The Real Estate Bust Continues

The real estate market continues to go bust as I had predicted in my first major article on the subject in December of 2005.

As it continues to rapidly barrel south, don’t tell the Bush Administration, the Federal Reserve, International Bankers, Mortgage Bankers, Mortgage Brokers, Realtors, home builders or even home sellers. Let’s keep it our little secret.

Still, none of them want to hear anything about it. They are, the majority of them, extremely myopic to the truth and material facts of what is really going on in the American economy.

SEC regulators should take note if they are really doing their jobs, but even they are too busy chasing thousands of back dating stock option executives these days.

The major buzzwords of “soft landing” and “temporary slowdown” fail to take into account numerous factors, which the contrarian indicators reveal to be present in the market. “Housing depression” is more accurate a term.

Some big publicly traded home builders like Lennar, Centex and Pulte have seen their stock prices tumble 30% or more over the past year with no bottom in sight by analysts in the know.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are acting much like their sponsor, the Federal Government.

While cooking their books, they refinance old debt with new debt, Fannie having just sold $3.5 billion in new debt securities, the classic move in any ponzi scheme.

Both institutions are now required to improve their record-keeping systems under a directive from their regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.

The new rule, which took effect today, requires the mortgage finance companies to establish and maintain a record retention program that is easier for OFHEO examiners to access.

A rhetorical rule that really means, “we know what’s wrong but can’t really, nor do we want to officially prove it”.

If we sift through the false data being filed by public companies in the mortgage, banking, building and general real estate services industry, aside from the ongoing false statistics published by the government, we begin to discover that America’s real estate markets are in far deeper trouble than anyone honestly dares to admit.

I continue to predict that the current bust will be the biggest loss in dollar terms in the history of this planet. Billions in coming losses are no longer a realistic estimate but rather we are talking trillions, perhaps by as much as five trillion being wiped out of the rather bloated false $20 trillion in equity in real estate across a broad spectrum of residential and commercial properties in the United States.

That may only appear to be a 25% correction in a market that has been inflated by as much as 500% during the past decade.

The sheer dollar volumes are what will ripple throughout the global economy and impact bond prices, stock prices, and commodities. Nothing and no one will be left untouched from the impact of this bust that is now well underway.

Although the Fed raised interest rates during the past two years and only recently stopped doing so during their last three meetings, in order to continue the previous trend of rising home prices, the Fed would now need to lower rates to less than 0%, much like Japan had to during the 1990’s when its real estate bust collapsed property values by more than 50%.

America is about to experience the same economic impact as Japan. At one point, Japanese banks were actually paying people to borrow money resulting in a negative interest rate. The Fed, three or four years from now may find it in a similar position. Global Net capital flows coming into the United States is shrinking and is being directed more towards Europe, Asia and of all places, the Middle East and Africa.

One can still find the largest mortgage banks in the nation such as Washington Mutual and Countrywide, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac making loans at close to 1% using option ARM programs that carry negative amortization clauses in their notes. These are ticking cluster bombs for the housing market.

Over a trillion dollars worth of mortgage backed securities have been issued to foreign investors which are collateralized by these types of mortgages, whose adjustments are gradually placing huge financial constraints on borrowers who are now trying to get out of them by putting their homes back on the market.

The exit doors are jammed, much like someone yelling fire in a theatre. And there is nothing wrong with yelling fire when there really is one. Because the refinance boom is well over, borrowers who lived off the equity in their homes are faced with only one choice and that is to sell, sell, sell, but many buyers are too nervous. They know.

The herd of thundering bulls rampaging toward the cliffs of real estate moguldom has blocked all the exits. Those who saw the edge of the cliff a year ago know that the time to sell was way back then, and now, if they managed to get out before everyone else, will sit on piles of cash, which was gained through huge amounts of leverage during the past decade, waiting for the end of the correction which may last as long as a decade.

Japan is the prime example of what happens when the people of a nation put their trust in the faulty banking systems currently in place.

Now, ten months after my article, the reports are trickling in. Martin Crutsinger, an Associated Press Economics Writer, wrote today “median prices of new homes plunged in September by the largest amount in more than 35 years”.

The US Commerce Department reported that the median price for a new home sold in September was $217,100, a drop of 9.7 percent from September 2005.

It was the lowest median price for a new home since September 2004 and the sharpest year-over-year decline since December 1970.

The weakness in new home prices was even sharper than a 2.5 percent fall in the price of existing homes last month, which had been the biggest drop on record.

In just two months real estate prices in general have fallen around 13% across the nation and the trend continues, with some markets being hit harder than others.

The final impact and domino effect this has on the American real estate market has not been felt yet at the highest levels of American and global finance. Homebuilder’s inventories are beginning to reach new record high levels, despite slowdowns in new permit applications.

Home buyers don’t want to buy in a falling market and because they cannot sell their old homes may sit on them for a while as the market wrings out the trillions of dollars of loans that are backed by false financial statements from the no income/no asset verification and stated income/stated asset loans originated during the past five years.

It is estimated that 30% of all loans originated over the past five years have been these types of loans and that 90% of them contain false financial or inflated income statements represented by the borrowers with the help of hungry loan officers motivated by high commissions during the refinance boom which is definitely over.

Some borrowers had refinanced two and three times during the past decade, pulling cash out each time, the only thing that was driving the national economy during the Bush administrations war economy. Now its’ all over but the shouting.

The Federal Reserve is well aware of these intrinsic problems in the asset qualities of mortgage-backed securities, as is the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That is another reason I wrote about America’s Fannie Being Spanked, a growing problem that is yet to be resolved by securities regulators. If the SEC were doing its job, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would go out of business and may yet do so when foreign investors realize the widespread nature of consumer fraud in the American mortgage industry.

The scandals involving those two major government sponsored institutions have been contained by corrupt politicians who head up the financial and banking committees but who may yet be thrown out of office in the coming elections this November. Their approval ratings are lower than the Presidents for just those reasons.

The Fed has issued guidance to all major regional banks and various other regulatory bodies are expected to follow suit which will create more scrutiny for these types of loans and if they abolished them altogether, one could see half the mortgage brokers in the country out of work within the next twelve months.

There are currently about 50,000 mortgage banks and brokers in the country that employ an army of around 3 million people directly or indirectly. All of them have fed the growth of the four largest players in the residential mortgage market, Washington Mutual, Countrywide, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Countrywide announced that it would lay off 2,500 workers just to save $500 million in overhead as the mortgage market shrivels. Other companies are also expected to start the layoff process.

Washington Mutual already cut 10,000 jobs and may need more in order cut expenses as mortgage originations have plummeted by 75% off their all time highs.

Those who failed to get out of their homes during the past year will be the only one’s feeling the consequences of those who lied on mortgage loan applications.

Those lies impact everyone, but mostly the lenders, who may soon find themselves under greater scrutiny by the FBI and other government investigators searching for scapegoats in the debacle of the American nightmare. Many will wake up from their “American Dream” and wonder what really happened.

Foreclosures in Southern California are up 50% and property prices have already fallen by more than 20% in some asset classes including apartment buildings and condos, a statistic that is not reflected in what the federal government publishes through its financial media machines.

Trying to tell people in the industry that they are now seeing the true beginning of the real estate bust of 2006, come back with defenses to validate their own incorrect perceptions of the market. They are too over sold on their own sales pitches.

Boston Globe writer Alexander von Hoffman says, “the Boston real estate market has been booming and busting since the 1630s, when the Puritans first began divvying up the land around Massachusetts Bay. The city's most famous real estate bust took place in the South End in the 1870s. The Great Depression brought far worse. Unemployment and deflation crippled the finances of thousands of Boston's working families who could not make their mortgages and lost their homes.”

The current bust will probably last a decade or more, just as it did in Japan, and put millions of people out of work. The fall guys in all of this will probably be Greenspan and the Bush Administration, not the millions of people who filled out phony loan applications to get artificially misleading low mortgage rates and bid up housing prices just to make their own quick profits.

The Federal Reserve knew twelve months ago that real estate was getting totally out of hand. They only stopped raising rates long enough to pierce the bubble. The stock market expects them to start lowering rates and if they don’t the ripple effect will be felt as stock prices plummet.

We can probably expect to see a new historical one-day drop in the stock market some time during the next year as a result. This will then jolt the fed back into action, but like the giant tentacle of the Octodragon that it is, it can only move as fast as its’ weakest cell.

In November of 2005, the National Association of Realtors lied to American homebuyers by stating, “the facts simply do not support the possibility of a housing bust -- not for these 135 markets and not for the nation”.

They saw what effects the fallout of the stock market bubble had on the economy and were very worried that the implosion of a real estate bubble would have similar - if not worse - consequences. It was more comfortable to lie than to face the facts and swallow the truth.

Those insiders who realized it was time to sell, and knew the blood letting would begin, got out, all the while telling their clients that there was no chance of a bubble bursting.

In order to keep the markets calm, the Bush administration, through the U.S. Commerce Department is trying to temper the bad news by publishing good news at the same, good news, which may in fact contain false and misleading statements. It is classic doublespeak announced just today.

Joe Bel Bruno, another Associated Press Business Writer said, “Wall Street initially was inspired by data showing capital spending jumped by the most in more than six years, but was then rattled by a report that indicated new home prices plunged at the steepest pace since 1970.”

The current administration thinks in short term cycles and cannot see the long term, it is strictly near sighted, always has been, and always will be unless politics are removed and separated from the economic engines of the military industrial financial media complex, which is highly unlikely even in the long term.

Some multi-national investors have rushed back into blue chips seeking safety, pushing the Dow to new record levels, while shorting the US dollar, which continues to fall, along with major industrial commodities, and have shifted out of REITs and home building stocks, perhaps even taking opportunities to short those as well.

Peter Slatin, a writer for Forbes, misleads the general public when he says that, “the real estate industry continues to become ever more transparent, largely because of the increasing weight of institutional capital in the mix,”.

It is because of institutionalized capital in the market that the industry has become more secretive than ever before.

In fact, institutions have caused the REIT market to balloon from a total REIT market capitalization at just about $10 billion in 1992; to today’s number which is closer to $1 trillion.

Between 1968 until the mid-1970s, there was a land rush of mortgage REIT initial public offerings. Then came the bust. In 1972, there were 46 REITs with a market capitalization of $1.8 billion. By the end of 1974 capitalization was down to $712.4 million. Cut by more than half.

30 years later there are more than 5,000 REITs, both public and private, with assets totaling over $2 trillion and combined public market caps of over $1 trillion, with three international banking organizations now approaching $2 trillion in assets each.

These same banking institutions (Bank of America, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch) are the very organizations that have fueled the boom in REIT’s and pushed commercial and industrial property values to new highs.

Just one example being the 115 apartment buildings in New York City which recently sold as a portfolio for close to $5 billion dollars. The sale was between institutions.

Pretty soon, being a billionaire won’t mean much any more, just like being a millionaire means you are now part of the lower middle class.

The secretiveness of the market prevents government regulators and politicians from seeing the daily billions in dollars of phony loan applications turned into mortgage loans and then sold off as securitized “assets” to unwary foreign institutions such as central banks, and multi-national corporations, pension funds and other institutional investors who are all driven by their own bottom lines – profit in an age of delusionally valued assets.

Deficit spending, and the national debt continue to balloon, forecasted to be $500 billion annually and $10 trillion respectively by the year 2008.

The national debt has already exceeded $8.5 trillion and is now growing at the rate of $2 billion per day. Congress will have to raise the debt limit from $9 billion to $10 trillion next year.

Part of that money may need to go to bailing out and consolidating Washington Mutual, Countrywide, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in an RTC type rescue package, the four biggest losers in the continuing real estate bust. _______

Alex S. Gabor is a freelance writer living in Hollywood. He spent 25 years investigating the mortgage banking industry and is the inventor of zero interest mortgages.

Alex S. Gabor calls George Soros "my adopted uncle" in this loony article:
The truth about the war on terrorism...
25.07.2006 00:23

SOROS AND ME!
PART VIII

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WAR ON TERRORISM-HOW TO DISMANTLE THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL FINANCIAL MEDIA COMPLEX?

By: Alex S. Gabor

This will be my last article on the subject of Soros and Me! After seven articles published independently around the world I had the great honor of being quoted in London’s Financial Times, and getting some terrific responses from an audience I didn’t know I had, particularly as it relates to my last article on America’s Fannie being Spanked.

My idea of creating a documentary about Soros and Me! has fizzled due to a lack of finance, as usual. George Soros’ spokesperson, Michael Vachon, will be glad to hear it. On the other hand, some historians may revisit my articles and delve deeper into my troubled life and realize that I was really a good man after all, but I won’t hold my breath. The prospect of my character being completely assassinated after this article does not scare me, it terrifies me, but I must write what I know to be the truth, and have the courage to accept the consequences.

I once had the notion that if I could get Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, George Soros, and nine other billionaires all in the same room together to listen to what I had to say, we could then proceed to change the whole future destiny of the entire world.

I have abandoned that notion along with my delusions of becoming the world’s first trillionaire, the subject of a book I may yet some day find the time to write about.

I’ve always been a hopeless utopian altruist at heart. In some of my past business dealings I used to ask prospective business associates what they would do if they had a billion dollars in cash at their disposal. I got some very interesting responses, but none of them matched my visions. My lifelong vision has been peace. World peace. A peace where there is no fear, no terror, and no violence.

After being clean and sober for 22 months I have come to the conclusion that those were delusions, imaginary yearnings to be free of the horrors of war, to be relieved of the stresses of conflict, and that the ultimate serenity available to me could only be found through death.

This world and the universe it shares are very violent. Nature is violent. Man’s violent nature cannot be tamed by violence and reason sometimes is ineffective in reaching an insane society in trying to make it rational. Just try talking to a mad man once and you will forever understand.

Then try talking to ten thousand bloggers who are hell bent on one side or the other on the issues of war, terrorism and the use of violent force to get one's beliefs, ideas or ideology across to any side that disagrees with it.

Yet there are still some people left in this world, writers, philosophers, philanthropists, perhaps altruists like myself, who continue to seek ways to improve civilization, to make life less violent for those who come upon this world after us, who have risen above the crowds of force worshipping war profiteers who are addicted to a permanent war economy, and who may take into consideration the truth about the so called “war on terror”.

Despite the clogged court system, I have always believed that going to Court would be better than taking lives, no matter what my former friends who now imagine themselves to be my personal enemies might consider to be the truth. The easist thing to shift is a viewpoint, and the most fallable of human weapons is the mind.

One person who, albeit his age, is still seeking ways to improve society is my adopted uncle George Soros, and I have always said, “everyone should adopt a billionaire”, they sometimes are very lonely people who are often misunderstood, or at the very least, jealously regarded because of their past performance in exercising their truly incredible talent in bringing about their own abundant wealth. They are so rare, there are less than a thousand of them throughout all of history.

Soros has been quoted in many places around the universe of the media on the subject, stating in effect that, "In the U.S. 'war on terror' is used to cover a multitude of sins. It is a false metaphor. 'Counterterrorism' is more honest."

In many quarters, particularly the far right neo Nazi fundamentalist Christian fascist strongholds of America, (I'm talking Skinhead country and LA County Jail) and the other far right Jewish Socialist sadomasochistic cabals of Israel, (I'm talking Mossad and other secret military societies around the planet read that as CIA, MI6, KGB, INTERPOL), in what the mainstream media has labeled extremism as quoted by the G8 summit statement on the recent events unfolding in the Middle East, the tactical use of character assassination has evolved into an effective painfully long drawn out torture mechanism for the living, often more powerful than any real covert assassinations., which are usually swift and relatively painless.

You have to be aware enough to know that you have lived before this lifetime to understand the real meaning of this, but suffice it to say, you can kill the body of a man, but you cannot destroy his soul, and you can attempt to destroy a nation by force, but you cannot kill the spirit of a nations visionaries, artists and creative people.

It is one universal law that no man can violate, as obvious as gravity to those who keep their feet on the ground and their heads out of their posteriors.

Character assassination is an intentional attempt to influence the portrayal or reputation of a particular person, organization or nation, whether living or historical, in such a way as to cause others to develop an extremely negative, unethical or unappealing perception of him or her.

The damage sustained can be life-long and, in the case of the historical larger than life personalities like Soros and me, it can last for many centuries. Surely I do not jest.

When it comes to Soros and Me, we have both suffered at the hands of those who do not seek the truth, care nothing for it, and in fact assassinate it all too well in their process of worshipping their true gods of war, greed, power and the ability to dominate the lives of others without the permission of the governed.

It is a form of force with worse than deadly consequences and is a tool of war. It has also evolved into the sophisticated realms of psychopolitics and brainwashing.

By its nature, character assassination involves the deliberate exaggeration or manipulation of facts to present an untrue picture of the targeted person, organization, nation or subject. One can just as easily assassinate a philosophical subject or religion as another human being or group. The mechanisms are the same.

For many individuals, this is an act of terrorism in its most viscious and ruthless form because they can be alienated from their families, their business, their communites and even their entire country.

The whole world may look upon someone whose character has been assasinated as evil, to be condemned forever to live out the rest of their days in lonely solitude, deprived of all human dignity and rights, or they can become fodder for all manner of overt or covert military, financial, media or legal harrassments.

It is very difficult to erase, reverse or even rectify, particularly if you cannot afford the time and money it takes to undo the damage such acts cause in this world of instant mass global communications. In some instances, no amount of time or money could possibly ever repair the damage caused.

Therefore, the process is aptly likened to a literal asssasination of human life. Only those who have had their lives dealt a blow in such a fashion can understand the deep levels of depression one can experience as the side effect of such operations upon the human psyche.

Assassination is the deliberate killing or destruction of an important person, organization, nation, culture, or entire civilization, which is akin to genocide, and both have the same underlying intentions to destroy an opposing entity. When it comes to individuals, it is usually a political figure, or other strategically important individual that becomes the target.

For some who have experienced character assassination, it would perhaps in their own estimation have been less painful to have been murdered than to have to continue to live with the knowledge that those who know them look upon them with scorn, contempt and disgrace. Especially when the truth is so close to the heart but so far from the minds of the public.

Perceptions of wrongness and badness are more easily taken for granted in a closed and suppressed society than in an open, honest and free one. Bad news usually travels faster than good news, especially in the mainstream media.

This negative impact on human life and the characters which play upon its stage may be one explaination for some of the more common escape mechanisms used by people experiencing character assassination such as suicide, drug or alchohol abuse, and even creating, joining or hiding in underground secret cabalistic societies, afraid of thereafter being discovered.

Changing one’s name, although a temporary solution, sometimes provides temporary relief and some minor solace. In the long run, death is the ultimate absolution for the victims of character assasination. Too many have been driven to suicide as a result. The ultimate injustice is dying with false labels and untruths attached to your character for all eternity.

Those who succumb to revenge, vindictive retalatory acts, and general malice toward the character assasin, usually are of the opinion that they have nothing to lose by killing, maiming or somehow destroying those who have attacked them. This however only serves to feed the fire, building up the subsequent consequences of the death domino sequence of events which follow on the heels of every murderer alive in this world today.

Most of the time the assassin, one who carries out an assassination, or the assassin’s employer, is portrayed as an individual. In truth, most if not all assassinations require the cooperation and coordination of more than one individual. One must coordinate times, dates, locations, tools, methods, transportation, fuel, and various logistics to execute any assassination.

One must indoctrinate the assassin. The technology of assassination, whether by negative publicity, or physical attack, is like a viral infection upon the whole of global civilization, which has left no political or religious group unscathed in its permeation of the bodies which seek to survive despite its rampant pandemic.

In both forms of assassination, it takes corroborative efforts to get the intended result. One person may make a statement, but when many say it, it becomes truth according the world of the international media. Wikipedia has a policy of not accepting or recognizing data or truth unless it can be corroborated by an outside source.

It only takes two or more people to spread a false rumor about someone or something that is "bad" for it to take on life of its own. This is the essence of evil, the opposite of "live", which gradually tears apart the life of the target of the rumor, unless the target truly understands what is being done to it. Only then is knowledge, wisdom and love capable of bringing about peace for the person or group being attacked.

But such things are a rare commodity, worth more than all the material riches of the world, because in the end, only truth brings about understanding and only understanding brings peace and love.

The front person, if the assassination is successful, is usually the one who get’s the brunt of public scorn in the form of a public trial, or in broader political terms, negative ratings in opinion polls. The accomplices are almost always invisible and intentionally so. They live on to die another day.

All assassinations involve a political or idealogical agenda coupled with the belief that there is no other way to get ones point across to the opposing party than through the use of force, usually always a false belief, particularly when confused with religious or strong psychopolitical convictions.

Character assassination is a subtler, lower harmonic wavelength of force, but nevertheless, the target, and his associates are forced to receive false perceptions of himself, sometimes resulting in the target actually going insane or having a psychotic break under the pressure of injustices melded upon him by the assassins.

At the very least, the false, negative and deliberately destructive information taints the perceptions of business and family associates against the target, resulting in a general lowering of esteem.

A suicide bomber is nothing more than an assassin acting as a brainwashed psychopolitical tool of the idealogy that motivates it to use force. It does not matter if that individual assassin appears to be acting alone, or acting as the head of an entire soveriegn nation with the full support of its own political leadership, the only difference is the impact and consequences are of different orders and degrees of magnitude.

An assassin under the color of law or the political idealogy of democracy is still an assassin and is no less guilty than a suicide bomber under the belief that he will enter heaven sooner if he executes his intent to destroy and harm others.

Some motivations behind assassination, whether by character or physical in nature, can include money, power, greed, or an aberated sense of superiority over other human beings, as in racist or cultural wars.

All wars start with an assassination whether by character or by physical brutality. Even kidnapping is a form of assassination in that the path of life upon which the kidnappee was on is disrupted, with a resultant damage to the friends and family who suffer the loss of the victim.

Physical wars usually result only after a long period of character assassination has succeeded in convincing an army of opponents to fight and destroy the “enemy”. It takes a lot of "training" to convince a human being that it is "right to kill another human being". The indoctrination is a process of assassinational education taught by all the military and police academies of this planet.

In order to hurt someone, we must first believe they have done something wrong, or in some way pose a threat to our own existence. This applies equally on the macro level as well as the micro level. The belief creates fear which in reality is actually false evidence appearing real. FEAR. False Evidence Appearing Real.

We wouldn’t hurt a fly if we didn’t think they posed a threat to our survival, but if they begin to destroy our fruit, we find all kinds of chemical weapons to wipe them off the face of the earth. Likewise, one nation would not consider nuking another nation unless there was a strong belief, usually false, that someone was going to strike first.

Underlying all desire to kill another, whether by assassination or war, which is more or less mass assassination, is fear. It is a basic fear of being destroyed first by that which is feared. If the fear is overcome, the destroyer feared is destroyed without assassination or physcial harm. That which is loved cannot hurt us. Only that which is feared comes after us until it consumes us.

To continue any conflict, whether it be a war, an argument, or some form of controversey, lies or false information must be introduced into the relationship in order for it to remain unresolved. It does not matter if the relationship is between two or more individuals, two or more organizations, companies or enterprises, two or more nations, or perhaps in the not too distant future, two or more planets. Only the truth examined by all sides can resolve conflicts. This is very difficult to accomplish in the presence of embedded lies and prejudices which perpetuated the hostilities in the first place. Only the greatest statesman are able to rise above the petty squabbles and teach those who are fighting the truth.

In order to continue the conflict, the beliefs or information between the parties to the conflict must contain some form of falsehood to remain perpetuated. If the truth were discovered and made known, the conflict would be resolved.

This is why counter intelligence fails when its’ cover is blown. It is also why counter-terrorism is a more accurate description of what the “war on terror” and its many facets, are all about.

In most political operations, the most common forms of character assassination are the spreading of usually false allegations that a candidate is a liar, is in some way dishonest, that they’re in some way a bad person, have a bad family life, are in an abusive relationship, have a criminal history, are a convicted felon, perhaps going so far as stating the person abuses their children physcially or sexually, is desrespected by his co-workers, or routinely engages in some highly exaggerated yet seroiusly disturbing , socially unacceptable behaviour, such as sexual deviancy. These are usually targeted specifically toward an individual.

On an international level, as used by modern governments as instructed by their higher up financial controllers, the more common modern forms of character assassination include the labelling of another country as an enemy, enemy combatant, terrorists, an axis of evil, an evil empire, a host for terrorists, or other negative connotations that invoke fear and loathing in the minds of political opinion leaders who would act on the false information by allocating energy, time, resources, and various other destructive tools toward creating and perpetuating an attack on the target.

No one can start a war unless we first assassinate the character of the nation upon which war is eventually declared. This must be done by instilling fear in those who have the power to cause a war to be started.

It must be done in a continous stream of lies and spun stories that reaffirm the false correctness of the intent to war, and once commenced, the rightness of the decision makers who allowed the war to begin, or who seek to profit from its ongoing maintenance, operations and persistence.

It is harder to retreat from a path of violence once started than to admit ones fallability and errors and humbly seek forgiveness for the taking of human life, because it is most difficult for those who have been hurt to forgive.

The more debase motivations for assassination are revenge, acts of espionage at the request of a government, or the practice of creating a false front as in when the assassin, in order to gain sympathy for his cause, shoots himself in the foot and then claims someone else did it, thereafter directing all attention toward an imaginary and thereafter unjustly persecuted enemy, giving the assassin time to effect his real plans, whatever they may be.

In practice, character assassination usually consists of the spreading of rumors and deliberate misinformation on topics relating to one's morals, integrity, and reputation. It is also called counter-intelligence. And by any other name, it is usually done in secret, and with the intent of never revealing the source of the information because the truth would destroy the operation of the assassins.

The only difference between character assassination and physical assassination is in the latter, the operation ends in the death of the target, whereas character assassins must continually engage in spreading rumors, planting false information and perpetuating the false perceptions of the target.

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