In a stunning reversal of US Policy, the Obama Administration scraped the Eastern European Missile Shield to appease the Russian Strongman; Vladimir Putin.  Obama has stabbed Poland and the Czechoslovakia in the back in a transparent move to appease the Russians in advance of his upcoming meeting with President Medvedev.  During the Russian war of aggression against Georgia during the Olympics the Poles and the Czechs bravely agreed to allow the placement of a new missile defense system on their territory.  The Russians immediately placed both countries on their enemies list and unleashed a torrent of verbal abuse on both nations even while continuing to intimidate the Ukraine and beat up the Georgians. 

At the time, it was stated that the missile shield was necessary to protect against rogue nations like Iran, but everyone knew that it was to counter the growing Russian belligerence in the region. Russia goes ballistic whenever its formerly subjugated states indicate they would rather risk their existence as a people, and a nation, to join NATO rather than continue under Russian tyranny. 

Poland is already in NATO but they were told any such installation on Polish soil would be target number one for Russian Nuclear Weapons in the event of war. 

Nations such as the Ukraine and Georgia risk their freedom to try and join NATO because the Russians are quite willing to use force to keep them in their zone of terror.  The Polish President refused to accept a call from Obama, and later refused to accept a call from the senate confirmed Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.  I’ve seen no public reports as to whether the Poles talked to the “Foreign Policy Czar” or the “Polish Czar” or the “Betrayal Czar” (We have so many Czars it’s difficult to know who’s really running the show in any given arena of policy since the cabinet, like the constitution and the congress,  is just for show these days.) 

            In essence Obama has ceded all of Eastern Europe to Russia’s dream of reconstituting the old Soviet Empire. Imagine a criminal thug-ocracy of a new and economically improved Russia taking over the Soviet Empire of satellite states and “spheres of influence” consisting of puppet states run by and for the Kremlin. 

Not since Yalta has the world seen such a foolhardy betrayal and sacrifice of a vast section of eastern Europeans; who believe in freedom and democracy far more than the current President of the United States.  At Yalta, Roosevelt was exhausted from the Great Depression, World War II, and having been elected for 4 terms as president.  It begs the question: What’s Obama’s Excuse for this stunning and incompetent display of weakness and appeasement before a wanabe dictator like Putin?

Barak Husain Obama has just dashed the hopes of freedom for all for all of Eastern Europe and has clearly demonstrated that, not only won’t we fight for them; we won’t lift a finger for them.  With friends like the United States, and NATO:  the Eastern Europeans would be well advised to make the best deal they can with Putin and end resistance to Russian demands. This action serves to underline what Obama proved with his earlier betrayal of Israel in the face of the Iranian threat:  The United State under the Obama Administration can’t be believed or counted on and all of our allies are now very much on their own.  The Lights are on in the White House but there’s nobody home.

Obama seems so preoccupied with remaking the United States into a Socialist State that he can’t be bothered with foreign policy until it becomes a crisis. The world has long accepted the view that if Hitler had been stopped at Munich and not appeased by the world powers then World War II may well have been avoided.  Obama’s shameful betrayal of Easter Europe is the “Munich” of our times and it’s quite likely we will see the same results. 

Putin must be overjoyed by now…..

Barak Obama is playing with fire at the behest of his Union masters.

In a blatant act of protectionism the Obama Administration is imposing additional tariffs on Chinese Tires, and risking a trade war with the Chinese. Once the tariffs and sanctions start to be imposed they are matched by counter tariffs and sanctions by the aggrieved government. At best relations with the largest buyer of US debt will sour relations a bit while at worst a general trade war can tear the economy apart as protection of our 7000 factory workers leads to losing the Chinese market in a mindless, and ill advised, game of tit for tat. From some of the most humble beginnings, like this carping over Chinese tires for example, a super destructive trade war can develop that has the power to topple a superpower from its perch.

No one really wins a trade war: it’s a bloody war of economic attrition, much like World War I was an ongoing mindless slaughter of troops to advance the front line a few hundred yards, became the poster child for wars of attrition. The combatants dig in and the mindless slaughter ensues until it becomes unsustainable. Even the eventual winner, is a loser, because of the mindless and senseless waste of recourses.

In a global economy, such as ours, with an enmeshed and ailing financial system, the law of unintended consequences could rear its ugly head, repeatedly, as a twenty first century trade war between the US and China causes untold damage on the planetary economy.

When the last economic straw comes, that crushes the American Economy for generations, it could well come from something as innocuous as this foolhardy tempest with the Chinese. Mr. Obama is, by his words a capitalist, but by his actions, a committed Marxist and a stealthy Black Nationalist, but we need a real president to hold the line on trade wars: not a “community organizer” whose been bought and paid for by big labor.

Consider the following article from the Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f67c6fe6-a024-11de-b9ef-00144feabdc0.html

US tyre duties spark clash By Geoff Dyer in Shanghai and Tom Braithwaite in Washington Published: September 13 2009 06:53 | Last updated: September 13 2009 19:23

A full-blown trade row erupted on Sunday night between the US and China after Beijing accused Washington of “rampant protectionism” for imposing heavy duties on imported Chinese tyres and threatened action against imports of US poultry and vehicles.

Trade relations between two of the world’s biggest economies deteriorated after Barack Obama, US president, signed an order late on Friday to impose a new duty of 35 per cent on Chinese tyre imports on top of an existing 4 per cent tariff.

In his first big test on world trade since taking office in January, Mr Obama sided with America’s trade unions, which have complained that a “surge” in imports of Chinese-made tyres had caused 7,000 job losses among US factory workers.

Chen Deming, China’s minister of commerce, condemned the decision, saying that it “sends the wrong signal to the world” at a time when Washington and Beijing should be co-operating to deal with the worst economic and financial crisis in decades.

“This is a grave act of trade protectionism,” Mr Chen said in a statement. “Not only does it violate WTO rules, it contravenes commitments the United States government made at the [April] G20 financial summit.”

China said it would now investigate imports of US poultry and vehicles, responding to complaints from domestic companies.

The US warned Beijing against taking retaliatory action. “Retaliation would be inappropriate, as the United States acted entirely within the bounds of trade laws and within the safeguard provision that China itself agreed to upon accession to the World Trade Organisation,” said an official from the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

The official said that enforcing trade agreements and laws was “critical” to maintaining free markets. Another official said the US had “negotiated to the end with the Chinese to come up with something we could all agree to”.

US officials said they were scrutinising the export of poultry and vehicles, but said any action in retaliation by China could result in a complaint by the US to the WTO.

The dispute comes less than a fortnight before Mr Obama is due to host world leaders at a summit of G20 nations in Pittsburgh and ahead of his planned visit to China in November.

The decision to impose extra tyre tariffs followed a petition by the United Steelworkers union, which represents workers at many US tyre factories. Official figures show an increase in imports from 14.6m in 2004 to 46m in 2008.

Eswar Prasad, professor of trade economics at Cornell University, warned that the disagreement could escalate.

“These protectionist measures, some of which amount to domestic political posturing rather than substantive restraints on trade, could easily ratchet up into a full-blown trade war and inflict serious economic damage on both countries,” he said.

This is the kind of deal making and last ditch diplomatic moves before a major conflict begins.  The Jerusalem Post has confirmed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken a clandestine trip to Russia according to a Kremlin spokesman.  Nothing is known of the subject matter, or of the officials involved but the probability is that it involved the situation in Iran and perhaps Syria.  It was staged without knowledge of, nor coverage of the press corps, and without the trappings of an official state visit.  A leased Jet supposedly took the prime minister on this cloak and dagger mission and no information of any meaningful nature has been released by either government to a hoodwinked press corp.

You need not be Einstein to conclude that time is rapidly running out on Middle East peace.  If Middle East Oil is interdicted or facilities destroyed by a regional war the economic effects could be catastrophic throughout the world.  Israel has no option at all and must attack or be destroyed by an Iranian Nuclear Bomb and the fact that hush-hush meetings are taking place between Russia and the Prime Minister of Israel can only mean that the day of reckoning is close at hand.

Kremlin official confirms PM’s trip

Sep. 9, 2009
Herb Keinon and jpost staff , THE JERUSALEM POST

A senior Kremlin official confirmed Wednesday to the Russian paper Kommersant that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu did indeed make a clandestine trip to Russia on Monday.

Commenting on the visit, the official said that “this kind of development could only be related to new and threatening information on Iran’s nuclear program.”

The Russian newspaper quoted experts speculating that such a trip would only be justified under extraordinary circumstances, “for example, in the case of Israel planning to attack Iran.”

The report comes despite a statement Wednesday from the Kremlin press service that “nothing is known” about reports of the visit. Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, also said he had no information, the Interfax news agency reported.

Nevertheless, there was never any official denial of the report from Moscow.

On Wednesday night, the Prime Minister’s Office appeared to stick to its original version of events: that Netanyahu was occupied with “secret and classified activities” during his unexplained absence of over 12 hours.

The PMO announced that Military Secretary to the Prime Minister Lt.-Gen. Meir Kalifi was not in contact with the prime minister.

According to the announcement, Kalifi undertook an independent initiative to safeguard these activities, and National Security Adviser Uzi Arad had no part in the affair.

Earlier Wednesday, the office neither explicitly confirmed nor denied a story that appeared in Yediot Aharonot claiming that Netanyahu had flown to Russia to talk about planned Russian arms sales to Iran.

Instead, Netanyahu’s spokesmen referred reporters back to the statement issued Monday evening amid a swirl of rumors that Netanyahu had gone abroad.

That statement, oddly released in the name of Kalifi and not in the name of spokesman Nir Hefetz, said, “The prime minister is visiting a security installation in Israel today.”

Asked explicitly if Netanyahu had left the country, another Netanyahu spokesman, Mark Regev, referred back to that statement.

That statement, however, did not rule out the possibility of a trip abroad, since after briefly visiting a security installation, Netanyahu could very well have flown overseas.

Faced with anger from the Israeli press that the Prime Minister’s Office had lied about Netanyahu’s whereabouts, Channel 2 reported Kalifi saying Wednesday night that, “in matters of national security, I take the prerogative of not saying the whole truth.”

Hefetz reportedly refused to issue Monday evening’s statement in his name because he was unable to confirm its veracity.

The whole mysterious episode has focused the spotlight on a reported fissure inside the Prime Minister’s Office, with Kalifi and Arad on one side, and Hefetz and Cabinet Secretary Tzvi Hauser on the other.

According to various new reports on Wednesday, Netanyahu – who was reportedly accompanied by Kalifi and Arad on the reported trip – leased a private jet from Merhav, a company owned by Israeli mogul Yossi Maiman, one of the shareholders of Channel 10 and EMG, an Egyptian company supplying gas to the Israel Electric Corp.

This was apparently done to make the trip as discrete as possible, since using an Israel Air Force jet – it was apparently thought – would have raised the suspicions of the Israeli media.

Maiman was reportedly not directly involved in leasing the jet, as this was done through a company he owns.

Senior Foreign Ministry officials, meanwhile, denied any knowledge of the trip, saying that Israel’s envoy in Moscow was also not appraised of it.

What is almost as mysterious as whether the trip took place, is what might have been discussed, with speculation focused on Iran, possible Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, or the disappearance of the Arctic Sea cargo ship – suspected of carrying Russian made S-300 anti-aircraft missiles bound for Iran – that went missing last month.

The trip, if indeed it took place, would not have been the result of an impromptu, emergency decision, since there was already talk among Netanyahu’s inner circle during his visit to London and Berlin two weeks ago about a possible visit to Russia ahead of the United Nations General Assembly meeting at the end of the month.

Interestingly, almost exactly two years ago, then-prime minister Ehud Olmert paid a lightning visit to Moscow to meet with then-Russian president Vladimir Putin, a day after the Russian leader returned from a trip to Teheran in which he warned outside powers not to attack Iran and said there was no evidence it was developing nuclear arms.

Back then, the Prime Minister’s Office tried to dissociate Olmert’s trip from Putin’s statements in Iran, but it was clear from the snap manner in which that meeting at the Kremlin was organized and announced that the Iranian nuclear issue would dominate the discussion.

At that time, however, the Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement a day ahead of the trip, informing the media of the visit, even though they were not invited to cover it.

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1251804532464&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
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Are you ready for another perilous slide into banking and real estate hell?  Well there’s an ever growing concern about America’s banking industry again and once again the real estate sector both commercial and residential is about to voyage to the bottom of the toilet.  We’ve had a brief but welcomed respite from failing banks and sharply devaluing real estate but the road ahead is not looking good.  We’ve had a terror-free summer in terms of our banks failing but more and more Americans are wake up to the possibility that we have a committed Marxist in the White House in President Barak Husain Obama. 

As conditions deteriorate in the financial world again, perhaps spurred on by insane government spending, the transition to a socialist or communist economy, and the realization that our government has become our enemy: our political crisis means that there will be nobody home to deal with the next economic crisis.  Clearly the Obama administration is thrilled each and every time something fails because the ensuing crisis becomes an excuse to clamp down on the reins of power even harder.  It would seem that Obama doesn’t care about a finical crisis rearing its ugly head again because the worse such a crisis becomes…. the more dependant we become on the government.  If more banks fail and real estate tanks again Obama will blame it on Bush and create more massive and costly government intervention that won’t solve our problems but will make his hold on power unbreakable.

It’s much harder now to infer the state of the economy from the performance of the stock market because the crazy government intervention in the free market has distorted market reality beyond reason.  This much government interference in the economy means that the stock market is about as predictive of economic conditions as a weather forecaster trying to tell you what it’ll be like outside three months from today.  Nevertheless, I find it fascinating that the finance and mortgage giants like Fannie Mae are leading the current negative trend in today’s stock market news.

I guess the more things change the more they stay the same.

Consider this story from Bloomberg (and look for the economic crisis part II that most analysts say will be coming our way in the fall!)

Banks Lead Decline in U.S. Stocks on Concern Over More Losses

 

By Lynn Thomasson

the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index since June, as concern banks will post more losses overshadowed manufacturing and housing data that topped estimates.

Wells Fargo & Co., the San Francisco-based bank that received $25 billion in government bailout funds, slid the most in two weeks. Bank of America Corp., American Express Co. and Citigroup Inc. declined more than 3 percent to lead the Dow Jones Industrial Average lower. American International Group Inc. tumbled 16 percent and MetLife Inc. plummeted 5.5 percent after analysts said the insurers’ shares have risen too far, too fast. Europe’s benchmark index retreated 1.8 percent.

The S&P 500 lost 1.8 percent to 1,002.32 at 2:07 p.m. in New York, its steepest intraday decline since Aug. 17. The Dow industrials fell 157.12 points, or 1.7 percent, to 9,339.16.

“The future for the banks is not as muddy as it was two quarters ago, but it’s still not clear,” said Don Wordell, the Orlando, Florida-based manager of the RidgeWorth Mid-Cap Value Equity Fund that has outperformed 94 percent of rivals in the past five years. “The market can’t sustain these huge moves.”

Financial companies have led the S&P 500’s 48 percent rally since March 9, gaining 126 percent. September is historically the worst month for U.S. stocks, with the benchmark index losing 1.3 percent on average since 1928, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Economy

U.S. stocks fell even after the Institute for Supply Management said manufacturing expanded in August for the first time in 19 months and the National Association of Realtors said contracts to buy pending homes increased more than forecast in July. The gauge of factories climbed to 52.9 in August, the ISM said today, topping the average economist estimate of 50.5.

Valuations for U.S. stocks look “marginally stretched” compared with other developed markets, Credit Suisse Group AG said in a research report. Strategist Andrew Garthwaite cut his recommended allocation of American equities and predicted they will underperform when the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index is above 50 and rising.

The surge in the S&P 500 made the index valued at about 19 times the profits of its companies as of the end of last week, the most expensive level since June 2004.

The benchmark index for U.S. stock options headed for its highest close since July 10. The VIX, as the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index is known, increased 9.7 percent to 28.54. The gauge, which measures the cost of using options as insurance against declines in the S&P 500, reached a record of 80.86 in November. The index is sill above the average over its 19-year history of 20.

Wells Fargo Slides

Wells Fargo dropped 3.2 percent to $26.65. Trading in the options market showed speculators were betting Wells Fargo shares will extend their decline. Trading of bearish Wells Fargo put options, which give the right to sell the stock, climbed to 162,000 contracts, triple the four-week average. More than four puts traded for each call option, which give the right to buy.

The most-active contracts were October $24 puts, which rose 67 percent to $1.25 and accounted for a quarter of today’s put trading. The shares haven’t closed below $24, or 13 percent less than yesterday’s closing price, since July 24.

AIG fell the most in the S&P 500, sliding 16 percent to $38.23. The insurer bailed out by the U.S. government was cut to “underperform” from “market perform” at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., which said the government may reduce its support for the firm once AIG is no longer deemed a risk to the financial system. AIG surged 245 percent last month.

‘Dose of Reality’

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage-finance companies under federal control, both tumbled more than 13 percent.

“Given the run that we’ve seen, where people could clearly care less about the fundamentals of the companies that were bid up, any dose of reality has to have a very chilling effect,” said Brad Golding, the New York-based managing director at Christofferson Robb & Co., which oversees $1.5 billion. “The financials have run so far, so much that they’ve gotten to levels that cannot be sustained in a choppy economy.”

MetLife dropped 5.5 percent to $35.68. The biggest U.S. life insurer was downgraded at Raymond James Financial Inc., after the company tripled in six months of New York trading.

Bank of America lost 4.5 percent to $16.80. American Express declined 3.8 percent to $32.54. Citigroup slumped 6.2 percent to $4.69.

Paul Tudor Jones’s Tudor Investment Corp., Clarium Capital Management LLC and Horseman Capital Management Ltd. are among funds betting that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley got it wrong in declaring the start of an economic recovery. The firms oversee a combined $15 billion in so-called macro funds, which seek to profit from economic trends by trading stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities.

 

This must be Obama’s idea of how to show respect for rule of law.  So as I understand it; the Green Czar is a former terrorist Dirt-Bag, serving in an unconstitutional role, designed to circumvent congressional approval and the constitution.  The Cabinet is approved by the Senate but Czars are created with an imperial wave of the Obama arm. Here is a man who would do anything for his liberal masters, by any means necessary, because the liberal cause is clearly his whole world.  You know, like Hitler appointing Nazi fanatics to corrupt and use the machinery of government to advance his sickening fascist agenda.  I wonder if Janet Napolitano (the director of Homeland Security) would put Van Jones on a potential terrorist list like they do Christians, Veterans and Legal gun owners.

Read the following Article and see if you can understand why Obama wants ex Weather Underground Thugs shaping and implementing policy for the United States Government……..  What does the bible say, “You shall know them by their fruits”?  Maybe Obama missed that day when that verse was preached during his twenty years in Jeremiah Wright’s church.

Obama’s ‘green jobs czar’ worked with terror founder
Van Jones served on board of activist group where ex-Weatherman serves as top director

---

Posted: August 13, 2009
12:20 am Eastern

By Aaron Klein
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

JERUSALEM – Van Jones, the man appointed as “green jobs czar” to the White House, previously served on the board of an environmental activist group at which a founder of the Weather Underground terrorist organization is a top director.

WND previously reported Jones was as an admitted radical communist and black nationalist leader.

He was appointed to serve as the special adviser for green jobs, enterprise and innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. According to the White House blog, Jones’ duties include helping to craft job-generating climate policy and to ensure equal opportunity in the administration’s energy proposals.

Jones, formerly a self-described “rowdy black nationalist,” boasted in a 2005 interview with the left-leaning East Bay Express that his environmental activism was a means to fight for racial and class “justice.”

Jones was president and founder of Green For All, a nonprofit organization that advocates for building a so-called inclusive green economy.

Until recently, Jones was a longtime member of the board of Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor, business, environmental and community leaders that claims on its website to be “working to catalyze a clean energy revolution that will put millions of Americans to work in a new generation of high-quality, green-collar jobs.”

Although influential, Apollo has only 14 state affiliates nationwide. Its New York office is directed by Jeff Jones, a top founding member of the Weather Underground radical organization.

Jeff Jones’ bio on the Apollo website boasts the activist campaigned to remove PCBs from the Hudson River, clean up toxic pollution in inner-city and rural neighborhoods, and reverse global warming.

The bio states that from 1995-2005, Jeff Jones served as the communications director of Environmental Advocates of New York. Previously, he was a reporter covering state politics and policy for a variety of news organizations.

Not mentioned is that Jeff Jones was a leading anti-war activist and terrorist group founder who spent time on the run from law enforcement agencies while his group carried out a series of bombings of U.S. government buildings.

Jeff Jones joined the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, from which the Weathermen splintered in the fall of 1965. Two years later, he became the SDS’s New York City regional director, a position in which he participated in nearly all of the group’s major protests until 1969, including the 1968 Columbia University protests and the violent riots that same year at the Democratic National Convention.

In 1969, Jeff Jones founded the Weathermen with terrorists Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd when the three signed an infamous statement calling for a revolution against the American government inside and outside the country to fight and defeat what the group called U.S. imperialism. President Obama came under fire for his longtime, extensive association with Ayers.

Jeff Jones was a main leader and orchestrator of what became known as the Days of Rage, a series of violent riots in Chicago organized by the Weathermen. The culmination of the riots came when he gave a signal for rowdy protestors to target a hotel that was the home of a local judge presiding over a trial of anti-war activists.

Jeff Jones went underground after he failed to appear for a March 1970 court date to face charges of “crossing state lines to foment a riot and conspiring to do so.” He moved to San Francisco with Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dorhn. That year, at least one bombing claimed by the Weathermen went off in Jones’ locale at the Presidio Army base.

Jones’ Weathermen would take credit for multiple bombings of U.S. government buildings, including attacks against the U.S. Capitol March 1, 1971; the Pentagon May 19, 1972, and a 1975 bombing of the State Department building.

Jeff Jones did not return WND phone and e-mail requests for comment.

White House adviser Van Jones, meanwhile, is not impartial to radical activism.

He was a founder and leader of the communist revolutionary organization Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM. The organization had its roots in a grouping of black people organizing to protest the first Gulf War. STORM was formally founded in 1994, becoming one of the most influential and active radical groups in the San Francisco Bay area.

STORM worked with known communist leaders. It led the charge in black protests against various issues, including a local attempt to pass Proposition 21, a ballot initiative that sought to increase the penalties for violent crimes and require more juvenile offenders to be tried as adults.

The leftist blog Machete 48 identifies STORM’s influences as “third-worldist Marxism (and an often vulgar Maoism).”

Speaking to the East Bay Express, Van Jones said he first became radicalized in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots, during which time he was arrested.

“I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th,” he said. “By August, I was a communist.”

“I met all these young radical people of color – I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’ I spent the next 10 years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary,” he said.

Trevor Loudon, a communist researcher and administrator of the New Zeal blog, identified several Bay Area communists who worked with STORM, including Elizabeth Martinez, who helped advise Jones’ Ella Baker Human Rights Center, which Jones founded to advocate civil justice. Jones and Martinez also attended a “Challenging White Supremacy” workshop together.

Martinez was a long time Maoist who went on to join the Communist Party USA breakaway organization Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, or CCDS, in the early 1990s, according to Loudon. Martinez still serves on the CCDS council and is also a board member of the Movement for a Democratic Society, where she sits alongside former Weathermen radicals Ayers and Dorhn.

One of STORM’s newsletters featured a tribute to Amilcar Cabral, the late Marxist revolutionary leader of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands.

The tribute is noteworthy because Jones reportedly named his son after Cabral and reportedly concludes every e-mail with a quote from the communist leader.

STORM eventually fell apart amid bickering among its leaders.

Van Jones then moved on to environmentalism. He used his Ella Baker Center to advocate “inclusive” environmentalism and launch a Green-Collar Jobs Campaign, which led to the nation’s first Green Jobs Corps in Oakland, Calif.

At the Clinton Global Initiative in 2007, Jones announced the establishment of Green For All, an activist organization which in 2008 held a national green conference in which most attendees were black. Jones also released a book, “The Green Collar Economy,” which debuted at No.12 on the New York Times’ bestseller list – the first environmental book written by an African American to make the list.

His appointment as a White House environmental adviser was announced March 10.

 

They say that the next big real estate crisis is the collapse of the “commercial real estate market” but that’s too optimistic by half: we’re likely to see another sharp downturn in residential real estate as ever more mortgages go under water.  A German analyst recently conclude that shortly half of American mortgages will be underwater, that is, worth less than the mortgage balance, and when the bank sells the properties at a steep discount it drives the market prices down. It’s fashionable to speculate that real-estate has hit bottom and found a floor just like its fashionable to speculate that the recession and our economic woes are over. 

The stock market has enjoyed a reprieve and some of the big banks give the illusion of being on the mend.  The fact that the government has stepped in to manipulate the market so as to avoid an unavoidable crisis will work for a time, just as it will with the banks, but as foreclosures mount the pressure continues to build.  The reprieve we’ve seen in recent days in real estate and banking are largely an illusion brought about by foolish and ham handed attempts by government to stave off the inevitable consequences demanded by our behavior.

Commercial Real Estate is going to crash as the economy derails again within the next six months.

Residential Real Estate is going to crash again as foreclosures continue and as unemployment and inflation skyrocket.

Banks will continue to be stressed, even destroyed, as the real estate assets in all classes’ lose value from the foreclosure cycle.

Out of Control Government Debt and our Broken Political System will continue to drive down the value of the dollar, perhaps to catastrophic levels and more and more nations lose faith in us.  Government intervention is destroying the economy, the currency, and perhaps the social cohesion of this nation. 

We’re in a reprieve right now but don’t kid yourself: it’s going to get hairy again soon!  It’s just a question of when the next shoe drops and if the economic and political structures can survive and events unfold.

Consider the following from the Associated Press:

Foreclosures rise 7 percent in July from June

By ALAN ZIBEL, AP Real Estate Writer Alan Zibel, Ap Real Estate Writer – 1 hr 57 mins ago

WASHINGTON – The number of U.S. households on the verge of losing their homes rose 7 percent from June to July, as the escalating foreclosure crisis continued to outpace government efforts to limit the damage.

Foreclosure filings were up 32 percent from the same month last year, RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday. More than 360,000 households, or one in every 355 homes, received a foreclosure-related notice, such as a notice of default or trustee’s sale. That’s the highest monthly level since the foreclosure-listing firm began publishing the data more than four years ago.

Banks repossessed more than 87,000 homes in July, up from about 79,000 homes a month earlier.

Nevada had the nation’s highest foreclosure rate for the 31st-straight month, followed by California, Arizona, Florida and Utah. Rounding out the top 10 were Idaho, Georgia, Illinois, Colorado and Oregon. Among cities, Las Vegas had the highest rate, followed by the California cities of Stockton and Modesto.

While there have been numerous recent signs that the ailing U.S. housing market is finally stabilizing after three years of plunging prices, foreclosures remain a big concern. Foreclosures are typically sold at a deep discount, hurting neighbors’ home values.

The mortgage industry has been slow to adapt to the surge in foreclosures. Many lenders have needed government prodding to get up to speed with the Obama administration’s plan to stem foreclosures.

The Treasury Department said last week that banks have extended only 400,000 offers to 2.7 million eligible borrowers who are more than two months behind on their payments. More than 235,000, or 9 percent, those borrowers have enrolled in three-month trials in which their monthly payments are reduced.

“The volume of loans that are in distress simply overwhelms” those efforts, said Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac’s senior vice president for marketing.

 

It astonishes me to hear the media people talking up the idea that somehow the recession is over and we’re safe and sound once again. 

Don’t you believe it. 

The Economic Fundamentals remain distressed, as in the article below, by the Financial Times.  This doesn’t even take into account the likelihood of a massive oil shock that will occur when the Israel/ Iran war kicks off which is likely to be in the fall or winter at the latest. 

I’m also astonished by the degree that one must work these days to get access to competent journalism instead of the ideological pabulum that passes for news today.  It’s the truth that sets you free not the propaganda!  The Bible maintains that the last days will be characterized by deception and the wonton disregard of the truth; and by that standard we’re defiantly in the latter days.  If you believe our economic woes have been fixed by Obama and the Socialist Democrats without dealing with the Fed flooding the world with our currency then I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

The Government is out of control and getting worse and when the next round of economic disasters hit, given the surly mood of the country, we could see a cultural unraveling not experienced since the American Civil War.  They say a word to the wise is sufficient:  Take all precautions to protect your family and your economic viability because the economic disaster is about to get a lot more intense shortly.  Don’t Be Deceived!  Do your best to prepare now: shed all debts and don’t buy anything you don’t really need.  At some point there’s going to be a loss of confidence in the dollar and that’s where America gets its wings clipped in earnest. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/markets/6018076/RBS-uber-bear-issues-fresh-alert-on-global-stock-markets.html

 

RBS uber-bear issues fresh alert on global stock markets

Three-month slide could hit record lows, Royal Bank of Scotland chief credit strategist Bob Janjuah predicts.

 

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor
Published: 8:26PM BST 12 Aug 2009

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Britain’s Uber-bear is growling again. After predicting a torrid “relief rally” over the early summer, Bob Janjuah at Royal Bank of Scotland is advising clients to take profits in global equity and commodity markets and prepare for another storm as winter nears.

“We are now in the middle of a parabolic spike up,” he said in his latest confidential note to clients.

 

“I expect this risk rally to continue into – and maybe through – a large part of August. What happens after that? The next ugly leg of the bear market begins as we get into the July through September ‘tipping zone’, driven by the failure of the data to validate the V (shaped recovery) that is now fully priced into markets.”

The key indicators to watch are business spending on equipment (Capex), incomes, jobs, and profits. Only a “surge higher” in these gauges can justify current asset prices. Results that are merely “less bad” will not suffice.

He expects global stock markets to test their March lows, and probably worse. The slide could last three months. “A move to new lows is highly likely,” he said.

Mr Janjuah, RBS’s chief credit strategist, has a loyal following in the City. He was one of the very few analysts to speak out early about the dangerous excesses of the credit bubble. He then made waves in the summer of 2008 by issuing a global crash alert, giving warning that a “very nasty period is soon to be upon us” as – indeed it was. Lehman Brothers and AIG imploded weeks later.

This time he expects the S&P 500 index of US equities to reach the “mid 500s”, almost halving from current levels near 1000. Such a fall would take London’s FTSE 100 to around 2,500. The iTraxx Crossover index measuring spreads on low-grade European debt will double to 1250.

Mr Janjuah advises investors to seek safety in 10-year German bonds in late August or early September.

While media headlines have played up the short-term bounce of corporate earnings, Mr Janjuah said this is a statistical illusion. Profits were in reality down 20pc in the second quarter from the year before. They cannot rise much as the West slowly purges debt and adjusts to record over-capacity. “Investors are again being sucked back into the game where ‘markets make opinions’, where ‘excess liquidity’ is the driving investment rationale.

“The last two Augusts proved to be pivotal turning points: August 2007 being the proverbial ‘head-fake’ when everyone wanted to believe that policy-makers had seen off the credit disaster at the pass, and August 2008 being the calm before the utter collapse of Sept/Oct/Nov… 3rd time lucky anyone?”

The elephant in the room is the spiralling public debt as private losses are shifted on to the taxpayer, especially in Britain and America. “Ask yourself this: who bails out Government after they have bailed out everyone?”

Mr Janjuah said governments might put off the day of reckoning into the middle of next year if they resort to another shot of stimulus, but that would store yet further problems. “If what I fear plays out then I will have to concede that the lunatics who ran the asylum pretty much into the ground last year are back in control.”

Over at Morgan Stanley, equity guru Teun Draaisma thinks we are through the worst. “We were on course for a Great Depression in February, but Armageddon was avoided. Governments did not repeat the policy errors of the 1930s.”

“We have seen the lows of this crisis. This is a genuine rebound rally, and it has been short by historical standards so far,” he said.

Mr Draaisma, who called the top of the bull market almost to the day in mid-2007, has crunched the worldwide data on 19 major stock market crashes over the last century. They show that the typical rebound rally (as opposed to bear trap rallies, when markets later plunge to new lows) lasts 17 months and stocks rise 71pc. The 1993 rally in the US was 170pc over 13 months. Finland’s rally in 1994 was 295pc. Hong Kong rallied 159pc in 2000. This rebound is only five months old. The key indexes have risen 49pc in the US and 42pc in Europe. Mr Draaisma advises clients to stay in the stocks for now, but stick to telecom companies, utilities, and oil.

Yet he too expects a nasty correction once this rally falters. The usual trigger at this stage of the cycle is when central bankers start to make hawkish noises, typically a couple of months before the first turn of the screw (normally a rate rise, but in this case an end to “quantitative easing”. “As long as policy-makers are talking about how fragile the recovery is, equities are unlikely to go down much.”

This moment can be hard to judge. There has already been rumbling from some governors at the US Federal Reserve and from the European Central Bank’s Jean-Claude Trichet. Markets are pricing in rates rises by early next year.

The pattern after major financial bust-ups is that the rebound rally gives way to another fall of 25pc or so, lasting a year, followed by five years of hard slog as stocks bounce up and down in a trading range, going nowhere. Mr Draaisma suggests taking a close look at the chart of Japan’s Nikkei index from 1991 to 1999. Gains were zero.

We are in uncharted waters, however. Monetary and fiscal stimulus has been unprecedented. Russell Napier at Hong Kong brokers CLSA says a powerful bull market is already taking shape as the American giant reawakens. Perma-bears will be left behind. He said: “It is dangerous to be in cash.”

When the finest minds in the business disagree so starkly, the rest of us can only shake our heads in confusion.

 

 The power crazed socialists of the Democrat Party have the reins of power and they’re bent on ending capitalism and inaugurate a new warm and fuzzy fascism that will cement the takeover of the United States by an elite financial oligarchy by ideological means. They’re going to turn us into a morose, weak, European state even if it kills us——– and it is killing us. The Obama worshiping fanatics will cry about compassion, green policies, tolerance and “evolving ethical standards” and my personal favorite, “social justice”, while the bankers solidify their power behind the scenes and pull the politicians strings with campaign contributions.

For decades the banking elites have, through corporate and philanthropic front organizations, corrupted and manipulated higher education and science until it routinely spits out “study’s” that support whatever the elites want us to believe. The crazed partisan media has been as corrupted as higher education and they routinely spout the elitist agenda, usually preceded by the phrase, “Science Says” to give legitimacy and cover to our invisible masters. On collage campuses across the nation they worry about global warming and saving the planet; they use bogus science to justify a social policy that sounds sophisticated and utopian but in reality is simply the global bankers repossessing the wealth and power of America. The professors scream “global warming” and the media screams “we’re all going to die” and the Government enacts Cap and Trade, and refuses to develop existing energy recourses for our own good and guess what??????? We’re dead.

Now maybe I’m getting cynical at midlife but when academics tells us that global warming is “settled science” and then suppresses and blackballs any scientist who dares present contradictory evidence I tend to think the liberal Scientists are lying. When Liberal Social Scientists tell me that Universal Health Care isn’t a Trojan horse for first legal, then mandatory, Euthanasia, (in spite of it being obviously government rationing of health care,) (Euthanasia) I tend to see the social scientists as liars. When the Government tells me that Universal Health Care is not about free abortions on demand; in spite of the fact that it’s in the legislation: I tend to “believe my lying eyes” rather than the government. Indeed when “Social Science” seems to find it necessary to enshroud the conventions of “political correctness” as American law via “Hate Crimes Legislation” and then suggests that any resistance to their agenda is “domestic terrorism” and “Christian Fanaticism” I tend to think I’m being conned.

Who benefits from the eternal political pie fight described above? The global banking elite, who print our money, spend and distribute it like salt water, and encourage us to become dependent on government in every way. They want us to be dependent on a government that they control, for our own good, as they work their will through unwitting dupes at the highest levels of our political parties. Corrupt Political Parties advance the goals of their super-wealthy masters while selling it as; Cap and Trade, Forced Vaccinations and Social Justice, and Environmentalism. They sell “Universal Health Care” not Abortion, Euthanasia and a new and frightening Eugenics program that replaces natural selection with a faceless committee of banking royalty.

The American Political System is broken and her wealth is being siphoned off to faceless transnational structures that are too big to fail, for our own good, by the people who pay the exorbitant prices to keep electing and reelecting our politicians, pay the salaries of our news media, and endow college chairs and research. The true power structure of our world is a transnational cabal of the super wealthy who wield more power than the present bought and paid for government of Barak Obama. Without the super wealthy elite there is and never would have been a Barak Obama and the coming fall of America from world leadership.

I never really understood the truth of the Bible saying that “the love of money is the root of all evil” but I understand it now. Money is about Power and Power is about Control and Control is about playing god—–Just like Satan wanted to do. Now I think I understand why our Christian Founding Fathers warned us that a Central Bank was “far more dangerous than a Standing Army!”

America is being raped, looted and burned to the ground as we stand in mute shock and stare at our children’s future going up in smoke. At Best we manage a pathetic whimper while our government, with a suicidal apathy at the highest levels, embarks on one obviously suicidal policy after another. The nation-state will die with America and a bizarre and evil transnational fascism of the financial elite will rule behind a facade of “government”. For all intents and purposes the world government predicted by the bible is already here— we just might not call it that. We the people will serve the jokers who are spending the money like salt water in a controlled demolition of the United States of America.

Consider the story below from the Associated Press because this is going to go on and on until the United States is toast.

 Federal deficit higher in July, $1.27T this year Record federal deficit climbs higher, $180.7 billion in July, $1.27 trillion so far this year •

By Martin Crutsinger, AP Economics Writer • On Wednesday August 12, 2009, 3:07 pm EDT WASHINGTON (AP) –

The federal deficit climbed higher into record territory in July, hitting $1.27 trillion with two months remaining in the budget year. The Treasury Department said Wednesday that the July deficit totaled $180.7 billion, slightly more than the $177.5 billion economists had expected.

The Obama administration is projecting that when the current budget year ends on Sept. 30, the imbalance will total $1.84 trillion, more than four times last year’s record-high. The soaring deficits have raised worries among foreign owners of U.S. Treasury securities including the Chinese, the largest holder of such debt. Massive amounts of government spending to combat the recession and stabilize the U.S. financial system have pushed the deficit higher.

The cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with depleted government tax revenues, also are major factors. The July deficit reflected government spending of $332.2 billion, a record amount for any month and up from outlays of $263.3 billion in July 2008. Of that increase, about $25 billion reflected the fact that Aug. 1 was a Saturday this year, requiring many government benefit checks to be sent out earlier and counted as spending in July. Government receipts totaled $151.5 billion, down 5.6 percent from a year ago. It marked the 15th consecutive month that government receipts have been lower than the same month in the prior year, illustrating how deep the recession has cut into tax receipts.

Through the first 10 months of the budget year, receipts total $1.74 trillion, down 16.9 percent from the same period in 2008. Outlays totaled $3 trillion over the past 10 months, up 21.1 percent from the same period in 2008. The resulting deficit of $1.27 trillion compares to an imbalance of $388.6 billion during the year-ago period.

The deficit for all of 2008 was $454.8 billion, the current record holder in dollar terms. President Barack Obama’s economic team sought to reassure the Chinese during high-level talks last month that the administration is committed to reducing the deficits once the current economic and financial crises have been resolved. So far, interest rates have remained low as the Federal Reserve has kept the federal funds rate, a key short-term interest rate at a record low near zero in an effort to jump-start the economy. At the end of a two-day meeting Wednesday, Fed officials repeated their view that the weak economy was likely to “to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period.” The concern, however, is that rates could begin rising despite the Fed’s efforts if foreigners suddenly lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage its debt burden.

In bond markets, prices fell Wednesday after a fairly weak auction of $23 billion in 10-year Treasury notes. The Treasury Department is auctioning a record $75 billion in debt this week. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, rose to 3.75 percent from 3.70 percent ahead of the auction results and 3.67 percent late Tuesday. Bond prices jumped Tuesday as stocks fell. Investors will track demand because a drop in buyers could force the government to increase its payout. The resulting rise in rates would raise borrowing costs for the government as well as consumers and businesses, and could end up slowing the economy. The total public debt now stands at $11.6 trillion. Interest payments on the debt cost $452 billion last year, the largest federal spending category after Medicare-Medicaid, Social Security and defense.

I found this on the Christian Broadcasting Network Site and its chilling indeed.  Obama and his socialist thugs are hot to trot on “Hate Crimes” legislation and America is clearly going the way of the United Kingdom.  This is very troubling and it continues the economic and cultural takeover that’s going on in the United States.  Those of you who thought that religious persecution could never happen here should think long and hard about this article because it’s about to bloom in America. All the groundwork has been laid and now the liberal socialists will really be cracking down on people of faith.

Britain’s War on Christianity: America’s Future Fight?

By Dale Hurd

CBN News Sr. Reporter

 

At her coronation, Queen Elizabeth, like British monarchs before her, promised to “maintain the laws of God and the true profession of the gospel.” But today, Britain is at war with the gospel, and with itself.

British Christians who take their faith into the workplace risk being demoted or fired. The government continues to push an aggressive gay rights agenda, while threatening to criminalize Christian speech and practice.

Politician and head of the Christian party, George Hargreaves told CBN News he received a complaint for his billboard advertisement.

“Yesterday I got a letter from the advertising standards authority over complaints saying that my billboard that says Britain is a Christian country is offensive to atheists and other religions and it incites hatred against them. What nonsense,” he said.

Hargreaves said Britain is constituted as a Christian country.

“Daily prayers are said in parliament whether atheists like it or not,” he added. “The queen is head of the Church of England and therefore has to acknowledge God for her sovereignty over the nation. These things are written, not just into our culture and our heritage, but into our constitution.”

At one time, Britain was the missionary base for the entire world, even sending missionaries to the new American colonies. But today, the cases of anti-Christian bigotry and discrimination have risen sharply.

In response, Christian legal centers like Christian Concern for Our Nation have mobilized.

Director Andrea Minichiello-Williams warns that if British Christians don’t step up now, the nation is on a path to eventually criminalize the practice of Christianity in public.

“There’s been a massive move by the secularist lobby to privatize religion,” she said. “You can have faith so long as it doesn’t affect you in the work place. So long as you don’t bring it into the workplace. ‘Just make it private. It can’t be public. It can’t affect what you do in the public square.’”

Christian Kwabena Peat was forced to attend homosexual sensitivity training at work, administered by a lesbian. 

“One of things that she said was, she asked the question, ‘What makes you think that to be heterosexual is natural?’ At which point, I walked out,” Peat said.

Then Peat wrote a letter to the sensitivity trainer, explaining the Bible’s position on homosexuality, and that God loved her and Peat loved her. He was suspended.

“They said that by me telling them about the Word of God, it constituted harassment and intimidation,” Peat said.

Peat was just recently reinstated. But cases like his are repeated over and over. Doctors, Nurses, adoptive parents, deemed unfit because of their Christian beliefs. Christians are told not to speak about God in the workplace or they could be punished for offending homosexuals or Muslims. 

And now the British government wants to pass a new equality bill that would force churches to hire practicing homosexuals or transsexuals.

Christian lawyer Paul Diamond has been very successful in defending discrimination cases against Christians in the courts.

“In the United Kingdom the homosexual agenda is militant,” he said. “The power shift began in about 2000, and they’ve been arresting Christians, jailing Christians for hate crimes, shutting off grants, constant litigation with the government, constant aggression.

Diamond said there is no “live and let live.”

“Your Christian values are wicked and evil, and that’s what they want everybody to believe,” he added.

A BBC program called Bone Kickers, showed a violent Christian beheading a Muslim. Britain’s government TV has also put a Muslim in charge of all of its religious programming.

Islam continues to advance in the UK in large part because the government and media give it almost a protected status, while essentially persecuting its own state religion, Christianity.

Many believe the architect of Britain’s new anti-Christian culture was former Prime Minister Tony Blair, a professed Christian who championed gay rights.

Both Minichiello-Williams and Diamond offered the same warning to American Christians: that any anti-life or hate crimes legislation that emerges under the Obama administration will erode America’s Christian base. 

“This is all coming to America,” Minichiello-Williams said. “If you liberalize the laws as President Obama has done.”

“Do you know who Obama reminds every British person of? Tony Blair,” Diamond said. “Charming, persuasive, convincing, the appearance of moderation, and then he shoved all the Judeo-Christian values down while saying he was a Christian.”

Diamond said the British know what is going to happen in America.

“We know what’s going to happen to your 40 percent church attendance,” he added. “It’s not going to 40 percent. It’s going to be 20 percent, when the Federal and state government start saying that if you criticize homosexuality, the hate crimes laws will apply to you Christians.”

By some estimates it only took about 10 years for the state to almost completely undermine Britain’s Christian heritage. Barring a sudden move of God, it is likely to take far longer to restore it. 

North Korea may have been responsible for a very successful cyber-attack on the USA and on South Korea over the 4^th of July Holiday weekend.   In World War II the big surprise was the improvements and coordination of tanks and air superiority combined in a blinding fast attack that the Germans called “Blitzkrieg”. (Lightning war)  We know that the most ambitious nation on earth, China, is pioneering cyber warfare and that the Russians and Europe are in the mix as well and the target is invariably the United States.  We better hope that Cyber Warfare is not the “Blitzkrieg” innovation of World War III because if that’s the case we’re far behind the power curve.  If World War II took five years to settle it’s likely that World War III, given the weapons of mass destruction we’re talking about, may be settled in a day or two.  We began World War II with the Pearl Harbor Disaster but we had the time to recover and come back to defeat the enemy.  In World War III the idea of a Pearl Harbor becomes untenable because the technology has become so horrific that the timeframe for staggering destruction and capitulation has shrunk to hours instead of years.

America is spending money like a drunken sailor on everything but the nation’s defenses and if there’s any government program that I would advocate spending more money on its Defense in general and Cyber, Space, and Missile Defense warfare.  The world’s cyber warriors are sharpening their skills on our nation’s computer infrastructure, with impunity, while we sit and debate how we’re going to pay for healthcare with a bankrupt nation, a broken political process, and a divided population.  In the information age the nation who controls the information frontiers of computer science and the high frontier of space will dominate the planet and enjoy unparalleled national security. As we make crazy deals with the Russians on the radical reduction of our nuclear deterrent that we’re trusting Putin to mirror we’re ignoring an effective cyber-defense in addition to acquiring a potent cyberwarfare capability ourselves.

The primary reason for the existence of government is to keep us safe and free; it’s not to give us bankrupt health care, tax our energy recourses, and redistribute wealth according to a weird social addenda, or to make sure every poor person has a mortgage they can’t possibly pay.  The Primary mission of government, national defense, is being neglected by the crazed social engineers of the Obama era in a headlong rush to destroy America and erect a Neo-socialist, Neo-Fascist state in its place.

It’s largely irrelevant whose doing the latest cyber attack because we seem to keep falling prey to such things and we have got to have a government that’s committed and effective in stopping these attacks.  The probability that these attacks were done by the crazy North Koreans just underlines our vulnerability and foolhardiness for not taking this threat as seriously as we should.

Consider this report from the AP:

North Korea May Be Behind Wave of Cyberattacks

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

•  

SEOUL, South Korea —  South Korean intelligence officials believe North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces committed cyber attacks that paralyzed major South Korean and U.S. government Web sites, aides to two lawmakers said Wednesday.

The sites of 11 South Korean organizations, including the presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry, went down or had access problems since late Tuesday, according to the state-run Korea Information Security Agency. Agency spokeswoman Ahn Jeong-eun said 11 U.S. sites suffered similar problems.

She said the agency is investigating the case with police and prosecutors.

In the U.S., the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the July 4 holiday weekend and into this week, according to American officials inside and outside the government.

Others familiar with the U.S. outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said that the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

The Korea Information Security Agency also attributed the attacks to denial of service.

Yang Moo-jin, a professor at Seoul’s University of North Korean Studies, said he doubts whether the impoverished North has the capability to knock down the Web sites.

But Hong Hyun-ik, an analyst at the Sejong Institute think tank, said the attack could have been done by either North Korea or China, saying he “heard North Korea has been working hard to hack into” South Korean networks.

On Wednesday, the National Intelligence Service told a group of South Korean lawmakers it believes that North Korea or North Korean sympathizers “were behind” the attacks, according to an aide to one of lawmakers who was briefed on the information.

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An aide to another lawmaker who was briefed also said the NIS suspects North Korea or its followers were responsible.

The aides spoke on condition of anonymity and refused to allow the names of the lawmakers they work for to be published, citing the classified nature of the information.

Both aides said the information was delivered in writing to lawmakers who serve on the National Assembly’s intelligence committee.

The National Intelligence Service — South Korea’s main spy agency — declined to confirm the information.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said military intelligence officers were looking at the possibility that the attack may have been committed by North Korean hackers and pro-North Korea forces in South Korea. South Korea’s Defense Ministry said it could not confirm the report.

Earlier Wednesday, the NIS said in a statement that 12,000 computers in South Korea and 8,000 computers overseas had been infected and used for the cyber attack.

The agency said it believed the attack was “thoroughly” prepared and committed by hackers “at the level of a certain organization or state.” It said it was cooperating with the American investigators to examine the case.

South Korean media reported in May that North Korea was running a cyber warfare unit that tries to hack into U.S. and South Korean military networks to gather confidential information and disrupt service.

An initial investigation in South Korea found that many personal computers were infected with a virus program ordering them to visit major official Web sites in South Korea and the U.S. at the same time, Korean information agency official Shin Hwa-su said. There has been no immediate reports of similar cyber attack in other Asian countries.

Yonhap said that prosecutors have found some of the cyber attacks on the South Korean sites were accessed from overseas. Yonhap, citing an unnamed prosecution official, said the cyber attack used a method common to Chinese hackers.

Prosecutors were not immediately available for comment.

Shin, the Information Security Agency official, said the initial probe had not yet uncovered evidence about where the cyber outages originated. Police also said they had not discovered where the outages originated. Police officer Jeong Seok-hwa said that could take several days.

Some of the South Korean sites remained unstable or inaccessible Wednesday. The site of the presidential Blue House could be accessed, but those for the Defense Ministry, the ruling Grand National Party and the National Assembly could not.

Ahn said there were no immediate reports of financial damage or leaking of confidential national information. The alleged attacks appeared aimed only at paralyzing Web sites, she said.

South Korea’s Defense Ministry and Blue House said that there has been no leak of any documents.