Exclusive: U.S. Scales-Back Military Exercise with Israel, Affecting Potential Iran Strike

Damn who finally cut up the credit card?

Seven months ago, Israel and the United States postponed a massive joint military exercise that was originally set to go forward just as concerns were brimming that Israel would launch a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The exercise was rescheduled for late October, and appears likely to go forward on the cusp of the U.S. presidential election. But it won’t be nearly the same exercise. Well-placed sources in both countries have told TIME that Washington has greatly reduced the scale of U.S. participation, slashing by more than two-thirds the number of American troops going to Israel and reducing both the number and potency of missile interception systems at the core of the joint exercise.

“Basically what the Americans are saying is, ‘We don’t trust you,’” a senior Israeli military official tells TIME.

The reductions are striking. Instead of the approximately 5,000 U.S. troops originally trumpeted for Austere Challenge 12, as the annual exercise is called, the Pentagon will send only 1,500 service members, and perhaps as few as 1,200. Patriot anti-missile systems will arrive in Israel as planned, but the crews to operate them will not. Instead of two Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense warships being dispatched to Israeli waters, the new plan is to send one, though even the

Treasury Shields Citigroup as Deletions Undercut Disclosure

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-25/u-s-treasury-shielding-of-citigroup-with-deletions-make-foia-meaningless.html

The cover up of fraud and embezzlement is actually considered and accepted a "Trade Secret" by the Treasury.
What I want to know is:
How long will it be before we see the evidence of vigilante justice being meted out, by the betrayed taxpayers, of the United States?
With every day's new attempt by the various government entities to sugar coat the wide spread racketeering that the investment banks subject this country to, the odds of such an act, are being brought clearly into focus.
It's only a matter of time, and that time, is clearly growing short.



The late Bloomberg News reporter Mark Pittman asked the U.S. Treasury in January 2009 to identify $301 billion of securities owned by Citigroup Inc. that the government had agreed to guarantee. He made the request on the grounds that taxpayers ought to know how their money was being used.

More than 20 months later, after saying at least five times that a response was imminent, Treasury officials responded with 560 pages of printed-out e-mails -- none of which Pittman requested. They were so heavily redacted that most of what’s left are everyday messages such as “Did you just try to call me?” and “Monday will be a busy day!”

None of the documents answers Pittman’s request for “records sufficient to show the names of the relevant securities” or the dates and terms of the guarantees. Even so, the U.S. government considers the collection of e-mails a partial response to an official request under the federal Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. The Justice Department in July cited an increase in such responses as evidence that “more information is being released” under the law.

The Mortgage Morass

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/opinion/15krugman.html?_r=1&src=twt&twt=NytimesKrugman

And where there is no clear property rights it's the governments job to create them.

But is it really the governments right to create property rights when contract law already exits?
Does contract law mean nothing in the United States?
The banks have no problem forcing you to hold your legal commitment to them.
They won't bargain with you if you need a better deal, they throw you out when you violate the terms of the agreement.
Does contract enforcement only count if your rich?
I don't think so.
The bank has violated the contract with the MBS investors, as well as the proper procedure for the documentation of it's legalities.
This time they have to clean up their own mess.
If it breaks them so be it.
It's called owning up to their own corporate responsibility.
They don't just get to run the world and change the laws retroactively that they choose to violate.

The accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom dispelled the myth of effective corporate governance. These days, the idea that our banks were well capitalized and supervised sounds like a sick joke. And now the mortgage mess is making nonsense of claims that we have effective contract enforcement — in fact, the question is whether our economy is governed by any kind of rule of law.

Now an awful truth is becoming apparent: In many cases, the documentation doesn’t exist. In the frenzy of the bubble, much home lending was undertaken by fly-by-night companies trying to generate as much volume as possible. These loans were sold off to mortgage “trusts,” which, in turn, sliced and diced them into mortgage-backed securities. The trusts were legally required to obtain and hold the mortgage notes that specified the borrowers’ obligations. But it’s now apparent that such niceties were frequently neglected. And this means that many of the foreclosures now taking place are, in fact, illegal.

This is very, very bad. For one thing, it’s a near certainty that significant numbers of borrowers are being defrauded — charged fees they don’t actually owe, declared in default when, by the terms of their loan agreements, they aren’t.

Beyond that, if trusts can’t produce proof that they actually own the mortgages against which they have been selling claims, the sponsors of these trusts will face lawsuits from investors who bought these claims — claims that are now, in many cases, worth only a small fraction of their face value.

And who are these sponsors? Major financial institutions — the same institutions supposedly rescued by government programs last year. So the mortgage mess threatens to produce another financial crisis.

The excesses of the bubble years have created a legal morass, in which property rights are ill defined because nobody has proper documentation. And where no clear property rights exist, it’s the government’s job to create them.

White House squelched release of BP oil spill estimates

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/10/06/101697/white-house-squelched-release.html

Why would the government need to keep you from knowing the truth?


Government scientists wanted to tell Americans early on how bad the BP oil spill could be, but the White House denied their request to make the worst-case scenarios public, a report by staff for the national panel investigating the spill said Wednesday.

The allegation by unnamed government officials, contained in a staff working paper released Wednesday by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, is certain to fuel controversy over why the government lowballed flow rates throughout much of the spill, even as independent scientists offered vastly higher — and ultimately more accurate — estimates.

The staff paper does not assign any motive to the administration’s moves but says the underestimating of flow rates “undermined public confidence in the federal government’s response” by creating the impression the government was either incompetent or untrustworthy.



Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/10/06/101697/white-house-squelched-release.html#ixzz11c1J5wy4

'Credible But Not Specific' Threat of New Terrorist Attack

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-credible-specific-threat-terrorist-attack/story?id=11747364

All because a "Suspected" German terrorist was going to Europe this summer. How convenient is it that he's being held in Afghanistan, where no one else can come into contact with him to ask him just exactly how this information was obtained from him. For having only 50 people Al Qaeda sure gets around don't they?

US and European officials said Tuesday they have detected a plot to carry out a major, coordinated series of commando-style terror attacks in Britain, France, Germany and possibly the United States.

A senior US official said that while there is a "credible" threat, no specific time or place is known. President Obama has been briefed about the threat, say senior US officials.

Reckless Europe beats reckless America at property bubbles

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100007092/reckless-europe-beats-reckless-america-at-property-bubbles/

I think Ambrose has underestimated the US inventory, or he just hasn't figured out that the banks have it well hid off their balance sheets, but that's beside the point. The point is how many countries that he points out who all coincidentally had the same type of bubble at the same time.
What a convenient coincidence, or is it? It would seem to me that the same type of banking model practice has been put to extensive use world wide, and world wide it blew up into their face.
Can you see the outline of a plot here, that was FED fortified?
Or else the world got stupid all at the same time.
The we didn't know excuse just doesn't wash anymore
This was an intentional take down.


Once and for all, let us nail the lie that the global credit crisis was basically a US sub-prime property bubble that went wrong, and that Europe was merely an innocent bystander hit by shrapnel.

This is the property bubble chart on Page 12 of the IMF’s latest report (Article IV) on France.

As you can see, France had the most extreme price rises from 1997 to 2009, followed by Spain and Italy some way below.

The Anglo-Saxons were more moderate. The US bubble was tame by comparison (measured by price: inventory overhang is another matter) and has largely corrected. This the American way, a short sharp purge. The Club Med bubbles have not corrected, by a long shot.

Goldman Sachs and the Obama government

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/46267

Who really runs America?

This essay shows the pervasive influence of Goldman Sachs and its units (like the Goldman-Robert Rubin-funded Hamilton Project embedded in the Brookings Institution) in the Obama government. These names are in addition to those compiled on an older such list and published here at FDL. In the future, I will combine the names here and those on the earlier article but I urge readers to look at the earlier list too (links below). Combined, this is the largest and most comprehensive list of such ties yet published.

For readability and clarity, I have NOT included many of the details and links that are found in the earlier article so as to make this one less repetitive and easier to read. So, if you want more documentation, please look at my earlier diary here at Firedoglake called "A List of Goldman Sachs People in the Obama Government: Names Attached To The Giant Squid’s Tentacles" published on April 27, 2010

As banks binged on risky mortgages, govt rewarded regulators with taxpayer-funded bonuses

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Govt-rewarded-bank-auditors-apf-3698670682.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=6&asset=&ccode=

Gee I wonder if we can demand a refund on the grounds of piss poor job preformance.
There must be a job opening for the Office of Thrift Supervision, because I don't see any being applied.

During the 2003-06 boom, the three agencies that supervise most U.S. banks -- the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency -- gave out at least $19 million in bonuses, records show.

Nearly all that money was spent recognizing "superior" performance. The largest share, more than $8.4 million, went to financial examiners, those employees and managers who scrutinize internal bank documents and sound the first alarms. Analysts, auditors, economists and criminal investigators also got awards

Foreclosure rates up by smallest amount in 4 years

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Foreclosure-rates-up-by-apf-1830270269.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=2&asset=&ccode=


The foreclosure crisis isn't over, but the pace of growth may finally be slowing down.

RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday that the number of U.S. households facing foreclosure in February grew 6 percent from the year-ago level, the smallest annual increase in four years.

More than 308,000 households, or one in every 418 homes, received a foreclosure-related notice, the Irvine, Calif.-based foreclosure listings company reported. That was down more than 2 percent from January

Still, fears remain about the hundreds of thousands of homeowners who are still being evaluated for help under loan modification programs. Many analysts say most of those borrowers will eventually lose their homes, sparking a new round of foreclosures later this year.

It's premature to declare victory just yet," said Rick Sharga, a RealtyTrac senior vice president for RealtyTrac. He did, however, allow that, "If this is the beginning of a slowdown in growth rates, that would be a good thing."
,
Banks repossessed nearly 79,000 homes last month, down 10 percent from January but still up 6 percent from February 2009.

The 2009 Financial Report Of The U.S. Government Is Out - America's Economic Goose Is Cooked

http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-7657-0-13-13--.html

That's an interesting little footnote there isn't it.
Who runs your government?

Lastly, one interesting tidbit in the 2009 Financial Report Of The U.S. Government can be found in footnote 2 on page vii of the report. In that footnote it tells us why the financial results for the Federal Reserve are not included in the report....

The Federal Reserve is an independent organization and not considered a part of the Federal reporting entity. As such, their financial results are not consolidated into the Government’s financial statements.

Very interesting.

Anyone have any comments?