Investors benefit from understanding the federal budget, credit policies and covert intervention that drive markets -- often overriding fundamental economics. How has the US governmental apparatus become so powerful in the marketplace and what does it mean to the health of our economy? How unstable is the mortgage bubble and where are the opportunities for investors if the bubble bursts?

It certainly pays to be Treasury Secretary if your former firm is a brokerage house, a new study says.

Goldman Sachs Group -- formerly run by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and Morgan Stanley, stand to be among the biggest beneficiaries of a $700 billion US bailout.

"Its benefits, in its current form, will be largely limited to investment banks and other banks that have aggressively written down the value of their holdings and have already recognized the attendant capital impairment," Jeffrey Rosenberg, Bank of America's head of credit strategy research, wrote in a report obtained by Bloomberg News yesterday.

New rules for national security investigations will help protect Americans from terror attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers Tuesday, even if they single out people from the Middle East.

By LARA JAKES JORDAN

Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON --

New rules for national security investigations will help protect Americans from terror attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers Tuesday, even if they single out people from the Middle East.

Skeptical Democrats clashed with Mueller, who told the House Judiciary Committee that FBI agents would no longer need solid evidence or allegations of wrongdoing to spy on Americans even before opening investigations. Democrats also expressed doubts that the Justice Department and FBI would protect civil liberties and privacy rights after years of previous abuses and stymied congressional oversight.

by Peter Dale Scott
September 5, 2008

Though few Americans realize it, Cheney and Rumsfeld worked through the 1980s and 1990s on emergency nuclear-response plans which allegedly suspended the American Constitution and also Congress.¹ (Through these decades Rumsfeld was CEO of a major pharmaceutical firm, and in the later 1990s Cheney was CEO of Halliburton; but their private status did not deter them from continuing to exercise a supra-constitutional planning power conferred on them by Ronald Reagan.)

Even fewer Americans know that these rules, originally dealing with a nuclear attack on America, were extended by Reagan Executive Order 12656 to cover "any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States."² And few Americans realize that at least some of these rules, known technically as Continuity of Government (COG) rules, were invoked before 10:00 AM on September 11, 2001.³

By Liliana Segura
September 2, 2008
AlterNet

After five years in legal limbo, the Palestinian university professor falsely accused of terrorism is free, but faces contempt charges.

Breaking, from ABC News.

Former professor Sami Al-Arian, who was once charged by the U.S. government with being a top Palestinian terrorist, has been released from custody for the first time in more than five years.

Immigration authorities released Al-Arian to the custody of his daughter, just hours before a federal judge had ordered the agency to explain Al-Arian's continued detention.

Posted 8/31/08: We encourage readers to pay close attention to this next week's events in Minneapolis, site of the upcoming Republican National Convention, and be prepared to help activists who may need assistance. Already, activists who have spent two years preparing to express the will of the People during the convention, are being rounded up, personal belongings seized, doors broken down with guns drawn, food from Food Not Bombs taken ... Glenn Greenwald is blogging this at Salon (partial entry below): "[B]oth journalists and lawyers -- in addition to protesters -- have been detained and arrested even though not a single violent or criminal act has occurred. We direct your attention also to Twin Cities Indymedia for moment to moment updates and Indymedia.us and the i-Witness Video Blog for more. As always, we must BE the MEDIA right now. Please pass along this information so that others will be informed, and able to help as it's needed. Information will be posted at these Indymedia sites to clarify what's useful. We are grateful to know that the National Lawyers Guild has sent legal observers, as they have for most actions of dissent in the last many years. (Thanks, NLG!!) At this point, i-Witness has requested, "We are asking the public to contact the office of St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman at 651-266-8510 to stop this house arrest, this gross intimidation by police officers, and the detention of media activists and reporters."

It is imperative that we let the powers that be know, without any doubt, that the nation's eyes are upon them--both in Minneapolis, and as events begin unfolding in Mississippi and Louisiana with Hurricane Gustav approaching. Already Blackwater has put out a call for security personnel to respond to the POTENTIAL disaster, and Bush has issued federal emergencies for both states. In light of what happened just three years ago, we must be alert, watchful, and ready to respond in whatever ways become needed. I'm sure legal funds will be needed in Minneapolis, and we've seen many examples of court systems make the right decisions when they start getting thousands of calls from around the nation. Please keep an eye on watch Indymedia and Glenn Greenwald for more.

I was inspired to make this today after reading this report from Glenn Greenwald about events in Minneapolis.

August 30, 2008
by John Byrne
RawStory.com

As the nation focuses on Sen. John McCain's choice of running mate, President Bush has quietly moved to expand the reach of presidential power by ensuring that America remains in a state of permanent war.

Buried in a recent proposal by the Administration is a sentence that has received scant attention -- and was buried itself in the very newspaper that exposed it Saturday. It is an affirmation that the United States remains at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban and "associated organizations."

August 8, 2008
Ivan Eland
Independent Institute

Assuming the federal government has, after almost seven years, finally identified the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks in 2001--admittedly a generous assumption given that for most of those years, it pursued, hounded, embarrassed, and ruined the career of the wrong man--larger dangers remain. As is normally the case with issues surrounding terrorism, the average citizen will probably be shocked to learn that their government is often a bigger threat than the terrorists. Remember the CIA's creation of the 9/11 threat by supporting the most radical Islamist groups fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s and then the U.S. government's provocation of terrorist attacks from those same militants by its non-Islamic military presence in Islamic Persian Gulf countries in the 1990s, which had continued unnecessarily subsequent to the first Gulf War.

by Robert Parry
August 7, 2008
Consortium News

The U.S. military commission's split guilty verdict on Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, has drawn praise from the Bush administration and criticism from civil rights groups, but what has been overlooked is the chilling message that "the Hamdan principle" sends about future prosecutions in the "war on terror."

This new principle holds that anyone -- regardless of how tangential a connection to actual acts of terrorism -- can be prosecuted through the kangaroo court of the military commissions and be sentenced to a long prison term (or even death). Though Hamdan is a Yemeni, the principle would seem to apply to U.S citizens, too.