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Numerian: The Goldman Sachs Credo - So What if We Lie? It's Nothing Personal, It's Just Business
by Numerian posted by Michael Collins
Reading the SEC allegations against Goldman Sachs and Co., you get the impression the agency would prefer a simple world where you could charge a company with lying and be done with it. Lying to one’s clients is at the core of the suit against Goldman Sachs. Unfortunately there is apparently no law against lying in phone conversations and meetings, but there are laws against fraudulent written representations, and this is the legal foundation on which the SEC is basing its suit.
The meaty stuff in the SEC complaint is to be found in the behavior of Goldman Sachs and its employee who structured the transaction known as ABACUS 2007-AC1. Fabrice Tourre, now age 31, was a vice president on the structured product correlation trading desk. He put together the ABACUS deals and is said in the complaint to have left out pertinent information, or lied altogether, to the firm that helped set up the ABACUS deal and make it sellable to investors. No other Goldman Sachs employee is identified in the suit, and the management on the trading desk or in his department are described only in shadowy terms.
Goldman’s response this week to the suit says that they will defend themselves vigorously (and no doubt with many millions of dollars of legal expense), so they are not throwing Mr. Tourre to the wolves as some rogue trader. This would have been the logical thing to do since the allegations against Mr. Tourre are especially damaging. By embracing and defending him so readily, we therefore have to assume Mr. Tourre’s behavior is emblematic of the Goldman Sachs culture, and how he comported himself is how many others behaved at the firm. This in itself is very revealing about Goldman Sachs and its management.
Global Peace and Justice Groups Threaten Israel's Legitimacy
by Stephen Lendman
Working pro bono for Israeli government agencies, the Tel Aviv-based Reut Institute (RI) provides "real-time strategic decision-making" support in areas of national security and socioeconomic policy.
Saying global peace and justice groups threaten Israel's legitimacy, its recent series of articles, policy papers, and presentations counterattacked - a combination of damage control and rethink despite legitimate criticism showing Israel delegitimizes itself, and no amount of policy paper makeover will change it. Only Israel can do that, but in its 62 year existence never tried.
The Right Wing is 'Trawling for Assassins'!
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
Radical right wingers --tea baggers et al --are accused of 'trawling for assassins. It's but one of several outrages now associated with the disingenuous, bigoted 'tea bagger movement'. The idea of 'assassinating' a President because he is both black and Democratic threatens to finish off America as a nation of noble ideals. Earlier the self-absorbed right wing --thinking themselves rich --allowed themselves to be used by a GOP party machine. They were fooled. To them, I say that like the rest of us, you have awakened as a cockroach unless you were one already. A nation in which about one half of the population openly pines for the murder of the only fairly elected president in some 9 years may be finished. It's hard to see any redemption following from that crooked, malevolent mentality. The writing is on the wall. The American ideals most us grew up with are on life-support! It was all by design and began with the Presidency of Ronald Reagan about whom GOP-types swooned: "He made us feel good about ourselves!"
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Not only have the Wall Street Journal and the hosts of Fox News been issuing their usual dark mutterings, but a new slogan has began appearing on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and even teddy bears: "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8."That psalm reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."Maddow seemed mainly amused by the teddy bears, but when she turned for comment to former right-wing evangelical leader Frank Schaeffer, he emphasized that in a religious context "it means something more threatening.""The situation that I find genuinely frightening right now," Schaeffer explained, "is that you have a ramping up of biblical language ... and what it's coalescing into is branding Obama ... as 'not us.' ... Now he joins the ranks of the unjust kings of ancient Israel ... who should be slaughtered, if not by God then by just men."--Former evangelist: Religious right is ‘trawling for assassins’
Israel’s stooges battle for British votes
Stuart Littlewood
We can already see how disastrously the US election turned out, not just for Americans but the rest of us also. “The US president is simply the voice of the Zionist parasite,” writes a friend in Norway. “It is sickening and frightening that Obama is seen toeing the Zionist line.
“Zionism has the US administration and other western governments by the balls.”
Well, that’s certainly the way it looks. Last month Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu slapped America in the face by approving more illegal settlements during vice-president Joe Biden’s visit. What did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton do? She repeated the pathetic mantra: “We have an absolute commitment to Israel’s security. We have a close unshakeable bond between the United States and Israel and between the American and Israeli people”.
The Anatomy of Authentic Leadership
Written by Frederick Alexander Meade
In recent weeks, considerable turmoil has emerged among some elite members of the Civil Rights community.
Publicly aired expressions germinating from PBS’s Tavis Smiley and the National Action Network’s President Rev. Al Sharpton, in which both parties have accused the other of working against the interests of the African-American community in an effort to garner favor from members of the political class - Former President Bill Clinton in relation to Smiley and the current Head of State Barack Obama with respect to Sharpton - have created a stir within many African-American quarters.
Deja Vu: Vanunu, Kamm, Blau and the Fragility of Freedom
eileen fleming
On April 14, 2010, Mordechai Vanunu reported from occupied east Jerusalem, "The restrictions, not to leave the country for one more year renewed. Now 7 years since my release AFTER 18 YEARS in Israel PRISON."
Twenty-four years after the Mossad kidnapped Mordechai Vanunu from Rome after luring him from London, they have returned to track down another who followed his conscience but has been labeled a traitor by the state and a public who view truth tellers as a threat to their sense of security.
Accelerating Fascism in Israel
by Stephen Lendman
Occupied Palestinians and Israeli Arabs never had rights in a state affording them solely to Jews. Now even they're at risk as democratic freedoms fast erode on their way to extinction; to wit, free expression, a right without which all others are endangered. It includes free speech, a free press, freedom of thought, culture, intellectual inquiry, and the right to challenge government authority peacefully, especially in times of war and cases of injustice, lawlessness, incompetence, and abuses of power. Israel has no constitution or specific laws guaranteeing equality or free expression. Yet its Basic Laws protect human dignity and liberty as fundamental democratic values, more rhetoric than fact given its persecution of journalist Anat Kam and Haaretz's national security reporter Uri Blau.
PHILIPPINES: Arrests, Torture and the Presidential Election
James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya
The run-up to presidential elections is a time of heightened state-sponsored repression as Asia’s foremost ‘death squad democracy’ wages war on its progressive rural medical workers.
The notoriously violent and corrupt elections in the Philippines stand in sharp contrast with those in South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Malaysia, where the ruling elites have secured their hegemony via economic prosperity, rising salaries, increased employment and extensive social services for their citizens. In these countries, the elite can abide by the results of a relatively ‘open’ election, whereas in the Philippines, any challenge to the closed, family-based ruling class is met with relentless terror.
Lebensraum in the West Bank
Khaled Amayreh
from Ramallah
Israel's latest scheme is ethnic cleansing by any other name.
In a new provocative measure aimed at narrowing Palestinian horizons and consolidating the Israeli grip on the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel has issued new military orders that would enable the Israeli occupation army to deport thousands of Palestinians from their homes and places of residence in the West Bank.
The new orders define as "infiltrator" any Palestinian or non-Palestinian living in the West Bank but not bearing an Israeli-issued identity card or special permit issued by the Israeli occupation army.
Thus, even Palestinians who were born in the West Bank and have been living there all their lives, but are not in possession of Israeli documents, would be viewed as "infiltrators" who could be deported at a moment's notice.
Next Supreme Court Justice to Solidify Right Wing, Neoliberal Control
by Stephen Lendman
On April 9, Justice John Paul Stevens delivered a letter to President Obama stating:
"Having concluded that it would be in the best interests of the Court to have my successor appointed and confirmed well in advance of the commencement of the Court's next Term, I shall retire from regular active service as an Associate Justice."
NBC anchor Brian Williams called him a "liberal lion," a "lawyer's lawyer." UPI's Michael Kirkland said he led the Court's "four-member liberal bloc." AP's Mark Sherman and Calvin Woodward said he "carved a liberal legacy on the high court." Clinton's acting Solicitor General, Walter Dellinger, called him "the Chief Justice of the Liberal Supreme Court." Writing in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin said he was a "liberal leader (who's) views suggest a sensibility more than a philosophy."
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