World View: North Korea Launches Three Short-Range Missiles

World View: North Korea Launches Three Short-Range Missiles

This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

  • The former girlfriend of France’s president Francois Hollande returns
  • The IRS follows the banksters in the culture of fraud and extortion
  • Banks return to synthetic securities backed by junk
  • North Korea launches three short-range missiles

The former girlfriend of France’s president Francois Hollande returns

Segolene Royal (AFP)
Segolene Royal (AFP)

France’s Socialist president Francois Hollande certainly has plenty ofproblems on his hands — recession, soaring unemployment, plungingpopularity, and the need to persuade the French that “there’s a pilotin the plane.” But now he has a new problem — or rather an oldproblem that’s new again. Segolene Royal, his former girlfriend of 30years and mother of four children by him, is returning to politics,and is releasing her new book, “This Beautiful Idea of Courage.”Hollande’s current girlfriend, Valerie Trierweiler, stole Hollandeaway from Royal several years ago, and the relationship between Royaland Trierweiler has been bitter and public. Guardian (London)

The IRS follows the banksters in the culture of fraud and extortion

For years I’ve been writing about the culture of fraud and extortionthat began with the rise of Generation-X, and has metastasizedthroughout Washington and Wall Street. Now we have the InternalRevenue Service (IRS) admitting that it specifically targetedpolitical opponents of the Obama administration, though laughablyclaiming that there were no political motives.

I’ve seen this all before — the fatuous denials and claims ofignorance, the arrogance, the lies, the coverups, the daily bombshellsof the 1970s Nixon administration — now playing out again in the2010s Obama administration. There’s even Obamacare which, as I’vewritten about many times, is an even more destructive economic policythan Nixon’s wage-price controls, which were disastrous. (See “Obama’s health plan, a proposal of economic insanity” from 2009.) As Mark Twain said, historydoesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

I’ve written about the culture of fraud and extortion dozensof times, and we’ve seen many illustrations:

  • The Gen-X financial engineers got their masters degrees in the 1990s, then went into financial institutions in the 2000s, creating tens of trillions of dollars in fraudulent subprime mortgage backed synthetic securities that brought about the global financial crisis — which is far from over. They sold the fraudulent securities to millions of investors and lied to their Boomer bosses, who didn’t ask any questions because they were making so much money. (See “Financial Crisis Inquiry hearings provide ‘smoking gun’ evidence of widespread criminal fraud” from 2010.)
  • The e-mail messages that came out of the Libor-rigging investigations show incredible arrogance on the part of banksters, who routinely manipulated markets to affect the interest rates on things like mortgages for their own personal gain, and apparently recognized no ethical or moral boundaries to anything. (See “9-Feb-13 World View — Comments and questions on the Libor-rigging scandal”)
  • In recent months, similar rate-fixing frauds have been discovered involving ISDAfix involving ISDAfix, and even in setting the price of oil on the world markets.
  • I’ve personally seen fraud and even criminal activities in the computer industry, by people who also have no ethical or moral standards.

So now it turns out that the people in the IRS also have no ethical ormoral standards. That was pretty obvious watching Friday’scongressional testimony by acting IRS commissioner Steve Miller, whoappeared to be totally lacking in ethics and morals, and was extremelyhigh on the sleaziness scale. And to make matters worse, the IRSpeople, with no ethical or moral standards, will be assigned toadminister Obamacare, a policy of economic insanity.

As I’ve suggested in the past, the mainstream press has not donePresident Obama any favors by being so completely credulous and socompletely in the tank for Obama. Obama learned that he could commitany crime with no fear of retribution, since the NY Times and NBC Newsand the Associated Press would always back him completely. But nowthe Associated Press reporters, whose phone records were secretlyobtained and scrutinized by the administration, are learning that whenpeople are too credulous, then sooner or later they get screwed,especially in this culture of fraud and extortion. Washington Post

Banks return to synthetic securities backed by junk

Banks made huge amounts of money in the 2004-2007 time frame byrepackaging faulty subprime mortgage debt as fraudulent syntheticsecurities, and selling them to credulous investors as AAA rated,risk-free investments. Now, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and MorganStanley are returning to those kinds of deals, starting with sales ofsythethic bonds backed by subprime auto loans made to borrowers withlow credit scores. Banksters have sold nearly $30 billion of these in2013, triple the sales in the same period last year. As I keeppointing out, the same people who caused the global financial crisisare still in the same jobs, looking for new ways to defraud people.Fortune/CNN

North Korea launches three short-range missiles

North Korea on Saturday launched three short range guided missilesinto the sea off the Korean Peninsula’s east coast. The missiles didnot threaten any South Korean, Japanese, or American assets. Thelaunch of short-range missiles is considered far less dangerous thanthe launch of long-range missiles, as was threatened last month byNorth Korea. Yonhap (Seoul)

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