Using Propaganda to Stop China's Strikes

Government and industry search for ways to calm the country's factory hands

Less than two years after the worker suicides at electronics giant Foxconn and a strike at Honda (HMC) suppliers in Guangdong province, labor troubles are again roiling China. On Nov. 17 around 7,000 workers at a Taiwanese-owned New Balance supplier in Dongguan protested plans to relocate production to Jiangxi province and cut bonuses. Dozens of workers were injured when police moved in, according to reports and photos posted on the Internet. Five days later, 1,000 workers halted production to protest overtime rules at a Shenzhen company that, according to its website, supplies Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). In Shanghai, women workers at Singapore-owned Hi-P International, a supplier for Motorola Mobility (MMI) and others, struck on Nov. 30 over a planned shift of part of production to Jiangsu province. (Motorola confirms the incident, and says it is not directly involved in working toward a resolution.) “We are seeing an upsurge in worker activism that exceeds anything since the summer of 2010,” says Geoffrey Crothall, communications director at China Labour Bulletin, an advocacy group in Hong Kong. Some 180,000 riots, strikes, and protests occurred in 2010, according to Sun Liping, a professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

On Dec. 1 the government announced the first contraction in manufacturing since 2009. “As the environment goes from bad to worse, a lot of factories want to find a way out,” says Willie Fung, chairman of Hong Kong bra-maker Top Form International. “They want to downsize, shut down, or move somewhere else, and this sparks labor disputes.” A strike at Fung’s Shenzhen factory ended after he agreed to a holiday bonus of $189 each for 500 workers.

China’s leaders don’t want strikes to stoke broad social unrest. That could be tricky, because the new generation is ready to assert itself. The young are less tolerant of long hours and assembly line jobs and more prone to job hopping, says Christian Ewert, president and CEO of New York-based International Council of Toy Industries CARE Foundation, which monitors working conditions and whose members include Walt Disney (DIS), Mattel (MAT), and Lego.

In Shenzhen, Philips (PHG), HP, and Dell (DELL) are working with a Dutch government-supported program to improve labor conditions while raising productivity. As “labor tightens in China, the industry needs to pay more attention to the worker,” says Sonny Kwok, a Philips senior vice-president. Consultant Infact Global Partners, hired to run the initiative, is designing training programs at 100 factories employing 500,000. Infact plans to interview departing workers to find out why they change jobs so often, and get supervisors to assess themselves, says Managing Director Ian Spaulding. “In an environment where you have 10 to 20 percent turnover a month, managers start to think of workers as machines. That creates resentment on both sides.”

Ewert’s group earlier this year launched a pilot program to teach labor law to workers and middle-level managers at factories that supply overseas corporations. These local companies have codes imposed on them by the multinationals about paying overtime properly, how many can sleep in a dorm, even how much meat the cafeteria serves.

The group’s “edutainment” videos have a Smurf-like figure who introduces dramas with real workers as the actors. In one segment, a line worker confronts a manager for holding a meeting in a noisy factory. Later a guard stops the protagonist for not having a badge, leaving him seething. His pretty girlfriend and her pal, who also work at the plant, persuade him to check the regulations on the bulletin board. The manager he had berated proves a friendly advocate who takes him to human resources to plead his case: happy ending. “With a good worker-management relationship, factories can be just like home!” says the blue narrator.

The Beginning of the End of Fiat Money

10 November 2011John Browne

The argument for the dollar and against gold is simplistic, and I will evaluate it against the four-stage collapse I see ahead for the Western currencies.

Last week, the G-20 meetings did not produce an expanded bailout fund for the eurozone. While this may bode well for the long-term solvency of the member-states (moral hazard and all), it has also triggered a market reaction that I expect to help destabilize the common currency. Yesterday's market moves suggested that this development is good for the dollar and bad for gold. Allow me to step back from the stampeding herd to evaluate whether they are, in fact, moving in the right direction.

The argument for the dollar and against gold is simplistic, and I will evaluate it against the four-stage collapse I see ahead for the Western currencies.

Arguing that gold is a hedge only against inflation, and taking current inflation figures at face value, mainstream analysts have concluded that gold is grossly overvalued - that it may, in fact, be the latest asset bubble to arise. However, these analysts fail to account for why gold is a hedge against inflation: it is ultimately an insurance policy against runaway currency collapse. In other words, it's intended as a longer-term, wealth-preserving purchase. Yes, some pit traders may be trying to make a quick buck shorting gold and going long on dollars, but for individual investors, following suit would leave them vulnerable to what may prove to be ahead. That is, a phased destabilization of the euro, leading to a possible collapse of the US dollar. In such circumstances, even today's volatile prices for gold and silver would look attractive.

Phase One of the threatened catastrophe is sovereign debt crisis, which is effectively camouflaging a currency crisis. The Greek default is significant as the first crack in the dam. But Greece is a relatively small problem. The bigger threat is Italy, with its $2.4 trillion of debt and a 10-year bond yield having just surpassed the critical 7 percent level. This is the ruinous milestone at which the cost of new debt money surpasses the economic growth rate plus inflation. Italy faces massive debt refunding, falling buyer interest, and no hope of a bailout. If Italy were to default, it could threaten rapid contagion to Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and other larger eurozone countries, including perhaps France. In such an event, most international banks and institutional investors, including those in the US, could suffer severe, possibly total, losses on their holding of certain sovereign bonds. MFGlobal is but one speculative example of a looming secular trend. Worse still, the writers of credit default swap (CDS) derivatives, including many German Landesbanks (state-level banks) and major US banks, could suffer crippling losses.

This would lead to Phase Two of the collapse: a renewed and far larger banking crisis. This, in turn, could bring stock markets tumbling and threaten major institutional investors, including politically sensitive pension and insurance companies. In addition, banks would become extremely wary of lending to each other. Likely, the interbank market would freeze, but far more severely than in 2008. It could result in curtailed lending and even the recall of short-term corporate funding and call-loans. This could cause a dramatic spike in US bank failures. Unwary depositors who have failed to watch their banks closely could find their insured funds frozen, perhaps for months, as the FDIC reorganizes the problem banks - and perhaps even waits for its own bailout. This would add further downward pressure to economic growth.

Meanwhile, the cascading banking crisis would likely push Europe into a severe recession, even a depression. As the EU accounts for some 22 percent of world trade, a European depression would no doubt drag down the US even further. In response, the price of precious metals may face severe selling pressure as liquidity becomes paramount.

This would present an opportunity for long-term gold and silver investors.

Phase Three would be a restructuring or dissolution of the euro and possibly a stampede into the US dollar, sending its price and US Treasuries temporarily upwards. With a far stronger dollar, the price of most commodities, including precious metals, may fall temporarily in dollar terms. We are seeing a preview of this dynamic with today's news on Italy.

However, to reallocate one's portfolio in reaction to such a move could put an investor in jeopardy. That is because Phase Four, the most alarming, would be investors' realization that the US dollar lies at the root of the international currency collapse and is itself vulnerable. Likely, this panic flight from the dollar would develop suddenly, and perhaps in undreamed of volumes. Doubtless, the speed and size of a stampede out of paper currencies and into precious metals will take many investors by surprise - just as the Credit Crunch in 2008 did. As the realization of currency catastrophe spreads, the price of silver may start to rise faster than even gold.

There's an old saying that "the higher you fly, the harder you fall." The US government is, by any measure, the luckiest government in centuries. It has risen to unforeseen heights of monetary excess - and has been rewarded for doing so. But it looks like lower flying planes are starting to stall out, and one can only imagine - from this height - how fast and how far the US may fall.

My humble advice is not to try to time it, but rather to use your golden parachute before it's too late.

For an even more in depth look at the prospects of international currencies, download Peter Schiff's and Axel Merk's Five Favorite Currencies for the Next Five Years .

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Capitalism Magazine. Capitalism Magazine often presents views that we do not entirely agree with, because they may still contain information of value to our readers. Excerpts are limited to 250 words, so long as the source and link are provided to the original article. Otherwise, reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

Mortgage brokers convicted of fraud, money laundering

Pacific Business News

Date: Wednesday, December 21, 2011, 6:04am HST

Welton Kalani, co-owner of Accel Mortgage LLC, and Stephen Balino, owner of New Horizons Financial, have been found guilty on numerous counts of mortgage fraud and money laundering, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Pacific Business News is reporting that the two Honolulu mortgage brokers encouraged struggling homeowners to surrender the title of their homes while allowing them to remain as renters until the homeowners could buy back the properties.

Meanwhile, Kalani and Balino recruited people to serve as buyers for the homes in question and helped those people obtain loans by falsely claiming they would live on the properties. The false loan applications were supported by fraudulent documents produced by people working with Kalani and Balino.

Following each sale, the brokers were paid fees and commissions for procuring the loans, and the equity was diverted away from the sellers and distributed by third parties back to Kalani, Balino and others working with them.

Oracle stock nose-dives after earnings report falls short of projections

By Jeremy C. Owens

jowens@mercurynews.com

Posted: 12/21/2011 08:06:40 AM PST

Oracle's (ORCL) stock price plummeted more than 14 percent Wednesday morning after the Redwood City software giant reported quarterly revenues and profits that did not live up to internal or external expectations.

The company's stock fell 9 percent in after-hours trading Tuesday night, but the decline continued after the bell rang on Wall Street on Wednesday, with shares trading as low as $24.91, a loss of $4.18, or 14.6 percent, in early trading.

The descent stems from Oracle's earnings for the quarter that ended Nov. 30. While sales, at $8.8 billion, and income, at $2.2 billion, both increased, the gains did not match Oracle's projections for the quarter nor analysts' forecasts for the company.

While sales grew 2 percent year-over-year, Oracle had predicted 5 percent to 9 percent growth; earnings were 43 cents a share, but Oracle predicted 44 to 46 cents a share, and analysts had expected 45 cents a share, according to a Thomson Reuters survey.

Some of the underlying fundamentals of the business caused doubts as well. In the latest period, the company missed several of its own targets. Revenue from new software licenses, a key indicator of future revenue from lucrative maintenance contracts, recorded a 2 percent increase after a forecast of 6 percent to 16 percent growth. Hardware sales were down 14 percent; the company had predicted a decline of 5 percent.

Oracle's projections for the current quarter also came in below analysts' expectations, as the company predicted sales of $8.9 billion to $9.25 billion, less than the $9.45 billion that analysts were predicting; and earnings per share of 55 to 58 cents, after excluding one-time charges, which analysts pegged at 58 cents a share on the same basis.

Oracle is one of the world's biggest sellers of database programs and other commercial software, along with high-end computer hardware. And because its fiscal quarter ends several weeks later than most of its competitors, analysts say the Redwood City company's performance offers the most current view of overall tech spending.

"My sense is that things are slowing out there and Oracle is seeing this first," Brian Schwartz, a tech analyst with the investment firm ThinkEquity, said Tuesday evening. "Buyers are getting more cautious."

Investors on Wall Street seemed to agree with Schwartz on Wednesday, as Silicon Valley stocks and the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index took a beating in early trading. While the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 index showed losses of 0.4 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively, the Nasdaq was down more than 1.6 percent at 8 a.m. Pacific.

Oracle competitor Salesforce.com, based in San Francisco, fell more than 7 percent in early trading, and Palo Alto-based competitor Tibco Software fell more than 13 percent. Palo Alto-based enterprise virtualization company VMware declined more than 8 percent, and open-source firm Red Hat dropped more than 5 percent -- both companies compete for the same spending as Oracle.

At 8 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday, an hour and a half into the trading session, Oracle stock was trading at $25.16, a loss of $4.01, or 13.8 percent.

Staff writer Brandon Bailey contributed to this report. Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/mercbizbreak.

American Conspiracies

Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies that the Government Tells Us

by Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell

Skyhorse Publishing, 2011, paperback

Albert Einstein

A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.

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Government is nothing but people, and people lie, especially where money and power are concerned.

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William Burroughs

Paranoia is having all the facts.

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There is a CIA operative inside every state government.

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I'm a skeptic about anything I read officially from the government. They don't tell the whole truth. They often seem to have an entirely different agenda. It's disheartening, to realize that what you read in the newspapers and the history books may not be accurate.

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Franklin D. Roosevelt

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power.

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FDR, after getting elected in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, started implementing his New Deal. He took on the stock speculators and set up new watchdog agencies. He put a stop to farm foreclosures, and made employers accept collective bargaining by the unions. And he took the country off the gold standard, meaning that more paper money could be available to create jobs for the unemployed and provide loans. That outraged some of the conservative financiers... the oligarchs of finance ... considered the new president a traitor to his own class, namely them. Within a year of FDR's taking office, they'd started hatching a plan to get rid of him.

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retired General Smedley Butler, in a speech to an American Legion convention, 1931

I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions .... I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents.

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retired General Smedley Butler to a WWII veterans group

[War is] largely a matter of money. Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot repay, the President sends Marines to get it. I know--I've been in eleven of these expeditions.

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former House of Representatives Speaker John McCormack, 1971

A well-organized minority can always outmaneuver an unorganized majority.

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Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so.

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Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

The Rhodes Scholarships, established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes' seventh will, are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire.

... [Funding of this organization later came from groups] associated with J.P. Morgan, and the Rockefeller and Whitney families.

... [The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is] a front for J.P. Morgan and Company.

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Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

[The goal of a cabal of global financiers linked to J.P. Morgan and Company was] nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.

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Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

[The goal of a cabal of global financiers linked to J.P. Morgan and Company was] nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. Each central bank... sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.

... The American branch of this 'English Establishment exerted much of its influence through five American newspapers (the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, and the Boston Evening Transcript).

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The wealthiest CEOs of the world have been coming together [Bilderberg Group] with the political elite from Europe and America since 1954, when they first met at the Bilderberg Hotel in a little Dutch town called Oosterbeek. The Bilderberg deep pockets reach back centuries, to royalty who still believe they're the entitled ones and the rest of us are merely cannon fodder.

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In 2007, an American investigative journalist named John Buchanan found documents from the [congressional] McCormack-Dickstein Committee in the National Archives. These directly linked Prescott Bush [father of George HW Bush] to the power brokers (Morgan, DuPont, Remington, and others) who were behind the plan to get rid of FDR. This got some play in the U.K., but not a word in the mainstream American press.

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Kevin Phillip's book on the Bush family "American Dynasty"

We have no reliable way of knowing exactly why, after 1933, men like Averell Harriman, George Walker, and Prescott Bush, the Dulles brothers, James Forrestal, Henry Ford, and several Rockefellers, maintained investment relationships with Hitler's Germany, in a few cases up to (and even after) Pearl Harbor.

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journalist Carl Bernstein in a Rolling Stone article "The CIA and the Media", 1977, showed how strongly mainstream news organizations were tied to the CIA

By far the most valuable ... associations, according to CIA officials have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc... Over the years, the [CBS] network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers... A high-level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966.

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journalist Carl Bernstein in a Rolling Stone article "The CIA and the Media", 1977, showed how strongly mainstream news organizations were tied to the CIA

[Joseph] Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services--from simple intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries.

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When Oliver Stone's movie "JFK" came out in 1991, the strongest attacks came from news outlets and journalists with the longest records of error and obstruction in defense of the flawed Warren Commission inquiry.

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Many of our public figures who've been killed--John Lennon, Malcolm X, and Dr. King--all seem to be under [US government] surveillance first and then assassinated later.

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In 1999, the [Martin Luther] King family brought a wrongful death lawsuit in a Tennessee Circuit Court. A nearly month-long trial ensued. Seventy witnesses were called. It took the jury only two and a half hours to come back with a verdict that Dr. King was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government.

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The FBI director [J Edgar Hoover[ had a series of meetings with persons involved with the CIA and military intelligence (MI) in the three weeks before [Martin Luther] King's assassination ... there were MI agents as well as Green Berets in Memphis the night he was shot.

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The Army's 111th Military Intelligence (MI) Group was keeping [Martin Luther] King under round-the-clock surveillance during the garbage strike in Memphis [in the] spring of 1968. One of the MI guys, Marrell McCollough, was undercover with the Memphis police--and ... was also involved in the planning sessions for the assassination.

... [MLK family attorney William F] Pepper's investigation found that McCullough went on to work for the CIA in the 1970s.

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Robert Kennedy in a speech in the U.S. Senate, May 9, 1966

A revolution is coming--a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough--but a revolution is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.

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In order to climb the ladder of the two political parties in our current system, you have to condone their corruption... most people, when they initially start in politics, are good people. They come into the system wanting to do their job, to change things. But the longer you stay in the system, the more corrupt you become.

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Dan Mitrione [was] an FBI agent and full-time spook operating undercover with the Agency for International Development (AID). Mitrione trained Latin American cops in interrogation techniques that included the use of torture and drugs.

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Dan Mitrione [was] an FBI agent and full-time spook operating undercover with the Agency for International Development (AID). Mitrione trained Latin American cops in interrogation techniques that included the use of torture and drugs.

In 1970, he was taken hostage and murdered by Uruguay's Tupamaros guerrillas. [People's Temple
Reverend Jim] Jones admitted having stayed friends with Mitrione. He even referred to him several times in taped speeches at Jones town.

The CIA claimed after Jonestown that its file on "the Rev. Jimmie Jones" was almost empty. Actually, the CIA's Office of Security had opened a 201-file on Jones in the early 1960s, when he took off for Rio de Janeiro. Agency records showed that file stayed open for ten years, only being closed for no explained reason after Mitrione was killed. So it seems pretty likely that Mitrione had recruited Jones into the CIA, using the Department as his cover.

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More than 700,000 of America's estimated 20 million pot-smokers got arrested in 2008. About half of the 200,000 inmates in our federal prisons are in there for drug-related offenses. Between 1970 and 2007, we saw a 547 percent increase in our prison population, mainly because of our drug policies... [In] the new prison-industrial complex, corporations are now running the show. We as taxpayers shell out $68 billion every year for prisons, and a lot of that ends up going into private contractors' pockets.

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About half of the 200,000 inmates in our federal prisons are in there for drug-related offenses.

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American banks are collectively the world's largest financial beneficiary of the drug trade.

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The heroin epidemic that ravaged our cities during the fifties and sixties originated with the CIA out of Southeast Asia. Almost from the moment of their founding in 1947, the CIA was giving covert support to organized drug traffickers in Europe and the Far East, and eventually the Middle East and Latin America. During the Vietnam War, heroin was being smuggled into this country in the bodies of soldiers being flown home.

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Toward the end of American involvement over there in 1975 [Vietnam], a former Green Beret named Michael Hand arranged a 500-pound shipment of heroin from Southeast Asia's "Golden Triangle" to the U.S. by way of Australia. That's where Hand had set up shop as vice chair of the Nugan Hand Bank, which was linked by the Australian Narcotics Bureau to a drug smuggling network that "exported some $3 billion [Australian] worth of heroin from Bangkok prior to June 1976. Several CIA guys ... used the Nugan Hand bank to channel funds for covert operations. By 1979, the bank had 22 branches in 13 countries and $1 billion in annual business.

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In the mid- 1980s, [Oliver] North got together with four companies that were owned and operated by drug dealers, and arranged payments from the State Department for shipping supplies to the [Nicaraguan] Contras.

... What became known as the Iran-Contra affair came to light in November 1986. We were selling arms to Iran, breaking an arms embargo, in order to fund the contras.

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The Reagan-Bush gang is gone, and Clinton is now president. [In] 1996 the San Jose Mercury News came out with a remarkable 20,000-word series by reporter Gary Webb that he'd been researching for more than a year. It described a pipeline between Colombian cartels, middlemen, and street gangs in South Central L.A. that involved tons of crack cocaine... The crack was being funneled to a young new-millionaire named "Freeway" Ricky Donnell Ross, who supplied it to the Crips and Bloods and beyond... How involved was the CIA in the crack epidemic then raging across our country?

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The CIA is into drugs ... because they can get money to operate with, and not have to account to Congress for what they're doing.

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[The Bank of Credit and Commerce International] BCCI ... was involved in drug-money transactions ... ClA Director [William] Casey was relying on BCCI to distribute American assistance to the Afghan mujahideen who were fighting the Russians at the time. Except most of the aid went to the faction controlled by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was probably the leading heroin trafficker in the world. Pakistani president Muhammad Zia in 1983 let local traffickers put their drug profits into BCCI.

... BCCI was the seventh biggest bank on the planet when it collapsed, shortly after the Soviets withdrew their troops from Afghanistan.

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according the United Nations

Money made in illicit drug trade has been bused to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis.

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Dennis Dayle, a forms DEA agent in the Middle East, at an anti-drug conference

In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.

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Beginning in the nineties, drug dealers in Mexico were taking charge of half of Colombia's drug trade into the U. S.. While Mexico used to be just the trans shipping point from South America, now it was a major producer and distributor... between $19 billion and $39 billion in proceeds from drugs heads back south [to Mexico]every year from the U.S.

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[In Mexico] between December 2006 and the spring of 2009, more than 10,780 people were killed. And most of the guns fueling the violence are coming from the U.S.. About 87 percent of the firearms that Mexican authorities have seized over the last five years can be traced to here, many of them from gun shops and gun shows in the Southwestern border states. And these are no longer simply handguns, but now military-grade weaponry and very serious ordnance. How come the manufacturers are not being held accountable for selling these weapons over the border.

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John Farmer, a senior counsel for the 9/11 Commission who drafted the original [9/11] report

At some level of the government, at some point in time ... there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened [on 9/11].

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Jesse Ventura

I am convinced that some people inside our government knew the [9/11] attack was going to happen and allowed it to come to pass--because it furthered their political agenda. I don't necessarily believe that they orchestrated it themselves, although the door is definitely open to that.

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Jesse Ventura

I am convinced that some people inside our government knew the [9/11] attack was going to happen and allowed it to come to pass--because it furthered their political agenda.

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NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] ... had been ordered to stand down [on 9/11]. Then LAX [Los Angeles International Airport] Security wanted to know who could have made that order. And word came back that it was from the highest level of the White House... [President] Bush ... was reading 'My Pet Goat' to the school kids in Florida, so the only other person it could be was Dick Cheney.

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September 11 [2001] was the second day of Vigilant Guardian. an exercise of the Joint Chiefs and NORAD that simulated planes being hijacked in the Northeastern United States

... Could the attack have been scheduled intentionally to coincide with those war games? If so, this raises a couple of questions. Either there was a major intelligence leak, whereby the terrorists realized the war games would be a good cover for their operation. Or else some people in the administration knew of the attack ahead of time and let it proceed simultaneously, knowing the confusion this would cause.

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Between September 2000 and June 2001, on 67 different occasions fighter jets were sent to intercept aircraft that had lost radio contact or their transponder signal or were flying off course, usually within ten minutes of any sign of a problem... Then, on June 1, 2001, the existing hijacking response procedures were changed to require approval by the secretary of defense before responding to a situation with lethal force. And when the call came into the Pentagon on 9/11, nobody answered the phone!

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According to the 9/11 Commission, [Vice-President Dick] Cheney didn't arrive underground at the PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center) until almost 10 AM. [Transportation Secretary Norman] Mineta, however, said the Vice President was already down there when he arrived at about 9:20 AM. Richard Clarke and Cheney's photographer indicated the same thing. 'That was before the Pentagon had been hit, an Mineta recalled that a young man came into the PEOC three times to tell Cheney how far out the plane was from Washington. After the third report, according to Mineta, the young fellow asked, "Do the orders still stand?" and Cheney responded, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" The 9/11 Commission chose to ignore Mineta's testimony and went so far as to remove it from the video archive.

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a firefighter who got dug out of the rubble on 9/11

The one thing that always troubled me is, why were they in such a hurry to remove all the evidence? Why did they take away everything from the site as fast and expediently as possible?

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former air force fighter pilot Russ Wittenberg about what hit the Pentagon on 9/11

We don't know what it was, but you can tell what it wasn't [a 757 aircraft].

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Major General Albert Stubblebine, retired Commanding General of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command

I have had a lot of experience looking at photographs. l don't know exactly what hit it [the Pentagon] but I do know from the photographs I have analyzed, it was not an airplane. For one thing, if you look at the hole that was made in the Pentagon, the nose penetrated far enough so that there should have been wing marks on the side [of the building.

... Whenever there's a plane crash, things are strewn about. So where are the seats, the luggage? The wings, vertical stabilizers, and engines were never fully recovered. A number of parts to a 757 are pretty much indestructible, but not a single piece has ever been positively identified as originating with Flight 77.

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Colonel George Nelson, who during 30 years of service in the air force served as an aircraft accident investigation board member.

With all the evidence readily available at the Pentagon crash site, any unbiased, rational investigator could only conclude that a Boeing 757 did not fly into the Pentagon as alleged. In all my years of direct and indirect participation, I never witnessed nor even heard of an aircraft loss, where the wreckage was accessible, that prevented investigators from finding enough hard evidence to positively identify the make, model, and specific registration number of the aircraft--and in most cases the precise cause of the accident.

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Colonel George Nelson, who during 30 years of service in the air force served as an aircraft accident investigation board member.

With all the evidence readily available at the Pentagon crash site, any unbiased, rational investigator could only conclude that a Boeing 757 did not fly into the Pentagon as alleged.

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The official story [of 9/11] is that, for the first time in history, the black boxes were not recovered. Not from any of the four planes... Also for the first time in history, no attempt was made to reconstruct the planes with whatever parts they could find.

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After 9/11, not a single employee at the FAA or NORAD got punished. In fact, all the major military men involved received promotions. They included General Richard Myers, who was named Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

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Not one shred of evidence produced in a courtroom leads to the conclusion that [Osama] bin Laden spearheaded [the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon].

p164
Theodore Roosevelt, 1895

Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses.

p168
The Federal Reserve ... controls our monetary policy. By changing the supply of dollars in circulation, they have influence over interest rates, mortgage payments, whether the financial markets boom or collapse, and basically whether our economy expands or stumbles. But the Fed is only partly an institution of government. The stockholders in a dozen different Federal Reserve banks in different regions of the country are the big private banks.

The Federal Reserve was created by Congress in 1913, after a financial panic that led to a secret meeting at banker J.P. Morgan's private resort, off the coast of Georgia at a place called Jekyll Island.

... What emerged was a cartel agreement with five objectives: stop the growing competition from the nation's newer banks; obtain a franchise to create money out of nothing for the purpose of lending; get control of the reserves of all banks so that the more reckless ones would not be exposed to currency drains and bank runs; get the taxpayer to pick up the cartel's inevitable losses; and convince Congress that the purpose was to protect the public. It was realized that the bankers would have to become partners with the politicians and that the structure of the cartel would have to be a central bank.

p183
Henry Wallace, vice president of the United States, 1944

With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.

p201
George Orwell, 1984

In vast laboratories in the Ministry of Peace, and in experimental stations, teams of experts are indefatigably at work searching . ... for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies.

p202
Justice Department attorney John Loftus in his 1982 book "The Belarus Secret"

Nazi germ warfare scientists came to America [and] experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases... the US. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early 1950s.

... Plum Island was experimenting with Lone Star ticks and the Cayenne tick, feeding them on viruses and testing them on pigs in 1975 and 1976--exactly when Lyme disease first showed up across from the island. At that time, the Lone Star tick was otherwise only found in Texas. Nobody can explain how it's happened to migrate all across the Eastern seaboard. Along with its cousin, the deer tick, the Lone Star variety is known for spreading Lyme disease.

... Germ labs like Plum Island pose a bigger threat to our country than any terror group... Lyme disease ... is the fastest-growing infectious illness in America after AIDS.

Development News Discontinued

When Development News was launched in the early 1990s, it filled an important niche for those inside and outside the Bank seeking a daily digest of development-related news. In the two decades since, a whole range of comprehensive and accessible online alternatives have emerged, many of them tools specifically targeted and tailored to meet the needs of development specialists. In light of the availability of such tools, we re-evaluated the role of the publication and concluded that it was no longer adding singificantly to existing development news outlets. We hope you will continue to follow the World Bank's contribution to development and the development debate via our website.

U.S. Stocks Fall; Tech Shares Slump

Q

By Rita Nazareth - Dec 21, 2011 6:17 PM GMT+0100

U.S. stocks fell, following yesterday’s rally, as Oracle Corp. tumbled on disappointing earnings and optimism faded about the European Central Bank’s plan to lend euro-area banks a record amount for three years.

Technology shares had the biggest decline in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index among 10 industries, dropping 2.7 percent as a group. Oracle plunged 13 percent, the most since 2002. Walgreen Co. (WAG), the largest U.S. drugstore chain, slumped 3.8 percent as profit trailed estimates. Emerson Electric Co. (EMR) retreated 6.2 percent, pacing losses in industrial companies, after reporting November orders that were lower than analysts’ projections.

The S&P 500 decreased 0.8 percent to 1,231.93 at 12:14 p.m. New York time. The benchmark gauge yesterday rallied 3 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 80.15 points, or 0.7 percent, to 12,023.43 today. The Nasdaq Composite Index slumped 1.9 percent to 2,555.43.

"The question is: Are negative headlines on the European situation starting to affect decision making and will that jeopardize the recovery?" Kevin Shacknofsky, who helps manage about $5 billion for Alpine Mutual Funds in New York, said in a telephone interview. "The key thing about the weakness in Oracle (ORCL) is that people were delaying making decisions investing in technology. There’s a lot of work to do to solve the European crisis. With sentiment as weak as it is, it’s a big problem."

Today’s decline extended this year’s drop in the S&P 500 to 2 percent. The measure tumbled 19 percent from this year’s high in April through Oct. 3 amid concern Europe’s debt crisis would derail global growth. Since then, it has rebounded 12 percent on better-than-estimated American economic data and steps taken by European leaders to tame the crisis.

Fading Optimism

Spanish two-year government notes fell for the first time in nine days amid fading optimism that the ECB’s three-year loans to euro-area banks will restore confidence in sovereign borrowers. The ECB awarded 489 billion euros ($645 billion) in 1,134-day loans, the most ever in a single operation and more than economists’ median estimate of 293 billion euros in a Bloomberg News survey.

"What the ECB is doing is just trying to prevent a disorderly deleveraging of European bank assets," Barry Knapp, the New York-based head of U.S. equity strategy at Barclays Plc, said in a telephone interview. "By no means it solves the financing problem for Italy or Spain or for the banks."

In the U.S., the number of existing homes sold was revised lower by an average 14 percent since 2007, the National Association of Realtors reported today, magnifying the depth of the slump that contributed to the last recession.

Technology (S5INFT) Shares

Measures of software, chips and computer makers tumbled at least 1.5 percent, for the biggest declines among 24 industries in the S&P 500.

Oracle plunged 13 percent to $25.24. Business-software companies are taking longer to close deals as companies gird for slow economic growth in the U.S. and the possibility of a recession in Europe next year, said Rick Sherlund, an analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), the biggest computer-services company, slipped 4.1 percent to $179.49. Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), the largest computer maker, slid 2.9 percent to $25.15. Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), the world’s biggest maker of networking equipment, dropped 2.6 percent to $17.94.

Walgreen slumped 3.8 percent to $32.24. A dispute between the company and Express Scripts Inc. (ESRX), an employee-benefits manager, led to a loss of customers, hurting pharmacy demand. CVS Caremark Corp. (CVS) and Rite Aid Corp. are trying to grab customers amid the standoff over the contract.

Orders Drop

Emerson Electric tumbled 6.2 percent to $46.59. The St. Louis-based company reported trailing three-month orders for November rose 4 to 5 percent, down from 8 percent in October and below the guidance range of 5 to 7 percent, said Julian Mitchell, a New York-based analyst with Credit Suisse.

KB Home (KBH) lost 6.5 percent to $7.24. The Los Angeles-based homebuilder that targets first-time buyers reported a quarterly profit that beat analysts’ estimates as sales and orders rose.

Nike Inc. (NKE) rallied 2.8 percent to $96.24. The world’s largest sporting-goods company reported second-quarter profit that topped analysts’ estimates as sales of running shoes surged in North America.

Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) surged 10 percent to $13.77 after reports Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Nokia Oyj (NOK1V) mulled a bid while Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) also considered buying the BlackBerry maker.

Turned Down

RIM “turned down takeover overtures” from Amazon because it wanted to fix shortcomings independently, Reuters reported yesterday. A Wall Street Journal article said Microsoft and Nokia “flirted with the idea of making a joint bid” in recent months. Both publications cited unidentified people familiar with the respective matters.

Microsoft declined 1.6 percent to $25.61. Amazon slumped 3.6 percent to $175.93.

Anyone expecting the so-called January effect to turn shares of smaller U.S. companies into market leaders may end up waiting in vain, according to Steven G. DeSanctis, a strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

“We do not think we will see a January effect occur in the remainder of this month or next month,” DeSanctis wrote yesterday in a report.

Smaller companies have only kept pace with larger ones since the end of October. In past years, they rallied during the period in anticipation of further gains in January. Price swings linked to concern that the U.S. and European economies are faltering explain why the effect is unlikely to surface, according to DeSanctis, a small-cap stock specialist based in New York.

In January, small caps beat large caps 73 percent of the time since 1926, according to his analysis of figures from the University of Chicago’s Center for Research in Security Prices. The percentage is the highest for any month of the year. Small caps also had their best monthly performance in January, with an average gain of 4 percent, DeSanctis wrote.

To contact the reporter on this story: Rita Nazareth in Sao Paulo at rnazareth@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nick Baker at nbaker7@bloomberg.net