by Stephen Lendman

From January 26, 2009 – January 25, 2013, he was Obama’s Treasury Secretary. He and Fed chairman Bernanke engineered crisis conditions.  Bankers profited hugely. They still do. Ordinary people were scammed. Geithner’s gone. His legacy speaks for itself. His background showed what to expect. He spent three years at Kissinger Associates.

From 1988 – 2002, he held various Treasury posts. He left to become Council on Foreign Relations international economics department senior fellow.  From 2001 – 2003, he was IMF Policy Development and Review director. He left to become New York Fed president. He partnered with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Bernanke. They planned the grandest of grand thefts. They implemented banker bailouts. They looted the federal treasury. They stuck taxpayers with the bill. They debased the currency. They transformed America into an unprecedented money making racket.

As New York Federal Reserve Bank president/vice chairman of the Fed Open Market Committee (FOMC), Geithner helped engineer crisis conditions. As Treasury Secretary, he exacerbated them. He turned them into a protracted mainstream depression. In November 2008, Michel Chossudovsky asked “Who are the Architects of Economic Collapse?”

The “financial meltdown (wasn’t) the result of a cyclical economic phenomenon.” It was willful government policy. It was implemented “through the Treasury and the US Federal Reserve Board.”

It was and remains “the most serious economic crisis in World history.” Banker bailouts exacerbated crisis conditions. They “trigger(ed) an unprecedented concentration of wealth.”

Economic and social inequality followed. Indebtedness “skyrocketed.” Everything that happened was planned. Robbing poor Peter to pay rich Paul became policy. Geithner and Bernanke bear full responsibility. They partnered in crime. Neil Barofsky was Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) watchdog. He served as SIGTARP (Special Inspector General for TARP).

In July 2009, he estimated the initial $700 billion bailout could balloon to $23.7 trillion. He said Obama administration secrecy concealed what’s essential to reveal. Trillions were stolen. From $9 to $14 trillion is known. Estimates range to multiples that amount. Corrupt bureaucrats and crooked bankers alone know how much.

Five major ones matter most: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo. They reflect more than too big to fail. What they say goes. They occupy Washington. They run America. They dictate policy.

Geithner and Bernanke are crime bosses. They’re complicit in grand theft. They abandoned Main Street for Wall Street. They know where the bodies are buried. They know the harm they caused. Bankers got bailouts. Ordinary people were lied to and scammed. Geithner and Bernanke exceeded the worst of Bush administration policies. Too big to fail became a license to steal.

They serve Wall Street giants. They engineering a financial coup d’etat. They created a fraudulent housing and debt bubble. They illegally shifted vast amounts of capital offshore. Privatization became piracy. It was used is as pretext to shift government assets to private investors. They did so at below-market prices.

At the same time, they moved private liabilities to government. They did it at no cost to private interests.

They’re waging war on middle America. They want social societies destroyed. They want banana republics replacing them. Labor is earmarked for destruction. Totalitarian neoliberal rule is planned.

Days before he left, he called his bailout scheme doomed to be unpopular. “You look like you’re giving aid to the arsonist,” he said.  He claims history will judge him more kindly. He turned reality on its head. He wrecked the economy. He claims he saved it. He didn’t avoid a Great Depression. He caused one.

He didn’t save millions of jobs. He destroyed them. He engineered fake financial reform. He capitulated to Wall Street. He avoided real change. He advanced global monetary control. He did it at the expense of fairness. He took advantage of a corrupted system. It’s crisis-prone, unstable, anarchic, ungovernable, and self-destructive. It repeats boom and bust cycles.

Crooks run monetary and fiscal policy. Recessions and depressions follow. Ordinary people are hurt most. Bankers and other financial giants profit enormously. Add money laundering to their profit centers.

Money power controls America. Policy facilitates grand theft. Too big to fail banks consolidate. They become larger and more powerful. They game the system for profit. They gamble with public money. They wage financial war on humanity. Massive fraud facilitates private gain. Reform is a figure of speech.

Last July, New York Fed documents implicated Geithner in rigging Libor (the London Interbank Offered Rate). It’s a fundamental rate-setting benchmark. It’s set daily between UK banks for overnight to 12 month durations.

It’s produced for ten currencies with 15 maturities. It represents the London market’s lowest cost of unsecured funding. It’s the primary global short-term rate benchmark. Last summer’s scandal reflected a cesspool of financial fraud. Manipulating the rate up lets banks steal countless billions in inflated loan costs.

Downward manipulation deprives states, communities, pension funds, ordinary investors, and retirees of similar amounts from fixed income holdings. As New York Fed president and Treasury Secretary, Geithner was complicit in fraud. His mandate was to facilitate it. He didn’t disappoint.

Instead of fixing a corrupted system, he advanced and exacerbated it. He turned crisis conditions into disaster. He and Bernanke share honors as public enemy number one.  They’re world class scoundrels. They gave away the store to Wall Street. They laid foundational plans for greater grand theft. In real democracies, they’d be in prison. Washington will have to explain why not.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour
http://www.dailycensored.com/tim-geithners-legacy-of-shame/

SOURCE: The NACLA Report /
Keane Bhatt
Manufacturing Contempt
There’s Something About Mary Anastasia O’Grady

O’Grady (Wikipedia)

Guest post by Peter Beattie:

So when my friend Keane asked me to write a guest post exposing the U.S. media’s horrid coverage on Latin America, I thought I’d help out by injecting a little humor into this space. But how, I wondered, can the subject of misreporting Latin America be funny? And then, like a banana creme pie to the face, Wall Street Journal op-ed writer and human editorial cartoon Mary Anastasia O’Grady came to mind.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady – Wikipedia

It’s been a while since I last read one of O’Grady’s editorials. The last time I had the misfortune, the blistering idiocy I encountered spurred me to read the two books she had mentioned and write dozens of pages about them. After that attempt to restore a bit of karmic balance to the universe that O’Grady had blithely upset, I relegated her to the back of my mind: arranged, according to degree of intellectual respectability, next to North Korean reports of Kim Jong-il’s sporting prowess.

And there O’Grady remained. The problem with her is that as soon as she starts writing in defense of some Latin American oligarchy or other, the blood of campesinos starts gushing out from between her lines—and the often hilarious lies she tells just aren’t enough to soak it all up. But her weekly attempts to whitewash bloodstained rightwingers in Latin America or explain why Fidel Castro is, like, the worst terrorist ever in the universe, just passed under my radar, no more noticeable than an official press release detailing how Jong-il’s reanimated corpse had scored a triple-double playing solo against the Lakers, or whatever. But then, I discovered that O’Grady recently bad-mouthed Chilean activist-heartthrob Camila Vallejo. My reaction was: “Aw hell no she didn’t!” (That’s not to say that I make all such decisions on this superficial basis.)
Camila Vallejo – islamiacu.blogspot.com

Vallejo: The Chilean firebrand remains anathema to counterrevolutionaries everywhere.

In the recent editorial assault she initiated against Vallejo, and by extension, the entire student movement in Chile, O’Grady is in typical form: completely unmoored to reality, yet arrogantly self-assured. The combination is just precious. She starts with the claim that “for decades, Chile has been intellectually swamped by leftist ideas.” Whoa! Really? Swamped? For how many decades, Mary? Just a few decades back, espousing leftist ideas in Chile might have led to your mutilated corpse being found in a swamp—perhaps that is the connection O’Grady was going for? Because back when her ideological soulmate Augusto Pinochet was running the country, espousing leftist ideas would subject you to the kinds of torture that Bret Easton Ellis would later write into the fevered imagination of the main character in his American Psycho, a misogynist psychopath serial killer and torturer. One might infer from O’Grady’s portrayal that Chilean Psycho and former dictator Pinochet was not only unsuccessful in reducing the spread of leftist ideas in Chile, but somehow he allowed for them to “swamp” Chile. Surprised by this, I checked the source that O’Grady cited and . . . oh wait—she didn’t cite anything. I guess I’ll just trust her.

One paragraph later, O’Grady writes, “Chileans aren’t interested in communism.” Gee, they’re swamped by leftist ideas . . . but they aren’t interested in communism. Chileans must be extremely interested in anarchism instead! But how does O’Grady know that Chileans are so enamored of Bakunin and Proudhon that they “aren’t interested in communism?” Well, it’s because upon returning home after a trip to Cuba during which she said a few nice words about Fidel Castro, Camila Vallejo “looked like a Castro stooge” to all Chileans, “and her popularity dipped.” I tried in vain to find a Chilean polling firm that tracks student activist Vallejo’s approval rating, until I realized that it was exclusively monitored by respected pollster Mary-Anastasia-O’Grady-Pulls-It-Out-of-Thin-Air, S.A. (traded on the Santiago Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol: BLSHT).

Rebuffed by the precipitous drop in her closely-tracked approval ratings, student activist Camila Vallejo apparently then decided, according to O’Grady, to turn instead to . . . student activism. As O’Grady explains, student activism “is a safer route for a rising demagogue” (and student activist). But while saying anything positive about world’s-worstest-terrorist-ever-in-history Fidel Castro is awful, protesting for free higher education is almost as bad, according to O’Grady. It’s all about the sickening “middle-class sense of entitlement.” Ew, yucky! The filthy rabble, what with its sense of entitlement to free, government-provided things like education, not to mention roads, sanitation systems, water and the like.

Even an analysis offered by the neoliberal magazine The Economist noted that Chile is the most unequal country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 31 rich countries. The magazine goes on to assert that Chile’s “education system has locked in social inequality rather than breaking it down”—nevertheless, O’Grady does not think that popular dissatisfaction with student loan debt and a constantly rising cost of tuition has anything to do with President Sebastian Piñera’s “dismal 29% popularity rating.” (This rating is computed by really-existing pollster Adimark, a competitor of Mary’s BLSHT.) No—according to O’Grady, what is holding Mr. Piñera back from wide popular acclaim is that he raised corporate taxes one time, and on another occasion he bowed to public pressure from environmentalists and canceled the construction of a coal-fired power plant. (Yes, coal—the fuel of the 21st century.) Fortunately for him, he doesn’t always do what “the people” want. O’Grady says that his “technocrats might be congratulated for holding free university education at bay considering the political pressures.” Bravo, Mr. Piñera—that’s the way you’ll get your popularity up! Just keep ignoring political pressures from like, democracy and stuff.

O’Grady – borev.net

So what is O’Grady’s prescription? She thinks that Piñera should become a champion of “liberty.” Yay, liberty! You mean, the liberty to get an education even if you (unlike O’Grady) were not born in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia? Oh hell no. She’s talking about economic liberty, the liberty to do whatever you want with the money you have, governed only by what O’Grady calls “the morality of the market.” Ah yes, blessed be The Market, and hallowed be its holy name! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go meet with my trafficker to discuss how much “economic liberty” I can get on the black market for selling some kidneys I bought from slumdwellers in Rio.

In the end, what does this Wall Street Journal columnist’s attack on Chile’s student movement mean? I’ll leave the last word to the defense. Camila, what do you make of the attacks on you by the likes of people such as Mary Anastasia O’Grady?

“They’re afraid, terrified,” said Vallejo recently to The New York Times. “But when the dogs snarl, that’s a sign that we’re advancing and advancing well.”

Peter Beattie is a lawyer and writer based in New York City.

By Patrick Martin, wsws.org

The divergence between the rising fortunes of the billionaires and the declining living standards of the masses is an essential feature of global capitalism. Nowhere is the contrast starker than in Spain, where Senor Ortega (see below), the founder of Inditex and its 1,600 Zara stores, increased his fortune by $22.2 billion in the course of 2012.

Amancio Ortega: Spain’s retail king, richer than Warren Buffet.

The world’s 100 richest people added $241 billion to their combined wealth in 2012, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The top 100 controlled an aggregate $1.9 trillion as calculated by the prices on world stock markets December 31, for an average of nearly $20 billion apiece.

If the top 100 were a separate state, their combined wealth would outstrip the Gross Domestic Product of all but eight countries. They would rank behind Italy, but ahead of India and Russia. Of course, being billionaire capitalists, the top 100 don’t actually produce anything. They own, and they reap the benefits of the labor of others.

The main driver in the increasing wealth of the super-rich was the rise in global stocks, up 13.2 percent worldwide, as measured by the MSCI World Index; up 13.4 percent in the US, as measured by the S&P 500. The Stoxx Europe 600 index is up 19.6 percent since June, when investors judged that the Greek debt crisis would not bring about the immediate collapse of the eurozone.

The United States accounted for nine of the top 12 billionaires and 37 of the top 100, with the combined holdings of American multibillionaires comprising half the total. Europe including Russia followed with 34, while Asia accounted for 14 and Latin America for 11.

The biggest single gainer among the top 100 was Amancio Ortega of Spain, the 76-year-old founder of the Inditex SA retailer, operator of the Zara clothing chain, whose fortune rose from $35.3 billion to $57.5 billion. This vaulted him into third place in the global index, passing American investor Warren Buffett, and trailing only the two who have headed the index for many years: Mexican banking, telecommunications and media mogul Carlos Slim, and Microsoft chief Bill Gates.

Ortega was part of a trend, as retail proprietors among the billionaires showed the biggest gains for the year, up 20 percent. Other retailers include IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, 86, the world’s fifth-richest man, at $42.9 billion; Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com; and the four direct heirs of Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart.

This increase was all the more remarkable since consumer spending has essentially stagnated since the 2008 Wall Street crash. The retail bosses are increasing their fortunes not so much because sales are rising, as because their smaller competitors are being ruined by the crisis, giving the biggest companies monopoly profits. Bezos, for example, added $6.9 billion to his net worth in 2012, in the wake of the collapse of rival Borders, which led to the elimination of 20,000 jobs.

The divergence between the rising fortunes of the billionaires and the declining living standards of the masses is an essential feature of global capitalism. Nowhere is the contrast starker than in Spain, where Senor Ortega, the founder of Inditex and its 1,600 Zara stores, increased his fortune by $22.2 billion in the course of 2012.

The capitalist crisis has brought disaster for Spanish working people. Household wealth has fallen by 8 percent on average, second only to depression-ravaged Greece among European countries, while both overall unemployment and youth unemployment set records at 26.6 percent and 56.5 percent, respectively. The right-wing government headed by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has announced a series of massive cuts in public spending, devastating public education and other essential services.

But while the Spanish working class suffers through the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression, one Spanish billionaire possesses a personal fortune greater than the total amount of the cuts announced by the Rajoy government. At $57.5 billion, Ortega’s wealth would have allowed him to carry out last month’s $52 billion bailout of the Spanish banking system, which effectively wrecked Spain’s national budget, and have billions left over.

In recent months, Spain has been the scene of social tragedies unheard of since the depths of Franco fascism, including suicides by victims of foreclosure, and unemployed workers and the elderly picking through garbage dumps for food.

When in the human body a small group of cells begins to multiply and grow without limit, at the expense of other cells and the organism as a whole, medical science has a specific term for the phenomenon: it is called a cancer. In the social organism of 21st century capitalism, the super-rich play that fundamentally pernicious and destructive role.

In the sphere of health care, the prescribed response is to destroy the cancer through a variety of treatments, in order to save the human being. In capitalist society, however, the growth of the super-rich is hailed as the source of all progress, the social cancer is dubbed the “job creator” and the entire political system bows down before it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick Martin is a senior political analyst with wsws.org, a socialist information resource affiliated with the 4th International.

Massive job losses in UK’s National Health Service
By Robert Stevens, wsws,org

Editors’ Note: It’s clear the British capitalists and their willful minions like the scummy Tony Blair are doing their best to make “socialism”—in this case the revered National Health Service, now 64 years old and still standing—look bad and eventually unacceptable. In that manner, sneakily, they create the conditions for a return to the rotten private healthcare model, as we have in the US.  Defunding —an old tactic—is utilized widely in the US to declaw consumer and environment laws. Public awareness and above all combativeness are critical to stem the constant tide of reaction issuing from the establishment.

The ongoing offensive against the National Health Service (NHS) has led to 28,500 health workers losing their jobs since the Conservative Party/Liberal Democrat coalition came to power in 2010.

This jobs massacre is set to escalate with another 32,700 jobs at risk, bringing job losses to a projected more than 61,000, up from 55,366 just six months ago. These cuts are being imposed as a result of the government’s unprecedented slashing of £20 billion (nearly 20 percent) from the NHS’s overall budget of £106 billion, to be completed by 2015.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has compiled figures drawn from data supplied by existing NHS trusts. According to the RCN, the 61,276 posts equate to the loss of 30 NHS jobs every day over the past 30 months. The job losses already made include more than 6,000 nursing jobs from a total of 312,000 nursing posts nationally.

The RCN report notes that 1,000 posts are being earmarked as “at risk” by NHS trusts every month. Job losses on this scale mean the “NHS is sleepwalking into a nursing crisis in England that is drawing closer as the size of the cuts increase.”

Commenting on the devastating planned job cuts at just one hospital, Rotherham General Hospital in South Yorkshire, Dr Peter Carter, the RCN’s General Secretary, told the Guardian, “What the hell is going on when the hospital trust in a town like Rotherham, with all its poverty, can say they’re going to cut 750 jobs? They can’t do that and still provide the same level of care.”

Other jobs losses include 675 in Blackpool, more than 400 in Greater Glasgow and Clyde, around the same number in Sandwell and West Birmingham, and 400 in the Greater Manchester primary care trust. A 23 percent cut in staffing numbers in South London is proposed up to 2015. In August and September nearly 700 jobs went in each month.

Newer figures of the size of the NHS workforce, released last week, show that were 7,134 fewer nurses working in the NHS in England in August than in 2010.

The cuts are a devastating refutation of the claims by both the previous Labour government, who initiated the £20 billion in “efficiency savings,” and the coalition who are implementing them. Both governments claimed that the cuts would not impact on frontline services, i.e., would not result in reductions in doctors and nurses jobs or the provision of health care to the population. The coalition included this pledge in its May 2010 Coalition Agreement. According to a recent Guardian article, former Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair is “said to have advised [Conservative Party Prime Minister David] Cameron to press ahead with the ‘reforms’ because, after the passage of the bill, opposition would die away and ‘it would be as if it was ever thus.’”

The huge levels of job cuts are already having a destructive impact on the NHS, with many hospitals unable to provide a basic level of care, let alone the required health provision. According to a recent annual report by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), one in six (16 percent) of the 250 hospital services inspected in 2011-12 did not meet the standard for having enough staff on duty to care properly for patients. The CCQ found that 1 in 10 patients are denied respect and dignity, 15 percent are not fed properly and 20 percent have their welfare and care neglected.

It comments that some services “have clearly struggled to make sure they had enough qualified and experienced staff on duty at all times, and then to make sure staff were properly trained and supervised – making it more difficult for staff to understand and focus on the needs of each and every patient.”

This deliberate running down of staffing and resources is reaping a terrible human cost. Last year 43 NHS hospital patients starved to death. Eleven people died of thirst, while 78 died from bedsores. A report earlier this year found that 1 in 3 nurses claimed they did not have enough time to help elderly patients eat or even go to the lavatory due to dwindling staffing levels.

While the jobs of thousands of fully qualified nurses are being shed, in 2011 the NHS in England employed more than 53,000 low paid and poorly trained “Healthcare Assistants.” This accounts for some 4 percent of the NHS workforce, with the numbers of healthcare assistants increasing by 6 percent each year.

More highly paid and better qualified nurses are being forced out, but now the jobs of these health care assistants are also threatened by the cuts being imposed. Nurses and health care assistants make up 34 percent of posts earmarked to be cut, the RCN study found.

As well as the huge numbers of nurses being forced to leave the state health sector, the number of new nurses being trained has fallen precipitously, down by 14 percent in just two years. In London, the fall in training places for adult nurses is even higher, down by 21 percent. This will lead to an even greater shortage of qualified NHS staff in the upcoming years.

Job cuts are wrecking all aspects of the provision of health care. The number of district nurses has fallen by one third since 2001 to just 8,000 today, with a report in March showing that almost 1,000 district nursing posts had gone in the previous 12 months. Ongoing cuts have led to a shortfall of 4,500 to 5,000 midwives, under conditions where half of the workforce are aged between 45 and 55.

The Health and Social Care Act, passed this year, lays the foundation for the ending of the state health care provision in the UK.

Previous UK governments operated on the basis of an enshrined “duty to provide” a comprehensive health service. The act now states that the government only has a “duty to arrange” health care. Under the act, private firms are able to take over vast swathes of public health provision and will further cut back services and health workers jobs in order to fulfill their central aim of turning big profits.

The exact number of job losses being carried out and proposed by NHS trusts is always an underestimation, as the government does not monitor the number centrally. However, as more and more NHS contracts are handed over to private firms such as Care UK, Circle and Virgin Health, job losses will become virtually impossible to quantify. Private firms are not required to submit such data to the NHS Information Centre. Their workforce plans are also unavailable for public scrutiny.

The loss of many more experienced, qualified nurses and other health care professionals will take place through the ending of the NHS Direct service and its re-organisation into a new “NHS 111” service. NHS Direct is a 24-hour telephone health advice and information service provided by the NHS for residents and visitors in England. According to the Unison public sector trade union, the ending of NHS Direct will result in 24 out of 30 call centres closing, with its workforce cut in by half from 1,500 to 750.

//

At almost 6ft 5-in, Bill O’Reilly could easily elicit Full Metal Jacket‘s DI’s quip, “I didn’t know shit could be stacked that high.”

Come to think of it, to call this blight on American communications a pile of excrement is almost to give excrement itself a bad name. Maddox called him, appropriately, “a giant self-collapsing vortex of hypocrisy.” He was being kind.  Read the rest of his note of appreciation, it’s pretty candid.

Anyway, here he is, this pretentious, blubbering, disgusting buffoon and shameless bully proving his worth to his masters, like a good running dog that he is, this time silencing Ron Paul who, whatever differences we may have with him due to his extreme libertarian views, is neither dishonest nor dumb about America’s foreign policy. Note that O’Reilly cuts Paul off precisely after he’s been saying a few hard truths about US foreign policy…and is on the brink of explaining why “the world hates us.” Heh. Fat chance. Some other time, Ron.

By the way, just for foisting the likes of Bill O’Reilly on the American consciousness, for constantly instilling obscurantism, hatred and enormous lies,  media baron Rupert Murdoch deserves to be given hard life with no parole, but only after a generous public flogging.  And he’s being lucky because the punishment hardly fits the crime.—Sean Lenihan

//