January 3, 2016
Clinton's Bosnia Adventure Goes South
Since the Gulf War, no one would ever accuse the beltway gang of being astute strategic thinkers. While the Democrats have not cornered the market in this regard, there’s no doubt the leftist DC establishment have become experts at developing policies that result in abject failures. These misadventures go down the memory hole in the offices of the NYT and the WaPo, except if a Republican is President. But not so with foreign news outlets. France 24 has highlighted Bill Clinton’s arrogance and ignorance in one of history’s classic leftist military interventions.
In the early 90s, US media crews showed us every detail of the Bosnian battlefields, burning farmhouses, and battered marketplaces, in order to paint a picture of a complex ethnic war that was tearing the country apart. CNN and its go-to-war promoter, Christiane Amanpour, were particularly effective at laying a guilt trip on the American public and politicians in urging intervention.
In the early 90s, US media crews showed us every detail of the Bosnian battlefields, burning farmhouses, and battered marketplaces, in order to paint a picture of a complex ethnic war that was tearing the country apart. CNN and its go-to-war promoter, Christiane Amanpour, were particularly effective at laying a guilt trip on the American public and politicians in urging intervention.
In reality, the ethnic and religious angle was emphasized because the Clinton administration just could not bring itself to declare that the war was largely a fight of national identity to gain freedom from tyrannical, socialist dictators by the name of Slobodan Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb ally, Radovan Karadzic. It was not advisable to openly go against ideological soul mates of the communist persuasion.
The Dayton Accords were ironed out in 1995 to stop the war and promote the peace, but there there was a major flaw in the plan crafted by US Secretary of State Warren Christopher and chief negotiator Richard Holbrooke. The agreement presupposed that the final battle lines and unit boundaries were indicative of the pre-war ethnic population distribution in the country. Of course, US and NATO soldiers now had to figure out how to step in amongst three sets of belligerents composed of Bosnian Croat Roman Catholics, Bosnian Serb Orthodox Christians, and Bosniak Muslims. One Herculean task was to assist the return of refugees to their traditional homes, which, in many cases were behind enemy lines. It was forecast at the time that it would take until, well, about now, to safely return displaced people to their original lands. So, how did this work out after 20 years?
According to France 24, it hasn’t worked at all. In their push to get a deal – any deal – to stop the war (sound familiar?), Clinton and his advisers had failed to differentiate military occupation of land due to combat operations and the origin and movement of ethnic refugees. In other words, the accords forced ethnic segregation where previously there had been ethnic integration.
France 24 notes that where ethnic groups had settled after the cease-fire, had resulted in de facto ethnic home territories. These entailed arbitrary boundaries stipulated by the accords and over a generation had promoted segregation rather than a return of refugees and ultimately a return to a pre-war status quo. To expect a multi-national force composed of US and Western European forces, combined with Turks and US paid Russian units, to follow the script was the height of folly.
On another front, the Clinton administration agreed to an arms embargo, but then tacitly allowed weapons to be smuggled in from the Middle East to help the Bosniak Muslims. Clinton then went along with regional isolation protocols to prevent outside help from reaching all the belligerents. Mysteriously, he turned a blind eye to the infiltration of about 200 Mujahadeen fighters into Bosnia. Either deliberately or unwittingly, former President Clinton had sown the seeds for a new Islamo-fascist threat; this time in Southeastern Europe.
At the time, even European media criticized the decision while the US military command downplayed the significance of this infiltration. Twenty years later, France 24 confirms the disastrous consequences of this ploy. The Muslims in Bosnia were considered to be very secular with a soft adherence to the tenets of Islam. This has been replaced by the hardline Salafist approach such that Bosniak Muslims provide the majority of European recruits to the Islamic State. France 24 reports that,
John Smith is the pen name of a former American intelligence officer.
The Dayton Accords were ironed out in 1995 to stop the war and promote the peace, but there there was a major flaw in the plan crafted by US Secretary of State Warren Christopher and chief negotiator Richard Holbrooke. The agreement presupposed that the final battle lines and unit boundaries were indicative of the pre-war ethnic population distribution in the country. Of course, US and NATO soldiers now had to figure out how to step in amongst three sets of belligerents composed of Bosnian Croat Roman Catholics, Bosnian Serb Orthodox Christians, and Bosniak Muslims. One Herculean task was to assist the return of refugees to their traditional homes, which, in many cases were behind enemy lines. It was forecast at the time that it would take until, well, about now, to safely return displaced people to their original lands. So, how did this work out after 20 years?
According to France 24, it hasn’t worked at all. In their push to get a deal – any deal – to stop the war (sound familiar?), Clinton and his advisers had failed to differentiate military occupation of land due to combat operations and the origin and movement of ethnic refugees. In other words, the accords forced ethnic segregation where previously there had been ethnic integration.
France 24 notes that where ethnic groups had settled after the cease-fire, had resulted in de facto ethnic home territories. These entailed arbitrary boundaries stipulated by the accords and over a generation had promoted segregation rather than a return of refugees and ultimately a return to a pre-war status quo. To expect a multi-national force composed of US and Western European forces, combined with Turks and US paid Russian units, to follow the script was the height of folly.
On another front, the Clinton administration agreed to an arms embargo, but then tacitly allowed weapons to be smuggled in from the Middle East to help the Bosniak Muslims. Clinton then went along with regional isolation protocols to prevent outside help from reaching all the belligerents. Mysteriously, he turned a blind eye to the infiltration of about 200 Mujahadeen fighters into Bosnia. Either deliberately or unwittingly, former President Clinton had sown the seeds for a new Islamo-fascist threat; this time in Southeastern Europe.
At the time, even European media criticized the decision while the US military command downplayed the significance of this infiltration. Twenty years later, France 24 confirms the disastrous consequences of this ploy. The Muslims in Bosnia were considered to be very secular with a soft adherence to the tenets of Islam. This has been replaced by the hardline Salafist approach such that Bosniak Muslims provide the majority of European recruits to the Islamic State. France 24 reports that,
Hillary Clinton’s presidential run has already been plagued by scandals from when she was Secretary of State, yet the MSM still shields her from scrutiny. While dodging sniper fire in Bosnia, she apparently didn’t realize that her husband’s military expedition, much like Obama’s precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, had formed a country that can now function as a safe haven for Islamic jihadists. It is likely this failure will not penetrate the MSM wall around Hillary, nor will it likely impress the hacks of the GOPe machine. This perhaps leaves only Trump or Cruz to bring this forgotten national security disaster to the fore. Let’s hope they do so.Around 300 Bosnians are fighting alongside jihadists in Syria today. Many of them are believed to have been radicalised when Salafist preachers emerged in Bosnia during the 1992-1995 war. Today the tiny Balkan nation is facing an increasingly alarming security situation as the jihadists threaten to return home, calling for terror strikes in Bosnia, and elsewhere in Europe.
John Smith is the pen name of a former American intelligence officer.
Read more:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/clintons_bosnia_adventure_goes_south.html#ixzz3wDNPS9he
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DEATH OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery.
Never have the rich increased their wealth so
quickly as in America since the financial crash
of 2008. But side by side with the amassing
of previously unthinkable private fortunes,
the infrastructure of America is crumbling,
education, health care and other social
services are starved of funding, and the living
standards of the vast majority of the
population, the working people who produce
the wealth, are declining.
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE DIRTY BANKSTER MONEY THAN BARACK OBAMA WHO PROMISED THAT HIS CRONIES WOULD NEVER BE "PUNISHED".
IF FACT, THEIR LOOTING ONLY RATCHETED UP AFTER THE 2008 BAILOUT.
OBAMA'S CRONY BANKSTERS ARE NOW HEAVILY INVESTED IN HILLARY CLINTON. BILLARY AND HILLARY HAVE SUCKED UP A VAST FORTUNE IN "SPEECH" BRIBES FROM THE BANKSTERS THAT OWN OBAMA!
The calamity was further deepened by the use of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to bail out the biggest Wall Street firms. For millions of people in the US and around the world, the 2008 collapse was a social tragedy from which there has been no meaningful recovery. Yet, as The Big Short points out, the bankers and speculators––who ought to be sitting in prison––are richer and more powerful today than ever.
The Big Short: The criminality of Wall Street and the crash of 2008
By Joanne Laurier
31 December 2015
Directed by Adam McKay; screenplay by McKay and Charles Randolph, based on the book by Michael LewisAdam McKay’s new film The Big Short is a hard-hitting comedy-drama about the historic collapse of the US housing bubble in 2008.
Based on Michael Lewis’s book, The Big Short: Inside The
Doomsday Machine (2010), the film offers a picture of rampant
criminality on the part of the financial establishment and its
government co-conspirators who, while systematically looting the
American economy, created a financial disaster.
The calamity was further deepened by the use of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to bail out the biggest Wall Street firms. For millions of people in the US and around the world, the 2008 collapse was a social tragedy from which there has been no meaningful recovery. Yet, as The Big Short points out, the bankers and speculators––who ought to be sitting in prison––are richer and more powerful today than ever.
McKay’s The Big Short centers on a number of Wall Street “outliers” who, despite the efforts of the banks, government regulators and media lackeys, uncover the truth about the explosive market for bonds based on subprime mortgages: that the latter are “junk” and a rotten foundation for an economic boom.
The film takes the form of a series of vignettes involving these figures, a number of whose paths cross at critical moments.
Bankers, The Big Short’s narrator (Ryan Gosling) explains at the outset, were once perceived as staid and conservative. Now, as the trade in mortgage-backed securities mushrooms and a vast housing bubble develops, they have gone “from the country club to the strip club,” a function of the degree of parasitism and degeneracy in the system.
Christian Bale plays the real-life San Jose, California neurosurgeon-turned-money manager Michael Burry, who sports a glass eye and has a penchant for heavy metal. With a manic focus, he spends the end of 2004 and early 2005 scanning hundreds of home loans that are packaged into mortgage bonds, eventually discovering an alarming pattern. As opposed to the prevailing wisdom that “the housing market is rock solid,” Burry comes to believe it is a flimsy house of cards.
Burry approaches Goldman Sachs, seeking to purchase hundreds of millions of dollars in credit default swaps (a form of insurance against a loan default or other credit event) that amount to a bet against the housing market. His hedge fund’s owners and investors are apoplectic, but the eccentric, anti-social Burry is convinced that patience is the key as he waits for the bottom to drop out and his assumptions to pay off. (According to Lewis’s book, Burry explained, “I’m not making a bet against a bond, I’m making a bet against a system.”)
He admonishes his skeptics: “[Federal Reserve Chairman] Alan Greenspan assures us that home prices are not prone to bubbles––or major deflations––on any national scale. This is ridiculous, of course…. In 1933, during the fourth year of the Great Depression, the United States found itself in the midst of a housing crisis that put housing starts at 10 percent of the level of 1925. Roughly half of all mortgage debt was in default. During the 1930s, housing prices collapsed nationwide by roughly 80 percent.”
Jared “Chicken Little” Vennett (Gosling, playing a fictionalized Greg Lippman), a Deutsche Bank subprime mortgage bond manager, gets wind of Burry’s astonishing gamble. Vennett, slick, sleazy and smart, crunches the numbers and sees a potential gold mine.
Vennett solicits financial backing from Wall Street-bashing Mark Baum (Steve Carell, based on Steve Eisman), head of FrontPoint Partners, a unit of Morgan Stanley. Vennett explains the certainty of a housing catastrophe. The irascible Baum, who continues to suffer from his brother’s suicide, is chronically appalled by the banks’ shenanigans.
To investigate Vennett’s claims, Baum sends his colleagues to a subdivision in Florida, where they discover homes in foreclosure, delinquent mortgages that were purchased in the name of family pets, and a stripper who owns several properties—all with adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs)—and was told that continuous refinancing would always work in her favor. In one abandoned south Florida home, an alligator has taken over the swimming pool. One of Baum’s associates says, “It’s like Chernobyl.”
Baum also talks to cocky young mortgage brokers who inform him, with a laugh, that they have made millions selling subprime mortgages to poor people and immigrants. He subsequently meets with a Standard & Poor’s representative (Melissa Leo), who tells Baum she has to rate all the banks’ financial vehicles at AAA (the top rate) to keep their business.
Another of The Big Shor t’s plot strands involves young, inexperienced money managers, Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) and Charlie Geller (John Magaro), who parlay $110,000 of their own money into a $30 million fund. Also seeing the writing on the wall for the housing market, they enlist the help of retired guru/trader and drop-out Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt, based on Ben Hockett), whose connections help them secure an agreement enabling them to work directly with the banks.
The filmmakers intersperse the narrative with comic interludes featuring what they call “celebrity explainers,” brought in to help make the complicated terminology comprehensible. In the movie’s production notes, director McKay elaborates: “Bankers do everything they can to make these transactions seem really complicated, so we came up with the idea of having celebrities pop up on the screen throughout the movie and explain things directly to the audience.”
Sipping champagne in a bubble bath, actress Margot Robbie discusses mortgage-backed securities, while chef Anthony Bourdain compares a “toxic financial asset” to a seafood stew. (McKay recruited Bourdain after reading the latter’s recommendation that no one should “order seafood stew because it’s where cooks put all the crap they couldn’t sell.”
The director goes on, “I thought, ‘Oh my God that’s a perfect metaphor for a collateralized debt obligation, where the banks bundle a bunch of bad mortgages and sell it as a triple-A rated financial product.’”)
Economist Dr. Richard Thaler and actress Selena Gomez take part in a casino sequence to demonstrate how synthetic Credit Default Obligations (CDOs)––essentially groups of bad mortgages bundled together to hide the real likelihood of default––are the means of arranging numerous layers of speculation. Says McKay: “It was investors making those kinds of side bets on mortgage-backed securities through CDOs that drove the whole world economy to where it was poised to crash.”
The film’s tipping point comes when Vennett convinces Baum to attend the American Securities Forum in Las Vegas, an event whose out of control goings-on prove to the latter that the housing market is a gigantic Ponzi scheme.
The vindication of the nay-sayers is delayed when the housing market begins to collapse, but the value of the CDOs remains steady. Only then do the protagonists realize that the banks are concealing the toxicity of their holdings on a massive scale.
As the meltdown approaches, the mood of The Big Short markedly darkens. Baum starts to believe the “party’s over” and that “the world economy will collapse.” He is convinced the bankers “are crooks and should be in jail.”
This is effectively highlighted by a scene where Baum debates a representative of Bear Stearns. The latter sings the praises of the housing market even as the firm’s stock price falls off the cliff.
The Big Short’s approach to the run-up to one of the greatest financial crises in history, despite its comic-absurdist mode, is a serious one. The filmmakers do their best to bring this crisis and its human dimensions to life.
The film touches upon the systemic and far-reaching character of the 2008 crash. McKay and his collaborators are obviously appalled by its outcome and consequences, and even invent an alternative scenario in which the bankers responsible for the crash are jailed and the banks become regulated. They point the finger at not only those who issued the mortgages, but those who sliced and diced them into rotten products and the credit agencies that gave them top ratings. They conclude that the financial establishment made super profits through the immiseration of the population. The various actors, as clearly demonstrated by their performances, were fully committed to the project.
Of course, dramatizing something as complex as the 2008 financial collapse is an immense undertaking, involving a mass of historical and social questions. The Big Short’s makers have chosen one means of treating it. This film is clearly not the final word. While McKay and the others involved obviously feel sympathy for those devastated by the crisis, the mass of the population is largely absent. Their attitude to capitalism is a critical one, but they are not opponents of the profit system.
However, at a time when most filmmakers seem obsessed with gender, sexuality and race (and themselves), McKay and the others have chosen to treat—and treat trenchantly—one of the critical events in recent times. Genuine credit is due them.
"During the past year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires surged past $7 trillion and the top 1 percent now controls half of the world’s wealth."
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.
"In the sphere of world economy, any expectation of an upturn has given way to the reality of permanent crisis. In the United States, six years into the so-called economic “recovery,” real unemployment remains at near-record highs, wages are under attack, and health care and pensions for millions of Americans are being wiped out."
"The essential and intended consequence of government policy over the past seven years has been to vastly increase social inequality. During the past year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires surged past $7 trillion and the top 1 percent now controls half of the world’s wealth. In the US, the scale of social inequality—and therefore political inequality—is so great that one recent scientific study concluded that “the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt."
On the threshold of the New Year
On the threshold of the New Year
31 December 2015
As the year 2015 ends, a general mood of fear and foreboding predominates in ruling circles. It is hard to find a trace of optimism. Commentators in the bourgeois media look back on the past year and recognize that it has been a year of deepening crisis. They look forward to 2016 with apprehension. The general sense in government offices and corporate boardrooms is that the coming year will be one of deep shocks, with unexpected consequences.The Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman gives expression to this pervasive feeling in his end-of-the-year assessment published on Tuesday. “In 2015, a sense of unease and foreboding seemed to settle on all the world’s power centers,” he writes. “All the big players seem uncertain—even fearful.” China “feels much less stable.” In Europe, the mood is “bleak.” In the US, public sentiment is “sour.”
Significantly, Rachman singles out as the “biggest common factor” in the world situation “a bubbling anti-elite sentiment, combining anxiety about inequality and rage about corruption that is visible in countries as different as France, Brazil, China and the US.” This observation reflects a growing recognition within the corporate media that the coming period will be one of immense social upheavals.
Rachman’s comment and others like it that have appeared in recent days confirm the assessment made by the World Socialist Web Site during the first week of 2015. The intervals between the eruption of major geopolitical, economic and social crises have “become so short that they can hardly be described as intervals,” we wrote. Crises “appear not as isolated ‘episodes,’ but as more or less permanent features of contemporary reality. The pattern of perpetual crisis that characterized 2014—an essential indicator of the advanced state of global capitalist disequilibrium—will continue with even greater intensity in 2015.”
In defending its rule, the ruling class seeks to cover over the reality of capitalism beneath a mass of lies and hypocrisy. War is cloaked in the language of freedom and democracy; antisocial domestic policy is portrayed as the pursuit of equality and freedom. But—and this is characteristic of a period of crisis—more and more, the essential nature of capitalism—a system of exploitation, inequality, war and repression—comes into alignment with the everyday experiences of broad masses of people. Illusions are dispelled; the essence appears.
In the sphere of world economy, any expectation of an upturn has given way to the reality of permanent crisis. In the United States, six years into the so-called economic “recovery,” real unemployment remains at near-record highs, wages are under attack, and health care and pensions for millions of Americans are being wiped out. Europe is growing at less than 2 percent a year, and large parts of the European economy—including Greece, the target of brutal austerity measures demanded by the European banks—are in deep recession. China, presented as a possible engine of world economic growth, is slowing sharply. Brazil and much of Latin America are in deep slump. Russia is in recession.
BLOG: OBAMA'S CRONY BANKSTERS HAVE BEEN BUSY BEAVERS SINCE THE LAST MELTDOWN THEY CAUSED!
Meanwhile, the easy-money policy of the world’s central banks has produced a new wave of speculative investment, centered in junk bonds and other forms of debt, which is beginning to unravel in a process that parallels the crisis in subprime mortgages prior to 2008.
The essential and intended consequence of government policy over the past seven years has been to vastly increase social inequality. During the past year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires surged past $7 trillion and the top 1 percent now controls half of the world’s wealth. In the US, the scale of social inequality—and therefore political inequality—is so great that one recent scientific study concluded that “the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.”
Joseph Kishore
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