USA - North Korea Connection

Amidst the cacophony of condemnation from all sides following North Korea’s second nuclear bomb test, there has been no mention whatsoever of how the secretive Stalinist state got its weapons in the first place - they were paid for by the U.S. government.

Both the Clinton and Bush administrations played a key role in helping Kim Jong-Il develop North Korea’s nuclear prowess from the mid 1990’s onwards.

The hypocrisy being spewed forth from all sides in reaction to the news that North Korea tested an underground nuclear device equivalent to 10 times the power of their first test in October 2006 is akin to when the U.S. cited Iraq’s possession of chemical and biological weapons as a reason to invade Iraq in 2003, having first checked the receipt of course, since it was Donald Rumsfeld who brokered the deal to supply Saddam with those weapons in the first place.

Rumsfeld was also the man who presided over a $200 million dollar contract to deliver equipment and services to build two light water reactor stations in North Korea in January 2000 when he was an executive director of ABB (Asea Brown Boveri).

Rumsfeld was merely picking up the baton from the Clinton administration, who in 1994 agreed to replace North Korea’s domestically built nuclear reactors with light water nuclear reactors. So-called government-funded ‘experts’ claimed that light water reactors (LWR's) couldn’t be used to make bombs. Not so according to Henry Sokolski, head of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre in Washington, who stated, “LWRs could be used to produce dozens of bombs’ worth of weapons-grade plutonium in both North Korea and Iran. This is true of all LWRs — a depressing fact U.S. policymakers have managed to block out.”

The U.S. State Department claimed that the light water reactors could not be used to produce bomb grade material and yet in 2002 urged Russia to end its nuclear co-operation with Iran for the reason that it didn’t want Iran armed with weapons of mass destruction. At the time, Russia was building light water reactors in Iran. According to the State Department, light water reactors in Iran can produce nuclear material but somehow the same rule doesn’t apply in North Korea.

In April 2002, the Bush administration announced that it would release $95 million of American taxpayer’s dollars to begin construction of the ‘harmless’ light water reactors in North Korea. Bush argued that arming the megalomaniac dictator Kim Jong-Il with the potential to produce a hundred nukes a year was, “vital to the national security interests of the United States.” Bush released even more money in January 2003, as was reported by Bloomberg News.

Bush released the funds despite the startling revelation, reported by South Korean newspapers, that a North Korean missile warhead had been found in Alaska.

Construction of the reactors was eventually suspended, but North Korea had an alternative source through which they could obtain the nuclear secrets vital to building an atom bomb arsenal - CIA asset and international arms smuggler AQ Khan.

In 2004, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb program, admitted sharing nuclear technology via a worldwide smuggling network that included facilities in Malaysia that manufactured key parts for centrifuges.

Khan’s collaborator Tahir ran a front company out of Dubai that shipped centrifuge components to North Korea.

Despite Dutch authorities being deeply suspicious of Khan’s activities as far back as 1975, the CIA prevented them from arresting him on two occasions.

“The man was followed for almost ten years and obviously he was a serious problem. But again I was told that the secret services could handle it more effectively,” former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers said. “The Hague did not have the final say in the matter. Washington did.”

Lubbers stated that Khan was allowed to slip in and out of the Netherlands with the blessing of the CIA, eventually allowing him to become the “primary salesman of an extensive international network for the proliferation of nuclear technology and know-how,” according to George W. Bush himself, and sell nuclear secrets that allowed North Korea to build nuclear bombs.

“Lubbers suspects that Washington allowed Khan’s activities because Pakistan was a key ally in the fight against the Soviets,” reports CFP. “At the time, the US government funded and armed mujahideen such as Osama bin Laden. They were trained by Pakistani intelligence to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Anwar Iqbal, Washington correspondent for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, told ISN Security Watch that Lubbers’ assertions may be correct. “This was part of a long-term foolish strategy. The US knew Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons but couldn’t care less because it was not going to be used against them. It was a deterrent against India and possibly the Soviets.”

In September 2005 it emerged that the Amsterdam court which sentenced Khan to four years imprisonment in 1983 had lost the legal files pertaining to the case. The court’s vice-president, Judge Anita Leeser, accused the CIA of stealing the files. “Something is not right, we just don’t lose things like that,” she told Dutch news show NOVA. “I find it bewildering that people lose files with a political goal, especially if it is on request of the CIA. It is unheard of.”

In 2005, Pakistani President Pervez Musharaf acknowledged that Khan had provided centrifuges and their designs to North Korea.

With this history in mind, the shock, condemnation and indignation being expressed by the U.S. government in response to North Korea’s second nuclear bomb test is tinged with hypocrisy to say the least. Through their policies in aiding North Korea to build light water reactors, and via the CIA asset AQ Khan who was protected at every step of the way while he helped provide North Korea with the means to build a nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government itself is directly complicit in providing North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il with the nuclear weapons that they are now condemning him for testing.

North Korea is controlled by a hereditary Stalinist dictatorship that has starved two million of its citizens to death in favor of building a million-man army. Some people put the figure at four million, one-quarter of the population. In the far north of the country there is a network of forced labor gulags where people who have ‘expressed a bland political opinion’ are, along with their entire families, tortured, raped and executed. Horrific bio-chemical experiments are performed on mass numbers of people. Babies are delivered and then stamped to death by the camp guards. If the mother screams while the guards are stamping on the baby’s neck, she is immediately assassinated by a firing squad. These guards are rewarded with bonuses and promotions for ripping out prisoners’ eyeballs.

The North Korean people are enslaved by a government that is using food as a weapon. Perhaps this is why the EU and the United States, via the UN World Food Program, resumed the shipment of hundreds of thousands of tons in food aid at the end of February 2003. This goes directly to the sitting dictatorship, which then decides who gets it by their level of allegiance to the state. Food aid only increases the power of Kim Jong-Il and yet it is veiled by the UN in bleeding heart humanitarian rhetoric. The money goes straight to enabling the North Korean leadership to live in the lap of westernized luxury with casinos and lavish new cars.

President Bush publicly claimed to loathe Kim Jong-Il and yet his administration, like Bill Clinton before him, set the policy to help North Korea obtain nuclear expertise. The U.S. intelligence network also protected AQ Khan and allowed him to provide the means with which North Korea aqcuired their nuclear capability.

Now the corporate media, along with Obama, the UN, Israel and others, are expressing their grave condemnation that North Korea is testing the very same nuclear weapons technology that was initially bankrolled by the U.S. government itself. Sanctions are already in the pipeline and others are even talking of military confrontation, which could ultimately lead to a conflict with China, North Korea’s close neighbor and ally.

When Swine flu!!!

Are globalist fear-mongers driving the media to panic the public into universal healthcare solutions? Or federally-mandated vaccinations?

By definition, a "pandemic" is an epidemic that is geographically widespread. Fear-mongers are always careful to add the innuendo that millions of people could and probably will die, as in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 that killed between 20 and 100 million people worldwide.

Excuse me, but how does the death of even a few hundred equate to 20 million?

Mexico, not the usual Southeast Asia, is the origin of the latest flu outbreak. It has spread in limited numbers to several continents. Almost all of the deaths, limited as they are, are in Mexico. The ratio of deaths to infections is very small.

Again, how does this outbreak even remotely qualify as a pandemic? Answer: It does not!

Scientists and virus researchers are baffled because the genetic makeup of the virus contains elements of human, swine and bird flu from three geographic regions: North America, Europe and Asia. Until now, this has been unknown in nature, but not theoretically impossible.

Because of its unique genetic makeup, this writer proposes calling it the "flying pig flu", or FPF, instead.

This writer is hardly qualified to write with authority about the scientific side of viruses. However, after reading several authoritative papers on swine and avian flu, several observations can be made.

In the world of virus experts, there are two types of researchers: Observers and Experimenters.

Observers

Most researchers are highly trained scientific observers. These "Sherlock Holmes" scientists examine the pathology of virus development. Where did it originate? What animals or human were involved? Did the infected humans handle animals? Are certain strains limited to geography? You get the idea.

Without good observers, we would know little about the source or spread of different viral strains.

There are several good Internet resources where the findings of research observers are published.

We should be thankful for astute observers who can untangle mysteries that would otherwise not be understood.

Experimenters

A minority of researchers are experimenters. This group is worrisome.

Experimenters establish their playground in trying to create different types of viruses in order to measure their effect on test animals.

Such was the case at Baxter AG, when such an experiment was "accidentally" released as a live virus in a vaccine distributed to 18 countries. In this case, the live H5N1 virus (avian flu) was combined with the much more contagious (human) H3N2 virus.

Experts say that it is almost impossible for Baxter to make such a grievous error by accident. Czech newspapers, where the story was originally broken, suggest it was a rogue employee or a mole that purposely mixed the virus' together, but nothing has been proven as yet. Baxter is now under great suspicion that it is attempting to foment a pandemic that would bring hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue to supply its normal H5N1 vaccine.

Another example is the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. In a 2004 report, CDC to mix avian, human flu viruses in pandemic study, it was noted that,

"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will soon launch experiments designed to combine the H5N1 virus and human flu viruses and then see how the resulting hybrids affect animals. The goal is to assess the chances that such a "reassortant" virus will emerge and how dangerous it might be."

Critics worried that such a "franken-virus" could itself cause a pandemic if it escaped from its creators. The CDC's only response is that their facilities were more secure than others who had experienced breaches of some sort in years past.

Why would the CDC risk world exposure to an artificially created virus? According to the above report, it was done in the name of preparedness.

As mentioned above, experimenters are a worrisome lot. Real world experience indicates that they are generally overconfident in their scientific prowess and in their abilities to contain the unpredictable fruit of their experiments.

Conclusion

There are some big problems with the current outbreak of flying pig flu. If there has been foul play, it may never be brought to light. Still, tough questions need to be asked:

• While it is not unknown for pigs to become infected with the H5N1 virus, the result has always been a less-lethal and less-contagious virus than avian flu by itself. Why is this epidemic so obviously contagious?
• How would genetic code from three continents find its way into a single strain in Mexico City?
• Is this virus an escaped experiment from a project gone awry?
• If man-made and not accidentally released, then who released it, and why?

As we contemplate these questions, watch the stock prices of major pharma companies skyrocket as they gear up to sell billions in vaccines. Watch governments as they declare mandatory vaccination programs. Watch the Obama administration as it railroads universal healthcare through Congress.

Indeed, flying pig flu may be just the right name for whatever is responsible for this particular flu outbreak.

In the meantime, we can reopen this case when pigs fly or when 10 million or so people have died, whichever comes first.

List of Business Failures in April 2009.

April has been a good year for the financial system, Dow climbing by 7 % and with just 5 major bankruptcies. Now we have a total of 48 major bankruptcies in the first 4 months. Bring down the average by 2.33 to 12 bankruptcies in a month for the year.

List of Bankruptcies -

1. Abitibi Bowater (CAN)
2. Darlington Football Club (UK)
3. General Growth Properties (USA)
4. LDV Group Limited (UK)
5. Chrysler (USA)

Obama and his $6 trillion!!??

I am not sure whether the global bond market would be able to fund the $6 trillion of the Obama fiscal package. The world is indeed running out of capital.

Unless this capital is forthcoming, a clutch of countries will prove unable to roll over their debts at a bearable cost. Countries most at risk of default are those that cannot print money as they do not have a national currency (Euro nations), and those who have borrowed abroad (Eastern Europe).

Traders already whisper that some governments are buying their own debt through proxies at bond auctions to keep up illusions - not to be confused with transparent buying by central banks under quantitative easing. This cannot continue for long.

Commerzbank said every European bond auction is turning into an "event risk". Britain too finds itself some way down the AAA pecking order as it tries to sell 220 billion pounds of Gilts this year to irascible investors.

US hedge fund Hayman Advisers is betting on the biggest wave of state bankruptcies and restructurings since 1934. The worst profiles are almost all in Europe - the epicentre of leverage, and denial. As the IMF said last week, Europe's banks have written down 17% of their losses - American banks have swallowed half.

It looked easy for Western governments during the credit bubble, when China, Russia, emerging Asia and petro-powers were accumulating $1.3 trillion a year in reserves, recycling this wealth back into the US Treasuries.

The tap has been turned off. These countries have become net sellers. Central bank holdings have fallen by $248 billion to $6.7 trillion over the last 6 months. The Oil crash has forced both Russia and Venezuela to slash reserves by a third.

Japan’s $1.5 trillion state pension fund (World’s Biggest) dropped a bombshell this month. It will start selling holdings of Japanese state bonds this year to cover a $40 billion shortfall on its books. So how is the Ministry of Finance going to fund a sovereign debt expected to reach 200% of GDP by 2010 (also the World’s Biggest) even assuming that Japan’s industry recovers from its 38% crash?

Japan is the first country to face a shrinking workforce in absolute terms, crossing the dreaded line in 2005. Its army of pensioners is dipping into the collective coffers. Japan’s saving rate has fallen from 14% of GDP to 2% of GDP since 1990. Such a fate looms for Germany, Italy, South Korea, Eastern Europe and perhaps eventually China.

So where is the $6 trillion going to come from this year, and beyond? For now we must fall back on the Fed, the Bank of England, and various central banks, World Bank – nota-bene and rely on printed money (QE) to pay for education, infrastructure and administration. It is necessary (Alas!!) to stave off debt deflation. But it is also a slippery slope, as Fed hawks keep reminding us their chairman Ben Bernanke. One wonders if Mr. Bernanke regrets saying so blithely that Washington can create unlimited dollars “at essentially no cost”.

The crux of the problem is not sub-prime or mortgage loans or this and that bank but the government. Governments around the world allowed their banking system to grow unchecked, in some cases going into an untenable liability for the host country. A disturbing number of states look like Iceland once you dig into the entrails, and most are in Europe where liabilities average 4.2 times the GDP.

The G20 deal to triple the IMF’s fire fighting fund to $750 billion buys time for the likes of Ukraine and Argentina. But the deeper malaise is that so many of the IMF backers are themselves exhausting their credit lines and cultural reserves.

Great bankruptcies change the world. Spain’s default under Philip II ruined the Catholic banking dynasties of Italy and South Germany, Shifting the locus of financial power to Amsterdam. Anglo-Dutch forces were able to halt the Counter-Reformation, free Northern Europe from absolutism, and break into North America.

Who knows what revolution will come from this crisis if it ever reaches defaults.

Former astronaut: Man not alone in universe.

Former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell and other UFO enthusiasts are concerned.

Mitchell, who was part of the 1971 Apollo 14 moon mission, asserted that extraterrestrial life exists, and that the truth is being concealed by the U.S. and other governments.

He delivered his remarks during an appearance at the National Press Club following the conclusion of the fifth annual X-Conference, a meeting of UFO activists and researchers studying the possibility of alien life forms.

Mankind has long wondered if we're "alone in the universe. [But] only in our period do we really have evidence. No, we're not alone," Mitchell said.

"Our destiny, in my opinion, and we might as well get started with it, is [to] become a part of the planetary community. ... We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there."

Mitchell grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, which some UFO believers maintain was the site of a UFO crash in 1947. He said residents of his hometown "had been hushed and told not to talk about their experience by military authorities." They had been warned of "dire consequences" if they did so.

But, he claimed, they "didn't want to go to the grave with their story. They wanted to tell somebody reliable. And being a local boy and having been to the moon, they considered me reliable enough to whisper in my ear their particular story."

Roughly 10 years ago, Mitchell claimed, he was finally given an appointment at Pentagon to discuss what he had been told.

An unnamed admiral working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff promised to uncover the truth behind the Roswell story, Mitchell said. The stories of a UFO crash "were confirmed," but the admiral was then denied access when he "tried to get into the inner workings of that process."

The same admiral, Mitchell claimed, now denies the story.

"I urge those who are doubtful: Read the books, read the lore, start to understand what has really been going on. Because there really is no doubt we are being visited," he said.

"The universe that we live in is much more wondrous, exciting, complex and far-reaching than we were ever able to know up to this point in time."

Severe Solar Storms Could Harm Power Grid, Navigational Systems and Spacecraft.

More than a billion people without power. The distribution of drinkable water disrupted. Transportation, communication and banking upset. Trillions of dollars in damage.

Hurricanes, blizzards and other earthly tempests aren't the only natural forces with the potential to sow catastrophe.

Severe weather in the sun's outer atmosphere could knock out much of the country's power grid, incapacitate navigational systems and jeopardize Spacecraft.

While the odds of a solar disaster are relatively small, scientists warn that we need to ramp up our defenses against solar storms, especially given our increasing dependence on technology that is so susceptible to radiation from sun.

'US Govt. urged silence about the losses' - Bank of America CEO

Bank of America Corp CEO Kenneth Lewis testified under oath that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pressured him to keep quiet about losses at Merrill Lynch & Co, which the bank was buying.

Testifying before New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in February, Lewis said "it wasn't up to me" to reveal Merrill's fourth-quarter losses as they were becoming apparent in December, the newspaper said, citing a deposition transcript.

Shareholders of Merrill and Bank of America voted to approve the merger on December 5, and the transaction closed on January 1. Bank of America subsequently reported that Merrill lost $15.84 billion in the fourth quarter.

At Bank of America's April 29 annual meeting, shareholders will vote on whether to force Lewis to step down as chairman of the largest U.S. bank or leave its board, because of Merrill and a falling share price.

Many critics also want Lewis to give up the chief executive job, which he has held since 2001.

The Journal said Lewis testified that Bernanke and Paulson told him the merger needed to go through and that any failure would "impose a big risk to the financial system" of the United States.

Cuomo's office is expected to release the deposition transcript to federal regulators and overseers of bank bailout money today.

Bank of America shares have lost three-fourths of their value since the Merrill purchase was announced September 15.

Merrill's losses triggered a federal bailout of Bank of America, including $20 billion of new capital, in January.

US Government will Stage Terror, Declare Martial Law?

Former US presidential candidate Alan Keyes has given perhaps his most dire warning yet, saying that the Obama administration is preparing to stage terror attacks, declare martial law and cancel the 2012 elections, which is why they are demonizing their political enemies as criminals and terrorists.

Keyes is best known for his performance during the 2000 Republican Presedential debates, when he was accredited by many media outlets as being the clear winner during a series of debates with George W. Bush and John McCain.

“It’s obvious that they will stop at nothing,” Keyes told attendees of a reception in Fort Wayne, adding, “We may wake up one day and there’s a series of terrorist attacks, the economy is paralysed….martial law will be declared everywhere in the United States and it won’t end until the crisis ends.”

Keyes said that Americans should be thankful if they even see another election in 2012, stating, “If we don’t wake up and work to see that it happens, we will not see another election.”

“The minute they think they can get away with it, they will end this system of government and that is their intention,” added Keyes, noting that everyone acting as if the time we are in was just “business as usual” reminds him of the attitude of politicians in the Weimar Republic when Hitler was rising to power or eastern Europe when the Communists were taking over after the second world war.

A fraud that makes Madoff look small time

Since Bernard L. Madoff was handcuffed and taken from his office by FBI agents, we have been made well aware of the nature of Ponzi schemes, fraudulent investment opportunities that pay off early participants with money from newcomers, not from returns on legitimate stock or bond holdings. Mr. Madoff, once a highly respected member of the Wall Street establishment, has admitted to defrauding investors of as much as $50 billion in such a manner. When asked by the agents who arrested him if he could explain what he'd done, he reportedly said, "There is no innocent explanation."

According to the man who may be the leading expert on banking fraud, there is also no innocent explanation for the events leading to the current economic crisis. Last week on his PBS show, Bill Moyers interviewed William K. Black, the senior regulator during the savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s. Mr. Black, who wrote a book based on his experiences and called it The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, said the fraud and deceit that resulted in the world banking system's dire distress makes Bernie Madoff look like a piker. In fact, says Mr. Black, who is the former director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention, what we have experienced was caused by "calculated dishonesty" on the part of corporate CEOs, aided and abetted by politicians and regulators who tore down the barriers to financial shenanigans - perhaps the most important example being the repeal of the Great Depression-inspired Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial banking from investment banking. This cleared the stage for the fraudulent investments that made a lot of people very, very rich in what we can now see was an immense Ponzi scheme, many times the size and scope of the scam pulled off by Mr. Madoff.

Consider that one company, the now-defunct IndyMac - which specialized in making liar's loans - in a single year (2006) sold $80 billion of these toxic things to other companies. IndyMac lost more money than all the lending institutions involved in the S&L crisis of the 1980s. And those at the helm of this firm and the others we've heard so much about - A.I.G., Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, etc. - knew what they were doing. Mr. Black believes they dealt in investment instruments they knew were created fraudulently.

So, why haven't we seen the people responsible for this hauled off in handcuffs the way Bernie Madoff was? Or at the very least, how come the CEOs of the banks involved in this scheme haven't been made to walk the plank like Rick Wagoner of General Motors? Because, says Mr. Black, "We don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover-up."

When asked by Mr. Moyers whether he was alleging that Timothy F. Geithner and others in the administration, and the banks, are engaged in a cover-up to keep us from knowing what went wrong, Mr. Black said, "Absolutely." The rulers are frightened to admit that many of the large banks are insolvent. They have ignored the proven methods for dealing with bank fraud and have instead adopted what they used to laugh at when the Japanese did it: covering up bank losses by lying about them and injecting money into failed institutions. Even though it's working exactly as one would expect - just as it did in setting Japan into a long, deep recession - they don't know what else to do. To take effective action would reveal what they believe cannot be revealed. The lurid facts must be hidden.

So much for the vaunted transparency the new president promised us.

The Big Money Behind Geithner

A guy who can’t figure out his own taxes is supposed to fix the economy? This is the absurd rationale being offered by media after it was disclosed that he was a serial tax evader. He did his own taxes for a couple years and got into trouble. This guy is supposed to be so smart we can entrust him with managing the entire U.S. economy?

Anybody watching this bizarre spectacle unfold has to suspect there is something more to the story. Who is behind Geithner and why? And why does Obama want him? This is where the media fear to tread. Major media companies such as GE (parent of NBC News) and the Washington Post Company have their own connections to Geithner through their own officials and board members. They have a conflict of interest that will never be reported by the news organizations themselves.

The real story, which can only emerge through talk radio and alternative media, is that Geithner has very powerful political and financial connections, not only to the media but the banking interests and lobbies that try to orchestrate U.S. policy behind the scenes.

The President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the Chinese-speaking Geithner is an associate of Henry Kissinger who can be counted on to convince the Chinese Communists to continue to buy U.S. debt and finance Obama’s massive expansion of federal government power. That is why Obama and his fellow Democrats are putting so much faith in him.

As Henry Kissinger recently put it, when he was celebrating U.S.-China relations on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Obama’s mission is to usher in a “New World Order.” He forgot to mention, of course, that it is a China-dominated New World Order in which the U.S. has become a subsidiary of China Inc.

Kissinger did comment that Obama had “appointed an extraordinarily able group of people in both the international and financial fields.” He didn’t name names, but that obviously includes Geithner, who used to work for Kissinger Associates.

It also turns out that Geithner’s father, Peter F. Geithner, serves on the board with Kissinger of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. This is the group that rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, celebrating Chinese investments in the U.S. economy. In another interesting connection, it turns out that Peter F. Geithner was with the Ford Foundation and oversaw the work of Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, developing what are called microfinance programs in Indonesia.

Based on what Obama has said about Geithner, and what the media have repeated ad nauseam, we are supposed to believe that he made some mistakes that were typical of an employee who had worked for an international organization, the International Monetary Fund. But this doesn’t hold up because he admits he was told by the IMF about the procedures and necessity of paying those taxes. So the failure to pay these taxes looks like a case of tax cheating. If it wasn’t cheating, then he didn’t understand the tax code or didn’t pay enough attention to get it done right. This doesn’t seem like a proper credential for the post of Treasury Secretary, with jurisdiction over the IRS.

There has to be something more to the rationale for confirming somebody who is this much of a conniver or this dumb to the post. What is it?

It doesn’t take much digging. For anybody in the dark about this, please consult and closely study his bio. Geithner is a wheeler-dealer for powerful special interests.

If you examine the nature of the “Group of Thirty,” an affiliation which appears at the bottom of his biography, right after his Council on Foreign Relations membership, you will quickly learn that the President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank is an associate of the governor of the Chinese central bank through this mysterious organization of bankers and other top current and former officials from various countries. You will notice that other Obama nominees and associates are members, including Paul Volcker and Lawrence Summers.

You will also learn that this organization has been funded by―surprise―some of the same financial institutions getting federal bailout money. These include American International Group, Goldman Sachs and Citi, among others. Because it has a website and publishes an annual report, all of this seems open and above board. But the fine print reveals that some of the meetings are by “invitation only.”

The entire list of “contributors and supporters” of the “Group of Thirty” is quite impressive. You will find not only U.S. financial institutions getting bailout money, but central banks around the world and Arab financial interests. In addition, you also find private financial interests, including the hedge fund operated by billionaire and Obama contributor George Soros.

But I can find no stories in the major U.S. media critically examining the history and purpose of this organization. Could it be because selected reporters are invited to its meetings on a deep background basis? And that they develop financial sources at these meetings that they swear to protect and defend?