization.”

Morgenthau warned that “based on information developed by my office, the Iranians with the help of Venezuela are now engaged in similar economic and proliferation sanctions-busting schemes.”

The international body seems adept at issuing “serious threats”, “harsh warnings”, “strong reprimands”, with military action (although unstated) off the tables. The IAEA appears inept at preventing illegal nuclear proliferation. Sanctions did not deter the nuclear ambitions of Saddam; nor have they deterred North Korea or Iran- the other two nations in President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” triumvirate. Nations undermined sanctions against Saddam by doing business with the Butcher of Baghdad.

The most chilling line in Morgenthau’s talk is hypothetical. But set amid a wealth of detail about mysterious factories, disturbing shipments, covert illicit finance and shared interests of “two of the world’s most dangerous regimes”–by which he meant Iran and Venezuela–it sounds like no idle comment. Morgenthau noted that Venezuela’s location “Is ideal for building and storing weapons of mass destruction far away from Middle Eastern states threatened by Iran’s ambition and from the eyes of the international community.”

This is a different picture from the congeniality implied by President Barack Obama’s handshake with Chavez in April at a Summit of the Americas.

So why is Morgenthau going out on a limb to sound the alarm? He’s no Republican cowboy. He’s a Democrat, whose credentials include a ringing endorsement of President Obama’s pick of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor when he testified at her confirmation hearings in July. Now 90 years old, still spry, but planning to retire at the end of December, Morgenthau as New York District Attorney has spent 34 years pounding one of America’s most vital law enforcement beats.

What this legendary DA has discovered about growing ties between Iran and Venezuela has evidently left him so concerned that he specifically asked for a Washington venue to deliver his public briefing on the subject. He spoke at a lunch at the Brookings Institution, hosted by a think-tank program called Global Financial Integrity, and The American Interest magazine. The full text of his remarks is now posted on his office’s Web site.

Morgenthau noted that his office and other law enforcement agencies “can play a small but important role” in trying to stop the flow of illicit funds, which he called “the lifeblood” of Iran’s nuclear and weapons programs. But he also spelled out that “Law enforcement in the U.S. alone is not enough to counter the threat effectively.”

That sounds like a plea to federal authorities, all the way up to President Obama, to get serious about stopping the rise of the Iranian-Venezuelan “axis of unity.” If this is to be tried via sanctions, then the going has evidently been far too slow and erratic. Morgenthau did not make a direct call for broad sanctions on Venezuela, but he certainly made a terrific case for doing so before the clock strikes midnight.

While Morgenthau was speaking in Washington, Chavez was continuing an 11-day tour that further underscores Venezuela’s fast-growing role as a hub in Latin America for interests deeply hostile to the U.S.

This included Chavez’s stopover last weekend in Iran; this was his eighth visit there since Ahmadinejad became president. This time, making no secret of a shared interest in nuclear technology, the two tyrants declared their intention of setting up an Iranian-Venezuelan “nuclear village.”

And while the U.S. administration has been pondering options such as more stringent efforts to squeeze Iran’s regime by way of sanctions on its imported gasoline, Venezuela and Iran have been forging ahead on ways to counter such measures. From Iran, Chavez announced a deal in which Venezuela later this fall would start exporting 20,000 barrels of gasoline per day to Iran.

AP News:

Iran is helping Venezuela to detect uranium deposits and initial evaluations suggest reserves are significant, the South American government said Friday _ the same day world leaders criticized the Islamic republic of secretly building a uranium-enrichment plant that could be used to make an atomic bomb.

The Economist:

The foreign-policy section of Venezuela’s “First Socialist Plan—2007-2013” (dubbed the “Simón Bolívar National Project”) assigns an “integral political alliance” with Iran, Syria, Belarus and Russia the highest priority outside the Latin American and Caribbean region. The rationale for this curious hotchpotch of alliances is the “common anti-imperialist interests” of those five countries—the imperialist in question being America.

Among the scheme’s aims is the strengthening of national defence and sovereignty. Not only the tanks but sophisticated anti-aircraft systems make up the order to Russia. Mr Chávez, a former lieutenant-colonel in Venezuela’s army, says these weapons will make it “very difficult for foreign aircraft to come and bomb us”. Having already spent at least $4.4 billion on Russian weapons, he has now secured an additional $2.2 billion credit-line from that country to lavish on more military hardware. Three submarines are among other possible purchases, press reports say.

In pursuit of his goal to “break North American imperialist hegemony”, the Venezuelan president has deployed to the full his prime asset—the country’s oil reserves. Thus Iran was promised 20,000 barrels of petrol a day, in potential defiance of sanctions advocated by America and despite Venezuela’s current problems supplying its own markets with fuel. Russia’s national oil consortium was also assigned a patch of the Orinoco heavy oil belt.

~~~

His avowed calculation is that by helping to stir up trouble for America in many places simultaneously, he can bring about the collapse of “the empire”. The regimes he is so assiduously cultivating are, by this account, the nucleus of a new world order. Although this seems far-fetched perhaps the world should start to take him a little more seriously.

Chavez clearly wants to play in the big leagues and as a counter-force to the United States.

Have you met our newly appointed, Obama stamp approved, “Diversity” Czar for the FCC?

No?

Well…check him out.

Mark Lloyd, chief diversity officer of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), called for a “confrontational movement” to combat what he claimed was control of the media by international corporations and to re-establish the regulatory power of government through robust public broadcasting and a more powerful FCC.

Lloyd expressed his regulatory call to arms in his 2006 book, “Prologue to a Farce: Communications and Democracy in America” (University of Illinois Press).

In the book, Lloyd also said that public broadcasting should be funded through new license fees charged to the nation’s private radio and television broadcasters, and that new regulatory fees should be used to fund eight new regional FCC offices.

These offices would be responsible for monitoring political advertising and commentary, children’s educational programs, number of commercials, and content ratings of the programs.

Frequently referencing one of his heroes, left-wing activist Saul Alinsky, Lloyd claims in his book that the history of American communications policy has been one of continued corporate control of every form of communication from the telegraph to the Internet.

~~~

Government, Lloyd said in his book, is the “only” institution that can manage the communications of the public, arguing that Washington must “ensure” that everyone has an equal ability to communicate.

“The American republic requires the active deliberation of a diverse citizenry, and this, I argue, can be ensured only by our government,” he says. “Put another way, providing for the equal capability of citizens to participate effectively in democratic deliberation is our collective responsibility.”

~~~

With Alinsky as the political guide, Lloyd outlines nine “lessons” that people can draw on when trying to combat international businesses.

~~~

To combat the control of international business and restore government to what he sees as its rightful place in managing public communications, Lloyd calls for a “confrontational movement” to protest the present order and organize a political movement that could force government to rein the businesses in.

“If our republican form of government is perishing because communications – the infrastructure of that republic – is under the yoke of international business how, at last, do we save it?” he asks. “We must build a confrontational movement to reclaim our democracy, a movement committed to active and sustained protest against the present order.”

To do this, Lloyd draws on his experience lobbying the FCC during the Clinton administration, counseling would-be revolutionaries to follow the tactics used by other left-wing movements, such as the followers of Saul Alinsky and the people who ran the campaign to block Republican Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.

“We understood at the beginning, and were certainly reminded in the course of the campaign,” wrote Lloyd, “that our work was not simply convincing policy makers of the logic or morality of our arguments. We understood that we were in a struggle for power against an opponent, the commercial broadcasters ….”

“We looked to successful political campaigns and organizers as a guide, especially the civil rights movement, Saul Alinsky, and the campaign to prevent the Supreme Court nomination of the ultra-conservative jurist Robert Bork,” wrote Lloyd. “From those sources we drew inspiration and guidance.”

Oh, it get’s better:

Lloyd proposes six initial goals for wresting control of communications from the corporate interests he claims control it. As his book details:

1. “End the federal subsidy of commercial media, particularly cable and broadcast television. Broadcasters should pay for the great privileges of a federally protected license to operate a business by using the publicly owned [radio or television] spectrum.”

2. “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) must be reformed along democratic lines and funded at a substantial level. The CPB board should be elected, [with] eight members representing eight regions of the country (New England, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Midwest, Plains States, Southwest, Mountain States, and the Pacific Coast) and a chairman appointed by the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate.”

“Federal and regional broadcast operations and local stations should be funded at levels commensurate with or above those spending levels at which commercial operations are funded,” said Lloyd.

“This funding should come from license fees charged to commercial broadcasters. … Local public broadcasters and regional and national communications operations should be required to encourage and broadcast diverse views and programs. … Spectrum allocations should be established that create clear preferences for public broadcasters ensuring that regional, local, and neighborhood communities are well served,” he added.

3. “The FCC should be fully funded with regulatory fees from broadcast, cable, satellite, and telecommunications companies. The FCC should be staffed at regional offices, matching those CPB regions, at levels sufficient to monitor and enforce communication regulation.

“Clear federal regulations over commercial broadcast and cable programs regarding political advertising and commentary, educational programming for children, the number of commercials, ratings information about programs before they are broadcast, and the accessibility of services to the disabled should be established and widely promoted.”

4. “Universal service support provided by all commercial telecommunications providers (whether they are classified as information services or not) to fund access to advanced telecommunications services should be expanded to all nonprofit organizations, including higher-level academic and vocational schools, community centers, and 501(c) (3) organizations unaffiliated with either business or government.”

5. “Postal subsidies should be fully restored to small independent nonprofits presses. Postal subsidies should be reduced for commercial and business operations. The postal service should be returned to congressional control with the central mission of ensuring that all Americans have access to the post.”

6. “Public secondary schools should be required to include civics and media literacy as part of their core curriculum. Testing on civic, media, and computer literacy should be required and national standards set.”

For those who think any or all of these recommendations might infringe on the free speech rights of broadcasters, Lloyd says his concern is not the “exaggerated” concerns over the First Amendment.

“It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press,” he said. “This freedom is all too often an exaggeration.

And just today Glenn Beck aired some footage of Lloyd speaking about the great change that happened in Venezuela with the dictator Chavez coming to power:

In Venezuela, with Chavez, really a incredible revolution. A dramatic revolution. To begin to put into place saying that we’re going to have impact on the people of Venezuela.

The property owners and the folks who were then controlling the media rebelled, work frankly with folks here in the US government, worked to oust him and came back and had another revolution and Chavez started to take the media very seriously in this country.

Get that? The “property owners” didn’t want a dictator, didn’t want Communism, and that’s bad. Our government even helped them fight against Communism but Chavez, Lloyd’s hero, came back fighting and took over the media…..which is a good thing to our new FCC czar.

He is completely opposed to any privately owned communications.

Read that again.

He want’s a government takeover of our media!

Here’s Glenn with Seton Motley:

Where is the MSM? Why are they not freaking out? Hell, this guy just said that freedom of speech is “exaggerated.”

But the left and the MSM hide.

Anyone on Twitter? Just as the new social media and technology came to the aid of the Iranians, it’s time to monitor the Honduran Twitterers. Per a Canadian Free Press report by Judi McLeod that they are receiving threatening text messages on their cells, warning them not leave their homes tomorrow night… and trying to get this message out to the world via their Twitter accounts.

“Now more than ever I will be the first one out the door,” Honduran Pedro Martinez told Canada Free Press tonight. Pedro Martinez is the pseudonym we gave to the young Honduran professional that Canada Free Press (CFP) walked through Twitter hookup last week.

“Tomorrow might be a bad day,” Pedro tipped off CFP on twitter. “People are infiltrating Honduras thru (sic) Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua with the intention to create chaos.”

It was only yesterday that ousted Chavez bud, and treasonous ex-President of Honduras threatened bloodshed to regain power, while speaking from neighboring Nicaragua.

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya gave his rival, Roberto Micheletti, one week to step down, saying he was prepared to risk bloodshed to recapture the presidency, which he lost on June 28.

~~~

Zelaya and Micheletti’s negotiating teams are expected to resume talks in Costa Rica on Saturday. But if those talks do not produce results, Zelaya said he would pay ”any cost” to reclaim the presidency.

“Let me come back – me with the people and you with your bayonets,” he said. “And instead of shooting innocent kids, shoot me.”

As Alec Rawls noted in an FA Reader Post on July 5th, Chavez has been strutting his stuff, making noises about invasion. If Zelaya is looking for a partner in bloodshed, he has no farther to look than the man who helped him print up the illegal ballots for an illegal referendum, and the Chavez minions who were among Zelaya’s back up when he stormed a Honduras Air Force base to recollect those confiscated ballots. It was then Zelaya was escorted out of the country.

Chavez has been laying some pretty convincing groundwork for an invasion… labeling the Honduras situation as “explosive” on Sunday.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said the political situation in Honduras is “explosive,” and some members of the Central American country’s military may take action to restore deposed President Manuel Zelaya.

~~~

“The situation is an explosive situation,” Chavez said today during his Sunday television program “Alo, Presidente.” “Don’t be surprised if a patriotic current comes out” of the military, he said.

Chavez said U.S. President Barack Obama should take control of the “Yankee empire,” which he said includes the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency. The socialist Venezuelan leader said the “empire” was behind Zelaya’s overthrow on June 28 because Honduras was strengthening ties with Chavez.

“The new specter that the bourgeoisie and the Yankee empire have invoked throughout the continent isn’t socialism and isn’t communism, it’s Chavismo,” he said, referring to a label used to describe Chavez’s ideology.

Apparently it doesn’t matter to the lefist one that Obama has not only sided with Chavez, but actually meddled in Honduras’ affairs prior to Zelaya’s ouster. Even the Eunuch in Chief can serve as a convenient “Great Satan” patsy.

Within 24 hours of Chavez’s thinly veiled threats, he was demanding Obama remove “gringo” US troops from the Honduran US airbase.

“If the U.S. really was against the coup it would have already withdrawn its troops from the Palmerola military base,” Chavez said in his Sunday TV program, Hello President.

The U.S., which has repeatedly condemned the coup, has some 350 soldiers deployed at an airbase in Honduras.

“Obama, pull your gringo soldiers out of Honduras, deprive the rebels of aid, freeze their accounts, stop giving them visas, and you will see how their rule ends,” Chavez went on.

In response to the increased chatter of threats, a curfew has been reimposed in Honduras from midnight to 5AM.

But the Hondurans aren’t easily intimidated.

Zelaya’s ultimatum to the interim government ordering it to relinquish power within the week and the demands for his immediate restitution has only raised the peoples’ dander.

People like Pedro expect only the worst from Zelaya.

This is a sturdy resistance that predates the July 28 bum’s rush, and one that sees Zelaya as a dictator who is giving their country and all it stands for over to “socialist rule under Chavez.”

“Long before the so-called coup d’etat, we watched as Chavez’s shiny new tractors were given like carnival candy to Honduran farmers,” Pedro told CFP in an earlier telephone call. “The tactics are the same ones used by Communists everywhere.”

“While his own people, whose children go hungry were out of work, Zelaya was swaggering under his 10-gallon cowboy hats and 100% tooled leather cowboy boots.

“We were told that big-spending Zelaya had been whooping it up in Costa Rica, where he blew his way through $80,000 in his first few days in exile.

“I was there at Tegucigalpa airport on July 6 when our interim government refused to let his plane touch down from Costa Rica. Zelaya and supporters, whose bullets killed my two countrymen, lied when they said the bullets came from the Interim Government side. Our side used rubber bullets. Zalaya supporters used real bullets on real people.”

Pedro, who speaks perfect English, says Zalaya “thugs” and “militants” have been threatening Honduran journalists. “We know what supermarket your wife uses. We know which school your little boy attends. That’s what they have been telling journalists,” Pedro says.

~~~

Meanwhile, Pedro and his many countrymen are in defending Honduras mode: “God bless Honduras. God bless Canada and the Free World. Nobody is going to take our Freedom and Democracy away. Nobody.”

Sounds like some old fashioned American spirit is alive and well… even if not in our borders.

I wish the Hondurans well… and very much hope a naive POTUS with misplaced loyalties does not hamstring our troops to aid in their defense.

Never a word from the Obama regime about Venezuela’s threat to invade Honduras and restore Chavez crony and fellow usurper Zelaya to power, but there is no lack of volume in Obama’s actions. Instead of facing Venezuela with a palm turned “stop,” Obama is pointedly walking away. AP headline: “U.S. halts military operations with Honduras to protest coup.”

This is not just some planned military exercise that has been canceled. Honduras is a close military ally and a base of operations for the United States in Central America. We will continue to use our bases, but as of now, the Hondurans are on their own.

Obama knows better than anyone that the arrest of Zelaya was completely legal and was not a coup

When AP calls the military arrest of Zelaya a “coup,” they are just following Obama, but the Obama regime was fully informed all along of the details of Zelaya’s attempted usurpation and fought vigorously to forestall his arrest:

The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, said the U.S. Embassy in Honduras was “consistently and almost constantly engaged in the last several weeks working with partners” and that U.S. officials were “in contact with all Honduran institutions, including the military.”

What were the Hondurans telling Obama? That the Honduran constitution REQUIRED the arrest of a president who tries to engineer a second term, and that it specifically empowers the Honduran Supreme Court to issue to the Honduran military an arrest warrant in such a case. Honduran Supreme Court justice Rosalinda Cruz describes how Zelaya had already started illegally shutting down checks and balances and how his arrest was immediately necessary to stop him from usurping the Honduran democracy:

“The only thing the armed forces did was carry out an arrest order,” said [Honduran Supreme Court Justice Rosalinda Cruz] in a telephone interview from the capital, Tegucigalpa. “There’s no doubt he was preparing his own coup by conspiring to shut down the congress and courts.”

Cruz said the court issued a sealed arrest order for Zelaya on June 26, charging him with treason and abuse of power, among other offenses. Zelaya had repeatedly breached the constitution by pushing ahead with a vote about rewriting the nation’s charter that the court ruled illegal, and which opponents contend would have paved the way for a prohibited second term.

She compared Zelaya’s tactics, including his dismissal of the armed forces chief for obeying a court order to impound ballots to be used in the vote, with those of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

“Some say it was not Zelaya but Chavez governing,” she said.

Having been “consistently and almost constantly engaged” for weeks “with all Honduran institutions,” the Obamaistas knew that Zelaya was trying to end the rule of law, yet they fought furiously against his removal, and when he was removed, dishonestly called Zelaya’s arrest “not legal“; declared Zelaya to still be the legal president of Honduras; and insisted on his immediate return to power.

OAS extended membership to communist Cuba last month

To ratchet up the pressure on Honduras, Obama is joining the call for Honduras to be ousted from the Organization of American States if it does not knuckle under to Zelaya. Exactly one month ago, the OAS voted to grant membership to the communist dictatorship in Cuba. Usurpers in. Rule of law out.

Check out AP’s picture of Hillary and Zelaya laughing over Cuba’s rehabilitation:

Actually, those should be thought balloons. Here is Zelaya’s actual commentary:

“The Cold War has ended this day in San Pedro Sula,” said Honduran President Manuel Zelaya immediately following the announcement.

Yes, we are all communists now.

UPDATE

Hugo Chávez said that he supports the return of deposed President Zelaya to Honduras by means of “a set of actions,” including contacts with military officers. Zelaya could return home “by land, air or water,” said Chávez in an address on Thursday in a state-run TV station, AFP reported.

“We are supporting his return to Honduras and we are planning several actions. (We are) contacting social leaders that are heading the resistance movements. We have contacted military leaders who disagree with what is happening in their country,” Chávez said.

If Chavez succeeds in creating violent chaos and undermining the Honduran congress and supreme court, expect Obama to continue to support Zelaya’s return to the presidency, regardless of popular opposition. Restoration of Zelaya is already Obama’s declared objective, and as with Chavez’ initial threat of to invade, Obama is saying nothing to counter this latest Chavez threat.

That’s the amazing thing. Longshot as it would be for Chavez to pull off a coup in another country, he is openly talking about it, and the United States is saying nothing in response. After Chavez’ initial threat to invade, Obama terminated cooperation with the Honduran military, so we have already left the way free for Chavez to find a violent path to power for Zelaya.

Like two peas in a pod:

In this video clip which is making the viral rounds in the Spanish-speaking online world, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez says “The rich are not human, they are animals in human form.”

President Obama traveled to Latin America last week and used his world stage, once again, to assure foreign leaders that America is but one culture among many and to apologize for America’s greatness. 

Expounding on his campaign promise to promote equality, Obama assured America’s foes that the United States is no better than any third world country. “I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership,” Obama said to Venezuela dictator Chavez. “There is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations.” He then proceeded to, once again, apologize for America’s arrogance.

Obama’s much vaunted tolerance was proudly on display as he politely endured a 50 minute anti-US diatribe from Nicaragua dictator Daniel Ortega. He then graciously, and publicly accepted a book from his new buddy, Venezuela dictator Chavez. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, a virulently anti-American book, instantly skyrocketed to #6 on Amazon.

The left is rejoicing at the apparent instant friendship between President Obama and thug Chavez, celebrating the vindication of their long-held belief that dialogue is better than war and that apologizing for America is a cool way to win friends and influence people.

Mea culpa is now official U.S. policy. In Mexico earlier last week, Obama took the occasion to blame America for all the gun violence in Mexico. Despite the fact that the report he was echoing has been thoroughly discredited, Obama stoically echoed the ‘fake but accurate’, theme made popular by the likes of (discredited) Dan Rather, (discredited Nobel prize winning author) Rigoberta Menchu, (discredited sex researcher) Kinsey…, well, you get the idea.

President Obama promised he would reach out to the rest of the world. One of his main campaign pledges was a vow to make everyone like us. Never mind that that kind of thinking is usually seen only among school kids. Obama wants us to be popular. And now we are. Just as long as we’re humble and continue kowtowing to despots.

The problem is, our new best friends are not very savory characters. From Castro to Kim Jong Il to Achmadenijad to Chavez, these guys are the school yard bullies. They routinely kill their own citizens, they impose law by fiat, they jail or kill any dissidents and generally impose their will on all citizens unfortunate enough to reside in their countries. But hey, it works for them.

Liberals, oops, progressives, hold the belief that dialogue, not guns, will cause third world dictators to realize and then remedy the error of their ways. Totally absent from their equation is any recognition of past history. Namely, the last 20 or so years that produced lots of words and dialogue yet spectacularly failed to influence or change any actions or policies.

Believing that his charm can trump reality, President Obama remains intent on changing the world. But first, America has to be brought down to size. We must acknowledge yet again the sins of our past and, like celebrities who hit bottom, apologize profusely and publicly and then enter rehab to assure the world we are, indeed, sorry.

Obama is a great communicator who convincingly tells the world what they’ve yearned to hear. Namely, that America is arrogant. And we’re sorry. And by the way, our system of, gasp, capitalism, despite being the engine that has fed the world, is flawed. And we’re sorry.

Our culture is responsible for all the world’s ills, and we’re sorry about that too. Mea culpa, mea culpa. On the bright side, now that the Obama administration has branded most conservatives as extremists and terrorists, maybe Obama will apologize to them too. Ya think?

America’s new president is well suited to displaying America’s humility. That’s because he really believes what he is saying. One need only look at his 20 year attendance at a church that preached hatred of America. One need only look at his (now former) associates, domestic terrorists Bill Dorn and wife. One need only listen to Michelle Obama’s own words on her ‘pride’ in America. One need only read Obama’s own book. America is to blame for everything wrong in the world. Case closed. Let’s move on. Oh, and we’re sorry.

When I asked my beautiful and smart, yet decidedly liberal niece, Sarah, why she voted for Obama, she thought a moment and then said, “He believes in the same things I do.” When asked to expound, she said, “Equality.”

68 million Americans voted for Obama based on the same lofty ideal. Equality, inclusion, tolerance, multiculturalism and the ‘fake but accurate’ belief that America is a racist, arrogant and imperial nation that needs to atone to the world for its sin of freedom and greatness.

The left, as exemplified by Obama, firmly believe all of life is a zero-sum game i.e.: if someone is rich, its always at the expense of the poor. A person, business or country is only successful because they hijacked success from those less fortunate. They view America as a nation of victims, oppressed by those that have the audacity to become successful and/or rich (without government help).

The 62 million Americans who didn’t vote for Obama think differently. They believe, based on history, that kowtowing to dictators is interpreted as a sign of weakness. They believe, based on reality, that all the carrots in the world will not change the minds of enemies dedicated to America’s downfall. They know from experience that accepting or rewarding bad behavior only encourages more bad behavior. They know, and Reagan proved, that America’s strength, real and perceived, is the single largest factor in avoiding war with recalcitrant dictators.

Equality is a wonderful concept. But, as Laurence Reed of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) says, “Citizens of free countries are not equal. And countries where citizens are equal, are not free.” That is a reality that no amount of rhetoric or mea culpas can change. Sorry.