One Nation under Capitalism It’s Time for a Crucifixion By Jason Miller 10/2/08 "Cyrano’s Journal Online" -- - Proudly surveying our kingdom from atop the capitalist pyramid, we US Americans have deluded ourselves into believing we are at the pinnacle of cultural, social, political, and economic evolution. We fancy ourselves to be so exceptional that we are entitled to a perpetual blessing from “our” Christian God. Break out the Haldol! We have afflicted the globe with the fatal contagions of the American Way and corporatism. And all of us, to varying degrees, are culpable. From bicycle-peddling vegans to limo riding corporados, we are each complicit in perpetuating American capitalism, a system so rotten that were it a piece of decaying meat, starving maggots would reject it. We would have far fewer amends to make if our nation’s impact were limited by the size of our population. Were that the case, we would be a mere blemish on the face of Mother Earth. But due to our extraordinary wealth and power, insatiable avarice, hostility towards life, and obscene appetites for consumption, the United States is more akin to a cankerous fist-sized boil, oozing pus and reeking with infection. We’re gluttonous beyond belief, greedily devouring every morsel of meat and marrow and leaving the “dogs” of the rest of the world to gnaw hungrily on the hollow bones we thoughtlessly cast aside. Spiritually we’ve struck a perverse Faustian bargain. Like the good doctor, we crave “more than earthly meat, cheese and drink.” But knowledge is not the object of our desire. What an insult to think that we’d relinquish our souls in exchange for something so hollow and meaningless. Big Macs, the NFL, NASCAR, McMansions, Hummers, American Idol, liposuction, and Viagra—we’ll settle for no less. Gloating over our seemingly endless supply of fast foods and hard-hitting dudes, heart-pounding races and expansive living spaces, monstrous cars and aspiring stars, and hot chicks and hard dicks, we glare contemptuously at the “rats” from other nations scurrying about our feet and fighting over the crumbs we don’t manage to inhale. For years we have satiated our desires with utter disregard for environmental cost, have ignored the abject suffering we inflict upon humans and animals, and have spilled a veritable ocean of blood to enable corporate plunder and to stomp anti-capitalist movements into the ground. Yet when we finally reaped a bit of what we’d sown in September of 2001 and again in September of 2008, we wailed, wept, and gnashed our teeth as if we were the only people ever to have sustained staggering blows. While both events are tragic, how can we express such righteous indignation that we’ve been wounded as a nation when we’ve been dishing out misery for years and have remained relatively unscathed? And can we be so blinded by the shimmer of the gold and diamonds that we worship that we can’t see that these deep wounds to the very heart of capitalism (both the destruction of the World Trade Center and the current financial market crisis) are clarion calls to slay this formidable but staggering beast? Capitalism has had its run and it has failed. Miserably. Despite a number of ‘socialist’ measures implemented by the ruling elite to pacify the masses throughout the crisis-ridden history of American capitalism, we still have an obscene percentage of wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, poverty and homelessness, unemployment, imperial conquests, monopolies and oligopolies, and ‘recessions.’ And our collective psyche suffers from a host of maladies and malformations. We are alienated from nature, each other and ourselves. We value property over life. We buy far more than we need or could ever use. We measure success in dollars and cents. We are driven by greed and selfishness. We worship money and militarism. As obviously dysfunctional, unjust, and destructive as our system is, many of us who oppose the $700 billion ‘bailout’ of the financial markets still soberly nod our heads in agreement when bourgeois economists insist that while the ‘bailout’ proposal is excessive, ‘something must be done to restore investor confidence and get credit flowing again.’ How about no? How about we do nothing? Most of those who stand to benefit from a ‘bailout’ of any dollar amount are all about the ‘free market’ and ‘law of the jungle’ capitalism. It’s sad how quickly those in the moneyed class cast aside their ‘principles’ when adversity slaps them in the face. ‘Dog-eat-dog’ is their mantra when they’re fighting tooth and nail to cut spending on socially beneficial programs, rewarding mass firings by increasing stock values, pushing for increased regressive taxes and decreases on progressive taxes, and slaughtering millions of innocents in resource wars. But when these uber-predators become prey, they expect the rest of us to charge to their rescue. So what of Paulson and the rest of the power elite who are coming to the working and middle classes on bended knee, begging for a hand-out? Let them twist in the wind and pray they start hurling themselves out of windows. What of the financial markets, Wall Street, and the decaying socioeconomic infrastructure of American capitalism? Let them collapse. What of the rest of us? Let us suffer as our victims have suffered for decades. Motivated by pain and by the realization that our system is ecocidal, genocidal, and morally reprehensible, we of the working and middle classes can finally redeem ourselves by nailing our depraved god of American capitalism to the cross and starting to forge a just, egalitarian, democratic and humane socioeconomic order. Good for us and good for the rest of the planet! Jason Miller is the associate editor of Cyrano’s Journal Online, founding editor of Thomas Paine’s Corner, and a corporate wage slave. He has experienced unemployment and homelessness, looks forward to meeting interesting people at the soup kitchen once his 401K has zeroed out and his job has been eliminated, and wonders when America’s wage slaves will finally unite and revolt.

Abtigiis America used to inspire me, now, thinkng about its fate, prespires me. Never imagined that a nation of 300 Million people cant produce anyone better than Obama and Palin, I am not counting McCain, White house was not built for retirement. Why not offer Federal incentive equal to Bin Laden's warrant prize of $ 50 Million to find a reasonable American candidate? If I was paid even $ 5 Million Dollars, I bet I can find a person who can run the USA like Singapore or Finland in efficiency and fiscal responsibility. But under this current system, it wont happen, Americans dont need to change the whip, they need to change the horse, their electoral system is the problem. It seems that, potential American candidates that can best represent America at this crucial time have been eliminated upon conception in the womb, or silenced somehow, which leaves the only choice Americans have is between two parties who agree on everything except on how high to jump. Superficially the two parties disagree on Abortion, environment and few other cosmetic issues, when it comes to serious issued that will define Americas place among nations next century, they elect Bush and his likes, who have no clue what climate change is all about until someone tells him " Mr. President, its caused by uncontrolled appetite for burning oil," which in the eyes of the President is a leftist conspiracy. Does the USA election raise Europe as an important ally as tiny Israel? Nope. Fifty Million Americans of German origin are never heard of except for Octoberfest, the cultural beer drinking festival, imagine if they became more vocal and active like AIPAC, the Israeli lobby and began grilling every presidential hopeful about his commitment to German Security and prosperity? and rightfully so, Germany has an ugly past with the Jews, and today the state of Israel has some 200 Nuclear weapons developed with US assistance, and since an Israeli professor once threatened to attack Germany with Nukes, if I was a German, I wouldn't sleep at night. Imagine if they demand that American foreign policy to be made in Berlin, Germany, as Americas strategic ally since ww2? or if they arrange free routine trips for all German origin lawmakers to visit Nuremberg and Dresden? Unfortunately most of them have melted away with no affinity or allegiance to their ancestral Saxony or Bavaria, except for the remnants who live around Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Wyoming and Oregon. As for African Americans, they care less of the plight of hungry Africans and the tragedy in Somalia, they will never demand from their politicians justice for the people of Africa. Obama, who is half African, seldom raises African issues to win votes. Nur

Warning to readers: The following Article is provocative, suggestive language, read it at your own discretion. Its posted for its political content only. Moderator. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------ Mad Dog Palin By Matt Taibbi 01/10/09 "Rolling Stone" -- - Sep 27, 2008 -- - The scariest thing about John McCain's running mate isn't how unqualified she is -- it's what her candidacy says about America. I'm standing outside the XCEL ENERGY CENTER in St. Paul, Minnesota. Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party's nomination for vice president. If I hadn't quit my two-packs-a-day habit earlier this year, I'd be chain-smoking now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against the fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy. All around me, a million cops in their absurd post-9/11 space-combat get-ups stand guard as assholes in papier-mâché puppet heads scramble around for one last moment of network face time before the coverage goes dark. Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joyously out the gates in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion Bowls and other "wild" drinks and extra-maritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the "unbelievable time" they will inevitably report to their pals back home. Only 21st-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they're at a party. The defining moment for me came shortly after Palin and her family stepped down from the stage to uproarious applause, looking happy enough to throw a whole library full of books into a sewer. In the crush to exit the stadium, a middle-aged woman wearing a cowboy hat, a red-white-and-blue shirt and an obvious eye job gushed to a male colleague they were both wearing badges identifying them as members of the Colorado delegation at the Xcel gates. "She totally reminds me of my cousin!" the delegate screeched. "She's a real woman! The real thing!" I stared at her open-mouthed. In that moment, the rank cynicism of the whole sorry deal was laid bare. Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore. And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she's a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed middle-American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin' Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else's, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning. Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV -and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation. The Palin speech was a political masterpiece, one of the most ingenious pieces of electoral theater this country has ever seen. Never before has a single televised image turned a party's fortunes around faster. Until the Alaska governor actually ascended to the podium that night, I was convinced that John McCain had made one of the all-time campaign season blunders, that he had acted impulsively and out of utter desperation in choosing a cross-eyed political neophyte just two years removed from running a town smaller than the bleacher section at Fenway Park. It even crossed my mind that there was an element of weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain's decision to cave in to his party's right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps he was responding to being ordered by party elders away from a tepid, ideologically promiscuous hack like Joe Lieberman -- reportedly his real preference -- by picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-thumping buffoon. As in: You want me to rally the base? Fine, I'll rally the base. Here, I'll choose this rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil pipelines. Happy now? But watching Palin's speech, I had no doubt that I was witnessing a historic, iconic performance. The candidate sauntered to the lectern with the assurance of a sleepwalker - and immediately launched into a symphony of snorting and sneering remarks, taking time out in between the superior invective to present herself as just a humble gal with a beefcake husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just happened to be the innocent targets of a communist and probably also homosexual media conspiracy. It was a virtuoso performance. She appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who, "five children later" is "still my guy." It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag. Within minutes, Palin had given TV audiences a character infinitely recognizable to virtually every American: the small-town girl with just enough looks and a defiantly incurious mind who thinks the PTA minutes are Holy Writ, and injustice means the woman next door owning a slightly nicer set of drapes or flatware. Or the governorship, as it were. Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban American supermom. It's the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant. Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her seminal crack about the "difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick," blurring once and for all the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government cheese. In her speech, Palin presented herself as a raging baby-making furnace of middle-class ambition next to whom the yuppies of the Obama set -who never want anything all that badly except maybe a few afternoons with someone else's wife, or a few kind words in The New York Times Book Review -- seem like weak, self-doubting celibates, the kind of people who certainly cannot be trusted to believe in the right God or to defend a nation. We're used to seeing such blatant cultural caricaturing in our politicians. But Sarah Palin is something new. She's all caricature. As the candidate of a party whose positions on individual issues are poll losers almost across the board, her shtick is not even designed to sell a line of policies. It's just designed to sell her. The thing was as much as admitted in the on-air gaffe by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who was inadvertently caught saying on MSNBC that Palin wasn't the most qualified candidate, that the party "went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives." The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains. Sure, there was politics in the Palin speech, but it was all either silly lies or merely incidental fluffery buttressing the theatrical performance. A classic example of what was at work here came when Palin proudly introduced her Down syndrome baby, Trig, then stared into the camera and somberly promised parents of special-needs kids that they would "have a friend and advocate in the White House." This was about a half-hour before she raised her hands in triumph with McCain, a man who voted against increasing funding for special-needs education. Palin's charge that "government is too big" and that Obama "wants to grow it" was similarly preposterous. Not only did her party just preside over the largest government expansion since LBJ, but Palin herself has been a typical Bush-era Republican, borrowing and spending beyond her means. Her great legacy as mayor of Wasilla was the construction of a $14.7 million hockey arena in a city with an annual budget of $20 million; Palin OK'd a bond issue for the project before the land had been secured, leading to a protracted legal mess that ultimately forced taxpayers to pay more than six times the original market price for property the city ended up having to seize from a private citizen using eminent domain. Better yet, Palin ended up paying for the ******* thing with a 25 percent increase in the city sales tax. But in her speech, of course, Palin presented herself as the enemy of tax increases, righteously bemoaning that "taxes are too high," and Obama "wants to raise them." Palin hasn't been too worried about federal taxes as governor of a state that ranks number one in the nation in federal spending per resident ($13,950), even as it sits just 18th in federal taxes paid per resident ($5,434). That means all us taxpaying non-Alaskans spend $8,500 a year on each and every resident of Palin's paradise of rugged self-sufficiency. Not that this sworn enemy of taxes doesn't collect from her own: Alaska currently collects the most taxes per resident of any state in the nation. The rest of Palin's speech was the same dog-whistle crap Republicans have been running on for decades. Palin's crack about a mayor being "like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities" testified to the Republicans' apparent belief that they can win elections till the end of time running against the Sixties. (They're probably right.) The incessant grousing about the media was likewise par for the course, red meat for those tens of millions of patriotic flag-waving Americans whose first instinct when things get rough is to whine like *****es and blame other people -reporters, the French, those ungrateful blacks soaking up tax money eating big prison meals, whomever -for their failures. Add to this the usual lies about Democrats wanting to "forfeit" to our enemies abroad and coddle terrorists, and you had a very run-of-the-mill, almost boring Republican speech from a substance standpoint. What made it exceptional was its utter hypocrisy, its total disregard for reality, its absolute un-relation to the facts of our current political situation. After eight years of unprecedented corruption, incompetence, waste and greed, the party of Karl Rove understood that 50 million Americans would not demand solutions to any of these problems so long as they were given a new, new thing to beat their meat over. Sarah Palin is that new, new thing, and in the end it won't matter that she's got an unmarried teenage kid with a bun in the oven. Of course, if the daughter of a black candidate like Barack Obama showed up at his convention with a five-month bump and some sideways-cap-wearing, junior-grade Curtis Jackson holding her hand, the defenders of Traditional Morality would be up in arms. But the thing about being in the reality-making business is that you don't need to worry much about vetting; there are no facts in your candidate's bio that cannot be ignored or overcome. One of the most amusing things about the Palin nomination has been the reaction of horrified progressives. The Internet has been buzzing at full volume as would-be defenders of san-ity and reason pore over the governor's record in search of the Damning Facts. My own telephone began ringing off the hook with calls from ex-Alaskans and friends of Alaskans determined to help get the "truth" about Sarah Palin into the major media. Pretty much anyone with an Internet connection knows by now that Palin was originally for the "Bridge to Nowhere" before she opposed it (she actually endorsed the plan in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign), that even after the project was defeated she kept the money, that she didn't actually sell the Alaska governor's state luxury jet on eBay but instead sold it at a $600,000 loss to a campaign contributor (who is now seeking $50,000 in taxpayer money to pay maintenance costs). Then there are the salacious tales of Palin's swinging-meat-cleaver management style, many of which seem to have a common thread: In addition to being ensconced in a messy ethics investigation over her firing of the chief of the Alaska state troopers (dismissed after refusing to sack her sister's ex-husband), Palin also reportedly fired a key campaign aide for having an affair with a friend's wife. More ominously, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin tried to fire the town librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, after Emmons resisted pressure to censor books Palin found objectionable. Then there's the God stuff: Palin belongs to a church whose pastor, Ed Kalnins, believes that all criticisms of George Bush "come from hell," and wondered aloud if people who voted for John Kerry could be saved. Kalnins, looming as the answer to Obama's Jeremiah Wright, claims that Alaska is going to be a "refuge state" for Christians in the last days, last days which he sometimes speaks of in the present tense. Palin herself has been captured on video mouthing the inevitable born-again idiocies, such as the idea that a recent oil pipeline deal was "God's will." She also described the Iraq War as a "task that is from God" and part of a heavenly "plan." She supports teaching creationism and "abstinence only" in public schools, opposes abortion even for victims of rape, denies the science behind global warming and attends a church that seeks to convert Jews and cure homosexuals. All of which tells you about what you'd expect from a raise-the-base choice like Palin: She's a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs who had to be educated as to the fact that the Constitution did not exactly envision government executives firing librarians. Judging from the importance progressive critics seem to attach to these revelations, you'd think that these were actually negatives in modern American politics. But Americans like politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them ****** and mean and ignorant of the rules. Which is why Palin has only seemed to grow in popularity as more and more of these revelations have come out. The same goes for the most damning aspect of her biography, her total lack of big-game experience. As governor of Alaska, Palin presides over a state whose entire population is barely the size of Memphis. This kind of thing might matter in a country that actually worried about whether its leader was prepared for his job -but not in America. In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you've been around for years. To a certain extent, this is why Obama is getting a pass on the same issue. He's been on TV every day for two years, and according to the standards of our instant-ramen culture, that's a lifetime of hands-on experience. It is worth noting that the same criticisms of Palin also hold true for two other candidates in this race, John McCain and Barack Obama. As politicians, both men are more narrative than substance, with McCain rising to prominence on the back of his bio as a suffering war hero and Obama mostly playing the part of the long-lost, future-embracing liberal dreamboat not seen on the national stage since Bobby Kennedy died. If your stomach turns to read how Palin's Kawasaki 704 glasses are flying off the shelves in middle America, you have to accept that middle America probably feels the same way when it hears that Donatella Versace dedicated her collection to Obama during Milan Fashion Week. Or sees the throwing-panties-onstage-"I love you, Obama!" ritual at the Democratic nominee's town-hall appearances. So, sure, Barack Obama might be every bit as much a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all qualities we're actually going to need in government if we're going to get out of this huge mess we're in. Here's what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat ******* pig who pins "Country First" buttons on his man titties and chants "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas. The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn't that she's totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and horked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the *** for eight solid years, and we'll not only thank you for your trouble, we'll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time. Democracy doesn't require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in a while, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are. This is a very different thing from shopping, which involves passively letting sitcoms melt your brain all day long and then jumping straight into the TV screen to buy a Southern-Style Chicken Sandwich because the slob singing "I'm Lovin' It!" during the commercial break looks just like you. The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next. And when it comes time to vote, all you have to do is put your Country First -- just like that lady on TV who reminds you of your cousin. U-S-A, baby. U-S-A! U-S-A! Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

Rahima sis Author writes: "However, the contractual agreements that are signed between the bank and its client put all of the risks of ownership upon the client, and these factors defeat the purpose of ijara, even if technically speaking the bank claims to follow the letter of the English law as the ‘owner’ of the property." In continuation of our past discussion on another thread, about halal mortgages in Islam, this article puts things in perspective, it shows few tricks that most people are not aware of. The Concept of Taxaayul: In Islam, when the legislator, ALLAH makes a law through a verse in Quraan, or through His Messenger, a clear purpose is served by that law, which is known in Islam as Maqaasidul Shariica. As I have written before, the core purpose of the Sharia in Islam is JUSTICE to be served, and from there it trickles down to detailed instruments and legislations that protect that important concept, which in the Science of Maqaasidul Shariica spell out that the Sharia protects: 1. Faith 2. Life 3. Wealth 4. Intellect 5. Progeny "In this Thread, we are talking about Purpose number 3, Protection of legitimacy of wealth." If at the end of the day, any law seems NOT to protect its respective purpose for which it was legislated to begin with, or fails to live up to its spirit, we can say in plain Chinese Language that SUM SING is WONG! a Joke goes like this: A Chinese couple in the hospital delivery room wanted to name their baby a nice befitting name, the baby, had wide eyes, dark skin and curly hairs, so the husband named the baby SUM SING WONG ( Something WRONG) ." The author brilliantly dismantles the trick of Taxaauyl in "Islamic Mortgages" as he shows that a string of isolated legally permissible legal instruments when combined to a single application can create an illegal situation such as usury, just like taking different medications for different ailments that can become toxic when combined to cure a single ailment. The wave of Islamic banking sweeping the world is not all after Allah's pleasure in following His law on money matters, rather many "Islamic Banking Instruments" are an attempt to further swindle money from the very disadvantaged group the Sharia was intended to protect, in a more creative ways. It is usury by a different name. "Yusammuunahaa bi gheyri asmaa ihaa." This clearly shows that Muslims are in dire need to understand the basic morals behind every legislation in islam, lest they fall unwittingly in violation of the same. The Concept of Taxaayul is more sinful than outright sin, for example. In The Quran, we read that in a fishing village, the Children of Israel's faith in Allah was under a test when they were commanded not to work on the the Sabbath. In that trial, Allah sent plenty of fish within their reach on their SABBATH resting day, while the rest of the week it was difficult to spot any fish. So the Jews, who we Muslims are on their footsteps on many aspects according to the Hadeeth, devised a trick in which they would observe the letter of the Law, while bent on catching the Sabbath fish the next days. The Taxaayul ( Trick) involved setting up of traps the day before SABBATH, so the fish can not go back with the tide at the end of day, so they can catch it on Sunday, a permissible day. The Quran says that Allah's wrath fell on that village dwellers, because of their TAXAAYUL, trying to going around to find a loophole against Allah's law. ("Ironically, The same is happening before our eyes in Wall Street to warrant this finacial meltdown) .") In the Sharia we also know that if a couple marry and divorce three times that they are not allowed to come together, unless the woman marries to another a man naturally (not pre-arraged) afterwards, a natural divorce occurs ( not planned). Applying the concept of Taxaayul, we find that some couples who fall in this dilemma, some with kids, arrange a quicky for the woman in which she marries another man for a night, and then get a divorce in the following day, to get back with her ex-hubby. This Taxaayul is known as MAXLAL and the Messenger of Allah SAWS has cursed all parties to this deal, the Ex-Hubby, the Woman and the Surrogate ( Place holder)husband. The moral of my note is that : "Its more immoral to go against the moral of a law, than to violate that law out right.." Nur

Fatwa on the Impermissibility of the HSBC and other "Halal" Mortgages.....Excellent TOPIC WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED BY NINBROWN ON December 24, 2004 06:47 AM The ruling on the permissibility of financing properties using Islamic ijara mortgages as currently implemented by HSBC and other banks Many people have enquired about the permissibility under Sharee’ah of the so-called Islamic ijara mortgages recently announced by banks such as HSBC. As it is in the interest of all Muslims to have a current and accurate understanding of the issues involved here, I have concluded the following judgement based upon the Quran and Sunnah in accordance with the understanding of the main school of thoughts. Let me first brief the reader regarding the manner in which the scheme works. Under the ijara (rental) variety of Islamic mortgage, the bank purchases a property selected by the client, following a promise from the client that he or she will live in that property and purchase it after an agreed period of time. In return, the client pays monthly installments to the bank, mainly composed of two payments. One portion of the installment is considered to be a payment of the purchase price for the property, and another portion is counted as rent that the client pays for living in the property in the meantime. The purchase price paid by the client is equal to the purchase price initially paid by the bank for the property. Once the client has paid all of the installments, in other words the purchase installments plus the rental installments, the bank will transfer the ownership of the property to the client. The bank makes its profit from the difference between the price it pays for the property (including related transaction costs) and the amounts received in installments from its client. This type of scheme, with some minor modifications, is used in the United Kingdom by HSBC Amanah Finance, Ahli United Bank and United National Bank[1]. In principle, an ijara scheme can be structured in such a way as to be acceptable under Sharee’ah so long as certain conditions are met, the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this judgement. However, the implementation of the scheme by the above banks is highly problematic. Firstly, the contract is ambiguous in terms of its nature. Is it a lease contract, a purchase contract or a combination of the two? Some scholars have prohibited combined contracts (for example, a transaction that combines both lease and purchase), as the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) prohibited two transactions in one transaction. This is the opinion adopted by most of the scholars, and although there are some who have allowed this type of transaction under certain strict conditions, there is a consensus that the presence of a significant amount of ambiguity invalidates a contract. Among the many Prophetic traditions on this point is that of Ibn Umar, who related that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) forbade sales that involve uncertainty or ambiguity (gharar)[2]. Many scholars, including the foremost Fiqh councils of our times[3], believe that if rental and sale are mixed in such a way that one cannot distinguish at any point of time whether the client is a tenant or a buyer, then such a contract is invalid according to Islamic jurisprudence. When pressed to clarify the nature of the ijara mortgage, staff in Islamic banking departments frequently describe it as a ‘lease ending in a purchase’. Yet if this really is the case, then the ijara mortgage should display the features of a lease throughout the entire time-span of the contract (often as much as 25 years) until it concludes with a purchase event. In other words, the bank will rent the house for a period of time with the promise that it will sell to the client at the end of the tenancy. During the tenancy, the bank will be the legal owner of the property. After the tenancy the client will be the legal owner. Although many scholars do not allow this type of combined contract, let us for the sake of argument consider it to be valid according to the opinion of those scholars who accept it. When we examine the available ijara schemes more closely, we find that the theoretical structure outlined above does not exist in practice. The ijara contract as it stands is neither a lease nor a purchase. Rather, it is closer to a conventional loan where the bank lends money to a client for a property purchase, and requires that the client must repay with a markup (under the guise of ‘rent’). Consider the following questions which illustrate the ambiguity of the contract: 1- Why does the tenant need to pay a large down payment? (Frequently an amount equal to 10% of the price is required. A genuine tenant does of course make some kind of down payment, relevant to the period of the tenancy, but no credible tenancy agreement can bind the tenant to place such a large down payment.) 2- Who pays the insurance of the house? Is it the bank or the tenant? (Technically, the owner of an asset is the one who should pay for its insurance.) 3- What will happen if there is loss or damage to the property and the insurance company refuses to cover the losses incurred? Who will pay for this? (Once again, if the bank is the actual owner, and such a loss or damage occurred through no fault of the client, then the bank cannot hold the client responsible for damages.) 4- If the tenant decides to stop the tenancy agreement, the bank will sell the property. If the price of the property has depreciated in the meantime (which means the bank as the owner of the property suffers a loss), why is the client bound to compensate that entire loss while being only a tenant? The point of all these questions is to address the central issue, namely, who is considered the actual owner (and thus liable for any damages or depreciation in value) for the duration of the lease? Is it the bank (in which case all of the above scenarios do not make sense), or is it the client (in which case this contract is not a lease contract in the first place, but rather something else)? A bank may give an answer to all or some of these questions, supported by quotations from jurists past or present. Some of these answers may indeed prove to be acceptable when looked at in isolation but, when taken as a whole, such practices may invalidate the contract. To illustrate our point, the bank might state that, according to a particular school of thought, the down-payment is not a part of the price of the property since it is not a purchase agreement. Rather, it is an assurance that the tenant is serious in renting the property for a given period of time (up to 25 years, perhaps). Such a condition is acceptable according to some jurists. Furthermore, the bank may state that the insurance is paid by the tenant based on a mutual agreement, and there is nothing wrong with such a condition, for the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said “Muslims are bound to the conditions taken on by themselvesâ€. In the meantime, they might claim that they are bound by English law to hold the title of the property, and will only pass it to the client upon the final payment. However, the contractual agreements that are signed between the bank and its client put all of the risks of ownership upon the client, and these factors defeat the purpose of ijara, even if technically speaking the bank claims to follow the letter of the English law as the ‘owner’ of the property. In the above we see arguments that are each, on their own, widely considered to be valid. However this should not lead us into the grave error of assuming that three valid matters when combined produce a valid outcome. Take, for example, the plain riba transaction, but in the following framework: 1) An interest-free loan, (which is something recommended) 2) A gift, (which is again, something recommended) 3) A promise. Taken individually, these three transactions are completely valid. However, if they are combined in a single contract, the result is pure riba. For example, I say, ‘Grant me a loan which I will repay you (a valid matter), and I promise you (a second valid matter) a gift (a third valid matter) in addition to the repayment when it becomes due’. Is this contact valid or is it riba? The answer is that it is manifest riba without any doubt, since the one who gave the money was promised that same amount back along with some profit. So, we need to look at the end-to-end process here and evaluate it as one transaction. And we need to answer the critical question: who is the real owner of the property during the whole process? Is it the client while the bank is just financing the deal as it does in a normal conventional mortgage? Or is it the bank? If the owner is the bank, then does a real owner free himself from any responsibility towards his property? Why does the bank avoid owning the property? Here, we need to explain an enormously incorrect methodology in deriving Islamic verdicts. A verdict should be derived by looking at a matter in its totality, in light of the aims behind it. When we break the matter of discussion into sub-issues and treat issues separately, without looking at the overall picture, then we are contradicting the right methodology in deriving verdicts. The reason is very simple: verdicts based upon sub-issues might not necessarily be the same as verdicts based upon a consideration of the general situation. A very good example is the previous one. Each sub-contract taken individually is completely valid, but taken as a whole the entire contract becomes null since it is a clear riba transaction. Based on this, many if not all jurists forbade contracts which try to employ such deception. As another example to further illustrate our point, let us look at the transaction known as ‘iynah. This transaction is strictly prohibited by the Prophet (SAW), and its prevalence is a sign that the Muslim ummah will decline. The Prophet (SAW) said “When you trade with one another with ‘iynah, and hold on to the tails of oxen, and are content with farming, and give up jihad, Allah will cause humiliation to prevail over you, and He will not withdraw it from you until you return to (your commitment) to Islam.â€[4] This transaction, when broken down into individual parts and examined solely upon these parts, appears to be valid. However, when taken as a whole, it is clearly a type of riba. How exactly does ‘iynah occur? One of the means of practising ‘iynah is that one party sells a product to a second party on a deferred payment. The second party then sells it back to the seller at a lesser price, but in cash. If you break this transaction into sub transactions you can conclude that there are two acceptable sale transactions. It is allowed for a person to sell a product for a deferred payment, and it is also allowed to buy a product for cash. However, the ultimate aim of this transaction is to enact a pure riba transaction. This is because the second party receives an amount of cash from the first party and is then required to pay back an amount of greater value at a later time. As for the product itself, since it changes hands twice, it returns to the initial ‘seller’. Therefore, the product is used merely as a loop-hole to avoid the prohibition on riba. This clearly illustrates that we cannot ignore the total aims of any transaction. Jurists mention this rule as a principle (qa’idah) that is employed for all business transactions. This principle states, ‘The consideration of a transaction is to be paid to its intention rather than its format’ or, alternatively, ‘Transactions are judged according to intention’. Of the evidences for this principle is the hadeeth of the Prophet “Actions are judged according to intentionsâ€. It is true that some people might say that scholars disagree with this concept, but those scholars who disagree with this concept (like Imam Shafi'i), agree with all other scholars that the aim of the transaction should not be to overcome a prohibited transaction. In other words, all scholars are in agreement that it is sinful for two parties to try to devise a scheme that appears to make permissible something that the Sharee’ah declares impermissible. I therefore conclude that there is no significant difference between the ijara scheme outlined above and the conventional mortgage which is a pure riba-based loan. Under the ijara scheme, the bank performs what is essentially a money lending transaction, placing such conditions upon its clients that guarantee, for all practical purposes, that it will obtain the same amount of money in return plus a profit disguised as ‘rent’. It might be true that many of the individual clauses and conditions of the contract are permissible (or, at best, subject to a difference of opinion among scholars), but when put together and examined as a whole, it is apparent that there is little that separates this contract from a simple mortgage. Of the many matters that clearly illustrate this is that the risks and rewards of ownership of the house are carried by the tenant, not the bank, regardless of who is the ‘paper-owner’ under English law. Allow me to provide a real Islamic scenario for acquiring a house, and also mention a philosophical and ideological approach in explaining a very important principle in Islamic finance. If two or more parties enter a business transaction, then of course their ultimate aim is profit. Islam, being the religion of ultimate justice, does not confer advantage to any party based on one’s worldly and materialistic power. In other words, in a permissible Islamic transaction, a powerful, richer person will not have any guaranteed advantage over a powerless, poor person. Both parties have to share the same risk of loss, just as they want to share the joy of profit. This is a very logical and simple – yet powerful – principle, which is an explanation of the Islamic rule: ‘ There shall be no profit without (a risk) of loss.’ This principle is based on many Prophetic traditions, such as: “It is not permissible to sell something on condition that the purchaser lends you something. And it is not permissible to have two conditions in one transaction. And no profit is permissible unless possession has been taken of the goods. And you cannot sell what is not in your possession.†[5]In another hadeeth, the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) forbade selling any item from the same place where it was bought; a buyer must first physically acquire these items (lit. ‘…add them to his own luggage’), then he may sell these goods.[6] The point of this rule is that whenever an investment contract is structured such that one party is guaranteed a profit, something is simply not right. Only in a pure riba transaction will there be guaranteed profit. Any permissible transaction in the Sharee’ah must have an element of risk involved, no matter how small that element is. Therefore, when looking at this particular transaction, it is essential that the bank (the stronger party) not take advantage of the client (the weaker party) by exploiting the financial power of the former and the desperate need of the latter. If these banks enact their transactions with this principle as an underlying morale framework, I think such contracts that we now see will disappear. Yet, the reality is far from this ideal. In light of this principle, we should always ask the following question: Do these banks share with their clients the risk of loss, or are they are stipulating all possible conditions to protect themselves against any foreseeable loss? Additionally, do these so-called Islamic banks own the properties they are renting to people? If we give sincere answers to the questions in discussion, we will see that the current ijara schemes are almost identical to conventional mortgages. They appear to be a ruse designed to promote conventional interest-based practices using Islamic terminologies and Sharee’ah expressions. Based on this, the ijara scheme as it is implemented here in the UK by major banks: Ahli United Bank (formerly called the United Bank of Kuwait), United National Bank and HSBC is totally prohibited. In fact, it is a deception rooted in riba. Until the Muslims in charge of these schemes prove that the above argument is invalid and give clear answers to the questions highlighted earlier, I believe that such transactions are totally prohibited, and I warn brothers and sisters not to get involved with them. I would also like to emphasize that the view of some Muslims, that this scheme is better than the conventional riba-based mortgage alternative and should therefore be used until a pure halal scheme is available, is incorrect. This is because there is no significant difference between the two schemes. And Allah knows best. Written By Haitham al-Haddad Haitham01234@yahoo.co.uk 1 Thulqadah 1425 – Dec 12th 2004

Ninbrown bro. Good to hear from you, thanks for posting a very valuable topic on Islamic finance. I have actually touched the tip of an ice berg on the "tricks of the trade" in "Islamic Banking", all of these tricks fall on the TAXAAYUL category, inshAllah, I will post more elaborate classification of the TAXAAYUL principle in time. Till then, a rule of thumb is be wary of any offer that transfers undue risk a customer, while the Bank securitizes its investment and the "profit" at the same time. Nur

Will Wall Street's Meltdown Turn America Into a Police State? By Scott Thill "Raw capitalism is dead." -- Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary "Can't we just all go out and say things are OK?" -- President Bush, to congressional leaders during bailout negotiations 30/09/08 "AlterNet" - -- I'm not much of an Army Times reader, but after reading that a brigade was shipping from Iraq in October to serve as "an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks" in the homeland right before the election, my antennae perked up. Same as they did when I read that an electoral college doomsday scenario exists in which Dick Cheney casts the deciding vote that gives McCain-Palin the White House. That is, if Cheney and Bush don't take it for themselves. That may sound like fantasy, but don't kill the messenger. They are all strands of the Gordian knot the Bush administration has tied around the neck of the American people for the last two presidential terms, best represented today by the failed bailout of banks, brokers and other complicit parties that have since jacked the American people out of trillions. And while the Army Times revelation or election doomsday may turn out to be paranoia rather than prescience, the evidence just isn't there. Like I said: antennae. They've come in handy as bullshit detectors since Bush stole the election from a flat-footed Al Gore and set about engineering the greatest transfer of public wealth into private hands in American history. If you factor in Monday's failed takeover, as well as the $5 trillion the American people now owe thanks to the "bailout" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, not to mention the continuing hyper-expensive occupation of Iraq and so on, our citizenry is now so far in the hole that it's pointless griping about numbers. If you want one, use the figure put forth by Dennis Kucinich: half a quadrillion dollars. We have evolved past the point of economic or geopolitical reality and entered a phase of pure concept. And all vectors of that phase point toward the conclusion that the proverbial shit has totally hit the fan -- head on, and all over again. Meet the New Rome, Same as the Old Rome "Franklin Roosevelt had to save capitalism from itself," Los Angeles Times business editor Tom Petruno told me as Washington Mutual and Wachovia became the latest banking dominoes to fall. "Is history repeating?" Indeed, it is, as one could tell from the repetitive usage of loaded terms and phrases like "Great Depression," "meltdown," "apocalypse," "Armageddon" and more to describe the just-on-time cratering of the American economy. After the strange bedfellows in both parties torpedoed Bush, Bernanke and Paulson's so-called bailout, more than $1 trillion of market value in American equities disappeared in a single day. The Dow Jones average set a record for quickest suicide dive in a single day. Other indexes sunk to multiyear lows, wiping out years of value, and stocks across the board went negative like Ann Coulter. In fact, the only major stock that actually advanced on Monday was Campbell Soup. Can there be a more fitting metaphor for the American economy stuck beneath the Bush administration's thumb? But the reruns, and their loaded terminology, are merging: Bush himself is just another iteration of the infamous "New World Order" instituted by his father while trying to, what else, convince the American public that it needed to go to war against Saddam Hussein. The revisionism is transparent, befitting a government that cares nothing of what its people actually think. Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show" recently juxtaposed Bush's address on the financial cataclysm with his pre-invasion speech in 2003 and found -- surprise! -- they were exactly the same. This is a long way of saying that this particularly frightening crux of historical geopolitics, fascism and environmental calamity has been a long time coming. Failing banks? Deregulation. Endless war? Homeland security. Total information awareness? Transparent government. Bankrupt economy? The fundamentals are strong. "Here's my question," Petruno adds. "If this is remembered as Black September, will that end up being too gentle a reference to what actually happened to the American financial system this month? It is beyond comprehension for people who have been on Wall Street their entire lives. I can only imagine how absolutely stunned the American public must be. Stunned, and very afraid." It should be. From a military brigade armed for action in the homeland in blatant transgression of Posse Comitatus to what ex-hedge funder and financial personality Jim Cramer recently called "financial terrorism," the United States is pushing forward back. To start with, the bailout was obvious theft, but our situation is more precarious than you think. The hyperreal credit default swap market, which few understand although it is estimated to involve tens if not hundreds of global trillions, is faltering under the weight of its own Ponzi origins. The scenario significantly worsens once you factor in the given that countries like China and others who have denominated their loans in dollars are shouldering our exploding debt, along with oil-soaked sovereign wealth funds from nations whose civil liberties records suck ***. As I wrote last year on this cluster****, if the Chinese call in our debts and oil-producing countries decide to peg their petrodollars to the euro, you can more or less kiss the dollar goodbye. Which means the last thing you'll need to worry about is your stocks, retirement or credit cards. You will instead worry whether or not the cash you have on hand will be worth anything at all. That is the loaded gun that bankers, brokers and the White House is holding to the public's head, as I write. That trillion erased on Monday, as well as the trillions that have been lost and will be lost in the coming months, was nothing more than a hostage situation engineered by the Bush administration, the Federal Reserve and their partners in crime in finance, insurance and real estate business. They don't call that sector FIRE for nothing. Fire destroys everything and leaves little in its catastrophic wake. Which raises the question: What's left to burn? "I think our economic situation can get much worse," argues Danny Schechter, the veteran producer and author whose 2006 indie documentary "In Debt We Trust" covered this volatile territory long before CNN would. "Jobless claims are already at a seven-year high, but the government is worried about the reaction from Asia. We are living on other countries' money, and when that spigot gets cut off, we will be in deeper doo-doo. Part of the reason for the scale of the bailout is to show Asia and sovereign wealth funds that we will protect their interests." But for how long? The Bush administration and Congress' disdain for the American people has been painfully obvious, so it's hard to believe they will call from sky-high Dubai to see how we are doing after making off with almost all of our money. "It's a high-stakes gamble, which is why Paulson tried to do it quickly in a climate of shock and crisis," Shechter says. "He knew that the longer it takes, the more opposition it will attract. This plan, if eventually passed, will pre-empt the next president from doing anything about it, because there will be no money. They are wrecking the government by wrecking the economy first." That shock doctrine, as Naomi Klein explained in her brilliant book of the same name, has foisted this same kind of disaster capitalism on country after country over the last century. Klein's book is littered with democracies that slept their way through coups and takeovers, entranced by one simulation or another. The United States was plugged into a matrix that onetime White House press secretary Ari Fleischer described as "an American way of life," adding without deceit that "it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life." By destroying it? Mission accomplished. "This is the September of surprise," Schechter concluded, "not a war on Iran but on America." Civil War, the Rerun? So, what's the next step for the shoe yet to drop? Perhaps the Army Times has the clues: (The brigade) may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack. ... The 1st BCT's soldiers also will learn how to use "the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded," 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them. Like every move the Bush administration has ever made, from the Patriot Act to the occupation of Iraq and down to bankrupting the American economy, this maneuver is a solution in search of a problem that it seems destined to create. Look around you. Housing is over. Stocks are nosediving. The banks are gone. War is ceaseless. Civil liberties are disappearing. Nerds at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury are taking hostages. It is madness. And mad people have a tendency to infect everyone around them. The difference is that when you go mad ... well, that's the question mark: What will happen? Ask the late Iman Morales, who went crazy in Brooklyn on a ledge 10 feet above ground and was illegally tasered by New York police officers, eventually falling to his death, immobilized. A perfect metaphor for our economy, sure, but it's also the type of literal shock we might be awaiting, as the November election creeps nearer and shit begins to hit the fan with ferocity. Many of us so-called alternative journos are not conspiracy nuts, but realists. We look at galvanizing leaders like Barack Obama, America's next president, and compare his impact to that of Lincoln, Kennedy or King -- without forgetting that all three were eventually assassinated. We are the type of realists who live through two Bush presidents, both of whom configured a New World Order, with and without the approval of the American people and the world at large. The type of realists that notice that after 9/11, we couldn't fly to Vegas, but Osama bin Laden's family was flown out of the country on government charter. And here is what we see today: Crowds protesting in the streets, the people's money wiped out thanks to the Bush administration's latest economic shock and awe. An army brigade matter-of-factly betraying Posse Comitatus for the purpose of crowd control. The public trust and wealth almost robbed cleanly with congressional approval. In other words, we see another unfolding coup, which is to say, a rerun. And there is no telling what the future may hold, or whether or not we are connecting vectors that should remain solitary. But our math has worked just fine in the past -- better than Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson's math, that's for sure. And we'd love to be wrong about what's coming. But unfortunately that isn't up to us, and it never has been: It's up to the Bush administration. And it has never failed to let us down. Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

Rahima sis Author writes: "However, the contractual agreements that are signed between the bank and its client put all of the risks of ownership upon the client, and these factors defeat the purpose of ijara, even if technically speaking the bank claims to follow the letter of the English law as the ‘owner’ of the property." In continuation of our past discussion on another thread, about halal mortgages in Islam, this article puts things in perspective, it shows few tricks that most people are not aware of. The Concept of Taxaayul: In Islam, when the legislator, ALLAH makes a law through a verse in Quraan, or through His Messenger, a clear purpose is served by that law, which is known in Islam as Maqaasidul Shariica. As I have written before, the core purpose of the Sharia in Islam is JUSTICE to be served, and from there it trickles down to detailed instruments and legislations that protect that important concept, which in the Science of Maqaasidul Shariica spell out that the Sharia protects: 1. Faith 2. Life 3. Wealth 4. Intellect 5. Progeny "In this Thread, we are talking about Purpose number 3, Protection of legitimacy of wealth." If at the end of the day, any law seems NOT to protect its respective purpose for which it was legislated to begin with, or fails to live up to its spirit, we can say in plain Chinese Language that SUM SING is WONG! a Joke goes like this: A Chinese couple in the hospital delivery room wanted to name their baby a nice befitting name, the baby, had wide eyes, dark skin and curly hairs, so the husband named the baby SUM SING WONG ( Something WRONG) ." The author brilliantly dismantles the trick of Taxaauyl in "Islamic Mortgages" as he shows that a string of isolated legally permissible legal instruments when combined to a single application can create an illegal situation such as usury, just like taking different medications for different ailments that can become toxic when combined to cure a single ailment. The wave of Islamic banking sweeping the world is not all after Allah's pleasure in following His law on money matters, rather many "Islamic Banking Instruments" are an attempt to further swindle money from the very disadvantaged group the Sharia was intended to protect, in a more creative ways. It is usury by a different name. "Yusammuunahaa bi gheyri asmaa ihaa." This clearly shows that Muslims are in dire need to understand the basic morals behind every legislation in islam, lest they fall unwittingly in violation of the same. The Concept of Taxaayul is more sinful than outright sin, for example. In The Quran, we read that in a fishing village, the Children of Israel's faith in Allah was under a test when they were commanded not to work on the the Sabbath. In that trial, Allah sent plenty of fish within their reach on their SABBATH resting day, while the rest of the week it was difficult to spot any fish. So the Jews, who we Muslims are on their footsteps on many aspects according to the Hadeeth, devised a trick in which they would observe the letter of the Law, while bent on catching the Sabbath fish the next days. The Taxaayul ( Trick) involved setting up of traps the day before SABBATH, so the fish can not go back with the tide at the end of day, so they can catch it on Sunday, a permissible day. The Quran says that Allah's wrath fell on that village dwellers, because of their TAXAAYUL, trying to going around to find a loophole against Allah's law. ("Ironically, The same is happening before our eyes in Wall Street to warrant this finacial meltdown) .") In the Sharia we also know that if a couple marry and divorce three times that they are not allowed to come together, unless the woman marries to another person( I mean a man ) naturally (not pre-arraged) afterwards, a natural divorce occurs ( not planned). Applying the concept of Taxaayul, we find that some couples who fall in this dilemma, some with kids, arrange a quicky for the woman in which she marries another man for a night, and then get a divorce in the following day, to get back with her ex-hubby. This Taxaayul is known as MAXLAL and the Messenger of Allah SAWS has cursed all parties to this deal, the Ex-Hubby, the Woman and the Surrogate ( Place holder)husband. The moral of my note is that : "Its more immoral to go against the moral of a law, than to violate that law out right.." Nur

Shirwac bro. Eid Mubaarak, taqabbala Allahu minna wa minkum saalixal acmaal, wa kullu caam wantum bi kheir. Yes, Somali translation is needed, the problem is volunteers who are 1. able 2. willing 3. Have the time resources. In this site, which is visited by many Nomads, my requests for volunteerism spirit to help in editing or even translating some of my work or others to Somali and vice versa, went on deaf ears. My prayers for you to get a response, "Innahu laa yay asu min raxmatillaahi illal qawmul faasiquun" Nur

A Shattering Moment In America's Fall From Power The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over. By John Gray 29/09/08 "The Observer" --- -- Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over. You can see it in the way America's dominion has slipped away in its own backyard, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez taunting and ridiculing the superpower with impunity. Yet the setback of America's standing at the global level is even more striking. With the renationalisation of crucial parts of the financial system, the American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated. In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed. Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions as the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy. China in particular was hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China's success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees. Despite incessantly urging other countries to adopt its way of doing business, America has always had one economic policy for itself and another for the rest of the world. Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future. Which version of the bail out of American financial institutions cobbled up by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is finally adopted is less important than what the bail out means for America's position in the world. The populist rant about greedy banks that is being loudly ventilated in Congress is a distraction from the true causes of the crisis. The dire condition of America's financial markets is the result of American banks operating in a free-for-all environment that these same American legislators created. It is America's political class that, by embracing the dangerously simplistic ideology of deregulation, has responsibility for the present mess. In present circumstances, an unprecedented expansion of government is the only means of averting a market catastrophe. The consequence, however, will be that America will be even more starkly dependent on the world's new rising powers. The federal government is racking up even larger borrowings, which its creditors may rightly fear will never be repaid. It may well be tempted to inflate these debts away in a surge of inflation that would leave foreign investors with hefty losses. In these circumstances, will the governments of countries that buy large quantities of American bonds, China, the Gulf States and Russia, for example, be ready to continue supporting the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency? Or will these countries see this as an opportunity to tilt the balance of economic power further in their favour? Either way, the control of events is no longer in American hands. The fate of empires is very often sealed by the interaction of war and debt. That was true of the British Empire, whose finances deteriorated from the First World War onwards, and of the Soviet Union. Defeat in Afghanistan and the economic burden of trying to respond to Reagan's technically flawed but politically extremely effective Star Wars programme were vital factors in triggering the Soviet collapse. Despite its insistent exceptionalism, America is no different. The Iraq War and the credit bubble have fatally undermined America's economic primacy. The US will continue to be the world's largest economy for a while longer, but it will be the new rising powers that, once the crisis is over, buy up what remains intact in the wreckage of America's financial system. There has been a good deal of talk in recent weeks about imminent economic armageddon. In fact, this is far from being the end of capitalism. The frantic scrambling that is going on in Washington marks the passing of only one type of capitalism - the peculiar and highly unstable variety that has existed in America over the last 20 years. This experiment in financial laissez-faire has imploded.While the impact of the collapse will be felt everywhere, the market economies that resisted American-style deregulation will best weather the storm. Britain, which has turned itself into a gigantic hedge fund, but of a kind that lacks the ability to profit from a downturn, is likely to be especially badly hit. The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it will have large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot support America's over-extended military commitments for much longer. Retrenchment is inevitable and it is unlikely to be gradual or well planned. Meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events. They are swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side-effects. Consider Iraq. The success of the surge, which has been achieved by bribing the Sunnis, while acquiescing in ongoing ethnic cleansing, has produced a condition of relative peace in parts of the country. How long will this last, given that America's current level of expenditure on the war can no longer be sustained? An American retreat from Iraq will leave Iran the regional victor. How will Saudi Arabia respond? Will military action to forestall Iran acquiring nuclear weapons be less or more likely? China's rulers have so far been silent during the unfolding crisis. Will America's weakness embolden them to assert China's power or will China continue its cautious policy of 'peaceful rise'? At present, none of these questions can be answered with any confidence. What is evident is that power is leaking from the US at an accelerating rate. Georgia showed Russia redrawing the geopolitical map, with America an impotent spectator. Outside the US, most people have long accepted that the development of new economies that goes with globalisation will undermine America's central position in the world. They imagined that this would be a change in America's comparative standing, taking place incrementally over several decades or generations. Today, that looks an increasingly unrealistic assumption. Having created the conditions that produced history's biggest bubble, America's political leaders appear unable to grasp the magnitude of the dangers the country now faces. Mired in their rancorous culture wars and squabbling among themselves, they seem oblivious to the fact that American global leadership is fast ebbing away. A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape. • John Gray is the author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Allen Lane)

Nomads, Ramadan is gone, with the highly celebrated Lailatul Qadr, in which those who stood up in front of Allah in worship were granted forgivenss of all their past sins. Ramadan was a month of soul training ( Not soul train!), in which we were expected to learn self restraint, and control of our desires of food, drink , sex and temper. Please share with us your persoanl experiences in the above regard so that other Nomads can learn collectively from different perspectives. Also, share, how has this Ramadan prepared you for the next 11 month till next Ramadan visits us again? Nur

Eid Mubaarak, WOL sis Agree, we cant only dwell on the fact that evil schemes will always backfire, we have to postively engage the public to show that our faith is not their enemy, Satan and their politicians. Nur

WOL sis The more they try defame Islam and frame innocent Muslims, the more non-Muslims grow interested to know about Islam, and as a result some convert to Islam. Nur

The Zack bro. Yes, it was declared in Makkah al Mukarramah, that tomorrow is Eid. Nur

Eid Mubaarak Its the conclusion of a month long worship and piety. What a Joy! To all SOL Nomads, silent readers and active contributors, I wish you all the best in health and happiness in these festive days of Eid. May Allah accept our worship, fasting and qiyaam in the Month of Ramadan. May Allah bless Somalia with peace and piety. Peace and Goodwill to all fellow travellers on Planet Earth. Nur

An Open Letter From Honorable Muse Sudi Yalaxow, Minister of Finance and Trade, Somali TFG (Transplant Foreigner Government ) To His Emperial Majesty, King George Dubya Bush II Your Highness, As one of your international allies in Somalia, I am disturbed to hear the bad news of the impending Financial meltdown of your nation. I understand that you want the foreign Sovereign funds to rescue your financial markets, unfortunatley, our Financial market, the Mogadishu Bakaara market, is being bombarded by our Ethiopian Allies and Friends, and the Ugandan UN Merceneries, so the best I can offer you is soft skills of how to raise funds our warlord way, let me share with you my own experience of financial planning and management in Somalia. 1. Remove monopoly of the US Mint money printing service, free market dictates that the American people should print their own money at home, just how your "Advisers" trained us here in Somalia, which is amazingly still working with success. 2. Legalize the drug business, just like how your "advisors" helped me finance my kidnapping operations of your wanted religious men in Somalia, as your allies of the free and civilized world. I think revenues from drug business alone can raise the 700 Billion you are seeking from Congress. The good thing about drug trade is it raises daily cash while its keeps the rest of your poeple hallucinated so they can not even understand your policies, let alone criticise it. 3. Divide the Americans into Catholics and Protestants, Blacks, whites and latinoes, just like how you've created our war here in Somalia between clans, thru your "Development advisory Sevices", and how you've brilliantly "developed" good relations in Iraq between Shia and Sunni, which is now your copy-paste of the same in Pakistan. To start a sustainable civil war, let your contractors hit one American Protestant church with a tomahowk missile, blame it on Catholics, then Hit a Catholic church with another cruise missile, blame it on Protestants, then get out of their way and watch the fire works from your balcony at the white house. When the killing, rape and looting by blacks and latinoes begins, let your homeland security set up road blocks in every neighborhood to collect passage fees. From my financial experience, each control point aka ISBAARA, should generate one million per day, with potential 10,000 check points in your big USA country, ( Your people are now ready for security checks) , I think you can generate at least 10 Billion per day, which can offset your entire deficit, in addition you can make additional sale of weapons to civilians, since Americans have a right to carry arms. This American civil war should be fully privatized and managed by Blackwater, you should get rid of the wall street boys and hire gun totting illitrate kids from run down neigborhoods on pick up trucks. Honorable Muse Sudi Yalaxow Minister Of Trade and Finance Somali Transplanted Foreigner Government ( TFG) Baidoa, Ethiopian Army Baracks. 2008 eNuri Political Satire Sharrul Baliyati Maa Yudxik!

Ayoub bro. Dogs are friends of believers too! read Surah Al Kahf, " Wa kalbuhum baasitun dhiraaceyhi bil waseed" protecting the Seven Sleepers of the Cave before they fell asleep for some 300 years solar orbit, and further 9 years for a lunar calander. Nur

S.O.S bro. Akhii, xaqu cidna kaalmo ugama baahna, dadka ayaa u baahan inay xaqa u hiilliyaan, hseyeeshee, markey dadku doorbidaan baadilka, oy xaqa nacaan, waa nooc cadaab adduunka ah, intaan la gaaring cadaabkii akhiro. Qofkaan xaqa u hiillin, waa qof baadilka ugu hiilliyey oo wax ka qariyey Xaqa ) Wax qariska af carabiga waxaa loo yaqaab KAFARA, af ingiriiskana COVER, labada ereyba wexey ka soo degeen luqad hore oo loo yaqaan Indo-European langauge. Nur

Trouble in Banktopia By Mike Whitney 27/09/08 "ICH" -- - The financial system is blowing up. Don't listen to the experts; just look at the numbers. Last week, according to Reuters, "U.S. banks borrowed a record amount from the Federal Reserve nearly $188 billion a day on average, showing the central bank went to extremes to keep the banking system afloat amid the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression." The Fed opened the various "auction facilities" to create the appearance that insolvent banks were thriving businesses, but they are not. They're dead; their liabilities exceed their assets. Now the Fed is desperate because the hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in the banks vaults have bankrupt the entire system and the Fed's balance sheet is ballooning by the day. The market for MBS will not bounce back in the foreseeable future and the banks are unable to roll-over their short term debt. Game over. The Federal Reserve itself is in danger. So, it's on to Plan B; which is to dump all the toxic sludge on the taxpayer before he realizes that the whole system is cratering and his life is about to change forever. It's called the Paulson Plan, a $700 billion boondoggle which has already been disparaged by every economist of merit in the country. From Reuters: "Borrowings by primary dealers via the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, and through another facility created on Sunday for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch, and their London-based subsidiaries, totaled $105.66 billion as of Wednesday, the Fed said." See what I mean; they're all broke. The Fed's rotating loans are just a way to perpetuate the myth that the banks aren't flat-lining already. Bernanke has tied strings to the various body parts and jerks them every so often to make it look like they're alive. But the Wall Street model is broken and the bailout is pointless. Last week, there was a digital run on the banks that most people never even heard about; a "real time" crash. An article in the New York Post by Michael Gray gave a blow by blow description of how events unfolded. Here's a clip from Gray's "Almost Armageddon": "The market was 500 trades away from Armageddon on Thursday...Had the Treasury and Fed not quickly stepped into the fray that morning with a quick $105 billion injection of liquidity, the Dow could have collapsed to the 8,300-level - a 22 percent decline! - while the clang of the opening bell was still echoing around the cavernous exchange floor. According to traders, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, money market funds were inundated with $500 billion in sell orders prior to the opening. The total money-market capitalization was roughly $4 trillion that morning. The panicked selling was directly linked to the seizing up of the credit markets - including a $52 billion constriction in commercial paper - and the rumors of additional money market funds "breaking the buck," or dropping below $1 net asset value." The Fed's dramatic $105 billion liquidity injection on Thursday (pre-market) was just enough to keep key institutional accounts from following through on the sell orders and starting a stampede of cash that could have brought large tracts of the US economy to a halt." (New York Post) Commercial paper is the lubricant that keeps the financial markets functioning. When confidence vanishes (because the stewards of the system in Washington are buffoons), investors withdraw their money, normal business operations become impossible, and the markets collapse. End of story. So, rather than restore the public's confidence by strong leadership and behavior designed to reassure investors; President Bush decided to give a major prime-time speech stating that if Paulson's emergency bailout package was not passed immediately, the nation's economy would vaporize into the ether. Go figure? Last week, the commercial paper market, (much of which is backed by mortgage-backed securities) shrunk by a whopping $61. billion to $1.702 trillion, the lowest level since early 2006. So, Paulson's bailout will effectively underwrite CP as well as the whole alphabet soup of mortgage-backed derivatives for which there is currently no market. The US taxpayer is not only getting into the plummeting real estate market, he is also backstopping the entire financial system including defaulting car loan securities, waning student loan securities, flailing home equity loan securities and faltering credit card securities. The whole mountainous pile of horsecrap-debt is about to be stacked on the back of the maxed-out taxpayer and the ever-shriveling greenback. Paulson assures us that its a "good deal". Booyah, Hank! PAULSON'S $700 BILLION BOONDOGGLE How did Treasury Secretary Paulson figure out that recapitalizing the banking system would cost $700 billion? Or did he just estimate the amount of money that could be loaded on the back of the Treasury's flatbed truck when it sputters off to shower his buddies at G-Sax with freshly minted greenbacks? The point is, that Paulson's calculations were not assisted by any economists at all, and they cannot be trusted. It is a purely arbitrary, "back of the envelope" type figuring. According to Bloomberg: Swiss investor Marc Faber, known for a long track record of good calls, believes the damage may come to $5 trillion: "Marc Faber, managing director of Marc Faber Ltd. in Hong Kong, said the U.S. government's rescue package for the financial system may require as much as $5 trillion, seven times the amount Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has requested.... ``The $700 billion is really nothing,'' Faber said in a television interview. ``The treasury is just giving out this figure when the end figure may be $5 trillion.''(Bloomberg News) Most people who follow these matters would trust Faber's assessment way over Paulson's. In his latest blog entry, economist Nouriel Roubini said that "no professional economist was consulted by Congress or invited to present his/her views at the Congressional hearings on the Treasury rescue plan." Roubini added: "The Treasury plan is a disgrace: a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer. And the plan does nothing to resolve the severe stress in money markets and interbank markets that are now close to a systemic meltdown." Roubini is right on all counts. So far, more than a 190 prominent economists have urged Congress not to pass the $700 bailout bill. There is growing consensus that the so-called "rescue package" does not address the central economic issues and has the potential to make a bad situation even worse. BANKER'S COUP? Financial industry rep. Paulson is the ringleader in a banker's coup the results of which will decide America's economic and political future for years to come. The coup leaders have drained tens of billions of dollars of liquidity from the already-strained banking system to trigger a freeze in interbank lending and hasten a stock market crash. This, they believe, will force Congress to pass Paulson's $770 billion bailout package without further congressional resistance. It's blackmail. As yet, no one knows whether the coup-backers will succeed and further consolidate their political power via a massive economic shock to the system, but their plan continues to move jauntily forward while the economy follows its inexorable slide to disaster. The bailout has galvanized grassroots movements which have flooded congressional FAXs and phone lines. Callers are overwhelmingly opposed to any bailout for banks that are buckling under their own toxic mortgage-backed assets. One analyst said that the calls to Congress are 50 percent "No" and 50 percent "Hell, No". There is virtually no popular support for the bill. From Bloomberg News: "Erik Brynjolfsson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School, said his main objection "is the breathtaking amount of unchecked discretion it gives to the Secretary of the Treasury. It is unprecedented in a modern democracy." "I suspect that part of what we're seeing in the freezing up of lending markets is strategic behavior on the part of big financial players who stand to benefit from the bailout," said David K. Levine, an economist at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies liquidity constraints and game theory." (Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis) Brynjolfsson's suspicions are well-founded. "Market Ticker's" Karl Denninger confirms that the Fed has been draining the banking system of liquidity in order to blackmail Congress into passing the new legislation. Here's Denninger: "The Effective Fed Funds rate has been trading 50 basis points or more below the 2% target for five straight days now, and for the last two days, it has traded 75 basis points under. The IRX is demanding an immediate rate cut. The Slosh has been intentionally drained by over $125 billion in the last week and lowering the water in the swamp exposed one dead body - Washington Mutual - which was immediately raided on a no-notice basis by JP Morgan. Not even WaMu's CEO knew about the raid until it was done....The Fed claims to be an "independent central bank." They are nothing of the kind; they are now acting as an arsonist. The Fed and Treasury have claimed this is a "liquidity crisis"; it is not. It is an insolvency crisis that The Fed, Treasury and the other regulatory organs of our government have intentionally allowed to occur." Bingo. This is a banker's coup cooked up and facilitated by the deep-money guys who operate stealthily behind the political sideshow. The only time they emerge from their stinkholes is when they're flushed out by a crisis that threatens their continued dominance. Grassroots resistance, spearheaded by Internet bloggers (like Mish, Roubini and Denninger) are demonstrating that they can mobilize tens of thousands of "peasants with pitchforks" and be a factor in political decision making. It also helps to have elected officials, like Senator Richard Shelby, who stand firm on principle and don't faint at the first whiff of grapeshot (like his weak-kneed Democratic counterparts) Shelby has shouldered the full-weight of executive pressure which has descended on him like a Appalachian rockslide. As a result, there's still a slight chance that the bill will have to be shelved and the industry reps will have to go back to Square 1. Market Ticker has provided charts from the Federal Reserve that prove that Bernanke has withdrawn $125 billion from the banking system in the last 4 days alone to create a crisis situation that will incite credit market mayhem and increase the liklihood of passing the bill. This is coercion of the worst kind. http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/2008/09/24.html The country's economic predicament is steadily deteriorating. Orders for manufactured durable goods were off 4.5 percent last month while inventories continued to rise. Unemployment is soaring and the housing crash continues to accelerate. Credit Suisse now expects 10.3 million foreclosures (total) in the next few years. Numbers like that are not accidental, but part of a larger scheme to use monetary policy as a way to shift wealth from one class to another while degrading the nation's overall economic well-being. More alarming, the country's primary creditors are now staging a rebellion that is likely to cut off the flow of capital to US markets sending the dollar plummeting and triggering a deflationary credit collapse. This is from Reuters: "Chinese regulators have asked domestic banks to stop lending to U.S. financial institutions in the interbank money markets to prevent possible losses during the financial crisis, the South China Morning Post reported Thursday. The China Banking Regulatory Commission's ban on interbank lending of all currencies applied to U.S. banks, but not to lenders from other countries, the report added." Bloomberg News reports that Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher has broken with tradition and lambasted the proposed bailout saying that it "would plunge the U.S. government deeper into a fiscal abyss." From Bloomberg: "The plan by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to buy troubled assets from financial institutions would put 'one more straw on the back of the frightfully encumbered camel that is the federal government ledger,' Fisher said today in the text of a speech in New York. 'We are deeply submerged in a vast fiscal chasm.'...The seizures and convulsions we have experienced in the debt and equity markets have been the consequences of a sustained orgy of excess and reckless behavior, not a too-tight monetary policy," Fisher said to the New York University Money Marketeers Club." (Bloomberg) Surely, the cure for hyperbolic "credit excesses and reckless behavior" cannot be "more of the same." In fact, Paulson's bailout does not even address the core issues which have been obscured by demagoguery and threats. The worthless assets must be written-down, insolvent banks must be allowed to go bust, and the crooks and criminals who engineered this financial blitz on the nation's coffers must be held to account. The carnage from Greenspan's low interest rate, "easy money" binge is now visible everywhere. Inflated home and stock values are crashing as the gas continues to escape from the massive equity bubble. The FDIC will have to be recapitalized--perhaps, $500 billion--to account for the anticipated loss of deposits from failing banks caught in the cross-hairs of asset-deflation and steadily contracting credit. Recession is coming, but economic collapse can still be avoided if Paulson's misguided plan is abandoned and corrective action is taken to put the country on solid financial footing. Market Ticker lays out framework for a workable solution to the crisis, but they must be acted on swiftly to rebuild confidence that major systemic changes are underway: 1--Force all off-balance sheet "assets" back onto the balance sheet, and force the valuation models and identification of individual assets out of Level 3 and into 10Qs and 10Ks. Do it now. (Editor: In other words, no more Enron-type accounting mumbo-jumbo and no more allowing the banks assign their own "values" to dodgy assets) 2--Force all OTC derivatives onto a regulated exchange similar to that used by listed options in the equity markets. This permanently defuses the derivatives time bomb. Give market participants 90 days; any that are not listed in 90 days are declared void; let the participants sue each other if they can't prove capital adequacy.(Ed: If trading derivatives contracts can damage the "regulated" system, than that trading must take place under strict government regulations) 3--Force leverage by all institutions to no more than 12:1. The SEC intentionally dropped broker/dealer leverage limits in 2004; prior to that date 12:1 was the limit. Every firm that has failed had double or more the leverage of that former 12:1 limit. Enact this with a six month time limit and require 1/6th of the excess taken down monthly. (Ed: The collapse in the "structured finance" model is mainly due to too much leverage. For example, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had $80 of debt for every $1 dollar od capital reserves when they were taken into government conservatorship) If there's going to be a bailout, let's get it right. Paulson's $700 billion bill does nothing to fix the deep structural problems in the financial markets; it merely pushes the day of reckoning a little further into the future while shifting the burden of payment for toxic assets onto the taxpayer. It's a real turkey. The entire system needs transformational change so that the activities of Wall Street mesh with the broader objectives of the society it's supposed to serve. Paulson's business-model is busted; it does no one any good to try to glue it back together.

The Illusion of Sovereignty By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich 28/09/08 "ICH" - - - Perhaps sovereignty is relative; how else can one explain the subjugation of the most powerful industrial nations to the will of another while under the delusion of independence, national interest, democracy, and even capitalism? A single country, Israel and its powerful lobby AIPAC have altered the course of history in America and by extension, the rest of the world. In order to understand the argument being made and the power of manipulation of this extraordinary group, one must revisit the Arab economic boycott of Israel dating back several decades. To defeat the boycott, the Israeli lobby went into full gear and argued before the House that the Arab boycott constituted "a harassment and blackmailing of America, an interference with normal business activities ... that the boycott activities were contrary to the principles of free trade that the United States has espoused for many years … and the Arab interference in the business relations of American firms with other countries is in effect an interference with the sovereignty of the United States."i Bowing to AIPAC, the US adopted and enforced comprehensive anti-boycott legislation which Jimmy Carter signed into law in 1977. The law called for fines to be levied on American companies which cooperated with the boycott. However, in spite of pressure from the Lobby, Congress refused to enforce sanctions on the Arab League on the grounds that “extraterritorial measures that impermissibly impinge on the sovereignty of other nations”ii was not acceptable. Yet in an about face, America has yielded its own sovereignty and has demanded other nations subjugate theirs and impose sanctions on Iran. Surely one must wonder what made the United States bow to the Israeli demands and impinge on the sovereignty of Japan as an example when it had to forgo its exclusive rights to develop part of Iran's Azadegan oil field, the country's largest in compliance with the Iran-Libya Sanction Act (ILSA). For not only is it believed that AIPAC wrote the ILSA, but today, using their foot soldier, the neocon influenced US government, it is holding the United Nations hostage as three rounds of illegal sanctions have been passed against Iran with a recent House approved tougher sanctions bill iii as Iran pursues nuclear technologies that are put in the service of humankind on every continent. Surely those whose lust for power blindly led them to office must come to realize that their power is an illusion for the reins are held by another. They are the puppets and the Lobby and the neoconservatives the puppeteers. Should we not question how we got to this point in our history? Was it the power of the vote or the ally’s treachery? In the 60’s and 70’s while the Lobby was asking for American sacrifice, Israel was busy betraying America. Within the CIA as elsewhere in the intelligence community, there is a "widespread belief" that in the 1960s Israeli intelligence spirited about two hundred pounds of weapons- grade uranium from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in Apollo, Pennsylvania. John Hadden, a former CIA station chief in Tel Aviv, states that NUMEC was an "Israeli operation from the beginning.” The NUMEC case was investigated by the GAO and the House Interior Committee in 1978, but their reports have never been declassified”. Lyndon Johnson who was the first of a string of administrations to bury the NUMEC affairiv, not only covered up the report but it would seem as if the audacity of their act merited further cover up - the killing of American servicemen on board the Liberty by Israelis.v To their credit, the Israelis, confident that they could do as they pleased with American administrations, smuggled 810 krytons to Israelvi (krytons can be used for electronic triggers for nuclear weapons). Not long after this outrageous thievery, Ronald Reagan punished Iran by reinstating trade sanctions (Exec. Ord. No.12613) (first imposed by Carter and lifted in accordance to the Algiers Accords). It would seem that the trend for punishing other nations for Israel’s dangerous betrayal continues. On every continent nuclear technology is being made available to promote progress. In South America, nuclear technology is being used to map underground aquifers, so that water supplies can be managed sustainably. The Nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (NMRI) which was changed to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) because of the negative connotations associated with the word nuclear in the late 1970's would be explored to diagnose and treat patients. In Vietnam farmers plant rice with greater nutritional value that was developed with IAEA assistance – rice is also the staple food of Iranians. Within the next few years (estimates are 10-25 years) over 2 billion people will be without drinking water. Research in desalination technology initiated in 1970 using Advance Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) will make salt water drinkable. These are the components of nuclear technology that are the fundamentals of ‘Atoms for Peace’. These are the inalienable rights of Iran under Article IV for which it is being sanctioned. AIPAC had previously contended that the Arab boycott constituted "a harassment and blackmailing of America.....”, yet today, with all nations blackmailed by a country that has an illegal nuclear arsenal capable of unimaginable destruction, a country which has no regard for international law and norms or loyalty, is demanding that sanctions be imposed on Iran for pursuing its inalienable right within the framework of the NPT. “What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.” - Hannah Arendt Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is an independent researcher with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the influence of lobby groups. She is a peace activist and political analyst.

Malika sis Your question opens door to a bigger question: Which rulings are meant as a goal, or as a means to a higher goal? For example, Khalwa, which is the act of two adults of opposite sex in seclusion away from the public, is prohibited in Islam as it can invite extra marital relationship. So khalwa is haram as a means, not as a goal, while, Zinaa in turn is Haram for the protection of offspring as the intermediate goal, the last being, worship of Allah. The issue of images falls in the category of glorifying people to the point of either self wirship ,( try google "mc escher" "self portrait" )that interferes with ibaada, or drawing other objects or people that may end up worshipped by future generations. The prohibition of hand drawn picture has to do with the idolatory of the sixth century, when up to 3600 images filled the Holy Kaaba in Makka, or the Catholic Church and Eastern religions such Hinduism, to close this loophole, the Prophet discouraged this act with stern warning of punishment for those who draw such pictures. Art and Music in Islam are seen as competing with the worship of Allah, the most beautiful! Nur

The Deadly Blast in Islamabad Why was the Marriott Targeted? By TARIQ ALI 23/09/08 "Counterpunch" -- - The deadly blast in Islamabad was a revenge attack for what has been going on over the past few weeks in the badlands of the North-West Frontier. It highlighted the crisis confronting the new government in the wake of intensified US strikes in the tribal areas on the Afghan border. Hellfire missiles, drones, special operation raids inside Pakistan and the resulting deaths of innocents have fuelled Pashtun nationalism. It is this spillage from the war in Afghanistan that is now destabilizing Pakistan. The de facto prime minister of the country, an unelected crony of President Zardari and now his chief adviser, Rehman Malik, said, "our enemies don't want to see democracy flourishing in the country". This was rich coming from him, but in reality it has little to do with all that. It is the consequence of a supposedly "good war" in Afghanistan that has now gone badly wrong. The director of US National Intelligence, Michael McConnell, admits as much, saying the Afghan leadership must deal with the "endemic corruption and pervasive poppy cultivation and drug trafficking" that is to blame for the rise of the neo-Taliban. The majority of Pakistanis are opposed to the US presence in the region, viewing it as the most serious threat to peace. Why, then, has the US decided to destabilize a crucial ally? Within Pakistan, some analysts argue this is a carefully coordinated move to weaken the Pakistani state by creating a crisis that extends way beyond the frontier with Afghanistan. Its ultimate aim, they claim, would be the extraction of the Pakistani military's nuclear fangs. If this were the case, it would imply Washington was determined to break up Pakistan, since the country would not survive a disaster on that scale. In my view, however, the expansion of the war relates far more to the Bush administration's disastrous occupation in Afghanistan. It is hardly a secret that President Karzai's regime is becoming more isolated each passing day, as Taliban guerrillas move ever closer to Kabul. When in doubt, escalate the war, is an old imperial motto. The strikes against Pakistan represent - like the decisions of President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, to bomb and then invade Cambodia - a desperate bid to salvage a war that was never good, but has now gone badly wrong. It is true that those resisting the Nato occupation cross the Pakistan-Afghan border with ease. However, the US has often engaged in quiet negotiations with them. Several feelers have been put out to the Taliban in Pakistan, while US intelligence experts regularly check into the Serena hotel in Swat to meet Maulana Fazlullah, a local pro-Taliban leader. Pashtuns in Peshawar, hitherto regarded as secular liberals, told the BBC only last week that they had lost all faith in the west. The decision to violate the country's sovereignty at will had sent them in the direction of the insurgents. While there is much grieving for the Marriott hotel casualties, some ask why the lives of those killed by Predator drones or missile attacks are considered to be of less value. In recent weeks almost 100 innocent people have died in this fashion. No outrage and global media coverage for them. Why was the Marriot targeted? Two explanations have surfaced in the media. The first is that there was a planned dinner for the president and his cabinet there that night, which was cancelled at the last moment. The second, reported in the respected Pakistani English-language newspaper, Dawn, is that "a top secret operation of the US Marines [was] going on inside the Marriott when it was attacked". According to the paper: "Well-equipped security officers from the US embassy were seen on the spot soon after the explosions. However, they left the scene shortly afterwards." The country's largest newspaper, the News, also reported on Sunday that witnesses had seen US embassy steel boxes being carried into the Marriott at night on September 17. According to the paper, the steel boxes were permitted to circumvent security scanners stationed at the hotel entrance. Mumtaz Alam, a member of parliament, witnessed this. He wanted to leave the hotel but, owing to the heavy security, he was not permitted to leave at the time and is threatening to raise the issue in parliament. These may be the motivations for this particular attack, but behind it all is the shadow of an expanding war.

Its the end of Ramadan Nomads, please share with us how can one increase their iman, specially from your experienceof what have worked for you during Ramadan ( Because Ramadan's purpose is " Lacallakum Tattaquun" ). Nur

Pakistan's Balkanization By SHAHID R. SIDDIQUI Lahore, Pakistan 22/09/08 "ICH" -- - - Re-mapping of the Muslim world is under spotlight in the US and Pakistan's balkanization forms a part of this agenda. American strategists are propagating the need to redraw its borders on ethnic lines by creating new political entities in the name of justice long denied to 'oppressed Muslim minorities'. 'Internal factors' are identified in each case, sometimes very naïvely, that they believe could lead to desired fragmentation. Redrawn maps were released, ostensibly to test the waters. That this also reflects the mindset of the US administration can be seen by its efforts and actions to engineer grounds for military intervention, regime-change or fragmentation in target countries. Rising militant Islam, serious challenges to American hegemony as world power, shifting of the economic epicenter to Asia and the worsening economic situation at home, all point to another 'New World Order' in the making – wherein America stands to lose much of its power and glory by mid century, if not sooner. Resurgent Russia and a powerful China are forcing it to redefine its strategic global planning, with focus on Eurasia. A paranoid America is willing to pursue all options to prevent its slide from power. American strategists favor fracturing and weakening the national unity of Islamic states that could become strongholds of Islamic militants. They want oil rich territories like Kurdistan, Eastern Arabian Peninsula and Balochistan carved out, unified and controlled by puppet regimes, while splintering other Muslim countries. This would enable the US to secure its oil supplies, micromanage a fragmented Muslim world and choke vital financial resources to Islamic militants. Iraq is already going through the motions. US invasion of a hostile Iran is feared to come before the new administration takes over. Apart from considering it dangerous to Israeli security and a spoiler in Iraq, the US suspects Iran will trigger the crash of US dollar, and consequently the US economy, by transacting oil sales in Euros in collusion with Venezuela. The US considers Pakistan unstable due to "political and economic mismanagement, divisive politics, lawlessness, corruption and ethnic friction" and cites this as cause for growing Talibanization. It fears that this might bring Islamic radicals to power with control over the nukes - a frightening scenario for Israeli and the US. Pakistan's military controls Pakistan's nukes, is an important player in the political dispensation of the country, is resentful of American pressure to fight a war against Taliban that it considers against Pakistan's interests, and has made a shift from the liberal British colonial mindset to a more religious one. From its strategic perspective a friendly government in Kabul that will keep peace on Pakistan's western border has always been critical to its defense planning for this would enable it to face off India on the east, which remains its primary concern. This has led it to maintain close links with Afghan Jihadi groups and the Taliban, until the US forced General Musharraf to abandon them after 9/11. Aware of this, the US fears that this can eventually tilt the balance of war in Taliban's favor and impede its long term objectives in the region. Therefore, a weaker military with lesser geographical spread and without nuclear fangs would clearly suit the US, as well as the Indians who are piggybacking the US. Of late, Balochistan has been the target in the Indian scheme of Pakistan's further dismemberment. India and the US were disturbed by Gen. Musharraf's new overtures towards China, seeking Chinese strategic economic interests in Balochistan. Motivated by the prospects of Balochistan's development and economic uplift and to checkmate foreign aided secessionist moves in the province, he wanted China to use Gawadar-Sinkiang land corridor for its imports through Gawadar port and transportation of oil refined at a Chinese owned Gawadar based refinery. China also showed interest in joining Pak-Iran gas pipeline project transiting through Balochistan. China's presence in Gawadar would bring it to the Indian Ocean, a sensitive spot both for Indians and Americans – the former seeing this as a threat to its control of the ocean with its blue water navy in the offing and the latter upset with its proximity to the Straits of Hormuz. These are grounds enough to balkanize Pakistan. Col. Ralph Peters, supposedly Pentagon's military scholar and former intelligence official, writing in June 2006 issue of Armed Forces Journal on balkanization of the Middle East (Blood Borders), advocates the incorporation of North West Frontier Province into Afghanistan and creation of a sovereign Free Balochistan, carved out of Baloch areas of Pakistan and Iran. His grounds: ethnic affinity. Pakistani Balochistan is estimated to hold 25.1 trillion cft. of gas and 6 trillion barrels of oil. In his recent article "Drawn and Quartered" Selig Harrison of the Center of International Policy, Washington, DC, concludes that Pakistan's balkanization is imminent owing to the rising nationalist sentiment in the Pashtun belt and growing disillusionment of the Pashtuns, Balochis and Sindhis with Punjab and Pakistan. He believes that ethnic diversity threatens Pakistan's unity, Both Col. Peters and Harrison are essentially singing the same tune and seem to be presenting a doctrine that broadly reflects US foreign policy. General Aslam Beg, Pakistan's former Army Chief, notes in an article that to pursue certain common interests with regard to Pakistan and the region, India and the US have signed the Strategic Partnership Deal the declared objective of which is "to contain and curb the rising military and economic power of China and the increasing threat of Islamic extremism in the region". Gen. Beg says this deal has led to the creation of a joint espionage network of CIA, Mosad, MI-6, Raw and others in Afghanistan, which is engaged in activities aimed at destabilizing Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia and other Central Asian states. He claims that dissidents from Pakistan are being trained at Sarobi and Kandahar for missions inside NWFP, whereas bases at Lashkargah and Nawah are being used to train dissidents from Balochistan for missions inside that province and also in support of the so called Balochistan Liberation Army. In this backdrop, recent calls by some Afghan leaders to 'liberate Pakistani Pashtuns', the departure of Gen. Musharraf and the cozy relationship between his successor and Karazai of Kabul who lost no opportunity to malign Pakistan, assume significance. The latest American decision to send drones and troops into Pakistan's territory, despite the declared Pakistan's opposition, to launch aerial and ground attacks on its tribesmen killing innocent women and children, also raise serious concerns. This seems to be an attempt at drawing a wedge between Pakistan and the independent tribes on the Pakistan side of the Pak-Afghan border belt by establishing Pakistan's inability to protect their life and property and promote a secessionist movement. Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Center for Research on Globalization, Ottawa (author of War on Terrorism) in his article "The Destabilization of Pakistan" says: "Washington's foreign policy course is to actively promote the political fragmentation and balkanization of Pakistan as a nation". He states: "The US course consists in fomenting social, ethnic and factional divisions and political fragmentation, including the territorial breakup of Pakistan. This course of action is also dictated by US war plans in relation to both Iran and Afghanistan. This US agenda for Pakistan is similar to that applied throughout the broader Middle East Central Asian region." Chossudovsky points out that "the US strategy, supported by covert intelligence operations, consists in triggering ethnic and religious strife, abetting and financing secessionist movements while also weakening the institutions of the central government." The US initiatives to balkanize the region are misguided and a grave miscalculation, promising an extremely volatile and unstable geopolitical scenario. Given the ability of jihadi militants to challenge and even defeat US imperialism, this could cause the situation to easily spiral out of control, proving counterproductive to US interests worldwide and seriously undermining the regional and international security environment. It is doubtful if EU will go along with such US plans due to its own security imperatives and in the end the US might find itself to be the Lone Ranger. In case of Pakistan, the plan will not be easy to accomplish. The military that holds the key to political power and unification of the country, supported by pro-Pakistan segments of the population, will be the biggest stumbling block. Having the benefit of East Pakistan experience behind it and geography no more a handicap, it stands a much better chance at successfully thwarting such attempts and maintaining national integrity.

Allah tells us about our human nature: 8. And verily, he ( Mankind) is violent in the love of wealth. How much more violence can one imagine than the collection of eleven thousand Nuclear warheads by the USA, and another 4 thousand by the Russians, the Genocide of entire vilages of American Red Inidans, Caucuses, Africa, Japan, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and soon, Pakistan! So violent is mankind, to pursue his happiness with the miseries of the others. What mankind is not accounting for, is his eventual return to His maker court of justice, one by one , as Allah said in Quraan " Wa kullun aateeh yawmal qiyaamati fardaa" " I shal audit all of mankind, one at a time". Nur