Author Archives: News Sources

American Jews shocked as essence of Zionism is exposed

Israeli journalist Yossi Gurvitz exposes a face of Zionism most American Jews would rather not see and puts into context the controversial Israeli government ad campaign appealing to Israelis to return home from the U.S.:

The main concept of Zionism is that Jewish life, outside of their national homeland, is the life of an invalid. They cannot be truly Jewish life since they lack the national element of Judaism. Jews can only be fully Jews when they live in Israel. An early Zionist writer, Yehuda Pinsker, compared the lives of diaspora Jews to that of the undead, and went further on to say anti-Semitism is a natural response to the unnatural existence of deracinated Diaspora Jews.

Accordingly, Zionism views Jewish life abroad with disdain. This is reflected in the language: A Jew who immigrates to Israel is called an “oleh,” literally someone who transcends; One who emigrates from Israel is called a “yored,” literally someone going down. Hence, the need for an a ministry who will cater to the needs of Jews who “make aliyah” – The Ministry of Aliyah Absorption. Incidentally, it is extremely difficult for a non-Jew to immigrate to Israel.

Israeli Jews, particularly the hardcore Zionists, view Diaspora Jews with thinly veiled contempt, which erupts to the surface from time to time – such as when former President Weizman called upon American Jews to leave the US and come to Israel, and so fulfill their destiny, or when the author A.B. Yohoshua told American Jews in 2006 that “Outside of Israel, Judaism cannot exist. You are dealing with a Judaism of plug and play… You switch identities as you change your jackets… If China becomes stronger than the US, you would all move to China.” This is not particularly new: The Palestine/Israel branch of the historic Zionist movement always considered Zionists living in Israel to be superior to Jews living in the Diaspora, and considered Diaspora Jews not as independent human beings but rather as Zionist building blocks. Nowhere was this more evident that in Ben Gurion’s famous saying, that if he had to choose between a million Jewish children being saved by being sent to Britain or just half of them saved, but sent to Palestine, he would choose the latter. For hardcore Zionists, Diaspora Jews are failures; They can only be redeemed by joining our armed ghetto.

Therefore, the very idea of an Israeli Jew leaving the country and joining the Diaspora is disgusting to Israeli Zionists, particularly the older ones. Former PM Rabin called them “a residue of cowards.” For most Zionists, the idea of an Israeli Jew losing himself and his hard-won identity in the Diaspora, basically spitting on all that Zionism fought for, is loathsome. Hence the ads: They are trying to save Israeli Jews from sinking to the level of “regular Jews,” or, God forbid, “assimilating” with the gentiles.

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The $7.77 trillion bailout

I posted this before, but it’s worth posting again.

Bloomberg Markets Magazine: The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”

The size of the bailout came to light after Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, won a court case against the Fed and a group of the biggest U.S. banks called Clearing House Association LLC to force lending details into the open.

The Fed, headed by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, argued that revealing borrower details would create a stigma — investors and counterparties would shun firms that used the central bank as lender of last resort — and that needy institutions would be reluctant to borrow in the next crisis. Clearing House Association fought Bloomberg’s lawsuit up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the banks’ appeal in March 2011.

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year. [Continue reading…]

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The Israelification of law enforcement in the United States

Max Blumenthal writes: In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”

Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.

The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.

Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing, and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Meanwhile, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people. The New York Police Department’s disclosure that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against Occupy protesters encamped in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park is just the latest example of the so-called War on Terror creeping into every day life. Revelations like these have raised serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics are being used to suppress the Occupy movement.

The process of Israelification began in the immediate wake of 9/11, when national panic led federal and municipal law enforcement officials to beseech Israeli security honchos for advice and training. America’s Israel lobby exploited the climate of hysteria, providing thousands of top cops with all-expenses paid trips to Israel and stateside training sessions with Israeli military and intelligence officials. By now, police chiefs of major American cities who have not been on junkets to Israel are the exception. [Continue reading…]

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The we-are-at-war! mentality

Glenn Greenwald writes: Two significant events happened on Thursday: (1) the Democratic-led Senate rejuvenated and expanded the War on Terror by, among other things, passing a law authorizing military detention on U.S. soil and expanding the formal scope of the War; and (2) Obama lawyers, for the first time, publicly justified the President’s asserted (and seized) power to target U.S. citizens for assassination without any transparency or due process. I wrote extensively about the first episode on Thursday, and now have a question for those supporting the assassination theories just offered by the President’s lawyers.

To pose that question, I’d like to harken back for a moment to the controversy over the Guantanamo detention system. Democrats universally purported to be appalled that the Bush administration was indefinitely imprisoning people without any charges or due process. Barack Obama, as a Senator from Illinois, denounced “the Bush Administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo” — i.e., that people would be put in cages, possibly forever,with no charges. But Bush lawyers offered a theory for why due-process-free imprisonment was justifiable. The theory had these four fairly simple premises:

(1) Terrorism is not primarily a criminal offense. It is an act of war. Thus: We Are At War With The Terrorists.

(2) Those who try to harm the U.S. as part of this War are combatants and Terrorists — not criminals — and are thus entitled to no due process or any other rights to which accused criminals are entitled. It is the U.S. military (led by the Commander-in-Chief) — not courts — which decides who is and is not a combatant and Terrorist.

(3) Whether someone is a combatant or Terrorist is decided by only one thing: the President’s unilateral decree. Once the President decrees someone a combatant or Terrorist — including one of his own citizens — that person by definition becomes one, and he can then be treated as such without any further judicial process or Constitutional protection. Once that presidential accusatory decree issues, protections of the Constitution and law disappear. In sum, presidential accusations that someone is a Terrorist are the same as proof and a verdict of guilt.

(4) Unlike virtually every other war ever fought, the “battlefield” of this War is not found where opposing forces are shooting at each other, but is rather defined as: wherever an accused Terrorist is found anywhere in the world. Thus, the President’s battlefield powers — which are limitless: unilateral targeting for death, indefinite imprisonment without charges, spying on communications without any oversight – are not confined to any geographical location, but instead can be applied everywhere. Wherever an accused combatant or Terrorist physically exists — sleeping in a bed, riding in a car with his children, thousands of miles away from any actual shooting — is the “battlefield.”

Those were the once-controversial theoretical premises offered repeatedly by Bush lawyers and other defenders to justify the Guantanamo detention system. More generally, these theories were (and remain) the heart and soul of the neocon view of the War on Terror. Once you accept those four premises, there is no coherent way to oppose Guantanamo. So here is my question:

At this point, do Obama defenders reject any of these four premises? I mean this literally: I cannot count how many times I have heard exactly this same theory offered by Obama supporters justifying his assassination powers (the President is entitled to target citizens for death because we are at War, and once you take up arms against the U.S. (meaning: once the President accuses you of doing so) you have no due process rights). Indeed, there simply is no possible way to defend the assassination powers claimed by Obama without embracing each of these theories. And therefore, here is what Obama lawyers said on Thursday:

U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida, top national security lawyers in the Obama administration said Thursday. The lawyers were asked at a national security conference about the CIA killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and leading al-Qaida figure. . . .

The government lawyers, CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson, did not directly address the al-Awlaki case. But they said U.S. citizens do not have immunity when they are at war with the United States.

Johnson said only the executive branch, not the courts, is equipped to make military battlefield targeting decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.

When Obama lawyers refer to “U.S. citizens who take up arms with al-Qaida,” what they mean is this: those whom the President accuses (in secret, with no due process or evidence presented) of having taken up arms with al-Qaida. When they refer to “battlefield targeting decisions,” they do not mean a place where there is active fighting, but rather: anywhere in the world an accused Terrorist is found (leaving no doubt about that, Johnson decreed that the limits of “battlefield v. non battlefield is a distinction that is growing stale“). In other words: the whole world is the battlefield, a claim Obama officials have long embraced, and someone is a Terrorist the minute the President declares him to be one: the President is the sole judge, the sole jury, and now even the sole executioner.

So my question to defenders of Obama’s assassination powers is this: which of those four core Bush/Cheney War on Terror premises do you reject, if any?

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The new cyber-industrial complex spying on us

Pratap Chatterjee writes: We live digital lives now, flitting from Facebook to YouTube, checking our iPhones and BlackBerries, and chatting with our loved ones on Skype. Very few of us worry too much about tweeting our personal opinions on politics or chatting with a new social network “friend” on the other side of the world, whom we barely know and often forget in a matter of a few hours or days.

Yet all these interactions have become fodder for a new industry that secretly vacuums up the data and preserves it forever on high-end servers that hold many petabytes (a million gigabytes) of information. This industry offers new tools to search that data and reconstruct our past, and even our real-time movements via our mobile phones, in a way that could well come back to haunt us.

WikiLeaks has just released the Spy Files – a trove of almost 300 documents from these companies that shine a light into this industry. At the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, where I work, we trawled through these documents, and tracked down yet more material which our research team – Matthew Wrigley, David Pegg, Christian Jensen and Jamie Thunder – used to create an online database that will soon cover over 160 companies in some 25 countries.

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Neocons worst fear: a shift in the balance of power in the Middle East

M.J. Rosenberg writes: Suddenly the struggle to stop Iran is not about saving Israel from nuclear annihilation. After a decade of scare-mongering about the second coming of Nazi Germany, the Iran hawks are admitting that they have other reasons for wanting to take out Iran, and saving Israeli lives may not be one of them. Suddenly the neoconservatives have discovered the concept of truth-telling, although, no doubt, the shift will be ephemeral.

The shift in the rationale for war was kicked off this week when Danielle Pletka, head of the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) foreign policy shop and one of the most prominent neoconservatives in Washington, explained what the current obsession with Iran’s nuclear program is all about.

The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, “See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.” … And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem.

Watch:

Hold on. The “biggest problem” with Iran getting a nuclear weapon is not that Iranians will use it but that they won’t use it and that they might behave like a “responsible power”? But what about the hysteria about a second Holocaust? What about Prime Minister Netanyahu’s assertion that this is 1938 and Hitler is on the march? What about all of these pronouncements that Iran must be prevented from developing a nuclear weapons because the apocalyptic mullahs would happily commit national suicide in order to destroy Israel? And what about AIPAC and its satellites, which produce one sanctions bill after another (all dutifully passed by Congress) because of the “existential threat” that Iran poses to Israel? Did Pletka lose her talking points?

Apparently not.

Pletka’s “never mind” about the imminent danger of an Iranian bomb seems to be the new line from the bastion of neoconservativism.

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Senate votes not to vote on indefinite detention on Americans

Adam Serwer writes: Can Americans be indefinitely detained by the military on suspicion of terrorism if arrested on American soil? Thursday evening the Senate added a compromise amendment to the defense spending bill that states: Maybe. Specifically, it says the bill does not alter current authorities relating to detention, leaving either side free to argue whether current law allows or prohibits indefinite military detention of Americans captured in the US.

The compromise amendment passed by a 99-1 after a previous effort by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) that would have explicitly prevented the indefinite detention of Americans without trial failed 45-55. Several Democrats joined Republicans in blocking the latter amendment with Republican Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) Rand Paul (R-Ky) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill) joining most Democrats in voting for Feinstein’s amendment.

The reason the compromise amendment worked is that it leaves the question of domestic military detention open, leaving the matter for Supreme Court to resolve should a future president decide to assert the authority to detain a US citizen on American soil. Senators who defended the detention provisions can continue to say that current law allows Americans to be detained based on the 2004 Hamdi v Rumsfeld case in which an American captured fighting in Afghanistan was held in military detention. Opponents can continue to point out that the Hamdi case doesn’t resolve whether or not Americans can be detained indefinitely without charge if captured in their own country, far from any declared battlefield. They have the better of the argument.

Dahlia Lithwick writes: The detainee language only makes us all safer if you assume that “they” are always guilty whenever the government says so. It’s the job of the courts to decide whether the government is right. Justice Antonin Scalia himself put it this way: “Where the Government accuses a citizen of waging war against it, our constitutional tradition has been to prosecute him in federal court for treason or some other crime. … The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.”

One of the two Republican senators to vote for the Udall Amendment yesterday was Sen. Rand Paul, who quoted Thomas Jefferson: “The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become instruments of tyranny at home.” No. Truer. Words. At this moment in America we seem to be so fond of dividing Americans into us and them that we have created all sorts of intriguing new legal double standards for the thems. Don’t think for a minute that these new powers will be used only against suspected terrorists. We already know that suspected illegal immigrants, suspected environmental activists, and suspected protesters have very different legal rights—which is to say, far more limited rights—than anyone else. And as Benjamin Wallace Wells detailed last August, the landmark anti-terror legislation known as the Patriot Act has, in the 10 years since its passage, been used in 1,618 drug cases and 15 terrorism cases. You’d never know it from watching the GOP hopefuls joyfully demonize women, immigrants, the poor, the prisoners, OWS protesters, and union members, but at some point, them always becomes us.

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GOP strategist warns governors ‘capitalism’ is now a dirty word

Yahoo News reports: The Republican Governors Association met this week in Florida to give GOP state executives a chance to rejuvenate, strategize and team-build. But during a plenary session on Wednesday, one question kept coming up: How can Republicans do a better job of talking about Occupy Wall Street?

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation’s foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

Luntz offered tips on how Republicans could discuss the grievances of the Occupiers, and help the governors better handle all these new questions from constituents about “income inequality” and “paying your fair share.”

Yahoo News sat in on the session, and counted 10 do’s and don’ts from Luntz covering how Republicans should fight back by changing the way they discuss the movement.

1. Don’t say ‘capitalism.’

“I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’ ” Luntz said. “The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”

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Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood says end to military rule is ‘top priority’

The Guardian reports: The Muslim Brotherhood has fired a warning shot at Egypt’s ruling generals, declaring that a swift end to military rule is the country’s “top priority” as it prepares to take charge of a newly elected parliament.

With provisional election results continuing to emerge, confirming earlier predictions of a strong victory for the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party, the movement’s leaders emphasised that now was the time for “consensus not collision” and agreed to work with parties across the political spectrum to advance the revolution and facilitate a smooth transition to civilian government.

In a sign the Brotherhood will not tolerate parliament being treated as a rubber stamp by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), which has clung to power despite almost two weeks of anti-junta protests and violent street clashes, senior members of the organisation told the Guardian the generals risked further unrest if they defied the people and failed to return to their barracks next year.

“Egypt is currently going through a critical era in its history, and I am confident the military will choose to cooperate with parliament and not confront it – any other path will create more chaos,” said Essam al-Arian, vice president of the Freedom and Justice Party.

Amr Darrag, the group’s chief in Giza, said a quick and painless handover to civilian rule was the most important issue facing the Arab world’s most populous nation at present. “We are going through a transitional phase and we are not yet at the optimum stage of this transition,” he argued. “Parliament must be formed, a president must be elected, and power must be transferred to civilian authority. Scaf currently wields executive and legislative power; as soon as parliament convenes the latter must be passed to the institution democratically elected by the Egyptian people.”

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Half of Israeli Jews say peace with Palestinians will never happen

Here are some of the findings from the Brookings Saban Center 2011 Public Opinion Poll of Jewish and Arab Citizens of Israel:

  • 49% of Israeli Jews say that peace with the Palestinians will never happen, while 42% say it will happen but will take more than five years.
  • 43% support a comprehensive peace based on the 1967 borders, while 31% oppose withdrawing from territories occupied in 1967 even if all Arab states accept and recognize Israel. 24% choose nether option.
  • A robust majority of Israeli Jews, 71% support a formulation of Israel that accommodates its non-Jewish citizens by defining the state as “the homeland of the Jewish people and of all its citizens.”
  • Two thirds of Israeli Jews say that Israel should do more to promote a comprehensive peace based on the 1967 borders with agreed modifications and a peaceful Palestinian state.
  • 52% of Jewish Israelis believe that Arab citizens of Israel have legal equality but institutional and societal discrimination, while 33% say there is full equality between Arab and Jewish citizens.
  • 57% of Arab/Palestinian Israelis describe their current status in Israel as one of legal equality but of institutional and societal discrimination, 36% describe it as akin to apartheid, and 3% say there is full equality.

Iran

  • 90% of Israelis believe that Iran will eventually develop nuclear weapons.
  • Israeli Jews are equally divided on attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, with 43% supporting and 41% opposing an attack. However, 68% of Arab citizens of Israel, who constitute nearly 20% of the population, oppose such an attack, while only 4% support it (see below). Overall, more Israelis oppose than support an attack.
  • Given a choice of two options, one where both Israel and Iran have nuclear weapons and one where neither has them, 65% of Israeli Jews support the latter while only 19% support the former.
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The $7 trillion secret loan program. The government and big banks should be punished

Eliot Spitzer writes: Imagine you walked into a bank, applied for a personal line of credit, and filled out all the paperwork claiming to have no debts and an income of $200,000 per year. The bank, based on these representations, extended you the line of credit. Then, three years later, after fighting disclosure all the way, you were forced by a court to tell the truth: At the time you made the statements to the bank, you actually were unemployed, you had a $1 million mortgage on your house on which you had failed to make payments for six months, and you hadn’t paid even the minimum on your credit-card bills for three months. Do you think the bank would just say: Never mind, don’t worry about it? Of course not. Whether or not you had paid back the personal line of credit, three FBI agents would be at your door within hours.

Yet this is exactly what the major American banks have done to the public. During the deepest, darkest period of the financial cataclysm, the CEOs of major banks maintained in statements to the public, to the market at large, and to their own shareholders that the banks were in good financial shape, didn’t want to take TARP funds, and that the regulatory framework governing our banking system should not be altered. Trust us, they said. Yet, unknown to the public and the Congress, these same banks had been borrowing massive amounts from the government to remain afloat. The total numbers are staggering: $7.7 trillion of credit—one-half of the GDP of the entire nation. $460 billion was lent to J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley alone — without anybody other than a few select officials at the Fed and the Treasury knowing. This was perhaps the single most massive allocation of capital from public to private hands in our history, and nobody was told. This was not TARP: This was secret Fed lending. And although it has since been repaid, it is clear why the banks didn’t want us to know about it: They didn’t want to admit the magnitude of their financial distress.

The banks’ claims of financial stability and solvency appear at a minimum to have been misleading—and may have been worse. Misleading statements and deception of this sort would ordinarily put a small-market player or borrower on the wrong end of a criminal investigation.

So where are the inquiries into the false statements made by the bank CEOs? And where are the inquiries about the Fed and Treasury officials who stood by silently as bank representatives made claims that were false, misleading, or worse?

Only now, because of superb analysis done by Bloomberg reporters — who litigated against the Fed and the banks for years to get the information — are we getting a full picture of the Fed and Treasury lending. The reporters also calculated that recipient banks and other borrowers benefited by approximately $13 billion simply by taking advantage of the “spread” between their cost of capital in these almost interest-free loans and their ability to lend the capital.

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Occupy economics

Econ4 economists’ statement in support of Occupy Wall Street:

We are economists who oppose ideological cleansing in the economics profession. Equally we oppose political cleansing in the vital debate over the causes and consequences of our current economic crisis.

We support the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street movement across the country and across the globe to liberate the economy from the short-term greed of the rich and powerful one percent.

We oppose cynical and perverse attempts to misuse our police officers and public servants to expel advocates of the public good from our public spaces.

We extend our support to the vision of building an economy that works for the people, for the planet, and for the future, and we declare our solidarity with the Occupiers who are excercising our democratic right to demand economic and social justice.

(The economists who have signed this statement are listed here.)

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