Who are the real economic terrorists?
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Some are asking : who are economic terrorists, the big bankers and corporate leaders , or the protesters, or lurking terrorists, or exactly who?
Some information, webpages, and articles relating to this question , FYI for your information
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Robert Fisk: Bankers are the dictators of the West
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Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other “story” – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.
But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard “experts” who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.
Let’s kick off with the “Arab Spring” – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We’ve been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have “taken a leaf” out of the “Arab spring” book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been “inspired” by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.
The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against “democratic” Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.
And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against “governments”. What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people’s power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of “experts” from America’s top universities and “think tanks”, who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.
The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people’s wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.
I didn’t need Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940?
Why don’t my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations – Inside Job started along the path – into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American “peacemaking” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are “moderates”, the bad guys “terrorists”.
The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become “anarchists”, the social “terrorists” of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can’t touch them.
The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to blame. Isn’t it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too?
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Economic terrorism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term economic terrorism is strictly defined to indicate an attempt at economic destabilization by a group. More precisely, in 2005 the Geneva Centre for Security Policy defined economic terrorism in the following terms:
Contrary to “economic warfare” which is undertaken by states against other states, “economic terrorism” would be undertaken by transnational or non-state actors. This could entail varied, coordinated and sophisticated or massive destabilizing actions in order to disrupt the economic and financial stability of a state, a group of states or a society (such as market oriented western societies) for ideological or religious motives. These actions, if undertaken, may be violent or not. They could have either immediate effects or carry psychological effects which in turn have economic consequences.[1]
[edit]See also
[edit]References
- ^ “Programme”. Roundtable on ‘Economic Terrorism’. Geneva Centre for Security Policy. July 11–12, 2005. Archived from the original on September 27, 2007.
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Republicans Are Economic Terrorists
John Thorpe|July 26, 2011|
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After years of fighting Al Qaeda, it seems the Republicans have decided if they can’t beat ’em, may as well join ’em.
Emulating the terrorists’ actions, the House Republicans have decided to hold the President — and 300 million Americans — hostage as they demand tax cuts for the wealthy and spending cuts for everyone else, in exchange for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling by just enough to avoid the United States government from defaulting on its debt.
That’s right: Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner and his Tea Party caucus are driving a jumbo-jet 747 into the world’s tallest economy, and no one on the right-wing seems to give a damn.
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Perhaps someone should educate the Tea Party on the basics of American government. I suppose I can lay out the very basic realities for the Tea Party. Here is the short version.
Dear Tea Party,
You only control one part of one branch of government. The system is set up to separate powers between the various branches, and power in the legislative branch is further divided between the House and the Senate.
When you control ONLY the House of Representatives, as you do now, and the other party controls the Senate and the White House, you have to do something called “negotiate”. Dictionary.com gives a simple definition. No pictures, sadly, but the words are short enough that even the Arizona tea party members can get the gist of it.
“Negotiate: to deal or bargain with another or others, as in the preparation of a treaty or contract or in preliminaries to a business deal.” In other words, negotiation involves some give and take; you get some, but not all, of what you want. Somewhere, in the middle of what the other parties want and what you want is the end result.
You’re Welcome for the Lesson,
Love,
John
And yet, Republicans insist that they get 100% of what they want or they’re simply going to vote no on any debt ceiling increase — even though the results of not lifting the debt ceiling would be catastrophic to the short, medium, and long-term health of the United States economy. In every sense of the phrase, that is economic terrorism. Either that or the Republicans have a bad case of the Terrible Twos.
Am I overstating things? Hardly. The Democrats, through the President, have already offered a plan that gives the Republicans most of what they want. Hell, Obama offered so much in terms of cuts, and so little in terms of tax increases, that Democrats in Congress were upset. It still isn’t good enough for Boehner and the Tea Party. Obama met the Republicans 90% of the way, and was willing to take the heat from his own party in order to get a deal done, and the Republicans told him to get lost.
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“Now, if you do not have any (additional) revenues, as the most recent Republican plan that’s been put forward both in the House and the Senate proposed, if you have no revenues at all, what that means is more of a burden on seniors, more drastic cuts to education, more drastic cuts to research, a bigger burden on services that are going to middle-class families all across the country,” Obama said.
“And it essentially asks nothing of corporate jet owners, it asks nothing of oil and gas companies, it asks nothing from folks like me who’ve done extremely well and can afford to do a little bit more. In other words, if you don’t have revenues, the entire thing ends up being tilted on the backs of the poor and middle-class families. And the majority of Americans don’t agree on that approach.”
And yet, here we are, a week before the United States government defaults on its debt and, for all intents and purposes, destroys the entire world economy. We cannot get a deal done because of one group of people: House Republicans, specifically the know-nothing imbeciles who rode the Tea Party Moron Express to victory in 2010 and who believe, quite wrongly, that a default would be wonderful politics for the GOP.
The truth is, there might not be an election worth winning if the U.S. defaults on its debts. We’re not Greece, where a few banks own our debt, and the pain can be relatively contained within, say, France and Germany.
Our securities are held world-wide specifically because they are as good as gold. If they lose that status, and if we default, credit-default swaps will be enacted across the globe. Banks will go bust trying to make heads or tails of the situation. The economy will collapse, contract, and implode upon itself. Global credit markets would dry up, and protectionism would once again rule the day.
The entire house of cards will fall, and God help anyone who cannot farm for their own food and gather their own water. It’s entirely possible we set the world economy back 300 years.
But hey, at least Boehner and the Tea Party would get to stick it to the black man one more time. Treasonous, terrorist rubes, each and every one of them.
— John Thorpe
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Poll: Most Democrats See Tea Party as ‘Economic Terrorists’
29 percent of Americans say the Tea Party threatens the economy
By PAUL BEDARD
With the Democrats and media rapping the Tea Party as economic terrorists during the debt ceiling debate and subsequent S&P downgrade of American debt, a new poll finds that a majority of Democrats agree that the conservative fringe is to blame for the nation’s economic woes, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll. But just as significantly, when all likely voters are lumped in, including key independents, only 29 percent call the Tea Party “economic terrorists.”
[See political cartoons about the Democrats.]
“While 53 percent of Democrats view Tea Party members as terrorists, 57 percent of voters not affiliated with either major party disagree, as do 74 percent of Republicans,” says the poll.
The Tea Party ducks the terrorist label, but the poll isn’t great news because 43 percent believe that party made things worse in the nation during the budget debates.
[Check out political cartoons about the Tea Party.]
Highlights of the new poll:
— 55 percent of likely voters say members of the Tea Party are not economic terrorists; 29 percent do and 16 percent are undecided.
— 53 percent of Democrats view Tea Party members as terrorists, 57 percent of voters not affiliated with either major party disagree, as do 74 percent of Republicans.
— 53 percent of Republicans believe the Tea Party has made things better, while 73 percent of Democrats feel it has made things worse. Unaffiliated voters are evenly divided with 37 percent saying the Tea Party made things better and 37 percent worse.
— 34 percent of all voters in separate polling favored tax hikes as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling; 55 percent opposed including tax increases of any kind in the deal.
[See editorial cartoons about the budget and deficit.]
— Among those who consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement, 92 percent feel they are not economic terrorists, and 76 percent think they’ve made things better for the country in terms of the budget debate. Those who are not members of the movement are narrowly divided over the terrorist question, and 58 percent of this group think the Tea Party has made things worse for the country.
- Tags:
republican party, economy, Tea Party, democratic party, deficit and national debt
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Capitalist Economic Terrorism 2008
Capitalist Economic Terrorism 2011
We Must Renounce and Dispose of Capitalism; It Cannot Be Salvaged
The United States code’s definition also applies to capitalist terrorism: “(An) act of terrorism means an activity that (A) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any state, and (B) appears to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population: (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping.”2 Source 3 Source |
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like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve–‘our partners in the government,’ as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.”If you look at [the economic crisis] in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron–a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.”Matt Taibbi, “
Because of this cabal economic terrorist attack, the American and world economy has already 
Hank Paulson presided over Goldman Sachs, during the heyday of production of the very same toxic securities that are creating this financial collapse. He exited Goldman Sachs (GS) with some $500 million in his pocket. After he left, Goldman went on to embark on a Machiavellian course of conduct, buying hedges against what they knew would be the inevitable demise of those toxic instruments, and that is why the company is now doing better than its peers.” 
globalist stooge: former EU Commissioner, an international advisor for Goldman Sachs, the European Chairman of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, and also a leading member of the Bilderberg Group.
The likely strategy behind the cabal’s European operations (led by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan/Chase) is the destruction of the European Union and the Euro Zone and the imposition of murderous “austerity” measures to destroy the European working class. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has said that if the Euro Zone collapses it will cause an economic crash that would instantly wipe out half of the value of Europe’s economy, plunging the continent into a depression as deep as that of the 1930s.
America is brutally manhandled by a demonic cabal that does what it wants–including the current economic 9/11, part II, terrorist attack.
Our responsibility is to work in every way possible to expose and defeat the terrorist cabal:
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REVEALED — THE LEFT’S ECONOMIC TERRORISM PLAYBOOK: THE CHASE CAMPAIGN BY A COALITION OF UNIONS, COMMUNITY GROUPS, LAWMAKERS AND STUDENTS TO TAKE DOWN US CAPITALISM AND REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH & POWER
- Posted on March 22, 2011 at 9:13am by
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FULL VERSION OF DISCUSSION
Transcript:
PRESENTATION
W: We’re going to hear from Steve Lerner next, of SEIU, the Architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign. Currently, he’s working on partnering with unions and groups in Europe and South America, it’s building campaigns to hold financial institutions accountable.
S. Lerner: It seems to me that we’re in a moment where we need to figure out in a much more, through direct action, much more concrete way how we really are trying to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital, for how corporations operate. And it may sound like that’s a crazy thing that in a moment of weakness we could deal with it, but the thing about a boom and bust economy, it is actually incredibly fragile, because it’s not based on real way, well, it’s based on gambling and all of that. And so there are actually extraordinary things that we could do right now that would start to de, destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement. And for example, 10% of homeowners, going back to where you started, who are under, a quarter of all people who own a home are under water. Right? Their home is under water, they’re paying more for it than it’s worth. Ten percent of those people are now in strategic default, meaning they’re refusing to pay but they’re staying in their homes. That’s totally spontaneous. Right? They figured out it takes a year to kick me out of my home because the mort, the foreclosure’s backed up. I’m going to say I won’t pay. It’s just what business does, it’s a good, a good business decision. If you could double that number, you would make banks, put banks on the edge of insolvency again.
And so the question would be, what would happen if we organized homeowners in mass to do a mortgage strike. Just say if we get, and, and, if we get half a million people to agree, we’ll all not, we’ll agree we won’t pay our mortgages, it would literally cause a new financial crisis.
There are four things we can do that could really upset Wall Street. One is if city and state and other government entities demanded to renegotiate their debt because they’re paying too much interest. And you might say, well why would the banks ever do it? Because they, the cities and counties could say we won’t do this and this in the future with you if you don’t renegotiate the debt now. Meaning, about a third of bank profits generate from dealing with cities and states. So we could leverage the power we have of government to say we won’t do business with you, JP Morgan Chase, anymore unless you do two things: you reduce the price of our interest, since your interest rate is down; and second, you rewrite the mortgages for everybody in the community so they can stay in their homes. We, we could make them do that.
The second thing is there’s a whole question in New York now about austerity and student’s rates and the question of the debt structure. What would happen if students said we’re not going to pay? It’s a trillion dollars. Think about your …sweeping that debt, a trillion dollars from students debt?
There’s a third thing that we could think about, what about if public employee unions, instead of them being on the defensive, put on the collective bargaining table when they negotiate they said we demand as a condition of negotiation that the government renegotiate, we want, we believe in good financial management. It’s crazy that you’re paying too much interest to your buddy the bankers. It’s a strike issue for us. We will strike unless you force the banks to relieve the debt of the city. I’m not going to go through all the detail except to say there’s extraordinary things we could do and if you add on top of that, if we really thought about moving to the kind of disruption in Madison, but moving that to Wall Street and moving that to other cities around the country where we basically said you stole $17 trillion, you’ve impoverished us and we’re going to make it impossible for, for you to operate.
Labor can’t lead it, but we can be a critical part of it. We do have money, we have millions of members who are furious, but I don’t think this kind of movement can happen unless actually the community groups and other activists take the lead. And that’s a big reversal of how a lot of these coalitions have even thought about it, so unions helping community groups, or communities who cover this narrowly. And if you’re se, if we really believe that we’re in a transformative stage and what’s happening in capitalism, and we need to confront this in a serious way and develop a real ability to put a boot in the wheel, then I think we have to think not about labor community alliances. We have to think about how together we’re building something that really has the capacity to disrupt how the system operates.
And so I just, I guess raise that we need a whole new way of thinking about things, which is not a partnership, but building something new. Because the bottom line is, as soon as the union gets sued, it’s going to be terrifying. When we get an injunction that says, you know, you, un, the union backs down. So we need to build a movement based on we know the oppression we’re going to face. And I think the only way we can do that is to think much more creatively, and the key thing I …is we have to say what does the other side fear most? They fear disruption, they fear uncertainty. Every article about Europe says a riot in Greece, the markets went down. The folks that control this country care about one thing: how the stock market does; how the bond market does; and what their bonus is. So I think we weed out a very simple strategy: how do we bring down the stock market, how do we bring down their bonuses, how do we interfere with their ability to, to be rich. And if we don’t do, and that means you have to politically isolate them, economically isolate them and disrupt them. So, it’s not all theory, I’ll do a pitch.
So, a bunch of us around the country are thinking about who would be a really good company to hate? We decided that would be JP Morgan Chase. …. And so we’re going to roll out over the next couple of months what will hopefully be an exciting campaign about JP Morgan Chase that is really about challenge the power of Wall Street. And so what we’re looking at is in the first week of May, we get enough people together – we’re starting now – to really have a week of action in New York with the goal of … I don’t want to go into any details because I don’t know which police agents are in the room, but the goal would be that we would roll out in New York the first week in May—
M: (Can’t hear speaker)
S. Lerner: Yes. …connect three ideas – that we’re not broke, there’s plenty of money; they have the money, we need to get it back; and that they’re using Bloomberg and other people in government as the vehicle to try to destroy us. And so that we need to take on those folks at the same time and that will start here. We’re going to look at a week of civil disobedience, direct action all over the city, then we’ll roll into the JP Morgan shareholder meeting, which they moved out of New York because they were afraid, I guess, of Columbus, where there’s going to be a ten state mobilization to try to shut down that meeting. And then looking at bank shareholder meetings around the country and try to create some moments like Madison, except where we’re on offense instead of defense. Where we have brave and heroic battles challenging the power of the giant corporations, and we hope to sort of inspire a much bigger movement about redistributing wealth and power in the country.
W: You were talking about why unions are so invested because of their pension plans and why ungovernability, as Frances Fox Piven and Cloward taught us, you know, poor peoples’ movements are successful when they create conditions of ungovernability. And then you win victories.
Transcription: TTE Transcripts Worldwide, Ltd.
Check out more analysis from Business Insider here.
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Was financial meltdown the result of economic terrorism?
POSTED AT 1:36 PM ON MARCH 1, 2011 BY ED MORRISSEY
Pajamas Media gives an exclusive look at an analysis prepared for the Department of Defense’s Irregular Warfare Support Program (IWSP) by Cross Consulting and Services in 2009 that alleges that the economic meltdown in 2008 was no accident. Kevin Freeman argued that a run-up of speculation by sovereign-wealth funds created a bubble in the oil industry that allowed bear raids on American financial institutions, using credit swaps and other non-regulated investment instruments to crash the US financial system. Bill Gertz reported on the analysis today for theWashington Times:
Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system.
The unclassified 2009 report “Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses” by financial analyst Kevin D. Freeman, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, states that “a three-phased attack was planned and is in the process against the United States economy.”
While economic analysts and a final report from the federal government’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission blame the crash on such economic factors as high-risk mortgage lending practices and poor federal regulation and supervision, the Pentagon contractor adds a new element: “outside forces,” a factor the commission did not examine.
“There is sufficient justification to question whether outside forces triggered, capitalized upon or magnified the economic difficulties of 2008,” the report says, explaining that those domestic economic factors would have caused a “normal downturn” but not the “near collapse” of the global economic system that took place.
The report warns that an attack on the American financial system could have taken place in two phases — and that a third phase may be ready to launch:
The first phase was a speculative run-up in oil prices that generated as muchas $2 trillion of excess wealth for oil-producing nations, filling the coffers of Sovereign Wealth Funds, especially those that follow Shariah CompliantFinance. This phase appears to have begun in 2007 and lasted through June 2008.
The rapid run-up in oil prices made the value of OPEC oil in the ground roughly$137 trillion (based on $125/barrel oil) virtually equal to the value of all other world financial assets, including every share of stock, every bond, every private company, all government and corporate debt, and the entire world‘s bank deposits. That means that the proven OPEC reserves were valued at almost three times the total market capitalization of every company on the planet traded in all27 global stock markets.
The second phase appears to have begun in 2008 with a series of bear raids targeting U.S. financial services firms that appeared to be systemically significant. An initial bear raid against Bear Stearns was successful in forcing the firm to near bankruptcy. It was acquired by JP Morgan Chase and the systemic risk was averted briefly. Similar bear raids were conducted against various other firms during the summer, each ending in an acquisition. The attacks continued until the outright failure of Lehman Brothers in mid-September. This created a system-wide crisis, caused the collapse of the credit markets, and nearly collapsed the global financial system. The bear raids were perpetrated by naked short selling and manipulation of credit default swaps, both of which were virtually unregulated. The short selling was actually enhanced by recent regulatory changes including rescission of the uptick rule and loopholes such as ―the Madoff exemption.
While substantial, unusual trading activity can be identified, the source of the bear raids has not been traceable to date due to serious transparency gaps for hedge funds, trading pools, sponsored access, and sovereign wealth funds. What can be demonstrated, however, is that two relatively small broker dealers emerged virtually overnight to trade―trillions of dollars worth of U.S. blue chip companies. They are the number one traders in all financial companies that collapsed or are now financially supported by the U.S. government. Trading by the firms has grown exponentially while the markets have lost trillions of dollars in value.
The risk of a Phase Three has quickly emerged, suggesting a potential direct economic attack on the U.S. Treasury and U.S. dollar.
Such an event has already been discussed by finance ministers in major emerging market nations such as China and Russia as well as Iran and the Arab states. A focused effort to collapse the dollar by dumping Treasury bonds has grave implications including the possibility of a downgrading of U.S. debt forcing rapidly rising interest rates and a collapse of the American economy. In short, a bear raid against the U.S.financial system remains possible and may even be likely.
Freeman pointed to the seizure of $134 billion in counterfeit US bonds as a potential clue as valuable as the Japanese intercepts prior to Pearl Harbor. His report calls the chain of events “the equivalent of box cutters on an airplane.” But does this theory hold water?
First, Freeman issued this warning in June 2009, when the US had just managed to get back on its feet after the financial collapse. The US sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into shoring up American financial institutions through the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 under both George Bush and Barack Obama. The time to strike in Freeman’s model of Phase 3 would have been at that point, when the US needed Treasury sales to rescue the banking and investment communities. While we have piled up even more debt and find ourselves lurking towards a Greece-like crisis, the short-term instability has mainly dissipated. Furthermore, the nations Freeman cited are no less hostile to American interests than they were in 2008. So if this was the plan all along, why no Phase 3?
Furthermore, one of those nations — China — has extensive holdings in the US. While it’s certainly possible that the Chinese autocracy might be so hostile to the US as to risk destabilizing their own country to bring down the American economy, it hardly seems likely. China’s government has no love for the US, but does have a love of economic success. They have even introduced capitalism back into their economy over the last several years (in a limited fashion) to improve their economic performance and prevent full-scale uprisings as seen in the Arab world this year. China’s rulers may be brutal, but they’re rational and rather predictable, too. Russia has enough problems in its own economy and hardly has the resources to conduct an economic war against the US, and their rivalries are mainly with Europe. Iran has every incentive in the world to attack the American economy, but few allies to join them in that region — and the Saudis would prefer to unseat the mullahs in Tehran rather than destroy the US economy that both feeds and protects them.
The report is very useful in underscoring the potential vulnerabilities in our system, especially in relation to sovereign-wealth funds, and should get attention from policymakers in protecting the US from financial wars. However, just because something is possible doesn’t mean it happened.
AYFKM?: Who Are The Real Financial Terrorists?
In yesterday’s commentary, I pointed out that the name calling starting with ‘racists’ to‘astroturf‘ to ‘domestic terrorists’ to ‘radicals and extremists‘ to ‘hobbits‘ was not going to make one iota of difference to tea party patriots who don’t give a flying rat’s a** what the left, the right, and the political elite call us because we are trying to keep our children from being sold down the river by those very same greed-driven pirates. I pointed out that the political class were going to have to do better with the name calling. Enter ‘financial terrorists’ (and our reaction is….yawn…whatever…we’ll still be here waiting you bastards out when it all comes tumbling down…and rest assured it will; one can only loot an entire world’s population for so long.)
MSNBC ‘Morning Joe’ Panelists (Yet Again) Call Tea Partiers ‘Economic Terrorists’
A trend is emerging on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” whereby guests make inflammatory statements likening conservatives to terrorists, and none of the co-hosts insist on a more elevated level of dialogue.
Following in the footsteps of Newsweek’s Tina Brown and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), two MSNBC analysts called conservatives in Congress “economic terrorists” and “crazy” on Friday, yet none of the program’s co-hosts questioned the offensive choice of words or called for a more civilized tone.
Disgraced former Obama car czar Steve Rattner went first, framing Tea Partiers as suicide bombers:
Poor Steve cannot seem to handle somebody having the audacity to say ‘no more thievery on our watch’.
You know, the problem with this is it’s like a form of economic terrorism. I imagine these Tea Party guys are like strapped with dynamite, standing in the middle of Times Square at rush hour and saying, ‘either you do it my way, or we’re going to blow you up, ourselves up, and the whole country up with us.’ So you tell me how those kinds of standoffs end.
And from TheBlaze.com:
NEW LIBERAL TALKING POINT: TEA PARTIERS = TERRORISTS?
It’s always easy to sniff out new Democratic talking points — like good liberal foot soldiers, they repeat their assigned memes nearly word-for-word. This week’s left hook: tea partiers are like terrorists.
Writing for Politico, William Yeomans describes the tea party’s “terrorist tactics”:
It has become commonplace to call the tea party faction in the House “hostage takers.” Butthey have now become full-blown terrorists.
They have joined the villains of American history who have been sufficiently craven to inflict massive harm on innocent victimsto achieve their political goals. A strong America has always stood firm in the face of terrorism. That tradition is in jeopardy, as Congress and President Barack Obama careen toward an uncertain outcome in the tea party- manufactured debt crisis.
TIME‘s Joe Klein:
The Republicans have been willing to concede nothing. Their stand means higher interest rates, fewer jobs created and more destroyed, a general weakening of this country’s standing in the world. Osama bin Laden, if he were still alive, could not have come up with a more clever strategy for strangling our nation.
Former Obama car czar Steve Rattner appearing this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:
You know, the problem with this is it’s like a form of economic terrorism. I imagine these Tea Party guys are like strapped with dynamite, standing in the middle of Times Square at rush hour and saying, ‘either you do it my way, or we’re going to blow you up, ourselves up, and the whole country up with us.’ So you tell me how those kinds of standoffs end.
Former green jobs czar Van Jones is careful not to use the term “terrorist,” but the connotation is clear:
Any faction in America that would put a gun to the head of 310 million people and say ‘If you don’t do it our way, we will blow your dreams away, we will blow a hole in the American economy’, that is un-American.
New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman:
[The tea party movement] is so lacking in any aspiration for American greatness, so dominated by the narrowest visions for our country and so ignorant of the fact that it was not tax cuts that made America great but our unique public-private partnerships across the generations. If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, theTea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission.
Seriously?
The truly important view to take of this entire situation is the question: ”who exactly are the financial terrorists?” The Tea Party stating ‘Don’t you dare raise that debt ceiling and weaken our country further!!!‘ or the freakazoids promising NOT TO TAKE THE $14 TRILLION DOLLAR DEBT TO $17 TRILLION AND ABOVE? Have any of these clowns kept a promise yet? And that’s not all folks, if you order right now, you will receive the ‘Super Congress’ of 12 clowns deciding the fates of 310 million people and give Chairman Zero a process in which he can raise the debt ceiling without congressional approval.
How’s that for a deal?
And you thought the tea party were the extremists and financial terrorists?
We’ve gone from 535 losers deciding our fate to 12 and a dictator. Welcome to the New World Order, globalist style.
Welcome to a vision of our financial future…Ron Paul “How Do You Solve The Debt Problem By Raising The Debt?”
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Terrorism Breeds Terrorism 
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Economic protesters target Washington lobbyists
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By Katharine Jackson
WASHINGTON | Wed Dec 7, 2011 8:21pm EST
(Reuters) – Police arrested 62 economic protesters in Washington on Wednesday as they blocked streets and disrupted traffic in an area famous as a center for the offices of lobbyists.
The demonstrators said the lobbyists represent the corporations that — along with the country’s richest people — they think have too much of the nation’s power and wealth.
The Washington actions came as elsewhere in the country authorities continued to move against encampments of the Occupy movement that seeks major change in the U.S. economic system.
Police dismantled a tent city of Occupy protesters in downtown San Francisco early on Wednesday, arresting 85 people, according to police spokesman Sergeant Carlos Manfredi, as they shut down the largest remaining Occupy encampment on the West Coast.
Protesters there briefly heckled the police at a public plaza, chanting “SFPD off our streets.”
San Francisco authorities had repeatedly warned Occupy protesters to move from the plaza at the foot of Market Street in recent weeks and tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a move to another location.
San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr said there were about 100 people in the camp when the police moved in early on Wednesday, and about 100 officers took part in the action.
Authorities in many U.S. cities, often citing health and safety conditions, have dismantled protest camps that sprang from the first Occupy protests near Wall Street in New York.
WASHINGTON AN EXCEPTION
An exception has been Washington, D.C., where Occupy encampments have remained in place and on occasion the protesters have been joined by other groups with similar aims.
This week union and church organizations, among others, were participating in a “Take Back the Capitol” effort marked by sit-ins at Congressional offices on Tuesday.
Undeterred by sporadic rain, the protests concentrated on K Street, where many corporate lobbyists have offices.
Occupy DC protesters had announced a march of their own in the same area. Some Occupy protesters remain wary of too closely identifying themselves with groups such as unions, which they see as politically partisan.
At one corner, Occupy protesters tried to build a barricade. They pushed tents, garbage cans and newspaper vending machines into the intersection.
“The world is the only thing we have and we need to protect it,” said Haley Freeman, an Occupy protester from Florida. “We need to protect the environment and each other because it’s the only home we have.”
Police on horseback forced the crowd out of the street and clear of the debris. They issued warnings and started making arrests, as some of the group laid down in the street.
All but one of the 62 protesters arrested were taken into custody for obstructing a public road, said Washington Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Officer Hugh Carew.
The other protester was arrested for assault on an officer, Carew said. Many of the protesters were expected to be released after paying a citation, but police said they would jail any of them with outstanding warrants.
Jerome Wilson, 52, an environmental services worker from Pittsburgh, told Reuters he had come to Washington with a church group for the protests.
“It’s about strengthening the people because that one percent is taking away everything from us,” he said. “We’re basically back in debtors’ prison again.”
“DEBTOR’S PRISON”
The “one percent” is a common reference among protesters to the idea that a tiny minority in the country has more wealth and power than is fair, at the expense of the vast majority.
In Denver, a federal judge on Wednesday denied Occupy Denver’s request for a restraining order against police, rejecting the group’s contention that police had illegally enforced ordinances to suppress its protest.
The ruling came the same day Denver police released reams of text messages, some of them containing blunt descriptions of the protesters as “pathetic” or “grungy,” sent car-to-car between officers during the three-month protests in that city.
The messages first came to light during a court hearing on Monday before the federal judge. “I say we just baton the people who start to incite everyone. The rest who are peaceful, let em stay,” read one of the police texts.
Denver Police Lieutenant Matthew Murray said the department regrets “the tenor and tone” of the texts.
As authorities have moved against Occupy encampments in an increasing number of cities, some local activists say they are now turning their attention to the foreclosure crisis and will “occupy” homes to prevent evictions.
(Additional reporting by Noel Randewich, Jonathan Weber, and Jim Christie in San Francisco, Ian Simpson in Washington, Robert Boczkiewicz and Keith Coffman in Denver, and Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Writing by Jerry Norton; Editing by Peter Bohan
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