Fascism And The World Company

by John Hoefle

February 29, 2008--With virtually every passing week, new reports of financial disaster surface, with previously obscure financial instruments becoming front-page news, new multi-billion-dollar losses at major financial institutions—including those that were said to be sheltered from such events—and more calls for emergency actions to stave off a spreading crisis we were assured was under control. We have moved with impressive swiftness from what have been reported as individual crises—subprime mortgages, subprime-backed securities, CDOs, SIVs, monoline bond insurers, et. al., to the latest, auction-rate securities—as if the financial system were a series of dominoes in a row, each problem triggering the next one. The regulators have treated the problems in the same way, trying to prevent particular dominoes from falling as a way of stopping the chain reaction. Obviously, this has not worked, and can not work, because it does not address the real problem, which is that the global financial system itself has collapsed. One could say that the dominoes are themselves disintegrating even as they topple in chain reaction, but even that understates the case.

This article will not cover the ins and outs of the financial disaster now unfolding, because, frankly, the details are not that important. LPAC is not "CSI Finance," and the process by which the carcass of the dead financial system decomposes is far less important than the fight over what type of system will replace it.

Few, if any, among the financial elite seem to understand that their precious financial system, which made them huge amounts of money and elevated them to great power, was based upon a simple fraud, namely treating a growing garbage-pile of unpayable debt as if it were a great mountain of wealth. Now, even as their delusion lifts like a fog, revealing the garbage, they are in denial. It is cyclical, they maintain, the fundamentals are sound and all we have to do is hang on until things return to normal. One can almost imagine the dinosaurs saying the same thing, as they went extinct.

Far from being in control, the financiers are reacting to events beyond their comprehension. They are acting on impulse, and their impulse is to try to save themselves no matter what the cost to the people of the United States, and the world. One can see this in the proliferation of bailout schemes being proposed on Wall Street and in Washington, all based on the premise that this is a temporary crisis, that the fundamentals are sound, that their delusions are real and that the reality of the collapse is the illusion. That, is a serviceable definition of insanity.

Cartels, and Fascism

What is left unsaid in all these bailout schemes is that they have the common aim of saving the speculators by passing the losses on to the public. Ultimately, it is the public which would pick up the tab, be it in the form of increased government debt and taxes, cuts in services, or the Rohatyn/Bloomberg plans to loot the public through the privatization of infrastructure.

As we have indicated in numerous locations, what is being proposed is a form of Mussolini-style corporatism, in which government becomes the agent for rule by financier-run corporate cartels. Since corporatism has a bad name, this variant of fascism has been re-branded as "globalism," a new and improved way of managing the world. Within the new packaging, however, lies the ancient evil of imperialism.

The cultural and political changes which burst forth in 1968 lay at the heart of the baby boomer generation's susceptibility to imperial manipulation. In addition to the cultural and political attacks upon the population in that period, an assault on the structure of the U.S. economy was also launched by the imperial gamemasters. The name of the project was the "world company," and it was introduced by senior Lehman Brothers banker and top Establishment figure George Wildman Ball at the Bilderberger meeting at Mont Tremblant, Canada, in April, 1968.

The aim of this world company project, as explained by Ball, was to eliminate "the archaic political structure of the nation state" in favor of a more "modern" corporate structure. "The world company has a great potential for good as an instrument for efficiently utilizing resources," Ball said, revealing the Malthusian nature of the project. Ball made explicit that what he was outlining was a return to the imperial form by citing "the overlapping sovereignties of the governments of Europe and the House of Rothschild," thus putting the financiers on the same level as governments. Ball also called for further political integration in Europe, as a precondition for expanding the power of the world company apparatus in Europe, a process he assisted by working with Jean Monnet and Robert Marjolin in laying the framework for what became the European Union.

After his Bilderberger speech, Ball and his co-imperialists gave a series of presentations designed to advance the project. One event, a 1974 seminar at the American Assembly, a Columbia University-affiliated operation housed at the old Harriman estate outside New York City, was turned into a book, "Global Companies, The Political Economy of World Business." Edited by Ball, it consists of transcripts of speeches attacking the very concept of national sovereignty and asserting the need for corporations to run the world.

In one of these speeches a top IBM official, Jacques Maisonrouge, used language similar to the claims made by globalists today. "Pandemic inflation, skyrocketing oil prices, scarcities of raw materials, disequilibrium in international payments, poor harvests, rising unemployment, high interest rates, growing fear of a global depression-these are only some of the problems bedeviling the human race," he said. "The seminal problem appears to be the lopsided distribution of the world's resources, both material and human. What is needed are mechanisms whereby those resources can be identified, managed, and more equitably distributed. One such mechanism-the international company-already exists. It is my contention that no better tool has yet been devised for realizing these goals than the international company." Presaging the claims made by Felix Rohatyn, Michael Bloomberg and the Rockefeller Foundation's Judith Rodin today, Maisonrouge claimed that "it is all too clear that purely political solutions do not work in the long run" as governments "place national interests, or their views of them, ahead of long-term international cooperation."

Felix the Fascist

While Ball was pushing this concept, his Lehman Brothers was working hard to implement it, and working closely with the Synarchist investment bank Lazard Freres to do so. Working together, these two firms were at the forefront of the assembling of the conglomerates, the predecessors to today's supranational giants. Cartelization, under the euphemism of mergers and acquisitions (M&A), has been the life's work of Felix Rohatyn, the long-time Lazard banker who, after a stint with Rothschild, joined Lehman. Rohatyn headed the New York Stock Exchange's Crisis Committee in the early 1970s, helping to restructure Wall Street to pave the way for this cartelization, and then became the most prominent of the M&A bankers. His sleazy role in orchestrating the machinations of one of his clients, ITT, involving deeds ranging from illegal stock parking to the installation of the fascist Pinochet government in Chile, earned him the insulting sobriquet Felix the Fixer, a name which, while true, was far too kind. Lazard, as U.S. and French intelligence reports have shown, was a controller of the Synarchy, the French variant of fascism, and Rohatyn was their man in the United States.

Over the years, Rohatyn has played a major role in building the globalist cartels that increasingly dominate the world economy. Now we have Rohatyn, a major power behind the scenes in the Democratic Party, moving to complete the world company project by using the current financial crisis to defeat the nation-state. The intention is to use the financial crisis and the political paralyzation in Washington to "prove" that the "archaic" nation-state is unable to deal with the complex problems facing the modern world, and that it is therefore necessary to move "beyond politics" into a more efficient, corporatist structure. This is what lies behind the "public-private partnership" privatization schemes. Politics has failed, and it is now time for change, they say, offering as the model the very system against which we fought the American Revolution.

Should we allow this project to come to fruition, the world will rapidly descend into austerity and chaos, as the financier imperialists consolidate their grip over the planet. Their intention is to restore the predatory system represented by the British East India Company and the Venetian Levant Company, using the modern technology of Big Brother. This means consolidating their control over raw materials, using their control over the restructured financial markets to rig prices on the necessities of life (and making what Enron did to California look like a walk in the park), and dramatically reducing global population. Much of this has already been completed, but we still have the opportunity to stop it, restore national sovereignty, and put these evils back in their Pandora's Box. Forget the financial system, which is already dead. What is on the line is civilization itself.

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Cognitive Infiltration--It can't happen here...

Glenn Greenwald has exposed in salon.com, a 2008 paper by the behavioral economist, Obama crony and Obama appointee Cass Sunstein. Greenwald began:

"Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama's closest confidants. Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for 'overseeing policies relating to PRIVACY, INFORMATION QUALITY, and statistical programs.' In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-'independent' advocates to 'cognitively infiltrate' online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems 'false conspiracy theories' about the Government. This would be designed to increase citizens' faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.

"Sunstein advocates that the Government's stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into 'chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.' He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called 'independent' credible voices to bolster the Government's messaging (on the ground that those who don't believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government). This program would target those advocating false 'conspiracy theories,' which they define to mean: 'an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.'"

Finally, Greenwald quotes Sunstein at greater length, asking:

"What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5)."

To which Greenwald responds appropriately:

"So Sunstein isn't calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) — having Government 'ban conspiracy theorizing' or 'impose some kind of tax on those who' do it — but he says 'each will have a place under imaginable conditions.' I'd love to know the 'conditions' under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will 'have a place.' That would require, at a bare minumum, a repeal of the First Amendment. Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position."

Amidst other fun, Greenwald makes the obvious reference to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, who was paid almost a million dollars by the Obama White House to consult on its health reform, but posed for a year as an "independent expert" backing up White House claims. Greenwald briefly took on the sorry Paul Krugman for defending Gruber's corruption, whereupon Krugman promptly went ballistic on the internet.

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How Obama's Healthcare Plan Will Impose Hitlerian Genocide on You and Your Family

Under the pretext of extending health insurance to more Americans, Obama's so-called healthcare reforms would actually accelerate death-rates, especially among the aged, the chronically ill, minorities and the poor.

This is not some unfortunate error of one or another clause or provision. Rather, it saturates the entirety of the Senate bill from the first page to page 2409, the last page, and similarly for the House bill.

This is no accident; it is completely deliberate. This was the policy of Hitler's secret "T4" directive of September-October, 1939. This is the crime of genocide, for which, under the label of so-called euthanasia, Nazi doctors were hanged at Nuremberg.


This too much to read? Try a 12 minute video report.

To begin to raise the curtain on the murderous intent of these "reforms," we will focus here on three features: first, the falsely so-called "Cadillac tax," which, in reality, is neither a tax, nor does it involve luxuries like Cadillacs. Second, on what physician Richard Cooper has called the "Dartmouth memorial clause," which would selectively withdraw Federal funds from hospitals in certain areas, and award those funds as bonuses to hospitals in other areas. Finally, we will refer, as we have before, to the IMAC or IMAB, an unlected, unconstitutional, Presidentially-appointed board solely dedicated to slashing Medicare, with little interference permitted from the elected representatives of the people in the Congress.

But before proceeding, it must be pointed out that the entirety of the Obama "healthcare" package, every part of which centers on subsidies for the Nixon-spawned private health-insurance entities known as "HMOs," is now completely under the cloud of the massive, unresolved AIG case, because of AIG's tentacles into the entirety of the insurance industry, including the HMOs.

Although the new Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has done a sloppy job on this so far in its first days of hearings, nevertheless former New York Governor (and Attorney General) Eliot Spitzer and his friends have been effective in defining some of the problems from the sidelines. As Spitzer and his friends point out, still-secret Federal Reserve and AIG emails and other documents are critical to the investigation.

A related civil case against AIG is progressing in California, and the House Oversight Committee of Reps. Towns and Issa has subpoenaed those emails with a return date of Jan 19, while Geithner is to testify there on Jan 29 on this matter, in which he is a central player.

In the light of this, and since the entirety of what Obama and company are pushing as a healthcare reform, goes into this question,— and moreover when the indications are that there is something legally smelly about the whole insurance aspect of the Obama healthcare legislation,— then the entire package must be suspended until this can be sorted out. If this is all one big fraud, then Obama's bill is killed on that ground.

The Cadillac Tax Isn't a Tax

Begin with the so-called "Cadillac tax:" what all healthcare economics insiders know, including all sentient Senators and Congressmen and their staffs, is that the Senate bill's "Cadillac tax" is not a tax at all. It is simply a Congressional PROHIBITION on any employer-provided health insurance above a certain level of premiums, presently $8,500 for an individual or $23,000 for a family. The reason that it is falsely designated as a "tax," rather than what it actually is, a prohibition, is merely so as to try to evade the question of the constitutionality of such a prohibition. That is, for example, many state attorneys general have rightly challenged the constitutionality of any law which would require Americans to buy health insurance from private companies.

But what would they say of a Congressional prohibition on purchasing health insurance above some Congressionally-designated minimum price? Moreover, a minimum price which is quite openly pre-programmed to DROP still further every single year in real terms, so that more and more Americans lose more health security, each and every year into the indefinite future?

Again, there is no one "on the inside" so stupid as not to know all of this in full detail. Only the gullible general reader of such trash as the New York Times and Washington Post is fooled, in the hope that by the time he finally wakes up, it will be "Too late, sucker!"

The proof that the so-called "Cadillac tax" is a "tax" in name only, begins with the fact that no one expects it to be paid. This so-called tax will be assessed by HMOs and charged to employers, to the extent of 40% of the excess of every premium over the permitted minimum value. But official US government studies expect only very few of these employers to pay it. (Documentation on all these related questions of the "Cadillac tax," can be found through Rep. Joe Coakley's website, and through a Jan 13 post by Jane Hamsher on Huffington Post.) Or, as official expert Jonathan Gruber (more on him below) wrote in the Washington Post on Dec 28, "The Cadillac Tax Isn't a Tax."

But you might reply, "You say the Cadillac tax is not a tax. But if it were not really a tax, it would not produce revenue. But then how can you explain that the fact the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that it will contribute $149 billion to the Federal budget between 2013-2019?"

The simple and straightforward answer to that honest question, is so richly unbelievable, that no reader could be blamed if he thought it a joke. Here is how the misnamed "Cadillac tax" will produce that revenue, according to the CBO.

Rather than pay the "tax," employers will either reduce the health coverage of their employees, or drop it entirely. Here's the next step: for every dollar they save in premiums in that way, employers will turn around and give a dollar back to their employees in increased wages! Thus, the way the "Cadillac tax" contributes to Federal revenues (in this fantasy), is overwhelmingly (80-83%) through the increased social security taxes and Federal income taxes, which will be paid in by those millions of employees who will get all these raises from their employers! This when real unemployment exceeds 20%, and the wages and hours of those lucky enough to be still employed are falling rapidly.

If you can believe that, you may be eligible for a professor's chair at MIT, and even perhaps for a one-year, $400,000 grant from Nancy DeParle's White House Office of Health Reform. Jonathan Gruber has both, but he didn't disclose the $400,000 grant. Instead, he spent the past year as a so-called "independent expert," being continually cited by the White House in support of this bizarre theory, which Gruber says is demonstrated by some private, proprietary economic model which he runs in secret.

He wrote op-eds on this for both the New York Times and Washington Post after explicitly lying to each newspaper about his conflict of interest,— for which both papers have now had to apologize. But the game ended when Marcy Wheeler exposed Gruber's $400,000 secret payoff this Jan 7 on firedoglake.com. Now it's hard to find anyone to defend the "theory!" Never mind that the whole Senate bill, and the "Cadillac tax" on which Obama personally insists, all depend upon it!

Now, what will really happen if this "Cadillac tax,"— what International Association of Firefighters head Harold Schaitberger has rightly called "a disaster, a nightmare,"— what will happen if it becomes law? Gruber claims that employers will cut $223 billion in health coverage over a decade, and workers will gain $223 billion in wages. The wage part can be disregarded, but employers will indeed cut $223 billion in coverage, and likely a lot more,— this by closing down many of their health plans entirely, leaving workers with the much-inferior "exchanges," or Medicaid.

What coverage will these workers lose? Will it be luxuries? Gruber and other flacks cite a $40,000 plan at Goldman Sachs which includes free gym memberships and yoga lessons. Is that what will be lost?

Of course not. What determines premiums is not primarily benefit levels, but the age, health status, sex, and geographic location of the insured,— and completely arbitrary decisions by crooked HMOs even more so. The average coal miner's policy costs about $32,500. Group policies are far more expensive in the Bronx, as they are in the vicinities of other urban ghettos, than they are elsewhere. And the very same Senate bill which includes this "Cadillac tax," also allows insurers to TRIPLE their rates based on age, alone.

These are the things which determine the level of premiums, not luxury, "Cadillac" benefits. Therefore, who will be cut? Obviously: The aged, the poor and minorities, the chronically ill, women, especially of childbearing age, and those in health-imperiling occupations like mining.

Or, as one study says, this pernicious measure will "make healthcare unaffordable for many families that currently have employer coverage,... especially women, older workers, and those with chronic conditions."

To what effect? As if it weren't obvious enough already, when benefits are cut, as through increased co-pays, what happens? Every study shows that the first thing that happens is that the victims "forego care for the chronic conditions which determine the 'excess' insurance." Diabetes, for instance. High blood pressure, and many others. And they die faster; but that's the whole point, isn't it?

And lastly and most important: never forget that this is only the beginning. That the "Cadillac tax" is carefully pre-programmed by the Senate, to take a bigger bite every year, year after year after year, as the minimum allowable real level of employer plan drops relentlessly down every year like the scythe in Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum."

Obama has been instructed by his controller, Britain's Tony Blair, that we must die faster and more often. That's just what Blair did with Britain's National Health Service when he was Prime Minister. And behind Tony Blair stands the British Royal Family of Prince Philip, the Royal Consort, who has repeatedly demanded that the world's population must be reduced from a presently estimated 6.7 billion, to less than two!

The Wennberg/Dartmouth Scam

The four legs of the US healthcare system today are, first, employer-provided insurance, covered above. Second is Medicare for those aged 65 and over, which we will treat last. A third leg is the veterans' system, and, finally, the fourth could be said to be Medicaid for the indigent, combined with free emergency care for those who have really nothing. With the sole exception of the veterans' system,— for now— the genocidal Obama plan is out to cut off each of these four "legs" in its drive for death.

The Wennberg/Dartmouth scam is designed especially to cripple what's left of Medicaid, along with free emergency-room care for those who have absolutely nothing else to resort to, by pushing into bankruptcy just those hospitals which serve urban ghettos and the poorest parts of the rural South.

Both the House and Senate so-called "healthcare" bills will shift money out of the hospitals which serve poor ghetto areas, and shift it into the so-called "more efficient" hospitals in the Northwest and Southwest which do not. This genocide is rationalized by the studies of Jack Wennberg's Dartmouth Institute, which have been exposed as fraudulent by EIR's Ned Rosinsky and other writers, and even exposed in a paper by the Federal Medicare Advisory Commission, MedPAC, as even the whorish Washington Post was forced to admit in a Jan 6 article by Alec MacGillis.

To make it more blatantly genocidal, penalization of the so-called less efficient hospitals will be done, not by individual hospital, but by county. This insures that if your hospital serves Harlem or the urban ghettos of Los Angeles, Texas or elsewhere, or poor areas in the South, it will be deprived of the Federal money it needs to operate, no matter what its so-called "efficiency," in costs per Medicare patient. All teaching hospitals will also be screwed.

The so-called more-efficient hospitals which will be rewarded with the funds stolen from treatment of the poor, are exemplified by the Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic, which has lobbied heavily for these changes. But besides the fact that it treats virtually no ghetto poor, another reason for Mayo's low cost is that it charges significant co-pays for Medicare patients. Another is that it simply triages the indigent. Mayo announced in October that its flagship Rochester, MN, facility will no longer accept Medicaid patients from Nebraska and Montana. Already, only 5 percent were on Medicaid there, a much smaller percentage than other big teaching hospitals, and less than Rochester's other hospital.

Mayo's facility in Glendale, AZ, recently announced that it will no longer accept Medicare patients for primary care without an additional fee of $250 per year plus $175-400 per visit. And Bloomberg reported that one of Mayo's Arizona primary-care clinics announced Dec 31 that it would cease to treat Medicare patients at all as of Jan 1.

Starve the hospitals that treat the poor! This is reform?

IMAB, or the Secret "T4" Committee

On the third major genocidal feature, EIR has extensively covered the body variously called IMAC or IMAB, or most recently also called the "Independent Payment Advisory Board," IPAB.

Like the ironically so-called "Cadillac tax," this is a feature of the Senate's bill, which Obama has personally insisted must be included in final healthcare legislation. It is an unelected, unconstitutional, Presidentially-appointed dictatorial board of 18, which has vast powers to slash Medicare, and only to slash Medicare, never to improve it, with little interference from the elected representatives of the people in Congress.

The IMAB most closely resembles the committee of leading physicians set up under Hitler's "T4" order, to determine which of the ill or handicapped Germans were living a "life unworthy to be lived," and were therefore designated be murdered by doctors and nurses in a so-called "mercy death." The Chief of Counsel on War Crimes for the US at Nuremberg, estimated that they murdered 275,000 non-Jewish Germans in this way, beginning with handicapped children, before they started in on the Jews, Communists, gypsies and other undesirables.

Who does not know that the biggest funding source for the Obama deathcare bill is $500 billion in cuts for the Medicare program for the aged? The Senate health-care bill, passed, ironically, on Christmas Eve, not only gives an unelected, Presidentially-appointed commission dictatorial powers to slash Medicare reimbursements and deny treatments, but it attempts to prevent future Congresses from altering the dictates of the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (IMAB), violating the Constitution, as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) pointed out on the Senate floor.

And never forget that IMAB, like the "Cadillac tax," is designed to cut a bit more, every year, on top of last year's cuts. Forever.

Thus does Obamacare aim to destroy every part of the American medical system (with the temporary exception of the veterans' system). The goal is death, as with the Spanish fascist who cried "Viva la muerte!", or "Long live death!"

There are those who have claimed that every German was responsible for the crimes of Hitler, saying that "each of them must have known what Hitler was doing." Well, your Senator and your Congressman knows everything we have written above, and more, and he probably even voted for all of it as well. And now, you know it too!

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The above article will appear in the Jan. 22, 2010 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Iceland President Stands by His People

January 8, 2010 (LPAC)-- Despite the hostility of the governments of Great Britain and the Netherlands, which have threatened to kick Iceland out of the "international community," Iceland President Olaf Ragnar Grimsson is standing by his decision, and defending, in interviews and statements, the right of his people to national sovereignty. In the Financial Times today, he is quoted as saying, "The Icelandic constitution is based on the fundamental principle that the people have sovereignty. It is the responsibility of the President to make sure that the will of the people will prevail."

He then called on the peoples of Britain and Netherlands ("and their political leaders") to stand "with the longstanding democratic traditions of Britain and the Netherlands, acknowledging that a referendum is a democratic way of making a decision,"

Grimsson was also interviewed in Swedish radio.

In an interview with BBC on Wednesday evening, Grimsson was verbally assaulted by the host, who looked like an attorney for Shylock and treated the President of a state like a felon. "Don't trust an Icelander," "Aren't international agreements more important than a President's will?" and "Are you happy with these results?" (downrating, loss of international credit, etc.) were the interviewer's questions and remarks. Grimsson taught the arrogant fellow a lesson, telling him, "I understand that Britain is not familiar with systems where the people is called to express its will " and that in Iceland, "not the parliament, but the nation is sovereign."

In contrast to the oligarchy, the British people continue to express their sympathy for Icelanders, at least judging from readers' comments continuing to flow in to major dailies (see below). It is probably due to this that a faction of the British establishment, represented by the Financial Times, has taken a distance from the government and openly rejected the "hard-line" approach towards Iceland. Significantly, an FT editorial today is entitled "Do Not Put Iceland in a Debtors' Prison." The FT also chose to publish a letter by Advocacy International, saying that it is "unjust" to make Iceland take sole responsibility for the "reckless behavior of private bankers and risk-takers."

The FT ran as a blowup quote, the view of its chief financial commentator, Martin Wolf: "This is not about cutting a running deficit, which is, indeed, unavoidable. It is about forcing innocent people to assume gigantic liabilities for which they have no legal or moral responsibility. How would U.K. citizens feel if they were forced to assume a debt of ￡400 billion because of HSBC's failure to meet deposit insurance liabilities in Asia? Let the U.K. take the bank's assets and leave it at that."

Also, Michael Hudson from the University of Missouri writes that "Iceland has the right to refuse debt servitude." Hudson argue that Iceland could pay foreign debt only out of balance-of-payments receipts, i.e. through export revenues. But already fish export revenues have been entirely earmarked to service existing debt; the same goes for aluminum exports and its geothermal and hydroelectric resources. Add to this the fact that most families have mortgages which, if the currency is depreciated, can only get worse, and you have the picture: It is impossible for Iceland to pay the debt. "A pragmatic economic principle is at work in such conditions. Debts that cannot be paid, will not." If we have learned the lessons of the collapse of living standards in post-Soviet Russia, he ends by asking, "by how many years must Icelandic lifespans shorten?"

According to a European banking source, the British and the Dutch are going to dump the burden on Scandinavian countries. On their side, the resistance organization in Iceland is calling on the Scandinavian governments to support them against the London and The Hague.

Obama's Approval Rating--How Low Can He Go?

January 4, 2010 (LPAC)—The Rasmussen Report's latest daily Presidential Tracking Poll, done Dec. 31, shows that Obama's approval fell 3 percentage points in December, compared to 2% declines in October and November, respectively. The poll shows that 42% of U.S. voters "strongly disapprove" of Obama's performance as President, while only 24% "strongly approve"—yielding a negative approval rating of -18%.

Rasmussen polls also show that 47% of voters think states should have the right to opt out of whatever healthcare plan Congress adopts.

In addition to the Hitler healthcare, firedoglake.com blogger and liberal Democrat Jane Hamsher has pointed to the White House-allied groups who insisted that no Democrats attack the AIG bailout early in Obama's term. Hamsher wrote, "The natural people who would have been organzing at that point in time were the liberal groups. The bankers came to the White House and said, 'We want you to ratchet down the rhetoric,' and that's what happened. The word went out at those meetings, 'Don't criticize the bankers; don't criticize Geithner and Summers,' " Hamsher wrote, referring to the gatherings of groups organized by the Obama campaign apparatus. "All that populist anger migrated over to the teabaggers and grew over there. That was a huge mistake, and we're going to pay for it in 2010."

Following Republican gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey in November, the January 19 election for Senator Ted Kennedy's Senate seat may be another shocker. In perennially Democratic Massachusetts, over-confident Democratic candidate Martha Coakley has gone on vacation, while Republican State Senator Scott Brown is running an ad showing President John Kennedy delivering his speech advocating tax cuts, and then cutting to Brown, who continues reading from it. In the past 6 weeks, Scott Brown's online donations have exploded.

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