Oblivion

Oblivion

Cogburn

Cogburn

John Mark Deutch (born July 27, 1938 ) is an American chemist and civil servant. He was the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1995 and Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from May 10, 1995 until December 14, 1996. He is presently an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves on the Board of Directors of Citigroup, Cummins, Raytheon, and Schlumberger Ltd. Deutch is also a member of the Trilateral Commission.

Nora Slatkin’s Experience

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Cogburn

skunk

mur

Cogburn

Oblivion

Originally Posted by Cogburn Hahah Bliv... nice avatar. People will think we planned it.

Oblivion

Originally Posted by Cogburn Hate to do this to you now, but here's the whole thing in one Google video.

skunk

skunk

Cogburn

Pam

mur

Originally Posted by Pam This was a really good watch! I don't understand how this information doesn't make it out to the masses.

Pam

Originally Posted by mur It's a truth people don't want to hear or believe

Oblivion

Pam

Originally Posted by Oblivion my wife, she would walk past and see it out the corner of her eye and already label it as shit by what she says... "whats that your watching, some conspiracy shit again?" not even the slightest bit of clue what its about, but already in denial.... sad really.

skunk

Oblivion

skunk

From The Wilderness Publications (1998-2006) archival site. The FTW legacy continues at http://www.mikeruppert.blogspot.com with the best analysis, and compilation of breaking news stories anywhere.

Cogburn

Goldman Sachs, Greece Didn’t Disclose Swap, Investors ‘Fooled’

Feb. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. managed $15 billion of bond sales for Greece after arranging a currency swap that allowed the government to hide the extent of its deficit.

No mention was made of the swap in sales documents for the securities in at least six of the 10 sales the bank arranged for Greece since the transaction, according to a review of the prospectuses by Bloomberg. The New York-based firm helped Greece raise $1 billion of off-balance-sheet funding in 2002 through the swap, which European Union regulators said they knew nothing about until recent days.

Failing to disclose the swap may have allowed Goldman, a co-lead manager on many of the sales, other underwriters and Greece to get a better price for the securities, said Bill Blain, co-head of fixed income at Matrix Corporate Capital LLP, a London-based broker and fund manager.

“The price of bonds should reflect the reality of Greece’s finances,” Blain said. “If a bank was selling them to investors on the basis of publicly available information, and they were aware that information was incorrect, then investors have been fooled.”

Michael DuVally, a spokesman at Goldman Sachs in New York, declined to comment.

Legal ‘At the Time’

Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s most profitable securities firm, is being criticized by European politicians including Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats, who have questioned whether the firm helped Greece hide its deficit to comply with the currency’s membership criteria. Greece is also being faulted by fellow euro-region countries for failing to disclose the swaps to EU regulators.

The swaps used by Greece to manage debt were “at the time legal,” Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said on Feb. 15. The government doesn’t use the swaps now, he said.

Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, this week ordered Greece to hand over information on the swaps transactions by the end of this week in an investigation that may extend to other EU countries.

Goldman Sachs earned about 735 million euros ($1 billion) underwriting Greek government bonds since 2002, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Goldman Sachs underwrote 10 bond sales. Prospectuses for six of them, obtained by Bloomberg, contain no mention of the swaps. The other four couldn’t be obtained.

‘Fear the Worst’

The yield on Greek 10-year government bonds jumped to as much as 7.2 percent on Jan. 28 amid the worst crisis in the euro’s 11-year history. The premium, or spread, investors demand to hold Greek 10-year notes instead of German bunds, Europe’s benchmark government securities, widened yesterday by 18 basis points to 323 basis points.

The spread reached 396 basis points last month, the most since the year before the euro’s debut in 1999, compared with an average of 57 basis points in the past decade. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.

“When people start to fear that the numbers aren’t accurate, they fear the worst,” said Simon Johnson, a former International Monetary Fund chief economist who is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

No ‘Smoking Gun’

Goldman could face legal liability “if it could be established that they were knowingly hiding risk, and therefore knew or had reason to know that the bond disclosure documents were misleading,” said Thomas Hazen, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But that would be a tough hill to climb, in terms of burden of proof. There’d have to be some sort of smoking-gun memo.”

The swap enabled Greece to improve its budget and deficit and meet a target needed to remain within the region’s single currency. Knowledge of their existence may have changed investors’ perception of the risk associated with Greece, and the price they may have been willing to pay for the country’s securities.

“From what we know, this is an egregious example of a conflict of interest” for Goldman Sachs, MIT’s Johnson said. “Even if the deal had been authorized, it doesn’t let them off the hook.”

A Greek government inquiry this month identified a series of swaps agreements with securities firms that allowed the country to hide its mounting deficit. Greece used the swaps to defer interest payments, causing “long-term damage” to the Greek state, according to the Feb. 1 document, commissioned by the Finance Ministry.

Cross-Currency Swap

European Union officials said this week they only recently became aware of the transaction with Goldman. The swaps don’t necessarily break EU rules, European Commission spokesman Amadeu Altafaj told reporters in Brussels on Feb. 15.

The transaction with Goldman consisted of a cross-currency swap of about $10 billion of debt issued by Greece in dollars and yen, according to Christoforos Sardelis, head of Greece’s Public Debt Management Agency at the time.

That was swapped into euros using a historical exchange rate, a mechanism that implied a reduction in debt and generated about $1 billion in an up-front payment from Goldman to Greece, Sardelis said. He declined to give specifics on how the swap affected the country’s deficit or debt.

European politicians such as Luxembourg Treasury Minister Jean-Claude Juncker this week criticized Goldman Sachs for arranging the Greek swap and are pressing the firm and Greece for more disclosure. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats aim to push for new rules that will force euro-region nations and banks to disclose bond swaps that have an impact on public finances, financial affairs spokesman Michael Meister said.

“Investment banks are guilty of being part of a wider collusion that fudged the numbers to make the euro look like a working currency union,” said Matrix’s Blain. “The bottom line is foreign exchange and bond investors bought something sellers knew not to be the case.”

mur

Originally Posted by Cogburn CIA infused Goldman Sachs? What a surprise.

Cogburn

Originally Posted by mur CIA? What makes you say that? I didn't see any reference

Shadow Elite: The Spy Who Came in From... Wall Street?

During the Cold War, we took it for granted that officers of the Central Intelligence Agency worked solely for the good of the USA -- or at least their version of the good. They were loyal first, last, and always only to one institution, the CIA. Americans assumed that they had one boss, and one boss alone: the CIA director. But this week came a revelation that shakes that longstanding belief to the core. Today, CIA officers are allowed to moonlight, and ply their espionage skills elsewhere in their free time.

I wish I could say this was a stunning revelation, but it is not. It is just the sort of dilution of loyalty, authority, and the government's "brain" that enables the top players of power and influence -- the shadow elite -- to serve their own agendas, rather than the public's, as they move seamlessly across government, business, think tank, and media organizations. In my new book Shadow Elite, I argue that this trend threatens our democracy, and often, even our security.

Here is what is detailed by reporter Eamon Javers, in his new book Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage. And it reads like a bit of farce from a John Le Carre novel, recast to 21st century Wall Street. Some active duty CIA officers, Javers reports, have been on the payroll of a company called BIA (deliberately named to resemble the CIA). For BIA, they reportedly practice "deception detection" to aid Wall Street companies and hedge funds in their business transactions. Like the TV series, "Lie To Me", in which a psychologist analyzes facial, body, and vocal expressions to ferret out who's lying and who's not in criminal investigations, these officers use their CIA training to read the cues that CEO's and market analysts unwittingly send off. They help clients, including Goldman Sachs, figure out if other executives are on the up-and-up when they tout the health of their company. It conjures up an absurd image of an elite, precision-trained spy, sitting and watching and scrutinizing.... business news on CNBC.

Not surprisingly, the CIA isn't saying how many of its officers moonlight or how long they've been doing it, but they insist that stringent safeguards are in place. Members of the House Intelligence Committee in a hearing Wednesday demanded a full review, and Sen. Diane Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is looking into it as well.

This case, involving moonlighting, multiple roles, and potentially divided loyalties within an agency whose mission is to protect Americans, points toward a disturbing trend I examine in Shadow Elite: power brokers and supposed public servants, with a multiplicity of ever-fluid involvements that lack traditional checks and balances, moving themselves, their connections, and their expertise through government, business, media, and think-tank organizations.

This trend can endanger democracy and the national interest. As in the CIA/BIA case, the danger often begins with the contracting out of official information and expertise -- "Is government outsourcing its brain?" an article in the Wall Street Journal asked -- and thus whether government is capable of minding the store. The widespread draining of official government is depriving it of crucial in-house expertise and institutional memory. But there is an even more disturbing implication. As players blend and blur their roles across organizations, the boundaries and purposes of those organizations also blend and blur. What are we to make of the BIA? Is it an offshoot of the CIA? As they trundle back and forth between Wall Street and Washington, does the information the CIA officers glean in one venue seep into the other?

Unfortunately, there are plenty of recent examples of dangers to democracy that arise when government and business intertwine, and loyalties are blowing in the wind.

One of these is the "SWIFT" case, in which a private company, given "government" access to sensitive, private data about U.S. citizens and other countries, not only worked alongside government to analyze the data, but then also (supposedly) oversaw the process.

Following 9/11, one government surveillance program tracked money flowing into and out of the U.S., transactions abroad and, in a small portion of cases, financial transactions within the U.S. SWIFT takes its name from the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, a "member-owned cooperative" that processes international financial transactions. Through SWIFT, the U.S. Treasury Department sought and gained access to large numbers of financial and communication records.

Treasury then established the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, run out of the CIA, to analyze the SWIFT data and later shared it with the CIA and FBI. It also hired Booz Allen Hamilton (whose majority owner is the Carlyle Group), now as an "independent" auditor, which, along with SWIFT, reviewed Treasury's logs of information searches. When the surveillance program was exposed amid controversy in 2006, a key question was how Booz Allen could be impartial given its record as a government contractor and the close ties of its executives to high government officials, and considering the fact that some of these executives are themselves one-time intelligence officials. As Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project, put it:

"It is bad enough that the administration is trying to hold out a private company as a substitute for genuine checks and balances on its surveillance activities. But of all companies to perform audits on a secret surveillance program, it would be difficult to find one less objective and more intertwined with the U.S. government security establishment."

Both the SWIFT and the CIA moonlighting episodes remind us that even more than in the novels of John Le Carre, a master of complexity himself, the machinations of today's players and entities are difficult to track and pin down. Le Carre has written that mixed loyalties can sometimes provide clarity, once writing, "the more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal." I don't buy it when it comes to the world of power and influence. In our new world of shadow elite, the more professional roles players have and the more venues in which they operate, the less we typically know about their motives and agendas. It might be serving them quite well, but it's unlikely they are serving the American people or the ideals of democracy and accountability.

****
Arianna Huffington has asked me to bring you an ongoing column based on my book, Shadow Elite, which exposes the new breed of power brokers who are a bit like the public policy equivalent of sci-fi shape-shifters. I call them flexians, people I've targeted in previous posts like Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Tom Daschle, and Barry McCaffrey, who cycle through identities and venues of power, both government and corporate, advancing their own personal agendas and those of their associates, not you, or the government agencies flexians are paid to serve, with your tax dollars.

Today's players are more dangerous and insidious to democracy than the power brokers who came before them. More peripatetic, they move seamlessly among public, corporate, think tank, and media organizations, and are more difficult to detect and less transparent. They cross borders and boundaries in areas of finance, health care, the economy, and the military, among others. They defy all the old standards of accountability. I plan to ferret out the shadow elite, their enablers, and the developments that encourage them, with, I hope, your help.

It all began in January when Arianna named Shadow Elite the First HuffPost Book Club Pick of 2010. In my ongoing blog, I'll continue to share my observations and also enlist contributions from other experts who see flexians and flex nets (exclusive networks of flexians) -- that is, the shadow elite -- as they perform overlapping, not-fully-revealed, roles to push their own agendas in crucial power arenas, with often disastrous results. The consequences can be seen on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan or the boardrooms of a collapsing Wall Street.

I also invite readers to serve as truth-tellers as well, using this space to share arguments, comments, and ideas about the shadow elite. A special thanks to everyone who already has posted and shared online. As much as possible, my plan is to post weekly, or on another day when news breaks. Linda Keenan, a former CNN producer and HuffPost blogger, has kindly agreed to edit and help with the blog.

Cogburn

CIA moonlighting to be investigated

The intelligence community will send a report to Congress examining policies that allow employees to moonlight in the private sector for extra cash, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told a congressional panel Wednesday.

"I'll make sure that we get a report to you," Blair said under questioning from Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) during a House Intelligence Committee hearing.

In an excerpt from his book "Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage," POLITICO's Eamon Javers revealed that CIA employees had worked for a consulting firm on behalf of hedge funds and a financial firm to apply sophisticated deception detection techniques to investment and management practices of those companies.

"I think that the reports that have come out in the last couple of days, I find them disturbing. I really find them disturbing," Eshoo said of the moonlighting policy.

"I think we need to have a full review of it. I think there is a real potential for conflict, so I think we need to know," she said. "It sounded more like fiction to me than fact, and that's why I raise it."

Blair said the reports surprised him. "Sometimes I too am surprised about what I read in the press about my own organization, I will tell you," Blair said.

He said some staff in the DNI's office teach at nearby universities, a trend he backs.

House Intelligence Committee staff are looking at the policy. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein has said she intends to ask questions about the policy and that her committee is looking into it.



Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories...#ixzz0fpG6jFmr

Cogburn

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mur

Cogburn

Cogburn

guinnessford

skunk

Originally Posted by Cogburn http://amkon.net/economic-meltdown-t...tml#post346778 Cross pollination from the Economic Meltdown thread linking the CIA via BIA to every single recipient of TARP funds.

guinnessford

Oblivion

Originally Posted by guinnessford cool, bliv. im glad you found some ruppert stuff, ive always like the things he has to say. him and his "people" have had a fairly good track record of predicting what has been coming, and without too much sensationalst doom to go along with it. think thats why i like his froim the wilderness site, its a little more down to earth than some others.

Cogburn

skunk

Originally Posted by guinnessford skunk, if i remember right, at the end of collapse mike was living in culver city ca., and was "not sure if he was going to make his rent" this month. i may be wrong though. i had looked all over for where he was last year, if you remember my ruppert thread, and he had gone to portland or, l.a., then south america and was in bad health. think he rebounded from the health issues, and wouldnt be surprised if he was poisoned.

Oblivion

Originally Posted by guinnessford skunk, if i remember right, at the end of collapse mike was living in culver city ca., and was "not sure if he was going to make his rent" this month. i may be wrong though.

guinnessford

Ethereal_Resonance

theeindiee

Ethereal_Resonance

Oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz account for roughly 40% of all world traded oil, and the 17 MMBD or more of oil that normally are shipped through the Strait of Hormuz goes eastwards to Asia (especially Japan, China, and India) and westwards (via the Suez Canal, the Sumed pipeline). Any closure of the Strait of Hormuz would require use of longer alternate routes. Such routes are now limited to the approximately 5-million-bbl/d- capacity East-West Pipeline across Saudi Arabia to the port of Yanbu, and the Abqaiq- Yanbu natural gas liquids line across Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea, although the GCC seems to have agreed to construct a new strategic pipeline through Oman to a port on the Gulf of Oman.