Banks worldwide have collapsed. Why?
Two reasons--(1) they gambled at the casino and lost trillions and (2) almost all their borrowers that borrowed huge sums (leveraging 30 times or more i.e. if a borrower has $1 million capital, he can borrower $30 million) have defaulted.
Common sense tells us that if our income is only $X and we borrow 30 times in excess of $X, there is no way that we can repay the debt, unless our gambling bets pay out in excess of 30 times the original amount of $X.
Common sense tells us that if you are conned into buying something allegedly worth US$500,000 when its actual value is US$5,000 and you borrowed to buy the inflated "asset", there is no way that you will continue paying the installments and the interests on such an acquisition. The bank on the other hand is stuck with an "asset" supposedly worth US$500,000 but its actual worth is only US$5,000 or less.
Common sense tells us that the banks and the governments (fearing a systemic banking collapse) will lie and cover up the con-game until it cannot cover up anymore as too many banks are having the same problems and more importantly, the con-game cannot be covered-up anymore because borrowers are walking away and saying to the banks and governments--"You conned us, you take the blame."
Common sense tells us that these so-called assets which "investors" have invested cannot be real assets, but mere papers masquerading as assets (such as CDOs, synthetic CDOs and CDO Squared--toilet papers). Therefore, so-called sophisticated "investors" were borrowing toilet papers to "invest" in toilet paper assets!
Common sense tells us, and thinking naturally and in simple terms will enable us to conclude, that only greedy people can be lured by such con-games and that when gambling at such casinos, these so-called sophisticated investors were not using common sense.
Common sense tells us that we, the remaining hardworking people should not allow any government to use our tax revenue to bailout such reckless and greedy people.
Common sense tells us that when gamblers lose millions at the Las Vegas or Macau casinos, no government can justify and or dare to bailout such stupid and greedy gamblers. We would vote them out of office.
Common sense tells us that since all these "clever people" by their reckless, irresponsible and fraudulent conduct have destroyed the economy, they should be prosecuted and sent to jail and the keys thrown away!
Common sense tells us that a system that allows such frauds and gambling should be banned and made illegal.
Common sense tells us that when common thieves rob a jewelry shop or a bank, they are sentenced to long terms of imprisonment and whipped as well, these sophisticated thieves should be likewise be whipped and sent to prison for life imprisonment, as their destruction is a million times more devastating than the common thieves!
Common sense tells us that when times are hard, we should be prudent and thrifty to overcome and survive the hardships, so why are we encouraged to borrow more and more and to spend, spend and spend?
Common sense tells us that when a shop is offering a discount, a reduction in the price of a product, the shop-keeper is encouraging us to spend and buy the goods.
Common sense tells us that it is not out of kindness that banks lower interest charges. Like the shopkeeper, it is to encourage more borrowing. More borrowing mean more debts and ultimately more profits for the bankers.
Common sense tells us that we should not get into debts unnecessarily and not to borrow to purchase things that are not within our income and our ability to repay.
Common sense tells us more importantly, not to be greedy and lust for material wealth.
Common sense tells us that we should be angry, very angry with the so-called "sophisticated and upright people" who commit fraud and the regulatory authorities and political leaders who cover up their crimes.
Finally, common sense tells us that we should take action to put a stop to these crimes and scandals.
Please use common sense and do something before it is too late!
(Matthias Chang is a prominent barrister and author based in Malaysia.)
Escalation Feared as Israel, Continuing Bombing, Lets Foreigners Leave Gaza
By Isabel Kershner and Taghreed El-Khodary, NY Times, January 3, 2009
JERUSALEM--Israeli warplanes pounded Hamas targets in Gaza for an eighth day on Saturday while Israel allowed hundreds of foreigners, many of them married to Palestinians, to leave the enclave, raising fears there that Israel was planning to escalate its week-old campaign.
Tensions spread to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where Palestinian anger at reports of civilian casualties in Gaza seemed to be translating into at least a temporary increase in popular sympathy for Hamas.
Israel has vowed to press its offensive until there is no more rocket fire out of Gaza; its troops and tanks remained along the border, poised for a possible ground invasion.
The United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East, Robert Serry, told reporters on Friday that he was deeply worried that Israel would decide to move into Gaza.
"We are gravely concerned about that prospect because that would just mean another cycle of violence and a further escalation of the conflict," he said.
"This must stop. With Israeli tanks on Gaza's border, it is absolutely imperative now that we find an immediate and lasting way out to avoid an even deeper and deadlier conflict."
Israeli analysts and experts have said that any ground operation should be brief but powerful.
Alex Fishman, the military analyst of the popular daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot, wrote Friday, "Since the name of the game is killing and destruction, the ground operation has to be quick, with a lot of firepower at friction points with Hamas." He added, "The goal is to exact a high price in the early stages of the ground operation and to end it quickly."
Medical officials in Gaza said 430 Palestinians had been killed and some 2,200 wounded since the Israeli campaign began last Saturday. The casualty figures include many Hamas security personnel members, but the United Nations has estimated that a quarter of those killed were civilians.
Three Israeli civilians and one soldier have been killed in rocket attacks in the past week, as Hamas deployed its more advanced, longer-range projectiles capable of hitting Israeli cities more than 20 miles away.
A Gaza teenager, Jawaher Hajji, who said she had lost two close relatives in the past week, described a scene of growing desperation in the enclave. "There is no water, no electricity, no medicine," Jawaher, a 14-year-old who has United States citizenship, told The Associated Press. "It's hard to survive. Gaza is destroyed."
Both Israel and the Western-backed Palestinian Authority have been working assiduously to subdue Hamas in the West Bank since the Islamic group took over Gaza in 2007.
But the events in Gaza and the gruesome images broadcast repeatedly by the Arabic television networks are stirring strong emotions among West Bank Palestinians, who are directing most of their anger at Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
The authority's security forces had been instructed to prevent any popular displays of support for Hamas and clashes with Israeli forces, by keeping protesters away from Israeli Army checkpoints and other flash points, leading some Palestinians to accuse the authority of colluding with Israel.
Muneer al-Zughair, a spokesman in Jerusalem for the families of Palestinian prisoners, said Hamas had been strengthened by what he called "the massacre" in Gaza. "People feel that they are the only ones who are doing something for the Palestinian people," he said.
At the entrance to the Shuafat refugee camp on the edge of Jerusalem, Palestinian youths burned tires and threw stones at an Israeli checkpoint where soldiers stood in full riot gear. A man from the camp, who identified himself only as Qassem, said: "Everyone is against what is happening in Gaza. The Israeli Army are the terrorists."
Letter to Bush on Gaza Crisis
By Ralph Nader, January 02, 2009
Dear George W. Bush,
Cong. Barney Frank said recently that Barack Obama's declaration that "there is only one president at a time" over-estimated the number. He was referring to the economic crisis. But where are you on the Gaza crisis where the civilian population of Gaza, its civil servants and public facilities are being massacred and destroyed respectively by U.S built F-16s and U.S. built helicopter gunships.
The deliberate suspension of your power to stop this terrorizing of 1.5 million people, mostly refugees, blockaded for months by air, sea and land in their tiny slice of land, is in cowardly contrast to the position taken by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. That year he single-handedly stopped the British, French and Israeli aircraft attack against Egypt during the Suez Canal dispute.
Fatalities in Gaza are already over 400 and injuries close to 2000 so far as is known. Total Palestinian civilian casualties are 400 times greater then the casualties incurred by Israelis. But why should anyone be surprised at your blanket support for Israel's attack given what you have done to a far greater number of civilians in Iraq and now in Afghanistan?
Confirmed visual reports show that Israeli warplanes and warships have destroyed or severely damaged police stations, homes, hospitals, pharmacies, mosques, fishing boats, and a range of public facilities providing electricity and other necessities.
Why should this trouble you at all? It violates international law, including the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter. You too have repeatedly violated international law and committed serious constitutional transgressions.
Then there is the matter of the Israeli government blocking imports of critical medicines, equipment such as dialysis machines, fuel, food, water, spare parts and electricity at varying intensities for almost two years. The depleted UN aid mission there has called this illegal blockade a humanitarian crisis especially devastating to children, the aged and the infirm. Chronic malnutrition among children is rising rapidly. UN rations support eighty percent of this impoverished population.
How do these incontrovertible facts affect you? Do you have any empathy or what you have called Christian charity?
What would a vastly shrunken Texas turned in an encircled Gulag do up against the 4th most powerful military in the world? Would these embattled Texans be spending their time chopping wood?
Gideon Levy, the veteran Israeli columnist for Ha'aretz, called the Israeli attack a "brutal and violent operation" far beyond what was needed for protecting the people in its south. He added: "The diplomatic efforts were just in the beginning, and I believe we could have got to a new truce without this bloodshed.....to send dozens of jets to bomb a total helpless civilian society with hundreds of bombs--just today, they were burying five sisters. I mean, this is unheard of. This cannot go on like this. And this has nothing to do with self-defense or with retaliation even. It went out of proportion, exactly like two-and-a-half years ago in Lebanon."
Apparently, thousands of Israelis, including some army reservists, who have demonstrated against this destruction of Gaza agree with Mr. Levy. However, their courageous stands have not reached the mass media in the U.S. whose own reporters cannot even get into Gaza due to Israeli prohibitions on the international press.
Your spokespeople are making much ado about the breaking of the six month truce. Who is the occupier? Who is the most powerful military force? Who controls and blocks the necessities of life? Who has sent raiding missions across the border most often? Who has sent artillery shells and missiles at close range into populated areas? Who has refused the repeated comprehensive peace offerings of the Arab countries issued in 2002 if Israel would agree to return to the 1967 borders and agree to the creation of a small independent Palestinian state possessing just twenty two percent of the original Palestine?
The "wildly inaccurate rockets", as reporters describe them, coming from Hamas and other groups cannot compare with the modern precision armaments and human damage generated from the Israeli side.
There are no rockets coming from the West Bank into Israel. Yet the Israeli government is still sending raiders into that essentially occupied territory, still further entrenching its colonial outposts, still taking water and land and increasing the checkpoints This is going on despite a most amenable West Bank leader, Mahmoud Abbas, whom you have met with at the White House and praised repeatedly. Is it all vague words and no real initiatives with you and your emissary Condoleezza Rice?
Peace was possible, but you provided no leadership, preferring instead to comply with all wishes and demands by the Israeli government--even resupplying it with the still active cluster bombs in south Lebanon during the invasion of that country in 2006.
The arguments about who started the latest hostilities go on and on with Israel always blaming the Palestinians to justify all kinds of violence and harsh treatment against innocent civilians.
From the Palestinian standpoint, you would do well to remember the origins of this conflict which was the dispossession of their lands. To afford you some empathy, recall the oft-quoted comment by the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, who told the Zionist leader, Nahum Goldmann:
"There has been anti-Semitism the Nazis Hitler Auschwitz but was that their [the Palestinians] fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"
Alfred North Whitehead once said: "Duty arises out of the power to alter the course of events." By that standard, you have shirked mightily your duty over the past eight years to bring peace to both Palestinians and Israelis and more security to a good part of the world.
The least you can do in your remaining days at the White House is adopt a modest profile in courage, and vigorously demand and secure a ceasefire and a solidly based truce. Then your successor, President-elect Obama can inherit something more than the usual self-censoring Washington puppet show that eschews a proper focus on the national interests of the United States.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
May We No Longer Be Silent
By Paul Craig Roberts, Creators Syndicate, January 1, 2009
The title of my article comes from the sermon of the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., John Bryson Chane, delivered on Oct. 5, 2008, at St. Columba Church.
The bishop's eyes were opened to Israel's persecution of Palestinians by his recent trip to Palestine. In his sermon, he called on "politicians seeking the highest office in (our) land" to find the courage to "speak out and condemn violations of human rights and religious freedom denied to Palestinian Christians and Muslims" by the state of Israel.
Chane's courage was to no avail. As Justin Raimondo reported on Antiwar.com on Dec. 27, when America's new leader of "change" was informed of Israel's massive air attack on the Gaza Ghetto, an area of 139 square miles where Israel confines 1.4 million Arabs and tightly controls the inflow of all resources--food, medicine, water and energy--America's president-elect Obama had "no comment."
According to the Dec. 26 Jerusalem Post, "At 11:30 a.m., more than 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters swept into Gazan airspace and dropped more than 100 bombs on 50 targets. ... Thirty minutes later, a second wave of 60 jets and helicopters struck at 60 targets. ... More than 170 targets were hit by IAF aircraft throughout the day. At least 230 Gazans were killed and over 780 were wounded ... ."
As I write, news reports are that Israel is sending tanks and infantry reinforcements in preparation for a ground invasion of Gaza.
Israel's excuse for its violence is that from time to time the Palestinian resistance organization Hamas fires off rockets into Israel to protest the ghetto life that Israel imposes on Gazans. The rockets are ineffectual for the most part and seldom claim Israeli casualties. However, the real purpose for the Israeli attack is to destroy Hamas.
In 2006, the United States insisted that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank hold free elections. When free elections were held, Hamas won. This was unacceptable to the Americans and Israelis. After unheeded warnings to the Gazans to rid themselves of Hamas and accept a puppet government, Israel has decided to destroy the freely elected government with violence.
Ehud Barak, who is overseeing the latest act of Israeli aggression, said in interviews addressed to the British and American public that asking Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas would be like asking the United States to agree to a ceasefire with al-Qaida. The terrorism that Israel inflicts on Palestinians goes unremarked.
According to the Dec. 28 London Times: "Britain and the United States were on a collision course with their European allies last night after refusing to call for an end to Israeli airstrikes on Hamas targets in Gaza. The wave of attacks marked a violent end to President George W. Bush's sporadic Middle East peace efforts. The White House put the blame squarely on Hamas." The British government also blamed Hamas.
For the U.S. and British governments, Israel can do no wrong. Israel doesn't have to stop withholding food, medicine, water and energy, but Hamas must stop protesting by firing off rockets. In violation of international law, Israel can drive West Bank Palestinians off their lands and out of their villages and give the stolen properties to "settlers." Israel can delay Palestinians in need of emergency medical care at checkpoints until their lives ebb away. Israeli snipers can get their jollies murdering Palestinian children. The Great Moral Anglo-Americans couldn't care less.
In his 2005 Nobel Lecture, British playwright Harold Pinter held the United States and its British puppet state accountable for "the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought."
Everyone knows that such crimes occurred in the Soviet Union and in its East European empire, but "U.S. crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all"--this despite the fact that "the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked."
Soviet crimes, like Nazi ones, are documented in gruesome detail, but America's crimes "never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
America's is "a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think."
Pinter presents a long list of American crimes and comes to Iraq: "The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was ... an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading--as a last resort, all other justifications having failed to justify themselves--as liberation."
Americans and their British puppets "have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.'
"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?" Pinter's question can also be asked of Israel. Israel has been in violation of international law since 1967, protected by the United States' veto of U.N. resolutions condemning Israel for its violent, inhumane, barbaric and illegal acts.
American evangelical Christians, who are degenerating into Zionists, are Israel's greatest allies. Jesus is forsaken, as Christians swallow whole the Israeli lies. A couple of years ago the U.S. Presbyterian Church was so distressed by Israel's immorality toward Palestinians that the church attempted to disinvest its investment portfolio from assets tainted with Israel. But the Israel lobby was stronger. The Presbyterian Church was unable to stand up for Christian principles and knuckled under to the Israel lobby's pressure.
This is hardly surprising considering that the U.S. government doesn't stand for Christian principles either.
America's doctrine of "full spectrum dominance" means that, like Vladimir Lenin's dictatorship, America is not bound by law or morality, but by power alone.
Pinter sums it up in a speech he had dreams of writing for President George W. Bush:
"God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it."
If only our ears could hear, this is the speech we have been hearing from Israel for 60 years