Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Police fear far-right terror attack

Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism command fears that right-wing extremists will stage a deadly terrorist attack in Britain to try to stoke racial tensions, the Guardian has learned.

Senior officers say it will be a "spectacular" that is designed to kill. The counter-terrorism unit has redeployed officers to increase its monitoring of the extreme right's potential to stage attacks.

Commander Shaun Sawyer told a meeting of British Muslims concerned about the danger to their communities that police were responding to the growing threat.

Sawyer said of the far right: "I fear that they will have a spectacular... they will carry out an attack that will lead to a loss of life or injury to a community somewhere. They're not choosy about which community."

He said the aim would be to cause a "breakdown in community cohesion".

Sawyer revealed that the Met commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, had asked the counter-terrorism command, SO15, to examine what the economic downturn would mean for far-right violence. The assessment concluded that the recession would increase the possibility of it.

Sawyer told the meeting last Wednesday that more of his officers needed to be deployed to try to thwart neo-Nazi-inspired violence. He said the terrorist threat posed by al-Qaida remained the unit's priority, but said of its far-right section: "It is a small desk ... we need to grow that unit." Sources have told the Guardian that while they believe the neo-Nazi terrorist threat has grown, they have no specific intelligence of an attack.

"There is an increased possibility of violence from the far right. There is a trend," said one senior source, adding that the ideology of the violent right was driven by "people who don't like immigration, people who don't like Islam. We're seeing a resurgence of anti-semitism as well."

The meeting at which Sawyer spoke was staged by the Muslim Safety Forum, whose chair, Abdurahman Jafar, said: "Muslims are the first line of victims in the extreme right's campaign of hate and division and they make no secret about that. Statistics show a strong correlation between the rise of racist and Islamophobic hate crime and the ascendancy of the BNP."

It is a decade since an extreme rightwing terrorist has used bombs to claim lives in Britain. In 1999, David Copeland struck three targets in London. His attack on a gay pub in Soho, London, killed three people and left scores injured. It followed attacks against the Muslim community in Brick Lane, east London, and the bombing of a market in Brixton, south London.

The senior source said: "When Copeland attacked we did not have the religious tensions with the Muslim community. What kind of schism would a Copeland-type event cause now?"

The far-right threat to Britain's Jewish communities is monitored by the Community Security Trust, which says attempted terrorist violence by neo-Nazis has increased in the past few years. It says nine white men have been "convicted of offences involving explosives, terrorist plots, violent campaigns or threats to carry them out".

David Rich, of the CST, said: "There's no one directing people, it's a mindset" – a reference to the easy availability of extremist right-wing material and information about making bombs.

Gerald Celente - Predicts Panic ‘08

Check this link .......... http://revolutionarypolitics.com/?p=1486

Proof of the New World Order in under 11 minutes

Check this link ......... http://revolutionarypolitics.com/?p=1494

Like His Father, Ron Paul's Kentucky Son Raises Cash Online

A possible bid for the 2010 Republican Senate nomination in Kentucky certainly won't enable eye surgeon Rand Paul to rake in the mega-millions in campaign donations procured by his much better-known father -- Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul -- when he campaigned for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination on his strongly libertarian-tinged platform.

But the younger Paul, a first-time candidate for public office, has taken a page from his father's playbook by going online to build up the treasury for the "exploratory" Senate campaign committee he established in May. And he pronounces himself pleased with the fact that his receipts topped $100,000 in a little more than a month.

Paul's organization said it hasn't held any fundraising events, instead collecting mostly small contributions "from over 1,200 regular people who nickle and dimed their way to an impressive showing" in advance of the candidate's fundraising report for the year's second quarter, which is due to be filed by July 15.

Paul is laying the groundwork for a Senate campaign in the event that two-term Republican incumbent Jim Bunning does not seek re-election. Trey Grayson, Kentucky's secretary of state, also has formed an exploratory committee but says he would step aside and not challenge Bunning in a GOP primary.

Bunning's re-electability is one of the biggest concerns for Republican strategists heading into the 2010 campaign. A narrow winner in both 1998 and 2004, Bunning has unusually low job approval ratings -- in part because of his reputation for having an abrasive personality that puts off even some fellow Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader (and fellow Kentuckian) Mitch McConnell.

But the 77-year-old incumbent, who had a Hall of Fame career as a major league baseball pitcher, thus far has rejected suggestions by some leading Republicans that it may be time for him to retire.

Bunning's political problems have prompted national Democratic strategists to target the 2010 Kentucky race, and two of the state's most prominent Democrats -- state Attorney General Jack Conway and Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo -- have launched campaigns for their party's Senate nomination. Mongiardo, as a little-known state senator, came within just more than 1 percentage point of upsetting Bunning as the 2004 Democratic nominee.

CQ Politics currently rates the 2010 Kentucky Senate general election as Tossup.

To see how the 2010 Senate races are shaping up, check out the CQ Politics' election map.

Military guinea pigs


Was One "Rogue Banker" Really to Blame for Oil's Recent Spike?

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If you ask the Financial Times, one "rogue banker" is to blame for the recent spike in oil prices. Ask others and all fingers point to Goldman Sachs (as reported here April 10, 2009, the story of Semgroup is an interesting one, perhaps FT would do itself well to acquaint itself with that particular tale?)

Via FT:

The startling spike in oil prices to their highest level this year on Tuesday was caused by a rogue broker who placed a massive bet in the Brent oil market, triggering almost $10m (€7m) of losses for his company.

PVM Oil Associates, the world’s largest over-the-counter oil brokerage, said on Thursday it had been the “victim of unauthorised trading”. The privately owned company said that as a result of the unauthorised trades it had been forced to close substantial volumes of futures contracts at a loss.

This is the second episode of rogue trading in the oil market this year. In May, an oil trader at Morgan Stanley was banned by the City watchdog after he hid from his bosses potential losses on trades made under the influence of alcohol.

bwhahahahahahahahahahaha. You know, if I were elbowed up against the Goldman boys trying to squeeze a few pennies a barrel, I'd probably be a raging drunk too. Anyway, we are revisiting Forbes on the master manipulation (*cough* sorry, I mean alleged misdeeds *cough*) here for your reading pleasure (refreshing your memory and all):

When oil prices spiked last summer to $147 a barrel, the biggest corporate casualty was oil pipeline giant Semgroup Holdings, a $14 billion (sales) private firm in Tulsa, Okla. It had racked up $2.4 billion in trading losses betting that oil prices would go down, including $290 million in accounts personally managed by then chief executive Thomas Kivisto. Its short positions amounted to the equivalent of 20% of the nation's crude oil inventories. With the credit crunch eliminating any hope of meeting a $500 million margin call, Semgroup filed for bankruptcy on July 22.

The $500 billion is how much the world would have overpaid for crude had a successful scam pushed up oil prices by $50 a barrel for 100 days.

What's the evidence of this? Much is circumstantial. Proving oil-trading manipulation is difficult. But numerous people familiar with the events insist that Citibank, Merrill Lynch and especially Goldman Sachs had knowledge about Semgroup's trading positions from their vetting of an ill-fated $1.5 billion private placement deal last spring. "Nothing's been proven, but if somebody has your book and knows every trade, it would not be difficult to bet against that book and put the company into a tremendous liquidity squeeze," says John Tucker, who is representing Kivisto.

I believe I have pointed this out before but Goldman's days are numbered at the top of the investment banking food chain, if not already seriously compromised.

Read the full article - click here

Internet filter danger

REMEMBER the images of German soldiers marching through the Arc de Triomphe after conquering Paris during World War II?

Or those grainy black-and-white photographs from May 1933 when the Nazis embarked on their campaign of burning all books considered to be subversive?

Do you recall the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984? Perhaps the burning books in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451?

Welcome to Australia in the 21st century, where totalitarian history meets science-fiction and dark political satire.

Welcome to the Rudd Government's internet filter.

Like most authoritarian pogroms, the internet filter is being sold as a measure to protect the greater communal well-being.

A quick recap: Australia's "Minister for Truth", Stephen Conroy, has claimed the filter will help stamp out child pornography, protecting the young and vulnerable from accessing inappropriate online material.

This will result in the internet being filtered at two levels. Firstly, all internet service providers will be required to block sites deemed unsuitable for children (hopefully this includes reruns of The Simpsons but that's a column for another day).

Anyway, we can opt out of this kiddie filter if we contact our ISP. What we can't opt out of, however, is the second-level filter that blocks all sites deemed illegal or unsuitable for adults to view.

This was sold as an attempt to free Australia from the scourges of child pornography, terrorism and so forth.

The great logical fallacy of that argument is that those who trade in child porn or bombmaking recipes don't do so in the public domain but swap their information on obscure message boards or by way of peer-to-peer file-sharing sites.

And what is terrorism? Is it a bunch of activists organising a demonstration against an OECD meeting, for example?

None of this can be blocked without effectively shutting down the entire internet to all but the likes of the ABC Kids webpage or official government websites.

So what will be caught?

Given that the Government has taken a leaf out of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbel's book and decreed the list of blocked sites will remain secret, we only have a broad indication of what we are to be protected from. Initially, it was to be material that would be refused classification by Australian censors: largely banned films and imagery of an explicit sexual and/or violent nature.

It also is likely to include a lot of milder X-rated material: what we married and consenting adults do in the privacy of our own homes, or in fact what various state governments sanction and tax through the licensing of legal brothels.

There are brothels in Brisbane, for example, that legally offer fairly mild dungeon and dominatrix fantasies that, if filmed, would be banned from ever being released on disk, even under our existing X-category. Go figure.

Sex aside, though, the nanny net also will include computer games.

Australia bans the sale of all computer games that attract anything higher than an MA 15+ rating.

Any game that might attract an R rating is banned from sale or must be heavily censored.

But computer gamers don't just buy a disc to slip into their PlayStation. They often participate in multi-player online games such as World of Warcraft.

These aren't rated and may well fall foul if there is a complaint of our new net nanny regime. If in doubt, ban it. Where will it end?

As internet freedom advocacy group Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesman Colin Jacobs was recently reported as saying: "This is confirmation that the scope of the mandatory censorship scheme will keep on creeping.

"Far from being the ultimate weapon against child abuse, it now will officially censor content deemed too controversial for a 15-year-old."

The office of Stephen Conroy also confirmed that online retail sites, which offer games refused classification in Australia because they fall into the restricted category, also could be blocked.

Hello? Is there anybody out there?

Wouldn't that include the likes of Amazon and eBay?

Right now, I could log on to Amazon and order copies of banned computer games such as Fallout 3 or Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, which was banned because it allegedly promoted graffiti art.

And what of banned or unclassified films?

Lets go to Amazon again and see if we can buy the likes of Pasolini's (banned) classic tale of fascism and mass human debasement Salo, the banned uncut version of Caligula, or perhaps even more confronting material such as Jorg Buttgereit's Nekromantik or Fred Vogel's August Underground.

Check, check, check and check again. Better block Amazon and every other online retailer on the planet that sells game and film titles refused classification.

Oh, and also block the likes of YouTube, which carries clips from these banned films and games.

And don't forget to block access to the thousands of movie and gaming forums that also discuss, and host sequences of, films and games that are forbidden here.

It's idiocy. Offer, and that means offer not impose, filtering for children's net use by all means but let adults decide for themselves what they want to watch, play and talk about, or buy online.

If this draconian madness of the internet filter comes to pass, I promise to publish whatever I can when it comes to ways of circumventing it.

And if that is deemed illegal, then just email me and we'll conduct the resistance by other means.

中國‧烏魯木齊暴亂140人死828傷‧新疆政府斥境外煽動

(烏魯木齊市)新疆自治區政府週一(7月6日)形容烏魯木齊週日(7月5日)發生的暴亂,是由境外遙控的一起“有預謀和有組織的打砸搶燒事件”。

140人死、828受傷

新疆維吾爾自治區黨委、政府在週一中午舉行的新聞發佈會上通報,這起騷亂已造成至少140人死亡,828人受傷,並警告傷亡人數還將“持續攀升”。

同時,有216輛車遭縱火焚毀,損毀商鋪203間、損毀民房住宅14間。

捕數百名參與暴動者

新疆公安表示,當局逮捕了“數百名”涉案人士。

根據最新報導,烏魯木齊秩序已基本恢復,市區絕大多數路障已經清除,但機場及市內保安明顯加

新疆公安廳表示,警方已拘捕數百名參與暴動者,包括10多名煽動暴動的核心人物,目前警方仍在搜索另外約90人。

新華社報導,事發在週日晚8時左右,烏魯木齊市多處地點有維吾爾族示威者上街,打砸搶燒、襲擊途人、放火燒車、破壞馬路圍欄、擾亂交通,當地政府調集了警力,驅散、抓捕鬧事者,平息事件。

矛頭直指新疆富熱比婭

自治區主席努爾白克力隨即在凌晨發表電視講話時,把矛頭直指向新疆女首富熱比婭為首的“世界維吾爾代表大會”。

他聲稱這是一起“典型的由境外指揮,境內行動,有預謀和有組織的打砸搶燒事件”。

他表示,烏市騷亂涉及6月在廣東韶關發生造成2名新疆員工死亡,120人受傷的港廠糾紛。事發後,境外支持恐怖、分裂和極端主義份子大肆炒作,借機攻擊中國,煽動上街遊行示威。

烏魯木齊有酒店職員說,人民廣場一帶有戒嚴,不給車輛駛入,衝突後武警都高度戒備。

新疆暴力事件頻仍
漢維兩族矛盾加劇

中共建政以來,漢族和維吾爾族的民族矛盾就一直存在,且有日趨加劇的跡象,這由去年新疆先後發生多宗暴力衝突事件,可見端倪。

中國研究新疆問題學者王力雄認為,中共如對新疆民族問題處理不當,將引發更多的暴力事件。

新疆民族問題一直困擾中共當局,特別是當地的“三股勢力”(即恐怖主義、分裂主義和極端主義)更被中共視為心腹大患。

過去10年,為打擊“三股勢力”,中國政府已投入巨資裝備武警、最近更將新疆武警總隊由一般省區的副軍級升為正軍級,但當地的暴力衝突事件至今未見平息。

而新疆公安廳新聞發言人李莉早前曾表示,今年新疆維穩形勢依然嚴峻,支持疆獨的東突恐怖勢力仍在積極策劃實施新的破壞活動。新疆將繼續加大防範力度,依法嚴厲打擊各種形式的恐怖活動,確保新疆社會穩定。

世維會指軍隊開鎗鎮壓
“當局圖轉移焦點”

旅居歐洲的世界維吾爾代表大會發言人迪里夏提說,當局把維族人的和平示威請願定性為打砸搶,還進行暴力鎮壓,無非是想轉移焦點,掩飾長期以來在新疆推行壓制政策、造成維族人普遍受到歧視的事實。

他並指責中國軍隊開鎗鎮壓導致大量傷亡。

他說:“當局出動50多輛軍車和軍人,包圍了抗議者,開始毆打他們,甚至有軍人進行開鎗掃射。從不同渠道取的資訊表明,有大量人員傷亡。有上百示威群眾遭到逮捕。”

他強調:“週日(7月5日)深夜,當局在烏魯木齊市展開了大搜捕,挨家挨戶搜查參加示威遊行的人。這些參加抗議示威遊行的人,來自烏魯木齊市區不同地方和街道,都是自發而來的。”

迪里夏提表示,當局應釋放被捕的維吾爾人,就死亡人數和真相,作出一個令人信服的交代。

維人抗議遊行爆發衝突

上消息表示,週日(7月5日)下午5時左右,部份維吾爾人展開“反對民族歧視、民族破壞及民族仇殺”的和平抗議遊行。

有目擊者說,在行經二道橋市場時,有維族人士與漢族群發生口角進而爆發衝突,維人四處破壞,見人就打見車就砸,將市內的車輛掀翻,並放火燒車,導致現場冒起滾滾濃煙。

目擊者稱,示威者最多時達萬人,“他們個個情緒激動,看樣子挺兇”。

由於今年為中共建政60週年,新疆再度鬧事,引起中央關注。當局隨即出動大批防暴警察,堵住維人前進路向,勸散無效後,開始以電棍和對空開鎗驅散,並拘捕帶頭示威的維人。

事發後,當地通訊一度中斷,無法對外聯絡。

發生騷亂的二道橋市場位於烏魯木齊市的南部,是一個烏魯木齊最富民族特色的商業圈,而有濃郁民族特色的新疆民街、國際大巴扎位於二道橋商圈內,也是遊客常去的烏魯木齊商業區。

封堵網絡防網民遭煽動

報導稱,烏魯木齊爆發大規模騷亂後,當地互聯網已遭封堵,以防有人透過網路煽動民眾上街。

市內一名姓韓的店舖東主接受路透社電話訪問時表示:“打從週日(7月5日)晚開始,就無法上網了。

一名姓張的手機零售商說:“這裡沒有網了。我的朋友都說,他們沒法子登入。”

此外,境外長途電話據稱也無法接通。

BBC中文網記者試圖從境外與新疆自治區和烏魯木齊市的政府新聞辦公室聯繫,但截至週一(7月6日)下午5時30分仍無法接通。

而新疆自治區政府、烏魯木齊市政府以及烏魯木齊公安局的網站也無法登陸。

新疆通報打砸搶燒發展始末

根據當局通報事件發展始末,新疆烏魯木齊騷亂發展過程可歸納如下:

週日(7月5日)下午5時許

200多人在市內人民廣場聚集,警方依法強行帶離現場70餘名帶頭鬧事者,迅速控制了局面。之後,又有大批人向解放南路、二道橋、山西巷片區等少數民族聚居的地區聚集,並高喊口號,現場秩序混亂。

晚上7時30分許

部份人在山西巷一家醫院門前聚集,人數達上千人。

晚上7時40分許

在人民路、南門一帶,有300餘人堵路,警方及時將他們控制、疏散。

晚上8時18分許

開始出現打砸行為,暴力犯罪份子推翻道路護欄,砸碎3輛公交汽車玻璃。

晚上8時30分許

暴力行為升級,暴力犯罪份子開始在解放南路、龍泉街一帶焚燒警車,毆打過路行人。約有700、800人衝向人民廣場,沿廣場向大小西門一帶有組織游竄,沿途不斷製造打砸搶燒殺事件。

晚上9時許

200餘名維吾爾族青年,在人民廣場自治區常委附近高呼口號,企圖進入常委機關大院未遂後離去。近萬名警力分赴廣場、南門、團結路、賽馬場、新華南路、新疆大學、紅雁池電廠等事態嚴重的地點進行處置。

晚上10時許

大規模打砸搶燒殺得到了基本控制。

暴力犯罪份子開始改策略,分多路、多股行動,製造打砸搶燒殺事件。指揮部迅速調整策略,組織部署前線處置力量,組成小分隊沿市區搜捕打砸搶燒份子,營救被困民眾。

週一(7月6日)凌晨

事態基本得到控制。

新疆近年暴力衝突事件

05/07/2009烏魯木齊發生大規模騷亂事件,傳維族人因與漢族人發生糾紛,至少有140人死亡,逾300人被捕。

10/08/2008疑犯向庫車縣公安局、工商管理所等投擲自製爆炸物,11死5傷、2輛警車損毀。

04/08/20082名男子在喀什發動自殺式襲警,武警16死、16傷。

08/07/2008烏魯木齊警方圍捕“聖戰培訓班”,擊斃5人、傷2人、拘8人。

06/04/2008烏魯木齊警方破獲密謀襲擊奧運的疆獨組織,拘35人,繳9.5公斤炸藥。

07/03/2008疆獨女子在飛北京客機上企圖引爆汽油彈,被機組人員制服。

27/01/2008軍警圍捕疆獨組織,遭扔手榴彈反抗,7名公安受傷。

11/01/2008警方圍捕“東伊運”成員,拘10人、繳100公斤炸藥及“聖戰”培訓資料。

我遇上了新疆暴動

“海外華文媒體新疆考察團”的行程原本十分順利,卻在即將結束前遇上了烏魯木齊暴動事件,使得們在新疆的最後一天節目完全了調。

暴動發生時,我們一行人並不在烏魯木齊,而是在新疆南部的庫爾勒。團員們從電視上得知消息後,都十分關注情況,然而暴動後全新疆的互聯和國際電話網絡都被封鎖,根本無法與國外聯繫。

我們一行在庫爾勒的行程只有短短一天,儘管烏魯木齊發生暴動,我們還是得趕回烏魯木齊,以便能夠從那裡轉機到北京或其他中國城市。

在抵達烏魯木齊後,我們被告知局勢已經平靜。我們看到市民照常生活、工作、上學。除了前一晚發生暴動的維吾爾族聚居區和附近一帶的老城區,已經被警方封鎖,其他地區基本上看不出曾經發生重大事故的跡象,只是街道上比之前幾天多了警察站崗,維持交通。

暴動區部署重重警力

自治區政府在暴動地區部署了重重警力,每一道路口都有武警站崗,任何人都不得逾越雷池一步。

我們一行人在抵達烏魯木齊後。即被安排參與採訪新疆自治區政府的新聞發佈會。許多國內外媒體的記者已經趕在7月6日早上飛到烏魯木齊。新疆政府特在人民廣場對面的酒店設立新聞中心,方便集中向國內外媒體發佈最新和準確的消息。

發佈會上,自治區的書記和宣傳部長向記者會報告了暴動的經過和死傷數字,並播放了長達10分鐘的暴動現場短片。讓各大媒體記者更瞭解當時的情況。

發佈會後,當局安排了多輛小客車在警方的開路下載記 者前往暴動地區實地察看情況。“海外華文媒體新疆考察團”當然也不放過機會,登上了我們的旅巴跟隨大隊前往。唯旅巴體積大,起動力小,不像小客車般能隨警 車飛速行駛,加上司機沒有實戰的經驗,我們最終落單了。我們都知道沒有隨著警車和政府車輛,我們是沒辦法進入封鎖地區的,這可急壞了我們,甚至有團員在車 上吆喝著司機違規駕駛以便趕上大隊,上演了一場可謂“驚心動魄”的市區飛車,最終還是功虧一簣。

現場感受暴動嚴重性

後來我們的領隊,即中國新聞社的主管決定換小車,一行十多人兵分兩路,希望能夠“闖入”封鎖 區,但是沒有警方開路,我們根本無法進入,幾經交涉,警方也不放行。中新社主管幾經曲折終於和政府當局負責人聯繫上,我們在暴動中被燒毀的車輛集中處跟上 了大隊,而我們也得以登上當局的小客車,參與採訪。在此處我們看見了許多在暴動中被燒成廢鐵的巴士和私家車,第一次感受到了暴動的嚴重性。

我們已經錯過了暴動現場的情況,我們還是在前往第3個採訪點──醫院的途中看到了暴動後景像,有許多商店被砸,窗戶都被打破了,也有被縱火的痕跡;一些被燒毀的汽車仍被遺棄在路邊,街道上佈滿了警察和武裝人員。

維族人罵警方被鎮壓

我們看見還是有少數維吾爾族人對警方破口大罵,甚至起了小爭執,不過他們很快的就被鎮壓了下來。我們也看見街道上有三三兩兩的維族人,老的少的,也有婦,在觀望著街道上的情況,他們心裡想甚麼,我們並不知道。記者群中甚至有人說,這些維族人當中,肯定有人參與了前一晚的暴動。而我也發現記者群中有很多都對維族人的暴行感到不滿。此外,我也感覺到漢族民眾基本上對維吾爾族也存有不滿。

在醫院,由於床位不足,傷者都被安置在走廊。其中有一個接受採訪的漢族傷者,頭被打破了。他告 訴記者,他是騎腳車前往朋友家途中,無端的被暴徒打傷了。而院方告訴記者,有一位漢族老太太抱著孫子經過此處,結果婆孫倆被石頭擊中。院方也說,一些傷者 甚至是重傷者在當晚不敢前來醫院,待局勢平靜後,才敢出來就醫。在醫院,記者也採訪到了一些維族傷者的家屬,他們顯然也對事件感到憤怒,心情一直無法平 伏。

採訪結束後,回到酒店,我們才被告知一位因感冒沒有隨大隊到南疆採訪的團員,在暴動當晚得知消息後,即到街道上和醫院採訪,因為他是私自行動,結果被警方扣留,至早上才在中新社的交涉下被釋放。

民族融合道路佈滿荊棘

我們在烏魯木齊下榻的酒店其實就在發生暴動的老城區,團員都慶幸暴動當晚沒有在烏魯木齊活動, 不然可危險了。不過在暴動後,局勢看似平靜但是風聲鶴唳,所以我們的活動都被取消了,包括前往國際大巴扎(Bazaar)的購物行程和聯歡會。在這種時刻 進行聯歡不合時宜,團員們也沒有心情。

團員們都有一個共同的感受,就是之前的行程都以會見自治區的領導為主,他們都向我們介紹了新疆 的漢族和各少數民族如何團結和諧相處的情況,我們也會見了不少少數民族的幹部,包括一些重要的領導,例如烏魯木齊市長都是由少數民族擔任。但這一場嚴重的 暴動卻暴露出了新疆的民族融合道路仍存佈滿了荊棘。

中國‧“大俠,請入座!”‧武俠餐廳充滿江湖味

(中國‧成都)幾名古裝打扮的年輕男子站在門口,見人上前便大聲招呼:“大俠,你來啦,快請入座!”這可不是在拍古裝劇,而是中國一家武俠餐廳的開幕現場。

“有人的地方就有江湖,有江湖的地方就有風波莊。”

位在四川成都的這家名為“風波莊”的武俠餐館早前開業,服務生一律以古裝打扮,所有稱呼說法都帶有濃重江湖味,顧客都是“大俠”、“俠”、“英雄”,服務生稱為“小二”,飯要說“練功”,吸菸是“彈指神功”,筷子叫做“雙截棍”,湯匙調羹則叫“飛刀”。

說起菜名,那更會嚇人一跳:九陰真經、九陽神功、降龍18掌……不過,“英雄”們(顧客)來這裡練功(吃飯),大多是沒權利決定自己要練甚麼功,而是由“莊主”負責給各位吃客安排酒菜。

上菜用的桌子是木頭的小方桌,英雄們坐的是矮腳的長板凳,喝酒有黑色的土瓷酒盞,吃菜則用大海碗。

食客恍如走進武林

而座位也有不同,分別以南帝、北丐、東邪、西毒、全真教等命名,不同名稱的座位還配有打狗棒、蕭、寶劍等門派標誌性兵器做裝飾,牆上還畫有各種武功祕笈,令食客恍如走進武林。

只消一頓飯的功夫,這“絕世武功”也就練成了。

美國‧被指是新疆騷亂黑手‧熱比婭吁國際調查

國‧華盛頓)被中國當局譴責是新疆騷亂幕後黑手的流亡維族領袖熱比婭,週一(7月6日)呼吁國際對烏魯木齊騷亂事件展開調查。

熱比婭在新聞發佈會上表示:“們希望聯合國、美國和歐盟委派小組調查新疆騷亂的實際狀況。”

美國維吾爾人協會主席熱比婭週一(7月6日)在華盛頓國家記者俱樂部發表談話。流亡美國的熱比婭否認中國政府指控她煽動新疆烏魯木齊騷亂事件。(圖:美聯社)
美國維吾爾人協會主席熱比婭週一(7月6日)在華盛頓國家記者俱樂部發表談話。流亡美國的熱比婭否認中國政府指控她煽動新疆烏魯木齊騷亂事件。(圖:美聯社)
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她說:“我們希望白宮發表一項烈聲明,呼吁中國政府保持克制,告知事情的經過和真相。”

陪同總統奧巴馬在莫斯科進行官方訪問的白宮發言人吉布斯在當地發出一項簡略聲明指出,美國“極度關注”新疆自治區都烏魯木齊的傷亡報導,並呼吁“新疆各方保持克制”。

熱比婭指出,廣東韶關玩具廠的維族員工遭“上萬名漢人”攻擊後,維族以和平方式抗議。

她說,無人在上述事件中被捕,“因此,烏魯木齊人民走上街和平抗議,為死者討回公道”。

中國‧示威、砸店、衝突、抓人‧警民街頭對峙‧新疆騷亂續擴大

(中國‧烏魯木齊)新疆騷亂持續擴大!在週日(7月5日)發生嚴重騷亂的烏魯木齊,今日(週二,7月7日)局勢依舊緊張。當天烏魯木齊多處爆發混亂,再有數百人走上街頭,抗議當局大舉抓人,不少示威者都是婦,他們與警方緊張對峙,甚至爆發衝突。

此外,大批漢人手持刀棍等武器,破壞維吾爾人的商店,警方施放催淚氣體驅散人群。

烏魯木齊局勢動盪,漢維對抗升級,在週一(7月6日)晚上,漢人自組警衛隊,戴上頭盔,手持木棍盾牌,在街上巡邏。(圖:美聯社)
烏魯木齊局勢動盪,漢維對抗升級,在週一(7月6日)晚上,漢人自組警衛隊,戴上頭盔,手持木棍盾牌,在街上巡邏。(圖:美聯社)

人民廣場萬名武警戒備

在發生過騷亂的人民廣場,周圍佈滿上萬名武警戒備,差不多每隔2米就有人站崗,武警都戴上頭盔,手持盾牌。

然而,儘管當局部署了大批武警戒備,在週二上午和下午,烏魯木齊市內多處地方,再次出現混亂,數百名維吾爾人再次上街示威。

法新社指,最少有200名騷亂後被捕者的家屬,在境外記者面前,抗議當局大舉抓人。他們堵塞一條市內主要道路,要求當局釋放他們的家人,與手持長棍的公安緊張對峙。

婦女哭訴丈夫被抓走

不少示威者都是維吾爾族婦女。部份婦女對著外地記者的鏡頭哭泣,情緒激動。有人說家中的男性都被帶走,只剩下婦孺。

路透社引述一名女示威者稱,她們的丈夫突然被當局不由分說的抓走。

與此同時,大批漢人手持刀、棍、鐵管、鐵鏟、鋤頭等武器。路透社和聯社指,這大批漢人數以百計,但法新社表示有數以千計。

漢人持械操向人民廣場

這些漢人最初試圖操向市內的人民廣場,警方阻止他們前進,用揚聲器呼吁他們停步。

但美聯社指,大約有300人在離人民廣場四條街的地方拐路,操往一間清真寺。美聯社記者聽到數聲巨響,然後冒出白煙,相信是警方施放催淚氣體。

路透社指,這些漢族人向維吾爾人開設的商店擲石頭,大肆破壞。

部份人向港記者表示,他們這麼做,是為了保護自己和家人。

地上仍佈滿血漬
店舖被砸爛汽車燒毀

“這2天不要出門!”不少目擊今次新疆騷亂恐怖場景的烏魯木齊市民猶有餘悸,街上人流明顯減少,市中心絕大多數商舖暫停營業;被砸爛的店舖一片狼藉,地上仍佈滿一攤攤烏黑的血漬,空氣中還有焚燒過後的焦味。

在烏魯木齊市南郊,一輛輛被焚的巴士和私家車停在路旁,大部份燒剩骨架,被燒過汽車的輪胎還在冒著熱氣,損毀的還包括有消防車。有路邊店舖的貨物被搶掠一空,打碎的玻璃散落一地,門口依稀可見一些血漬。在烏魯木齊市金銀路,大部份商店關門停業,清潔工人正在清理街道。

德士司機嚇到腿軟

一名德士司機曾先生向記者稱,“嚇得現在還腿軟”,他週一(7月6日)原本打算不再開工,但覺得在家中也不一定安全,想離開烏魯木齊。

一名維族女子說,很害怕再有人鬧事,“那些人太殘忍了!”由於官方表示仍有人圖謀擴大事端,有些市民打電話提醒親友“這2天不要出門”。

在週日晚爆發的長達10小時的騷亂,令烏魯木齊市陷入動盪,店舖遭焚,濃煙直沖上天,中間還夾雜“砰、砰、砰……”鎗聲,最後是出動近萬名公安武警才能控制局面。美國《華爾街日報》稱,在這場從日間延至凌晨的騷動中,有維族青年拿刀捅人,主要針對目標是漢族人。

1434人被捕
死亡人數增至156

烏魯木齊市政府今日(週二,7月7日)召開新聞發佈會,指當局至今就騷亂一事,逮捕了1434人,其中男性1379人,女性55人。當局已著手審訊的工作。

烏魯木齊週日(7月5日)騷亂的死亡人數,已增至156人,另有1080人受傷。死者當中,包括129男27女。官方週一(7月6日)公佈的死亡人數是140人。

此外,有209家店舖和2幢樓房被焚。260多輛汽車被燒被砸,其中11輛是警車。

烏魯木齊市委書記栗智說,目前被扣留審查的疑犯,如未發現有嚴重犯罪事實的,可讓單位領回。但對仍逍遙在逃的犯罪嫌疑人決不會放過。

廣東維漢毆鬥事件拘15人

另外,被指引發週日新疆騷亂的廣東韶關玩具廠維漢2族毆鬥事件,當局已拘15人。

韶關市公安局副局長劉國說,被捕的13人曾參與毆鬥,有3人是新疆人,另外10人是其他地區人員。另外,亦有2人因在互聯上散播謠言被刑事拘留。

事發在6月26日,玩具廠部份維吾爾族員工與這間工廠其他員工發生衝突,數百人參與毆鬥,導致百多人受傷,2名維吾爾族員工傷重死亡。

傳騷亂已蔓延喀什
緊急安保措施啟動

在烏魯木齊發生暴亂後,喀什成為另一個焦點,據稱騷動已蔓延至這個新疆第2大城,不過當地政府已啟動緊急預案,恢復去年奧運期間採取的安保措施,加強值班和巡邏等。

英文新華社報導,烏魯木齊爆發嚴重騷亂後,當局正嚴防騷亂會蔓延至新疆的喀什、伊犁和阿克蘇市。

有人策劃更多騷亂

報導指,警方收到線報,有人正在試圖在喀什、伊犁和阿克蘇市等地策劃更多騷亂。

有消息人士透露,解放軍週二凌晨派出大約40輛“東風牌”軍車運送官兵進入喀什;甚至當地傳言喀什已進入戒嚴。

目前,從喀什機場至市中心沿途的主要路口,警方都設置了關卡。

200人圖聚清真寺

官方指,週一傍晚6時左右,喀什市當地的全中國最大清真寺,有大約200人試圖聚集,被警方驅散。

報導又指,在緊張局勢下,喀什市的大部份商舖均已關門。

廣東維漢毆鬥事件拘15人

被指引發週日新疆騷亂的廣東韶關玩具廠維漢2族毆鬥事件,當局已拘15人。

韶關市公安局副局長劉國強說,被捕的13人曾參與毆鬥,有3人是新疆人,另外10人是其他地區人員。另外,亦有2人因在互聯網上散播謠言被刑事拘留。

廣東省政法委說,集體毆鬥涉及人數眾多,取證難度非常大,當局正整理證據,儘快讓案件進入訴訟程序,安撫民心。

另外,新疆喀什副書記買買提週二表示,韶關玩具廠維族工人已經復工,並指新疆人外出打工的方針不

買買提說,事發後,新疆和廣東省當局都快速反應,所有傷者集中到條件最好的醫院。韶關當局亦即日將廠內的所有維族工人,妥善安置。

事發在6月26日,玩具廠部份維吾爾族員工與這間工廠其他員工發生衝突,數百人參與毆鬥,導致百多人受傷,2名維吾爾族員工傷重死亡。

記者被圍堵

官方新華社週二報導,境外記者在新疆烏魯木齊市採訪時,受到數量不明的人圍堵。

報導說,新疆自治區外宣辦透露,當天上午,由烏魯木齊市外宣辦工作人員帶領的境外媒體記者約60人,在“7‧5”打砸搶燒嚴重暴力犯罪事件涉及區域之一賽馬場採訪時,被數量不明的人圍堵,局面較為混亂。

在警方勸解下,圍堵境外記者的人群已經散去。

新疆暴力襲擊事件

去年,新疆發生多宗針對中共當局的暴力襲擊事件:

‧北京奧運前夕、8月4日早晨,2名維吾爾族男子趁喀什公安邊防支隊武警出操之際,駕車以炸彈及利刃突襲,造成武警15人死17傷,令中央震動。

‧2008年的3月7日,全國“兩會”期間,南方航空一架由烏魯木齊飛北京客機,途中險遭疆獨人士以自製汽油彈騎劫,半途被機上保安員發現制服,客機急降蘭州,至少2名維族人士(其中一名為維族女子)被捕。

‧2008年1月27日,烏魯木齊還發生“聖戰姊妹”與武警在居民小區駁火事件,當局稱擊斃2名恐怖份子,拘捕15人,繳一批鎗枝爆炸物。

全球評論

穩定局面不容破壞

烏魯木齊打砸搶燒暴力犯罪事件,以血淋淋的事實再一次警示人們:穩定為幸福之源,動亂是災禍之根。

30年來,新疆的國民經濟以年均10.3%的速度增長。2008年,新疆工業增加值達 1790.7億元,比1952年增長274倍,比1978年增長16.6倍;糧食產量突破1000萬噸,比1949年增長11倍,比1978年增長1.8 倍,人均糧食佔有量超過全國平均水準……這些既是新疆的發展成果,也是新疆人民的福祉所在。

然而,新疆人民珍視的,正是三股敵對勢力的眼中釘、肉中刺。原因很簡單,新疆越美好,新疆人民就越是珍惜社會環境,越是熱祖國,越是擁護黨和政府的民族政策,越是反對一切破壞行徑和恐怖活動,敵對勢力分裂祖國的陰謀就是越難以得逞。這正是3股勢力不願意也不甘心看到的。因此,他們總是伺機制造民族矛盾,利用一切可能挑起事端,唯恐新疆不亂。

千百年來新疆發展的歷史一再證明,只有社會和諧,新疆才能發展進步。歷史也一再證明,在中國這樣一個多民族聚居的大國,政通人和則百業興旺,各民族大團結是國家繁榮、人民幸福的重要保證,分裂與動亂只會給國家和人民帶來災難。

中國新華社

漠視維人不滿
衝突一定會來

新疆騷亂,引起國際社會高度關注,也令到意大利準備出席八國集團(G8)峰會的中國國家主席胡錦濤,受到國際壓力。

這是“天安門屠殺以來最嚴重騷亂”,在北京準備慶祝中共建政60週年、宣示民族團結和愛國主義時發生,來得最不合時。

維吾爾族人“看似阿富汗人多於中國人”,對漢人不斷遷入新疆不滿,認為共產黨想令他們漢化,又對維吾爾族人的宗教自由口惠而實不至,當局卻永遠不會調查維吾爾族人為甚麼不滿,只懂歸咎是少數份子的陰謀,鎮壓令民眾不敢鬧事,他們只能等待下一次少數民族衝突爆發,而且一定會來。

印尼‧投票前夕‧更改總統選舉規則‧允選民用身份證投票

(印尼‧雅加達)印尼週三(7月8日)舉行總統大選前夕,憲法法院週一(7月6日)投票,贊成改選民登記規則,因為挑戰者暗示,違規行為有利於尋求連任的現任總統蘇西洛。

這個在大選2天前通過的戲劇性裁決,將允許印尼選民不再根據選民名冊,轉而使用身份證及護照來投票。

另2位總統候選人梅加瓦蒂和卡拉,週一在聯合新聞發佈會上,呼吁更改選民登記規則,投訴數百萬選民沒有出現在選民冊上,並質疑大選的可信度。

梅加瓦蒂拐彎抹角地表示,蘇西洛的支持者企圖操縱選票,但遭到蘇西洛否認。

2競選陣營歡迎裁決

2個競選陣營對法院的裁決表示歡迎,但目前並不清楚他們是否會停止投訴。

卡拉向印尼都會(Metro)電視台表示:“這並不只是關於哪個候選組合勝選的事,而是關於恢復人民的權利,因為如果人民沒有被列入選民名單上,他們就無法投票,這顯然剝奪了他們的權利。”

梅加瓦蒂發言人阿里亞向法新社表示:“們可以接受這個裁決,但並非完全接受。這個決定至少能減少那些名字不在選民冊上的選民的損失。”

總統選舉週三投票

週三的選舉將是獨裁者蘇哈多1998年結束獨裁政權後,印尼舉行的第二次總統直接選舉。

蘇西洛在2004年次選舉中,以壓倒性票數把梅加瓦蒂拉下台。他現在被視為有望在週三的選舉中勝出連任。

梅加瓦蒂先前針對4月的全國大選也做出類似投訴,但選舉當局最終宣佈選舉屬合法,給蘇西洛的民主黨帶來巨大勝利,使之成為國會勢黨派。

選舉官員表示,他們無意延遲週三的大選。

印尼3候選人的政綱

蘇西洛

‧在2014年以前,推動經濟增長率達7%,通膨率維持在6%以下
‧確保發展是全面的,以協助減少貧窮
‧撥出10%的預算發展基礎建設,改革官僚文化,以改善投資環境,縮減開支但不會減少工作機會
‧必要時,頒佈總統政令,力保影響力巨大的貪污法院繼續存在
‧不會私營化國營公司

梅加瓦蒂

‧透過推動發展農業,使經濟增長能達到10%
‧透過貸款及微額信貸計劃協助窮人、農民及漁民
‧與外資公司談判合約時採取強硬立場
‧反對私營化,主張國營公司依然是主要的經濟驅動力,允許延期償付外債

尤索夫‧卡拉

‧設定在2011年以前,達到8%的經濟增長率
‧提倡“獨立、民族主義經濟”
‧主張公平貿易,而非自由貿易
‧處理與外國公司的“不公平”合約
‧嚴禁外包工人,向年輕人提供創業資金

泰國‧就去年佔據機場事件‧外長拒辭職

(泰國‧曼谷)泰國外交部長卡實拒絕就去年佔據曼谷國際機場癱瘓航空交通一事辭職,並表示他“不是恐怖份子”。

針對去年人民民主聯盟(PAD)領袖參與佔據機場一事,卡實在接傳票後,已於週一(7月6日)晚間到警局報到,聆聽指控罪名,當中包括非法集會、入侵、違反航空法和涉及恐怖主義活動。

曾經在去年11月至12月期間參與佔據曼谷機場活動的卡實表示:“不是恐怖份子。”當時他與組織的主要目標是推翻前任相塔辛。

他說:“我否認所有的指控。我加入人民民主聯盟並不是為了掀戰。我是根據憲法在那裡(集會現場)行使我的權利,推翻塔辛政權。”

當被詢及如果被控上法庭,他會否辭職時,卡實說:“他們沒有證據,也無法解釋他們對於恐怖主義的定義。我並沒有做錯。”

新加坡‧台灣一電視台疑移花接木‧馬女傭虐童舊聞變獨家

(新加坡)大馬童慘遭女傭虐待的駭人新聞,早前懷疑被台灣的一家電視台移花接木,成為這家電視台的“獨家新聞”,並指案發地點是在新加坡!

一名署名“kpo”的友,早前在新加坡的一個新聞網站中,上載了一則新聞視頻的聯絡網址。

他指出,視頻中所報導的女傭虐打年幼女童的新聞,“應該是在新加坡發生的事件”,如今卻被移花接木,成台灣的“獨家報導。

記者點擊進入網友提供的網址後,發現播映的視頻出自中國湖南公共電視台,但當中的新聞報導卻是由“台灣中天電視”提供的“獨家專稿”。

在這段長達1分17秒的新聞中,畫面雖然模糊不清,但依稀可看到一名“外籍保姆”對一名年幼女童拳打腳踢的驚悚過程。

視頻中,新聞旁述員更以夸張的旁白,如“180度大回轉”等,繪聲繪影地描述女傭施暴的過程,讓人看了更加觸目驚心。

此外,台灣中天新聞記者更走訪了當地護士和醫生,征詢他們對這起事件的看法和意見。但新聞中都沒有引述短片的來源。

女傭虐童前年發生在大馬

不過,經記者查悉,這段影片其實早在2個月前,就已出現在視頻分享網站Youtube上,而這起虐童案的事發地點,其實是在吉隆坡。

當時,這部短片共吸引了超過9萬人追看,許多網友也紛紛留言,力譴責施暴的女傭。之後,新加坡報章也廣泛報導這起案件,並引起新加坡社會的關注,警方也隨之介入調查。

吉隆坡刑事調查主任邱震華後來向《海峽時報》證實,這起案件發生在2007年11月間,當時就引起當地媒體的廣泛報導。

涉及此案的是一名18歲的印尼女傭,她的雇主是一名電腦程序顧問。短片中被虐的3歲女童,重復向父母投訴自己肚子痛後,父母裝置閉路電視後,才發女傭的行徑。

新加坡‧“破解魔術之謎砸飯碗”‧魔術師抨擊電視節目

(新加坡)魔術師被破“魔法”,搞到飯碗被砸?

新加坡電視頻道最近播映至少2個破解魔術之謎的節目,雖然成功吸引許多觀眾,但也遭到新加坡魔術師和魔術迷的猛批和不滿。

其中一個節目,是在AXN頻道播出的“破解魔術師的密碼”(Breaking the Magicians Code)。另一個是在okto頻道播出的兒童節目“Tricky TV”。

許多魔術師表示受到威脅,並透露最近魔術表演的邀請,有減少的趨勢。

江健身:破解者技術差

新加坡魔術師協會副會長江健身(51歲)說,所謂破解魔術之謎的人,其實本身的魔術技術差得可憐,完全破壞魔術的

“魔術娛樂觀眾的方法,就是它的懸疑色彩。就像一本書或一部電影,人們最痛恨的就是在還未讀完書或看完電影,就穿結局,完全破壞其中的樂趣。”

他也說,他們的做法非常短視,一旦揭露魔術的秘密,其他魔術師的生計都可能受影響。

據江健身瞭解,新加坡魔術師近年來的表演次數已有所減少,不過他也承認這可能與經濟情況有關。

魔術迷抨破壞奧妙

許多魔術迷也紛紛在魔術絡論壇上抨擊這類節目破壞魔術的奧妙。

一名魔術好者指出,只要不斷求進步和突破,開創新魔術,魔術師就能永遠走在魔術破壞者的前頭。

網友說,魔術代表著“天下無難事,只怕有心人”,沒有甚麼是不可能的,它鼓勵人們勇敢挑戰“不可能任務”。

泰國‧再添2死亡病例‧累積已奪9命

(泰國‧曼谷)泰國衛生當局今日(週二,7月7日)通報再添兩宗A型流感死亡病例,使全國目前共累積了9宗流感死亡病例。

泰國副公共衛生部長馬尼特表示,2名死者是分別來自佛丕府及曼谷的8歲孩及58歲男子。

他也證實泰國新增156宗A型流感確診病例,使泰國的流感病例目前已增至2428宗。

另外,阿根廷的A型流感疫情迄今已有60人死亡,阿根廷人民質疑阿根廷政府處理疫情的手法,並指控官員所採取的行動過於緩慢。

阿根廷總統克里斯蒂娜在南半球入冬之際關閉學校,並讓公共部門的工作人員休假,以遏止A型流感高度蔓延。

但是有人批評,在A型流感死亡病例持續增加之時,克里斯蒂娜卻忙著應付國會選舉及於上週末前往華盛頓,參與幫助遭推翻的洪都拉斯總統復職的外交活動。

新加坡‧地鐵摸臀被摑又被控‧保安員非禮女生罰9000

(新加坡)地鐵車廂內摸生臀部,保安人員被女生摑了一巴掌,被法庭罰款4000新元(9600令吉)懲戒!

一名保安人員早晨搭乘地鐵,在擁擠的車廂站立時竟對一名女大學生起色心,伸手摸她臀部3次。

女生被摸2次後,以為對方是不小心碰到她,怎知移開身體後又被摸,她憤而摑男子一巴掌,接著報警。

被告楊榮(37歲,譯音)認罪後,週一(7月6日)被法庭罰款4000新元。

案件發生在去年5月20日早上7時半左右,21歲的受害人乘搭地鐵在裕廊東和金文泰地鐵站之間的東向列車裡遭非禮。

受害女生受訪時表示,案件雖然發生在一年多前,她至今仍有陰影。

“經過這件事,如果在巴士或地鐵上有人靠近,我就會覺得不舒服。如果被人碰到我也會特別敏感,即使對方是女的。”

女生說,她當時穿著長褲,站在門邊。她打被告一巴掌後,被告並沒有生氣,只說他不小心碰到她。另一名女乘客見狀,把手機遞給她,讓她撥電報警。

楊榮強面對3項非禮控狀,控方以一項提控他,餘項讓法官下判時考慮。

A look at Palin's postings on Twitter

A look at some of Sarah Palin's postings on Twitter since she announced she was stepping down as Alaska governor:

"We'll soon attach info on decision to not seek re-election... this is in Alaska's best interest, my family's happy... it is good, stay tuned."

"Happy for hard working Alaskans who get a sunny break tomorrow to celebrate the Fourth of July - be safe, enjoy friends, thank the troops!"

"Critics are spinning, so hang in there as they feed false info on the right decision made as I enter last yr in office to not run again...."

"Attached is my "thank you" sent yesterday to express gratitude, & smack down lies at same time ..."

"Grateful Todd left fishing grnds to join me this wkend; but now he's back slaying salmon & working the kids (at) the site; anxious to join 'em!"

Final report released in Snowbird crash

A faulty seatbelt and the failure of an Air Force pilot to properly check he was strapped in led to the fatal crash of a Snowbird jet two years ago in Montana.

In its final report into the May 2007 crash, the Air Force notes that Capt. Shawn McCaughey experienced problems with the seat belt latch in his jet at least three times before.

The report says McCaughey may not have died had he done the right check on the day of the crash to ensure his harness was done up.

The pilot was flying upside down during a pre-show practice session over Great Falls, Mont., when he fell out of his seat and lost control of the plane.

The report says McCaughey was under significant stress at the time and may not have been mentally prepared for the flight.

Republican turmoil hits early presidential states

WEST DES MOINES — Social conservatives in Iowa and New Hampshire already were reeling from scandals surrounding two Republicans thought to be considering White House runs when Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin shocked the party by announcing her resignation.

Now they aren't sure what to think in the early presidential voting states.

"You have to wonder who will be the standard-bearer for social conservatives in 2012," said veteran Republican strategist Bob Haus. "If they are going to talk the talk, they better walk the walk. Anyone who comes in and claims that mantle had better be pretty clean."

Admissions of extramarital affairs by South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and Nevada Sen. John Ensign would seem to have ended any presidential ambitions. Palin is popular among the social conservatives who dominate Iowa's Republican caucuses and could get a huge boost from the state should she seek the nomination, but her resignation complicates things.

"She has some work to do to convince people they can trust her," Haus said. "Unfortunately it's all self-inflicted."

Maintaining good standing in Iowa is especially important if Palin seeks the presidency because her stances line up well with the state party's social conservatism. In contrast, Republicans in New Hampshire — home to the nation's first primary — tend to be more fiscally conservative and socially moderate.

Polls on possible 2012 candidates have shown Palin behind former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in New Hampshire, likely due in part to the state's preference for more moderate candidates, said Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.

Smith said Palin could have a chance there in 2012, but didn't help herself by quitting her job.

"I don't think any way you can square it can be seen as good for her right now — it may turn out to be good down the road — but right now she's in a difficult spot," he said.

Presidential primaries and caucuses may be years off, but Iowa Christian Alliance head Steve Scheffler said Palin's resignation has left many people so confused she needs to act quickly if planning to be in the 2012 mix.

Winning in Iowa requires courting state politicians and activists, even when a candidate is not facing the kind of uncertainty that's enveloped Palin.

"I think she has to come to Iowa and convince people she can be a leader," Scheffler said. "She's going to have to prove that to caucus-going Iowans, and she has to come to Iowa over and over again."

New Hampshire is a bit less of a pressure cooker.

"In some sense, the stakes are a bit lower for her here," said Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire. "A strong second place would be fine in a state where the electorate is going to be more moderate than it would be in an Iowa Republican primary."

Palin, Ensign and Sanford all had strong potential followings in Iowa, where the party has become increasingly controlled by social conservatives even as overall voting has become more Democratic. Barack Obama easily won the state last year, and Democrats hold the governorship, both legislative chambers and three of five congressional districts.

Sioux City businessman Bob Vander Plaats, who is seeking the GOP nomination for governor, said conservative Republicans can recover — but in a state where presidential politics is a never-ending sport, recent events haven't helped their cause.

"For conservatives to win again, they need to be trusted," Vander Plaats said. "I don't know if it damages the brand, but it means there's a little bit of sorting out that needs to be done."

There's no indication the recent upheaval will cause conservatives to lose their grip on Iowa's state party, especially in caucus politics dominated by activists rather than more casual voters who only show up at general election time.

Senate Minority Leader Paul McKinley, of Chariton, said he's confident voters will evaluate Republicans on issues rather than bombshells.

"I think the party will be judged on solution to problems that Republicans come up with," McKinley said. "I think some individuals have had a bad few weeks."

Still, Republican Sen. Ron Weick, of Sioux City, said it's foolish to dismiss the party turmoil.

"Obviously it causes damage," Weick said. "I guess the only thing that I see is we can't expect it to be a perfect world."

Whether voters turn away from the GOP remains to be seen, but many party members aren't ready to count anyone out, or in, just yet.

"I certainly don't think this would take Sarah Palin out of the running in New Hampshire," said Phyllis Woods, a Republican National Committeewoman from Dover, N.H. "We're just like the rest of the country, we're waiting to see who else may be running."

___

Associated Press Writer Holly Ramer reported from Concord, N.H.

Ocean temperatures: The new bluff in alarmism

There has been a change in direction by the alarmists, as shown by their new “Synthesis Report.” The independent scientists noticed it during the Wong-Fielding meeting.

The alarmists have abandoned air temperatures as a measure of global temperature, because the air temperature graphs are just too hard to argue with (like the second figure below, from the Skeptics Handbook). Instead they’ve switched to ocean temperatures, which they often disguise as ocean heat content (a huge number like 15×10²² Joules sounds much more scary than the warming it implies of 0.003° C/year).

All three pages of the Synthesis Report that deal with ‘evidence’ are about factors or trends that tell us nothing about whether or not the warming is due to carbon emissions. If God put the galaxy in a toaster, sea levels would rise, ocean heat content would increase, and ice would melt.

Notice how the graph above from the Synthesis Report that came out this month doesn’t include the last six years of data? Carrier pigeons from the remote worldwide network of Argo buoys make it back to base eventually, but the world’s leading team of climate researchers seem to have trouble googling “argo”. Not coincidentally, measurements of ocean heat capacity from 2003-2009 aren’t the numbers Team AGW were looking for. Indeed Craig Loehle has calculated the ocean has lost about 10% of the gain listed above since since 2003. (More info here).

It’s clear on the graph that the planet’s air barely counts (don’t mention the troposphere, or ‘hot spot’? What hot spot?). So now it “doesn’t matter” if air temperatures stay flat like this:

They’re right on one point: ocean heating trumps atmospheric heating for heat content. But how awkward for them that, with the new Argo data, no one can find any warming in the ocean either?

The new litany is that ocean temperatures are rising and rising fast. The evidence of the last five years contradicts them, so don’t look too closely; and don’t look from too far away either, or you won’t see the rise since 1960. But with the US climate bill and Copenhagen coming up, they only need to confound and confuse the issue for six months.

All the public education we did with air temperatures now starts all over again with ocean temperatures.

David Evans summed it up in an email today:

1. Ocean temperatures can only be adequately measured by the Argo buoy network (Wikipedia). Argo buoys duck dive down to 700m, recording temperatures, then come up and radio back the results. There are 3,000 of them floating around all the world’s oceans.

2. The Argos buoys have only been operational since the end of 2003. Since then they show a slight cooling:
Source Link

Source Link

3. Josh Willis, who runs the Argos buoy program, said in March 2008:“There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant”
4. The Argo buoys initially showed definite cooling, but were recalibrated in 2007. After recalibration they showed slight warming, but now show slight cooling (PDF).
5. The Argo data shows that the AGW hypothesis is wrong, because temperatures are definitely not rising as fast as predicted by AGW: see William Di Puccio.
6. Before the Argo network we used bathythermographs (XBTs) to measure
ocean temperatures. Those records are inadequate both for depth and geographical coverage.

This graph gives an alternative view that fits the data better (thanks to Akasofu).

Many alarmists like to ignore everything but the last warming, because the last warming is accompanied by large human emissions of CO2. But history matters because the climate model predictions are very much based on history. Briefly, here’s how.

The little ice age in the 1600s and 1700s was obviously not caused by humans. Since 1750 the global temperature has been recovering, with alternating warming and cooling periods of about 30 years each around a steady underlying warming trend. Human emissions of CO2 were negligible before 1850, and before 1945 they were insignificant compared to today’s emissions.

The climate models were trained by assuming that nearly all the warming since 1750 was due to rising CO2 levels. This assumption underpins all of AGW. Therefore if there were other causes of warming coming out of the little ice age, then (1) the models overestimate the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 and (2) their predictions of future warming are exaggerated.

We have just had 26 years of warming (1975 - 2001). If the pattern holds, we are now due for at least two decades of slight cooling.

And where did the extra CO2 come from before 1950? High school chemistry: a warmer ocean releases more of its dissolved CO2 into the atmosphere.

The Fielding-Wong meeting spawned a brief email debate between climate heavyweights. The alarmist started it by patronizing Fielding’s independent scientists, but it seems that when you call the bluff of a government funded alarmist scientist and put a direct question you don’t get a direct reply — only evasion and arrogance.

BTW, climate alarmism is a paper tiger — there is no evidence (PDF).

[The full set of official and unofficial documents arising from the Wong-Fielding meeting are all listed and linked to here.]

China South America: Argentina and Spanish oil giant Repsol still thinking...

Repsol is playing down speculation about unloading some of its 85% stake in Argentinian oil business YPF. But shareholders must hope a deal materializes, and soon. Apart from its exposure to Argentina's political and economic risks, YPF ties up capital that Repsol could use to develop large recent Brazilian oil discoveries.

Myanmar rebuilding uneven a year after the cyclone

As the U.N. helicopter skimmed above the Irrawaddy Delta, the world's top diplomat was haunted by the memory of a baby girl he encountered here a year ago.

"She was only one day old," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon mused aloud on a trip on Saturday to the area devastated by Cyclone Nargis in May 2008.

He had seen the mother living in a tent with the girl, hours after her birth. He'd seen another girl, too, just 19 days old, sick and clinging to life, but lacking medical support. He'd told the mothers not to lose hope, the United Nations was there to help.

On a brief visit carefully scripted by Myanmar's government, the U.N. chief wasn't able to determine the whereabouts of those fledgling lives. Instead, he and his entourage — top aides and two journalists — got a snapshot that showed some improvements while masking remaining problems.

The angry waters that swallowed 138,000 lives have receded. Seen from above, where there had been a monolith of shimmering water was now a patchwork of rice field and border, river and shoreline, muddy pond and gray cloud.

Gone were the endless stretches of flooded rice fields and islands of destroyed homes with a few people standing on the rooftops. It affected more than two million, leaving a quarter-million homeless.

Many Western nations haven't fully opened their wallets to the U.N.'s three-year, $691 million recovery plan, lacking trust in Myanmar or not wanting to provide too much help to an authoritarian regime, a senior U.N. humanitarian official said on condition of anonymity to protect his relationship with Myanmar authorities.

The World Food Program, which has operated in Myanmar for 15 years, still cannot muster 44 percent of the $79 million it says is needed over three years. The World Health Organization still lacks 57 percent of $42 million in projected needs for 325 townships.

The biggest health threats remain HIV and AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, according to the International Organization for Migration, which began partnering with Myanmar's government in 2005.

Local medical officials at first began to explain to a reporter last Saturday how the clinics were all busy, with the village and the broader Irrawaddy Delta region suffering from a high number of respiratory infections, replacing diarrhea as the leading cause of illnesses.

But after government minders began listening in, the medical officials suddenly seemed to lose their ability to speak English. End of conversation.

In the past year IOM-led medical teams treated 110,613 people in 858 cyclone-hit villages.

Nearly a quarter-million people in remote villages rely on boat deliveries of clean drinking water, rice fields remain bare or contaminated with salt from the floodwaters, and food handouts are increasingly scarce.

Schools are rebuilt but short of teachers, and a half-million people still live in the most basic of shelters.

Ban, who carried the same message as last year that the U.N. was there to help and keep hope alive, said he was satisfied "the government has taken necessary measures."

A year ago, the single-family plastic tents through which Ban strode had covered neat stacks of supplies that seemed flown in for the occasion.

This year, the tents were replaced by small wooden homes on stilts and families with painted faces and kids sporting freshly starched and ironed white linen garb.

Some improvements were obvious, but this was the camp that the xenophobic junta that rules Myanmar, also known as Burma, wanted the world to see.

Ban's first trip helped overcome the reluctance for which the junta was widely condemned in granting foreign aid agencies access in the first weeks after the disaster, which almost certainly added to the death toll.

"His job is to carry the message of the international community," a senior U.N. official said of Ban as his entourage, for a second year in a row, picked their way along the muddy walkways and throngs of villagers.

"Clearly, they are living in their own world," the official said of Myanmar's ruling junta, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid angering authorities.

Israel seizes Cynthia McKinney

Government and media does nothing

Iran Frees Arrested Reporter, Embassy Employees

Iran has reportedly released the eighth of nine employees of the British embassy arrested and accused of a role in the post-election protests. The government also released a journalist with dual British and Greek citizenship, in a sign that they are seeking to calm growing tensions with the British government.


The arrests had enraged the British government and spawned threats of retaliation from the European Union. A top Iranian cleric had claimed only two days ago that the embassy employees had confessed to charges of playing key roles in the violent demonstrations, and said the government was planning to try them.

The releases certainly come as a welcome surprise as tensions between the two nations grow, but the release of the reporter suggests Iran is still seeking to save face after accusing the British government of backing the unrest. They labeled the release of Washington Times journalist Jason Fowden as a gesture of goodwill towards Greece, not Britain. Fowden had been accused of “carrying out activities contrary to journalism.”

The latest of the detained embassy employees is still in custody, but the British government has been told to expect a “positive result” on his detention. Ayatollah Jannati had accused the British government of plotting the unrest in the nation since March. Others in the Iranian government had blamed the violence on the US, Israel, and other Western nations as well.


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THE GREAT AMERICAN BUBBLE MACHINE

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citi-group - which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former GoIdman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads ofthe Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange. the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank ofNew York - which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman - not to mention ...

But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain - an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere - high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, halfeaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to payoff hailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense. Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth - pure profit for rich individuals.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch ofreally smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s - and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went - and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long - including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.


BUBBLE #1
THE GREAT DEPRESSION


Goldman wasn't always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids - just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in lhe use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to small-time vendors in downtown Manhattan.

You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman's first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shitloads of money. In that ancient history there's really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman's disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 1920s.

This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Eack then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an "investment trust." Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player. Much as in the 1990s, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regular-guy investors into the speculation game.

Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investment-trust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hog-wild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund - which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Elue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah - which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading.

The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line. The basic idea isn't hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred.

In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1929 titled "In Goldman Sachs We Trust," the famed economist Jobn Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leverage-based investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the market's historic crash; in today's dollars, the losses the bank suffered totaled $475 billion. "It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity," Galbraith observed, sounding like Keith Olbermann in an ascot. "If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."


BUBBLE #2
TECH STOCKS


Fast-forward about 65 years. Goldman not only survived the crash that wiped out so many of the investors it duped, it went on to become the chief underwriter to the country's wealthiest and most powerful corporations. Thanks to Sidney Weinberg, who rose from the rank of janitor's assistant to head the firm, Goldman became the pioneer of the initial public offering, one of the principal and most lucrative means by which companies raise money. During the 1970s and 1980s, Goldman may not have been the planet-eating Death Star of political influence it is today, but it was a top-drawer firm that had a reputation for attracting the very smartest talent on the Street.

It also, oddly enough, had a reputation for relatively solid ethics and a patient approach to investment that shunned the fast buck; its executives were trained to adopt the firm's mantra, "long-term greedy." One former Goldman banker who left the firm in the early Nineties recalls seeing his superiors give up a very profitable deal on the grounds that it was a long-term loser. "We gave back money to 'grownup' corporate clients who had made bad deals with us," he says. "Everything we did was legal and fair - but 'long-term greedy' said we didn't want to make such a profit at the clients' collective expense that we spoiled the marketplace."

But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's co-chairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.

Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national cliché that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy - a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline THE COMMITTEE TO SAVE THE WORLD. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy - beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.

The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system - one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.

"Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public," says one prominent hedge-fund manager. "The company had to be in business for a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash." Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: "Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share."

The problem was, nobody told investors that the rules had changed. Everyone on the inside knew," the manager says. "Bob Rubin sure as hell knew what the underwriting standards were. They'd been intact since the 1930s."

Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who specializes in IPOs, says banks like Goldman knew full well that many of the public offerings they were touting would never make a dime. "In the early Eighties, the major underwriters insisted on three years of profitability. Then it was one year, then it was a quarter. By the time of the Internet bubble, they were not even requiring profitability in the foreseeable future."

Goldman has denied that it changed its underwriting standards during the Internet years, but its own statistics belie the claim. Just as it did with the investment trust in the 1920s, Goldman started slow and finished crazy in the Internet years. After it took a little-known company with weak financials called Yahoo! public in 1996, once the tech boom had already begun, Goldman quickly became the IPO king of the Internet era. Of the 240 companies it took public in 1997, a third were losing money at the time of the IPO. In 1999, at the height of the boom, it took 47 companies public, including stillborns like Webvan and eToys, investment offerings that were in many ways the modern equivalents of Blue Ridge and Shenandoah. The following year, it underwrote 18 companies in the first four months, 14 of which were money losers at the time. As a leading underwriter of Internet stocks during the boom, Goldman provided profits far more volatile than those of its competitors: In 1999, the average Goldman IPO leapt 281 percent above its offering price, compared to the Wall Street average of 181 percent.

How did Goldman achieve such extraordinary results? One answer is that they used a practice called "laddering," which is just a fancy way of saying they manipulated the share price of new offerings. Here's how it works: Say you're Goldman Sachs, and Bullshit.com comes to you and asks you to take their company public. You agree on the usual terms: You'll price the stock, determine how many shares should be released and take the Bullshit.com CEO on a "road show" to schmooze investors, all in exchange for a substantial fee (typically six to seven percent of the amount raised). You then promise your best clients the right to buy big chunks of the IPO at the low offering price - let's say Bullshit.com's starting share price is $15 - in exchange for a promise that they will buy more shares later on the open market. That seemingly simple demand gives you inside knowledge of the IPO's future, knowledge that wasn't disclosed to the day-trader schmucks who only had the prospectus to go by: You know that certain of your clients who bought X amount of shares at $15 are also going to buy Y more shares at $20 or $25, virtually guaranteeing that the price is going to go to $25 and beyond. In this way, Goldman could artificially jack up the new company's price, which of course was to the bank's benefit - a six percent fee of a $500 million IPO is serious money.

Goldman was repeatedly sued by shareholders for engaging in laddering in a variety of Internet IPOs, including Webvan and NetZero. The deceptive practices also caught the attention of Nicholas Maier, the syndicate manager of Cramer & Co., the hedge fund run at the time by the now-famous chattering television asshole Jim Cramer, himself a Goldman alum. Maier told the SEC that while working for Cramer between 1996 and 1998, he was repeatedly forced to engage in laddering practices during IPO deals with Goldman. "Goldman, from what I witnessed, they were the worst perpetrator," Maier said. "They totally fueled the bubble. And it's specifically that kind of behavior that has caused the market crash. They built these stocks upon an illegal foundation - manipulated up - and ultimately, it really was the small person who ended up buying in." In 2005, Goldman agreed to pay $40 million for its laddering violations - a puny penalty relative to the enormous profits it made. (Goldman, which has denied wrongdoing in all of the cases it has settled, refused to respond to questions for this story.)

Another practice Goldman engaged in during the Internet boom was "spinning," better known as bribery. Here the investment bank would offer the executives of the newly public company shares at extra-low prices, in exchange for future underwriting business. Banks that engaged in spinning would then undervalue the initial offering price - ensuring that those "hot" opening-price shares it had handed out to insiders would be more likely to rise quickly, supplying bigger first-day rewards for the chosen few. So instead of Bullshit.com opening at $20, the bank would approach the Bullshit.com CEO and offer him a million shares of his own company at $18 in exchange for future business effectively robbing all of Bullshit's new shareholders by diverting cash that should have gone to the company's bottom line into the private bank account of the company's CEO.

In one case, Goldman allegedly gave a multimillion-dollar special offering to eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who later joined Goldman's board, in exchange for future i-banking business. According to a report by the House Financial Services Committee in 2002, Goldman gave special stock offerings to executives in 21 companies that it took public, including Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and two of the great slithering villains of the financial-scandal age - Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski and Enron's Ken Lay. Goldman angrily denounced the report as "an egregious distortion of the facts" - shortly before paying $110 million to settle an investigation into spinning and other manipulations launched by New York state regulators. "The spinning of hot IPO shares was not a harmless corporate perk," then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer said at the time. "Instead, it was an integral part of a fraudulent scheme to win new investment-banking business."

Such practices conspired to tum the Internet bubble into one of the greatest financial disasters in world history: Some $5 trillion of wealth was wiped out on the NASDAQ alone. But the real problem wasn't the money that was lost by shareholders, it was the money gained by investment bankers, who received hefty bonuses for tampering with the market. Instead of teaching Wall Street a lesson that bubbles always deflate, the Internet years demonstrated to bankers that in the age of freely flowing capital and publicly owned financial companies, bubbles are incredibly easy to inflate. and individual bonuses are actually bigger when the mania and the irrationality are greater.

Nowhere was this truer than at Goldman. Between 1999 and 2002, the firm paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and benefits - an average of roughly $350,000 a year per employee. Those numbers are important because the key legacy of the Internet boom is that the economy is now driven in large part by the pursuit of the enormous salaries and bonuses that such bubbles make possible. Goldman's mantra of "long-term greedy" vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.

The market was no longer a rationally managed place to grow real, profitable businesses: It was a huge ocean of Someone Else's Money where bankers hauled in vast sums through whatever means necessary and tried to convert that money into bonuses and payouts as quickly as possible. If you laddered and spun 50 Internet IPOs that went bust within a year. so what? By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission got around to fining your firm $110 million, the yacht you bought with your IPO bonuses was already six years old. Besides, you were probably out of Goldman by then, running the U.S. Treasury or maybe the state of New Jersey. (One of the truly comic moments in the history of America's recent financial collapse came when Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who ran Goldman from 1994 to 1999 and left with $320 million in IPO-fattened stock, insisted in 2002 that "I've never even heard the term 'laddering' before.")

For a bank that paid out $7 billion a year in salaries, $110 million fines issued half a decade late were something far less than a deterrent - they were a joke. Once the Internet bubble burst, Goldman had no incentive to reassess its new, profit-driven strategy; it just searched around for another bubble to inflate. As it turns out, it had one ready, thanks in large part to Rubin.


BUBBLE #3
THE HOUSING CRAZE


Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.

None of that would have been possible without investment bankers like Goldman, who created vehicles to package those shitty mortgages and sell them en masse to unsuspecting insurance companies and pension funds. This created a mass market for toxic debt that would never have existed before; in the old days, no bank would have wanted to keep some addict ex-eon's mortgage on its books, knowing how likely it was to fail. You can't write these mortgages, in other words, unless you can sell them to someone who doesn't know what they are.

Goldman used two methods to hide the mess they were selling. First, they bundled hundreds of different mortgages into instruments called Collateralized Debt Obligations. Then they sold investors on the idea that, because a bunch of those mortgages would turn out to be OK, there was no reason to worry so much about the shitty ones: The CDO, as a whole, was sound. Thus, junk-rated mortgages were turned into AAA-rated investments. Second, to hedge its own bets, Goldman got companies like AIG to provide insurance - known as credit-default swaps - on the CDOs. The swaps were essentially a racetrack bet between AIG and Goldman: Goldman is betting the ex-cons will default. AIG is betting they won't. There was only one problem with the deals: All of the wheeling and dealing represented exactly the kind of dangerous speculation that federal regulators are supposed to rein in. Derivatives like CDOs and credit swaps had already caused a series of serious financial calamities: Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings both lost fortunes, and Orange County, California, was forced to default in 1994. A report that year by the Government Accountability Office recommended that such financial instruments be tightly regulated - and in 1998, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a woman named Brooksley Born, agreed. That May, she circulated a letter to business leaders and the Clinton administration suggesting that banks be required to provide greater disclosure in derivatives trades, and maintain reserves to cushion against losses.

More regulation wasn't exactly what Goldman had in mind. "The banks go crazy - they want it stopped," says Michael Greenberger, who worked for Born as director of trading and markets at the CFTC and is now a law professor at the University of Maryland. "Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and [SEC chief Arthur] Levitt want it stopped."

Clinton's reigning economic foursome - "especially Rubin," according to Greenberger - called Born in for a meeting and pleaded their case. She refused to back down, however, and continued to push for more regulation of the derivatives. Then, in June 1998, Rubin went public to denounce her move, eventually recommending that Congress strip the CFTC of its regulatory authority. In 2000, on its last day in session, Congress passed the now-notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had been inserted into an 11,000 page spending bill at the last minute, with almost no debate on the floor of the Senate. Banks were now free to trade default swaps with impunity.

But the story didn't end there. AIG, a major purveyor of default swaps, approached the New York State Insurance Department in 2000 and asked whether default swaps would be regulated as insurance. At the time, the office was run by one Neil Levin, a former Goldman vice president, who decided against regulating the swaps. Now freed to underwrite as many housing-based securities and buy as much credit-default protection as it wanted, Goldman went berserk with lending lust. By the peak of the housing boom in 2006, Goldman was underwriting $76.5 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities - a third of which were subprime - much of it to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies. And in these massive issues of real estate were vast swamps of crap.

Take one $494 million issue that year, GSAMP Trust 2006-S3. Many of the mortgages belonged to second-mortgage borrowers, and the average equity they had in their homes was 0.71 percent. Moreover, 58 percent of the loans included little or no documentation - no names of the borrowers, no addresses of the homes, just zip codes. Yet both of the major ratings agencies. Moody's and Standard & Poor's, rated 93 percent of the issue as investment grade. Moody's projected that less than 10 percent of the loans would default. In reality, 18 percent of the mortgages were in default within 18 months.

Not that Goldman was personally at any risk. The bank might be taking all these hideous, completely irresponsible mortgages from beneath-gangster-status firms like Countrywide and selling them off to municipillities and pensioners - old people, for God's sake - pretending the whole time that it wasn't grade-D horseshit. But even as it was doing So, it was taking short positions in the same market, in essence betting against same crap it was selling. Even worse, Goldman bragged about it in public. The mortgage sector continues to he challenged," David Viniar, the bank's chief financial officer, boasted in 2007. "As a result, we took significant markdowns on our long inventory positions, ... However, our risk bias in that market was to be short, and that net short position was profitable." In other words, the mortgages it was selling were for chumps. The real money was in betting against those same mortgages.

"That's how audacious these assholes are," says one hedge-fund manager. "At least with other banks, you could say that they were just dumb - they believed what they were selling, and it blew them up. Goldman knew what it was doing."

I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you're actually betting against - particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer - doesn't amount to securities fraud.

"It's exactly securities fraud." he says. "It's the heart of securities fraud."

Eventually, lots of aggrieved investors agreed. In a virtual repeat of the Internet IPO craze, Goldman was hit with a wave of lawsuits after the collapse of the housing bubble, many of which accused the bank of withholding pertinent information about the quality of the mortgages it issued. New York state regulators are suing Goldman and 25 other underwriters for selling bundles of crappy Countrywide mortgages to city and state pension funds, which lost as much as $100 million in the investments. Massachusetts also investigated Goldman for similar misdeeds, acting on behalf of 714 mortgage holders who got stuck holding predatory loans. But once again, Goldman got off virtually scot-free, staving off prosecution by agreeing to pay a paltry $60 million - about what the bank's CDO division made in a day and a half during the real estate boom.

The effects of the housing bubble are well known - it led more or less directly to the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG, whose toxic portfolio of credit swaps was in significant part composed of the insurance that banks like Goldman bought against their own housing portfolios. In fact, at least $1.3 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: It fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets.

And once again, while the world was crashing down all around the bank, Goldman made sure it was doing just fine in the compensation department. In 2006. the firm's payroll jumped to $16.5 billion - an average of $622,000 per employee. As a Goldman spokesman explained, "We work very hard here."

But the best was yet to come. While the collapse of the housing bubble sent most of the financial world fleeing for the exits, or to jail, Goldman boldly doubled down - and almost single-handedly created yet another bubble, one the world still barely knows the firm had anything to do with.


BUBBLE #4
$4 A GALLON


By the beginning of 2008, the financial world was in turmoil. Wall Street had spent the past two and a half decades producing one scandal after another, which didn't leave much to sell that wasn't tainted. The terms junk bond, IPO, subprime mortgage and other once-hot financial fare were now firmly associated in the public's mind with scams; the terms credit swaps and CDOs were about to join them. The credit markets were in crisis, and the mantra that had sustained the fantasy economy throughout the Bush years - the notion that housing prices never go down - was now a fully exploded myth, leaving the Street clamoring for a new bullshit paradigm to sling.

Where to go? With the public reluctant to put money in anything that felt like a paper investment, the Street quietly moved the casino to the physical-commodities market - stuff you could touch: corn, coffee, cocoa, wheat and, above all, energy commodities, especially oil. In conjunction with a decline in the dollar, the credit crunch and the housing crash caused a "flight to commodities." Oil futures in particular skyrocketed, as the price of a single barrel went from around $60 in the middle of 2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008.

That summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic example of how Republicans and Democrats respond to rises by engaging in fierce exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be "very helpful in the short term," while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out.

But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up. the short-term flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-term supply of oil rising, the demand tor it was falling - which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down.

So what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help - there were other players in the physical-commodities market - but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures - agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 pcrcent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.

As is so often the case, there had been a Depression-era law in place designed specifically to prevent this sort of thing. The commodities market was designed in large part to help farmers: A grower concerned about future price drops could enter into a contract to sell his corn at a certain price for delivery later on, which made him worry less about building up stores of his crop. When no one was buying corn, the farmer could sell to a middleman known as a "traditional speculator," who would store the grain and sell it later, when demand returned. That way, someone was always there to buy from the farmer, even when the market temporarily had no need for his crops.

In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. If that happened, prices would be affected by something other than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue. A new law empowered the Commodity Futures Trading commission - the very same body that would later try and fail to regulate credit swaps - to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. As a result of the CITC's oversight, peace and harmony reigned in the commodities markets for more than 50 years.

All that changed in 1991 when, unbeknownst to almost everyone in the world, a Goldman-owned commodities-trading subsidiary called J. Aron wrote to the CFTC and made an unusual argument. Farmers with big stores of corn, Goldman argued, weren't the only ones who needed to hedge their risk against future price drops - Wall Street dealers who made big bets on oil prices also needed to hedge their risk, because, well, they stood to lose a lot too.

This was complete and utter crap - the 1936 law, remember, was specifically designed to maintain distinctions between people who were buying and selling real tangible stuff and people who were trading in paper alone. But the CFTC, amazingly, bought Goldman's argument. It issued the bank a free pass, called the "Bona Fide Hedging" exemption, allowing Goldman's subsidiary to call itself a physical hedger and escape virtually all limits placed on speculators. In the years that followed, the commission would quietly issue 14 similar exemptions to other companies.

Now Goldman and other banks were free to drive more investors into the commodities markets, enabling speculators to place increasingly big bets. That 1991 letter from Goldman more or less directly led to the oil bubble in 2008, when the number of speculators in the market - driven there by fear of the falling dollar and the housing crash - finally overwhelmed the real physical suppliers and consumers. By 2008, at least three quarters of the activity on the commodity exchanges was speculative, according to a congressional staffer who studied the numbers - and that's likely a conservative estimate. By the middle of last summer, despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a gallon every time we pulled up to the pump.

What is even more amazing is that the letter to Goldman, along with most of the other trading exemptions, was handed out more or less in secret. "I was the head of the division of trading and markets, and Brooksley Born was the chair of the CFTC," says Greenberger, "and neither of us knew this letter was out there." In fact, the letters only came to light by accident. Last year, a staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committee just happened to be at a briefing when officials from the CFTC made an offhand reference to the exemptions.

"I had been invited to a briefing the commission was holding on energy," the staffer recounts. "And suddenly in the middle of it, they start saying, "Yeah, we've been issuing these letters for years now." I raised my hand and said, 'Really? You issued a letter? Can I see it?' And they were like, 'Duh, duh.' So we went back and forth, and finally they said, 'We have to clear it with Goldman Sachs.' I'm like, 'What do you mean, you have to clear it with Goldman Sachs?'"

The CFTC cited a rule that prohibited it from releasing any information about a company's current position in the market. But the staffer's request was about a letter that had been issued 17 years earlier. It no longer had anything to do with Goldman's current position. What's more, Section 7 of the 1936 commodities law gives Congress the right to any information it wants from the commission. Still, in a classic example of how complete Goldman's capture of government is, the CFTC waited until it got clearance from the bank before it turned the letter over.

Armed with the semisecret government exemption, Goldman had become the chief designer of a giant commodities betting parlor. Its Goldman Sachs Commodities Index - which tracks the prices of 24 major commodities but is overwhelmingly weighted toward oil - became the place where pension funds and insurance companies and other institutional investors could make massive long-term bets on commodity prices. Which was all well and good, except for a couple of things. One was that index speculators are mostly "long only" bettors, who seldom if ever take short positions - meaning they only bet on prices to rise. While this kind of behavior is good for a stock market, it's terrible for commodities, because it continually forces prices upward. "If index speculators took short positions as well as long ones, you'd see them pushing prices both up and down," says Michael Masters, a hedge-fund manager who has helped expose the role of investment banks in the manipulation of oil prices. "But they only push prices in one direction: up."

Complicating matters even further was the fact that Goldman itself was cheerleading with all its might for an increase in oil prices. In the beginning of 2008, Arjun Murti, a Goldman analyst, hailed as an "oracle of oil" by The New York Times, predicted a "super spike" in oil prices, forecasting a rise to $200 a barrel. At the time Goldman was heavily invested in oil through its commodities-trading subsidiary, J. Aron; it also owned a stake in a major oil refinery in Kansas, where it warehoused the crude it bought and sold. Even though the supply of oil was keeping pace with demand, Murti continually warned of disruptions to the world oil supply, going so far as to broadcast the fact that be owned two hybrid cars. High prices, the bank insisted, were somehow the fault of the piggish American consumer; in 2005, Goldman analysts insisted that we wouldn't know when oil prices would fall until we knew "when American consumers will stop buying gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and instead seek fuel-efficient alternatives."

But it wasn't the consumption of real oil that was driving up prices - it was the trade in paper oil. By the summer of 2008, in fact, commodities speculators had bought and stockpiled enough oil futures to fill 1.1 billion barrels of crude, wich meant that speculators owned more future oil on paper than there was real, physical oil stored in all of the country's commercial storage tanks and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve combined. It was a repeat of both the Internet craze and the housing bubble, when Wall Street jacked up present-day profits by selling suckers shares of a fictional fantasy future of endlessly rising prices.

In what was by now a painfully familiar pattern, the oil-commodities melon hit the pavement hard in the summer of 2008, causing a massive loss of wealth; crude prices plunged from $147 to $33. Once again the big losers were ordinary people. The pensioners whose funds invested in this crap got massacred: CalPERS, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, had $1.1 billion in commodities when the crash came. And the damage didn't just come from oil. Soaring food prices driven by the commodities bubble led to catastrophes across the planet, forcing an estimated 100 million people into hunger and sparking food riots throughout the Third World.

Now oil prices are rising again: They shot up 20 percent in the month of May and have nearly doubled so far this year. Once again, the problem is not supply or demand. "The highest supply of oil in the last 20 years is now," says Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan who serves on the House energy committee. "Demand is at a 10-year low. And yet prices are up."

Asked why politicians continue to harp on things like drilling or hybrid cars, when supply and demand have nothing to do with the high prices, Stupak shakes his head. "I think they just don't understand the problem very well," he says. "You can't explain it in 30 seconds, so politicians ignore it."


BUBBLE #5
RIGGING THE BAILOUT


After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming - this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.

It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers - one of Goldman's last real competitors - collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.

Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bankholding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding - most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs - and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.

Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman - New York Fed president William Dudley - is yet another former Goldmanite.

The collective message of all this - the AlG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds - is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."

Once the bailouts were in place, Goldman went right back to business as usual, dreaming up impossibly convoluted schemes to pick the American carcass clean of its loose capital. One of its first moves in the post-bailout era was to quietly push forward the calendar it uses to report its earnings, essentially wiping December 2008 - with its $1.3 billion in pretax losses - off the books. At the same time, the bank announced a highly suspicious $1.8 billion profit for the first quarter of 2009 - which apparently included a large chunk of money funneled to it by taxpayers via the AIG bailout. "They cooked those first-quarter results six ways from Sunday," says one hedge-fund manager. "They hid the losses in the orphan month and called the bailout money profit."

Two more numbers stand out from that stunning first-quarter turnaround. The bank paid out an astonishing $4.7 billion in bonuses and compensation in the first three months of this year, an 18 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008. It also raised $5 billion by issuing new shares almost immediately after releasing its first-quarter results. Taken together, the numbers show that Goldman essentially borrowed a $5 billion salary payout for its executives in the middle of the global economic crisis it helped cause, using halfbaked accounting to reel in investors, just months after receiving billions in a taxpayer bailout.

Even more amazing, Goldman did it all right before the government announced the results of its new "stress test" for banks seeking to repay TARP money - suggesting that Goldman knew exactly what was coming. The government was trying to carefully orchestrate the repayments in an effort to prevent further trouble at banks that couldn't pay back the money right away. But Goldman blew off those concerns, brazenly flaunting its insider status. "They seemed to know everything that they needed to do before the stress test came out, unlike everyone else, who had to wait until after," says Michael Hecht, a managing director of JMP Securities. "The government came out and said, 'To pay back TARP, you have to issue debt of at least five years that is not insured by FDIC - which Goldman Sachs had already done, a week or two before."

And here's the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008?

Fourteen million dollars.

That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion - yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year.

Howis this possible? According to Goldman's annual report, the low taxes are due in large part to changes in the bank's "geographic earnings mix." In other words, the bank moved its money around so that most of its earnings took place in foreign countries with low tax rates. Thanks to our completely fucked corporate tax system, companies like Goldman can ship their revenues offshore and defer taxes on those revenues indefinitely, even while they claim deductions upfront on that same untaxed income. This is why any corporation with an at least occasionally sober accountant can usually find a way to zero out its taxes. A GAO report, in fact, found that between 1998 and 2005, roughly two-thirds of all corporations operating in the U.S. paid no taxes at all.

This should be a pitchfork-level outrage - but somehow, when Goldman released its post-bailout tax profile, hardly anyone said a word. One of the few to remark on the obscenity was Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money," he said, "the left is hiding it offshore."


BUBBLE #6
GLOBAL WARMING


Fast-forward to today. it's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs - its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign - sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are HankPaulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits - a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade.

The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Here's how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy "allocations" or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions: President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.

The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of all' electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.

Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief ofstaff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank's environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson's report argued that "voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate-change problem." A few years later, the bank's carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won't be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, "We're not making those investments to lose money."

The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Hanis. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets, There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in green-tech ... the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy-futures market?

"Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee.

Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming?Maybe - but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.

"If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedgefund director who' spoke out against oil-futures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want, It's just asinine."

Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees - while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.

It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things tbat are no longer there.

But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going.