An American, Australian ,Israeli, British "Judeo Christian Friendly " blog.

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Warning to all Muslims the world over seeking asylum and protection from the manifestations of their faith.
Do not under any circumstances come to Australia, for we are a Nation founded upon Judeo Christian Law and principles and as such Australia is an anathema to any follower of the Paedophile Slave Trader Mohammad's cult of Islam.
There is no ideology more hated and despised in Australia than Islam.You simply would not like it here.
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Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire French author, humanist, rationalist, & satirist (1694 - 1778)
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Those who demand you believe that Islam is a Religion of Peace also demand you believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming.
Aussie News & Views Jan 1 2009
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"But Communism is the god of discontent, and needs no blessing. All it needs is a heart willing to hate, willing to call envy “justice."
Equality then means the violent destruction of all social and cultural distinctions. Freedom means absolute dictatorship over the people."
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Take Hope from the Heart of Man and you make him a Beast of Prey
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“ If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.
“There may be even a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves”
Winston Churchill. Pg.310 “The Hell Makers” John C. Grover ISBN # 0 7316 1918 8
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said.
This matters above everything.
—Confucius
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'a socialist is communist without the courage of conviction to say what he really is'.
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Hontar: We must work in the world, your eminence. The world is thus.
Altamirano: No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world... thus have I made it.
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Voltaire said: “If you want to know who rules over you, just find out who you are not permitted to criticize.”


--------Check this out, what an Bum WOW!!!!




When those sworn to destroy you,Communism, Socialism,"Change you can Believe in" via their rabid salivating Mongrel Dog,Islam,take away your humanity, your God given Sanctity of Life, Created in His Image , If you are lucky this prayer is maybe all you have left, If you believe in God and his Son,Jesus Christ, then you are, despite the evils that may befall you are better off than most.

Lord, I come before You with a heavy heart. I feel so much and yet sometimes I feel nothing at all. I don't know where to turn, who to talk to, or how to deal with the things going on in my life. You see everything, Lord. You know everything, Lord. Yet when I seek you it is so hard to feel You here with me. Lord, help me through this. I don't see any other way to get out of this. There is no light at the end of my tunnel, yet everyone says You can show it to me. Lord, help me find that light. Let it be Your light. Give me someone to help. Let me feel You with me. Lord, let me see what You provide and see an alternative to taking my life. Let me feel Your blessings and comfort. Amen.
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"The chief weapon in the quiver of all Islamist expansionist movements, is the absolute necessity to keep victims largely unaware of the actual theology plotting their demise. To complete this deception, a large body of ‘moderates’ continue to spew such ridiculous claims as “Islam means Peace” thereby keeping non-Muslims from actually reading the Qur’an, the Sira, the Hadith, or actually looking into the past 1400 years of history. Islamists also deny or dismiss the concept of ‘abrogation’, which is the universal intra-Islamic method of replacing slightly more tolerable aspects of the religion in favor of more violent demands for Muslims to slay and subdue infidels"

*DO NOT CLICK ON ANY SENDVID VIDEOS *


Anthropogenic Global Warming SCAM

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Why Tony Abbott was dumped.Lord Monckton and The Great American Bubble Machine

Lord Monckton

Australia October 2014




Climate Sceptics Lord Monckton and the plan to get rid of  Tony Abbott

Aussie News and Views to Barenaked Islam September 13 2015 predicted the leadership spill and why the day before it happened (Spookey)


Malcolm Turnbull's previous employers

The Great American Bubble Machine

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again

By Matt Taibbi April 5, 2010

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Invasion of the Home Snatchers

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …

But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass lay offs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

The Feds vs. Goldman

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went — and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long — including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.

BUBBLE #1 The Great Depression

Goldman wasn't always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids —just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to small time vendors in down town Manhattan.

You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman's first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shitloads of money. In that ancient history there's really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman’s disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 1920s.

Wall Street's Big Win

This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Back then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an "investment trust." Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player. Much as in the 1990s, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regular-guy investors into the speculation game.

Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investment trust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hogwild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund — which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah — which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading.


The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line. The basic idea isn't hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred.

In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1929 titled "In Goldman Sachs We Trust," the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leveragebased investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the market's historic crash; in today's dollars, the losses the bank suffered totaled $475 billion. "It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity," Galbraith observed, sounding like Keith Olbermann in an ascot. "If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."

BUBBLE #2 Tech Stocks

Fast-forward about 65 years. Goldman not only survived the crash that wiped out so many of the investors it duped, it went on to become the chief underwriter to the country's wealthiest and most powerful corporations. Thanks to Sidney Weinberg, who rose from the rank of janitor's assistant to head the firm, Goldman became the pioneer of the initial public offering, one of the principal and most lucrative means by which companies raise money. During the 1970s and 1980s, Goldman may not have been the planet-eating Death Star of political influence it is today, but it was a top-drawer firm that had a reputation for attracting the very smartest talent on the Street.

It also, oddly enough, had a reputation for relatively solid ethics and a patient approach to investment that shunned the fast buck; its executives were trained to adopt the firm's mantra, "long-term greedy." One former Goldman banker who left the firm in the early Nineties recalls seeing his superiors give up a very profitable deal on the grounds that it was a long-term loser. "We gave back money to 'grownup' corporate clients who had made bad deals with us," he says. "Everything we did was legal and fair — but 'long-term greedy' said we didn't want to make such a profit at the clients' collective expense that we spoiled the marketplace."

But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's cochairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.

Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national clichè that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy — a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline The Committee To Save The World. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy — beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his
old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.

The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than potfueled ideas scrawled on napkins by uptoolate bongsmokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for mega-millions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.

"Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public," says one prominent hedge-fund manager. "The company had to be in business for a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash." Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: "Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share."

The problem was, nobody told investors that the rules had changed. "Everyone on the inside knew," the manager says. "Bob Rubin sure as hell knew what the underwriting standards were. They'd been intact since the 1930s."

Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who specializes in IPOs, says banks like Goldman knew full well that many of the public offerings they were touting would never make a dime. "In the early Eighties, the major underwriters insisted on three years of profitability. Then it was one year, then it was a quarter. By the time of the Internet bubble, they were not even requiring profitability in the foreseeable future."

Goldman has denied that it changed its underwriting standards during the Internet years, but its own statistics belie the claim. Just as it did with the investment trust in the 1920s, Goldman started slow and finished crazy in the Internet years. After it took a little-known company with weak financials called Yahoo! public in 1996, once the tech boom had already begun, Goldman quickly became the IPO king of the Internet era. Of the 24 companies it took public in 1997, a third were losing money at the time of the IPO. In 1999, at the height of the boom, it took 47 companies public, including stillborns like Webvan and eToys, investment offerings that were in many ways the modern equivalents of Blue Ridge and Shenandoah. The following year, it underwrote 18 companies in the first four months, 14 of which were money losers at the time. As a leading underwriter of Internet stocks during the boom, Goldman provided profits far more volatile than those of its competitors: In 1999, the average Goldman IPO leapt 281 percent above its offering price, compared to the Wall Street average of 181 percent.

How did Goldman achieve such extraordinary results? One answer is that they used a practice called "laddering," which is just a fancy way of saying they manipulated the share price of new offerings. Here's how it works: Say you're Goldman Sachs, and Bullshit.com comes to you and asks you to take their company public. You agree on the usual terms: You'll price the stock, determine how many shares should be released and take the Bullshit.com CEO on a "road show" to schmooze investors, all in exchange for a substantial fee (typically six to seven percent of the amount raised). You then promise your best clients the right to buy big chunks of the IPO at the low offering price — let's say Bullshit.com's starting share price is $15 — in exchange for a promise that they will buy more shares later on the open market. That seemingly simple demand gives you inside knowledge of the IPO's future, knowledge that wasn't disclosed to the day trader schmucks who only had the prospectus to go by: You know that certain of your clients who bought X amount of shares at $15 are also going to buy Y more shares at $20 or $25, virtually guaranteeing that the price is going to go to $25 and beyond. In this way, Goldman could artificially jack up the new company's price, which of course was to the bank's benefit — a six percent fee of a $500 million IPO is serious money.

Goldman was repeatedly sued by shareholders for engaging in laddering in a variety of Internet IPOs, including Webvan and NetZero. The deceptive practices also caught the attention of Nicholas Maier, the syndicate manager of Cramer & Co., the hedge fund run at the time by the now-famous chattering television asshole Jim Cramer, himself a Goldman alum. Maier told the SEC that while working for Cramer between 1996 and 1998, he was repeatedly forced to engage in laddering practices during IPO deals with Goldman.

"Goldman, from what I witnessed, they were the worst perpetrator," Maier said. "They totally fueled the bubble. And it's specifically that kind of behavior that has caused the market crash. They built these stocks upon an illegal foundation — manipulated up — and ultimately, it really was the small person who ended up buying in." In 2005, Goldman agreed to pay $40 million for its laddering violations — a puny penalty relative to the enormous profits it made. (Goldman, which has denied wrongdoing in all of the cases it has settled, refused to respond to questions for this story.)

Another practice Goldman engaged in during the Internet boom was "spinning," better known as bribery. Here the investment bank would offer the executives of the newly public company shares at extra-low prices, in exchange for future underwriting business. Banks that engaged in spinning would then undervalue the initial offering price — ensuring that those "hot" opening-price shares it had handed out to insiders would be more likely to rise quickly, supplying bigger first-day rewards for the chosen few. So instead of Bullshit.com opening at $20, the bank would approach the Bullshit.com CEO and offer him a million shares of his own company at $18 in exchange for future business — effectively robbing all of Bullshit's new shareholders by diverting cash that should have gone to the company's bottom line into the private bank account of the company's CEO.

In one case, Goldman allegedly gave a multimillion-dollar special offering to eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who later joined Goldman's board, in exchange for future i-banking business. According to a report by the House Financial Services Committee in 2002, Goldman gave special stock offerings to executives in 21 companies that it took public, including Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang and two of the great slithering villains of the financial-scandal age — Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski and Enron's Ken Lay. Goldman angrily denounced the report as "an egregious distortion of the facts" — shortly before paying $110 million to settle an investigation into spinning and other manipulations launched by New York state regulators. "The spinning of hot IPO shares was not a harmless corporate perk," then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer said at the time. "Instead, it was an integral part of a fraudulent scheme to win new investment-banking business."

Such practices conspired to turn the Internet bubble into one of the greatest financial disasters in world history: Some $5 trillion of wealth was wiped out on the NASDAQ alone. But the real problem wasn't the money that was lost by shareholders, it was the money gained by investment bankers, who received hefty bonuses for tampering with the market. Instead of teaching Wall Street a lesson that bubbles always deflate, the Internet years demonstrated to bankers that in the age of freely flowing capital and publicly owned financial companies, bubbles are incredibly easy to inflate, and individual bonuses are actually bigger when the mania and the irrationality are greater.

Nowhere was this truer than at Goldman. Between 1999 and 2002, the firm paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and benefits — an average of roughly $350,000 a year per employee. Those numbers are important because the key legacy of the Internet boom is that the economy is now driven in large part by the pursuit of the enormous salaries and bonuses that such bubbles make possible. Goldman's mantra of "long-term greedy" vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.

The market was no longer a rationally managed place to grow real, profitable businesses: It was a huge ocean of Someone Else's Money where bankers hauled in vast sums through whatever means necessary and tried to convert that money into bonuses and payouts as quickly as possible. If you laddered and spun 50 Internet IPOs that went bust within a year, so what? By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission got around to fining your firm $110 million, the yacht you bought with your IPO bonuses was already six years old. Besides, you were probably out of Goldman by then, running the U.S. Treasury or maybe the state of New Jersey. (One of the truly comic moments in the history of America's recent financial collapse came when Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who ran Goldman from 1994 to 1999 and left with $320 million in IPO-fattened stock, insisted in 2002 that "I've never even heard the term 'laddering' before.")

For a bank that paid out $7 billion a year in salaries, $110 million fines issued half a decade late were something far less than a deterrent —they were a joke. Once the Internet bubble burst, Goldman had no incentive to reassess its new, profit-driven strategy; it just searched around for another bubble to inflate. As it turns out, it had one ready, thanks in large part to Rubin.

BUBBLE #3 The Housing Craze

Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.

None of that would have been possible without investment bankers like Goldman, who created vehicles to package those shitty mortgages and sell them en masse to unsuspecting insurance companies and pension funds. This created a mass market for toxic debt that would never have existed before; in the old days, no bank would have wanted to keep some addict ex-con's mortgage on its books, knowing how likely it was to fail. You can't write these mortgages, in other words, unless you can sell them to someone who doesn't know what they are.

Goldman used two methods to hide the mess they were selling. First, they bundled hundreds of different mortgages into instruments called Collateralized Debt Obligations. Then they sold investors on the idea that, because a bunch of those mortgages would turn out to be OK, there was no reason to worry so much about the shitty ones: The CDO, as a whole, was sound. Thus, junk-rated mortgages were turned into AAA-rated investments. Second, to hedge its own bets, Goldman got companies like AIG to provide insurance — known as credit default swaps — on the CDOs. The swaps were essentially a racetrack bet between AIG and Goldman: Goldman is betting the ex-cons will default, AIG is betting they won't.

There was only one problem with the deals: All of the wheeling and dealing represented exactly the kind of dangerous speculation that federal regulators are supposed to rein in. Derivatives like CDOs and credit swaps had already caused a series of serious financial calamities: Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings both lost fortunes, and Orange County, California, was forced to default in 1994. A report that year by the Government Accountability Office recommended that such financial instruments be tightly regulated — and in 1998, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a woman named Brooksley Born, agreed. That May, she circulated a letter to business leaders and the Clinton administration suggesting that banks be required to provide greater disclosure in derivatives trades, and maintain reserves to cushion against losses.

More regulation wasn’t exactly what Goldman had in mind. “The banks go crazy — they want it stopped,” says Michael Greenberger, who worked for Born as director of trading and markets at the CFTC and is now a law professor at the University of Maryland. “Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and [SEC chief Arthur] Levitt want it stopped.”

Clinton's reigning economic foursome — “especially Rubin,” according to Greenberger — called Born in for a meeting and pleaded their case. She refused to back down, however, and continued to push for more regulation of the derivatives. Then, in June 1998, Rubin went public to denounce her move, eventually recommending that Congress strip the CFTC of its regulatory authority. In 2000, on its last day in session, Congress passed the now-notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had been inserted into an 11,000-page spending bill at the last minute, with almost no debate on the floor of the Senate. Banks were now free to trade default swaps with impunity.

But the story didn't end there. AIG, a major purveyor of default swaps, approached the New York State Insurance Department in 2000 and asked whether default swaps would be regulated as insurance. At the time, the office was run by one Neil Levin, a former Goldman vice president, who decided against regulating the swaps. Now freed to underwrite as many housing-based securities and buy as much credit-default protection as it wanted, Goldman went berserk with lending lust. By the peak of the housing boom in 2006, Goldman was underwriting $76.5 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities — a third of which were sub-prime — much of it to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies. And in these massive issues of real estate were vast swamps of crap.

Take one $494 million issue that year, GSAMP Trust 2006S3. Many of the mortgages belonged to second-mortgage borrowers, and the average equity they had in their homes was 0.71 percent. Moreover, 58 percent of the loans included little or no documentation — no names of the borrowers, no addresses of the homes, just zip codes. Yet both of the major ratings agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, rated 93 percent of the issue as investment grade. Moody's projected that less than 10 percent of the loans would default. In reality, 18 percent of the mortgages were in default within 18 months.

Not that Goldman was personally at any risk. The bank might be taking all these hideous, completely irresponsible mortgages from beneath-gangster-status firms like Countrywide and selling them off to municipalities and pensioners — old people, for God's sake — pretending the whole time that it wasn't grade D horseshit. But even as it was doing so, it was taking short positions in the same market, in essence betting against the same crap it was selling. Even worse, Goldman bragged about it in public. "The mortgage sector continues to be challenged," David Viniar, the bank's chief financial officer, boasted in 2007. "As a result, we took significant markdowns on our long inventory positions … However, our risk bias in that market was to be short, and that net short position was profitable." In other words, the mortgages it was selling were for chumps. The real money was in betting against those same mortgages.

"That's how audacious these assholes are," says one hedge fund manager. "At least with other banks, you could say that they were just dumb — they believed what they were selling, and it blew them up. Goldman knew what it was doing."

I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you're actually betting against — particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer — doesn't amount to securities fraud.

"It's exactly securities fraud," he says. "It's the heart of securities fraud."

Eventually, lots of aggrieved investors agreed. In a virtual repeat of the Internet IPO craze, Goldman was hit with a wave of lawsuits after the collapse of the housing bubble, many of which accused the bank of withholding pertinent information about the quality of the mortgages it issued. New York state regulators are suing Goldman and 25 other underwriters for selling bundles of crappy Countrywide mortgages to city and state pension funds, which lost as much as $100 million in the investments. Massachusetts also investigated Goldman for similar misdeeds, acting on behalf of 714 mortgage holders who got stuck holding predatory loans. But once again, Goldman got off virtually scot-free, staving off prosecution by agreeing to pay a paltry $60 million — about what the bank's CDO division made in a day and a half during the real estate boom.

The effects of the housing bubble are well known — it led more or less directly to the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG, whose toxic portfolio of credit swaps was in significant part composed of the insurance that banks like Goldman bought against their own housing portfolios. In fact, at least $13 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: It fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets.

And once again, while the world was crashing down all around the bank, Goldman made sure it was doing just fine in the compensation department. In 2006, the firm's payroll jumped to $16.5 billion — an average of $622,000 per employee. As a Goldman spokesman explained, "We work very hard here."

But the best was yet to come. While the collapse of the housing bubble sent most of the financial world fleeing for the exits, or to jail, Goldman boldly doubled down — and almost single-handedly created yet another bubble, one the world still barely knows the firm had anything to do with.

BUBBLE #4 $4 a Gallon

By the beginning of 2008, the financial world was in turmoil. Wall Street had spent the past two and a half decades producing one scandal after another, which didn't leave much to sell that wasn't tainted. The terms junk bond, IPO, sub-prime mortgage and other once-hot financial fare were now firmly associated in the public's mind with scams; the terms credit swaps and CDOs were about to join them. The credit markets were in crisis, and the mantra that had sustained the fantasy economy throughout the Bush years — the notion that housing prices never go down — was now a fully exploded myth, leaving the Street clamoring for a new bullshit paradigm to sling.

Where to go? With the public reluctant to put money in anything that felt like a paper investment, the Street quietly moved the casino to the physical-commodities market — stuff you could touch: corn, coffee, cocoa, wheat and, above all, energy commodities, especially oil. In conjunction with a decline in the dollar, the credit crunch and the housing crash caused a "flight to commodities." Oil futures in particular skyrocketed, as the price of a single barrel went from around $60 in the middle of 2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008.

That summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic example of how Republicans and Democrats respond to crises by engaging in fierce exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be "very helpful in the short term," while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out.

But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the short-term flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-term supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling — which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down.

So what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.

As is so often the case, there had been a Depression-era law in place designed specifically to prevent this sort of thing. The commodities market was designed in large part to help farmers: A grower concerned about future price drops could enter into a contract to sell his corn at a certain price for delivery later on, which made him worry less about building up stores of his crop. When no one was buying corn, the farmer could sell to a middleman known as a "traditional speculator," who would store the grain and sell it later, when demand returned. That way, someone was always there to buy from the farmer, even when the market temporarily had no need for his crops.

In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. If that happened, prices would be affected by something other than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue. A new law empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the very same body that would later try and fail to regulate credit swaps — to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. As a result of the CFTC's oversight, peace and harmony reigned in the commodities markets for more than 50 years.

All that changed in 1991 when, unbeknownst to almost everyone in the world, a Goldman-owned commodities-trading subsidiary called J. Aron wrote to the CFTC and made an unusual argument. Farmers with big stores of corn, Goldman argued, weren't the only ones who needed to hedge their risk against future price drops — Wall Street dealers who made big bets on oil prices also needed to hedge their risk, because, well, they stood to lose a lot too.

This was complete and utter crap — the 1936 law, remember, was specifically designed to maintain distinctions between people who were buying and selling real tangible stuff and people who were trading in paper alone. But the CFTC, amazingly, bought Goldman's argument. It issued the bank a free pass, called the "Bona Fide Hedging" exemption, allowing Goldman's subsidiary to call itself a physical hedger and escape virtually all limits placed on speculators. In the years that followed, the commission would quietly issue 14 similar exemptions to other companies.

Now Goldman and other banks were free to drive more investors into the commodities markets, enabling speculators to place increasingly big bets. That 1991 letter from Goldman more or less directly led to the oil bubble in 2008, when the number of speculators in the market — driven there by fear of the falling dollar and the housing crash — finally overwhelmed the real physical suppliers and consumers. By 2008, at least three quarters of the activity on the commodity exchanges was speculative, according to a congressional staffer who studied the numbers — and that's likely a conservative estimate. By the middle of last summer, despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a gallon every time we pulled up to the pump.

What is even more amazing is that the letter to Goldman, along with most of the other trading exemptions, was handed out more or less in secret. "I was the head of the division of trading and markets, and Brooksley Born was the chair of the CFTC," says Greenberger, "and neither of us knew this letter was out there." In fact, the letters only came to light by accident. Last year, a staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committee just happened to be at a briefing when officials from the CFTC made an offhand reference to the exemptions.

"I had been invited to a briefing the commission was holding on energy," the staffer recounts. "And suddenly in the middle of it, they start saying, 'Yeah, we've been issuing these letters for years now.' I raised my hand and said, 'Really? You issued a letter? Can I see it?' And they were like, 'Duh, duh.' So we went back and forth, and finally they said, 'We have to clear it with Goldman Sachs.' I'm like, 'What do you mean, you have to clear it with Goldman Sachs?'"

The CFTC cited a rule that prohibited it from releasing any information about a company's current position in the market. But the staffer's request was about a letter that had been issued 17 years earlier. It no longer had anything to do with Goldman's current position. What's more, Section 7 of the 1936 commodities law gives Congress the right to any information it wants from the commission. Still, in a classic example of how complete Goldman's capture of government is, the CFTC waited until it got clearance from the bank before it turned the letter over.

Armed with the semi-secret government exemption, Goldman had become the chief designer of a giant commodities betting parlor. Its Goldman Sachs Commodities Index — which tracks the prices of 24 major commodities but is overwhelmingly weighted toward oil — became the place where pension funds and insurance companies and other institutional investors could make massive long-term bets on commodity prices. Which was all well and good, except for a couple of things. One was that index speculators are mostly "long only" bettors, who seldom if ever take short positions — meaning they only bet on prices to rise. While this kind of behavior is good for a stock market, it's terrible for commodities, because it continually forces prices upward. "If index speculators took short positions as well as long ones, you'd see them pushing prices both up and down," says Michael Masters, a hedge fund manager who has helped expose the role of investment banks in the manipulation of oil prices. "But they only push prices in one direction: up."

Complicating matters even further was the fact that Goldman itself was cheerleading with all its might for an increase in oil prices. In the beginning of 2008, Arjun Murti, a Goldman analyst, hailed as an "oracle of oil" by The New York Times, predicted a "super spike" in oil prices, forecasting a rise to $200 a barrel. At the time Goldman was heavily invested in oil through its commodities trading subsidiary, J. Aron; it also owned a stake in a major oil refinery in Kansas, where it warehoused the crude it bought and sold. Even though the supply of oil was keeping pace with demand, Murti continually warned of disruptions to the world oil supply, going so far as to broadcast the fact that he owned two hybrid cars. High prices, the bank insisted, were somehow the fault of the piggish American consumer; in 2005, Goldman analysts insisted that we wouldn't know when oil prices would fall until we knew "when American consumers will stop buying gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and instead seek fuel-efficient alternatives."

But it wasn't the consumption of real oil that was driving up prices — it was the trade in paper oil. By the summer of 2008, in fact, commodities speculators had bought and stockpiled enough oil futures to fill 1.1 billion barrels of crude, which meant that speculators owned more future oil on paper than there was real, physical oil stored in all of the country's commercial storage tanks and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve combined. It was a repeat of both the Internet craze and the housing bubble, when Wall Street jacked up present-day profits by selling suckers shares of a fictional fantasy future of endlessly rising prices.

In what was by now a painfully familiar pattern, the oil-commodities melon hit the pavement hard in the summer of 2008, causing a massive loss of wealth; crude prices plunged from $147 to $33. Once again the big losers were ordinary people. The pensioners whose funds invested in this crap got massacred: CalPERS, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, had $1.1 billion in commodities when the crash came. And the damage didn't just come from oil. Soaring food prices driven by the commodities bubble led to catastrophes across the planet, forcing an estimated 100 million people into hunger and sparking food riots throughout the Third World.

Now oil prices are rising again: They shot up 20 percent in the month of May and have nearly doubled so far this year. Once again, the problem is not supply or demand. "The highest supply of oil in the last 20 years is now," says Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan who serves on the House energy committee. "Demand is at a 10-year low. And yet prices are up."

Asked why politicians continue to harp on things like drilling or hybrid cars, when supply and demand have nothing to do with the high prices, Stupak shakes his head. "I think they just don't understand the problem very well," he says. "You can't explain it in 30 seconds, so politicians ignore it."

BUBBLE #5 Rigging the Bailout

After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.

It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson green-lighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.

Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.

Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict of interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.

The collective message of all this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."

Once the bailouts were in place, Goldman went right back to business as usual, dreaming up impossibly convoluted schemes to pick the American carcass clean of its loose capital. One of its first moves in the post-bailout era was to quietly push forward the calendar it uses to report its earnings, essentially wiping December 2008 — with its $1.3 billion in pretax losses — off the books. At the same time, the bank announced a highly suspicious $1.8 billion profit for the first quarter of 2009 — which apparently included a large chunk of money funneled to it by taxpayers via the AIG bailout. "They cooked those first quarter results six ways from Sunday," says one hedge fund manager. "They hid the losses in the orphan month and called the bailout money profit."

Two more numbers stand out from that stunning first-quarter turnaround. The bank paid out an astonishing $4.7 billion in bonuses and compensation in the first three months of this year, an 18 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008. It also raised $5 billion by issuing new shares almost immediately after releasing its first quarter results. Taken together, the numbers show that Goldman essentially borrowed a $5 billion salary payout for its executives in the middle of the global economic crisis it helped cause, using half-baked accounting to reel in investors, just months after receiving billions in a taxpayer bailout.

Even more amazing, Goldman did it all right before the government announced the results of its new "stress test" for banks seeking to repay TARP money — suggesting that Goldman knew exactly what was coming. The government was trying to carefully orchestrate the repayments in an effort to prevent further trouble at banks that couldn't pay back the money right away. But Goldman blew off those concerns, brazenly flaunting its insider status. "They seemed to know everything that they needed to do before the stress test came out, unlike everyone else, who had to wait until after," says Michael Hecht, a managing director of JMP Securities. "The government came out and said, 'To pay back TARP, you have to issue debt of at least five years that is not insured by FDIC — which Goldman Sachs had already done, a week or two before."

And here's the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008?

Fourteen million dollars.

That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion — yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year.

How is this possible? According to Goldman's annual report, the low taxes are due in large part to changes in the bank's "geographic earnings mix." In other words, the bank moved its money around so that most of its earnings took place in foreign countries with low tax rates. Thanks to our completely fucked corporate tax system, companies like Goldman can ship their revenues offshore and defer taxes on those revenues indefinitely, even while they claim deductions upfront on that same untaxed income. This is why any corporation with an at least occasionally sober accountant can usually find a way to zero out its taxes. A GAO report, in fact, found that between 1998 and 2005, roughly two-thirds of all corporations operating in the U.S. paid no taxes at all.

This should be a pitchfork-level outrage — but somehow, when Goldman released its post-bailout tax profile, hardly anyone said a word. One of the few to remark on the obscenity was Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money," he said, "the left is hiding it offshore."

BUBBLE #6 Global Warming

Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade.

The new carbon credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Here's how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy "allocations" or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.

The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.

Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank's environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson's report argued that "voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate change problem." A few years later, the bank's carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won't be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, "We're not making those investments to lose money."

The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in green-tech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy futures market?

"Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee.

Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe — but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.

"If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedge fund director who spoke out against oil futures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want. It's just asinine."

Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees — while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.

It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.

But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going.

This article originally appeared in the July 9-23, 2009 of Rolling Stone.




Julie Bishop Awakens Malcolm from GQ induced Slumber







Malcolm and Julie's victory speech 

Monday, September 14, 2015

ALP Wins Liberal Party Leadership Ballott





 Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull and Member for Goldman Sachs,THEIR ABC,Q & A Homosexual Marriage,Open Borders, Climate Change Tax and all round UN Cheer Leader.




Re Elected Deputy Liberal Party Leader Julie Bishop alleged architect of the leadership spill.

Australia Falls to the Left effectively now a One Party State.Labor Wins Liberal Party Leadership Ballott


NEW Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull 
 A "self centred, selfish individual. It has always been about you.”

Australian Liberal Party (Conservative) Leadership decided. Turnbull wins Party ballot.

Australian PM Tony Abbott loses Liberal Party (Conservative) leadership and Prime Ministership.


Leadership spill was instigated by the resignation of Left wing and Media poster boy Malcolm Turnbull, and subsequent press conferences outlining why he no longer is prepared to serve under Tony Abbott as Leader and PM.








Leftist Media Pin Up Boy Malcolm Turnbull (aka. Prince of Darkness POD.)





Six and Eight Year Old Girls Sexual Organs Hacked and Mutilated in Muslim Religious Ceremony cut “down there” and “hurt (in the) bottom,”





And the Australian Labor Green Loon Co Party is complaining that that Australian PM Tony Abbott is going to pick Christians over Muslims in any refugee intake from Syria.


Seven-year-old girl pictured herself as ‘princess in a garden’ to blank out pain of genital mutilation, court hears

The Daily Telegraph

Two women, 71 and 38, have pleaded not guilty on two counts
One is the girls’ mother. They face a maximum of 21 years
Both are members of a sect which hails from sub-continent
Seven-year-old ‘pictured herself as a princess’ to blank out pain
Mother told eldest daughter to keep what happened secret

TWO sisters revealed to police the secret practice of alleged female genital mutilation among a small Islamic sect in Wollongong and Sydney, a court has heard.

The girls, then aged six and eight, told police officers who interviewed them at their primary school that they had been cut “down there” and “hurt (in the) bottom,” during the secret ceremony called Khatna allegedly practised by the Shia sect Dawoodi Bohra on young girls.

The girls’ mother along with a retired nurse and a high-ranking member of the Dawoodi Bohra clergy are the first three people in NSW to stand trial for female genital mutilation.

It is alleged the girls’ mother, 38, who is called A2 to protect the girls’ identity arranged the procedure and was there when the nurse, 71, called KM, carried it out on her daughters in Wollongong and 

Baulkham Hills in Sydney’s north west some time between October 2009 and August 2012.

Both women have pleaded not guilty to two counts of female genital mutilation which carries a maximum penalty of 21 years.

They have also pleaded not guilty to two back-up charges of assault occasioning actual bodily harm in company.

Sheik Shabbir Mohammedbhai Vaziri, 59, has pleaded not guilty to being an accessory after the fact to female genital mutilation.

Crown prosecutor Nanette Williams said police began investigating Dawoodi Bohra after receiving allegations that female genital mutilation was practised inside the group whose followers are mostly from western India and Pakistan.

Ms Williams said the police interviewed the sisters C1 and C2 at their school on August 29, 2012 where the pair allegedly explained the practise of “khatna”.

“C1 (the eldest) knew what Khatna was because it had happened to her. She was seven years old when she had her private parts cut,” Ms Williams said.

C1 told police she tried to picture herself being a princess in a garden to remain calm when she was laid down on a bed and received “a little cut down there.”

After police interviewed the girls their mother was called to pick them up, but while her vehicle was at the school it was bugged by police.

Ms Williams said as the mother drove the girls home she told her eldest daughter, “I told you this is a big secret never tell anyone.”

Ms Williams said the girls were soon after examined at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead but the doctor was unable to confirm or deny whether the girls had been circumcised.

It is alleged when police started asking in the community about female genital mutilation Vaziri advised people to tell officers that they did not believe in the practice.

Defence barrister for A2 and Vaziri Robert Sutherland SC said the procedure was a “ritualistic ceremony.”

“It did not involve any mutilation or injury to either child,” he said.

The eldest daughter, now 11, will give evidence tomorrow.

Labor Green Loons Favourite Killers control Australia's Beaches

Sharks: Dawn of new era as traditional safety warnings are outdated

Geoff Chambers
The Daily Telegraph
September 14, 2015




SURFERS are being put in deadly danger because shark safety messages peddled by government agencies do not apply to white pointers and can’t be easily accessed online.

The Daily Telegraph can reveal traditional safety messages about swimming at dusk and dawn and staying close to the beach are outdated.

North coast shark victims Paul Wilcox and Tadashi ­Nakahara were both attacked and killed by great whites near the beach in good conditions between 10am and 11am.

Ballina bodyboarder Matt Lee was lucky to survive after being attacked midmorning in similar conditions off Lighthouse Beach in July.

In stark contrast to the NSW Department of Primary Industries website, which has no mention of sharks on its home page and requires links to find its so-called “Sharksmart” information, the WA 

government has a dedicated shark site, also called Sharksmart.

The WA page provides real-time updates on tagged shark locations, and photos of shark species instead of illustrations.

It also provides clear ­information on emergency response details and a fact/fiction checklist, which presents uncensored information on the threat posed by some shark species.

BALLINA ATTACK VICTIM WELCOMED HOME

SYDNEY PREPARES FOR SHARK SUMMER

 One of the country’s most senior shark experts told The Daily Telegraph traditional safety protocols did not apply to white pointers. And while bull sharks were known to be near river mouths and to attack 

humans, the ­behaviour of bronze whalers and tiger sharks could vary.

“It is impossible to predict. And every shark behaves differently and every coastline is different,” the expert said.


Matilda Hughes, part-owner of Avoca and Terrigal Learn to Surf, told The Daily Telegraph her business was hurt following a local attack last year.

The 20-year-old said accurate and updated shark education tips were crucial for both locals and tourists.

The DPI said it was looking at improving the NSW Sharksmart program and agreed it was an “important tool to protect beachgoers”.

SHARK ATTACK VICTIM LUCKY AFTER ‘FANNING MOMENT’


WATCH THE AMAZING MICK FANNING SHARK ATTACK VIDEO


Australia : "They share a stunning lack of humility. What unites them is their opinion that other Australians, “out there” in the suburbs, are selfish, parochial, gullible, redneck morons, easily led by evil Right Wing NutJobs (RWNJ)."

Miranda Devine: Turn Left to take the road to damnation

Miranda Devine
The Sunday Telegraph


September 13, 2015 



IT is in the egalitarian nature of Australia that we have neglected to cultivate a class of genuine elites. Unfortunately, this vacuum at the top means that a bunch of chattering mediocrities have appointed themselves to the role of our moral and intellectual betters.

Some even have acquired posh accents and a haughty tone to give the impression of superiority.

They share a stunning lack of humility. What unites them is their opinion that other Australians, “out there” in the suburbs, are selfish, parochial, gullible, redneck morons, easily led by evil Right Wing NutJobs (RWNJ).
Our faux elites claim they are driven by altruism, at least when it comes to issues that don’t adversely affect them, like refugee, drug and climate policies.

They don’t live in suburbs affected by drug crime, and can afford to pay for rehab for their wayward offspring.

They don’t have to fish dead bodies out of the ocean or face the consequences of their demand for open borders.

They don’t compete for welfare resources or family reunion quotas with asylum seekers or live near areas of social friction.

They barely notice the soaring energy costs that arise from climate policies they push for reasons of guilt, moral vanity, and in-crowd identity.

Their compassion is employed only in those circumstances where it showcases their status and their membership of a virtuous elite.

Thus, the tragedy of Syria’s civil war only merited their tears after that photograph of a drowned Syrian toddler became a media focal point.

What followed was an unseemly contest to trumpet their sad feelings.

To any reasonable observer, these people are irrational and ridiculous, bordering on downright dangerous.

Their self regard is so extreme that it verges into mass delusion.

Or, to apply a more precise diagnosis, they suffer from an affliction know as “pathological altruism”.

This is the inspired coinage of American systems engineer Barbara Oakley.

In a 2013 paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she defined it as “behaviour in which attempts to promote the welfare of … others results, instead, in harm that … was reasonably foreseeable.”



So, for instance, if you accidentally break a vase while helping a friend move house, that is not pathological altruism because the bad outcome was not foreseeable.

But if your brother is going through drug withdrawal and you get him more drugs to make him feel better, you are just “enabling his addiction. In this case, your well-meaning altruism is pathological.

Oakley cites examples such as “the overly attentive ‘helicopter’ father who threatens to sue instructors who give well-deserved bad grades, or the mother who attempts to protect her son by refusing to vaccinate him and who consequently fuels a loss of herd immunity underpinning a local whooping cough epidemic in which an infant dies”.

Closer to home, examples abound: drug liberalisers, who wants ice decriminalised might be motivated by a desire to help drug addicts.

But their remedies only exacerbate the harms and increase the numbers of addicts.

Similarly, well-meaning lefties, who talked Kevin Rudd into dismantling Howard-era border protections caused harm to those people they lured across the ocean, to those refugees whose places were taken, and damaged public confidence in our high level of migration. In other words, what might feel altruistic can end up making the situation worse.

“Altruistic intentions must be run through the sieve of rational analysis; all too often, the best long-term action to help others … is not intuitively obvious, not what temporarily makes us feel good, and not what is being promoted by other individuals, with their own self-serving interests,” Oakley says.

Elevating rational analysis over emotion is what the Prime Minister did last week when considering Australia’s response to the Syrian crisis: “It’s important that we act with our head as well as with our heart here.

“While I think we are all in the grip of grief, really, as we saw the tragedy unfolding on our television screens, the responsibility of government ... is to act in a measured and considered way.”

But for taking time to consider, he was criticised.

In our emotionally incontinent culture, driven by the sentimental narcissism of social media, true altruism can seem cruel.

Oakley cites examples of saying “no” to the student who demands a higher grade or to the addict who needs another hit.

“The social consequences of appearing cruel in a culture that places high value on kindness, empathy, and altruism can lead us to misplaced ‘helpful’ behaviour and result in self-deception regarding the consequences of our actions.”

Thus our faux elites damned the Abbott government as cruel when it went about rescuing our immigration system from criminal people smugglers.

They refuse to acknowledge that only because we “stopped the boats” is it possible to offer 12,000 Syrians a new home.

Similarly, they slam the government for skewing the intake towards persecuted minorities, particularly Christians against whom a religious genocide is being waged in the Middle East.

In order to showcase their tolerance they falsely claim helping the most needy is ­Islamophobic.

No, the altruism flaunted by our phony elites isn’t really about helping refugees or drug addicts or saving the planet.

It’s all about burnishing their reputations.

The road to hell is paved with their good intentions.

The Muslim Problem : Enduring cost of Labor’s failure as nearly 90 per cent of ‘humanitarian migrants’ are on welfare

Refugee crisis: Enduring cost of Labor’s failure as nearly 90 per cent of ‘humanitarian migrants’ are on welfare

Simon Benson
National Political Editor
The Daily Telegraph





MORE than 90 per cent of surveyed refugees granted permanent visas under the previous Labor government had failed to find a job within three to six months, forcing the majority to rely on government welfare to survive, a new report has revealed.

Despite 80 per cent claiming to feel “welcomed by Australia”, the social difficulties they faced were immense, according to the first government study to follow the new wave of humanitarian ­migrants.

Almost half reported they had never had a job in their lives, and 15 per cent had never attended school in their birth country.

Almost 40 per cent reported not understanding or speaking English, with only 10 per cent having a university degree and just 6 per cent being qualified for a trade. Only 7.8 per cent had qualifications recognised in Australia.

As a result, only 6 per cent of all those followed in the Building a New Life in Australia (BNLA) report, to be released today by the Department of Social Services, had found a job.

The main source of income for 88 per cent of the refugees at the time of reporting was government payments.

Newstart or Youth allowance payments accounted for 71.8 per cent, with 1.8 per cent on the age pension and 1.4 per cent on the Disability Support Pension. A further 19.3 per cent relied on family and parenting-related payments.

The study highlights the difficulties facing the 12,000 Syrians the government last week announced would be granted permanent visas in the wake of the humanitarian crisis flowing from civil war and terrorism in Syria.
Social Services Minister Scott Morrison said it “highlighted the serious challenges that Australia had always faced when seeking to resettle refugees through the humanitarian entrance”.

“What we want is a good settlement outcome where people become part of Australia’s culture, learn the language, go to school and get a job so they can support themselves,” Mr Morrison said.

“We can’t underestimate the scale of that challenge … and the less control over the selection process, the less control you have over outcome.

“When you get this wrong the consequences are generational.

“That is why, as we seek to identify and assess and integrate 12,000 refugees into Australia, we are focusing on the persecuted minorities, which are dominated by Christian groups, and will go about the process in a systemic and measured, professional manner.
“Where you rush this, where you fail to appreciate the challenges, that is when you reap a bitter harvest.”

The study looked at 2399 refugees from over 1500 migrating families who had all been granted permanent visas in 2013 under the former Labor government. They had either arrived or been granted visas three to six months prior to the study being conducted.

The study included asylum seekers, boat arrivals and refugees classed as either women at risk, UNHRC-identified refugees, and those granted protection under the special humanitarian program.

All were from Iran, Afghanistan or Iraq.



Despite the challenges facing refugees in Australia, the majority reported positive experiences with more than 80 per cent saying it was “good” or “very good”.

The majority of all those surveyed had also enrolled in English language classes, which would boost their employment prospects.

Many refugees granted protection were regarded as having significant mental health problems, such as post-traumatic stress associated with war zones.

More than a third assessed their health as fair, poor or very poor, which was ­marginally higher than ­indigenous communities but three times higher than non-indigenous Australians.

Bolt Report + Andrew Bolt YOU won’t defend what you don’t value. That’s why so many of the Left now want to sell out Europe and even Australia.

Leftists give away our heritage over Third World migrant wave

Andrew Bolt
September 14 2015.


YOU won’t defend what you don’t value. That’s why so many of the Left now want to sell out Europe and even Australia.

Hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants from the Third World are this year streaming into Europe, and in ever-increasing numbers.

They’ve heard the fences have been trampled flat, and are now marching through Europe’s poorer southern countries to demand entry to the richest, especially Germany.

They are demanding to have what people from another culture have created — and are demanding it simply because they want it, too.

After all, their own cultures have failed to produce any such riches, and without reform won’t.

Actually, when I say these people are poor, I mean only relatively. Many are actually rich enough to have seen the West’s wealth on their iPhones, and to have paid thousands of dollars to fly, drive or sail to the gates of Europe.

Now, normal people do not let strangers barge into their homes to take what they fancy, yet the Left in Europe has done just what the Left in Australia did when 50,000 illegal immigrants sailed here under Labor.

It has said yes, let them come and take it.

And Australian journalists, in an astonishing frenzy of sanctimony, demanded we take thousands of them, too, to come help themselves.

None of this makes sense, although the sanitised news reporting may explain some of this delirium.

For instance, the media have focused on a drowned toddler and on desperate families with children to whom you would give your heart, and some cash. But almost completely absent from media reports are the unmistakeable symptoms of the culture clash Europe is now admitting.

I have seen virtually no news report here about the violent riots in three German cities last week between Kurdish and Turkish immigrants, nor about the brawl in a German hostel by around 100 Syrian migrants outraged by the tearing of a Koran by an Afghan.

There has been a virtual blackout on last week’s riot on the Greek island of Lesbos by hundreds of Afghan men. There was a similar blackout on the scores of migrants chanting “f--- you” at Budapest when denied a train.

No TV news bulletin showed migrants in Hungary hurling stones, or the well-built migrant at an aid centre turning aggressively to a camera to mime the slashing of a throat. Few reports noted the warning by Spain’s government of infiltration of these columns of migrants by Islamic State terrorists.

Nothing that might make you fear the consequences of this great river of people is given much coverage. Even news in April that Muslims on a boat to Italy murdered Christian passengers was played down.

TV reports last week also said little about the massive trail of rubbish left along the road by this migrant army — rubbish suggesting an uncomfortable truth, that renters do not respect a home as owners do.

Nor is much context given for the rising unease by working-class Europeans at this massive influx of people from the Third World, 72 per cent of them men and overwhelmingly Muslim. That context: European nations from Spain to Sweden are already suffering from the great cultural clash of our time, between Islam and the Christian West.

All have struggled to assimilate large Muslim minorities, and all have battled increasing jihadism.

They have learned that mass immigration from the Middle East is now more like colonisation, as our own Lakemba shows.

No surprise. Why assimilate, when satellite TV beams in programs from home, the internet binds a world-wide ummah, subsidised mosques are around the corner, shopkeepers speak Arabic and cheap travel keeps old ties strong?




All this has been played down by our media class. What should be seen as a threat to be resisted to maintain our Western societies is presented instead as a duty to accept.

Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, praised by the Left for seeming to welcome an expected 500,000 illegal immigrants this year, admits Germany will be changed, and possibly not for the best.

“What we are experiencing now is something that will occupy and change our country in coming years,” she said.

“We want the change to be positive, and we believe we can accomplish that.”

Or maybe Germany won’t, but then it will be too late.

So how to explain this refusal to defend the West from an invasion of people whose culture often seems at war with all the West represents?

The answer is most obvious with Germany — shame for the past.

Merkel knows using the German army to force unwanted minorities onto trains for shipment will be too shocking a reminder of her country’s Nazi history.

This guilt still drives Germany’s intelligentsia, with Nobel-winning writer Herta Müller groaning: “We have the responsibility given the past.”

But shades of a similar shame runs through the West’s media and political elites, who have long held Europe in contempt for its racist and colonialist legacy, and howled down any suggestion of its civilising influence on the world.

That’s not so in the prouder and more religious nations of Eastern Europe, now the most adamant about not accepting these immigrants.

But the intelligentsia of Western Europe has for decades vilified even their rich Christian heritage, the foundation of their freedoms, as little more than a shameful relic of an oppressive faith ministered by paedophile priests.

And so Christian churches in countries such as Holland are converted into offices and shops, while proud mosques rise in immigrant suburbs.

In Australia it has been the same — or worse.

For nearly 30 years, Midnight Oil’s lyrics have been the soundtrack of our increasing self-loathing:

The time has come

A fact’s a fact

It belongs to them

We’re gonna give it back

Decades of such preaching in schools and universities have succeeded. They have produced a political and media class that trashes the very idea of Western civilisation — those bits it can still understand.

This is a class that resents its own wealth and despises its past, inventing genocides that never occurred.

It is a class that sees Australia as riddled not just with racists but planet-killers, eating evil coal and living on “stolen” land for which some ritual apology must be made at public events to “traditional owners”.

It is a class that sneers at patriotism (Sydney’s Waverley Council once even banned the Australian flag at the Bondi Pavilion, calling it inflammatory) and mocks talk of “Team Australia”.

It is a class which celebrates hyphenated identities — Lebanese-Australian, Chinese-Australian — and attacks Australia Day as “Invasion Day”.

At bottom, this is a class which attacks the traditions that produced our prosperity, and which believes we little deserve what we grubbily have.

No, share our wealth with those more worthy. Invite the Third World to come take what we sinners only stole.

 The Bolt Report






Sunday, September 13, 2015

Grand Pa V's Grand Ma

There was this loving grandfather who always made a special effort to spend time with his son's family on weekends.

Every Saturday morning he would take his 5-year-old granddaughter out for a drive in the car for some quality time - pancakes, ice cream, candy—just him and his granddaughter.

One particular Saturday, however, he had a terrible cold and could not get out of bed.
He knew his granddaughter always looked forward to their drives and would be very disappointed.

Luckily, his wife came to the rescue and said that she would take their granddaughter for her weekly drive and breakfast.

When they returned, the little girl anxiously ran upstairs to see her grandfather who was still in bed.

"Well, did you enjoy your ride with grandma?" he asked.

“Not really, Papa, it was boring.  We didn't see a single asshole, queer, piece of shit, horse's ass, socialist, politician, blind bastard, dip shit, Muslim camel humper or son of a bitch anywhere we went!"

We just drove around and Grandma smiled at everyone she saw.

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