Hat tip the Standard and the person who send them the video.
It's raining men AKA as John Key's job summit
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Monthly Archives: February 2009
Alan Bollard warns summit of severe recession
Allan “Nincompoop” Bollard tells us to have a thought for our bankers. Look at John Key in the background he can barely contain his smirk.
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House building hits rock bottom
House building activity hit its lowest ever recorded level in January.
Statistics New Zealand said that just 812 dwelling units, including apartments, were authorised for construction during the month. That’s the lowest number since SNZ started recording the figures in 1965.
On a seasonally adjusted basis, the number of approvals plunged 8.2 percent in the month.
The figures, which point to future building activity, have been falling substantially since the housing boom started running out of steam in mid-2007.
Today’s latest figures will be likely to put further pressure on job numbers in the building industry. Economists have previously suggested there are many thousands too many people in the industry now relative to the amount of activity.
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Anthrax spores don't match dead researcher's samples
Poisonous anthrax that killed five Americans in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks doesn’t match bacteria from a flask linked to Bruce Ivins, the researcher who committed suicide after being implicated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a scientist said.
Spores used in the deadly mailings “share a chemical ‘fingerprint’ that is not found in the flask linked to Bruce Ivins,” Roberta Kwok wrote in Nature News, citing Joseph Michael, a scientist at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Michael analyzed letters sent to the New York Post and offices of Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, and found a distinct “chemical signature” not present in the flask known as RMR-1029, which Ivins could access in his laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
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Some background on Lord Ashcroft
To most New Zealanders Michael Ashcroft is the guy who forked out $ 200,000,- to buy back some old war medals and since most Pakeha and Maori folk still believe that they are fighting in just wars whenever the US calls on them to sacrifice some more young people that immediately bought him the goodwill of every gullible Kiwi of which there are plenty. And so when John Key announced last week that Lord Ashcroft in his imperial goodness found it in his heart to come over and have a wee chat with our esteemed Prime Minister nobody thought any thing of it in fact when Lord Aschroft let it be known that he wanted to initiate an anti crime phoneline where people could phone into anonymously they all thought that that was real swell.
However philantrophy is not all the Lord does. In fact Philantrophy is only a tiny sideline.
Among his many endeavors is financing the Tory party being their backroom strategist and he is a Banker. In fact he owns a bank in Belize but more importantly he is a major share holder n a group known as the Carlyle group. Now for those of you who don’t know that the Carlyle group is and what it does it pays to watch the documentary below. Dont worry, only the introduction is in Dutch, the documentary is in English and well worth watching.
To watch it is to understand that with Lord Ashcroft the eye of Mordor has come to New Zealand.
The Oscar for Denial
German society is still – and may always be – in recovery, not just from the atrocities committed in its name, by its leaders, but from the silent acquiescence of the millions who lacked the will to speak up against what they knew was wrong. To sweep the crimes and excesses of the Bush-Cheney years under the rug would destroy the American soul. The world needs the American sense of justice now more than ever. But we forfeit our moral authority if we do not take responsibility for the crimes of the Bush-Cheney years.
Kate Winslet’s Academy Award for Best Actress in The Reader surely disappointed and outraged Ron Rosenbaum. Amid the torrent of nonsense glutting U.S. media since the movie award nominations were announced, Rosenbaum’s objections to The Reader were far more substantive and accusatory.
In his Slate column, Rosenbaum attacked the “essential metaphorical thrust” of the film, which he said aimed “to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution.” Rosenbaum decried the notion of honoring “a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer and intimates that ‘ordinary Germans’ were ignorant of the extermination until after the war…”
Rosenbaum indicted “the Kate Winslet character’s ‘illiteracy’: She’s a stand-in for the German people and their supposed inability to ‘read’ the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens. To which one can only say: What a crock!”
In fact it is a crock, a willful misreading of The Reader to lump it in with a genre of films which exploit the Holocaust (e.g., Life is Beautiful, winner of several Academy Awards). Bernard Schlink, author of the novel on which the film of The Reader is based, told an interviewer in December: “It’s definitely not a movie about the Holocaust. It’s about a generation trying to come to terms with what they had to learn about their parents’ generation.”
But Rosenbaum’s Shoah sensitivities are Manichean. He concedes nothing to the moral and emotional complexities within or between the characters, especially in the film’s central relationship between Michael and Hanna.
Michael’s passionate affair with the much-older Hanna at first uplifts his adolescence. But when, as a law student, he witnesses her murder trial, along with other former Nazi concentration camp guards, he is devastated. Michael believes that Hanna has admitted to writing a report about the death of 300 Jewish prisoners, trapped in a burning church, in order to avoid revealing her illiteracy.
Michael tells his law professor (Bruno Ganz) that he has knowledge relevant to the trial, perhaps in the defendant’s favor. The older professor urges Michael to speak up: You don’t want to be like us and do nothing do you? Here Ganz is referring to his own silent wartime generation. But Michael cannot bring himself to visit Hanna during her trial, even though he knows her illiteracy has probably condemned her to a far greater penalty than her equally – or perhaps surpassingly – guilty comrades.
The other guards have no moral sense. But they are rewarded for their lies and stonewalling, receiving much lighter sentences than Hanna, who simply blurts out the truth, takes the rap and ends up sentenced to life in prison. She admits to having no moral sense, and therefore must be the more strongly condemned. Does this really create undue sympathy for Hanna, as Rosenbaum suggests? At the end of the film, an escaped victim (Lena Olin) explicitly asks the adult Michael (Ralph Fiennes) if he thinks Hanna’s illiteracy mitigates her guilt. And he says no.
As one of the law students in the film declares, the question is not who knew about the extermination of the Jews. There were hundreds of camps all over Europe. Everybody knew. ”My parents, my teachers, everyone.” The question is, what did they do about it? The answer is: Nothing. As the student says to the bemused Ganz: “The only question is why you didn’t all just kill yourselves?”
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Afghanistan: U.S. Escalates the Illegal Drug Industry
It is common knowledge that Afghanistan remains the primary source of the world’s supply of opium and heroin. A recent United Nations’ report claims that three quarters of the world’s heroin comes from the provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. But there is also recognition that poppies are grown in almost all of the country’s 34 provinces.
The western media argues that most of the production of illegal drugs is being done by the Taliban or that the Taliban is protecting the farmers. The fact that there are well known drug lords in the government of President Hamid Karzai, and many are members of the parliament, is usually ignored. Yet the Asian press carries photos of “narco palaces” in Kabul and describes the local “narcotecture.” The Afghan population is well aware of the close ties between the drug lords and the government.
Of course this is quite embarrassing to the U.S. government, which put Karzai in office and created the present Afghan constitution and system of government. Thus Hillary Clinton, nominated for Secretary of State, created quite a shock when she referred to Afghanistan as a “narco state” in her testimony before the U.S. Senate.
Forgotten in all this is the key role that the U.S. government played in the development and expansion of the illegal drug industry in Afghanistan. It goes back to the decision made in July 1978 by the administration of Jimmy Carter to give aid and assistance to the radical Islamists in their rebellion against the leftist government of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan.
The CIA and the Afghan Drug Trade
The U.S. government devoted billions of dollars to the proxy war in Afghanistan. Most of this was funneled through the Pentagon’s infamous Black Budget, secret funds for secret operations. In 1981 this budget was estimated at $9 billion but rose to $36 billion by 1990. The CIA obtained cash to buy weapons and other equipment which was then channeled to the Islamist rebels.
In the Afghan operation the CIA provided cash to the Pakistan government, primarily through its accounts with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), best known for laundering illegal drug money. As John Cooley notes, “The CIA already had a history of using corrupt or criminal banks for its overseas operations.” In the 1980s the CIA and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency were using the BCCI for covert operations. First American, in Washington, D.C., was one of the CIA banks of choice, and it had been acquired by BCCI.
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The "Geithner Put": It's time to break up the big banks
“We will preserve the banking system that is owned and managed by the private sector” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
Timothy Geithner is putting the finishing touches on a plan that will dump $1 trillion of toxic assets onto the US taxpayer. The plan, which goes by the opaque moniker the “Public-Private Investment Fund” (PPIF), is designed to provide lavish incentives to hedge funds and private equity firms to purchase bad assets from failing banks. It is a sweetheart deal that provides government financing and guarantees for illiquid mortgage-backed junk for which there is no active market. As one might expect, the charismatic President Obama has been called in to generate public support for this latest addition to the TARP bailout. In this week’s address to Congress he said:
“This administration is moving swiftly and aggressively to restore confidence, and re-start lending.
We will do so in several ways. First, we are creating a new lending fund that represents the largest effort ever to help provide auto loans, college loans, and small business loans to the consumers and entrepreneurs who keep this economy running.”
The Obama administration is clearly afraid to use the unpopular Geithner to sell this boondoggle to the American people. Geithner’s last performance set off a political firestorm and put the equities markets into a swan-dive. No one wants to see that again.
Details of the plan remain sketchy, but the PPIF will work in concert with the Fed’s new lending facility, the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, which will start operating in March and will provide up to $1 trillion of financing for buyers of new securities backed by credit card, auto and small-business loans. Geithner’s financial rescue “partnership” will also focus on cleaning up banks balance sheets by purging mortgage-backed securities. (MBS)
In Monday’s New york Times, Paul Krugman summed up the Geithner plan like this:
“Now the administration is talking about a “public-private partnership” to buy troubled assets from the banks, with the government lending money to private investors for that purpose. This would offer investors a one-way bet: if the assets rise in price, investors win; if they fall substantially, investors walk away and leave the government holding the bag. Again, heads they win, tails we lose.
Why not just go ahead and nationalize?”
Why not, indeed, except for the fact that Geithner’s main objective is to “keep the banks in private hands” regardless of the cost to the taxpayer. The Treasury Secretary believes that if he presents his plan a “lending program” rather than another trillion dollar freebie from Uncle Sam, he’ll have a better chance slipping it by Congress and thereby preserving the present management structure at the banks. Keeping the banking giants intact is “Job 1″ at the Treasury.
The PPIF is a way of showering speculators with subsidies to purchase non-performing loans at bargain-basement prices. The Fed is using a similar strategy with the TALF which, according to the New York Times, could easily generate “annual returns of 20 percent or more” for those who borrow from the facility.
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I.O.U.S.A.
A view to the crisis crippling the world
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Hawke's Bay wind farm rejected
A wind farm project, selected by the Labour Government to be fast-tracked through the resource consent process, has been turned down by the Environment Court.
The proposed 34-turbine wind farm near the Te Waka Range in Hawke’s Bay was rejected in a court decision yesterday, lines company Unison company said.
The company refused to say why the court had turned down its proposal, but chief executive Ken Sutherland said on the basis of this decision a legislative change would be needed for such schemes to succeed in the future.
“The decision sends some seriously disconcerting signals to companies trying to undertake environmentally friendly energy production,” he said.
“Unison and its business partner in this proposed venture have spent more than five years going through legal processes to go this far, and have spent significant sums pursuing consent for this excellent energy source.”
Mr Sutherland said three turbines had been removed from the original design at a loss of renewable electricity for 3000 homes per year in order to cater for Maori concerns.
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