Prof. Johnathan Turley has a great blog. This story is not only seasonal, but, instructive as well!
Maryland police Sgt. Eric Janik, 37, may not get the thrust of trick of treat traditions. The Baltimore police office went to a haunted house called the House of Screams with friends and when confronted by a character dressed as Leatherface with a chainsaw (sans the chain, of course), Janik pulled out his service weapon and pointed it at the man, who immediately dropped character, dropped the chainsaw, and ran like a bat out of Halloween Hell.
In the comment section, me and a poster named Patriot have been discussing terrorism, Iraq, oil, you name it. The article itself is crap, but, the comment sections may give people help in how to counter wingnut lunatics they encounter.
(Author note: Those here at docudharma have seen what my posts look like when I get a bit drunk. And no, I’m not now, but, do apologize for posting the last two drivels.)
Matt Taibi’s Latest big Rolling Stone article came out last week to no fanfare. RS has stopped simulpublishing to the web and print edition to sell hard copies. That may or may not be working. I can’t say. But it’s killing Taibbi’s viral-ability on the internet.
Anyway. I just found the article, but only by wondering if it was up yet, then going there, and finding it. Shame because it’s really important. It goes a long way towards confirming what many of us have suspected/known all along: that Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were taken down deliberately by naked shorting and other schemery.
Why?
This is an email I wrote to my friend Bob Swern, one of the best writers over at Daily Kos who covers economics and the ongoing crime that is the financial sector. In it, I asked him for help in my research of the real story behind the financial collapse that wrecked the fortunes of so many, yet made trillions for a few others.
I WANT YOUR HELP TOO.
This will be an experiment in Open Source Reporting (a concept I just thought of). If you know of anything that contributes to this investigation, please provide it.
Here’s the email to Bob which lays out my line of inquiry.
I have a theory. It goes like this:
Bankers (Goldman, JPM, etc.) saw derivatives crisis years ago (2005?, 06?, earlier?)
They knew they needed Shock and Awe to get Americans to bail out their
ponzi scheme.
So they drove up oil prices by speculating on oil futures among other things.
As always, any spike in oil prices causes a recession. It worked (People seem to
be acting like $4 gas prices never happened or had nothing to do with the economic
contraction. It was the single biggest factor in causing the recession) and the economy started to grind to a halt.
THEN, stage 2: Sink Lehman and/or Bear Sterns. Like setting a managed forest
fire. Naked short selling, media operatives trashing the company, which WAS trash but
no more so than anyone else. They had to let one fall, maybe two.
Shock and awe ensues, and then the political blitz of sky is falling and…. OKYOUCANHAVETRILLIONSOFDOLLARS!!!
Anyway, you get the gist. So, what do you think. Am I close? Do you have any
evidence to support some of the main contentions in this thesis? They are again:
1. Preknowledge that the whole thing was going to tank.
2. Shock Doctrine to crash the economy by manipulation of oil and gas prices.
3. Naked shorting to bring down Lehman
My thesis probably places Goldman at the epicenter of this whole scheme. And, though
I’m not sure where it ties in, I am almost certain that the entire market rally is a scam too.
I think the timing it essential too and maybe even their choice of Obama.
Anyway, there it is. Would love your opinion on the plausibility of this. And I
would love any evidence that confirms or refutes any part of it.
On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody – nobody knows who – made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness – “like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets,” according to one financial analyst.
But what’s even crazier is that the bet paid.
At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.
The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or…
Or what? That this was a brazen case of insider manipulation was so obvious that even Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the pillow-soft-touch Senate Banking Committee, couldn’t help but remark on it a few weeks later, when questioning Christopher Cox, the then-chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission. “I would hope that you’re looking at this,” Dodd said. “This kind of spike must have triggered some sort of bells and whistles at the SEC. This goes beyond rumors.”
[UPDATE]: Some folk seem to have a problem with my assertion that the “entire market rally is a scam”. Perhaps I should have clarified. I don’t thank all of the trades that led to this rally are bogus or illegitimate. And as time has passed, nervous investors have edged back in.
But there have been red flags going back to last spring that the market was artificially pumped up by the Fed and the few remaining big banks in a position to do so.
There has been much reporting on this issue. Here’s a good primer. But I’ve yet to find it better explained than here (go to the 4:00 minute mark):
A Republican Trick or Treat experience….brought to you by Docudharma and by your contributions (hint hint, the donation bowl is on your right!)
The scene, a suburban Red State street at dusk on All Hallows eve….fade in…
“Knock knock!”
“Who’s there?”
No, no, this isn’t a knock knock joke, this is Halloweeeeen! Let’s try again…
“Knock knock!”
(Door creaks spookily open)
“Trick or Treat?”
“What is this, some kind of extortion attempt? WTF do you mean…trick or treat? What kind of choice is that? And who are you to come to my door and demand a treat? Or to threaten me with tricks….what is this, some new kind of Socialism? If I don;t give you some of my hard earned candy you are going to put me in a FISA camp???”
“Well…um…no, you see it is a Holiday tradition, I get dressed up in this really scary Rahm Emanuel costume and come to your door, and…..”
“And try to extort candy from me, yeah I get it. If I don’t give you a treat you are going to audit me and make my wife wear a burqha, right? You Liberal Fascist Commies are all the same”
“No, no it is an American tradition designed to make pediatric dentists rich! See the kids go around knocking on…”
“You are not a kid…in fact if I didn’t know better I would say that under that Rahm costume you are one of those….shudder….liberal bloggers! The most powerful force for evil in the world, even WORSE than Socialists!!! AND trying to get my hard earned candy, why should I pay for your candy!!!!”
“Damn, I have been found out! Say…while I’m here, would you like to make a contribution to Docu….
“This is a moment of truth for the Democratic Party. Will we stand for the people or the insurance companies?
We compromised on [a] single payer [health care system] by backing a public option, and now we are being asked to compromise the public option with negotiated rates. In conference, we will likely be asked to compromise negotiated rates with a trigger.
In each and every step of the health care debate, the insurance companies have won. If they get hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxpayer subsidies, they get to raise their premiums, and increase their co-pays and deductibles, while the public is forced to pay for private insurance, then the insurance companies win big.
If this is the best we can do, then it is time to ask ourselves whether the two-party system is truly capable of representing the American people or whether the system has been so compromised by special interests that we can’t even protect the health of our own people.”
Update: I have re-written this essay almost in its entirety in light of events since I published here yesterday. It’s full-on mockery now.
There has been a lot written lately a bout the acceptability of criticizing President Obama. What way is best, what kind of criticism is effective, whether it should be done at all. These are important questions, and I am proud of how this community has tackled this with such maturity.
What I’ve found is, some think criticism is fine, as long as it doesn’t attack the president personally. I wasn’t sure how to do that without using his name or without referring to his behavior. So I was starting to get a bit puzzled and headachy. And some people were angry with me.
Some think, as I did until today, that the best way to hold a politician accountable, is to, like, call, write letters, and post diaries asserting what the actual beef is, in the hopes that the politician will respond to mass pressure. What I found out is, if that politician is THIS president, this is a no-no. Of course, criticism of the LAST president for the same behavior is A-OK. That got me even more headachy. I HATE headaches.
KABUL (AFP) – Taliban gunmen stormed a UN guesthouse in Kabul on Wednesday, killing at least eight people in a suicide attack as the Islamist militia signalled a bloody countdown to new Afghan elections next week.
President Hamid Karzai ordered an urgent security upgrade for international organisations after the rampage, which left at least five expatriate UN staff dead in the worst assault on the world body’s Afghanistan mission since 2001.
A defence ministry official said the raid was the work of Pakistani Taliban dressed as police who struck the UN-approved Bekhtar Guesthouse before dawn.
A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.
But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.
“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”
In the face of the corruption and Corporatism we now see OUR government drowning in….and the fact that that corruption and Corporatism is in the process of drowning the planet, it has become obvious that The People need to take our government back from those who have hijacked it to further enrich themselves.
To do that we will need a Populist Uprising…of some sort.
We all saw this summer what a Populist Right has to offer….fighting the fascist communists Hitlers and demanding birth pedigrees that are in the public record already. Oh and hot beverages IF you dip their hats in boiling water. They were at their most ridiculous when someone would ask them what they were trying to accomplish, what their goals were….when asked, they would mumble about taxes and fascism and have…like the Republicans who fostered them…no real answer. No solutions, no positive agenda. They were angry, but being the boobs that they were, they had no real substantive answer for what they were angry about. Their movement fizzled…imo, because unfocused anger is unsustainable as an effective political tool.
Anger must be accompanied by education and MUST be focused on achieving some goal.
What can a Populist Left offer? Can ‘we’ do better? Is all Populism destined to be hijacked by trivia, ridiculous sloganeering and demagogues?
Or is there a way to build a serious and effective Populist Left?
