FROM HAL TURNER ******** URGENT ******** URGENT ********
SPECIAL "CLOSED SESSION" OF U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES DISCUSSED A LOT MORE THAN THE PENDING SECURITY SURVEILLANCE PROVISIONS LAST NIGHTS SESSION WAS ONLY THE FOURTH TIME IN 176 YEARS THAT CONGRESS CLOSED ITS DOORS TO THE PUBLIC
Word has begun leaking from last nights special, closed-door session of the United States House of Representatives.
Not only did members discuss new surveillance provisions as was the publicly stated reason for the closed door session, they also discussed:
the imminent collapse of the U.S. economy to occur by September 2008,
the imminent collapse of US federal government finances by February 2009,
the possibility of Civil War inside the USA as a result of the collapse,
advance round-ups of "insurgent U.S. citizens" likely to move against the government,
The detention of those rounded-up at "REX 84" camps constructed throughout the USA,
the possibility of retaliation against members of Congress for the collapses,
the location of "safe facilities" for members of Congress and their families to reside during expected massive civil unrest
the necessary and unavoidable merger of the United States with Canada (for its natural resources) and with Mexico (for its cheap labor pool),
the issuance of a new currency - THE AMERO - for all three nations as the proposed solution to the coming economic armageddon.
Members of Congress were FORBIDDEN to reveal what was discussed and ABC News via WCPO web site at the link below CONFIRMS congress members were FORBIDDEN to talk about it!
Several are so furious and concerned about the future of the contry, they have begun leaking info. More details coming later today and over the weekend. SPREAD THE WORD!!!
House Goes Behind Closed Doors To Debate Surveillance Bill CAPITOL HILL (AP) -- The House has held a closed session for the first time in 25 years, discussing a hotly contested surveillance bill.
Republicans had requested privacy for what they termed "an honest debate" on the new Democratic eavesdropping measure.
The bill is opposed by the White House and most Republicans in Congress.
Lawmakers were forbidden to disclose what was said during the hour-long late-night session.
The extent to which minds were changed, if at all, should be more clear Friday, when the House is expected to openly debate and then vote on the bill.
President Bush has vowed to veto the surveillance measure, saying it would undermine the nation's security.
Bush opposes it in part because it wouldn't provide retroactive legal immunity for telecom companies that may have helped the government eavesdrop on their customers without court permission after the 9/11 terror attacks.
Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
.5 to .75 Fed Cut Expected Tuesday, and the CPI is 0.3% lower than expected. Carlyle did a $17B bankruptcy yesterday, Bear Stearns credit was cut, banks are failing, we're crossing below a support level on the DJIA, gold hit $1009 record today, oil is volatile + people are loosing their shirts in futures and forex with margin calls.
I did tell you to watch the news!
The DJIA will hit 10800, or maybe 10000 before it turns around (at least another 1000pt drop).
NEW YORK, March 14 (Reuters) - U.S. gold futures rose 1 percent to a record high on Friday, trading firmly above the $1,000 an ounce, lifted by a record low dollar and as investors fled to bullion as a safe haven due to a worsening financial market crisis.
Bear Stearns Chief Executive Alan Schwartz said that the U.S. investment bank's liquidity position in the last 24 hours had significantly deteriorated, and that JPMorgan Chase and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York agreed to provide secured funding to Bear as necessary. [ID:ID:nN14389680\]
"It is indicative of how serious the financial crisis is, and the impact that it has on financial firms in the whole financial arena," said Bill O'Neill, managing partner of LOGIC Advisors in Upper Saddle River in New Jersey.
"This is not a positive thing in my view. This is indicative of the kind of crisis that we are in. I do view this as bullish for hard assets," O'Neill said.
At 10:33 a.m. EDT (1433 GMT), the active gold contract for April delivery GCJ8 on the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange jumped $10.40 or 1.1 percent to $1,004.30 an ounce. It traded between a bottom of $991.70 overnight and a record high of $1,007.30.
Investors often turn to gold as insurance in times of financial market jitters and economic uncertainties.
U.S. stocks had dropped as much as 2 percent, while Bear Stearns stock had nosedived as much as 50 percent. The U.S. stock market trimmed losses and was down about 1 percent.
The dollar fell to a fresh 12-1/2-year low against the yen and a record low against the euro on the Bear Stearns liquidity news, increasing fear of a deep U.S. recession.
Returns on U.S. holdings are eroding for foreign investors and many see precious metals as hard assets that can protect portfolios.
Spot gold firmly breached the historic $1,000 level on Friday, after U.S. gold contracts burst through the psychological barrier on Thursday due to a struggling dollar and inflation fears.
Spot gold was quoted at $1,001.55/1,002.25, up from $991.00/991.80 at the close Thursday. London bullion dealers fixed the morning spot price at $997.00 an ounce.
George Gero, vice president of RBC Capital Markets Global Futures in New York, said that investors continued to favor hard assets as gold was trading at all-time highs.
"Thousand-dollar gold may have legs now with media attention bringing new investors to the market, while palladium and silver are catching up as well," Gero said.
Gold is up 20 percent this year. In January it surpassed the historic milestone from January 1980. That year, bullion peaked at $850 an ounce against a backdrop of high inflation linked to strong oil prices, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution.
COMEX's May silver SIK8 was up 41.0 cents, or 2 percent, at $20.83 an ounce. It traded between a bottom of $20.320 and a high of $20.975.
Spot silver jumped to $20.74/20.79 from $20.42/20.47 at Wednesday's close. London silver was fixed at $20.41.
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The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked
By Greg Palast Reporting for Air America Radio?s Clout
Listen to Palast on Clout at www.GregPalast.com
While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ?escort? $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush?s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.
Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there?s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush?s man Bernanke was using ours.
This week, Bernanke?s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks? mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.
Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers? bordello: Eliot Spitzer.
Who are they kidding? Spitzer?s lynching and the bankers? enriching are intimately tied.
How? Follow the money.
The press has swallowed Wall Street?s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn?t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That?s blaming the victim.
Here?s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ?sub-prime? mortgage and it?s variants including loans with teeny ?introductory? interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ?Countrywide? became America?s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chuck of these ?sub-prime.?
Here?s how it worked: The Grinning Family, with US average household income, gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 a month payment is 25% of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at the cheap rate, in two years. But in two years, the promise ain?t worth a can of spam and the Grinnings are told to scram - because their house is now worth less than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the ?discount? they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of pre-tax income. Grinnings move into their Toyota.
Now, what kind of American is ?sub-prime.? Guess. No peeking. Here?s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren?t stupid ? they had no choice. They were ?steered? as it?s called in the mortgage sharking business.
?Steering,? sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called ?fraudulent conveyance? or ?predatory lending? under US law, were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.
But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hardy ? it was OK now to steer?m, fake?m, charge?m and take?m.
But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.
Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush?s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of ?federal pre-emption,? Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.
Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer?s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush?s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.
Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the sharkfest: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup?s Citibank made mortgage usury their major profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called ?securitization.?
What that means is that they took a bunch of junk mortgages, like the Grinnings, loans about to go down the toilet and re-packaged them into ?tranches? of bonds which were stamped ?AAA? - top grade - by bond rating agencies. These gold-painted turds were sold as sparkling safe investments to US school district pension funds and town governments in Finland (really).
When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide?s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will ?earn? a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars ? he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.
But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide?s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks.
Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That?s Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.
The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure ? and got to keep the Grinning?s house. There was no ?quid? of a foreclosure moratorium for the ?pro quo? of public bail-out. Not one family was saved ? but not one banker was left behind.
Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo?s Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company?s stock rise $10 billion in an afternoon.
And that very same day the bail-out was decided ? what a coinkydink! ? the man called, ?The Sheriff of Wall Street? was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.
Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, ?Take him down today!? Naw, that?s not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. Headlines in the financial press ? one was ?Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer? - made clear to Bush?s enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it wasn?t Bin Laden.
It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:
?Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which he federal government was turning a blind eye.?
Bush, said Spitzer right in the headline, was the ?Predator Lenders? Partner in Crime.? The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.
Spitzer wrote, ?When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.?
But now, the Administration can rest assured that this love story ? of Bush and his bankers - will not be told by history at all ? now that the Sheriff of Wall Street has fallen on his own gun.
A note on ?Prosecutorial Indiscretion.?
Back in the day when I was an investigator of racketeers for government, the federal prosecutor I was assisting was deciding whether to launch a case based on his negotiations for airtime with 60 Minutes. I?m not allowed to tell you the prosecutor?s name, but I want to mention he was recently seen shouting, ?Florida is Rudi country! Florida is Rudi country!?
Not all crimes lead to federal bust or even public exposure. It?s up to something called ?prosecutorial discretion.?
Funny thing, this ?discretion.? For example, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, paid Washington DC prostitutes to put him diapers (ewww!), yet the Senator was not exposed by the US prosecutors busting the pimp-ring that pampered him. Naming and shaming and ruining Spitzer ? rarely done in these cases - was made at the ?discretion? of Bush?s Justice Department.
Or maybe we should say, 'indiscretion.'
************ Greg Palast, former investigator of financial fraud, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Hear The Palast Report weekly on Air America Radio?s Clout.
And next Wednesday March 19, join Palast and Clout host Richard Greene on a dinner cruise on the Potomac River. For more i
From: Don Ba Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 4:20 PMSubject: CLOSED Congress Session Last Night: Only 4th Time In 176 Years !SPECIAL "CLOSED SESSION" OF U.S. HOUSE OFREPRESENTATIVES DISCUSSED A LOT MORE ... more
-------- Original Message --------Subject: House Passes FISA Bill Without ImmunityDate: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:00:49 -0500From: t r u t h o u t messenger@truthout.orgTo: apfn@apfn.orgHouse permits... more
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