US-Iran Policy Dynamics

Do we not have the right to invade and destroy a foreign country? Of course we do. That's a given. The only question is: Will the surge work? Or some other tactic? Perhaps this catastrophe is costing us too much. And those are the limits of the debates among the presidential candidates, the Congress and the media, with rare exceptions. That's part of the reason the debates are so inconclusive. The basic issues are not discussable.

The Washington Post’s Bias Against Democracy in Latin America

In the 1980s the Washington Post honed an editorial page style to attack the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua that involved complex and convoluted editorials weaving half truths, total lies, innuendo, and unsupported speculation. These editorials were impossible to respond to with letters to the editor limited to 200 words. The “big lie” strategy is effective because to respond with the truth takes even more words than the original lie.

The Washington Post is now using the “big lie” strategy against the Bolivarian process in Venezuela and its democratically elected president Hugo Chavez. An editorial on August 17, 2007 is a textbook example of this strategy. It is entitled “Cash-and-Carry Rule” with a sub heading “Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez cements his autocracy with petrodollars and another push for ‘reform.’”

The US Venezuela Solidarity Network offers this sentence by sentence deconstruction of the Washington Post editorial as a public service to educate serious readers on important issues of US-Venezuela relations and the campaign to derail the process in Venezuela to use its oil wealth for the benefit of its poor majority.

ON BORROWED TIME

HOW DID THIS ALL COME ABOUT? A (bearish) hedge-fund operator, in a letter to his investors, describes how a senior Wall Street marketing director recounted the genesis of the current situation:

"'Real money' (U.S. insurance companies, pension funds, etc.) accounts had stopped purchasing mezzanine tranches of U.S. Subprime debt in late 2003 and [Wall Street] needed a mechanism that could enable them to 'mark up' these loans, package them opaquely, and EXPORT THE NEWLY PACKAGED RISK TO UNWITTING BUYERS IN ASIA AND CENTRAL EUROPE!!!!

"He told me with a straight face that these CDOs were the only way to get rid of the riskiest tranches of subprime debt. Interestingly enough, these buyers (mainland Chinese banks, the Chinese Government, Taiwanese banks, Korean banks, German banks, French banks, U.K. banks) possess the 'excess' pools of liquidity around the globe. These pools are basically derived from two sources: 1) massive trade surpluses with the U.S. in U.S. dollars, 2) petrodollar recyclers. These two pools of excess capital are U.S. dollar-denominated and have had a virtually insatiable demand for U.S. dollar-denominated debt...until now."

These investors then had standing orders on Wall Street desks for any U.S. debt rated triple-A. Through the "alchemy of CDOs" and "the help of the ratings agencies," the CDO managers collected triple-B and triple-B-minus subprime and repackaged them so the top tier got paid out first. Then leverage the lower mezzanine tranches by 10-20 times and, "POOF...you magically have 80% of the structure rated 'AAA' by the ratings agencies, despite the underlying collateral being a collection of BBB and BBB- rated assets."

The letter concludes: "This will go down as one of the biggest financial illusions the world has EVER seen."

And to think it's all played out is even more laughable.

History Channel Fraudsters Pass Off Joke Website as Representative Of 9/11

As part of a catalogue of dirty tricks employed to smear the truth movement in its 9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction special, The History Channel used screenshots of an inane parody website and passed it off as representative of people asking questions about the official story.

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