I have heard rumors that we were target with financial warfare last year, just before the bailout, and the bailout was actually a cover-up for this attack on money market accounts...supposedly over $500 billion was simply stolen, in a matter of hours, and the Fed dumped hundreds of billions into it as soon as they realized it. I actually heard this on conservative radio, anyone know anything about it?

And I thought all the stupid people were kicked out with that murderer GWB. So the USA wants to do more stupid things? This Timothy twerp wants to give everyone added impetus to flee USA greenbacks does he?

This guy obviously has some other motive, because it seems to me that the best economics I have heard so far says the greenback in the near future will not have the value of toilet paper. What kind of weapon is that?

Sophie Scholl-The Final Days

>>Instead, Bracken suggests, the U.S. might consider targeting the "foreign bank accounts of the top 500 people" in an enemy state. "That financially decapitates a country's elite."

What exactly IS an enemy state? How many of these "states" are a threat to the United States of America?

The answer is NONE.

Once more the United States of America uses the threat of some imagined enemy to justify their criminal behaviour on behalf of the Corporations.

""This kind of financial warfare -- it could be another tool in the toolkit.""

This is nothing new. Financial Warfare has always been a tool in our arsenal as evidenced by the IMF and World Bank. Previously it was used against poor, developing nations - 'either follow our strictures or else' - and is responsible for the extreme under-development of a host of African and Asian nations that are still reeling under the crushing debt-burden.

The Pentagon i believe just figured this out ! We can wait for another 100 years before they figure out peace is the only alternative.

"Look at the embargo on Iraq in the 90s; the main effect was killing children and old people."

And if you believe in what is popularly called "karma", there's another reason for the decline of this nation.

Corporate media have already re-written the history of the Russia-Georgia conflict. Let's get it right, huh, Georgia invaded South Ossettia, bombed buildings and killed ethnic Russians, with the military support of the U.S. and Israel. Russia invaded Georgia in response. "Justice Department official David Rivkin suggested punishing Moscow..." Isn't there some way to punish Rivkin and his ilk for their constant warmongering. Financial warfare is just another way of killing innocent people around the world, akin to bombing power plants and water systems, only just starving them to death and fomenting civil wars. This MIC has torpedoed Americans' 401Ks and drained wealth from the middle class and stuffed it in their own pockets. Financial warfare worked on us, now they want to take it on the road.

Anonymous Pentagon flack sez: "This kind of financial warfare -- it could be another tool in the toolkit."

***
The U.S. has no toolkit. It has only the hammer of warfare. Hence, all problems are treated as nails.

This is nothing new. Financial Warfare has always been a tool in our arsenal as evidenced by the IMF and World Bank. Previously it was used against poor, developing nations -

Indeed see Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins

Greed is a form of warfare. Financial warfare is a activity of the rich against the poor. Nationalism and racism are smokescreens to hide additional motives of global financial 'elite' gangsters, war profiteers. The 'drug war' is another racist looting scheme: http://stopthedrugwar.org.

Here's another form of warfare, practiced by the racist banks:

http://naacp.org/news/press/2009-03-13/index.htm
NAACP FILES LANDMARK LAWSUIT TODAY AGAINST WELLS FARGO AND HSBC
REMEDIES WOULD BENEFIT MILLIONS OF POTENTIAL BORROWERS
Today, the NAACP filed separate lawsuits in U.S. District Court in California against two of the country’s largest lenders, Wells Fargo, and HSBC. These lawsuits allege systematic, institutionalized racism in sub-prime home mortgage lending. The remedies being asked for in the lawsuit include measures for increased accountability and transparency.

According to the lawsuits, African American homeowners who received sub-prime mortgage loans from these lenders were more than 30 percent more likely to be issued a higher rate loan than Caucasian borrowers with the same qualifications. Other studies cited in the lawsuits demonstrate that disparities are pervasive. In fact, upper income African Americans are more than twice as likely to receive higher cost loans as their lower income white counterparts. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition’s most recent study finds that discrimination against minorities persists in mortgage lending. The Federal Reserve Board, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the FDIC have all made similar observations.
...

There's also the financial warfare against the environment, where the corporate criminals hide the current and future devastation caused by their actions. For instance, corporate looter Charles Hurwitz and Maxaam destroyed huge parts of Headwaters Forest in California: http://www.jailhurwitz.com/

Guess there's a bright side to everything. A new weapon for the boys at the Pentagon and its only cost about $3 trillion.

Financial Warfare? We just discovering that. The wealthy corporatists have been waging war on the poor in the US alone for over 150 years. The only reason they are winning is that the gullible Grigos just don't understand that. Sometimes I wonder how we wasted so much money on education. Just look at the results.

"Instead, Bracken suggests, the U.S. might consider targeting the "foreign bank accounts of the top 500 people" in an enemy state. "That financially decapitates a country's elite."

What a great idea. US try it first. We are number one!

Whiskey Rebellion : Hamilton purposely used whiskey making taxes too bankrupt small trans Apalacian farmers in order to create cheap labor for coastal Industrial Stills.

"China's prime minister said Friday he's "a little worried" that those investments may not be totally sound."

What kind of lousy journalism is this? When did China get a prime minister? It has a president and a premier... hey, maybe they're not communist anymore...

Perhaps this whole 'crisis' was a deliberate act by the U.S. to destabilize the world economic system. Exporting of toxic investments to other countries was an act of sabotage. Notice how the dollar has strengthened and Treasury paper is now in high demand. No longer is the Euro the world's emerging reserve currency. Dick Cheney was no doubt one of the masterminds behind this along with Alan Greenspan. Diabolical!

Some of these comments remind me of good old extortion schemes practiced from time immemorial. The Hamilton-Whiskey Rebellion is one such example. The other is the time old Nick Biddle (supposedly backed by European financial wizards) tried that game on Old Hickory and lost. And of course the addiction to playing the ponies by J. Edgar Hoover who mysteriously had his markers covered by the "non-existent" mob.
The history of the Federal Reserve in this country has gone international...
Economics coercion is an old game.

This article is a little sketchy. The usual economic warfare is conducted via the World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans to poor countries, extracting concessions for capitalist interests when those countries can't pay. The article doesn't mention that fact.

The article just offers two iffy examples where the United States could supposedly target the bank accounts of the elites in a country. I'm not really sure how that's conducting economic warfare on a state since most of elite capital isn't circulated in local economies anyway. And how would the United States force banks to freeze those assets anyway without some criminal charge in an international court?

The only other example in this article is a scenario where China targets the United States, devaluating the dollar and causing U.S. interest rates to rise. This seems like a more concrete idea, but it signifies economic warfare against the United States. China holds a lot of U.S. debt, but it can invest elsewhere, Chinese officials recently told Obama. It'd be a Pyrrhic victory for China to cut their losses by pulling out U.S. investments, but if things are going down anyway, why not do it?

This article includes big talk from Pentagon "consultants," but it doesn't sound like they really know what they're talking about. It's the United States that's going bankrupt, and it's doing so, in part, because of Pentagon spending.

I should add that the article's inclusion of a picture of Geithner is highly misleading as it doesn't seem he has anything to do with the article's main premise.

-TIA

This is a very poor article that ignores a very many facts on the ground.

The first fact is that the USA has NO cash resources.
I have seen borrowing figures that now top 60 Trillion, this is over 5 years of the entire US economy (I thought around 11 Trillion was a typical figure for overall GDP of the USA).

So in order to leverage the kind of cash resources espoused in this article the USA would not be able to secure these funds by any other means than borrowing them.

We borrow our money from China.

We may not know it yet, but we are their client state.

I think we might well have this kind of power the article states, but only as a proxy for Chinese interests. We have no room to maneuver only so many in the USA have not figured this out yet....probably because the Chinese have yet to fully wield the power they have over us.

I predict this power is one they will use soon.

They will have no choice if the USA forces their hand with more Bush-doctrine idiocy that's for sure.

In short, the article is stupid and the USA is basically in it's death throes. The rest of the world will be lucky to escape her dying convulsions.

Since our financial welfare depends on Chinese and Arab and other buyers of US Treasury Bonds - starting financial warfare would have disastrous unintended consequences. This might have been effective 20 years ago, was never a good idea,
and would be a disaster now.
samoking1

This thought about "financial warfare" has entered my mind too, but in a slightly different version: the US printing worthless money yet being able to purchase 'property' any place in this collapsing world. This financial crisis has been brought on purposely!

"Countries are under stress. Their populations are getting more and more agitated. So they're more dependent on our investments," one Pentagon official tells Danger Room. "This kind of financial warfare -- it could be another tool in the toolkit."

ah - the tool kit

death squads, assassinations, gang rape, drugs, pay offs, plane crashes, single car vehicle accidents, poisons

there's tool kit that any freedom loving god fearing american bullet headed country mother's son can be proud of

we will all be much more familiar with the tool kit when it is directed at us this summer in the conflict that will arise when the sheeple finally figure out

1 there will be no recovery
2 obama is a nwo shill
3 the supranational corporations no longer consider the american population to be of any true value to them and will be discarded to the homelessness of the rapidly growing tent cities sprouting up everywhere

we are in for some hard lessons because we know how ruthless the corporations are and in many ways we deserve it for being so lazy and weak

sometimes you are the windshield sometime you are the bug

"The US Could Use Crisis to Wage 'Finacial Warfare.'" This is exactly what is discussed in Naomi Klein's book "SHOCK DOCTRINE - THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM." The corporate/financial class use crises or "disasters" -- be they economic, political or natural (such as hurricane Katrina) to ram through unpopular programs on an uninformed public that is in shock. See her great interview discussing her book which can be viewed at "fora.tv.com/naomiklein"

It is probably because of "Global Warming" right, hmmmmm.............