Banksters attack Syria to enslave America

from presstv.ir

Syrian troops (file photo)

Thu May 30, 2013 4:47AM GMT

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By Dr. Kevin Barrett

The war on Syria is not an American war on Syria, an Israeli war on Syria, an al-Qaeda war on Syria, a Qatari war on Syria, a Turkish war on Syria, or a Saudi war on Syria. It is a bankers' war on Syria."

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Israel bombs Syria and threatens Iran. Russia moves its warships into the Mediterranean, and furnishes Syria with advanced anti-aircraft weapons. Hezbollah defends Syria against al-Qaeda. Pro-Israel US Senators like John McCain join forces with al-Qaeda.

What is really going on here? Who is fighting whom, and why? Will Syria become the flash point for World War III?

Is the West attacking the Islamic world in a “clash of civilizations”? Then why are the Israeli and American governments backing al-Qaeda in Syria?

The old narratives no longer make sense.

The real war isn't between nations, civilizations, or religions.

The real war is the bankers' war to conquer the entire world.

In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins explained how it works. The bankers use their control of currency to impose debt slavery on individuals as well as nations. They force nations to accept loans that are impossible to pay back - by design. The bankers use the resulting bankruptcy and/or “restructuring agreements” to seize control of those nations and their resources.

If a nation's leader refuses to obey the bankers - as in the cases of Venezuela and Iran - that leader, or nation, is put on the bankers' “hit list.” That nation becomes a target for regime change, whether by assassination, coup d'état, a bought or stolen election, or outright invasion.

The bankers use the military and intelligence services of the nations they control to attack and subvert the nations they do not control. They also use their own private armies and intelligence services to subvert all nations.

Thus the war on Syria is not an American war on Syria, an Israeli war on Syria, an al-Qaeda war on Syria, a Qatari war on Syria, a Turkish war on Syria, or a Saudi war on Syria. It is a bankers' war on Syria.

The biggest international banking families exert a relatively high degree of control over the US, Israel, Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. They have only moderate influence in Syria, Russia, and China. And they have even less influence in Iran. So they are mobilizing their assets in hopes of achieving regime change in Syria. Iran, Russia, and China are next on their hit list.

The bankers are trying to create the first truly global empire. As John Perkins says, their biggest weapon is usury; military force is secondary. They first try to buy a country; if the leadership is not for sale, they try to assassinate or overthrow the leader(s); and if all else fails, they send the US military to invade the target country.

To create their global slave empire, the bankers must also control communications. If their plans were widely-known, people of all nations would revolt.

David Rockefeller spoke the truth at the 1991 Bilderberg meeting in Baden, Germany: "We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

Today, the only major media operations in English that are not owned, controlled, or duped by the bankers are Press TV and Russia Today. Apparently, Iran and Russia do not appreciate being on the bankers' hit list. And they are learning how to fight back - by telling the truth to the whole world. No wonder the banker-owned US and Europe have done their best to shut down Press TV.

The people of the English-speaking world in general, and the American people in particular, need to wake up to the fact that the bankers' war on Syria (and later Iran, Russia, and China) is also a war against them. The bankers are not prejudiced. They want to enslave everyone, regardless of race, nationality, or creed.

Here in the USA, the bankers enslave young people through student loans. If you want access to higher education in the US, and you are not rich, you have no choice but to take out student loans. By the time you graduate, you will be $20,000, $50,000, or even $100,000 in debt. And that debt will keep right on accumulating interest. You will spend half your working life struggling to pay off your loans - and providing the bankers with handsome profits.

The student loan system is a form of indentured servitude. Like indentured servants, who were forced to work as slaves for seven years to pay the cost of their ticket to America, college graduates in America find themselves the slaves of the bankers. Like indentured servants, American college students seek a ticket to freedom and opportunity; and like indentured students, the price of that ticket is years of slavery.

The bankers are achieving ever-higher degrees of control over the USA. They now own both major political parties and all major US media outlets.

But they are afraid of the American people more than any other people. The USA has the world's most powerful educated middle class. If it awakens, it could overthrow the bankers and stymie their plans to eliminate the Constitution, national sovereignty, and the middle class itself.

The Syrian people and the American people are struggling against the same enemy, though few of them realize it.

It is time for people of good will in all nations to unite against the tyranny of the global oligarchs. If the world fails to rise up in revolt, we will all find ourselves working on the bankers' global slave plantation. 

Obama Did It for the Money

from truthdig

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Posted on May 7, 2013

AP/Carolyn Kaster

President Obama looks to longtime fundraiser Penny Pritzker after announcing her nomination to run the Commerce Department and that of economic adviser Michael Froman, left, as the next U.S. Trade Representative.

By Robert Scheer

The love fest between Barack Obama and his top fundraiser Penny Pritzker that has led to her being nominated as Commerce secretary would not be so unseemly if they both just confessed that they did it for the money. Her money, not his, financed his rise to the White House from less promising days back in Chicago.

“Without Penny Pritzker, it is unlikely that Barack Obama ever would have been elected to the United States Senate or the presidency,” according to a gushing New York Times report last year that read like the soaring jacket copy of a steamy romance novel. “When she first backed him during his 2004 Senate run, she was No. 152 on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans. He was a long-shot candidate who needed her support and imprimatur. Mr. Obama and Ms. Pritzker grew close, sometimes spending weekends with their families at her summer home.”

But don’t sell the lady short; she wasn’t swept along on some kind of celebrity joyride. Pritzker, the billionaire heir to part of the Hyatt Hotels fortune, has long been first off an avaricious capitalist, and if she backed Obama, it wasn’t for his looks. Never one to rest on the laurels of her immense inherited wealth, Pritzker has always wanted more. That’s what drove her to run Superior Bank into the subprime housing swamp that drowned the institution’s homeowners and depositors alike before she emerged richer than before.

Pritzker and her family had acquired the savings and loan with the help of $600 million in tax credits. She became the new bank’s chairwoman and ended up as a director of the holding company that owned it. Under her leadership, Superior specialized in subprime lending, hustling folks with meager means and poor credit into high interest loans that were bundled into the toxic securities that wrecked the U.S. economy. 

As federal regulators began to move in on her bank after it had dangerously inflated the value of its toxic assets, Pritzker assured its employees: “Our commitment to subprime has never been stronger.” Two months later, the bank was pronounced insolvent. At the time, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s inspector general report concluded, “The failure of Superior Bank was directly attributable to the board of directors and executive management ignoring sound risk diversification principles, as evidenced by excessive concentration in residual assets related to subprime lending. ...”

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No biggie. In announcing her appointment, Obama joked, “For your birthday present, you get to go through confirmation. It’s going to be great.” It’s the same sort of joke he could have cracked in appointing Citigroup alum Jack Lew to be Treasury secretary.

It is deeply revealing that in the midst of the continuing cycle of misery brought on by the chicanery of the financial community two key Cabinetpositions dealing with business practices will likely be occupied by people who specialized in those financial rip-offs.

For Pritzker, as with the confirmation of Lew, the fix is in. The Republicans don’t dare push back too hard on shady business practices that their deregulation legislation endorsed, and Democrats will go along with anything the president wants.

The same restraint will be exhibited in exploring the offshore tax havens that have protected the Pritzker family’s immense wealth. Back in 2008, when she had been rumored for this same Cabinet post, Pritzker was queried about avoiding the sort of taxes most ordinary folks are obligated to pay, and she replied in writing: “I am a beneficiary of some non-U.S. situs trusts which were established about 50 years ago (when I was a child) and are administered by a non-U.S.–based financial institution as trustee. I do not control how those assets are administered.” If the Republicans challenge that canard, the Democrats will smugly remind them of Mitt Romney’s tax havens, as if that excuses tax avoidance within their own ranks.

Certainly the Republicans will not raise questions about the anti-union practices that helped create the Hyatt fortune in the first place and continue to this day. Nor will the Democrats, who embrace unions only at national convention time. 

“There is a huge unresolved set of issues in the Democratic Party between people of wealth and people who work,” noted Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union, which attempts to organize the miserably paid workers that produced Pritzker’s wealth. “Penny is a living example of that issue.”

But it’s payback time, and even normally progressive Democrats like Pritzker’s home state Sen. Dick Durbin are prepared to roll over. Treating the appointment of billionaire Pritzker as a victory for women everywhere, the senator said she’d “broken through the glass ceiling with her extraordinary intelligence and business acumen.” 

Right, Pritzker will be a fine role model for those women working at the Asian factories that she’ll be touring as Commerce secretary extolling the virtues of the American business model.

Click here to check out Robert Scheer’s new book, “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.” Keep up with Robert Scheer’s latest columns, interviews, tour dates and more atwww.truthdig.com/robert_scheer.

It’s Not Just One Bad ‘Apple’

from billmoyers

May 24, 2013

by Lauren Feeney

Earlier this week, a Senate panel investigated how Apple avoided billions in taxes through a web of offshore subsidiaries “so complex it spanned continents and went beyond anything most experts had ever seen.” Although the company may have achieved, in the words of Sen. Carl Levin, the “holy grail of tax avoidance,” senators didn’t accuse Apple of doing anything illegal and it is by no means alone in its use of loopholes and gimmicks to avoid paying taxes.

Here’s a list, topped by Apple, of 10 companies that increased their offshore holdings in the past year.

Read more about this chart on the Citizens for Tax Justice site.

The U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent — one of the highest in the world — but as The New York Times reported yesterday, the effective corporate tax rate (what companies actually pay) “fell to 17.8 percent in 2012 from 42.5 percent in 1960,” according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Another chart from the Citizens for Tax Justice shows 10 companies that managed to do much better than average, paying little or no taxes for the past five years. Dollar amounts are numbers in millions and “rate” is the effective tax rate that the companies paid.

Read more about this chart on the Citizens for Tax Justice site.

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As Warren Buffett and Bill Gross shun corporate bonds, others pile in

from bloomberg 

Sarika Gangar, Bloomberg News | 13/05/20 | Last Updated: 13/05/20 11:45 AM ET
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Daniel Acker/BloombergWarren Buffett, the billionaire chairman and chief executive officer of Omaha, Nebraska-basedBerkshire Hathaway Inc., told Bloomberg Television this month that he felt “sorry” for fixed-income investors with yields oncorporate bonds so low.

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Sales of corporate bonds in the U.S. are surging toward the busiest May ever as borrowers race to the market before demand dries up with Bill Gross and Warren Buffett cautioning against buying debt at all-time low yields.

In defence of bonds: Why investors don’t need Warren Buffett’s pity

Warren Buffett earlier this week joined a long list of high-profile investors warning about the perils of the asset class in an era of rock-bottom interest rates when he said bonds are a “terrible” investment. Indeed, the threat of higher inflation and rising interest rates on future bond returns has been a constant on markets for several years now. But unlike Mr. Buffett and others who suggest bonds be avoided at all costs, many investors are choosing to tackle the risks that lie ahead not through total liquidation, but by adjusting their bond mix to provide more exposure to shorter-term maturities and greater diversification. Read more.

Petroleo Brasileiro SA’s US$11-billion deal, the biggest on record for an emerging markets issuer, leads sales this month of US$120.2 billion, on pace to exceed the unprecedented US$162.6 billion sold in May 2008, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Issuance has already eclipsed the US$108.2 billion sold in all of May 2012.

Borrowers are accelerating sales as speculation mounts that yields may only rise amid signs the economy is improving. Three Federal Reserve regional bank presidents called last week for phasing out the central bank’s monthly purchases of US$40 billion in mortgage-backed securities as the housing recovery shows signs of gaining momentum, potentially reducing demand for riskier assets from stocks to speculative-grade bonds.

“Many issuers may decide it is not worth tempting that fate,” Edward Marrinan, a macro credit strategist at RBS Securities in Stamford, Connecticut, said in a telephone interview. The firm is one of the 21 primary dealers of U.S. government securities authorized to trade with the Fed.

Tempting Fate

Buffett, the billionaire chairman and chief executive officer of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc., told Bloomberg Television this month that he felt “sorry” for fixed-income investors with yields on corporate bonds so low.

Related

• I feel sorry for savers suffering ‘brutal’ yields, says Warren Buffett
• Warren Buffett on Apple bonds: No thanks, not at those yields

Yields fell to an unprecedented 3.35% on May 2 from more than 11% in 2008, according to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. Corporate & High Yield index. That represents interest savings of about $76.5 million a year on every $1 billion borrowed. Yields ended last week at 3.465%.

Gross, manager of the $293 billion Total Return Fund for Newport Beach, California-based Pacific Investment Management Co., said in a Twitter post on May 10 that a three-decade bull market in bonds probably ended April 29. Investors chasing yield have led to “frothiness” in some markets, analysts at Morgan Stanley led by Adam Richmond in New York wrote in a May 17 report.

“Investors have cash to spend yet fewer alternatives to buy,” the Morgan Stanley analysts wrote. Purchasers are having to accumulate corporate bonds “at levels sometimes not justified by fundamentals,” they wrote.

Spreads, Swaps

Elsewhere in credit markets, the extra yield investors demand to hold corporate bonds globally rather than government debentures held at the lowest level in more than five years. The cost of protecting corporate bonds from default in the U.S. and Europe declined. Prices on leveraged loans fell.

Spreads on company bonds from the U.S. to Europe and Asia were little changed at 134 basis points, or 1.34 percentage points, after reaching that level on May 10, the least since Nov. 12, 2007, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Global Corporate index. Yields fell to 2.518% from 2.521% a week earlier.

The Barclays Global Aggregate Corporate Index has lost 1.71% this month, bringing the loss for this year to 0.51%.

The Markit CDX North American Investment Grade Index, used to hedge against losses or to speculate on creditworthiness, fell 1.9 basis points last week to 70.3 basis points, according to prices compiled by Bloomberg. The index reached 68.9 on May 7, the least since Nov. 6, 2007.

Petrobras Active

The Markit iTraxx Europe Index of 125 companies with investment-grade ratings decreased 2.7 to 88.5, the lowest since May 2010, at 9:15 a.m. in London.

Both indexes typically fall as investor confidence improves and rise as it deteriorates. Credit-default swaps pay the buyer face value if a borrower fails to meet its obligations, less the value of the defaulted debt. A basis point equals $1,000 annually on a swap protecting $10 million of debt.

The Standard & Poor’s/LSTA U.S. Leveraged Loan 100 Index fell 0.03 cent to 98.85 cents on the dollar. The measure, which tracks the 100 largest dollar-denominated first-lien leveraged loans, has declined from 98.88 on May 9, the highest since July 18, 2007.

Leveraged loans and high-yield, high-risk, or junk, bonds are rated below Baa3 by Moody’s Investors Service and lower than BBB- at S&P.

Global Sales

In emerging markets, relative yields widened 1.4 basis points to 276.6 basis points, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s EMBI Global index. The measure ended last year at 265.8.

Bonds of Rio de Janeiro-based Petrobras were the most actively traded dollar-denominated corporate securities by dealers last week, accounting for 5.2% of the volume of trades of $1 million or more, according to Trace, the bond-price reporting system of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

The company’s $3.5 billion of 4.375%, 10-year notes rose 1.6 cents from their issue price on May 13 to 100.42 cents on the dollar to yield 4.32%.

Corporate bond offerings in the U.S. have exceeded the $29.5 billion weekly average for the past 12 months in each of the past five weeks, propelling sales to the busiest pace ever.

Issuance has reached $689.6 billion this year, exceeding the $593.2 billion in the corresponding period of 2012. Globally, offerings total $1.66 trillion, the fastest pace behind $1.8 trillion in the similar timeframe in 2009.

‘Substantial Appetite’

“Investors worldwide still have a substantial appetite to own high-quality, fixed-income assets,” RBS’s Marrinan said. “The crowding-out effect of central bank purchases of government securities is forcing the investors into a diminishing pool of buyable high-quality corporate exposure.”

Petrobras split its offering in six parts, including fixed- rate bonds due in three, five, 10 and 30 years as well as three- and five-year floating-rate bonds, Bloomberg data show.

Apple Inc. sold $17 billion of bonds in the biggest corporate offering on record on April 30 as the iPhone maker issued its first debentures since 1996, Bloomberg data show. The sale included $4 billion of 1%, five-year notes paying a relative yield of 40 basis points and $5.5 billion of 2.4%, 10-year securities with a 75 basis-point spread.

Proceeds from the Apple offering will help finance a $100 billion capital reward for shareholders. The sale was a “great example of companies using funds for equity-friendly behavior,” John Lonski, chief economist for Moody’s Capital Markets Research Group in New York, said in a telephone interview.

‘Not Buying’

Buffett said he isn’t investing in corporate debt, including Apple’s record offering, because yields are too low.

“We’re not buying corporate bonds of any kind now,” Buffett, 82, said May 4 during an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Betty Liu in Omaha, where Berkshire held its annual meeting. “Not at those yields.”

Gross, known as “The Bond King” in media outlets and named fixed-income manager of the decade in January 2010 by Morningstar Inc., said May 10 that returns will probably be in the range of 2% to 3%.

Markets are entering “a 12-month period of time ahead in which, combined, Treasury, corporate and high yields don’t move much,” Gross, the co-founder and co-chief investment officer of Pimco, said in a May 16 Bloomberg Television interview with Erik Schatzker and Sara Eisen.

“Given this juncture where we are, there are a lot of different opinions and the range is pretty wide,” Dorian Garay, a New York-based money manager for an investment-grade debt fund at ING Investment Management, said in a telephone interview. “Uncertainty is pretty high.”

Benchmark Maintained

The Federal Open Market Committee said May 1 it will keep up its monthly purchases of mortgage bonds and $45 billion in Treasuries, and is ready to increase or reduce the pace in response to changes in the outlook for inflation and the labor market.

Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said May 16 that buying mortgage bonds risks disrupting the market, while Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser said, “it’s not good for the bank to be holding lots of mortgage paper.” Jeffrey Lacker of Richmond said to reporters a day earlier that the Fed should “get out of the credit allocation business.”

Policy makers also are maintaining benchmark interest rates, kept in a range between zero and 0.25% since December 2008, at record lows as long as the outlook for inflation doesn’t exceed 2.5% and unemployment remains above 6.5%.

Issuance ‘Wildcard’

“The wildcard for issuance will likely be what rates do during the remainder of the year,” analysts led by Jason Shoup at Citigroup Inc. wrote in a May 17 report. “We fully expect to see companies taking a more aggressive approach to prefunding their 2014 maturities,” capital expenditures and mergers, especially if discussion of the Fed withdrawing stimulus continues, they wrote.

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President John Williams said last week that quickening economic growth and gains in the job market may prompt the Fed in the next few months to start reducing bond buying.

“It’s clear that the labor market has improved since September” when the Fed began its third round of asset purchases, Williams said in a May 16 speech in Portland, Oregon. “We could reduce somewhat the pace of our securities purchases, perhaps as early as this summer” and end the program late this year “if all goes as hoped.”

Refinancing Purposes

Of investment-grade companies selling debt in the U.S. in April, 70% specified refinancing among their use of proceeds, 10% cited mergers-and-acquisitions activity, 23% shareholder payments and 3% capital spending, according to Lonski of Moody’s. Use of offerings can fall into more than one category, while the figures exclude sales designated for general corporate purposes.

The number of junk-rated companies that are under liquidity stress was at almost all-time low levels this month as strong investor demand allows firms to shore up cash, according to a May 16 report from Moody’s.

“Most U.S. speculative-grade companies are avoiding liquidity problems despite tepid growth in corporate sales and continued softness in the economy,” Moody’s analysts led by John Puchalla wrote.

The ratings company’s Liquidity-Stress Index, which falls when corporations’ ability to manage cash needs appears to improve and rises when it weakens, is at about an unprecedented low, reaching 3.2% in mid-May from a record 2.8% at the end of April, according to the report. That compares with an historic average of 7.3%.

“Conditions for issuers could not be more ideal,” wrote Shoup of Citigroup. “How much longer the party lasts is the billion dollar question.”

Bloomberg.com

Global Capital and the Nation State - Robert Reich

from truthdig

Global Capital and the Nation State

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Posted on May 20, 2013

Image via Shutterstock

By Robert Reich

This post originally ran on Robert Reich’s Web page.

As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can, while telling Washington that lower corporate taxes are necessary in order to keep the U.S. “competitive.”

Baloney. The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up, thereby shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people whose wages are already shrinking because companies are playing workers off against each other.

I’m in London for a few days, and all the talk here is about how Goldman Sachs just negotiated a sweetheart deal to settle a tax dispute with the British government; Google is manipulating its British sales to pay almost no taxes here by using its low-tax Irelandsubsidiary (the chair of the Parliamentary committee investigating this has just called the do-no-evil firm “devious, calculating, and unethical”); Amazon has been found to route its British sales through a subsidiary in low-tax Luxembourg, and now receives more in subsidies from the British government than it pays here in taxes; Starbucks’ tax-avoidance strategy was so blatant British consumers began boycotting the firm until it reversed course.

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Meanwhile, At a time when you’d expect nations to band together to gain bargaining power against global capital, the opposite is occurring: Xenophobia is breaking out all over.

Here in Britain, the UK IndependenceParty — which wants to get out of the European Union — is rapidly gaining ground, becoming the third most popular party in the country, according to a new poll for The Independent on Sunday. Almost one in five people plan to vote for it in the next general election. Ukip’s overall ratings have risen four points to 19 per cent in the past month, despite Prime MinisterDavid Cameron’s efforts to wrest back control of the crucial debate over Britain’s relationship with the European Union.

Right-wing nationalist parties are gaining ground elsewhere in Europe as well. In the U.S., not only are Republicans sounding more nationalistic of late (anti-immigrant, anti-trade), but they continue to push “states rights” — as states increasingly battle against one another to give global companies ever larger tax breaks and subsidies.

Nothing could strengthen the hand of global capital more than such breakups.

Robert B. Reich, chancellor’s professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, was secretary of labor in the Clinton administration. Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective Cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including the best-sellers “Aftershock” and “The Work of Nations.” His latest, “Beyond Outrage,” is now out in paperback. He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.