1. “The most common conspiracy theory held by firefighters is that the Twin Towers—as well as a third building, 7 World Trade Center—collapsed not because planes crashed into them but due to a “controlled demolition.” On Sept. 11, an NBC reporter quoted New York Fire Department Chief of Safety Albert Turi as saying he believed there were explosives planted in one of the towers. After the attacks, the New York Fire Department interviewed firefighters to create an oral history of 9/11. These tapes—which were not released until 2005—contain numerous references to explosions heard just before the buildings fell. Firefighters for 9/11 Truth, a Web site started in 2008, says the government destroyed evidence that 7 World Trade Center was blown up and hosts a petition asking Congress to look into the possibility that “exotic accelerants” destroyed the buildings. (The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which investigated the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, concluded that “blast events inside the building did not occur and found no evidence supporting the existence of a blast event.”)
Another common theory is that federal agents found three of the planes’ four black boxes and then hid or destroyed them because they contained incriminating evidence. Nicholas DeMasi, a firefighter formerly with Engine Company 261 in Queens, was quoted in a 2003 book saying that he was there when federal agents made the discovery. Another first responder corroborated his account. Although his allegations are contradicted by The 9/11 Commission Report, which says the boxes were never found, many truthers choose to believe there was a cover-up.
Do other professions marshal their own expertise to poke holes in the official story? Absolutely. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth point to the physics of the towers’ collapse—its “free fall” pace, the “lateral ejection” of steel, the “mid-air pulverization of concrete”—as evidence that they could not have fallen exclusively because of the planes’ impact. Pilots for 9/11 Truth have their own set of theories that focus on the planes’ black boxes and flight paths, arguing, for example, that the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 would have had to perform an extremely difficult aerial maneuver to hit the Pentagon where they did. Lawyers for 9/11 Truth conclude that the 9/11 Commission investigation was inadequate. There’s also Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice (not to be confused with its rival, Scholars for 9/11 Truth), which tackles scientific aspects of the towers’ collapse, such as the alleged residue of explosive materials like thermate in the dust at Ground Zero.
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Guys, check out some of the comments on the slate site. As far as “psychological comfort,” I actually would *rather* believe that these doubters are ALL paid shills. That would make sense in terms of the logical fallacies they use to get around inconvenient facts. What really gets to me is that probably at least 60% of those people are actually just ordinary citizens, who find “inside job” to be so painful/preposterous, that they will grasp onto ANY red herring in order to cling to their position. It’s frustrating enough to contribute to the “9/11 truth burnout” syndrome articulated recently by Jules.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/19804
2. “The Suicide of the West
Who killed our economy — “foreigners,” or Washington, Wall Street, and the War Party?
I had to laugh when I saw the headline blaring from one end of the Huffington Post to the other: “Pentagon Preps For Global Economic Warfare“!
Yikes! Man the battlements! Deploy the credit cards! Unleash the default credit swaps! And for the love of God speed up those printing presses at the Federal Reserve!
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The whole premise of this dubious exercise is that our problems aren’t caused by anything or anyone here on the home front — no, no, it’s those horrible foreigners, with their cheap labor costs and spicy foods, who are responsible for the economic plight of our nation!
Oh, I can hear it now, in calls for protectionist measures, and lame justifications for government subsidies to favored businesses: “The Europeans do it!” It won’t be long before we hear accusations that the Enemy of the Month is harboring economic weapons of mass destruction aimed directly at the American people.
As absurd as such a premise is — the idea of the world economy as a battle zone, rather than an interlocking grid of economic self-interest, is a primitive throwback to pre-industrial economics — it is perfectly suited to the modern welfare-warfare state, and hardly surprising that the Pentagon is now spending our tax dollars on such anti-market, autarchist nonsense. They’re keen to dissolve the economic bonds that bind us all, and treat the world market as if it were a battle zone — and they call us “isolationists”!
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Any attempt to blame “foreigners” for our economic ills is letting the Money Power in the US off the hook, and diverting the righteous anger of the American people to a convenient overseas scapegoat. If we’re looking to blame someone for the impending bankruptcy of the United States of America, then the search for the culprits ought to begin on our own shores — and you don’t have to be a modern day Sherlock Holmes to know exactly where to find them. The economic saboteurs aren’t in Beijing or Moscow — they’re in Washington, D.C. “
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/04/09/the-suicide-of-the-west/
3. “Much of the media attention this week on President Obama’s new military budget has put forward a false narrative wherein Obama is somehow taking his socialist/pacifist sledgehammer to the Pentagon’s war machine and blasting it to smithereens. Republicans have charged that Obama is endangering the country’s security, while the Democratic leadership has hailed it as the dawn of a new era in responsible spending priorities. Part of this narrative portrays Defense Secretary Robert Gates as standing up to the war industry, particularly military contractors.
The reality is that all of this is false.
Here is an undeniable fact: Obama is substantially increasing US military spending, by at least $21 billion from Bush-era levels, including a significant ratcheting up of Afghanistan war spending, as well as more money for unmanned attack drones, which are increasingly being used in attacks on Pakistan. (David Swanson over at AfterDowningStreet.org does a great job of breaking down some of the media coverage of this issue across the political spectrum).“
4. “Wells Fargo’s Turnaround: A Mirage?
Wells Fargo is projecting a $3 billion dollar first quarter profit.
But since the Fed is ordering banks to keep the results of the “stress tests” secret, and given the suspension of mark-to-market accounting, can we be sure that Wells has really turned a corner?
Well, Wells was effectively insolvent a short time ago, drowning in toxic derivatives debt. And Geithner’s toxic asset plan is a charade, merely shuffling bad debt between the biggest derivatives holders. So its hard to see how Wells could have turned around so quickly.
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I wish that Wells’ turnaround was for real. But given that the Fed and Treasury are suppressing the results of the phony stress tests (if you don’t know that they are phony, see this and this), given that mark-to-market has been suspended, given that Wells was one of the banks previously judged insolvent because of its huge derivatives holdings, and given that Wells appears to have very little reserves, I’d be a little skeptical of its amazing turn around.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/wells-fargos-turnaround-mirage.html
5. “Former Head of Structured Products at UBS: Game Theory Exposes Toxic Asset Plan As Fraudulent“
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/former-head-of-structured-products-at.html
6. “Solution” to the Financial Crisis: Game Theory Exposes PPIP As Fraudulent
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Why is this particularly interesting? Many commentators have pointed out the obvious: that the PPIP is another welfare program for the big banks, funded by the taxpayer.
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The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin pressed the FDIC’s Shelia Bair on this point and she apparently claimed that the accountants “signed off on no net losses.” But we are now in zero sum territory. There are only the assets, the banks, and the government. The windfall to the banks is offset by the expected loss to the government. Convincing one’s accountants that a transaction with a high expected loss has no expected loss is fraud.
Here is where the over-engineered PPIP begins to raise troubling questions. Recall that in the initial announcement of the PPIP in March, Geithner made much of the auction process that would be used to price the assets. This auction, where five of the top asset managers in the country would bid against each other, was meant to ensure the fairness of the process.
In his Wall Street Journal editorial announcing the program on May 23, Geithner assured us that “private-sector purchasers will establish the value of the loans and securities purchased under the program, which will protect the government from overpaying for these assets.”
One suspects that the accountants for the FDIC were convinced that the loans would be purchased at a fair price because they would be sold through an auction mechanism. But if every bidder in the auction has the same incentive to overbid, it is no longer a fair auction. A naïve accountant might equate “auction” with “fair” and ignore the distortion built in to the process.
Jeffrey Sachs did a fine job pointing out that the incentive is actually to massively overbid, and perhaps even collude. Paul Krugman pointed out that the plan is a “disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.” Josef Stiglitz commented that Geithner’s plan “only works if the taxpayer loses big time.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13134
7. “Given that Obama is doing exactly what Bush did in this area, Gibbs’ claim that Obama “still thinks that the Bush administration abused the state secrets privilege” must be one of the most incoherent and intellectually dishonest claims to come from the White House since the Inauguration — either that, or Obama believes that Bush abused the privilege and that he, Obama, is also doing so.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
