Banks keep pulling from bag of tricks
THE LOOTING of AMERICA – THE CRIMINAL BANKSTER ARE SURE DOIN’ GOOD!
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http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/11/obamas-his-bankster-looters-arent-they.html
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OBAMA CONNED US WITH HIS PERFORMANCES OF “CHANGE” AND BECAME GEORGE W. BUSH’S THIRD TERM. WALL ST PILLAGE CONTINUED, NOT ONE BANKSTER DONOR HAS GONE TO PRISON!
WAR, WAR, WAR OVER THERE, ENDLESS WAR FOR SAUDIS INTERESTS TO FIGHT SAUDIS TERRORIST ENEMIES, WHILE OUR BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX ARE PUSHED OPEN WIDER EVERY DAY!
POSTED! NO LEGAL NEED APPLY! NO ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY HAS BEEN INFESTED WITH A FOREIGN INTEREST AS OBAMA’S WITH HIS LA RAZA “THE RACE” SUPREMACIST PARTY!
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“The stimulus plan purports to address the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression without examining its underlying causes or the social interests that underlie the crisis. This is no accident, since the fundamental premise of all of the measures taken in response to the crisis, by Obama no less than Bush, is the defense of the interests of the financial elite.”
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Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup
Friday, November 4, 2011
POVERTY FOR AMERICANS (legals) SOARS, AS DOES BANKSTER CRIMES, PROFITS & FORECLOSURES
The Obama administration and both parties in Congress, as well as every level of state and local government, are agreed on one point: nothing can stand in the way of the wealthy enriching themselves, and far from any new social reforms being envisioned, all existing programs “are on the table [i.e., the chopping block].”
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OBAMA’S BANKSTER DONORS ARE DOING WELL. PROFITS SOARING AND NOT ONE WENT TO PRISON. THEIR INVESTMENT IN OBAMA PAID OFF!
BANKSTER CAUSED FORECLOSURES ARE SOARING! PARTICULARLY IN STATES OCCUPIED BY LA RAZA, No. 1 – NEVADA – LA RAZA HARRY REID’S STATE IS NEARLY 30% ILLEGAL – No. 2. MEXIFORNIA WHICH PAYS OUT $20 BILLION PER YEAR IN SOCIAL SERVICES TO ILLEGALS, AND WHERE LA RAZA ENDORSED GOV JERRY BROWN JUST SIGNED A LAW PROHIBITING EMPLOYERS FROM USING E-VERIFY, No. 3 ARIZONA, ONE OF THE THREE (3) STATES OBAMA HAS SUED TO EXPAND LA RAZA SUPREMACY!
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BEFORE THE 2008 BANKSTER CAUSED MELTDOWN, EVERY YEAR THERE WERE 1.5 MILLION ILLEGALS HOP OUR BORDERS AND WELFARE. THE ONLY THING THEY BROUGHT WITH THEM WAS THEIR LA RAZA SUPREMACIST CONTEMPT FOR OUR NATION, AND THEIR LOOTERS’ MENTALITY!
EVERY YEAR THERE HAS ALSO BEEN 1.5 MILLION AMERICANS (LEGALS) THAT HAVE FALLEN INTO POVERTY!
THE EVER EXPANDING LA RAZA OCCUPATION DEPRESSES WAGES FOR LEGALS FROM $300 TO $400 BILLION PER YEAR.
THIS IS WHY THE LA RAZA DEMS, OBAMA, MEXICO AND THE U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE WANT OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY, NO E-VERIFY, AND NO I.D. FOR LA RAZA PARTY MEMBERS TO VOTE ILLEGALLY!
VIVA LA RAZA LOOTING? OBAMA DOES DAILY!
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Sharp rise in extreme-poverty neighborhoods in the US since 2000
By David Walsh
4 November 2011
While Democrats and Republicans in Washington continue to wrangle over the precise means by which what’s left of the social safety net should be shredded, reports continue to emerge detailing the desperate economic condition facing tens of millions in the US.
Basing itself on US Census Bureau material, the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., has issued a report on the “Re-emergence of Concentrated Poverty,” which reveals, among other things, that the population in extreme-poverty neighborhoods (where at least 40 percent of residents live below the official poverty line) rose by one third from 2000 to 2005-2009. The report suggests that, given the ongoing economic slump, this process will continue.
When the researchers speak of “extreme poverty,” they are hardly overstating the case. Some 20.5 million people in the US, or 6.7 percent of the population, survive at 50 percent or less of the official poverty line. According to the Associated Press, “Those living in deep poverty represent nearly half of the 46.2 million people scraping by below the poverty line. In 2010, the poorest poor meant an [annual] income of $5,570 or less for an individual and $11,157 for a family of four.” For the record, Goldman Sachs chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein makes approximately $9,200 each hour.
Extreme poverty is a condition, in other words, of destitution in which getting by from one day to the next is a painful, often humiliating process. The 6.7 percent figure is the highest in the 35 years the Census Bureau has been keeping such records, surpassing the previous highs in 2009 and 1993.
The Brookings study indicates that concentrated poverty almost doubled in Midwestern urban communities during the past decade and increased by a third in Southern metropolitan areas (such as El Paso, Texas, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Jackson, Mississippi). Furthermore, the report’s authors note that from 2000 to 2005-2009 the population in extreme-poverty neighborhoods rose more than twice as fast in suburbs as in cities.
The Northeast was not spared either. New Haven, Connecticut, home to Yale University, with all its wealth and influence, is one of the nation’s fastest-growing centers of concentrated poverty. Western metropolitan areas, which did not fare too badly in the first half of the 2000s, “experienced the largest growth in their rate of concentrated poverty from 2005–09 to 2010.”
The sharp increase in impoverished neighborhoods in the Midwest in particular also “altered the average demographic profile of extreme-poverty neighborhoods. Compared to 2000, residents of extreme-poverty neighborhoods in 2005–09 were more likely to be white, native-born, high school or college graduates, homeowners, and not receiving public assistance [9.7 percent of those living in the poorest neighborhoods held bachelor’s degrees].”
The authors of “The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty,” Elizabeth Kneebone, Carey Nadeau, and Alan Berube, seem at times almost taken aback by their own findings. Writing of the growth of economic deprivation in the Midwest (due primarily to the decimation of manufacturing), for instance, they note that metropolitan areas in the region “registered a 79 percent increase in extreme-poverty neighborhoods in the 2000s. The number of poor living in these tracts almost doubled over the decade, pushing the concentrated poverty rate in the region’s metro areas up by a staggering 5 percentage points.”
The study points to the “economic struggles” of regions such as Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan; Toledo, Dayton, Akron and Youngstown, Ohio; Indianapolis; and Chicago, and adds: “Concentrated poverty in these metro areas spread beyond the urban core to what might previously have been considered working-class areas. Poor local labor market conditions may have pushed up poverty rates across a more demographically and economically diverse set of neighborhoods than traditional ‘underclass’ areas.”
In the case of the Detroit metropolitan area, “as extreme-poverty neighborhoods spread in the cities of Detroit and Warren, and in Oakland (Pontiac) and St. Clair Counties (Port Huron), scores of other neighborhoods saw poverty rates climb markedly—crossing the 10, 20, and even 30 percent poverty level—in both the inner-ring suburbs and along the metropolitan fringe.”
However, the spread of poverty to once relatively affluent areas in the Sun Belt (stretching across the South and the Southwest) in the most recent period is one of the study’s most striking features. The collapse of the housing market and subsequent downturn have had a particularly severe impact on areas such as Cape Coral and Palm Bay, Florida; Fresno, Modesto and Riverside, California; as well, of course, as Las Vegas.
The list of metropolitan areas with the greatest primary city increase in concentration of poverty over the past decade is topped by Bradenton-Sarasota-Venice, Florida (a 36.7 percent increase), Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, Ohio-Pennsylvania (36.3 percent), Portland-South Portland-Biddeford, Maine (25.4 percent) and Dayton, Ohio (25.2 percent). The areas with the greatest suburban growth of poverty concentration include New Haven-Milford, Connecticut (a 13.8 percent increase), Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown, New York (13.1 percent), Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, Florida (10.2 percent) and Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, Ohio (8.0 percent).
The developments of the past decade represent a significant change from the 1990s. In what the Associated Press terms “a stunning reversal of economic fortune,” after a decline in the number of poor people living in concentrated areas of poverty from 4.4 million to 3 million during the 1990s, “By 2009, the number again exceeded 4 million, and the Brookings researchers assume the figure will be larger still when the Census releases detailed data for 2010” (AP).
The 2000s wiped out much of the progress that was made in the central cities in the 1990s, “while accelerating and spreading the growth of higher-poverty suburban communities.”
As AP comments, “In all, the numbers underscore the breadth and scope by which the downturn has reached further into mainstream America. ‘There now really is no unaffected group, except maybe the very top income earners,’ said Robert Moffitt, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University. ‘Recessions are supposed to be temporary, and when it’s over, everything returns to where it was before. But the worry now is that the downturn—which will end eventually—will have long-lasting effects on families who lose jobs, become worse off and can’t recover.’ ”
The solutions the Brookings Institution authors propose in response to this disastrous situation (“regional economic development strategies,” more “balanced growth,” greater “economic integration,” “stronger connections between poor neighborhoods and areas with better education and job opportunities,” etc.) are not to be taken seriously. The Obama administration and both parties in Congress, as well as every level of state and local government, are agreed on one point: nothing can stand in the way of the wealthy enriching themselves, and far from any new social reforms being envisioned, all existing programs “are on the table [i.e., the chopping block].”
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OBAMA’S BANKSTER DONORS ARE DOING WELL. PROFITS SOARING AND NOT ONE WENT TO PRISON. THEIR INVESTMENT IN OBAMA PAID OFF!
BANKSTER CAUSED FORECLOSURES ARE SOARING! PARTICULARLY IN STATES OCCUPIED BY LA RAZA, No. 1 – NEVADA – LA RAZA HARRY REID’S STATE IS NEARLY 30% ILLEGAL – No. 2. MEXIFORNIA WHICH PAYS OUT $20 BILLION PER YEAR IN SOCIAL SERVICES TO ILLEGALS, AND WHERE LA RAZA ENDORSED GOV JERRY BROWN JUST SIGNED A LAW PROHIBITING EMPLOYERS FROM USING E-VERIFY, No. 3 ARIZONA, ONE OF THE THREE (3) STATES OBAMA HAS SUED TO EXPAND LA RAZA SUPREMACY!
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BEFORE THE 2008 BANKSTER CAUSED MELTDOWN, EVERY YEAR THERE WERE 1.5 MILLION ILLEGALS HOP OUR BORDERS AND WELFARE. THE ONLY THING THEY BROUGHT WITH THEM WAS THEIR LA RAZA SUPREMACIST CONTEMPT FOR OUR NATION, AND THEIR LOOTERS’ MENTALITY!
EVERY YEAR THERE HAS ALSO BEEN 1.5 MILLION AMERICANS (LEGALS) THAT HAVE FALLEN INTO POVERTY!
THE EVER EXPANDING LA RAZA OCCUPATION DEPRESSES WAGES FOR LEGALS FROM $300 TO $400 BILLION PER YEAR.
THIS IS WHY THE LA RAZA DEMS, OBAMA, MEXICO AND THE U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE WANT OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY, NO E-VERIFY, AND NO I.D. FOR LA RAZA PARTY MEMBERS TO VOTE ILLEGALLY!
VIVA LA RAZA LOOTING? OBAMA DOES DAILY!
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Sharp rise in extreme-poverty neighborhoods in the US since 2000
By David Walsh
4 November 2011
While Democrats and Republicans in Washington continue to wrangle over the precise means by which what’s left of the social safety net should be shredded, reports continue to emerge detailing the desperate economic condition facing tens of millions in the US.
Basing itself on US Census Bureau material, the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., has issued a report on the “Re-emergence of Concentrated Poverty,” which reveals, among other things, that the population in extreme-poverty neighborhoods (where at least 40 percent of residents live below the official poverty line) rose by one third from 2000 to 2005-2009. The report suggests that, given the ongoing economic slump, this process will continue.
When the researchers speak of “extreme poverty,” they are hardly overstating the case. Some 20.5 million people in the US, or 6.7 percent of the population, survive at 50 percent or less of the official poverty line. According to the Associated Press, “Those living in deep poverty represent nearly half of the 46.2 million people scraping by below the poverty line. In 2010, the poorest poor meant an [annual] income of $5,570 or less for an individual and $11,157 for a family of four.” For the record, Goldman Sachs chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein makes approximately $9,200 each hour.
Extreme poverty is a condition, in other words, of destitution in which getting by from one day to the next is a painful, often humiliating process. The 6.7 percent figure is the highest in the 35 years the Census Bureau has been keeping such records, surpassing the previous highs in 2009 and 1993.
The Brookings study indicates that concentrated poverty almost doubled in Midwestern urban communities during the past decade and increased by a third in Southern metropolitan areas (such as El Paso, Texas, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Jackson, Mississippi). Furthermore, the report’s authors note that from 2000 to 2005-2009 the population in extreme-poverty neighborhoods rose more than twice as fast in suburbs as in cities.
The Northeast was not spared either. New Haven, Connecticut, home to Yale University, with all its wealth and influence, is one of the nation’s fastest-growing centers of concentrated poverty. Western metropolitan areas, which did not fare too badly in the first half of the 2000s, “experienced the largest growth in their rate of concentrated poverty from 2005–09 to 2010.”
The sharp increase in impoverished neighborhoods in the Midwest in particular also “altered the average demographic profile of extreme-poverty neighborhoods. Compared to 2000, residents of extreme-poverty neighborhoods in 2005–09 were more likely to be white, native-born, high school or college graduates, homeowners, and not receiving public assistance [9.7 percent of those living in the poorest neighborhoods held bachelor’s degrees].”
The authors of “The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty,” Elizabeth Kneebone, Carey Nadeau, and Alan Berube, seem at times almost taken aback by their own findings. Writing of the growth of economic deprivation in the Midwest (due primarily to the decimation of manufacturing), for instance, they note that metropolitan areas in the region “registered a 79 percent increase in extreme-poverty neighborhoods in the 2000s. The number of poor living in these tracts almost doubled over the decade, pushing the concentrated poverty rate in the region’s metro areas up by a staggering 5 percentage points.”
The study points to the “economic struggles” of regions such as Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan; Toledo, Dayton, Akron and Youngstown, Ohio; Indianapolis; and Chicago, and adds: “Concentrated poverty in these metro areas spread beyond the urban core to what might previously have been considered working-class areas. Poor local labor market conditions may have pushed up poverty rates across a more demographically and economically diverse set of neighborhoods than traditional ‘underclass’ areas.”
In the case of the Detroit metropolitan area, “as extreme-poverty neighborhoods spread in the cities of Detroit and Warren, and in Oakland (Pontiac) and St. Clair Counties (Port Huron), scores of other neighborhoods saw poverty rates climb markedly—crossing the 10, 20, and even 30 percent poverty level—in both the inner-ring suburbs and along the metropolitan fringe.”
However, the spread of poverty to once relatively affluent areas in the Sun Belt (stretching across the South and the Southwest) in the most recent period is one of the study’s most striking features. The collapse of the housing market and subsequent downturn have had a particularly severe impact on areas such as Cape Coral and Palm Bay, Florida; Fresno, Modesto and Riverside, California; as well, of course, as Las Vegas.
The list of metropolitan areas with the greatest primary city increase in concentration of poverty over the past decade is topped by Bradenton-Sarasota-Venice, Florida (a 36.7 percent increase), Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, Ohio-Pennsylvania (36.3 percent), Portland-South Portland-Biddeford, Maine (25.4 percent) and Dayton, Ohio (25.2 percent). The areas with the greatest suburban growth of poverty concentration include New Haven-Milford, Connecticut (a 13.8 percent increase), Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown, New York (13.1 percent), Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, Florida (10.2 percent) and Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, Ohio (8.0 percent).
The developments of the past decade represent a significant change from the 1990s. In what the Associated Press terms “a stunning reversal of economic fortune,” after a decline in the number of poor people living in concentrated areas of poverty from 4.4 million to 3 million during the 1990s, “By 2009, the number again exceeded 4 million, and the Brookings researchers assume the figure will be larger still when the Census releases detailed data for 2010” (AP).
The 2000s wiped out much of the progress that was made in the central cities in the 1990s, “while accelerating and spreading the growth of higher-poverty suburban communities.”
As AP comments, “In all, the numbers underscore the breadth and scope by which the downturn has reached further into mainstream America. ‘There now really is no unaffected group, except maybe the very top income earners,’ said Robert Moffitt, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University. ‘Recessions are supposed to be temporary, and when it’s over, everything returns to where it was before. But the worry now is that the downturn—which will end eventually—will have long-lasting effects on families who lose jobs, become worse off and can’t recover.’ ”
The solutions the Brookings Institution authors propose in response to this disastrous situation (“regional economic development strategies,” more “balanced growth,” greater “economic integration,” “stronger connections between poor neighborhoods and areas with better education and job opportunities,” etc.) are not to be taken seriously. The Obama administration and both parties in Congress, as well as every level of state and local government, are agreed on one point: nothing can stand in the way of the wealthy enriching themselves, and far from any new social reforms being envisioned, all existing programs “are on the table [i.e., the chopping block].”
OBAMA'S & HIS BANKSTER LOOTERS - Aren't They Doing Well?
THE LOOTING of AMERICA – THE CRIMINAL BANKSTER ARE SURE DOIN’ GOOD!
*
OBAMA CONNED US WITH HIS PERFORMANCES OF “CHANGE” AND BECAME GEORGE W. BUSH’S THIRD TERM. WALL ST PILLAGE CONTINUED, NOT ONE BANKSTER DONOR HAS GONE TO PRISON!
WAR, WAR, WAR OVER THERE, ENDLESS WAR FOR SAUDIS INTERESTS TO FIGHT SAUDIS TERRORIST ENEMIES, WHILE OUR BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX ARE PUSHED OPEN WIDER EVERY DAY!
POSTED! NO LEGAL NEED APPLY! NO ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY HAS BEEN INFESTED WITH A FOREIGN INTEREST AS OBAMA’S WITH HIS LA RAZA “THE RACE” SUPREMACIST PARTY!
*
“The stimulus plan purports to address the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression without examining its underlying causes or the social interests that underlie the crisis. This is no accident, since the fundamental premise of all of the measures taken in response to the crisis, by Obama no less than Bush, is the defense of the interests of the financial elite.”
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Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
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THE REASON WHY OBAMA NOMINATED SOTOMAYER WAS BECAUSE SHE IS A L RAZA PARTY MEMBER, AND HAD A LONG HISTORY OF PANDERING TO THE CORPORATE INTEREST. SOTOMAYER REFERS TO ILLEGALS AS “UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS (OBAMA REFERS TO THEM AS “MY LA RAZA PARTY UNREGISTERED VOTERS). SOTOMAYER VOTED AGAINST MAKING E-VERIFY MANDATORY NATION WIDE!
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Wsws.org …. Get on their free daily news email for info on how our gov if fucking us over today on behalf of Wall St!
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The fundamental social division is class, not race or gender
28 May 2009
The introduction of Sonia Sotomayor as President Obama’s first selection for the US Supreme Court took place at a White House media event of a completely choreographed and stereotyped character. Such ceremonies have become an essential part of how America is governed. The less the political system is capable of actually responding to the needs and aspirations of working people, the more it must put on the pretense of concern, using biography as a substitute for policy.
As always on such occasions, the nomination’s “roll-out” was an unrestrained exercise in public tear-jerking. Led by President Obama, who based his own campaign on the marketing of a compelling personal “narrative,” Sotomayor’s elevation was presented as a triumph over all manner of adversity. There were tributes to the humble origins of the future Supreme Court justice, noting her hard-working immigrant parents, her poverty-stricken childhood in a South Bronx housing project, the death of her father when she was nine years old, and even her struggle with juvenile diabetes.
No doubt, it has not been an easy personal journey for Judge Sotomayor, and there can be little doubt that she is as tough as nails. However, amidst all the tributes to Judge Sotomayor’s triumph, one cannot help but think about the conditions that confront the hundreds of thousands of South Bronx residents whom she left behind.
There is another element of Sotomayor’s nomination that deserves analysis. Media coverage of the nomination, and the bulk of the political commentary, liberal and conservative, approving and hostile, focused on the fact that she would become the first Hispanic and third woman to take a seat on the highest US court. The premise of both supporters and detractors was that Sotomayor’s gender and ethnic origins were of decisive importance in evaluating her nomination and determining her likely course on the court.
Totally obliterated in this flood of commentary is the most fundamental social category in American society: class. Sotomayor will go to the Supreme Court, not as the representative or advocate of Hispanics, women or the socially disadvantaged more generally, but as the representative of a definite social class at the top of American society—the financial aristocracy whose interests she and every other federal judge, and the entire capitalist state machine, loyally serve and defend.
Only one “mainstream” bourgeois publication focused on this critical question. That was the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page serves as a major voice of the ultra-right—denouncing the Sotomayor nomination in strident tones—but whose news pages explored her record as a well-paid commercial litigator and federal judge, on issues of direct interest to big business, including contract law, employment and property rights.
The newspaper quoted several Wall Street lawyers describing Sotomayor as a safe choice for corporate America. “There is no reason for the business community to be concerned,” said one attorney. Barry Ostrager, a partner at Simpson Thacher LLP who defended a unit of J.P. Morgan Chase in a lawsuit over fraudulent pricing of initial public offerings, cited Sotomayor’s role in an appeals court ruling barring the class-action suit. “That ruling demonstrated that in securities litigation, she is in the judicial mainstream,” he told the Journal.
Barack Obama is the culmination of this process. Celebrated as the first African-American president, he has overseen the greatest handover of resources to the billionaires and Wall Street speculators in history. In the restructuring of the auto industry, with ever-escalating demands for cuts in jobs, pay and benefits for auto workers, he has set the stage for the greatest assault on the working class since the Reagan administration smashed the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981 and gave the signal for a nationwide campaign of wage-cutting and union-busting. In this, Obama demonstrates that the class he serves, not the color of his skin or his social origins, is the decisive political factor.
The political development of the American working class requires, first and foremost, the direct and open discussion of the class realities of American society. No country in the world is as deeply and intractably divided along economic lines as the United States, where the top 1 percent of the population owns 40 percent of the wealth and monopolizes 20 percent of the income. Any analysis of the political issues facing working people that does not take these class divisions as the fundamental reality is an exercise in deception and political stultification.
Patrick Martin
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April 1, 2009
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Obama’s Ersatz Capitalism
By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ
THE Obama administration’s $500 billion or more proposal to deal with America’s ailing banks has been described by some in the financial markets as a win-win-win proposal. Actually, it is a win-win-lose proposal: the banks win, investors win — and taxpayers lose.
Treasury hopes to get us out of the mess by replicating the flawed system that the private sector used to bring the world crashing down, with a proposal marked by overleveraging in the public sector, excessive complexity, poor incentives and a lack of transparency.
Let’s take a moment to remember what caused this mess in the first place. Banks got themselves, and our economy, into trouble by overleveraging — that is, using relatively little capital of their own, they borrowed heavily to buy extremely risky real estate assets. In the process, they used overly complex instruments like collateralized debt obligations.
The prospect of high compensation gave managers incentives to be shortsighted and undertake excessive risk, rather than lend money prudently. Banks made all these mistakes without anyone knowing, partly because so much of what they were doing was “off balance sheet” financing.
In theory, the administration’s plan is based on letting the market determine the prices of the banks’ “toxic assets” — including outstanding house loans and securities based on those loans. The reality, though, is that the market will not be pricing the toxic assets themselves, but options on those assets.
The two have little to do with each other. The government plan in effect involves insuring almost all losses. Since the private investors are spared most losses, then they primarily “value” their potential gains. This is exactly the same as being given an option.
Consider an asset that has a 50-50 chance of being worth either zero or $200 in a year’s time. The average “value” of the asset is $100. Ignoring interest, this is what the asset would sell for in a competitive market. It is what the asset is “worth.” Under the plan by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the government would provide about 92 percent of the money to buy the asset but would stand to receive only 50 percent of any gains, and would absorb almost all of the losses. Some partnership!
Assume that one of the public-private partnerships the Treasury has promised to create is willing to pay $150 for the asset. That’s 50 percent more than its true value, and the bank is more than happy to sell. So the private partner puts up $12, and the government supplies the rest — $12 in “equity” plus $126 in the form of a guaranteed loan.
If, in a year’s time, it turns out that the true value of the asset is zero, the private partner loses the $12, and the government loses $138. If the true value is $200, the government and the private partner split the $74 that’s left over after paying back the $126 loan. In that rosy scenario, the private partner more than triples his $12 investment. But the taxpayer, having risked $138, gains a mere $37.
Even in an imperfect market, one shouldn’t confuse the value of an asset with the value of the upside option on that asset.
But Americans are likely to lose even more than these calculations suggest, because of an effect called adverse selection. The banks get to choose the loans and securities that they want to sell. They will want to sell the worst assets, and especially the assets that they think the market overestimates (and thus is willing to pay too much for).
But the market is likely to recognize this, which will drive down the price that it is willing to pay. Only the government’s picking up enough of the losses overcomes this “adverse selection” effect. With the government absorbing the losses, the market doesn’t care if the banks are “cheating” them by selling their lousiest assets, because the government bears the cost.
The main problem is not a lack of liquidity. If it were, then a far simpler program would work: just provide the funds without loan guarantees. The real issue is that the banks made bad loans in a bubble and were highly leveraged. They have lost their capital, and this capital has to be replaced.
Paying fair market values for the assets will not work. Only by overpaying for the assets will the banks be adequately recapitalized. But overpaying for the assets simply shifts the losses to the government. In other words, the Geithner plan works only if and when the taxpayer loses big time.
Some Americans are afraid that the government might temporarily “nationalize” the banks, but that option would be preferable to the Geithner plan. After all, the F.D.I.C. has taken control of failing banks before, and done it well. It has even nationalized large institutions like Continental Illinois (taken over in 1984, back in private hands a few years later), and Washington Mutual (seized last September, and immediately resold).
What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a “partnership” in which one partner robs the other. And such partnerships — with the private sector in control — have perverse incentives, worse even than the ones that got us into the mess.
So what is the appeal of a proposal like this? Perhaps it’s the kind of Rube Goldberg device that Wall Street loves — clever, complex and nontransparent, allowing huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets. It has allowed the administration to avoid going back to Congress to ask for the money needed to fix our banks, and it provided a way to avoid nationalization.
But we are already suffering from a crisis of confidence. When the high costs of the administration’s plan become apparent, confidence will be eroded further. At that point the task of recreating a vibrant financial sector, and resuscitating the economy, will be even harder.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 1997, was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2001.
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ARE AMAZED AT HOW UTTERLY BRAZEN THESE CORPORATE OWNED POLITICIANS ARE?
GET THIS BOOK!
Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies
by Michelle Malkin
Editorial Reviews
In her shocking new book, Malkin digs deep into the records of President Obama's staff, revealing corrupt dealings, questionable pasts, and abuses of power throughout his administration.
From the Inside Flap
The era of hope and change is dead....and it only took six months in office to kill it.
Never has an administration taken office with more inflated expectations of turning Washington around. Never have a media-anointed American Idol and his entourage fallen so fast and hard. In her latest investigative tour de force, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Malkin delivers a powerful, damning, and comprehensive indictment of the culture of corruption that surrounds Team Obama's brazen tax evaders, Wall Street cronies, petty crooks, slum lords, and business-as-usual influence peddlers. In Culture of Corruption, Malkin reveals:
* Why nepotism beneficiaries First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are Team Obama's biggest liberal hypocrites--bashing the corporate world and influence-peddling industries from which they and their relatives have benefited mightily
* What secrets the ethics-deficient members of Obama's cabinet--including Hillary Clinton--are trying to hide
* Why the Obama White House has more power-hungry, unaccountable "czars" than any other administration
* How Team Obama's first one hundred days of appointments became a litany of embarrassments as would-be appointee after would-be appointee was exposed as a tax cheat or had to withdraw for other reasons
* How Obama's old ACORN and union cronies have squandered millions of taxpayer dollars and dues money to enrich themselves and expand their power
* How Obama's Wall Street money men and corporate lobbyists are ruining the economy and helping their friends In Culture of Corruption, Michelle Malkin lays bare the Obama administration's seamy underside that the liberal media would rather keep hidden.
Product Details
• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: Regnery Publishing (July 27, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596981091
• ISBN-13: 978-1596981096
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Wall Street demands lifting of pay limits
16 February 2009
A provision restricting executive compensation that was inserted into the $787 billion economic stimulus bill prior to its passage by the US Congress has provoked howls of protest from the Wall Street elite and sent the Obama administration scrambling to emasculate it.
The measure was authored by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, over the objections of Obama and his top economic advisers. Dodd argued that the measure was necessary to assuage public outrage against bank executives who have continued to reward themselves with multimillion-dollar bonuses after their banks received billions of dollars in taxpayer funds. He said such action was needed to make it politically possible for Congress to allocate hundreds of billions more to bail out the banks.
The provision goes somewhat further than the token pay restrictions announced February 4 by Obama's treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, which set a base pay limit of $500,000 only on the top executives of banks receiving "exceptional assistance" and did not apply retroactively to banks that previously received money under the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Dodd's measure applies retroactively to all banks that have received TARP funds. It sets no limit on salaries, but restricts bonuses to one-third of total compensation. It does not apply to deferred compensation or pensions, and evidently places no limits on stock options.
Since the vast bulk of the stratospheric annual compensation of Wall Street tycoons comes in the form of bonuses, stock options and other perks rather than base pay, the measure, if enforced, could reduce their yearly take to the millions, rather than the double-digit millions to which they have become accustomed. The Wall Street Journal on Saturday estimated that under the new provision, Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis's compensation would fall from $16.4 million in 2007 to a "mere" $2.25 million.
Such a fate, the prospect of which sent Wall Street lobbyists descending on Capitol Hill and the White House, would reduce Lewis's income to a sum more than 56 times that of an ordinary American—that is, he would be forced to survive on substantially more per week than the median worker earns in a year.
The outrage of the Wall Street billionaires was immediately translated into front-page headlines in the major US newspapers. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post all ran lead stories Saturday on the issue. The Post, the main newspaper in the nation's capital, ran a front-page follow-up on Sunday, bearing the subtitle "Compensation Limits May Backfire."
Only weeks ago, it should be recalled, Congress was railing against autoworkers who make less than $60,000 a year. Obama supported the imposition of drastic wage and benefit cuts, along with mass layoffs, as a condition for emergency loans to prevent the collapse of General Motors and Chrysler.
Judging from the Sunday morning news and interview programs, there was some doubt as to whether Obama would go ahead with his plans to sign his "stimulus and recovery" bill on Tuesday, as scheduled. His representatives felt obliged to affirm that he would sign the bill, but hastened to add that the White House would demand changes in its executive compensation provisions even after it became law.
Senior adviser David Axelrod said on "Fox News Sunday" that the White House would work with Congress to "do something that's workable" about the issue. Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation," said the administration would seek to "strike the right balance" by discussing changes with House and Senate members.
It is an extraordinary commentary on the reality of class relations and political power in the United States that this issue should figure so prominently in the discussion of what is billed as a plan to rescue the nation from, in Obama's words, a "catastrophe." The narrow and selfish interests of a miniscule fraction of the population weigh infinitely more on the scales of government policy than the needs of tens of millions of people who are being hurled into unemployment and poverty. This financial aristocracy exercises an effective veto power over state policy—exposing the class dictatorship that underlies the increasingly threadbare trappings of democracy.
The real question in the minds of most Americans is why the bank executives who bear direct responsibility for the collapse of their own firms and the economy as a whole—not only in the United States but internationally—are still in their posts. They want to know why there are no serious investigations or criminal prosecutions.
The furor over the bankers' pay also sheds light on the nature of the stimulus package itself. It is a hodgepodge of tax cuts—including tens of billions for big business and the wealthy—and government outlays that will do nothing to solve the economic crisis and little to relieve the mounting suffering of the people.
Moreover, as Obama indicated in his Saturday radio-video address, it is a prelude to another massive taxpayer bailout of Wall Street that will reach into the trillions of dollars, to be followed by draconian austerity measures targeting basic social programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
The stimulus plan purports to address the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression without examining its underlying causes or the social interests that underlie the crisis. This is no accident, since the fundamental premise of all of the measures taken in response to the crisis, by Obama no less than Bush, is the defense of the interests of the financial elite.
The response of the Wall Street elite to the executive pay provision exposes the cynicism of Obama's talk of collective "responsibility" for the crisis and his calls for "national sacrifice." For their part, the plutocrats have no intention of ceding an inch of their wealth or power, whatever the cost to society.
They have made it clear that if the Dodd provision stands, they will drain their reserves to pay back the government as soon as possible in order to remove themselves from its compensation limits, further undermining the viability of their own firms and threatening an even greater economic disaster for the US and the world. And, as many commentators have suggested, they will evade the restrictions on bonuses by jacking up their salaries. As Nell Minow of the Corporate Library told the Washington Post, "The people who work on Wall Street are motivated by money."
All of the measures proposed to rein in the bankers are utterly inadequate. Over the past decade, they have pocketed—in salaries, bonuses, stock options, golden parachutes, pensions, private jets, limos and other perks—trillions of dollars. Their extravagance has involved a massive transfer of wealth from the working class and played no small part in bringing the US and global economy to the point of collapse.
Their finances should be audited and they should be forced to make restitution. The wealth they have drained from society should be recaptured, transferred to the public treasury and used to finance public works programs to provide millions of jobs rebuilding the schools, hospitals and basic infrastructure.
A rational solution to the crisis is not a technical issue. It is a fundamental class question, and therefore a political and revolutionary question. There is a direct relationship between the forms of the crisis—the parasitism of the ruling elite, the vast growth of social inequality—and the mode of production and appropriation under capitalism, which subordinates all social needs to the accumulation of personal wealth by those who own and control the means of production and the levers of finance.
Their stranglehold must be broken through a mass, independent social and political movement of the working class. The aim of this movement must be the establishment of a workers' government to carry out socialist policies.
The demand must be raised to open the books of the banks and conduct a careful, public examination to reveal how trillions of dollars were squandered and the economy bankrupted. Those responsible must be held accountable, including by means of criminal prosecution.
The banks and major financial institutions must be nationalized and transformed into public utilities under the democratic control of the working people. Only on this basis can the wealth produced by the working class be utilized and developed to meet the needs of the people.
Barry Grey
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World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org
The looting of America
10 April 2009
The New York Times on Thursday published a front-page article that provides further insight into the economic and class interests that are being served by the Obama administration’s economic “recovery” policies.
Headlined “Small Investors May Be Enlisted in Bank Bailout,” the article outlines discussions between the administration and Wall Street investment firms on structuring the so-called “Public-Private Investment Program” announced last month in a manner that will allow people of modest means to invest in the scheme, whose purpose is to enable the banks to offload their toxic assets at public expense.
When the plan was announced March 23 by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, it sparked a wild rally on the stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 497 points when it became clear that the government was offering to provide up to 95 percent of the capital, insure almost all potential losses and virtually guarantee large profits for hedge funds and other financial firms that agree to purchase the bad debts of the banks at inflated prices, with the taxpayers underwriting the windfall for Wall Street and assuming virtually all of the risk.
Thursday’s Times article indicates that opening the scheme up to small investors is seen as a way of providing a “democratic” gloss to what is, in reality, a brazen plan to plunder the public treasury for the benefit of the very bankers and speculators who are responsible for the financial crash. Evidently not seeing a contradiction, the article also makes clear that the bailout measures are being drawn up in the closest consultation with the Wall Street insiders who stand to profit from them.
“Some of the biggest investment managers in the United States,” the Times notes, “including BlackRock and PIMCO, have been consulting with the government on ways to rebuild the country’s broken financial markets.”
The article quotes Steven A. Baffico, an executive at BlackRock, as saying, “It’s giving the guy on Main Street an equal seat at the table next to the big guys.” This is true only in the sense that “Main Street” will be given the opportunity to absorb the bulk of any losses while the “big guys” cream off the best assets and pocket the profits.
There are political concerns behind this effort to create the appearance of offering the general public a cut in the winnings. Hedge fund managers are wary that when, as they anticipate, their partnership with the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) pays off with double-digit profits there will be a public outcry, similar to that which erupted over the AIG executive bonuses. This, they fear, might lead to limits on their compensation, higher taxes on their fortunes or similar intolerable infringements.
More important are definite commercial calculations. By opening up the scheme to the broad public, the private firms chosen by the Treasury to operate the plan stand to increase greatly their take from investor fees. As the Times puts it, “For the investment managers, the benefits are potentially large. These big firms can charge healthy fees to investors for taking part.”
There is one particularly remarkable passage in the Times account. “But the comparison one industry official uses to illustrate the mistake that America must avoid,” the newspaper writes, “is the large-scale privatization in Russia in the 1990s, which involved a transfer of entire industries to a few, well-connected oligarchs. That experience tarnished the idea of free-market capitalism in Russia and undermined its program to move toward a market economy.”
The many differences in political and historical circumstances aside, there is a very real parallel between the plundering of Soviet society by the former Stalinist bureaucrats and their domestic gangster and foreign imperialist allies and the current manner in which the economic crisis in the US is being seized upon by Wall Street and its political instrument, the Obama administration, to further enrich the American financial aristocracy. Indeed, the perpetrators are themselves quite conscious that they are engaged in a similar—although much bigger—looting operation.
The scale and character of the operation are further indicated by another New York Times article published this week. This one, authored by Times financial writer Andrew Ross Sorkin and published on Tuesday, concerns the role of the FDIC in the new bailout scheme.
The article begins by noting that the FDIC was established 76 years ago, in the depths of the Great Depression, to provide a government guarantee, initially up to $5,000 and now up to $250,000, on the bank deposits of small savers. It describes the transformation of the FDIC, under the toxic asset disposal plan of the Obama administration, as follows:
“It’s going to be insuring 85 percent of the debt, provided by the Treasury, that private investors will use to subsidize their acquisition of toxic assets.”
In other words, the function of the FDIC is being transformed from guaranteeing the bank deposits of small savers to guaranteeing the investments of multimillionaire investment fund managers. And, as the article notes, this is occurring without a vote by Congress.
The FDIC will be insuring more than $1 trillion in new obligations incurred as the government covers the bad debts of the banks. However, the FDIC’s charter limits the obligations it can take on to $30 billion. The Times article quotes one “prominent securities lawyers” as saying, “They may not be breaking the letter of the law, but they’re sure disregarding its spirit.”
What is the significance of this astonishing reasoning? Simply this: The Obama administration, in order to protect the wealth and power of the financial elite, is facilitating and directly perpetrating on a colossal scale the same type of accounting fraud and reckless leveraging that led to the economic catastrophe in the first place.
Who is to pay the price for this looting operation? The answer can be seen in the Obama Auto Task Force’s demands for the liquidation of much of the US auto industry and the brutal downsizing of what remains, combined with the imposition of poverty-level wages on those workers who remain in the surviving plants and the gutting of the pensions and health benefits of retirees. It can be further seen in the administration’s pledge to slash social programs, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The administration’s “recovery” plan is a barely disguised scheme to preserve the fortunes of the financial aristocracy, whose interests it represents, by imposing poverty and social misery on the working class.
Barry Grey
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OBAMA CONNED US WITH HIS PERFORMANCES OF “CHANGE” AND BECAME GEORGE W. BUSH’S THIRD TERM. WALL ST PILLAGE CONTINUED, NOT ONE BANKSTER DONOR HAS GONE TO PRISON!
WAR, WAR, WAR OVER THERE, ENDLESS WAR FOR SAUDIS INTERESTS TO FIGHT SAUDIS TERRORIST ENEMIES, WHILE OUR BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX ARE PUSHED OPEN WIDER EVERY DAY!
POSTED! NO LEGAL NEED APPLY! NO ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY HAS BEEN INFESTED WITH A FOREIGN INTEREST AS OBAMA’S WITH HIS LA RAZA “THE RACE” SUPREMACIST PARTY!
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“The stimulus plan purports to address the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression without examining its underlying causes or the social interests that underlie the crisis. This is no accident, since the fundamental premise of all of the measures taken in response to the crisis, by Obama no less than Bush, is the defense of the interests of the financial elite.”
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Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
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THE REASON WHY OBAMA NOMINATED SOTOMAYER WAS BECAUSE SHE IS A L RAZA PARTY MEMBER, AND HAD A LONG HISTORY OF PANDERING TO THE CORPORATE INTEREST. SOTOMAYER REFERS TO ILLEGALS AS “UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS (OBAMA REFERS TO THEM AS “MY LA RAZA PARTY UNREGISTERED VOTERS). SOTOMAYER VOTED AGAINST MAKING E-VERIFY MANDATORY NATION WIDE!
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Wsws.org …. Get on their free daily news email for info on how our gov if fucking us over today on behalf of Wall St!
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The fundamental social division is class, not race or gender
28 May 2009
The introduction of Sonia Sotomayor as President Obama’s first selection for the US Supreme Court took place at a White House media event of a completely choreographed and stereotyped character. Such ceremonies have become an essential part of how America is governed. The less the political system is capable of actually responding to the needs and aspirations of working people, the more it must put on the pretense of concern, using biography as a substitute for policy.
As always on such occasions, the nomination’s “roll-out” was an unrestrained exercise in public tear-jerking. Led by President Obama, who based his own campaign on the marketing of a compelling personal “narrative,” Sotomayor’s elevation was presented as a triumph over all manner of adversity. There were tributes to the humble origins of the future Supreme Court justice, noting her hard-working immigrant parents, her poverty-stricken childhood in a South Bronx housing project, the death of her father when she was nine years old, and even her struggle with juvenile diabetes.
No doubt, it has not been an easy personal journey for Judge Sotomayor, and there can be little doubt that she is as tough as nails. However, amidst all the tributes to Judge Sotomayor’s triumph, one cannot help but think about the conditions that confront the hundreds of thousands of South Bronx residents whom she left behind.
There is another element of Sotomayor’s nomination that deserves analysis. Media coverage of the nomination, and the bulk of the political commentary, liberal and conservative, approving and hostile, focused on the fact that she would become the first Hispanic and third woman to take a seat on the highest US court. The premise of both supporters and detractors was that Sotomayor’s gender and ethnic origins were of decisive importance in evaluating her nomination and determining her likely course on the court.
Totally obliterated in this flood of commentary is the most fundamental social category in American society: class. Sotomayor will go to the Supreme Court, not as the representative or advocate of Hispanics, women or the socially disadvantaged more generally, but as the representative of a definite social class at the top of American society—the financial aristocracy whose interests she and every other federal judge, and the entire capitalist state machine, loyally serve and defend.
Only one “mainstream” bourgeois publication focused on this critical question. That was the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page serves as a major voice of the ultra-right—denouncing the Sotomayor nomination in strident tones—but whose news pages explored her record as a well-paid commercial litigator and federal judge, on issues of direct interest to big business, including contract law, employment and property rights.
The newspaper quoted several Wall Street lawyers describing Sotomayor as a safe choice for corporate America. “There is no reason for the business community to be concerned,” said one attorney. Barry Ostrager, a partner at Simpson Thacher LLP who defended a unit of J.P. Morgan Chase in a lawsuit over fraudulent pricing of initial public offerings, cited Sotomayor’s role in an appeals court ruling barring the class-action suit. “That ruling demonstrated that in securities litigation, she is in the judicial mainstream,” he told the Journal.
Barack Obama is the culmination of this process. Celebrated as the first African-American president, he has overseen the greatest handover of resources to the billionaires and Wall Street speculators in history. In the restructuring of the auto industry, with ever-escalating demands for cuts in jobs, pay and benefits for auto workers, he has set the stage for the greatest assault on the working class since the Reagan administration smashed the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981 and gave the signal for a nationwide campaign of wage-cutting and union-busting. In this, Obama demonstrates that the class he serves, not the color of his skin or his social origins, is the decisive political factor.
The political development of the American working class requires, first and foremost, the direct and open discussion of the class realities of American society. No country in the world is as deeply and intractably divided along economic lines as the United States, where the top 1 percent of the population owns 40 percent of the wealth and monopolizes 20 percent of the income. Any analysis of the political issues facing working people that does not take these class divisions as the fundamental reality is an exercise in deception and political stultification.
Patrick Martin
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April 1, 2009
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Obama’s Ersatz Capitalism
By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ
THE Obama administration’s $500 billion or more proposal to deal with America’s ailing banks has been described by some in the financial markets as a win-win-win proposal. Actually, it is a win-win-lose proposal: the banks win, investors win — and taxpayers lose.
Treasury hopes to get us out of the mess by replicating the flawed system that the private sector used to bring the world crashing down, with a proposal marked by overleveraging in the public sector, excessive complexity, poor incentives and a lack of transparency.
Let’s take a moment to remember what caused this mess in the first place. Banks got themselves, and our economy, into trouble by overleveraging — that is, using relatively little capital of their own, they borrowed heavily to buy extremely risky real estate assets. In the process, they used overly complex instruments like collateralized debt obligations.
The prospect of high compensation gave managers incentives to be shortsighted and undertake excessive risk, rather than lend money prudently. Banks made all these mistakes without anyone knowing, partly because so much of what they were doing was “off balance sheet” financing.
In theory, the administration’s plan is based on letting the market determine the prices of the banks’ “toxic assets” — including outstanding house loans and securities based on those loans. The reality, though, is that the market will not be pricing the toxic assets themselves, but options on those assets.
The two have little to do with each other. The government plan in effect involves insuring almost all losses. Since the private investors are spared most losses, then they primarily “value” their potential gains. This is exactly the same as being given an option.
Consider an asset that has a 50-50 chance of being worth either zero or $200 in a year’s time. The average “value” of the asset is $100. Ignoring interest, this is what the asset would sell for in a competitive market. It is what the asset is “worth.” Under the plan by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the government would provide about 92 percent of the money to buy the asset but would stand to receive only 50 percent of any gains, and would absorb almost all of the losses. Some partnership!
Assume that one of the public-private partnerships the Treasury has promised to create is willing to pay $150 for the asset. That’s 50 percent more than its true value, and the bank is more than happy to sell. So the private partner puts up $12, and the government supplies the rest — $12 in “equity” plus $126 in the form of a guaranteed loan.
If, in a year’s time, it turns out that the true value of the asset is zero, the private partner loses the $12, and the government loses $138. If the true value is $200, the government and the private partner split the $74 that’s left over after paying back the $126 loan. In that rosy scenario, the private partner more than triples his $12 investment. But the taxpayer, having risked $138, gains a mere $37.
Even in an imperfect market, one shouldn’t confuse the value of an asset with the value of the upside option on that asset.
But Americans are likely to lose even more than these calculations suggest, because of an effect called adverse selection. The banks get to choose the loans and securities that they want to sell. They will want to sell the worst assets, and especially the assets that they think the market overestimates (and thus is willing to pay too much for).
But the market is likely to recognize this, which will drive down the price that it is willing to pay. Only the government’s picking up enough of the losses overcomes this “adverse selection” effect. With the government absorbing the losses, the market doesn’t care if the banks are “cheating” them by selling their lousiest assets, because the government bears the cost.
The main problem is not a lack of liquidity. If it were, then a far simpler program would work: just provide the funds without loan guarantees. The real issue is that the banks made bad loans in a bubble and were highly leveraged. They have lost their capital, and this capital has to be replaced.
Paying fair market values for the assets will not work. Only by overpaying for the assets will the banks be adequately recapitalized. But overpaying for the assets simply shifts the losses to the government. In other words, the Geithner plan works only if and when the taxpayer loses big time.
Some Americans are afraid that the government might temporarily “nationalize” the banks, but that option would be preferable to the Geithner plan. After all, the F.D.I.C. has taken control of failing banks before, and done it well. It has even nationalized large institutions like Continental Illinois (taken over in 1984, back in private hands a few years later), and Washington Mutual (seized last September, and immediately resold).
What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a “partnership” in which one partner robs the other. And such partnerships — with the private sector in control — have perverse incentives, worse even than the ones that got us into the mess.
So what is the appeal of a proposal like this? Perhaps it’s the kind of Rube Goldberg device that Wall Street loves — clever, complex and nontransparent, allowing huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets. It has allowed the administration to avoid going back to Congress to ask for the money needed to fix our banks, and it provided a way to avoid nationalization.
But we are already suffering from a crisis of confidence. When the high costs of the administration’s plan become apparent, confidence will be eroded further. At that point the task of recreating a vibrant financial sector, and resuscitating the economy, will be even harder.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 1997, was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2001.
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Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies
by Michelle Malkin
Editorial Reviews
In her shocking new book, Malkin digs deep into the records of President Obama's staff, revealing corrupt dealings, questionable pasts, and abuses of power throughout his administration.
From the Inside Flap
The era of hope and change is dead....and it only took six months in office to kill it.
Never has an administration taken office with more inflated expectations of turning Washington around. Never have a media-anointed American Idol and his entourage fallen so fast and hard. In her latest investigative tour de force, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Malkin delivers a powerful, damning, and comprehensive indictment of the culture of corruption that surrounds Team Obama's brazen tax evaders, Wall Street cronies, petty crooks, slum lords, and business-as-usual influence peddlers. In Culture of Corruption, Malkin reveals:
* Why nepotism beneficiaries First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are Team Obama's biggest liberal hypocrites--bashing the corporate world and influence-peddling industries from which they and their relatives have benefited mightily
* What secrets the ethics-deficient members of Obama's cabinet--including Hillary Clinton--are trying to hide
* Why the Obama White House has more power-hungry, unaccountable "czars" than any other administration
* How Team Obama's first one hundred days of appointments became a litany of embarrassments as would-be appointee after would-be appointee was exposed as a tax cheat or had to withdraw for other reasons
* How Obama's old ACORN and union cronies have squandered millions of taxpayer dollars and dues money to enrich themselves and expand their power
* How Obama's Wall Street money men and corporate lobbyists are ruining the economy and helping their friends In Culture of Corruption, Michelle Malkin lays bare the Obama administration's seamy underside that the liberal media would rather keep hidden.
Product Details
• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: Regnery Publishing (July 27, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596981091
• ISBN-13: 978-1596981096
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Wall Street demands lifting of pay limits
16 February 2009
A provision restricting executive compensation that was inserted into the $787 billion economic stimulus bill prior to its passage by the US Congress has provoked howls of protest from the Wall Street elite and sent the Obama administration scrambling to emasculate it.
The measure was authored by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, over the objections of Obama and his top economic advisers. Dodd argued that the measure was necessary to assuage public outrage against bank executives who have continued to reward themselves with multimillion-dollar bonuses after their banks received billions of dollars in taxpayer funds. He said such action was needed to make it politically possible for Congress to allocate hundreds of billions more to bail out the banks.
The provision goes somewhat further than the token pay restrictions announced February 4 by Obama's treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, which set a base pay limit of $500,000 only on the top executives of banks receiving "exceptional assistance" and did not apply retroactively to banks that previously received money under the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Dodd's measure applies retroactively to all banks that have received TARP funds. It sets no limit on salaries, but restricts bonuses to one-third of total compensation. It does not apply to deferred compensation or pensions, and evidently places no limits on stock options.
Since the vast bulk of the stratospheric annual compensation of Wall Street tycoons comes in the form of bonuses, stock options and other perks rather than base pay, the measure, if enforced, could reduce their yearly take to the millions, rather than the double-digit millions to which they have become accustomed. The Wall Street Journal on Saturday estimated that under the new provision, Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis's compensation would fall from $16.4 million in 2007 to a "mere" $2.25 million.
Such a fate, the prospect of which sent Wall Street lobbyists descending on Capitol Hill and the White House, would reduce Lewis's income to a sum more than 56 times that of an ordinary American—that is, he would be forced to survive on substantially more per week than the median worker earns in a year.
The outrage of the Wall Street billionaires was immediately translated into front-page headlines in the major US newspapers. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post all ran lead stories Saturday on the issue. The Post, the main newspaper in the nation's capital, ran a front-page follow-up on Sunday, bearing the subtitle "Compensation Limits May Backfire."
Only weeks ago, it should be recalled, Congress was railing against autoworkers who make less than $60,000 a year. Obama supported the imposition of drastic wage and benefit cuts, along with mass layoffs, as a condition for emergency loans to prevent the collapse of General Motors and Chrysler.
Judging from the Sunday morning news and interview programs, there was some doubt as to whether Obama would go ahead with his plans to sign his "stimulus and recovery" bill on Tuesday, as scheduled. His representatives felt obliged to affirm that he would sign the bill, but hastened to add that the White House would demand changes in its executive compensation provisions even after it became law.
Senior adviser David Axelrod said on "Fox News Sunday" that the White House would work with Congress to "do something that's workable" about the issue. Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation," said the administration would seek to "strike the right balance" by discussing changes with House and Senate members.
It is an extraordinary commentary on the reality of class relations and political power in the United States that this issue should figure so prominently in the discussion of what is billed as a plan to rescue the nation from, in Obama's words, a "catastrophe." The narrow and selfish interests of a miniscule fraction of the population weigh infinitely more on the scales of government policy than the needs of tens of millions of people who are being hurled into unemployment and poverty. This financial aristocracy exercises an effective veto power over state policy—exposing the class dictatorship that underlies the increasingly threadbare trappings of democracy.
The real question in the minds of most Americans is why the bank executives who bear direct responsibility for the collapse of their own firms and the economy as a whole—not only in the United States but internationally—are still in their posts. They want to know why there are no serious investigations or criminal prosecutions.
The furor over the bankers' pay also sheds light on the nature of the stimulus package itself. It is a hodgepodge of tax cuts—including tens of billions for big business and the wealthy—and government outlays that will do nothing to solve the economic crisis and little to relieve the mounting suffering of the people.
Moreover, as Obama indicated in his Saturday radio-video address, it is a prelude to another massive taxpayer bailout of Wall Street that will reach into the trillions of dollars, to be followed by draconian austerity measures targeting basic social programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
The stimulus plan purports to address the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression without examining its underlying causes or the social interests that underlie the crisis. This is no accident, since the fundamental premise of all of the measures taken in response to the crisis, by Obama no less than Bush, is the defense of the interests of the financial elite.
The response of the Wall Street elite to the executive pay provision exposes the cynicism of Obama's talk of collective "responsibility" for the crisis and his calls for "national sacrifice." For their part, the plutocrats have no intention of ceding an inch of their wealth or power, whatever the cost to society.
They have made it clear that if the Dodd provision stands, they will drain their reserves to pay back the government as soon as possible in order to remove themselves from its compensation limits, further undermining the viability of their own firms and threatening an even greater economic disaster for the US and the world. And, as many commentators have suggested, they will evade the restrictions on bonuses by jacking up their salaries. As Nell Minow of the Corporate Library told the Washington Post, "The people who work on Wall Street are motivated by money."
All of the measures proposed to rein in the bankers are utterly inadequate. Over the past decade, they have pocketed—in salaries, bonuses, stock options, golden parachutes, pensions, private jets, limos and other perks—trillions of dollars. Their extravagance has involved a massive transfer of wealth from the working class and played no small part in bringing the US and global economy to the point of collapse.
Their finances should be audited and they should be forced to make restitution. The wealth they have drained from society should be recaptured, transferred to the public treasury and used to finance public works programs to provide millions of jobs rebuilding the schools, hospitals and basic infrastructure.
A rational solution to the crisis is not a technical issue. It is a fundamental class question, and therefore a political and revolutionary question. There is a direct relationship between the forms of the crisis—the parasitism of the ruling elite, the vast growth of social inequality—and the mode of production and appropriation under capitalism, which subordinates all social needs to the accumulation of personal wealth by those who own and control the means of production and the levers of finance.
Their stranglehold must be broken through a mass, independent social and political movement of the working class. The aim of this movement must be the establishment of a workers' government to carry out socialist policies.
The demand must be raised to open the books of the banks and conduct a careful, public examination to reveal how trillions of dollars were squandered and the economy bankrupted. Those responsible must be held accountable, including by means of criminal prosecution.
The banks and major financial institutions must be nationalized and transformed into public utilities under the democratic control of the working people. Only on this basis can the wealth produced by the working class be utilized and developed to meet the needs of the people.
Barry Grey
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World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org
The looting of America
10 April 2009
The New York Times on Thursday published a front-page article that provides further insight into the economic and class interests that are being served by the Obama administration’s economic “recovery” policies.
Headlined “Small Investors May Be Enlisted in Bank Bailout,” the article outlines discussions between the administration and Wall Street investment firms on structuring the so-called “Public-Private Investment Program” announced last month in a manner that will allow people of modest means to invest in the scheme, whose purpose is to enable the banks to offload their toxic assets at public expense.
When the plan was announced March 23 by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, it sparked a wild rally on the stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 497 points when it became clear that the government was offering to provide up to 95 percent of the capital, insure almost all potential losses and virtually guarantee large profits for hedge funds and other financial firms that agree to purchase the bad debts of the banks at inflated prices, with the taxpayers underwriting the windfall for Wall Street and assuming virtually all of the risk.
Thursday’s Times article indicates that opening the scheme up to small investors is seen as a way of providing a “democratic” gloss to what is, in reality, a brazen plan to plunder the public treasury for the benefit of the very bankers and speculators who are responsible for the financial crash. Evidently not seeing a contradiction, the article also makes clear that the bailout measures are being drawn up in the closest consultation with the Wall Street insiders who stand to profit from them.
“Some of the biggest investment managers in the United States,” the Times notes, “including BlackRock and PIMCO, have been consulting with the government on ways to rebuild the country’s broken financial markets.”
The article quotes Steven A. Baffico, an executive at BlackRock, as saying, “It’s giving the guy on Main Street an equal seat at the table next to the big guys.” This is true only in the sense that “Main Street” will be given the opportunity to absorb the bulk of any losses while the “big guys” cream off the best assets and pocket the profits.
There are political concerns behind this effort to create the appearance of offering the general public a cut in the winnings. Hedge fund managers are wary that when, as they anticipate, their partnership with the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) pays off with double-digit profits there will be a public outcry, similar to that which erupted over the AIG executive bonuses. This, they fear, might lead to limits on their compensation, higher taxes on their fortunes or similar intolerable infringements.
More important are definite commercial calculations. By opening up the scheme to the broad public, the private firms chosen by the Treasury to operate the plan stand to increase greatly their take from investor fees. As the Times puts it, “For the investment managers, the benefits are potentially large. These big firms can charge healthy fees to investors for taking part.”
There is one particularly remarkable passage in the Times account. “But the comparison one industry official uses to illustrate the mistake that America must avoid,” the newspaper writes, “is the large-scale privatization in Russia in the 1990s, which involved a transfer of entire industries to a few, well-connected oligarchs. That experience tarnished the idea of free-market capitalism in Russia and undermined its program to move toward a market economy.”
The many differences in political and historical circumstances aside, there is a very real parallel between the plundering of Soviet society by the former Stalinist bureaucrats and their domestic gangster and foreign imperialist allies and the current manner in which the economic crisis in the US is being seized upon by Wall Street and its political instrument, the Obama administration, to further enrich the American financial aristocracy. Indeed, the perpetrators are themselves quite conscious that they are engaged in a similar—although much bigger—looting operation.
The scale and character of the operation are further indicated by another New York Times article published this week. This one, authored by Times financial writer Andrew Ross Sorkin and published on Tuesday, concerns the role of the FDIC in the new bailout scheme.
The article begins by noting that the FDIC was established 76 years ago, in the depths of the Great Depression, to provide a government guarantee, initially up to $5,000 and now up to $250,000, on the bank deposits of small savers. It describes the transformation of the FDIC, under the toxic asset disposal plan of the Obama administration, as follows:
“It’s going to be insuring 85 percent of the debt, provided by the Treasury, that private investors will use to subsidize their acquisition of toxic assets.”
In other words, the function of the FDIC is being transformed from guaranteeing the bank deposits of small savers to guaranteeing the investments of multimillionaire investment fund managers. And, as the article notes, this is occurring without a vote by Congress.
The FDIC will be insuring more than $1 trillion in new obligations incurred as the government covers the bad debts of the banks. However, the FDIC’s charter limits the obligations it can take on to $30 billion. The Times article quotes one “prominent securities lawyers” as saying, “They may not be breaking the letter of the law, but they’re sure disregarding its spirit.”
What is the significance of this astonishing reasoning? Simply this: The Obama administration, in order to protect the wealth and power of the financial elite, is facilitating and directly perpetrating on a colossal scale the same type of accounting fraud and reckless leveraging that led to the economic catastrophe in the first place.
Who is to pay the price for this looting operation? The answer can be seen in the Obama Auto Task Force’s demands for the liquidation of much of the US auto industry and the brutal downsizing of what remains, combined with the imposition of poverty-level wages on those workers who remain in the surviving plants and the gutting of the pensions and health benefits of retirees. It can be further seen in the administration’s pledge to slash social programs, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The administration’s “recovery” plan is a barely disguised scheme to preserve the fortunes of the financial aristocracy, whose interests it represents, by imposing poverty and social misery on the working class.
Barry Grey
OBAMA'S PUSH FOR WAR AGAINST IRAN FOR HIS SAUDI CRONIES
DO THE SAUDIS KNEELING WAR PROFITEERING SERVANTS, OBAMA, CLINTION, BUSH AND THEIR DONOR, DIANNE FEINSTEIN SMELL MONEY IN MORE WAR WITH IRAN FOR THEIR SAUDIS PAYMASTERS???
THE STENCH OF TRAITORS!
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Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism . by DORE GOLD
In the global search for culprits and causes in the rise of terrorism, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold shines a spotlight on a nation many think of as a close ally of the United States: Saudi Arabia. As he explains in Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, Gold believes that the Saudi government is greatly influenced by the Islamist sect known as Wahhabism and, he explains, that influence has lead to Saudi support of terrorism in the Middle East, Europe, the United States and around the world.
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9-11 the SAUDI, not IRAQI terrorist!
George W. Bush and his extended squalid family had never known a Wall St. mow down crisis they didn’t scoop up another fortune. From Neil Bush’s crimes during the savings and loans debacle we’re still paying for, blueprint for the the freaking banksters have done to us this round.
Bush senior made a wad off WorldCom, as fucker Bush crawled deeper under the bedcovers with the filthy Saudis. Now Bush Saudis, Inc. operates ad CARLYLE GROUP, another global crime wave making the bucks off war and anything else their influence peddling can squandel a backroom deal!
It was Bush cabinet member, lawyer James Baker part of CARLYLE GROUP, that went to town to protect the SAUDIS from the American people that launched. Baker moved to protect the Bush family partners from the wraith of the American people and the Courts. Obama, also smelling Saudis money would make it impossible for Americans to pursue their Saudis partners.
Oh, it was GEORGE bush that permitted the bin Laden and Saudis lard buckets to fly out of the country when our airways were closed to EVERYONE ONE ELSE BUT AIR FORCE ONE AND THE SAUDIS TERRORIST!
The Bush mafia started two wars with Iraq to protect their filthy Saudis cronies! TWO WARS! Meanwhile the Saudis royal lard-buckets have pumped a vast fortune into the WAHHABI FASCIST ANTI-AMERICA TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS.
We all cringed at the sight of BARACK OBAMA over in Muslim land kneeling to kiss the hem of the royal Saudi LARDBUCKET! Guess he smells that good ol’ Saudi money for his presidential library???
Then we have Sen. Dianne Feinstein, an Obama and Clinton (she has doled our bribes to half of the Senate to keep investigations of her corruption at bay!) donor and the biggest war profiteer in American history! With her first check after Bush bought this old whore as an insurance policy against impeachment, Feinstein bought herself a $16 million dollar mansion only miles from her S.F. hotel where she hires “cheap” labor illegals! (Feinstein sent out letters that to her duped constituents that she would not vote for an impeachment, and that means two votes as Boxer (also a Feinstein-Blum bribes recipient) exist to siphon off “consultant fees” in the millions (where did you think her fortune came from? Her bullshit book sales and 22 city book tours???) (Feinstein Boxer both voted HELL NO to end the Dems fave source of legally accepting bribes!). Feinstein has accumulated more than $50 million in mansions scattered around the nation while in elected office by setting up highly lucrative deals she and Boxer have pushed in the Senate! Her deals with RED CHINA alone have raked in millions in bribes.
You saw Feinstein give half of Obama’s inaugural, with her pimp husband, RICHARD BLUM sitting behind Obama picking pockets for deals Feinstein and he could profiteer on!
Then we have HILLARY BILLARY, also two of the most corrupt in history. They raked in big bucks siphoned to the BILLARY BULLSHIT LIBRARY from all these freaking monster Muslim dictators! Don’t they all smell Saudis money? Hasn’t Hillary voted for war and hopped up and down for her Saudis paymasters like Obama and Bush who holds the lard-buckets’ hand as he acts like a Saudis monkey on a string!?!
EVERY ONE OF THESE FUCKERS HAS VOTED FOR ANYTHING THAT WOULD BENEFIT THE SAUDIS TERRORIST! WAR WITH IRAN IS SOMETHING THEY’VE BEEN ITCHING AT FOR YEARS BECAUSE THE IRANIANS ARE ENEMIES OF THEIR FILTHY SAUDIS PAYMASTERS!
MEANWHILE everyone one of these fuckers want OPEN BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX, AMNESTY, ENDLESS GRINGO-PAID DREAM ACTS, NO WALL, NO I.D. REQUIRED OF LA RAZA VOTERS, EXPANDED WELFARE FOR WALL ST AND LA RAZA, AND ANYTHING THAT WILL ULTIMATELY KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED FOR THEIR WALL ST. FRIENDS.
AFTER THE BANKSTERS BIGGEST LOOTING OF AMERICA SINCE BUSH AND THE SAVINGS AND LOAN RAPE OF THE 1980’s, OBAMA HAS AGAIN, FOR THE SECOND TIME, RAKED IN MORE CRIMINAL BANKSTER LOOTINGS THAN ANYONE IN HISTORY!
THERE ARE MORE AMERICAN TROOPS PROTECTING THE KOREAN BORDER THAN ON THE NARCOMEX BORDER!
WE CAN’T SAVE OUR COUNTRY UNTIL WE REMOVE THESE TRAITORS, SAUDIS FOOTSTOOLS, AND WAR PROFITEERS!
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Wsws.org
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US/Britain prepare for war against Iran
4 November 2011
Articles in the British-based Guardian and Telegraph newspapers on Wednesday have lifted the lid on military preparations by the US and Britain for an attack on Iran that go well beyond routine contingency planning.
The leaks pointing to a dangerous new military adventure take place amid a debate within the Israeli inner cabinet and media over whether to unilaterally launch air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.
Officials and ministers in all three countries have denied the reports, but have repeated the longstanding threat that “all options remain on the table”. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is due to release a new assessment of Iran’s nuclear programs, described to the Guardian by an unnamed Western official as “a game-changer”, that could well provide the pretext for war. Iran has consistently denied it has any plans to build nuclear weapons.
The Guardian reported: “The [British] Ministry of Defence believes the US may decide to fast-forward plans for targeted missile strikes at some key Iranian facilities. British officials say that if Washington presses ahead it will seek, and receive, UK military help for any mission, despite some deep reservations within the coalition government.” In anticipation, “British military planners are examining where best to deploy Royal Navy ships and submarines equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles over the coming months.”
An article in the Telegraph confirmed that Ministry of Defence (MoD) had signalled the need to act quickly based on claims that Iran was shifting key uranium enrichment technology to a facility near Qom buried deep underground. MoD planners told the newspaper there was a “shortening window of opportunity” as a result. “You have got to get there early enough—once they dig into the ground, it gets much more difficult,” one source declared.
Unnamed British sources told the Guardian that US President Obama did not want “to embark on a new and provocative military venture before next November’s presidential election. But they warned the calculations could change because of mounting anxiety over intelligence gathered by Western agencies.” One Whitehall official commented: “President Obama has a big decision to make in the coming months because he won’t want anything just before the election.”
Israel could prompt Obama to plunge into a new war by launching its own strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, or threatening to do so. Last Friday, prominent Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea, writing in Yediot Aharonot, reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barack were pressing the inner cabinet and security chiefs to agree to attack Iran. The claim provoked a furious response from inner cabinet member Benny Begin, who denounced the media debate as “utterly irresponsible” as it “severely impeded the government’s ability to make decisions” on the issue.
The Israeli government has already made advanced preparations for an attack on Iran. The Ha’aretz newspaper reported on Tuesday that the Israeli foreign ministry had begun a diplomatic campaign in mid-September stressing to allies that there was not much time left to end the Iranian nuclear program through diplomatic pressure and sanctions. On the military front, Israeli warplanes last week conducted a long-range exercise—of the type required to reach Iran—using a NATO airbase on the Italian island of Sardinia. On Wednesday, Israel test-fired a long-range ballistic missile that also has the potential to strike Iran.
Those who claim that Israel and its American and European backers would not risk an attack on Iran and potentially calamitous consequences ignore the fact that their intelligence agencies have already been engaged in activities that are tantamount to acts of war. It is widely acknowledged that Israel, with the likely assistance of the US, was behind the cyber war operation using the Stuxnet computer virus to sabotage Iran’s enrichment facilities, as well as the assassination of several Iranian nuclear scientists over the past year.
More fundamentally, the preparations for war against Iran are no more being driven by concerns over its nuclear program than the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were motivated by “terrorism” or “weapons of mass destruction”, or the NATO bombing of Libya was to protect the Libyan people. The US has recklessly plunged into one war after another over the past decade in a desperate bid to offset its economic decline by securing its hegemony over the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia.
The neo-colonial invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have both turned into disasters, which, as American commentators have repeatedly noted, have only enhanced the standing of Iran in the region by removing two hostile regimes. Having failed to secure a status of forces agreement with Baghdad, the US position will be further weakened when it removes its remaining troops from Iraq by the end of the year. The prospects are no better in Afghanistan as the US and its allies prepare to wind back combat forces by 2014.
Far from acting as a restraint, the worsening global economic crisis is impelling US imperialism to use its military might to shore up its economic and strategic interests at the expense of its main European and Asian rivals. That is the twisted logic behind targeting Tehran, which is regarded in Washington as a major obstacle to US ambitions in the Middle East and the main reason for its failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, as in the case of Libya, a US-led war on Tehran would seriously undermine the substantial economic interests of China and Russia in Iran, as well as their efforts to forge closer strategic ties.
The Obama administration is also being driven by the deepening economic crisis and rising class tensions at home that have been exposed by the eruption of the anti-Wall Street protest movement. Despite the widespread popular opposition to militarism and war that has developed over the past decade, the American financial aristocracy is quite willing to take another irresponsible gamble to shore up its interests in the Middle East and as a means of diverting attention from the social devastation produced by its austerity agenda.
The latest reports in the British press constitute the sharpest warning to the American and international working class. As global capitalism lurches from one economic and political crisis to the next, rivalry between the major powers for markets, resources and strategic advantage is plunging humanity towards a catastrophic conflict that would devastate the planet. The only social force capable of ending the danger of world war is the international working class through a unified struggle to abolish the profit system and establish a world-planned socialist economy. That is the perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections in every country.
Peter Symonds
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Saudi Arabia backs US campaign against Iran
By Sahand Avedis
21 June 2010
Last week, the Sunday Times of London revealed that Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to let Israeli jets pass through its airspace for a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The Times quoted a US defence source: “They have already done tests to make sure their own jets aren’t scrambled and no one gets shot down. This has all been done with the agreement of the [US] State Department.”
The Times report continued, “The four main targets for any raid on Iran would be the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom, the gas storage development at Isfahan and the heavy-water reactor at Arak. Secondary targets include the lightwater reactor at Bushehr, which could produce weapons-grade plutonium when complete.”
These reports come after years of sanctions and war threats by Israel and the US against Iran, citing Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme.
The significance of the Saudi plans lies in the fact that the targets are more than 2,000 km away from Israel. Even with aerial refueling, a successful raid would be a difficult operation for the Israeli military, which historically evolved to attack its neighbors, such as Egypt and Syria. It lacks the capability for long-distance operations, particularly against a widely spread set of targets in a country the size of Iran. The Times noted, “An open corridor across northern Saudi Arabia would significantly shorten the distance” to be traveled by Israeli fighter planes.
Given the Times’s reputation as an outlet for leaks from Israeli military intelligence, this revelation prompted extensive comment in the Middle East. Saudi officials denied the report, claiming that they would not allow Saudi territory to be used for attacks on a neighbouring country.
Such denials are at best unconvincing, given that Saudi Arabia has a long history of backing Washington’s operations in the Middle East—most notably, serving as a base for US forces in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.
Recent months have seen increasing tensions between Riyadh and Tehran. Arab regimes are pressing the US to adopt a tougher stance with respect to Iran’s nuclear programme. In a meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Riyadh in February, Saudi Foreign Minister Al-Faisal stated that the Iranian nuclear threat demands “a more immediate solution” than sanctions.
In March, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates helped the US to defuse Chinese opposition to UN sanctions against Iran, by reassuring Beijing that they would increase their oil exports to China, if sanctions against Iran cut the amount of oil China could import from Iran.
In addition to fears of the regional geopolitical implications of Iran’s nuclear programme, the Saudi monarchy is concerned about the internal implications of tensions between the Shiite-populist Iranian regime and the Sunni Saudi monarchy. As a result, it has supported the US and European campaign against Iran.
These concerns were highlighted by the recent war between Shiite Houthi rebels and the US-allied Yemeni government of Ali Abdullah Saleh in northern Yemen, near the border with Saudi Arabia. The Saudi regime worried about the impact of the Houthi uprising on its own southern Shiite population. In November 2009, the Royal Saudi Land Forces entered into Yemen, with the support of joint Saudi-US air raids on rebel strongholds. The conflict resulted in 133 Saudi casualties, with close to 500 soldiers captured or wounded.
US-allied Arab states accused Tehran of backing the Shiite rebels in Yemen and supported the Saudis. In response, Tehran accused Saudi Arabia of waging an unequal war against the Shiite population of Yemen, on orders from Washington.
The longstanding sectarian tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in Saudi Arabia have vast strategic implications for the Saudi regime and the world economy.
Although there is a large population of Shiites on the Yemeni border, Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority is concentrated in the “Eastern Province,” across the Persian Gulf from Iran. This province contains most of Saudi Arabia’s oil resources. Shiite opposition thus potentially threatens to disrupt Saudi Arabia’s crucial oil production. Saudi Shiites are socially oppressed, facing restrictions on their religious practices and, since the 1980s, on their employment in the oil industry.
These tensions are bound up with the lasting consequences of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. From 1968, the year that Britain announced its withdrawal from the Persian Gulf, until the revolution, the Iranian monarchy regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi maintained friendly relations with the Saudi kingdom.
The Saudi regime saw the massive oil strikes that led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the Shiite populist regime that emerged from it, as a deadly threat, however. The Saudi regime feared that opposition to monarchy and US imperialism could spread to its own population, particularly as Tehran appealed to the marginalised Arab Shiite populations against US-allied Arab monarchies. Despite their hostility to the nationalism of the Iraqi Baath party, the Gulf monarchies backed Saddam Hussein in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, in which they saw Iran as a far more serious threat.
Saudi-Iranian tensions rose dramatically during the “war on terror,” as the US invaded or toppled regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon—intensifying competition between the Iranian and Saudi governments for influence in the Middle East.
The coming to power of Shiite parties in US-occupied Iraq after 2008—notably the rise of a Shiite anti-occupation movement in Iraq around Moqtada al-Sadr—was a source of deep concern for the Saudi regime. It has been widely suggested that Saudi intelligence was behind numerous bombings in Iraqi Shiite areas that helped push Iraq into sectarian civil war.
The 2005 election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led to a more assertive Iranian foreign policy, including stronger support for the Shiite-based Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia and the US, however, backed a Lebanese government led by Sunni politicians Fuad Siniora and then Saad Hariri after the 2005 US-backed “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon.
Iranian reformists around Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami have constantly attacked Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy. Mohammad Abtahi, one of the key organisers of the 2009 Green Movement protests against Ahmadinejad’s re-election, said in 2006: “[A]t a time when all the Arab and Islamic states are at their lowest level of diplomatic relation with Iran, Ahmadinejad’s visit to left-wing Latin American countries to resurrect the Socialist-Communist axis would entail a huge cost for the Iranian Muslim nation.”
As part of the broader US strategy against the Ahmadinejad government in Tehran, media in US-allied Arab countries are waging a press campaign together with elements of the Green movement.
According to Iraqi news network “Nahrain Net”, Saudi intelligence last month instructed Saudi-financed media throughout the Gulf to launch a campaign against Ahmadinejad and promote the Green opposition on the anniversary of the Iranian presidential election. The goal of the Saudis, according to the Nahrain Net’s report, was to “demonstrate that there is a real crisis in Iran,” and that “the events in the last 12 months have boosted the reformists vis-Ã -vis Ahmadinejad.”
European sources that leaked the news also claimed that the “Iran Section” of Saudi intelligence has been trained in the US and Britain and familiarised with the views of various sections of the Iranian opposition.
One such media is Al-Arabiya news television station, which rivals Qatar’s Al-Jazeera and Iranian-owned Alalam in the Arab world. Al-Arabiya launched a Persian website before the June 2009 election and has dedicated the website to the views of mostly London-based Green opposition leaders such as Ataollah Mohajerani.
Mohajerani also frequently appears in BBC Persian TV, as a spokesman for the Green opposition. Alireza Nourizadeh, the director of the Centre for Arab & Iranian Studies in London and a Western intelligence asset who promotes the Green movement, is also a frequent source in al-Arabiya TV channel discussions on Iran.
Alleged connections between the Green movement and the Gulf regimes was the subject of intense debate in the 2009 Iranian presidential election. In his debate with reformist candidate Mirhossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad accused Rafsanjani of colluding with a Gulf country in 2005, shortly after Rafsanjani’s defeat in the presidential election, to subvert his government: “Mr. Hashemi sent a message to one of the kings in a neighbouring country that he would overthrow the new government in six months.”
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Freedom House
http://www.freedomhouse.org
Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques
http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/special_report/45.pdf
Basics Project: Terrorism – Ideology
http://www.basicsproject.org/terrorism/ideology.htm#Wahhabism
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Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism . by DORE GOLD
In the global search for culprits and causes in the rise of terrorism, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold shines a spotlight on a nation many think of as a close ally of the United States: Saudi Arabia. As he explains in Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, Gold believes that the Saudi government is greatly influenced by the Islamist sect known as Wahhabism and, he explains, that influence has lead to Saudi support of terrorism in the Middle East, Europe, the United States and around the world.
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Is Saudi Arabia Waging Resource Aggression Against the American People and the World Economy?!
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Posted November 8, 2007
Imagine waking up to the following nightmare headline "Canada Interdicts the Head Waters of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and All Water Flows From Its Territory Into the Great Lakes." One's reaction would not be passive nor that of our government to such a blatant act of resource aggression. And if you permit a glib interjection, any argumentation that , "well its water on their side of the border" would hold no water whatsoever. The deterioration of relations between the United States and Canada would be immediate, grave, and threatening.
Yet in degree, this is the current status of our resource relationship with the Saudis. Consider the following. On March 5, 2007 in a first page article "Oil Innovations Pump New Life Into Old Wells", the New York Times reported that Nansen G. Saleri, the head of reservoir management at the state owned Saudi Aramco reported that Saudi Arabia's total reserves were almost three times higher than the kingdom's officially published figure of 260 billion barrels. He estimated the kingdom's resources at 716 billion barrels. Mr. Saleri continued that he wouldn't be surprised if ultimate reserves of Saudi Arabia reached a trillion, (1,000,000,000,000) barrels!
This amazing revelation coming from the reservoir manager of Aramco underlines the degree to which the Saudis have perverted the current world oil market. The Saudis are the putative leaders of OPEC and their capabilities and objectives determine OPEC's policy goals. It is clear as the International Energy Agency phrased it in their recent report, "The greater the increase in the call of oil and gas...the more likely it will be that they will seek a higher rent from their exports and to impose higher prices ... by deferring investment and constraining production."
Saudi Arabia, given its enormous reserves, could readily produce significant additional quantities of oil in order to abate the steep run up of oil prices. At these price levels the fact they and OPEC are maintaining the major portion of their production cuts made at the beginning of this year (OPEC's production cut of 1.7 million barrels/day altered by a production increase of only 500,000 barrels/day starting this month) is smoking gun evidence of their extortionist intent. By holding oil off the market, oil which they clearly have in ample supply, they are gouging the world's economies, pricing their product at levels that have no market rationale whatsoever. They are preying on the world's need for oil. It is an act of resource aggression against the world's consumers much as Canada's hypothetical interference with the headwaters of our major river ways would be an act of aggression against the United States.
Please note in my title I referred to waging resource aggression against the American people. The government was not mentioned because in this imbroglio our administration is in effect Saudi Arabia's, as well as OPEC's and the oil patch's greatest ally. In the near seven years of its Presidency, virtually nothing has been done to constrain Saudi Arabia's policies. On the contrary our President and Vice President are so wedded to the oil industry's interests that the enormous increase in oil prices during their tenure can well be ascribed to willful lack of any forceful policies to counter the Saudi extortion. This has manifested itself in many ways.
Let me just cite a few:
In the near seven years of the Bush presidency, virtually no serious steps have been taken to significantly abate demand for fossil fuels;
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The Specter of Muslim Disloyalty in America
Posted By Raymond Ibrahim On September 13, 2010 @ 12:03 am In Homeland Security, Politics, Religion, US News | 61 Comments
Islamist enmity for infidels, regularly manifested in the jihad, is by now moderately well known. Lesser known, however, but of equal concern, is the mandate for Muslims to be loyal to fellow Muslims and Islam — a loyalty that all too often translates into disloyalty to all things non-Muslim, including the American people and their government.
This dichotomy of loyalty to Muslims and enmity for infidels — which, incidentally, corresponds well with Islamic law’s division of the world into the abode of war (deserving of enmity) and the abode of Islam (deserving of loyalty) — is founded on a Muslim doctrine called wala’ wa bara’ (best translated as “loyalty and enmity”). I first encountered this doctrine while translating [1] various Arabic documents for The Al Qaeda Reader [2]. In fact, the longest and arguably most revealing document I included in that volume is titled “Loyalty and Enmity” (pgs.63-115), compiled by Aymen Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two.
The nations Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been used to underpin escalating prices by continuing purchases even as prices exploded, thereby signaling the governments acceptance and approval of these price levels, and worse by declaring the doubling of the Reserve just as crude oil prices were retreating to $50/bbl earlier this year.
Neither through "friendly persuasion" nor as a Dutch Uncle, making Saudi Arabia understand its price and production policies are intolerable. This even though we are in essence the guarantors of last resort of Saudi Arabia's independence as evidenced by the some $100 million dollars a day being expended from this nation's treasury on our naval flotilla stationed off the Saudi Coast in the Arabian Gulf thereby serving as a bulwark against Shia Iran that without our presence would have designs and capabilities against Sunni Saudi Arabia;
By the fawning obsequiousness our high government officials have shown toward Saudi officialdom, (see "The Price of Oil, OPEC and Our Laws and Now Welcome to Vichy" 5.4.06) or be it Price Bandar's open access to the Oval Office while he was Ambassador in Washington and thereafter.
Or as exemplified by the symbolic holding of then Price Abdullah's hand at the Crawford Ranch meeting (see "Cheney in Saudi Land, Don't Hold Abdullah's Hand" 01.16.06; and "President Bush's Most Respectful Letter to King Abdullah on Energy Cooperation" 06.22.06 ) whose coziness resulted in an almost immediate upward ratcheting of oil prices.
The administration's oil industry buddies are ecstatic at the windfall the entire oil sector has reaped by the quadrupling of oil prices to levels undreamed of before the advent of this Presidency, while many of the nations citizens are having their household budgets ripped to shreds in order to meet their home heating bills this coming winter. Rarely if ever in the history of the Republic has there been such a divergence between the nation's interests and those of the vested interests that formed this administration.
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INTERESTING.... given the SAUDIS 9-11 INVADERS of AMERICA are the biggest financiers of global Islamic terrorism!
Now if we could only get BUSH CRIME FAMILY, BUSH-SAUDI-CARLYLE GROUP, HILLARY-BILLARY LIBRARY and BARACK OBAMA to stop pandering to the royal saudis lardbucket wahhabist!
Understanding the Wahhabist Infiltration of America
Frank Salvato
Part of the reason many Americans don’t appreciate the significance of Osama bin Laden’s declarations of war against the United States and the West is because they are completely oblivious to the in roads radical Islam has made within the United States. Radical Islamists (i.e., Islamofascists, Wahhabis) understand that the conflict must take place on multiple fronts: militarily, economically, diplomatically and ideologically. Because they understand the complexity of the confrontation and the ability of the West to adapt to challenges – albeit lethargically – they employ multiple tactics in their aggressive pursuit of victory. The West’s addiction to sensationalism, epitomized by our limited attention to detail, unless it plays in the superficial 24 hour news cycle, facilitates the successful infiltration of radical ideology into Western society.
Much to the chagrin of the multicultural and the proponents of diversity, those who promote radical Islamist ideology thrive on the fact that the politically correct culture of the West – and the United States in particular – deems it inappropriate to question religious practices or teachings. With this politically correct “wall of separation” in place little if any scrutiny is given to the information disseminated within any given religious institution. This directly facilitates the ideological advancement of Wahhabism, the most radical and puritanical form of Islam, within the mosques of the United States.
To accurately understand the depth of infiltration of the Wahhabist ideology on American soil we need to examine the ideology and how it is advanced within the United States.
Wahhabism is a fiercely fundamentalist form of orthodox Sunni Islam. After a brief examination of its tenets it is clear that it is one of division, domination and hate.
Wahhabism originated circa 1703 and is the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabists believe that any and all evolution of the Islamic faith after the 3rd century of the Muslim era – after 950 A.D. – was specious and must be expunged. Consequently, Wahhabism is the form of Islam that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahri practice.
This radically fundamentalist dogma is fanatically bigoted, xenophobic and lends itself to serve as the catalyst for much of the Islamofascist aggression being perpetrated around the world. It is a wrathful doctrine that rejects the legitimacy of all religious philosophy but its own. Wahhabism condemns Christians, Jews and all other non Muslims, as well as non Wahhabi Muslims. Wahhabists believe it is a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews.
It stresses a worldview in which there exist two opposing realms that can never be reconciled Dar al Islam, or House of Islam, and Dar al Har, or House of War, also referred to as Dar al Kufr, House of the Infidel. When Muslims are in the Dar al Har, they must behave as if they were operatives in a conflict who have been tasked with going behind enemy lines. The Wahhabist ideology permits Muslims to exist “behind enemy lines” for only a few reasons: to acquire knowledge, to make money to be later employed in the jihad against the infidels, or to proselytize the infidels in an effort to convert them to Islam.
Wahhabist doctrine specifically warns Muslims not to imitate, befriend or help “infidels” in any way. It instills hatred for United States because we are ruled by legislated constitutional law rather than by tyrannical Sharia law. Wahhabists are instructed by edict to, above all, work for the creation of an Islamic state where ever they may dwell.
It is because of the Wahhabist ideology’s cruel and unyielding fanaticism that we in the United States should be concerned with its prevalence within the mosques of our nation.
After the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 – an unprecedented action by the fundamentalists of the sect, the Saudi Arabian government responded by coming to terms with the fundamentalist Wahhabist movement of the Sunni sect. The Saudis, in return for a declaration of non aggression, began to finance the construction of mosques in countries around the world. An estimated $45 billion has been spent by the Saudis to finance the building and operational costs of mosques and Islamic schools in foreign countries, including in North America.
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Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism (Paperback)
by DORE GOLD
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In the global search for culprits and causes in the rise of terrorism, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold shines a spotlight on a nation many think of as a close ally of the United States: Saudi Arabia. As he explains in Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, Gold believes that the Saudi government is greatly influenced by the Islamist sect known as Wahhabism and, he explains, that influence has lead to Saudi support of terrorism in the Middle East, Europe, the United States and around the world. The historical portion of Gold’s argument, where he traces the emergence of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the changing face of Saudi leadership, is admirably extensive and detailed. His modern research is a little more uneven, relying on statements by various Muslim clergy members, letters to the editors of newspapers, opinion pieces, and other evidence that is rarely damnable. Curiously, mentions of Israel and the long-standing Arab-Israeli conflict are much more infrequent than one would expect from an Israeli diplomat and scholar. But regardless of one’s opinion of Gold’s research or his alarming conclusions, the book offers something not often found in modern political nonfiction: a coherent structure, exhaustive research, and a clear and consistent perspective on the ongoing threat of terrorism. --John Moe --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Saudi Friends and Foes
By Frank Gaffney
11/3/2010
It seems that, thanks to Saudi Arabia, the latest effort to kill Americans with sophisticated bombs failed. Thanks to Saudi Arabia, we are certain to be subjected to more such attacks in the future.
The preceding paragraph captures the double game we confront from a kingdom that, on the one hand, is routinely characterized by American officials as a reliable U.S. ally in the volatile Middle East, a crucial source of oil and a trustworthy recipient of sophisticated weaponry. On the other hand, it is also the wellspring of shariah, the supremacist totalitarian doctrine that is the law of the land in Saudi Arabia and that animates and enables jihadists worldwide – thanks to immense support from Saudi royals, government agencies, businessmen, clerics and “charities.”
In a report Sunday on the intercepted Hewlett Packard printers whose ink cartridges were transformed into potent bombs and dispatched from Yemen, the New York Times declared that Saudi Arabia in recent years had been forced to “wake up to a reality it had long refused to acknowledge. The puritanical strain of Islam fostered by the state, sometimes called Wahhabism, was breeding extremists who were willing to kill even Muslims for their cause.” Now, the paper concluded, “Saudi Arabia’s problem…has become the world’s problem.”
The truth is that the Saudis’ problem has been the world’s problem for some time now. It is a problem that becomes more intractable, not less, as our government and others refuse even to come to recognize, let alone come to grips with, the Kingdom’s double game whose malevolent elements are directly fueled by what the authorities of Islam – especially those who operate in the kingdom – call shariah, rather than Wahhabism.
How has Washington chosen to respond instead? By and large, it has seen what it wants to see in the House of Saud and averted its gaze from what it does not want to see. Accordingly, the Saudis’ episodic help with countering terrorism is lauded, while their vast material and ideological contribution to its spread is largely overlooked. Their contribution to instability in the Middle East is discounted and their “peace plan” for ending the Israel-Palestinian conflict on terms that would assuredly endanger the Jewish State is enthusiastically embraced.
Similarly, the Saudis are never held accountable for their role as prime-movers behind the “stealth jihad” – the effort to insinuate shariah into nations like ours through the text books, mosques, Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, media ownership and other influence operations they underwrite. This dangerous practice is often lubricated by the Saudis’ generous financial and other relationships with former senior U.S. government officials and prominent businesses, who can be counted upon to discourage probing questions or more prudential policies here.
At the moment, this “see-no-evil” approach is manifested by President Obama’s proposed sale of $60-plus billion worth of advanced American arms to Saudi Arabia. Unless Congress objects in the next few weeks, large quantities of sophisticated fighter planes, helicopters, missile systems and bombs will be transferred to the Saudis over the next decade.
Such weapons are, of course, unlikely to do much to help the Saudis with what the New York Times euphemistically calls their “problem” with “extremists” and “militants.” The latter are, after all, simply acting upon the Saudis’ own politico-military-legal code, shariah.
These arms may or may not assure the Kingdom will provide down the road the sort of help its intelligence services reportedly gave us in recent days in countering “their problem” as it continues to metastasize around the world. Even less certain is whether this massive infusion of U.S. military equipment will have any appreciable impact in contending with the Saudis’ other problem – and ours: a nuclear-armed and ever-more-aggressive Iran.
What does seem predictable, however, is that at some point these arms will wind up in the hands of people who are not even our fair-weather friends. Candidates would include those among the 5,000 Saudi princes who take seriously their duty under shariah to wage holy war against infidels like us. Then, there are the followers of Osama bin Laden – some of whom are actually affiliated with al Qaeda, others of whom simply emulate him – who seek to supplant the Saudi royals and would love to have access to the Kingdom’s arsenal and oil wealth to pursue their jihadist ambitions against Israel and the United States.
Another possibility is that a nuclear-armed Iran may become so dominant a force in the Persian Gulf that it manages – one way or another, perhaps by direct force of arms or perhaps by collusion with the Shiites who populate the Saudis’ most oil-rich region – to acquire this array of formidable American-supplied weaponry. While the dangers associated with such an eventuality may be mitigated somewhate by the need to have U.S. contractors maintain and support such weapons, they cannot be denied.
The United States simply can no longer afford to look the other way on Saudi double-dealing. The time to establish whose side they really are on – and are likely to be on in the years to come – is before we arm them to the teeth with weapons that could come back to bite us.
Frank Gaffney
Frank Gaffney Jr. is the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy and author of War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World .
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US Supreme Court declines to hear case of 9/11 families
By Joe Kishore
30 June 2009
The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case brought by families of 9/11 victims against Saudi Arabia, four members of the Saudi royal family, a Saudi bank and a charity. The action lets stand a lower court ruling that the Saudi members cannot be held liable in US courts.
The Obama administration supported the Saudi monarchs, who were accused of financially supporting several of the individuals involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The administration last month intervened to ask the high court to reject the appeal.
The family members claim that Saudi princes contributed to charities that funded Al Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers.
In August 2008, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld a 2006 district court ruling that the Saudi officials and entities were protected under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. The families argued that lower courts had made conflicting rulings on the scope of sovereign immunity, and that the Supreme Court should therefore intervene.
The Justice Department has sought furiously to prevent the release of documents assembled by lawyers for the families, which, according to a New York Times report, “provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family.” The government has had copies of the documents destroyed and has sought to prevent judges from even looking at them.
The US government has worked systematically to conceal from the American people evidence of Saudi support for at least two of the hijackers, part of a broader cover-up of the many unanswered questions that still surround the 9/11 attacks.
The documents gathered by the 9/11 families—including a classified section of the 2003 joint congressional inquiry into the attacks—likely include material on Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, two Saudi nationals who were aboard the planes that crashed on 9/11. They were known by US intelligence to be members of Al Qaeda at least since 1999.
Despite their previous association, the two men were allowed into the US, where they found accommodations with the help of a Saudi intelligence agent (Omar al-Bayoumi) and, later, an FBI asset (Abdussattar Shaikh). Al-Bayoumi received financing from Princess Haifa, the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar.
The suit filed by the families focuses solely on the role of Saudi Arabia. However, the more fundamental question is the role of sections of the American state. The Saudi royal family has had long and intimate ties with American intelligence, and the broader exposure of Saudi links to the attacks threatens to unravel the entire official story of the September 11 attacks.
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Obama administration seeks to quash suit by 9/11 families
By Barry Grey
26 June 2009
The Obama administration has intervened to quash a civil suit filed against Saudi Arabia by survivors and family members of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The suit seeks to hold the Saudi royal family liable, charging that it provided financial and other support to Al Qaeda and was thereby complicit in the hijack bombings that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and Washington DC.
According to an article by Eric Lichtblau in the June 24 New York Times, documents assembled by lawyers for the 9/11 families “provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family.” However, the article states, the documents may never find their way into court because of legal challenges by Saudi Arabia, which are being supported by the US Justice Department.
The administration is taking extraordinary measures to kill the suit and suppress the evidence of Saudi support for Al Qaeda and complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Last month, the Justice Department sided in court with the Saudi monarchy in seeking to halt further legal action. Moreover, it had copies of American intelligence documents on Saudi finances that had been leaked to lawyers for the families destroyed, and is now seeking to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.
Two federal judges and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already ruled against the 7,630 people represented in the lawsuit, rejecting the suit on the grounds that the plaintiffs cannot sue in the US against a sovereign nation and its leaders. The Supreme Court is expected to rule this month on whether to hear an appeal, but the families’ prospects have been weakened by the intervention of the Obama administration, which has called on the court not to hear the plaintiffs’ appeal.
The Times reports that it obtained the new documents from the families’ lawyers, adding that they are among “several hundred thousand pages of investigative material” assembled by the 9/11 families in their long-running suit against the Saudi royal family.
Lichtblau writes that the documents “provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the events of September 11, 2001.” However, there is a wealth of evidence in the public record strongly pointing to such a connection. And there is the 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint congressional inquiry into 9/11 that deals with the Saudi role in the attacks. Lichtblau writes that “the secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers.”
Then-President George W. Bush ordered that section of the congressional report to be classified, and its contents were blacked out in the findings released to the public by Congress. The Obama administration is continuing this policy of shielding the Saudi monarchy.
Lichtblau reports that the material obtained by the Times from the families’ lawyers includes “thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents” that provide “an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence.” He cites as one example “internal Treasury Department documents” that show that the International Islamic Relief Organization, a “Saudi charity,” heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, “provided ‘support for terrorist organizations’ at least through 2006.”
He gives other examples of evidence of Saudi support for Islamist terrorists in Bosnia in the 1990s and witness statements and intelligence reports of money being given by Saudi princes to the Taliban and to “militants’ activities” in Pakistan and Bosnia during the same decade.
What are the motives behind the Obama administration’s efforts to cover up the connections between the Saudi monarchy and Al Qaeda?
The Justice Department, according to the Times, cites “potentially significant foreign relations consequences” should the 9/11 families’ suit be allowed to go to trial. This is undoubtedly a factor. The US has an immense political and economic interest in protecting the Saudi dictatorship, which is a major American ally in the Middle East, a supporter of Washington’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the world’s biggest producer of oil.
But there is a more immediate and compelling reason for suppressing any exposure of the Saudi connection to Al Qaeda and 9/11. The revelations would undoubtedly shatter the official explanations of the September 11 attacks and point to complicity on the part of US intelligence and security agencies.
Given its longstanding and intimate ties to the Saudi royal family and Saudi intelligence, it is not possible to believe that the CIA would have been unaware of Saudi support for Al Qaeda and at least some of the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals, as they were preparing to carry out the attacks on New York and Washington.
The ties between the Saudi and US intelligence establishments were strengthened during the US-backed war against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan, beginning in 1979 and continuing through the 1980s. The US poured billions of dollars in arms and financing into this war, most of it funneled through the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency.
The Saudi regime also helped fund the anti-Soviet guerrillas, many of whom were brought to Afghanistan by Islamist forces in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden served as the Saudi regime’s personal emissary in this cause, helping to organize, train and equip Arab volunteers for the Afghan war. The movement now known as Al Qaeda was spawned through the interaction of these three intelligence agencies—the CIA, the ISI and the Saudis.
The bipartisan 9/11 commission, in its July 2004 report, echoed the Bush administration’s whitewash of Saudi ties to the terrorist attacks, declaring that it found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded” Al Qaeda.
However, in a book published later that year, Intelligence Matters, then-Florida Senator Bob Graham charged the Bush administration with orchestrating a cover-up of Saudi involvement in the September 11 attacks. Graham was at the time the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which had carried out, along with its House counterpart, the joint congressional investigation into 9/11.
He wrote that “evidence of official Saudi supportî for at least some of the hijackers was ìincontrovertible.” Graham’s charges focused on the extraordinary cases of Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who were identified as hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.
The two men, both Saudi nationals, are undoubtedly the “two hijackers” to whom Times reporter Lichtblau refers in connection with the secret section of the joint congressional report on 9/11.
Both were known to US intelligence as Al Qaeda operatives at least since 1999. Malaysian agents, acting in concert with the CIA, photographed and videotaped them and others during a 2000 meeting of Islamist terrorist groups in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Nevertheless, after the meeting, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were allowed to fly to the US using their own passports and visas issued by US consular authorities in Saudi Arabia. While the CIA knew of their presence in the US, it did not inform the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the FBI. (The CIA disputes this claim, insisting that it did alert the FBI). Nor did the CIA inform immigration authorities.
After landing in Los Angeles in January of 2000, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were met by Omar al-Bayoumi, an employee of the Saudi civil aviation authority. US investigators have concluded that al-Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence agent.
Al-Bayoumi invited the pair to move to San Diego, where he found them an apartment, provided them with money and helped enroll them in flight school.
It has been reported that al-Bayoumi served as a conduit for thousands of dollars in funding for the future hijackers sent by Princess Haifa, the wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the US and a close confidante of the Bush family.
Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar lived openly in the US, one of them even having his name listed in the telephone directory.
Within months, al-Hazmi moved into the home of Abdussattar Shaikh, a retired professor at San Diego State University. Shaikh was on the FBI payroll, charged with monitoring the activities of Islamist groups in the San Diego region.
In his book, Graham wrote that the FBI concealed from the joint congressional committee the fact that its paid informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, had established a close personal relationship with the two hijackers.
When the committee staff discovered Shaikh’s role and the committee issued a subpoena to question him under oath, the FBI and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to serve the subpoena. Graham said that a senior FBI official wrote to him and the Republican co-chair of the joint committee declaring that the administration would neither allow the FBI to serve a subpoena on Shaikh nor allow the committee staff to interview him.
Graham wrote that this was the only time he had ever heard of the FBI refusing to serve a congressional subpoena. He commented, “We were seeing in writing what we had suspected for some time: the White House was directing a cover-up.”
Bush’s extraordinary intervention to block questioning of FBI informant Shaikh was consistent with his administration’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, when it allowed chartered planes to ferry some 140 prominent Saudis—including at least a dozen of Osama bin Laden’s relatives—to Boston for evacuation to Saudi Arabia. The pick-up flights were organized at a time when all non-military and non-emergency aviation had been grounded by government order. Bin Laden’s relatives were allowed to leave the country with little or no questioning by the FBI.
In his book, Graham himself posed the question of why the congressional committee was denied access to the San Diego FBI informant. After offering several possible answers, he suggested in deliberately obscure language a “far more damning possibility”—“perhaps the informant did know something about the plot that would be even more damaging were it revealed, and that this is what the FBI is trying to conceal.”
Graham did not spell out what “damning” information about the 9/11 conspiracy the informant might have revealed. But the role of the CIA, the FBI and the Bush administration in the case of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar suggests that it went beyond involvement by the Saudi government. It strongly suggests he was blocked from being questioned out of concern that he would reveal that elements within the US state apparatus knew of plans for an impending hijacking and allowed them to go forward.
Eight years after the attacks, no one has been held accountable for what on its face is the greatest failure of national security in US history. The question is: Was it a failure, or was a decision taken to permit a terrorist attack on US soil in order to provide the pretext for implementing plans for wars abroad and repressive policies at home that had been drawn up well in advance of September 11, 2001?
That a new administration is continuing the policy of shielding the Saudi monarchy and suppressing evidence of its complicity in 9/11 points strongly to the latter explanation.
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Is Saudi Arabia Waging Resource Aggression Against the American People and the World Economy?!
Posted November 8, 2007
Imagine waking up to the following nightmare headline "Canada Interdicts the Head Waters of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and All Water Flows From Its Territory Into the Great Lakes." One's reaction would not be passive nor that of our government to such a blatant act of resource aggression. And if you permit a glib interjection, any argumentation that , "well its water on their side of the border" would hold no water whatsoever. The deterioration of relations between the United States and Canada would be immediate, grave, and threatening.
Yet in degree, this is the current status of our resource relationship with the Saudis. Consider the following. On March 5, 2007 in a first page article "Oil Innovations Pump New Life Into Old Wells", the New York Times reported that Nansen G. Saleri, the head of reservoir management at the state owned Saudi Aramco reported that Saudi Arabia's total reserves were almost three times higher than the kingdom's officially published figure of 260 billion barrels. He estimated the kingdom's resources at 716 billion barrels. Mr. Saleri continued that he wouldn't be surprised if ultimate reserves of Saudi Arabia reached a trillion, (1,000,000,000,000) barrels!
This amazing revelation coming from the reservoir manager of Aramco underlines the degree to which the Saudis have perverted the current world oil market. The Saudis are the putative leaders of OPEC and their capabilities and objectives determine OPEC's policy goals. It is clear as the International Energy Agency phrased it in their recent report, "The greater the increase in the call of oil and gas...the more likely it will be that they will seek a higher rent from their exports and to impose higher prices ... by deferring investment and constraining production."
Saudi Arabia, given its enormous reserves, could readily produce significant additional quantities of oil in order to abate the steep run up of oil prices. At these price levels the fact they and OPEC are maintaining the major portion of their production cuts made at the beginning of this year (OPEC's production cut of 1.7 million barrels/day altered by a production increase of only 500,000 barrels/day starting this month) is smoking gun evidence of their extortionist intent. By holding oil off the market, oil which they clearly have in ample supply, they are gouging the world's economies, pricing their product at levels that have no market rationale whatsoever. They are preying on the world's need for oil. It is an act of resource aggression against the world's consumers much as Canada's hypothetical interference with the headwaters of our major river ways would be an act of aggression against the United States.
Please note in my title I referred to waging resource aggression against the American people. The government was not mentioned because in this imbroglio our administration is in effect Saudi Arabia's, as well as OPEC's and the oil patch's greatest ally. In the near seven years of its Presidency, virtually nothing has been done to constrain Saudi Arabia's policies. On the contrary our President and Vice President are so wedded to the oil industry's interests that the enormous increase in oil prices during their tenure can well be ascribed to willful lack of any forceful policies to counter the Saudi extortion. This has manifested itself in many ways.
Let me just cite a few:
In the near seven years of the Bush presidency, virtually no serious steps have been taken to significantly abate demand for fossil fuels;
The nations Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been used to underpin escalating prices by continuing purchases even as prices exploded, thereby signaling the governments acceptance and approval of these price levels, and worse by declaring the doubling of the Reserve just as crude oil prices were retreating to $50/bbl earlier this year.
Neither through "friendly persuasion" nor as a Dutch Uncle, making Saudi Arabia understand its price and production policies are intolerable. This even though we are in essence the guarantors of last resort of Saudi Arabia's independence as evidenced by the some $100 million dollars a day being expended from this nation's treasury on our naval flotilla stationed off the Saudi Coast in the Arabian Gulf thereby serving as a bulwark against Shia Iran that without our presence would have designs and capabilities against Sunni Saudi Arabia;
By the fawning obsequiousness our high government officials have shown toward Saudi officialdom, (see "The Price of Oil, OPEC and Our Laws and Now Welcome to Vichy" 5.4.06) or be it Price Bandar's open access to the Oval Office while he was Ambassador in Washington and thereafter.
Or as exemplified by the symbolic holding of then Price Abdullah's hand at the Crawford Ranch meeting (see "Cheney in Saudi Land, Don't Hold Abdullah's Hand" 01.16.06; and "President Bush's Most Respectful Letter to King Abdullah on Energy Cooperation" 06.22.06 ) whose coziness resulted in an almost immediate upward ratcheting of oil prices.
The administration's oil industry buddies are ecstatic at the windfall the entire oil sector has reaped by the quadrupling of oil prices to levels undreamed of before the advent of this Presidency, while many of the nations citizens are having their household budgets ripped to shreds in order to meet their home heating bills this coming winter. Rarely if ever in the history of the Republic has there been such a divergence between the nation's interests and those of the vested interests that formed this administration.
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ISLAMOFASCIST that Bush protects and kisses up to!
UNDERSTANDING WAHHABIST INFILTRATION OF AMERICA
November 05, 2007
Understanding the Wahhabist Infiltration of America
Frank Salvato
Part of the reason many Americans don’t appreciate the significance of Osama bin Laden’s declarations of war against the United States and the West is because they are completely oblivious to the in roads radical Islam has made within the United States. Radical Islamists (i.e., Islamofascists, Wahhabis) understand that the conflict must take place on multiple fronts: militarily, economically, diplomatically and ideologically. Because they understand the complexity of the confrontation and the ability of the West to adapt to challenges – albeit lethargically – they employ multiple tactics in their aggressive pursuit of victory. The West’s addiction to sensationalism, epitomized by our limited attention to detail, unless it plays in the superficial 24 hour news cycle, facilitates the successful infiltration of radical ideology into Western society.
Much to the chagrin of the multicultural and the proponents of diversity, those who promote radical Islamist ideology thrive on the fact that the politically correct culture of the West – and the United States in particular – deems it inappropriate to question religious practices or teachings. With this politically correct “wall of separation” in place little if any scrutiny is given to the information disseminated within any given religious institution. This directly facilitates the ideological advancement of Wahhabism, the most radical and puritanical form of Islam, within the mosques of the United States.
To accurately understand the depth of infiltration of the Wahhabist ideology on American soil we need to examine the ideology and how it is advanced within the United States.
Wahhabism is a fiercely fundamentalist form of orthodox Sunni Islam. After a brief examination of its tenets it is clear that it is one of division, domination and hate.
Wahhabism originated circa 1703 and is the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabists believe that any and all evolution of the Islamic faith after the 3rd century of the Muslim era – after 950 A.D. – was specious and must be expunged. Consequently, Wahhabism is the form of Islam that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahri practice.
This radically fundamentalist dogma is fanatically bigoted, xenophobic and lends itself to serve as the catalyst for much of the Islamofascist aggression being perpetrated around the world. It is a wrathful doctrine that rejects the legitimacy of all religious philosophy but its own. Wahhabism condemns Christians, Jews and all other non Muslims, as well as non Wahhabi Muslims. Wahhabists believe it is a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews.
It stresses a worldview in which there exist two opposing realms that can never be reconciled Dar al Islam, or House of Islam, and Dar al Har, or House of War, also referred to as Dar al Kufr, House of the Infidel. When Muslims are in the Dar al Har, they must behave as if they were operatives in a conflict who have been tasked with going behind enemy lines. The Wahhabist ideology permits Muslims to exist “behind enemy lines” for only a few reasons: to acquire knowledge, to make money to be later employed in the jihad against the infidels, or to proselytize the infidels in an effort to convert them to Islam.
Wahhabist doctrine specifically warns Muslims not to imitate, befriend or help “infidels” in any way. It instills hatred for United States because we are ruled by legislated constitutional law rather than by tyrannical Sharia law. Wahhabists are instructed by edict to, above all, work for the creation of an Islamic state where ever they may dwell.
It is because of the Wahhabist ideology’s cruel and unyielding fanaticism that we in the United States should be concerned with its prevalence within the mosques of our nation.
After the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 – an unprecedented action by the fundamentalists of the Shi’ite sect, the Saudi Arabian government responded by coming to terms with the fundamentalist Wahhabist movement of the Sunni sect. The Saudis, in return for a declaration of non aggression, began to finance the construction of mosques in countries around the world. An estimated $45 billion has been spent by the Saudis to finance the building and operational costs of mosques and Islamic schools in foreign countries, including in North America.
Through the funding of mosques, Islamic Centers and their operations, Saudi Arabia is exporting the Wahhabist ideology. It is not unusual to find that the presiding cleric in any given mosque within the United States is a Wahhabist and that his teachings have been sanctioned and financed by the Saudi government and vetted by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Two of the more predominant mosques in the United States that have received funding from the Saudi government, and that adhere to the Wahhabist ideology, are the al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, New York, and the King Fahd mosque in Los Angeles, California. Both mosques welcomed a number of the hijackers who piloted the planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on September 11th, 2001.
In 2005, Freedom House, a 501(c)(3) organization concerned with the mounting threats to peace and democracy, released a report titled, Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques. This examination of a comprehensive sampling of mosques and Islamic Centers across America shows that literature available in an overwhelming number of them indicates deference for the Wahhabist ideology.
THE STENCH OF TRAITORS!
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Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism . by DORE GOLD
In the global search for culprits and causes in the rise of terrorism, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold shines a spotlight on a nation many think of as a close ally of the United States: Saudi Arabia. As he explains in Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, Gold believes that the Saudi government is greatly influenced by the Islamist sect known as Wahhabism and, he explains, that influence has lead to Saudi support of terrorism in the Middle East, Europe, the United States and around the world.
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9-11 the SAUDI, not IRAQI terrorist!
George W. Bush and his extended squalid family had never known a Wall St. mow down crisis they didn’t scoop up another fortune. From Neil Bush’s crimes during the savings and loans debacle we’re still paying for, blueprint for the the freaking banksters have done to us this round.
Bush senior made a wad off WorldCom, as fucker Bush crawled deeper under the bedcovers with the filthy Saudis. Now Bush Saudis, Inc. operates ad CARLYLE GROUP, another global crime wave making the bucks off war and anything else their influence peddling can squandel a backroom deal!
It was Bush cabinet member, lawyer James Baker part of CARLYLE GROUP, that went to town to protect the SAUDIS from the American people that launched. Baker moved to protect the Bush family partners from the wraith of the American people and the Courts. Obama, also smelling Saudis money would make it impossible for Americans to pursue their Saudis partners.
Oh, it was GEORGE bush that permitted the bin Laden and Saudis lard buckets to fly out of the country when our airways were closed to EVERYONE ONE ELSE BUT AIR FORCE ONE AND THE SAUDIS TERRORIST!
The Bush mafia started two wars with Iraq to protect their filthy Saudis cronies! TWO WARS! Meanwhile the Saudis royal lard-buckets have pumped a vast fortune into the WAHHABI FASCIST ANTI-AMERICA TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS.
We all cringed at the sight of BARACK OBAMA over in Muslim land kneeling to kiss the hem of the royal Saudi LARDBUCKET! Guess he smells that good ol’ Saudi money for his presidential library???
Then we have Sen. Dianne Feinstein, an Obama and Clinton (she has doled our bribes to half of the Senate to keep investigations of her corruption at bay!) donor and the biggest war profiteer in American history! With her first check after Bush bought this old whore as an insurance policy against impeachment, Feinstein bought herself a $16 million dollar mansion only miles from her S.F. hotel where she hires “cheap” labor illegals! (Feinstein sent out letters that to her duped constituents that she would not vote for an impeachment, and that means two votes as Boxer (also a Feinstein-Blum bribes recipient) exist to siphon off “consultant fees” in the millions (where did you think her fortune came from? Her bullshit book sales and 22 city book tours???) (Feinstein Boxer both voted HELL NO to end the Dems fave source of legally accepting bribes!). Feinstein has accumulated more than $50 million in mansions scattered around the nation while in elected office by setting up highly lucrative deals she and Boxer have pushed in the Senate! Her deals with RED CHINA alone have raked in millions in bribes.
You saw Feinstein give half of Obama’s inaugural, with her pimp husband, RICHARD BLUM sitting behind Obama picking pockets for deals Feinstein and he could profiteer on!
Then we have HILLARY BILLARY, also two of the most corrupt in history. They raked in big bucks siphoned to the BILLARY BULLSHIT LIBRARY from all these freaking monster Muslim dictators! Don’t they all smell Saudis money? Hasn’t Hillary voted for war and hopped up and down for her Saudis paymasters like Obama and Bush who holds the lard-buckets’ hand as he acts like a Saudis monkey on a string!?!
EVERY ONE OF THESE FUCKERS HAS VOTED FOR ANYTHING THAT WOULD BENEFIT THE SAUDIS TERRORIST! WAR WITH IRAN IS SOMETHING THEY’VE BEEN ITCHING AT FOR YEARS BECAUSE THE IRANIANS ARE ENEMIES OF THEIR FILTHY SAUDIS PAYMASTERS!
MEANWHILE everyone one of these fuckers want OPEN BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX, AMNESTY, ENDLESS GRINGO-PAID DREAM ACTS, NO WALL, NO I.D. REQUIRED OF LA RAZA VOTERS, EXPANDED WELFARE FOR WALL ST AND LA RAZA, AND ANYTHING THAT WILL ULTIMATELY KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED FOR THEIR WALL ST. FRIENDS.
AFTER THE BANKSTERS BIGGEST LOOTING OF AMERICA SINCE BUSH AND THE SAVINGS AND LOAN RAPE OF THE 1980’s, OBAMA HAS AGAIN, FOR THE SECOND TIME, RAKED IN MORE CRIMINAL BANKSTER LOOTINGS THAN ANYONE IN HISTORY!
THERE ARE MORE AMERICAN TROOPS PROTECTING THE KOREAN BORDER THAN ON THE NARCOMEX BORDER!
WE CAN’T SAVE OUR COUNTRY UNTIL WE REMOVE THESE TRAITORS, SAUDIS FOOTSTOOLS, AND WAR PROFITEERS!
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Wsws.org
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US/Britain prepare for war against Iran
4 November 2011
Articles in the British-based Guardian and Telegraph newspapers on Wednesday have lifted the lid on military preparations by the US and Britain for an attack on Iran that go well beyond routine contingency planning.
The leaks pointing to a dangerous new military adventure take place amid a debate within the Israeli inner cabinet and media over whether to unilaterally launch air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.
Officials and ministers in all three countries have denied the reports, but have repeated the longstanding threat that “all options remain on the table”. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is due to release a new assessment of Iran’s nuclear programs, described to the Guardian by an unnamed Western official as “a game-changer”, that could well provide the pretext for war. Iran has consistently denied it has any plans to build nuclear weapons.
The Guardian reported: “The [British] Ministry of Defence believes the US may decide to fast-forward plans for targeted missile strikes at some key Iranian facilities. British officials say that if Washington presses ahead it will seek, and receive, UK military help for any mission, despite some deep reservations within the coalition government.” In anticipation, “British military planners are examining where best to deploy Royal Navy ships and submarines equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles over the coming months.”
An article in the Telegraph confirmed that Ministry of Defence (MoD) had signalled the need to act quickly based on claims that Iran was shifting key uranium enrichment technology to a facility near Qom buried deep underground. MoD planners told the newspaper there was a “shortening window of opportunity” as a result. “You have got to get there early enough—once they dig into the ground, it gets much more difficult,” one source declared.
Unnamed British sources told the Guardian that US President Obama did not want “to embark on a new and provocative military venture before next November’s presidential election. But they warned the calculations could change because of mounting anxiety over intelligence gathered by Western agencies.” One Whitehall official commented: “President Obama has a big decision to make in the coming months because he won’t want anything just before the election.”
Israel could prompt Obama to plunge into a new war by launching its own strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, or threatening to do so. Last Friday, prominent Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea, writing in Yediot Aharonot, reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barack were pressing the inner cabinet and security chiefs to agree to attack Iran. The claim provoked a furious response from inner cabinet member Benny Begin, who denounced the media debate as “utterly irresponsible” as it “severely impeded the government’s ability to make decisions” on the issue.
The Israeli government has already made advanced preparations for an attack on Iran. The Ha’aretz newspaper reported on Tuesday that the Israeli foreign ministry had begun a diplomatic campaign in mid-September stressing to allies that there was not much time left to end the Iranian nuclear program through diplomatic pressure and sanctions. On the military front, Israeli warplanes last week conducted a long-range exercise—of the type required to reach Iran—using a NATO airbase on the Italian island of Sardinia. On Wednesday, Israel test-fired a long-range ballistic missile that also has the potential to strike Iran.
Those who claim that Israel and its American and European backers would not risk an attack on Iran and potentially calamitous consequences ignore the fact that their intelligence agencies have already been engaged in activities that are tantamount to acts of war. It is widely acknowledged that Israel, with the likely assistance of the US, was behind the cyber war operation using the Stuxnet computer virus to sabotage Iran’s enrichment facilities, as well as the assassination of several Iranian nuclear scientists over the past year.
More fundamentally, the preparations for war against Iran are no more being driven by concerns over its nuclear program than the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were motivated by “terrorism” or “weapons of mass destruction”, or the NATO bombing of Libya was to protect the Libyan people. The US has recklessly plunged into one war after another over the past decade in a desperate bid to offset its economic decline by securing its hegemony over the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia.
The neo-colonial invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have both turned into disasters, which, as American commentators have repeatedly noted, have only enhanced the standing of Iran in the region by removing two hostile regimes. Having failed to secure a status of forces agreement with Baghdad, the US position will be further weakened when it removes its remaining troops from Iraq by the end of the year. The prospects are no better in Afghanistan as the US and its allies prepare to wind back combat forces by 2014.
Far from acting as a restraint, the worsening global economic crisis is impelling US imperialism to use its military might to shore up its economic and strategic interests at the expense of its main European and Asian rivals. That is the twisted logic behind targeting Tehran, which is regarded in Washington as a major obstacle to US ambitions in the Middle East and the main reason for its failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, as in the case of Libya, a US-led war on Tehran would seriously undermine the substantial economic interests of China and Russia in Iran, as well as their efforts to forge closer strategic ties.
The Obama administration is also being driven by the deepening economic crisis and rising class tensions at home that have been exposed by the eruption of the anti-Wall Street protest movement. Despite the widespread popular opposition to militarism and war that has developed over the past decade, the American financial aristocracy is quite willing to take another irresponsible gamble to shore up its interests in the Middle East and as a means of diverting attention from the social devastation produced by its austerity agenda.
The latest reports in the British press constitute the sharpest warning to the American and international working class. As global capitalism lurches from one economic and political crisis to the next, rivalry between the major powers for markets, resources and strategic advantage is plunging humanity towards a catastrophic conflict that would devastate the planet. The only social force capable of ending the danger of world war is the international working class through a unified struggle to abolish the profit system and establish a world-planned socialist economy. That is the perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections in every country.
Peter Symonds
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Saudi Arabia backs US campaign against Iran
By Sahand Avedis
21 June 2010
Last week, the Sunday Times of London revealed that Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to let Israeli jets pass through its airspace for a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The Times quoted a US defence source: “They have already done tests to make sure their own jets aren’t scrambled and no one gets shot down. This has all been done with the agreement of the [US] State Department.”
The Times report continued, “The four main targets for any raid on Iran would be the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom, the gas storage development at Isfahan and the heavy-water reactor at Arak. Secondary targets include the lightwater reactor at Bushehr, which could produce weapons-grade plutonium when complete.”
These reports come after years of sanctions and war threats by Israel and the US against Iran, citing Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme.
The significance of the Saudi plans lies in the fact that the targets are more than 2,000 km away from Israel. Even with aerial refueling, a successful raid would be a difficult operation for the Israeli military, which historically evolved to attack its neighbors, such as Egypt and Syria. It lacks the capability for long-distance operations, particularly against a widely spread set of targets in a country the size of Iran. The Times noted, “An open corridor across northern Saudi Arabia would significantly shorten the distance” to be traveled by Israeli fighter planes.
Given the Times’s reputation as an outlet for leaks from Israeli military intelligence, this revelation prompted extensive comment in the Middle East. Saudi officials denied the report, claiming that they would not allow Saudi territory to be used for attacks on a neighbouring country.
Such denials are at best unconvincing, given that Saudi Arabia has a long history of backing Washington’s operations in the Middle East—most notably, serving as a base for US forces in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.
Recent months have seen increasing tensions between Riyadh and Tehran. Arab regimes are pressing the US to adopt a tougher stance with respect to Iran’s nuclear programme. In a meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Riyadh in February, Saudi Foreign Minister Al-Faisal stated that the Iranian nuclear threat demands “a more immediate solution” than sanctions.
In March, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates helped the US to defuse Chinese opposition to UN sanctions against Iran, by reassuring Beijing that they would increase their oil exports to China, if sanctions against Iran cut the amount of oil China could import from Iran.
In addition to fears of the regional geopolitical implications of Iran’s nuclear programme, the Saudi monarchy is concerned about the internal implications of tensions between the Shiite-populist Iranian regime and the Sunni Saudi monarchy. As a result, it has supported the US and European campaign against Iran.
These concerns were highlighted by the recent war between Shiite Houthi rebels and the US-allied Yemeni government of Ali Abdullah Saleh in northern Yemen, near the border with Saudi Arabia. The Saudi regime worried about the impact of the Houthi uprising on its own southern Shiite population. In November 2009, the Royal Saudi Land Forces entered into Yemen, with the support of joint Saudi-US air raids on rebel strongholds. The conflict resulted in 133 Saudi casualties, with close to 500 soldiers captured or wounded.
US-allied Arab states accused Tehran of backing the Shiite rebels in Yemen and supported the Saudis. In response, Tehran accused Saudi Arabia of waging an unequal war against the Shiite population of Yemen, on orders from Washington.
The longstanding sectarian tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in Saudi Arabia have vast strategic implications for the Saudi regime and the world economy.
Although there is a large population of Shiites on the Yemeni border, Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority is concentrated in the “Eastern Province,” across the Persian Gulf from Iran. This province contains most of Saudi Arabia’s oil resources. Shiite opposition thus potentially threatens to disrupt Saudi Arabia’s crucial oil production. Saudi Shiites are socially oppressed, facing restrictions on their religious practices and, since the 1980s, on their employment in the oil industry.
These tensions are bound up with the lasting consequences of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. From 1968, the year that Britain announced its withdrawal from the Persian Gulf, until the revolution, the Iranian monarchy regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi maintained friendly relations with the Saudi kingdom.
The Saudi regime saw the massive oil strikes that led to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the Shiite populist regime that emerged from it, as a deadly threat, however. The Saudi regime feared that opposition to monarchy and US imperialism could spread to its own population, particularly as Tehran appealed to the marginalised Arab Shiite populations against US-allied Arab monarchies. Despite their hostility to the nationalism of the Iraqi Baath party, the Gulf monarchies backed Saddam Hussein in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, in which they saw Iran as a far more serious threat.
Saudi-Iranian tensions rose dramatically during the “war on terror,” as the US invaded or toppled regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon—intensifying competition between the Iranian and Saudi governments for influence in the Middle East.
The coming to power of Shiite parties in US-occupied Iraq after 2008—notably the rise of a Shiite anti-occupation movement in Iraq around Moqtada al-Sadr—was a source of deep concern for the Saudi regime. It has been widely suggested that Saudi intelligence was behind numerous bombings in Iraqi Shiite areas that helped push Iraq into sectarian civil war.
The 2005 election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led to a more assertive Iranian foreign policy, including stronger support for the Shiite-based Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia and the US, however, backed a Lebanese government led by Sunni politicians Fuad Siniora and then Saad Hariri after the 2005 US-backed “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon.
Iranian reformists around Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami have constantly attacked Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy. Mohammad Abtahi, one of the key organisers of the 2009 Green Movement protests against Ahmadinejad’s re-election, said in 2006: “[A]t a time when all the Arab and Islamic states are at their lowest level of diplomatic relation with Iran, Ahmadinejad’s visit to left-wing Latin American countries to resurrect the Socialist-Communist axis would entail a huge cost for the Iranian Muslim nation.”
As part of the broader US strategy against the Ahmadinejad government in Tehran, media in US-allied Arab countries are waging a press campaign together with elements of the Green movement.
According to Iraqi news network “Nahrain Net”, Saudi intelligence last month instructed Saudi-financed media throughout the Gulf to launch a campaign against Ahmadinejad and promote the Green opposition on the anniversary of the Iranian presidential election. The goal of the Saudis, according to the Nahrain Net’s report, was to “demonstrate that there is a real crisis in Iran,” and that “the events in the last 12 months have boosted the reformists vis-Ã -vis Ahmadinejad.”
European sources that leaked the news also claimed that the “Iran Section” of Saudi intelligence has been trained in the US and Britain and familiarised with the views of various sections of the Iranian opposition.
One such media is Al-Arabiya news television station, which rivals Qatar’s Al-Jazeera and Iranian-owned Alalam in the Arab world. Al-Arabiya launched a Persian website before the June 2009 election and has dedicated the website to the views of mostly London-based Green opposition leaders such as Ataollah Mohajerani.
Mohajerani also frequently appears in BBC Persian TV, as a spokesman for the Green opposition. Alireza Nourizadeh, the director of the Centre for Arab & Iranian Studies in London and a Western intelligence asset who promotes the Green movement, is also a frequent source in al-Arabiya TV channel discussions on Iran.
Alleged connections between the Green movement and the Gulf regimes was the subject of intense debate in the 2009 Iranian presidential election. In his debate with reformist candidate Mirhossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad accused Rafsanjani of colluding with a Gulf country in 2005, shortly after Rafsanjani’s defeat in the presidential election, to subvert his government: “Mr. Hashemi sent a message to one of the kings in a neighbouring country that he would overthrow the new government in six months.”
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Freedom House
http://www.freedomhouse.org
Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques
http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/special_report/45.pdf
Basics Project: Terrorism – Ideology
http://www.basicsproject.org/terrorism/ideology.htm#Wahhabism
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Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism . by DORE GOLD
In the global search for culprits and causes in the rise of terrorism, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold shines a spotlight on a nation many think of as a close ally of the United States: Saudi Arabia. As he explains in Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, Gold believes that the Saudi government is greatly influenced by the Islamist sect known as Wahhabism and, he explains, that influence has lead to Saudi support of terrorism in the Middle East, Europe, the United States and around the world.
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Is Saudi Arabia Waging Resource Aggression Against the American People and the World Economy?!
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Posted November 8, 2007
Imagine waking up to the following nightmare headline "Canada Interdicts the Head Waters of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and All Water Flows From Its Territory Into the Great Lakes." One's reaction would not be passive nor that of our government to such a blatant act of resource aggression. And if you permit a glib interjection, any argumentation that , "well its water on their side of the border" would hold no water whatsoever. The deterioration of relations between the United States and Canada would be immediate, grave, and threatening.
Yet in degree, this is the current status of our resource relationship with the Saudis. Consider the following. On March 5, 2007 in a first page article "Oil Innovations Pump New Life Into Old Wells", the New York Times reported that Nansen G. Saleri, the head of reservoir management at the state owned Saudi Aramco reported that Saudi Arabia's total reserves were almost three times higher than the kingdom's officially published figure of 260 billion barrels. He estimated the kingdom's resources at 716 billion barrels. Mr. Saleri continued that he wouldn't be surprised if ultimate reserves of Saudi Arabia reached a trillion, (1,000,000,000,000) barrels!
This amazing revelation coming from the reservoir manager of Aramco underlines the degree to which the Saudis have perverted the current world oil market. The Saudis are the putative leaders of OPEC and their capabilities and objectives determine OPEC's policy goals. It is clear as the International Energy Agency phrased it in their recent report, "The greater the increase in the call of oil and gas...the more likely it will be that they will seek a higher rent from their exports and to impose higher prices ... by deferring investment and constraining production."
Saudi Arabia, given its enormous reserves, could readily produce significant additional quantities of oil in order to abate the steep run up of oil prices. At these price levels the fact they and OPEC are maintaining the major portion of their production cuts made at the beginning of this year (OPEC's production cut of 1.7 million barrels/day altered by a production increase of only 500,000 barrels/day starting this month) is smoking gun evidence of their extortionist intent. By holding oil off the market, oil which they clearly have in ample supply, they are gouging the world's economies, pricing their product at levels that have no market rationale whatsoever. They are preying on the world's need for oil. It is an act of resource aggression against the world's consumers much as Canada's hypothetical interference with the headwaters of our major river ways would be an act of aggression against the United States.
Please note in my title I referred to waging resource aggression against the American people. The government was not mentioned because in this imbroglio our administration is in effect Saudi Arabia's, as well as OPEC's and the oil patch's greatest ally. In the near seven years of its Presidency, virtually nothing has been done to constrain Saudi Arabia's policies. On the contrary our President and Vice President are so wedded to the oil industry's interests that the enormous increase in oil prices during their tenure can well be ascribed to willful lack of any forceful policies to counter the Saudi extortion. This has manifested itself in many ways.
Let me just cite a few:
In the near seven years of the Bush presidency, virtually no serious steps have been taken to significantly abate demand for fossil fuels;
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The Specter of Muslim Disloyalty in America
Posted By Raymond Ibrahim On September 13, 2010 @ 12:03 am In Homeland Security, Politics, Religion, US News | 61 Comments
Islamist enmity for infidels, regularly manifested in the jihad, is by now moderately well known. Lesser known, however, but of equal concern, is the mandate for Muslims to be loyal to fellow Muslims and Islam — a loyalty that all too often translates into disloyalty to all things non-Muslim, including the American people and their government.
This dichotomy of loyalty to Muslims and enmity for infidels — which, incidentally, corresponds well with Islamic law’s division of the world into the abode of war (deserving of enmity) and the abode of Islam (deserving of loyalty) — is founded on a Muslim doctrine called wala’ wa bara’ (best translated as “loyalty and enmity”). I first encountered this doctrine while translating [1] various Arabic documents for The Al Qaeda Reader [2]. In fact, the longest and arguably most revealing document I included in that volume is titled “Loyalty and Enmity” (pgs.63-115), compiled by Aymen Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two.
The nations Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been used to underpin escalating prices by continuing purchases even as prices exploded, thereby signaling the governments acceptance and approval of these price levels, and worse by declaring the doubling of the Reserve just as crude oil prices were retreating to $50/bbl earlier this year.
Neither through "friendly persuasion" nor as a Dutch Uncle, making Saudi Arabia understand its price and production policies are intolerable. This even though we are in essence the guarantors of last resort of Saudi Arabia's independence as evidenced by the some $100 million dollars a day being expended from this nation's treasury on our naval flotilla stationed off the Saudi Coast in the Arabian Gulf thereby serving as a bulwark against Shia Iran that without our presence would have designs and capabilities against Sunni Saudi Arabia;
By the fawning obsequiousness our high government officials have shown toward Saudi officialdom, (see "The Price of Oil, OPEC and Our Laws and Now Welcome to Vichy" 5.4.06) or be it Price Bandar's open access to the Oval Office while he was Ambassador in Washington and thereafter.
Or as exemplified by the symbolic holding of then Price Abdullah's hand at the Crawford Ranch meeting (see "Cheney in Saudi Land, Don't Hold Abdullah's Hand" 01.16.06; and "President Bush's Most Respectful Letter to King Abdullah on Energy Cooperation" 06.22.06 ) whose coziness resulted in an almost immediate upward ratcheting of oil prices.
The administration's oil industry buddies are ecstatic at the windfall the entire oil sector has reaped by the quadrupling of oil prices to levels undreamed of before the advent of this Presidency, while many of the nations citizens are having their household budgets ripped to shreds in order to meet their home heating bills this coming winter. Rarely if ever in the history of the Republic has there been such a divergence between the nation's interests and those of the vested interests that formed this administration.
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INTERESTING.... given the SAUDIS 9-11 INVADERS of AMERICA are the biggest financiers of global Islamic terrorism!
Now if we could only get BUSH CRIME FAMILY, BUSH-SAUDI-CARLYLE GROUP, HILLARY-BILLARY LIBRARY and BARACK OBAMA to stop pandering to the royal saudis lardbucket wahhabist!
Understanding the Wahhabist Infiltration of America
Frank Salvato
Part of the reason many Americans don’t appreciate the significance of Osama bin Laden’s declarations of war against the United States and the West is because they are completely oblivious to the in roads radical Islam has made within the United States. Radical Islamists (i.e., Islamofascists, Wahhabis) understand that the conflict must take place on multiple fronts: militarily, economically, diplomatically and ideologically. Because they understand the complexity of the confrontation and the ability of the West to adapt to challenges – albeit lethargically – they employ multiple tactics in their aggressive pursuit of victory. The West’s addiction to sensationalism, epitomized by our limited attention to detail, unless it plays in the superficial 24 hour news cycle, facilitates the successful infiltration of radical ideology into Western society.
Much to the chagrin of the multicultural and the proponents of diversity, those who promote radical Islamist ideology thrive on the fact that the politically correct culture of the West – and the United States in particular – deems it inappropriate to question religious practices or teachings. With this politically correct “wall of separation” in place little if any scrutiny is given to the information disseminated within any given religious institution. This directly facilitates the ideological advancement of Wahhabism, the most radical and puritanical form of Islam, within the mosques of the United States.
To accurately understand the depth of infiltration of the Wahhabist ideology on American soil we need to examine the ideology and how it is advanced within the United States.
Wahhabism is a fiercely fundamentalist form of orthodox Sunni Islam. After a brief examination of its tenets it is clear that it is one of division, domination and hate.
Wahhabism originated circa 1703 and is the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabists believe that any and all evolution of the Islamic faith after the 3rd century of the Muslim era – after 950 A.D. – was specious and must be expunged. Consequently, Wahhabism is the form of Islam that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahri practice.
This radically fundamentalist dogma is fanatically bigoted, xenophobic and lends itself to serve as the catalyst for much of the Islamofascist aggression being perpetrated around the world. It is a wrathful doctrine that rejects the legitimacy of all religious philosophy but its own. Wahhabism condemns Christians, Jews and all other non Muslims, as well as non Wahhabi Muslims. Wahhabists believe it is a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews.
It stresses a worldview in which there exist two opposing realms that can never be reconciled Dar al Islam, or House of Islam, and Dar al Har, or House of War, also referred to as Dar al Kufr, House of the Infidel. When Muslims are in the Dar al Har, they must behave as if they were operatives in a conflict who have been tasked with going behind enemy lines. The Wahhabist ideology permits Muslims to exist “behind enemy lines” for only a few reasons: to acquire knowledge, to make money to be later employed in the jihad against the infidels, or to proselytize the infidels in an effort to convert them to Islam.
Wahhabist doctrine specifically warns Muslims not to imitate, befriend or help “infidels” in any way. It instills hatred for United States because we are ruled by legislated constitutional law rather than by tyrannical Sharia law. Wahhabists are instructed by edict to, above all, work for the creation of an Islamic state where ever they may dwell.
It is because of the Wahhabist ideology’s cruel and unyielding fanaticism that we in the United States should be concerned with its prevalence within the mosques of our nation.
After the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 – an unprecedented action by the fundamentalists of the sect, the Saudi Arabian government responded by coming to terms with the fundamentalist Wahhabist movement of the Sunni sect. The Saudis, in return for a declaration of non aggression, began to finance the construction of mosques in countries around the world. An estimated $45 billion has been spent by the Saudis to finance the building and operational costs of mosques and Islamic schools in foreign countries, including in North America.
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Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism (Paperback)
by DORE GOLD
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In the global search for culprits and causes in the rise of terrorism, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold shines a spotlight on a nation many think of as a close ally of the United States: Saudi Arabia. As he explains in Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, Gold believes that the Saudi government is greatly influenced by the Islamist sect known as Wahhabism and, he explains, that influence has lead to Saudi support of terrorism in the Middle East, Europe, the United States and around the world. The historical portion of Gold’s argument, where he traces the emergence of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the changing face of Saudi leadership, is admirably extensive and detailed. His modern research is a little more uneven, relying on statements by various Muslim clergy members, letters to the editors of newspapers, opinion pieces, and other evidence that is rarely damnable. Curiously, mentions of Israel and the long-standing Arab-Israeli conflict are much more infrequent than one would expect from an Israeli diplomat and scholar. But regardless of one’s opinion of Gold’s research or his alarming conclusions, the book offers something not often found in modern political nonfiction: a coherent structure, exhaustive research, and a clear and consistent perspective on the ongoing threat of terrorism. --John Moe --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Saudi Friends and Foes
By Frank Gaffney
11/3/2010
It seems that, thanks to Saudi Arabia, the latest effort to kill Americans with sophisticated bombs failed. Thanks to Saudi Arabia, we are certain to be subjected to more such attacks in the future.
The preceding paragraph captures the double game we confront from a kingdom that, on the one hand, is routinely characterized by American officials as a reliable U.S. ally in the volatile Middle East, a crucial source of oil and a trustworthy recipient of sophisticated weaponry. On the other hand, it is also the wellspring of shariah, the supremacist totalitarian doctrine that is the law of the land in Saudi Arabia and that animates and enables jihadists worldwide – thanks to immense support from Saudi royals, government agencies, businessmen, clerics and “charities.”
In a report Sunday on the intercepted Hewlett Packard printers whose ink cartridges were transformed into potent bombs and dispatched from Yemen, the New York Times declared that Saudi Arabia in recent years had been forced to “wake up to a reality it had long refused to acknowledge. The puritanical strain of Islam fostered by the state, sometimes called Wahhabism, was breeding extremists who were willing to kill even Muslims for their cause.” Now, the paper concluded, “Saudi Arabia’s problem…has become the world’s problem.”
The truth is that the Saudis’ problem has been the world’s problem for some time now. It is a problem that becomes more intractable, not less, as our government and others refuse even to come to recognize, let alone come to grips with, the Kingdom’s double game whose malevolent elements are directly fueled by what the authorities of Islam – especially those who operate in the kingdom – call shariah, rather than Wahhabism.
How has Washington chosen to respond instead? By and large, it has seen what it wants to see in the House of Saud and averted its gaze from what it does not want to see. Accordingly, the Saudis’ episodic help with countering terrorism is lauded, while their vast material and ideological contribution to its spread is largely overlooked. Their contribution to instability in the Middle East is discounted and their “peace plan” for ending the Israel-Palestinian conflict on terms that would assuredly endanger the Jewish State is enthusiastically embraced.
Similarly, the Saudis are never held accountable for their role as prime-movers behind the “stealth jihad” – the effort to insinuate shariah into nations like ours through the text books, mosques, Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, media ownership and other influence operations they underwrite. This dangerous practice is often lubricated by the Saudis’ generous financial and other relationships with former senior U.S. government officials and prominent businesses, who can be counted upon to discourage probing questions or more prudential policies here.
At the moment, this “see-no-evil” approach is manifested by President Obama’s proposed sale of $60-plus billion worth of advanced American arms to Saudi Arabia. Unless Congress objects in the next few weeks, large quantities of sophisticated fighter planes, helicopters, missile systems and bombs will be transferred to the Saudis over the next decade.
Such weapons are, of course, unlikely to do much to help the Saudis with what the New York Times euphemistically calls their “problem” with “extremists” and “militants.” The latter are, after all, simply acting upon the Saudis’ own politico-military-legal code, shariah.
These arms may or may not assure the Kingdom will provide down the road the sort of help its intelligence services reportedly gave us in recent days in countering “their problem” as it continues to metastasize around the world. Even less certain is whether this massive infusion of U.S. military equipment will have any appreciable impact in contending with the Saudis’ other problem – and ours: a nuclear-armed and ever-more-aggressive Iran.
What does seem predictable, however, is that at some point these arms will wind up in the hands of people who are not even our fair-weather friends. Candidates would include those among the 5,000 Saudi princes who take seriously their duty under shariah to wage holy war against infidels like us. Then, there are the followers of Osama bin Laden – some of whom are actually affiliated with al Qaeda, others of whom simply emulate him – who seek to supplant the Saudi royals and would love to have access to the Kingdom’s arsenal and oil wealth to pursue their jihadist ambitions against Israel and the United States.
Another possibility is that a nuclear-armed Iran may become so dominant a force in the Persian Gulf that it manages – one way or another, perhaps by direct force of arms or perhaps by collusion with the Shiites who populate the Saudis’ most oil-rich region – to acquire this array of formidable American-supplied weaponry. While the dangers associated with such an eventuality may be mitigated somewhate by the need to have U.S. contractors maintain and support such weapons, they cannot be denied.
The United States simply can no longer afford to look the other way on Saudi double-dealing. The time to establish whose side they really are on – and are likely to be on in the years to come – is before we arm them to the teeth with weapons that could come back to bite us.
Frank Gaffney
Frank Gaffney Jr. is the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy and author of War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World .
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US Supreme Court declines to hear case of 9/11 families
By Joe Kishore
30 June 2009
The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case brought by families of 9/11 victims against Saudi Arabia, four members of the Saudi royal family, a Saudi bank and a charity. The action lets stand a lower court ruling that the Saudi members cannot be held liable in US courts.
The Obama administration supported the Saudi monarchs, who were accused of financially supporting several of the individuals involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The administration last month intervened to ask the high court to reject the appeal.
The family members claim that Saudi princes contributed to charities that funded Al Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers.
In August 2008, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld a 2006 district court ruling that the Saudi officials and entities were protected under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. The families argued that lower courts had made conflicting rulings on the scope of sovereign immunity, and that the Supreme Court should therefore intervene.
The Justice Department has sought furiously to prevent the release of documents assembled by lawyers for the families, which, according to a New York Times report, “provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family.” The government has had copies of the documents destroyed and has sought to prevent judges from even looking at them.
The US government has worked systematically to conceal from the American people evidence of Saudi support for at least two of the hijackers, part of a broader cover-up of the many unanswered questions that still surround the 9/11 attacks.
The documents gathered by the 9/11 families—including a classified section of the 2003 joint congressional inquiry into the attacks—likely include material on Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, two Saudi nationals who were aboard the planes that crashed on 9/11. They were known by US intelligence to be members of Al Qaeda at least since 1999.
Despite their previous association, the two men were allowed into the US, where they found accommodations with the help of a Saudi intelligence agent (Omar al-Bayoumi) and, later, an FBI asset (Abdussattar Shaikh). Al-Bayoumi received financing from Princess Haifa, the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar.
The suit filed by the families focuses solely on the role of Saudi Arabia. However, the more fundamental question is the role of sections of the American state. The Saudi royal family has had long and intimate ties with American intelligence, and the broader exposure of Saudi links to the attacks threatens to unravel the entire official story of the September 11 attacks.
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Obama administration seeks to quash suit by 9/11 families
By Barry Grey
26 June 2009
The Obama administration has intervened to quash a civil suit filed against Saudi Arabia by survivors and family members of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The suit seeks to hold the Saudi royal family liable, charging that it provided financial and other support to Al Qaeda and was thereby complicit in the hijack bombings that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and Washington DC.
According to an article by Eric Lichtblau in the June 24 New York Times, documents assembled by lawyers for the 9/11 families “provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family.” However, the article states, the documents may never find their way into court because of legal challenges by Saudi Arabia, which are being supported by the US Justice Department.
The administration is taking extraordinary measures to kill the suit and suppress the evidence of Saudi support for Al Qaeda and complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Last month, the Justice Department sided in court with the Saudi monarchy in seeking to halt further legal action. Moreover, it had copies of American intelligence documents on Saudi finances that had been leaked to lawyers for the families destroyed, and is now seeking to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.
Two federal judges and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already ruled against the 7,630 people represented in the lawsuit, rejecting the suit on the grounds that the plaintiffs cannot sue in the US against a sovereign nation and its leaders. The Supreme Court is expected to rule this month on whether to hear an appeal, but the families’ prospects have been weakened by the intervention of the Obama administration, which has called on the court not to hear the plaintiffs’ appeal.
The Times reports that it obtained the new documents from the families’ lawyers, adding that they are among “several hundred thousand pages of investigative material” assembled by the 9/11 families in their long-running suit against the Saudi royal family.
Lichtblau writes that the documents “provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the events of September 11, 2001.” However, there is a wealth of evidence in the public record strongly pointing to such a connection. And there is the 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint congressional inquiry into 9/11 that deals with the Saudi role in the attacks. Lichtblau writes that “the secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers.”
Then-President George W. Bush ordered that section of the congressional report to be classified, and its contents were blacked out in the findings released to the public by Congress. The Obama administration is continuing this policy of shielding the Saudi monarchy.
Lichtblau reports that the material obtained by the Times from the families’ lawyers includes “thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents” that provide “an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence.” He cites as one example “internal Treasury Department documents” that show that the International Islamic Relief Organization, a “Saudi charity,” heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, “provided ‘support for terrorist organizations’ at least through 2006.”
He gives other examples of evidence of Saudi support for Islamist terrorists in Bosnia in the 1990s and witness statements and intelligence reports of money being given by Saudi princes to the Taliban and to “militants’ activities” in Pakistan and Bosnia during the same decade.
What are the motives behind the Obama administration’s efforts to cover up the connections between the Saudi monarchy and Al Qaeda?
The Justice Department, according to the Times, cites “potentially significant foreign relations consequences” should the 9/11 families’ suit be allowed to go to trial. This is undoubtedly a factor. The US has an immense political and economic interest in protecting the Saudi dictatorship, which is a major American ally in the Middle East, a supporter of Washington’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the world’s biggest producer of oil.
But there is a more immediate and compelling reason for suppressing any exposure of the Saudi connection to Al Qaeda and 9/11. The revelations would undoubtedly shatter the official explanations of the September 11 attacks and point to complicity on the part of US intelligence and security agencies.
Given its longstanding and intimate ties to the Saudi royal family and Saudi intelligence, it is not possible to believe that the CIA would have been unaware of Saudi support for Al Qaeda and at least some of the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals, as they were preparing to carry out the attacks on New York and Washington.
The ties between the Saudi and US intelligence establishments were strengthened during the US-backed war against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan, beginning in 1979 and continuing through the 1980s. The US poured billions of dollars in arms and financing into this war, most of it funneled through the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency.
The Saudi regime also helped fund the anti-Soviet guerrillas, many of whom were brought to Afghanistan by Islamist forces in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden served as the Saudi regime’s personal emissary in this cause, helping to organize, train and equip Arab volunteers for the Afghan war. The movement now known as Al Qaeda was spawned through the interaction of these three intelligence agencies—the CIA, the ISI and the Saudis.
The bipartisan 9/11 commission, in its July 2004 report, echoed the Bush administration’s whitewash of Saudi ties to the terrorist attacks, declaring that it found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded” Al Qaeda.
However, in a book published later that year, Intelligence Matters, then-Florida Senator Bob Graham charged the Bush administration with orchestrating a cover-up of Saudi involvement in the September 11 attacks. Graham was at the time the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which had carried out, along with its House counterpart, the joint congressional investigation into 9/11.
He wrote that “evidence of official Saudi supportî for at least some of the hijackers was ìincontrovertible.” Graham’s charges focused on the extraordinary cases of Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who were identified as hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.
The two men, both Saudi nationals, are undoubtedly the “two hijackers” to whom Times reporter Lichtblau refers in connection with the secret section of the joint congressional report on 9/11.
Both were known to US intelligence as Al Qaeda operatives at least since 1999. Malaysian agents, acting in concert with the CIA, photographed and videotaped them and others during a 2000 meeting of Islamist terrorist groups in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Nevertheless, after the meeting, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were allowed to fly to the US using their own passports and visas issued by US consular authorities in Saudi Arabia. While the CIA knew of their presence in the US, it did not inform the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the FBI. (The CIA disputes this claim, insisting that it did alert the FBI). Nor did the CIA inform immigration authorities.
After landing in Los Angeles in January of 2000, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were met by Omar al-Bayoumi, an employee of the Saudi civil aviation authority. US investigators have concluded that al-Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence agent.
Al-Bayoumi invited the pair to move to San Diego, where he found them an apartment, provided them with money and helped enroll them in flight school.
It has been reported that al-Bayoumi served as a conduit for thousands of dollars in funding for the future hijackers sent by Princess Haifa, the wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the US and a close confidante of the Bush family.
Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar lived openly in the US, one of them even having his name listed in the telephone directory.
Within months, al-Hazmi moved into the home of Abdussattar Shaikh, a retired professor at San Diego State University. Shaikh was on the FBI payroll, charged with monitoring the activities of Islamist groups in the San Diego region.
In his book, Graham wrote that the FBI concealed from the joint congressional committee the fact that its paid informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, had established a close personal relationship with the two hijackers.
When the committee staff discovered Shaikh’s role and the committee issued a subpoena to question him under oath, the FBI and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to serve the subpoena. Graham said that a senior FBI official wrote to him and the Republican co-chair of the joint committee declaring that the administration would neither allow the FBI to serve a subpoena on Shaikh nor allow the committee staff to interview him.
Graham wrote that this was the only time he had ever heard of the FBI refusing to serve a congressional subpoena. He commented, “We were seeing in writing what we had suspected for some time: the White House was directing a cover-up.”
Bush’s extraordinary intervention to block questioning of FBI informant Shaikh was consistent with his administration’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, when it allowed chartered planes to ferry some 140 prominent Saudis—including at least a dozen of Osama bin Laden’s relatives—to Boston for evacuation to Saudi Arabia. The pick-up flights were organized at a time when all non-military and non-emergency aviation had been grounded by government order. Bin Laden’s relatives were allowed to leave the country with little or no questioning by the FBI.
In his book, Graham himself posed the question of why the congressional committee was denied access to the San Diego FBI informant. After offering several possible answers, he suggested in deliberately obscure language a “far more damning possibility”—“perhaps the informant did know something about the plot that would be even more damaging were it revealed, and that this is what the FBI is trying to conceal.”
Graham did not spell out what “damning” information about the 9/11 conspiracy the informant might have revealed. But the role of the CIA, the FBI and the Bush administration in the case of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar suggests that it went beyond involvement by the Saudi government. It strongly suggests he was blocked from being questioned out of concern that he would reveal that elements within the US state apparatus knew of plans for an impending hijacking and allowed them to go forward.
Eight years after the attacks, no one has been held accountable for what on its face is the greatest failure of national security in US history. The question is: Was it a failure, or was a decision taken to permit a terrorist attack on US soil in order to provide the pretext for implementing plans for wars abroad and repressive policies at home that had been drawn up well in advance of September 11, 2001?
That a new administration is continuing the policy of shielding the Saudi monarchy and suppressing evidence of its complicity in 9/11 points strongly to the latter explanation.
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Is Saudi Arabia Waging Resource Aggression Against the American People and the World Economy?!
Posted November 8, 2007
Imagine waking up to the following nightmare headline "Canada Interdicts the Head Waters of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and All Water Flows From Its Territory Into the Great Lakes." One's reaction would not be passive nor that of our government to such a blatant act of resource aggression. And if you permit a glib interjection, any argumentation that , "well its water on their side of the border" would hold no water whatsoever. The deterioration of relations between the United States and Canada would be immediate, grave, and threatening.
Yet in degree, this is the current status of our resource relationship with the Saudis. Consider the following. On March 5, 2007 in a first page article "Oil Innovations Pump New Life Into Old Wells", the New York Times reported that Nansen G. Saleri, the head of reservoir management at the state owned Saudi Aramco reported that Saudi Arabia's total reserves were almost three times higher than the kingdom's officially published figure of 260 billion barrels. He estimated the kingdom's resources at 716 billion barrels. Mr. Saleri continued that he wouldn't be surprised if ultimate reserves of Saudi Arabia reached a trillion, (1,000,000,000,000) barrels!
This amazing revelation coming from the reservoir manager of Aramco underlines the degree to which the Saudis have perverted the current world oil market. The Saudis are the putative leaders of OPEC and their capabilities and objectives determine OPEC's policy goals. It is clear as the International Energy Agency phrased it in their recent report, "The greater the increase in the call of oil and gas...the more likely it will be that they will seek a higher rent from their exports and to impose higher prices ... by deferring investment and constraining production."
Saudi Arabia, given its enormous reserves, could readily produce significant additional quantities of oil in order to abate the steep run up of oil prices. At these price levels the fact they and OPEC are maintaining the major portion of their production cuts made at the beginning of this year (OPEC's production cut of 1.7 million barrels/day altered by a production increase of only 500,000 barrels/day starting this month) is smoking gun evidence of their extortionist intent. By holding oil off the market, oil which they clearly have in ample supply, they are gouging the world's economies, pricing their product at levels that have no market rationale whatsoever. They are preying on the world's need for oil. It is an act of resource aggression against the world's consumers much as Canada's hypothetical interference with the headwaters of our major river ways would be an act of aggression against the United States.
Please note in my title I referred to waging resource aggression against the American people. The government was not mentioned because in this imbroglio our administration is in effect Saudi Arabia's, as well as OPEC's and the oil patch's greatest ally. In the near seven years of its Presidency, virtually nothing has been done to constrain Saudi Arabia's policies. On the contrary our President and Vice President are so wedded to the oil industry's interests that the enormous increase in oil prices during their tenure can well be ascribed to willful lack of any forceful policies to counter the Saudi extortion. This has manifested itself in many ways.
Let me just cite a few:
In the near seven years of the Bush presidency, virtually no serious steps have been taken to significantly abate demand for fossil fuels;
The nations Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been used to underpin escalating prices by continuing purchases even as prices exploded, thereby signaling the governments acceptance and approval of these price levels, and worse by declaring the doubling of the Reserve just as crude oil prices were retreating to $50/bbl earlier this year.
Neither through "friendly persuasion" nor as a Dutch Uncle, making Saudi Arabia understand its price and production policies are intolerable. This even though we are in essence the guarantors of last resort of Saudi Arabia's independence as evidenced by the some $100 million dollars a day being expended from this nation's treasury on our naval flotilla stationed off the Saudi Coast in the Arabian Gulf thereby serving as a bulwark against Shia Iran that without our presence would have designs and capabilities against Sunni Saudi Arabia;
By the fawning obsequiousness our high government officials have shown toward Saudi officialdom, (see "The Price of Oil, OPEC and Our Laws and Now Welcome to Vichy" 5.4.06) or be it Price Bandar's open access to the Oval Office while he was Ambassador in Washington and thereafter.
Or as exemplified by the symbolic holding of then Price Abdullah's hand at the Crawford Ranch meeting (see "Cheney in Saudi Land, Don't Hold Abdullah's Hand" 01.16.06; and "President Bush's Most Respectful Letter to King Abdullah on Energy Cooperation" 06.22.06 ) whose coziness resulted in an almost immediate upward ratcheting of oil prices.
The administration's oil industry buddies are ecstatic at the windfall the entire oil sector has reaped by the quadrupling of oil prices to levels undreamed of before the advent of this Presidency, while many of the nations citizens are having their household budgets ripped to shreds in order to meet their home heating bills this coming winter. Rarely if ever in the history of the Republic has there been such a divergence between the nation's interests and those of the vested interests that formed this administration.
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ISLAMOFASCIST that Bush protects and kisses up to!
UNDERSTANDING WAHHABIST INFILTRATION OF AMERICA
November 05, 2007
Understanding the Wahhabist Infiltration of America
Frank Salvato
Part of the reason many Americans don’t appreciate the significance of Osama bin Laden’s declarations of war against the United States and the West is because they are completely oblivious to the in roads radical Islam has made within the United States. Radical Islamists (i.e., Islamofascists, Wahhabis) understand that the conflict must take place on multiple fronts: militarily, economically, diplomatically and ideologically. Because they understand the complexity of the confrontation and the ability of the West to adapt to challenges – albeit lethargically – they employ multiple tactics in their aggressive pursuit of victory. The West’s addiction to sensationalism, epitomized by our limited attention to detail, unless it plays in the superficial 24 hour news cycle, facilitates the successful infiltration of radical ideology into Western society.
Much to the chagrin of the multicultural and the proponents of diversity, those who promote radical Islamist ideology thrive on the fact that the politically correct culture of the West – and the United States in particular – deems it inappropriate to question religious practices or teachings. With this politically correct “wall of separation” in place little if any scrutiny is given to the information disseminated within any given religious institution. This directly facilitates the ideological advancement of Wahhabism, the most radical and puritanical form of Islam, within the mosques of the United States.
To accurately understand the depth of infiltration of the Wahhabist ideology on American soil we need to examine the ideology and how it is advanced within the United States.
Wahhabism is a fiercely fundamentalist form of orthodox Sunni Islam. After a brief examination of its tenets it is clear that it is one of division, domination and hate.
Wahhabism originated circa 1703 and is the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabists believe that any and all evolution of the Islamic faith after the 3rd century of the Muslim era – after 950 A.D. – was specious and must be expunged. Consequently, Wahhabism is the form of Islam that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahri practice.
This radically fundamentalist dogma is fanatically bigoted, xenophobic and lends itself to serve as the catalyst for much of the Islamofascist aggression being perpetrated around the world. It is a wrathful doctrine that rejects the legitimacy of all religious philosophy but its own. Wahhabism condemns Christians, Jews and all other non Muslims, as well as non Wahhabi Muslims. Wahhabists believe it is a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews.
It stresses a worldview in which there exist two opposing realms that can never be reconciled Dar al Islam, or House of Islam, and Dar al Har, or House of War, also referred to as Dar al Kufr, House of the Infidel. When Muslims are in the Dar al Har, they must behave as if they were operatives in a conflict who have been tasked with going behind enemy lines. The Wahhabist ideology permits Muslims to exist “behind enemy lines” for only a few reasons: to acquire knowledge, to make money to be later employed in the jihad against the infidels, or to proselytize the infidels in an effort to convert them to Islam.
Wahhabist doctrine specifically warns Muslims not to imitate, befriend or help “infidels” in any way. It instills hatred for United States because we are ruled by legislated constitutional law rather than by tyrannical Sharia law. Wahhabists are instructed by edict to, above all, work for the creation of an Islamic state where ever they may dwell.
It is because of the Wahhabist ideology’s cruel and unyielding fanaticism that we in the United States should be concerned with its prevalence within the mosques of our nation.
After the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 – an unprecedented action by the fundamentalists of the Shi’ite sect, the Saudi Arabian government responded by coming to terms with the fundamentalist Wahhabist movement of the Sunni sect. The Saudis, in return for a declaration of non aggression, began to finance the construction of mosques in countries around the world. An estimated $45 billion has been spent by the Saudis to finance the building and operational costs of mosques and Islamic schools in foreign countries, including in North America.
Through the funding of mosques, Islamic Centers and their operations, Saudi Arabia is exporting the Wahhabist ideology. It is not unusual to find that the presiding cleric in any given mosque within the United States is a Wahhabist and that his teachings have been sanctioned and financed by the Saudi government and vetted by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Two of the more predominant mosques in the United States that have received funding from the Saudi government, and that adhere to the Wahhabist ideology, are the al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, New York, and the King Fahd mosque in Los Angeles, California. Both mosques welcomed a number of the hijackers who piloted the planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on September 11th, 2001.
In 2005, Freedom House, a 501(c)(3) organization concerned with the mounting threats to peace and democracy, released a report titled, Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques. This examination of a comprehensive sampling of mosques and Islamic Centers across America shows that literature available in an overwhelming number of them indicates deference for the Wahhabist ideology.
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