Obama Praises CIA Agents Killed in Afghanistan

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
January 1, 2010

Pakistan’s Taliban has claimed responsibility for a deadly suicide bombing at a CIA camp in the eastern Khost province of Afghanistan. On Wednesday, a suicide bomber waltzed into the CIA’s Camp Chaman and killed himself and eight CIA employees. Two of the agents were contractors employed by Xe, formerly known as Blackwater.

The CIA has promised the attack “will be avenged through aggressive counterterror operations,” according to the New York Daily News. “People at Langley are galvanized.”

On Thursday, CIA drones flew into Pakistan and hit targets in warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani’s territory. Haqqani was supported by the CIA back in the 1980s when the CIA organized and funded the Afghan Mujihadeen in a successful effort to force the Soviets out of the country. After “everything changed” on 9/11, Haqqani refused CIA overtures and sided with his old pal, the late CIA asset Osama bin Laden.

In the past year, CIA drones have killed Haqqani’s relatives and it is speculated he is responsible for the deadly attack on the CIA operation at Camp Chapman, a former Soviet airbase. The base is named after Green Beret Nathan Chapman, who was fighting alongside the CIA when he became the first U.S. soldier killed in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

Following the attack, Obama called the dead CIA agents “brave Americans [who] were part of a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their fellow citizens, and for our way of life.”

The United States would not be able to maintain the freedom and security that we cherish without decades of service from the dedicated men and women of the CIA. You have helped us understand the world as it is, and taken great risks to protect our country. You have served in the shadows, and your sacrifices have sometimes been unknown to your fellow citizens, your friends, and even your families.

The “service” Obama spoke of has resulted in numerous brutal dictatorships and murderous covert operations around the world — from the coup against the democratically elected leader of Iran to sponsoring the overthrow of the democratically elected leader Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and beyond. The CIA has sponsored coups and mass murder campaigns in the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Chile, Cambodia, El Salvador, and many other countries.

Under the direction of future CIA director and Wall Street lawyer Allen Dulles, the OSS worked closely with the Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen and his intelligence organization after the Second World War. “Gehlen was far from the only Nazi war criminal employed by the CIA. Others included Klaus Barbie (”the Butcher of Lyon”), Otto von Bolschwing (the Holocaust mastermind who worked closely with Eichmann) and, SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny (a great favorite of Hitler’s). There’s even evidence that Martin Bormann, Hitler’s second-in-command at the end of the war, faked his own death and escaped to Latin America, where he worked with CIA-linked groups,” writes Mark Zepezauer in his classic, The CIAs Greatest Hits.

The CIA worked with fascists in Italy and organized a secret paramilitary army with hidden stockpiles of weapons and explosives. Called Operation Gladio, the pretense of this operation was to prevent communism in Europe (i.e., subverting democratic elections). Gladio was often directed by former SS officers. “Leftist organizations like the Red Brigades were infiltrated, financed and / or created, and the resulting acts of terrorism, like the assassination of Italy’s premier in 1978 and the bombing of the railway station in Bologna in 1980,” writes Zepezauer. The existence of Gladio was confirmed by none other than Giulio Andreotti, the Italian PM.

John Stockwell: How 6 million People Were killed in CIA secret wars against third world countries.

The CIA is the world’s premier drug cartel. Beginning at the end of the Second World War, it worked closely with the Corsican Mafia, at the time one of the biggest heroin traffickers in the world. The CIA’s involvement in the global drug business — conducted in the name of bankers and Wall Street (the CIA was the brainchild of Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner) — is a well-documented fact. A direct link between cocaine trafficking and the CIA mercenary army the Contras was established by senator John Kerry’s commission in 1989. “In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA,” Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit, has stated. The agency established drug operations in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan.

Not only did the CIA build-up the illegal drug business, it also created crooked banks to launder its profits, specifically the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. “Throughout its entire history, the CIA has set up an elaborate shell game of ‘proprietaries’ (front companies), money-laundering operations and off-the-books projects so complex that no outsider — and few insiders — could ever keep track of them. BCCI was neither the first nor the last of these,” explains Zepezauer. BCCI was not only involved in laundering drug money, but also financing gun running, bribing government officials and influencing policies around the world, activity revealed during a Senate committee in October, 1991.

Deputy Director Frank Wisner proudly referred to the CIA’s worldwide propaganda machine as “the mighty Wurlitzer.” The CIA owns countless newspapers and magazines world-over. Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein revealed that over 400 US journalists had been employed by the CIA. These ranged from freelancers who were paid for regular debriefings, to actual CIA officers who worked under deep cover. Nearly every major US news organization has had operatives on the payroll, usually with the cooperation of top management, under the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird. Wisner recruited Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, to run the project within the industry (this is why I call The Washington Post the CIA’s favorite newspaper).

In regard to Afghanistan and the recent suicide bombing that killed eight CIA employees, this is yet another example of legendary blowback the agency on occasion experiences as a result of its skullduggery and consistent premeditated violence. The CIA recruited, armed, funded, and directed the Afghan Mujahideen, so it is fair to say this latest violence was self-inflicted. “Besides tossing billions of dollars into the conflict, the CIA transferred sensitive weapons technology to fanatical Muslim extremists, with consequences that will haunt the US for years to come,” writes Zepezauer.

The CIA groomed Osama bin Laden and other Mujahideen warriors with the enthusiastic participation of Pakistan’s ISI, or Inter-Services Intelligence. Bin Laden’s rag-tag group would later be called “al-Qaeda” by the government and the Mockingbird corporate media.

Working with the ISI, the CIA also created the Taliban. These medieval fanatics were the favored sons of Washington and multinational corporations until their over-the-top fanaticism conflicted with corporate designs in the region.

Obama’s disgusting characterization of CIA agents recruiting cutthroats and patsies in U.S.-occupied Afghanistan as patriots is truly Orwellian. It should come as no surprise that “turncoats” (as the corporate media calls them) would attack their former collaborators and paymasters, especially considering the CIA’s penchant for turning on its own and recruiting psychopaths and mental deficients.

Research related links

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4. Obama increases troops in Afghanistan by 40%
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6. Obama Warns Soldiers Coming Days in Afghanistan Will Be “Bloody”
7. False Right-Left Façade Slips: Coulter Praises Obama
8. Obama Says No “Precipitous Drawdown” of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan
9. US killed 97 Afghan civilians in two days
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Common Sense 2009

Larry Flynt
The Huffington Post
August 20, 2009

The American government — which we once called our government — has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “economic royalists,” who choose our elected officials — indeed, our very form of government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance to the tune of their corporate masters. In America, corporations do not control the government. In America, corporations are the government.

	Here’s what Rockefeller said in 1994 at a U.N. dinner: “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nations will accept the New World Order.” They’re gaming us. Our country has been stolen from us.

This was never more obvious than with the Wall Street bailout, whereby the very corporations that caused the collapse of our economy were rewarded with taxpayer dollars. So arrogant, so smug were they that, without a moment’s hesitation, they took our money — yours and mine — to pay their executives multimillion-dollar bonuses, something they continue doing to this very day. They have no shame. They don’t care what you and I think about them. Henry Kissinger refers to us as “useless eaters.”

But, you say, we have elected a candidate of change. To which I respond: Do these words of President Obama sound like change?

“A culture of irresponsibility took root, from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street.”

“And a regulatory regime basically crafted in the wake of a 20th-century economic crisis — the Great Depression — was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st-century global economy.”

This is nonsense.

The reason Wall Street was able to game the system the way it did — knowing that they would become rich at the expense of the American people (oh, yes, they most certainly knew that) — was because the financial elite had bribed our legislators to roll back the protections enacted after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Congress gutted the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial lending banks from investment banks, and passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed for self-regulation with no oversight. The Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently revised its rules to allow for even less oversight — and we’ve all seen how well that worked out. To date, no serious legislation has been offered by the Obama administration to correct these problems.

Instead, Obama wants to increase the oversight power of the Federal Reserve. Never mind that it already had significant oversight power before our most recent economic meltdown, yet failed to take action. Never mind that the Fed is not a government agency but a cartel of private bankers that cannot be held accountable by Washington. Whatever the Fed does with these supposed new oversight powers will be behind closed doors.

Consider what multibillionaire banker David Rockefeller wrote in his 2002 memoirs:Obama’s failure to act sends one message loud and clear: He cannot stand up to the powerful Wall Street interests that supplied the bulk of his campaign money for the 2008 election. Nor, for that matter, can Congress, for much the same reason.

“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

Read Rockefeller’s words again. He actually admits to working against the “best interests of the United States.”

Need more? Here’s what Rockefeller said in 1994 at a U.N. dinner: “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nations will accept the New World Order.” They’re gaming us. Our country has been stolen from us.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone, notes that esteemed economist John Kenneth Galbraith laid the 1929 crash at the feet of banking giant Goldman Sachs. Taibbi goes on to say that Goldman Sachs has been behind every other economic downturn as well, including the most recent one. As if that wasn’t enough, Goldman Sachs even had a hand in pushing gas prices up to $4 a gallon.

The problem with bankers is longstanding. Here’s what one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, had to say about them:

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, and then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their father’s conquered.”

We all know that the first American Revolution officially began in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. Less well known is that the single strongest motivating factor for revolution was the colonists’ attempt to free themselves from the Bank of England. But how many of you know about the second revolution, referred to by historians as Shays’ Rebellion? It took place in 1786-87, and once again the banks were the cause. This time they were putting the screws to America’s farmers.

Daniel Shays was a farmer in western Massachusetts. Like many other farmers of the day, he was being driven into bankruptcy by the banks’ predatory lending practices. (Sound familiar?) Rallying other farmers to his side, Shays led his rebels in an attack on the courts and the local armory. The rebellion itself failed, but a message had been sent: The bankers (and the politicians who supported them) ultimately backed off. As Thomas Jefferson famously quipped in regard to the insurrection: “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Perhaps it’s time to consider that option once again.

I’m calling for a national strike, one designed to close the country down for a day. The intent? Real campaign-finance reform and strong restrictions on lobbying. Because nothing will change until we take corporate money out of politics. Nothing will improve until our politicians are once again answerable to their constituents, not the rich and powerful.

Let’s set a date. No one goes to work. No one buys anything. And if that isn’t effective — if the politicians ignore us — we do it again. And again. And again.

The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class. If we come together on this single issue, everything else will resolve itself. It’s time we took back our government from those who would make us their slaves.

Banksters on The War Path

How Wall Street Is Fighting Back and Winning Their Fight For The Status Quo by Danny Schechter

Global Research, May 2, 2009 New York, New York: Dick Durbin knows his way around the Senate. He’s been there a long time, long enough to know how things really work. Over the years, the man from Illinois has come to realize that it’s not the elected officials who are in charge. Last week, he said it was the bankers “who run the place” acknowledging that Senators may be in office, but not necessarily in power.   Usually, the people who pull the strings stay in the background to avoid too much public exposure. They rely on lobbyists to do their bidding. They prefer to work in the shadows. They may back certain politicians, but coming from a world of credit default swaps as they do, they hedge their bets by putting money on all the horses.   They have so much influence because they have been reengineering the American economy for decades through “financialization,” a process by which banks and financial institutions gradually came to dominate economic and political decision-making.  Kevin Phillips, a one time Reagan advisor and commentator,  says our deepest problem is “the ascendancy of finance in national policymaking (as well as in the gross domestic product, and the complicity of politicians who really don’t want to talk about it.” Curiously, despite the journalists like Bill Moyers and Arianna Huffinton who have been blowing the whistle on the role of the “banksters” in our political life, criticizing the Republicans and Democrats who deregulated the financial system, this issue seems to float above the heads of most of the public, much of the press, and even the activist community more drawn to punishing the torture inflicted on a few by a former Administration than the economic duress being imposed on the majority of Americans by a minority of the superrich.    Demonstrators are still drawn more to the White House than the banks that have proliferated on every corner of the country.   Last week, a Zogby poll found that a majority of the public believes the press made things worse by reporting on the economic collapse. Not only is that blaming the messenger, it also overlooks the fact that much of the media was complicit in the crisis by not covering  the forces that caused the collapse when it might have done some good.   Exacerbating the problem is that the Obama Administration has, in Robert Scheer’s words, enlisted “the very experts who helped trigger the crisis to try to fix it.”   “Obama,” he writes “seems depressingly reliant on the same-old, same old cast of self-serving house wreckers who act as if government exists for the sole benefit of corporations and executives.”   The team of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers has been carrying Wall Street’s water as Robert Rubin did before them. No wonder that Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder told the Street last February, “We’re not going to go on any witch hunts.”   That was before we learned that Wall Street forced US regulators to delay the release of stress test results for the country's 19 biggest banks until next Thursday, because some of the lenders objected to government demands that they needed to raise more capital. They are trying to rig the results.   That was also before the public learned of the obscenely huge bonuses the firms benefiting from the TARP bailout were shelling out to their executives. That was before, we saw how the bankers with help from Democrats, including new convert Arlen Spector, vited managed to kill a bill to help homeowners stop foreclosures. “The Senate on Thursday rejected an effort to stave off home foreclosures by a vote of 51 to 45. It was an overwhelming defeat, with the bill’s backers falling 15 votes short — a quarter of the Democratic caucus — of the 60 needed to cut off debate and move to a final vote. Across the United States, the measure is estimated to have been able to prevent 1.69 million foreclosures and preserve $300 billion in home equity.”    Commented the Center for Responsible Lending, “Instead of defending ordinary Americans, the majority of Senators went with the banks.  Yes, the same banks who have benefited so richly from the TARP bailout.   (There was one small victory with the House approving a bill to protect consumers from credit card abuses. Its not clear if the Senate will pass it too. “It's one step forward and one step backward," said Travis Plunkett, of the Consumer Federation of America. "Congress is moving in fits and starts to re-regulate the financial services industry and the banking lobby still has tremendous clout.”   “Tremendous clout” is an understatement.”   In this past week, we also saw how a few hedge funds undermined the attempt to save Chrysler from bankruptcy by holding out for more money even after the unions and big banks agreed to compromise to save jobs. The President was furious but apparently powerless: “A group of investment firms and hedge funds decided to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout,” Obama said. ”They were hoping that everybody else would make sacrifices, and they would have to make none. Some demanded twice the return that other lenders were getting.” Explains the blog Naked Capitalism, “the banksters are eagerly, shamelessly, and openly harvesting their pound of flesh from financially stressed average taxpayers, and setting off a chain reaction in the auto industry which has the very real risk of creating even larger scale unemployment than the economy already faces. It’s reckless, utterly irresponsible, over-the-top greed.” Will they be allowed to get away with it? A “captured” Congress is doing their bidding. There is no doubt that class antagonism is stewing,  says the editor of the blog. He expressed a fear of a reaction that will go way beyond flag-wavng tea parties. “… I am concerned this behavior is setting the stage for another sort of extra-legal measure: violence. I have been amazed at the vitriol directed at the banking classes. Suggestions for punishment have included the guillotine (frequent), hanging, pitchforks, even burning at the stake. Tar and feathering appears inadequate, and stoning hasn’t yet surfaced as an idea. And mind you, my readership is educated, older, typically well-off (even if less so than three years ago). The fuse has to be shorter where the suffering is more acute.” One is reminded of the title of that movie, “There will be blood.” Rather than show contrition or compassion for its own victims, Wall Street is hoping to jack up its salaries and bonuses to pre-2007 levels. The men at the top are oblivious to the pain they helped cause. And so far, they’ve only occasionally been scolded by politicians that have mostly enabled, coddled, bankrolled, funded, rewarded, and genuflected to their power. Wall Street’s behavior may be predictable but how can we account for the silence of so many organizations that should be out there organizing the outrage that is building? Knock, Knock, Obama supporters, bloggers, trade unionists, out of work workers and fellow Americans. Will we fight back or roll over? Pitchforks anyone?

Pentagon preps for economic warfare

By EAMON JAVERS | 4/9/09 4:18 AM EDT

The Pentagon sponsors a war game that examines how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy. Photo: AP The Pentagon sponsored a first-of-its-kind war game last month focused not on bullets and bombs — but on how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy, a scenario made all the more real by the global financial crisis.  The two-day event near Ft. Meade, Maryland, had all the earmarks of a regular war game. Participants sat along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data, according to the accounts of three participants.  “It felt a little bit like Dr. Strangelove,” one person who was at the previously undisclosed exercise told POLITICO.  But instead of military brass plotting America’s defense, it was hedge-fund managers, professors and executives from at least one investment bank, UBS – all invited by the Pentagon to play out global scenarios that could shift the balance of power between the world’s leading economies.  Their efforts were carefully observed and recorded by uniformed military officers and members of the U.S. intelligence community.  In the end, there was sobering news for the United States – the savviest economic warrior proved to be China, a growing economic power that strengthened its position the most over the course of the war-game.  The United States remained the world’s largest economy but significantly degraded its standing in a series of financial skirmishes with Russia, participants said. The war game demonstrated that in post-Sept. 11 world, the Pentagon is thinking about a wide range of threats to America’s position in the world, including some that could come far from the battlefield.  And it’s hardly science fiction. China recently shook the value of the dollar in global currency markets merely by questioning whether the recession put China’s $1 trillion in U.S. government bond holdings at risk – forcing President Barack Obama to issue a hasty defense of the dollar.  “This was an example of the changing nature of conflict,” said Paul Bracken, a professor and expert in private equity at the Yale School of Management who attended the sessions. “The purpose of the game is not really to predict the future, but to discover the issues you need to be thinking about.”  Several participants said the event had been in the planning stages well before the stock market crash of September, but the real-world market calamity was on the minds of many in the room. “It loomed large over what everybody was doing,” said Bracken.  “Why would the military care about global capital flows at all?” asked another person who was there. “Because as the global financial crisis plays out, there could be real world consequences, including failed states. We’ve already seen riots in the United Kingdom and the Balkans.”  The Office of the Secretary of Defense hosted the two-day event March 17 and 18 at the Warfare Analysis Laboratory in Laurel, MD. That facility, run by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, typically hosts military officials planning intricate combat scenarios.  A spokesperson for the Applied Physics Laboratory confirmed the event, and said it was the first purely economic war game the facility has hosted. All three participants said they had been told it was the first time the Pentagon hosted a purely economic war game. A Pentagon spokesman would say only that he was not aware of the exercise. Read full article

Goldman Sachs Hires Law Firm to Shut Down Blogger

James Quinn
Telegraph
April 11, 2009

The bank has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website.

Florida-based Mr Morgan began a blog entitled "Facts about Goldman Sachs" – the web address for which isgoldmansachs666.com – just a few weeks ago.

In that time Mr Morgan, a registered investment adviser, has added a number of posts to the site, including one entitled "Does Goldman Sachs run the world?". However, many of the posts relate to other Wall Street firms and issues.

According to Chadbourne & Parke’s letter, dated April 8, the bank is rattled because the site "violates several of Goldman Sachs’ intellectual property rights" and also "implies a relationship" with the bank itself.

Unsurprisingly for a man who has conjoined the bank’s name with the Number of the Beast – although he jokingly points out that 666 was also the S&P500’s bear-market bottom – Mr Morgan is unlikely to go down without a fight.

Read entire article

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The Real AIG Conspiracy

by Prof. Michael Hudson

Global Research, March 18, 2009 It may seem odd, but the public outrage against $135 million in AIG bonuses is a godsend to Wall Street, AID scoundrels included. How can the media be so preoccupied with the discovery that there is self-serving greed to be found in the financial sector? Every TV channel and every newspaper in the country, from right to left, have made these bonuses the lead story over the past two days. What is wrong with this picture? Is there not something over-inflated about the outrage led most vociferously by Senator Charles Schumer and Rep. Barney Frank, the two leading shills for the bank giveaways over the past year? And does Pres. Obama perhaps find it convenient that finally, at long last, he has been able to criticize something that he believes Wall Street has done wrong? Even the Wall Street Journal has gotten into the act. The government’s takeover of AIG, it pointed out, "uses the firm as a conduit to bail out other institutions." So much more greed is involved than just that of AIG employees. The firm owed much more to other players – abroad as well as on Wall Street – than the assets it had. That is what drove it to insolvency. And popular opposition has been rising to how Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain could have banded together to support the bailout that, in retrospect, amounts to trillions and trillions of dollars thrown "down the drain." Not really down the drain at all, of course – but given to financial speculators on the winning "smart" side of AIG’s bad financial gambles. "The Washington crowd wants to focus on bonuses because it aims public anger on private actors," it accused in a March 17 editorial. But instead of explaining that the shift is away from Wall Street grabbers of a thousand times the amount of bonuses being contested, it blames its usual all-purpose bete noire: Congress. Where the right and left differ is just whom the public should be directing its anger at! Here’s the problem with all the hoopla over the $135 million in AIG bonuses: This sum is only less than 0.1% – one thousandth – of the $183 BILLION that the U.S. Treasury gave to AIG as a "pass-through" to its counterparties. This sum, over a thousand times the magnitude of the bonuses on which public attention is conveniently being focused by Wall Street promoters, did not stay with AIG. For over six months, the public media and Congressmen have been trying to find out just where this money DID go. Bloomberg brought a lawsuit to find out. Only to be met with a wall of silence. Until finally, on Sunday night, March 15, the government finally released the details. They were indeed highly embarrassing. The largest recipient turned out to be just what earlier financial reporters had said was rumored: Mr. Paulson’s own firm, Goldman Sachs, headed the list. It was owed $13 billion in counterparty claims. So here’s the picture that’s emerging. Last September, Treasury Secretary Paulson, from Goldman Sachs, drew up a terse 3-page memo outlining his bailout proposal. The plan specified that whatever he and other Treasury officials did (thus including his subordinates, also from Goldman Sachs), could not be challenged legally or undone, much less prosecuted. This condition enraged Congress, which rejected the bailout in its first incarnation. It now looks as if Mr. Paulson had good reason to put in a fatal legal clause blocking any clawback of funds given by the Treasury to AIG’s counterparties. This is where public outrage should be focused. Instead, the leading Congressional shepherds of the bailout legislation – along with Mr. Obama, who came out in his final, Friday night presidential debate with Sen. McCain strongly in favor of the bailout in Mr. Paulson’s awful "short" version – have been posing as conspicuously as possible for the media to cover a deflected target – the AIG executives receiving bonuses, not the company’s counterparties. There are two questions that one always must ask when a political operation is being launched. First, qui bono? Who benefits? And second, why now? In my experience, timing almost always is the key to figuring out the dynamics at work. Regarding qui bono, what does Sen. Schumer, Rep. Frank, Pres. Obama and other Wall Street sponsors gain from this public outcry? For starters, it depicts them as hard taskmasters of the banking and financial sector, not its lobbyists carrying water for one giveaway after another. So the AIG kafuffle has muddied the water about where their political loyalties really lie. It enables them to strike a misleading pose – and hence to pose as "honest brokers" next time they dishonestly give away the next few trillion dollars to their major sponsors and campaign contributors. Regarding the timing, I think I have answered that above. Talking about AIG bonuses has effectively distracted attention from the AIG counterparties who received the $183 billion in Treasury giveaways. The "final" sum to be given to its counterparties has been rumored to be $250 billion, do Sen. Schumer, Rep. Frank and Pres. Obama still have a lot more work to do for Wall Street in the coming year or so. To succeed in this work – while mitigating the public outrage already rising against the bad bailouts – they need to strike precisely the pose that they’re striking now. It is an exercise in deception. The moral should be: The wetter the crocodile tears shed over giving bonuses to AIG individuals (who seem to be largely on the healthy, bona fide insurance side of AIG’s business, not its hedge-fund Ponzi-scheme racket), the more they will distract public attention from the $180 billion giveaway, and the better they can position themselves to give away yet more government money (Treasury bonds and Federal Reserve deposits) to their favorite financial charities.