Mr. Mortgage
The Wall St Journal ran a very thorough yet backward looking story on the state of CA real estate. They focus on Los Banos, a small farming community about 80 miles South of Silicon valley, which is another ’subprime central’. One important thing they leave out is the fact this is beginning to happen everywhere not just Los Banos and the Subprime epicenters. In all areas Notices-of-Default, the first stage to foreclosure are surging. This will lead to similar foreclosure epidemics in higher priced areas.

Values in the state have plummeted everywhere and you can use the ‘Subprime Implosion’ road map as a guide to what will happen to higher paper grades such as Pay Option ARMs, broader Alt-A, Jumbo Prime and finally Prime conventional sue to the negative equity effect and/or the exotic nature of said loans. Remember, what happened to Subprime borrowers with respect to payment adjustments is not unique to Subprime. Its just that Subprime ARM were mostly structured with 2-year teaser rate periods. The higher paper grades were structured longer such as 5-years.

As a matter of fact the most popular Alt-A, Jumbo Prime and Prime loan program type in CA from 2003 through 2005 was the 5/1 interest only that allows an interest only period for 5-years then adjusts to a fully amortized loan in most cases according to LIBOR, CMT or 1-yr Treasury yield plus a margin. Do the math…2003 to 2005 + 5-years = heavy adjustments coming from 2008 - 2010. Even though the payments won’t double on these loans like on Subprime, any payment increase when the value of your home is down 50%, you are underwater 30% and paying 60% of your gross income on debt is rubbing salt on the wound and grounds for many to walk.

Another very popular 5-year program was the now infamous Pay Option ARM, which has destroyed nearly every bank holding them. Below is their adjustment time. We can still get ahead of the major Pay Option implosion with proactive loan modifications but the banks just don’t want to play that way yet. They rather wait until the borrower defaults and then deal with it. The title of the Journal’s story is also misleading, sales are not improving they are getting worse. Below are my Sept existing and new home sales reports. More

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Posted by markw, filed under Finance. Date: October 29, 2008, 3:36 pm | No Comments »

The exchange in this video is a prime example of how Wall Street pundits actually believe their own propaganda. While Rick Santelli deludes himself and his viewers into believing the US economy is healthy, he educates Liesman on FED rates. Steve Liesman hasn’t a clue what’s going on in the global economy. His smug arrogance is only surpassed by his breathtaking stupidity and total lack of vision and independent thought. He recently returned from Jackson Hole where he obsequiously interviewed his corrupt, self-serving corporate buddies. Liesman’s nauseating pretense of authority in economics is topped by the network’s imbecile star, Kramer, who just recently claimed we’ve reached the bottom of the housing market.

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Posted by markw, filed under Finance, Video. Date: September 3, 2008, 3:33 pm | No Comments »

Paul Craig Roberts
OpEdNews
The success of the Bush Regime’s propaganda, lies, and deception with gullible and inattentive Americans since 9/11 has made it difficult for intelligent, aware people to be optimistic about the future of the United States. For almost 8 years the US media has served as Ministry of Propaganda for a war criminal regime. Americans incapable of thinking for themselves, reading between the lines, or accessing foreign media on the Internet have been brainwashed.

As the Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, said, it is easy to deceive a people. You just tell them they have been attacked and wave the flag.

It certainly worked with Americans.

The gullibility and unconcern of the American people has had many victims. There are 1.25 million dead Iraqis. There are 4 million displaced Iraqis. No one knows how many are maimed and orphaned.

Iraq is in ruins, its infrastructure destroyed by American bombs, missiles, and helicopter gunships.

We do not know the death toll in Afghanistan, but even the American puppet regime protests the repeated killings of women and children by US and NATO troops.

We don’t know what the death toll would be in Iran if Darth Cheney and the neocons succeed in their plot with Israel to bomb Iran, perhaps with nuclear weapons.

What we do know is that all this murder and destruction has no justification and is evil. It is the work of evil men who have no qualms about lying and deceiving in order to kill innocent people to achieve their undeclared agenda.

That such evil people have control over the United States government and media damns the American public for eternity.

America will never recover from the shame and dishonor heaped upon her by the neoconned Bush Regime.

The success of the neocon propaganda has been so great that the opposition party has not lifted a finger to rein in the Bush Regime’s criminal actions. Even Obama, who promises “change” is too intimidated by the neocon’s success in brainwashing the American population to do what his supporters hoped he would do and lead us out of the shame in which the neoconned Bush Regime has imprisoned us.

This about sums up the pessimistic state in which I existed prior to the go-ahead given by the Bush Regime to its puppet in Georgia to ethnically cleanse South Ossetia of Russians in order to defuse the separatist movement. The American media, aka, the Ministry of Lies and Deceit, again accommodated the criminal Bush Regime and proclaimed “Russian invasion” to cover up the ethnic cleansing of Russians in South Ossetia by the Georgian military assault.

Only this time, the rest of the world didn’t buy it. The many years of lies–9/11, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda connections, yellowcake, anthrax attack, Iranian nukes, “the United States doesn’t torture,” the bombings of weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games, Abu Ghraib, renditions, Guantanamo, various fabricated “terrorist plots,” the determined assault on civil liberties–have taken their toll on American credibility. No one outside America any longer believes the US media or the US government.

The rest of the world reported the facts–an assault on Russian civilians by American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian troops.

The Bush Regime, overcome by hubris, expected Russia to accept this act of American hegemony. But the Russians did not, and the Georgian military was sent fleeing for its life.

The neoconned Republican response to the Russian failure to follow the script and to be intimidated by the “unipower” was so imbecilic that it shattered the brainwashing to which Americans had succumbed.

McCain declared: “In the 21st century nations don’t invade other nations.” Imagine the laughs Jon Stewart will get out of this on the Daily Show. In the early years of the 21st century the United States has already invaded two countries and has been beating the drums for attacking a third. President Bush, the chief invader of the 21st century, echoed McCain’s claim that nations don’t invade other nations. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7556857.stm

This dissonant claim shocked even brainwashed Americans, as readers’ emails reveal. If in the 21st century countries don’t invade other countries, what is Bush doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what are the naval armadas and propaganda arrayed against Iran about?

Have two of the worst warmongers of modern times–Bush and McCain–called off the US/Israeli attack on Iran? If McCain is elected president, is he going to pull US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan as “nations don’t invade other nations,” or is President Bush going to beat him to it?

We all know the answer.

The two stooges are astonished that the Americans have taught hegemony to Russians, who were previously operating, naively perhaps, on the basis of good will.

Suddenly the Western Europeans have realized that being allied with the United States is like holding a tiger by the tail. No European country wants to be hurled into war with Russia. Germany, France, and Italy must be thanking God they blocked Georgia’s membership in NATO.

The Ukraine, where a sick nationalism has taken hold funded by the neocon National Endowment for Democracy, will be the next conflict between American pretensions and Russia. Russia is being taught by the neocons that freeing the constituent parts of its empire has not resulted in their independence but in their absorption into the American Empire.

Unless enough Americans can overcome their brainwashed state and the rigged Diebold voting machines, turn out the imbecilic Republicans and hold the neoconservatives accountable for their crimes against humanity, a crazed neocon US government will provoke nuclear war with Russia.

The neoconservatives represent the greatest danger ever faced by the United States and the world. Humanity has no greater enemy.

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Posted by markw, filed under NWO/WWIII. Date: August 15, 2008, 2:38 pm | No Comments »

Nick Turse
Alternet

“Liberal Hollywood” is a favorite whipping-boy of right-wingers who suppose the town and its signature industry are ever-at-work undermining the U.S. military. In reality, the military has been deeply involved with the film industry since the Silent Era. Today, however, the ad hoc arrangements of the past have been replaced by a full-scale one-stop shop, occupying a floor of a Los Angeles office building. There, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and the Department of Defense itself have established entertainment liaison offices to help ensure that Hollywood makes movies the military way.

What they have to trade, especially when it comes to blockbuster films, is access to high-tech, tax-payer funded, otherwise unavailable gear. What they get in return is usually the right to alter or shape scripts to suit their needs. If you want to see the fruits of this relationship in action, all you need to do is head down to your local multiplex. Chances are that Iron Man — the latest military-entertainment masterpiece — is playing on a couple of screens.
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Posted by markw, filed under Film. Date: May 22, 2008, 7:46 pm | No Comments »


A reporter asks White House spokeswoman Dana Perino about the Pentagon’s propaganda

On April 20, The New York Times published an expose revealing the Pentagon’s secret program using retired military analysts to “generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.” Since that time, the media have been disappointingly silent on the story and their roles in the Pentagon’s program. Read more

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Posted by markw, filed under Politics/Religion, Video. Date: May 10, 2008, 11:24 am | No Comments »

Photo Adacito

Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon’s illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008. Read more

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Posted by markw, filed under Politics/Religion. Date: May 8, 2008, 3:04 am | No Comments »

Photo liberalmind

The Pentagon is setting up a global network of foreign-language news websites, including an Arabic site for Iraqis, and hiring local journalists to write current events stories and other content that promote U.S. interests and counter insurgent messages. The news sites are part of a Pentagon initiative to expand “Information Operations” on the Internet. Neither the initiative nor the Iraqi site, www.Mawtani.com, has been disclosed publicly. At first glance, Mawtani.com looks like a conventional news website. Only the “about” link at the bottom of the site takes readers to a page that discloses the Pentagon sponsorship.
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Posted by markw, filed under Media, Politics/Religion. Date: May 2, 2008, 5:55 pm | No Comments »

27  Apr
Black propaganda

Photo courtesy of Vanessa

Back in February 2002, the BBC reported on Pentagon plans for black propaganda: planting propaganda and misleading stories in the international media. The office set up to disseminate this black propaganda was called the Office of Strategic Influence. In November the same year, Fair.org ran a story about how this revelation (also reported in The New York Times) “was met with outrage, and within a week the Pentagon had closed down the OSI, claiming the negative attention had damaged the office’s reputation so much ‘that it could not operate effectively’”. Fair goes on: “…although Rumsfeld was forced to close the office he had no plans to abandon the work.”

Which brings us to the current story appearing in The
New York Times
exposing a secret Pentagon campaign to infiltrate the U.S. media with pro-war propaganda.

You can bet propaganda campaigns of this nature continue. Hence the importance of seeking sources from other than mainstream corporate owned media–seek out the little guys, for the bigger the publication, the more likely its information is biased.

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Posted by markw, filed under Technology. Date: April 27, 2008, 3:02 pm | No Comments »

Pic courtesy of Zac-Attack

This from Salon.com:

[The]…New York Times article by David Barstow, documenting the Pentagon and U.S. media’s joint use of pre-programmed “military analysts” who posed as objective experts while touting the Government line and having extensive business interests in promoting those views, is very well-documented and well-reported. And credit to the NYT for having sued to compel disclosure of the documents on which the article is based. There are significant elements of the story that exemplify excellent investigative journalism.

At the same time, though, in light of questions on this very topic raised even by the NYT back in 2003, it is difficult to take the article’s underlying points seriously as though they are some kind of new revelation. And ultimately, to the extent there are new revelations here, they are a far greater indictment of our leading news organizations than the government officials on whom it focuses.

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Posted by markw, filed under Politics/Religion. Date: April 21, 2008, 8:00 pm | No Comments »