As the Global Financial Crisis rumbles along in its fifth year, we read the latest revelations of bankster fraud, the LIBOR scandal. This follows the muni bond fixing scam detailed a couple of weeks ago, as well as the J.P. Morgan trading fiasco and the Corzine-MF Global collapse and any number of other scandals in recent months. In every case it was traders run amuck, fixing "markets" to make an easy buck at someone's expense. In times like these, I always recall Robert Sherrill's 1990 statement about the S&L crisis that "thievery is what unregulated capitalism is all about."

After 1990 we removed what was left of financial regulations following the flurry of deregulation of the early 1980s that had freed the thrifts so that they could self-destruct. And we are shocked, SHOCKED!, that thieves took over the financial system.

Nay, they took over the whole economy and the political system lock, stock, and barrel. They didn't just blow up finance, they oversaw the swiftest transfer of wealth to the very top the world has ever seen. They screwed workers out of their jobs, they screwed homeowners out of their houses, they screwed retirees out of their pensions, and they screwed municipalities out of their revenues and assets.

Financiers are forcing schools, parks, pools, fire departments, senior citizen centers, and libraries to shut down. They are forcing national governments to auction off their cultural heritage to the highest bidder. Everything must go in firesales at prices rigged by twenty-something traders at the biggest and most corrupt institutions the world has ever known.

And since they've bought the politicians, the policy-makers, and the courts, no one will stop it. Few will even discuss it, since most university administrations have similarly been bought off - in many cases, the universities are even headed by corporate "leaders" - and their professors are on Wall Street's payrolls.

We're screwed.

One wonders what Syrians are thinking, as "rebels" vowing to "free Syria" take the country down the same road to destruction as "rebels" in Libya. Libya, under Gaddafi a well-run country whose oil revenues were shared with the Libyan people instead of monopolized by a princely class as in Saudi Arabia, now has no government and is in disarray with contending factions vying for power.

Just as no one knew who the Libyan "rebels" were, with elements of al Qaeda reportedly among them, no one knows who the Syrian "rebels" are, or indeed if they are even rebels (Antiwar.com).

Some "rebels" appear to be bandit groups who seize the opportunity to loot and to rape and set themselves up as the governments of villages and towns. Others appear to be al Qaeda. (Antiwar.com)

The fact that the "rebels" are armed is an indication of interference from outside.

There have been reports that Washington has ordered its Saudi and Bahrain puppet governments to supply the "rebels" with military weaponry. Some suspect that the explosion that killed the Syrian Defense Minister and the head of the government's crisis operations was not the work of a suicide bomber but the work of a US drone or missile reminiscent of Washington's failed attempts to murder Saddam Hussein. Regardless, Washington regarded the terror attack as a success, declaring that it showed the rebels were gaining "real momentum" and called on the Syrian government to respond to the attack by resigning. (reuters.com)

As HSBC executives apologize to the US Senate for laundering drugs money, the fact is that nothing changes.

"Steal a little," wrote Bob Dylan, "they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you a king." These days, he might recraft the line to read: deal a little dope, they throw you in jail; launder the narco billions, they'll make you apologise to the US Senate.

Two months ago in Washington DC, a poor black man called Edward Dorsey Sr was convicted of peddling 5.5 grams of crack cocaine. Because he was charged before a recent relative amelioration in sentencing, he was given a mandatory 10 years in jail.

Last week, managers from Britain's biggest bank, HSBC, lined up before the Senate's permanent sub-committee on investigations - just across the Potomac river from the scene of Dorsey's crime - to be asked questions such as: "It took three or four years to close a suspicious account. Is there any way that should be allowed to happen?"

President Bashar al-Assad's artillery pounded rebel-held areas in and around Aleppo on Friday in preparation for an onslaught on Syria's biggest city where the United States has said it fears a "massacre" may be imminent.

Opposition sources said the shelling, which follows intensive ground and air bombardment, was an attempt to drive fighters inside Aleppo from their strongholds and to stop their comrades outside the city from resupplying them.

"They are shelling at random to instill a state of terror," said Anwar Abu Ahed, a rebel commander outside the city.

The battle for Aleppo, a major power centre that is home to 2.5 million people, is being seen as a potential turning point in the 16-month uprising against Assad that could give one side an edge in a conflict where both the rebels and the government have struggled to gain the upper hand.

A rebel commander said insurgents had attacked a convoy of Syrian army tanks heading towards the city, as the government continued to redeploy forces from other parts of the country to bolster its forces there.

"Society's tendency is to maintain what has been. Rebellion is only an occasional reaction to suffering in human history: we have infinitely more instances of forbearance to exploitation, and submission to authority, than we have examples of revolt." (Zinn, 1968)

Have you ever wondered why society hardly ever changes? I think most of us have.

One answer is that humans have a mental bias towards maintaining the status quo. People think like this all the time. They tend to go with what they know rather than a new, unknown option.

People feel safer with the established order in the face of potential change. That's partly why people buy the same things they bought before, return to the same restaurants and keep espousing the same opinions.

This has been called the 'system justification bias' and it has some paradoxical effects (research is described in Jost et al., 2004):

Did you know that roughly one person in a hundred is clinically a psychopath? These individuals are either born with an emotional deficiency that keeps them from feeling bad about hurting others, or they are traumatized early in life in a manner that causes them to become this way. With more than 7 billion people on the planet that means there are as many as 70,000,000 psychopaths alive today. These people are more likely to be risk takers, opportunists motivated by self-interest and greed, and inclined to dominate or subjugate those around them through manipulative means.


Last year, the Occupy Movement drew a distinction between the top 1% and the remaining 99% - as distinguished by measures of wealth and income. Of course, this breakdown is misleading, since there are many top income earners who sympathize with the plights of others and are not part of the problem. But the real defining metric reveals itself: 1% of the global population is comprised of people who exhibit psychopathic tendencies.

In one of the most shocking articles that the New York Times has ever put out, a New York Times reporter has openly admitted that virtually every major mainstream news organization allows government bureaucrats and campaign officials to censor their stories.

For example, almost every major news organization in the country has agreed to submit virtually all quotes from anyone involved in the Obama campaign or the Romney campaign to gatekeepers for "quote approval" before they will be published.

If the gatekeeper in the Obama campaign does not want a certain quote to get out, the American people will not see it, and the same thing applies to the Romney campaign. The goal is to keep the campaigns as "on message" as possible and to avoid gaffes at all cost. But this kind of thing is not just happening with political campaigns. According to the New York Times, "quote approval" has become "commonplace throughout Washington".

In other words, if you see a quote in the newspaper from someone in the federal government then it is safe to say that a gatekeeper has almost certainly reviewed that quote and has approved it. This is another sign that "the free and independent media" in this country is a joke. What we get from the mainstream media is a very highly filtered form of propaganda, and that is one reason why Americans are turning away from the mainstream media in droves. People want the truth, and more Americans than ever realize that they are not getting it from the mainstream media.

The following quote comes from the recent article in the New York Times mentioned above and it is absolutely jaw dropping....

The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative.

They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name.

Most reporters, desperate to pick the brains of the president's top strategists, grudgingly agree. After the interviews, they review their notes, check their tape recorders and send in the juiciest sound bites for review.

The verdict from the campaign - an operation that prides itself on staying consistently on script - is often no, Barack Obama does not approve this message.

This is an article that everyone needs to read. If you have not read it yet, you can find it right here.

The intensity and sweep of the Food and Drug Administration's efforts to spy on the communications of whistle-blowing employees suspected of leaking trade secrets to outsiders were astonishing. What started as an effort to monitor the e-mails of a single individual quickly grew to encompass five employees and their communications with other F.D.A. workers, journalists, Congressional staff members and two government offices that investigate allegations raised by whistle-blowers on what is supposed to be a confidential basis.

The surveillance began on April 22, 2010, after GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric, requested an investigation of how information that it considered a trade secret had ended up in The New York Times on March 29, 2010. That article focused primarily on allegations about unwarranted radiation risks posed by a CT machine made by General Electric to screen patients for colon cancer; it quoted two of the whistle-blowers who would later come under surveillance and be let go.

During Occupy Wall Street protests New York police officers obstructed news reporters and legal observers, conducted frequent surveillance, wrongly limited public gatherings and enforced arbitrary rules, a group of lawyers said in a lengthy report issued on Wednesday.

The group, called the Protest and Assembly Rights Project, which included people involved with the law clinics at New York University School of Law and Fordham Law School, said that they had cataloged hundreds of instances of what they described as excessive force and other forms of police misconduct said to have taken place since September, when the Occupy Wall Street movement began.

Although the report referred to some well-known events, including Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna's use of pepper spray, it also detailed specific instances of alleged misconduct that had not appeared in news reports.

The US military is being used to protect civilian events, like the 2012 Democratic and Republican Party National Conventions in Tampa, Florida and Charlotte, North Carolina.

USNORTHCOM and Leon Panetta, US Secretary of Defense, has readily admitted that US armed forces will collaborate with local law enforcement "if called upon".

In fact, more than 20,000 troops were brought home and readied for deployment within the US to assist in "civil unrest and crowd control".

The US military will prop up the US Secret Service "for operational security reasons we do not discuss the numbers of military personnel and resources that are involved. Additionally, we do not share our operational plans," said U.S. Navy Lt. Cdr. William G. Lewis.

The extent of use of military forces on civilian matters, as reported by mainstream media (MSM) have included the reallocation of hundreds of military police officers being trained to "assist local authorities" in investigation, crime scene and case building.