Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Is this a Scam or Not?

Bankers gambled our money away on dodgy bonds and appealed to governments for money to cover the debts they irresponsibly accumulated. Governments say they cannot let banks go to the wall, as they ought to according to the principles of capitalism, so they agreed to underwrite them. Trillions of dollars were passed over to the banks. Now national treasuries were empty or also in hock, so governments say they have to borrow money from the banks to run the economy, and have to cut public expenditure on education, health and so on, and increase public taxes, to service the borrowing from the banks.

So, government is borrowing money from the banks that it gave them to keep them viable. And we pay. Is this a scam or not?

WikiLeaks Leaks the Truth about the Afghan War

WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers’ website, feels threatened by US counterintelligence designs. It is reported in www.france24.com that WikiLeaks twittered:

If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our April 5 film. And you know who is responsible.

The film, Pentagon Murder Cover-up, apparently shows US military personnel killing civilians and journalists in Afghanistan. While the British media constantly publish propaganda featuring our “brave heroes” being paraded through Wootten Bassett in hearses, they say nothing about the many hundreds of Afghans being killed each month, most of whom are innocent. Weeping British mothers bewail their dead sons, but seem not to give a thought to the sons and mothers being killed daily by our heroes. WikiLeaks has a reputation for reliability, having been given a prize as Best New Media by The Economist in only 2008.

The US intelligence agency, in a classified document, described WikiLeaks as “a threat to US troops abroad”, but WikiLeaks published the report, forcing the Department of Justice to confirm the story was true. The report described ways to bring down the website. The report also lists embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks—U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq and violations in the attack on Fallujah, as well as human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.