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The Great American Bubble Machine

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.
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 layoffs, 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...

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Matt Taibbi @'Rolling Stone'

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Really, stop what you are doing and just watch this. It’s short. Even though you know what the ultimate position is, try to forget that for a minute and listen with fresh ears. This is simply astounding.
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ADR- Solitary Pursuits

Aaron David Ross: Brooklyn Resident, multimedia artist, and one half of Giallo-crusaders Gatekeeper (Merok) is here as ADR for this first full-presentation from Public Information.
Solitary Pursuits: an 8 track mini LP, a burning head-trip into electronic swamplands packed with science-fiction sonics.
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The Haqqani network and Pakistan

If I hear about the ‘Haqqani network’ and their collusion with Pakistan one more time I will be very, very upset. That interestingly is exactly what the members of the All-Parties Conference (APC) convened by Prime Minister (PM) Gilani did; they were all very upset, very, very upset and even some might say a little irate. And in their combined opinion the Haqqanis, whoever they might be, have nothing to do with the Pakistan army’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) and even if they did it was at best a very ‘innocent’ relationship based on occasional roast lamb and chicken pulao parties and some entirely harmless social chitchat. Whenever it comes to the goings on in Afghanistan, all the ‘players’ have different points of view. First is of the US and its allies, including the Afghan government, and that be can summarised as ‘Pakistan bad, ISI bad, Taliban bad, Haqqanis very bad’ and they are all trying their best to make life difficult for the US and President Karzai. After 10 years in Afghanistan, the US has reached the point of exhaustion and wants to get most of its fighting men out as soon as possible. The problem for the US is that it does not want to leave a situation behind where the Taliban take over Kabul and much of Afghanistan soon after the US combat forces withdraw from Afghanistan.
Then there is the point of view of the Pakistanis or at least of the Pakistani ‘establishment’. For those who still wonder who exactly is the ‘establishment’, a look at the APC participants will give them the answer. The beards, the pirs, the Makhdooms, the epaulets and sashes, the Chaudhries, the Maliks, the Mians and the Syeds, the tribal sardars or their representatives and the occasional ‘ordinary’ MQM types were all there. The bureaucrats might not have participated directly but were the ‘event managers’ who prepared the guest list, decided upon the agenda and were responsible for what came out of the meeting. What came out was basically that the US has overstayed its welcome in Afghanistan by almost 10 years, and ‘thank you very much for the money you gave us’ but now please leave and let us do our ‘thing’. However, after a decent interval please do restore your financial aid.
What do the Taliban want? Well, first they would like to kill as many of the foreign ‘infidels’ as possible. While killing all these infidels they would also like to see the US and NATO forces leave as soon as possible so that they can re-establish their emirate in Afghanistan and continue the holy work they were doing when they were so rudely interrupted by the US infidels 10 years ago. Once back in power, they will kill many more infidels of the Muslim sort, and destroy all remnants of ‘modernisation’ once again.
As far as the truth is concerned, truth is always the first casualty of war. So now we have multiple truths pushed by the different participants in this ‘theatre’ of war. But there are some truths that apply to us the ordinary people in Pakistan but for most of us ‘strategic depth’ is a meaningless concept. For us, the real truths that matter are about load shedding, the deteriorating law and order situation, terrorism, galloping food price inflation, the dengue epidemic in Lahore, target killings in Karachi, corruption and a rapidly disappearing sense of hope in our future as a country. Yes, these are our truths and the Haqqani network is definitely one of them...