While most Americans are struggling hard to overcome the hardships of the recession, the profits of national banks continue to rise. JP Morgan is among those cashing-in ... and it's a contract to process food stamp payments that's helping it on its way. RT's Maria Portnaya found out how the rich benefit off the back of the poor.

Produced by Jacob Crawford with assistance from Ali Winston and Josh Wolf.

Undercover cops have been caught red-handed, infiltrating the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US in order to try to get protestors "to do things we want them to do" - instigating violence, vandalising things, starting fights and generally causing mayhem.

The present financial meltdown may only be the latest example of the incalculable harm done to civilization, and countless individual lives, by psychopaths, a subspecies of Homo sapiens. The purpose of this essay is twofold. First, I will provide a brief tour of the psychopath subspecies so that you understand who they are and how they operate. You probably already know psychopaths, and it is overwhelmingly likely that at some point in your life a psychopath that you encounter personally will try to harm you. Second, I will draw the correlative between psychopathy and the present financial meltdown and provide a suggestion of a relatively simple change that could decrease the likelihood of the sort of abuses that could lead to future meltdowns.

Part One: What is a Psychopath?

History

Kunlangeta is a word Yupik Eskimos apply to "a man who . . . repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and . . . takes sexual advantage of many women -- someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment." In a Harvard University study conducted by anthropologist Jane M. Murphy in 1976, an Eskimo man was asked how his people might deal with a Kunlangeta, to which he replied, "Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking."

After ousting independent leaders, Washington replaces them with puppets. Mustafa Abdul Jalil is interim chairman. Until October 23, Mahmoud Jibril was prime minister.

Abdurraheem el-Keib replaced him, a dual US/Libyan citizen. He lived in America, holds a doctorate in electrical engineering, and taught at North Carolina State University and the University of Alabama for years.

A businessman and prominent Tripoli family scion, he also taught at the UAE's Petroleum Institute. Big Oil giants fund it.

He played no part in the conflict. Last August, Washington parachuted him in as their man. Past puppet rulers were installed the same way.

After WW II, Syngman Rhee came in from Hawaii to run South Korea. In 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem became South Vietnam's president the same way, brought in from New Jersey.

In February 2004, after US marines ousted Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide, south Florida's Gerard Latortue was anointed interim prime minister. Ordinary people had no say each time.

Keib's not only Washington's man, he's Big Oil's man, chosen to assure they control Libya's oil, gas and whatever else they want. Forget about sovereign rights. Only imperial and corporate ones matter.

Israeli President Shimon Peres said late on Saturday "an attack on Iran" by Israel and other countries was "more and more likely."

He told Israeli private television's second channel: "The intelligence services of the different countries that are keeping an eye on (Iran) are worried and putting pressure on their leaders to warn that Iran is ready to obtain the nuclear weapon," Israeli media reported.

"We must turn to these countries to ensure that they keep their commitments ... this must be done, and there is a long list of options," Peres declared.

Israel on Thursday completed a major civil defence drill in the Tel Aviv region aimed at simulating a response to conventional and non-conventional missile attacks, the military said.

It will be the latest sobering economic milestone that few were hoping to see: The U.S. national debt - any day now - will soar above the $15 trillion mark.

As of this writing, the total debt is $14.97 trillion, so moving beyond the symbolic $15 trillion is a foregone conclusion. When the unwelcome milestone is reached, it will come at a volatile time both in this country and abroad.

Across the Atlantic, President Obama is in Cannes, France, for the G-20 summit that takes place as Europe is trying to finalize a bailout for debt-ridden Greece.

Back on the home front, Obama is preparing for a difficult re-election fight next year. Republican candidates from Mitt Romney to Herman Cain have pounced on the country's economic woes in their bids to win the GOP nomination and the chance to oppose Obama. Meanwhile, the Occupy Wall Street protests directed at the nation's financial inequalities continue to rage across the country.

The expansion of the CIA's undeclared drone war in the tribal areas of Pakistan required a big expansion of who can be marked for death. Once the standard for targeted killing was top-level leadership in al-Qaeda or one of its allies. That's long gone, especially as the number of people targeted at once has grown.

This is the new standard, according to a blockbuster piece in the Wall Street Journal: "men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren't always known." The CIA is now killing people without knowing who they are, on suspicion of association with terrorist groups. The article does not define the standards are for "suspicion" and "association."

Strikes targeting those people - usually "groups" of such people - are called "signature" strikes. "The bulk of CIA's drone strikes are signature strikes," the Journal's Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman and Julian E. Barnes report.

This week Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, look at bank stocks ablaze and a Grecian vortex. They also discuss speculators responding to falling prices by smashing showrooms in Shanghai and holding Congress hostage in America. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser interviews Leah McGrath Goodman about Occupy Wall Street, the Koch Brothers and oil derivatives and the new market in water derivatives.

"You can't be having a driving dream when you are in the midst of a nightmare." - President Richard Nixon.

"In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed and today people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life, but now they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us: from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism, a powerful and sinister network with sleeper cells in countries across the world, a threat that needs to be fought by a War on Terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It's a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media." - Adam Curtis. From his 2004 documentary, "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear."

"Death is mighty.
Laugh as we may,
we are all his.
Mid-life, when we are sure of the day,
Death weeps boldly
right in our midst." - Rainer Maria Rilke, "End Piece," from The Book of Images.

Debt and death are the two main outcomes in the game of terror that was created by the shadow governments in Washington, London, and Israel.

Debt and death are the two main weapons that the transnational shadow elite uses to control the government and the people of the United States of America.

As Washington's Blog points out in his recent article, raising the debt of the United States is the main policy goal of the privately owned and traitorous Federal Reserve Bank. "Indeed," writes the author of Washington's Blog, "despite the harms that too much debt can cause, some in government have worried that paying off our debt would be harmful for our country."

A debt-free America means an independent and sovereign America. And the shadow banking elite who hijacked America in 1913 do not want that. They have taken America to war based on false intelligence and propaganda for a century, beginning in World War I.

At the start of the 21st century, when America was on the verge of paying off its debt, a new endless war on terrorism was invented by the shadow banking elite to put America in debt again. This was done by design.

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November!

V for Vendetta may be the most revolutionary film ever made, but don't expect the BBC to tell you that.

"V for Vendetta masks: Who's behind them?" the BBC recently asked.

They published a couple of vague, misleading answers.

The BBC quotes David Lloyd:

"'My feeling is the Anonymous group needed an all-purpose image to hide their identity and also symbolise that they stand for individualism - V for Vendetta is a story about one person against the system...' "

"...It is that image of collective identification and simultaneous anonymity that is appealing to Anonymous and other groups, says Rich Johnston, a commentator on the world of comics."

Blathering about individual vs. collective, the lure of anonymity, etc., without grounding the interpretation in specifics from the film is the worst possible way to answer the question. As a literature teacher - I have four advanced degrees in literature and have taught everything from Chaucer to Hausa Literature to Philip K. Dick - I would award a D at best to any student who offered such a lame interpretation of a story's central symbol.