What credit crunch?

Goldman Sachs bankers in line for £1.5 BILLION pay and bonus pot (and that's just for London staff). With Britain in the grip of a recession, the announcement last night will only add to public fury over City payouts. The company, which is awarding its workers £8.2billion globally, has 5,300 staff based in Britain.

The news comes despite disappointing annual results from the investment bank. Goldman is expected to reveal profits fell to £1.95billion last year, from £5.5billion in 2010. This would make it its second lowest annual profit in almost ten years, reflecting the impact Europe's debt crisis is having on the Wall Street bank. The company's president, Gary Cohn, said the large payouts were necessary for staff retention. The total pot this year is £1.8billion less than the £10billion awarded for their efforts the previous year.

Mail Online

US Commercial on the National Debt

Banned US Commercial

The United States has lost its sterling credit rating

The credit rating agency Standard & Poor's on Friday lowered the nation's AAA rating for the first time since granting it in 1917. The move came less than a week after a gridlocked Congress finally agreed to spending cuts that would reduce the debt by more than $2 trillion – a tumultuous process that contributed to convulsions in financial markets.

The promised cuts were not enough to satisfy S&P.The drop in the rating by one notch to AA-plus was telegraphed as a possibility back in April. The three main credit agencies, which also include Moody's Investor Service and Fitch, had warned during the budget fight that if Congress did not cut spending far enough, the country faced a downgrade. Moody's said it was keeping its AAA rating on the nation's debt, but that it might still lower it.

One of the biggest questions after the downgrade was what impact it would have on already nervous investors. While the downgrade was not a surprise, some selling is expected when stock trading resumes Monday morning. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 699 points this week, the biggest weekly point drop since October 2008.

Huffingtonpost.com

Teutonic Genie out of bottle

Max Keiser, financial analyst and host of RT's Keiser Report says Germany is ready to emerge as the world's new superpower.

MaxKeiser.com

The Coming Sell-Out to the American Super Rich

Mr. Obama seems to be campaigning for his own defeat! Thanks largely to the $13 trillion Wall Street bailout – while keeping the debt overhead in place for America’s “bottom 98%” – this happy 2% of the population now receives an estimated three quarters (~75%) of the returns to wealth (interest, dividends, rent and capital gains).

We are dealing with shameless demagogy. The financial End Time has arrived, but Mr. Obama’s happy-talk pretends that “two years” will get us through the current debt-induced depression. The Republican plan is to make more Congressional and Senate gains in 2012 as Mr. Obama’s former supporters “vote with their backsides” and stay home, as they did earlier this month. So “two years” means forever in politician-talk. Why vote for a politician who promises “change” but is merely an exclamation mark for the Bush-Cheney policies from Afghanistan and Iraq to Wall Street’s Democratic Leadership Council on the party’s right wing? One of its leaders, after all, was Mr. Obama’s Senate mentor, Joe Lieberman.

More on AlterNet

US veterans should voluntarily give up their disability benefits to help reduce the deficit

The Young Turks

Toronto turned into fortress for G8, G20 summits

Thousands of Canadian police threw a tight security net over eastern Ontario province Thursday as world leaders began arriving for key summits focused on economic recovery and development.

In one of the North American country's largest ever security operations, some 20,000 police have been deployed in the city of Toronto and the exclusive lakeside community of Huntsville, some 225 kilometers (140 miles) to the north.

Leaders from the Group of Eight leading economies will meet Friday in Huntsville, before joining up with other officials from the Group of 20 developed and emerging nations in Toronto on Saturday and Sunday.

In a huge operation, police combed Toronto's streets barricaded by wire fences and miles of concrete blocks, backed by overhead helicopters, with many schools and businesses closed, and the main Union Station partially shut down.

Local trains only were allowed to unload passengers, who arrived to find the platforms mostly deserted, and security personnel posted at every corner.

Protestors are planning days of demonstrations to focus attention on issues from the environment to the rights of indigenous peoples.

More on The Raw Story – CBC News

Also interesting: 2010 G8/G20 Summit: Upcoming Actions and Events on ActiveHistory.ca

David Icke "What is Money?"

Join the meeting in Amsterdam, The Netherlands by David Icke on September 19th 2009 and about ordering tickets from outside of The Netherlands, please follow the walkthrough on the ordering process!

Medvedev Shows Off Sample Coin of New ‘World Currency’ at G-8

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev illustrated his call for a supranational currency to replace the dollar by pulling from his pocket a sample coin of a “united future world currency.”

“Here it is,” Medvedev told reporters today in L’Aquila, Italy, after a summit of the Group of Eight nations. “You can see it and touch it.”

The coin, which bears the words “unity in diversity,” was minted in Belgium and presented to the heads of G-8 delegations, Medvedev said.

The question of a supranational currency “concerns everyone now, even the mints,” Medvedev said. The test coin “means they’re getting ready. I think it’s a good sign that we understand how interdependent we are.”

Bloomberg.com

UK Expenses row: MP who claimed for 500 trees accuses constituents of 'jealousy'

Why are people so angry about the MPs' expenses scandal? "Jealousy," according to the veteran MP Sir Anthony Steen who yesterday expressed his dismay at the ­outcry over his claim for the treatment of 500 trees in the grounds of his house.

Steen, MP for Totnes since 1974, was forced by David Cameron to issue a strongly worded apology after he blamed constituents for forcing his retirement from Westminster. Steen "unreservedly apologised" after declaring that the public had no right to "interfere" with his private life.

Cameron moved against Steen, who was told he would be stripped of the Tory whip unless he "shut up", after he appeared on Radio 4's The World at One to lash out at constituents who objected to his claim for the treatment of 500 trees in the grounds of his house.

"I've done nothing criminal, that's the most awful thing, and do you know what it's about? Jealousy," Steen said. "I've got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It's a merchant's house of the 19th century. It's not particularly attractive, it just does me nicely."

The Guardian

Alex Jones Bilderberg Club's plan

The Alex Jones Show - YouTube Exodus

We need to evacuate the 2000 + videos on the Alex Jones Channel immediately. We need to clone these videos around the Internet:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel

Bilderberg 2009 Attendee list

As expected, the participation list this year leaked again. On the Internet it is now only 2 places in the Greek language to see where I can find (here and here), he translated via google translate some names wrong (here), but can be read / decipher that Hirsch Ballin is there so there is reasonable chance that this is a "part" of the list of this year (2009 Bilderberg Attendee list) among others:

Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands

Queen Sofía of Spain

Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands

David Rockefeller, patriarch of the Rockefeller family, USA

Keith B. Alexander, Director of the NSA, USA

Timothy Geithner, USA, Secretary of the Treasury

Donald E. Graham (Washington Ρost Company)

Victor Halberstadt, Professor of Economics, Leiden University, Netherlands

Ernst Hirsch Ballin, minister of Justice, Netherlands

Richard Holbrooke, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, USA

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO Secretary General, Netherlands

Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Competition. Netherlands

David Petraeus, Commander, U.S. Central Command, USA

Jeroen van der Veer, CEO Royal Dutch Shell, Netherlands

Guy Verhofstadt, ex Prime Minister, Belgium

Nout Wellink, President of De Nederlandsche Bank, the Netherlands

Paul Wolfowitz, American Enterprise Institute, USA

See whole Bilderberg 2009 Attendee list on We Are Change Holland

David Icke on UK Surveillance Society

When you’ve got nothing to hide, so nothing to fear, WATCH THIS!

More of this series here.

The Final Push for World Government

Throughout the history of mankind, the elite have always fought for world empire. Now, using secrecy and international banking systems, they are making their final push for world government. Only an educated and informed public can stop them in their tracks.

Speaker at the beginning: Carl Sagan

Endgame

For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker ALEX JONES reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME.

InfoWars.com - PrisonPlanet.com - InfoWars.net - PrisonPlanet.tv - The Jones Report - TruthNews.us - ObamaDeception.net

Operation Mind Seed

Subscribe to the Operation Mind Seed newsletter at Operation Mind Seed

G20 police 'used undercover men to incite crowds'

An MP who was involved in last month's G20 protests in London is to call for an investigation into whether the police used agents provocateurs to incite the crowds.

Liberal Democrat Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards.

Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon.

Brake, a member of the influential home affairs select committee, will raise the allegations when he gives evidence before parliament's joint committee on human rights on Tuesday.

The Observer – Also see Who Controls The Black Bloc Anarchists? by Paul Joseph Watson (PrisonPlanet)

Guilty of Being Poor

The jailers of the 19th century — even in the pre-Civil War South — largely abandoned the practice of imprisoning people for falling into debt as counterproductive and ultimately barbaric. In the 1970s and ’80s, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that incarcerating people who can’t pay fines because of poverty violates the U.S. Constitution.

Apparently, though, some states and county jails never got the memo. Welcome to the debtors’ prisons of the 21st century. “Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son,” the New York Times wrote in an editorial.

“When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments. That is both barbaric and unconstitutional.”

Dissident Voice - New York Times