If Greeks vote yes, U.S. hedge funds get bailed out

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

https://youtu.be/U_AnI5dutGk?list=PLhvPB4lyc4dTIaS6FyeiQDHaYn4sN7pP3

Of course. It always comes back to Wall Street, doesn’t it?

JESSICA DESVARIEUX, PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore.

If you’re in Greece this week, good luck trying to go to the bank. Greek banks are closed all week after news broke that the country will be holding a referendum vote on whether to accept the bailout measures offered by international creditors. But if the Greek population decides to vote yes for the bailout deal, does this mean that they will be handing creditor banks a bailout?

Now joining us to give us their take on the issue are our two guests. Joining us from Quito, Ecuador, is Bill Black. Bill is an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri Kansas City. He’s a white collar criminologist and a former financial regulator, and author of the book The Best Way To Rob A Bank is to Own One. And also joining us from Germany is Michael Hudson. Michael is distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His latest book is Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroyed the Global Economy.
Thank you both for joining us.

MICHAEL HUDSON, PROF. OF ECONOMICS, UMKC: Good to be here.

WILLIAM K. BLACK, PROF. OF ECONOMICS, UMKC: Thank you.

DESVARIEUX: So Bill, I’m going to start off with you. Can you just explain to our viewers who’s actually getting bailed out in this deal. Are creditor banks the ones benefiting at the end of the day?

BLACK: Well, the same people are getting bailed out that have been getting bailed out from the beginning of the Greek crisis, and that is foreign banks. So this money just moves in sort of an elaborate circle from the Troika, which is the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF, through the Greek government, through the Greek banks, and then they pay the foreign creditors. And they pay them just enough that they don’t have to recognize a loss for accounting purposes.

As Michael will explain, of late the big investors tend to be American hedge funds, as opposed to what used to be primarily French banks.

DESVARIEUX: Okay. Michael, I want to ask you about the role of French banks in all of this. Can you just speak to this, give us a sense of how they even got entangled in Greek debt.

HUDSON: Well, today’s problem with the debts really stem back from 2010 and 2011 when Greece obviously couldn’t pay. When Greece joined the Eurozone, it falsified its debt figures. The head of its central bank worked with Goldman Sachs to make it complicated derivatives to hide it all, and that was Lucas Papademos.

Well, in 2010 right after the PASOK party came to power in Greece, they revealed the fact that their figures had been fudged all along, and that the debt was so large that Greece couldn’t pay. So the International Monetary Fund, which hadn’t been making loan–almost had no customers in the world, had its European staff calculate. And the staff unanimously said, Greece can’t pay these debts. These are fraudulent debts that are all, that are way beyond the ability to pay. They’ve got to be written down. And the board of directors agreed.
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Happy 4th of July, have some terror with that

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Gasworks Park Seattle 4th of July

I guess it’s about time for another one. After all, people have been getting far too uppity lately, it’s time we got back to the things like mattered — like more surveillance:

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – The FBI and Department of Homeland Security are asking Americans to remain vigilant to the threat of a terror attack over the Fourth of July weekend.

The FBI is setting up command centers at its 56 field offices across the country, including the one in Minnesota.

Although officials say there is no credible threat, the FBI is reacting to a call to arms by ISIS for mass murder during Ramadan.
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Someone is cutting the internet in California

~ susie

Cali-Internet-Outages

This is bizarre, isn’t it?

There have been nearly a dozen physical attacks on California Bay Area residents’ internet connections in the past year, prompting an FBI investigation.

The latest attack Tuesday knocked out internet service for Sacramento businesses and residents by breaking into an underground network protector and snipping fiber-optic cables. The FBI hasn’t provided details on the extent of the outages targeting two internet providers, Level 3 Communications, Zayo Group, and subsidiary client Wave Broadband, but evidence suggests similar attacks have been happening since July 6, 2014.

The FBI asked the public in June for information regarding suspicious behavior before the internet outages, indicating the Web saboteurs were dressed as telecommunications maintenance professionals.

“When some of the first cuts were taking place, the cuts and cables were fixed, and there was no evidence, no anything to look at,” FBI Special Agent Greg Wuthrich told the Wall Street Journal. “We just need to have a little bit more time to have our people go in.”

Repairs are being made to restore service in the Sacramento area but the motive behind the attacks unknown and raises concerns of power grid security.

Double duty

~ susie

Kiev - Skinheads
Yep, the real terrorists are already here. White supremacists are signing up for the military to get training that will be used to start a race war:

After the horrific massacre at Charleston’s historic black church, Americans are slowly realizing the threat posed by white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements. But few know that their presence has grown within one of the most powerful institutions in America: the US military.

According to the FBI, there are hundreds of white supremacists in the US army or in the veteran community. Some analysts even estimate the number is in the thousands. In America, 203 white supremacist “extremist cases” investigated by the Bureau from 2001 to 2008 involved veterans. The problem hasn’t gone away. Neo-Nazi veteran Wade Michael Page attacked six worshippers at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in 2012.

I spent a number of years investigating how neo-Nazis and white supremacists had infiltrated the US military, with very little push back from the Pentagon, which was desperate to keep the supply of troops flowing for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

As part of my research, I spoke to veterans who had become white supremacists before service and joined to gain access to weapons and training, as well as veterans who had been radicalized after returning from the war.

Charles Wilson, spokesman for the National Socialist Movement, one of the top neo-Nazi groups in America, was frank about his attempts to populate the US armed forces with extremists: “We do encourage [our members] to sign up for the military. We can use the training to secure the resistance to our government. Every one of them takes a pact of secrecy … Our military doesn’t agree with our political beliefs, they are not supposed to be in the military, but they’re there, in ever greater numbers.” He claimed to have 190 members serving.

Wilson’s claims can’t simply be dismissed as empty boasting. In a 2006 report , the National Gang Intelligence Center, which operates under the DOJ and integrates gang intelligence across agencies, noted: “various white supremacist groups have been documented on military installations both domestically and internationally.” Neo-Nazis “stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they’re inside, and they are hard-core,” Department of Defense gang detective Scott Barfield told the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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