Thursday, July 29, 2010

Social Security Myths

An Email I just got from MoveOn.org:

Top 5 Social Security Myths

Myth #1: Social Security is going broke.

Reality: There is no Social Security crisis. By 2023, Social Security will have a $4.6 trillion surplus (yes, trillion with a 'T'). It can pay out all scheduled benefits for the next quarter-century with no changes whatsoever.1 After 2037, it'll still be able to pay out 75% of scheduled benefits—and again, that's without any changes. The program started preparing for the Baby Boomers' retirement decades ago.2 Anyone who insists Social Security is broke probably wants to break it themselves.

Myth #2: We have to raise the retirement age because people are living longer.

Reality: This is a red-herring to trick you into agreeing to benefit cuts. Retirees are living about the same amount of time as they were in the 1930s. The reason average life expectancy is higher is mostly because many fewer people die as children than they did 70 years ago.3 What's more, what gains there have been are distributed very unevenly—since 1972, life expectancy increased by 6.5 years for workers in the top half of the income brackets, but by less than 2 years for those in the bottom half.4 But those intent on cutting Social Security love this argument because raising the retirement age is the same as an across-the-board benefit cut.

Myth #3: Benefit cuts are the only way to fix Social Security.

Reality: Social Security doesn't need to be fixed. But if we want to strengthen it, here's a better way: Make the rich pay their fair share. If the very rich paid taxes on all of their income, Social Security would be sustainable for decades to come.5 Right now, high earners only pay Social Security taxes on the first $106,000 of their income.6 But conservatives insist benefit cuts are the only way because they want to protect the super-rich from paying their fair share.

Myth #4: The Social Security Trust Fund has been raided and is full of IOUs

Reality: Not even close to true. The Social Security Trust Fund isn't full of IOUs, it's full of U.S. Treasury Bonds. And those bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.7 The reason Social Security holds only treasury bonds is the same reason many Americans do: The federal government has never missed a single interest payment on its debts. President Bush wanted to put Social Security funds in the stock market—which would have been disastrous—but luckily, he failed. So the trillions of dollars in the Social Security Trust Fund, which are separate from the regular budget, are as safe as can be.

Myth #5: Social Security adds to the deficit

Reality: It's not just wrong—it's impossible! By law, Social Security's funds are separate from the budget, and it must pay its own way. That means that Social Security can't add one penny to the deficit.8

Defeating these myths is the first step to stopping Social Security cuts. Can you share this list now?

Thanks for all you do.

–Nita, Duncan, Daniel, Kat, and the rest of the team

Sources:

1."To Deficit Hawks: We the People Know Best on Social Security," New Deal 2.0, June 14, 2010
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=89703&id=22136-1257984-Xfskukx&t=4

2. "The Straight Facts on Social Security," Economic Opportunity Institute, September 2009
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=89704&id=22136-1257984-Xfskukx&t=5

3. "Social Security and the Age of Retirement," Center for Economic and Policy Research, June 2010
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=89705&id=22136-1257984-Xfskukx&t=6

4. "More on raising the retirement age," Washington Post, July 8, 2010
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=89706&id=22136-1257984-Xfskukx&t=7

5. "Social Security is sustainable," Economic and Policy Institute, May 27, 2010
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=89707&id=22136-1257984-Xfskukx&t=8

6. "Maximum wage contribution and the amount for a credit in 2010," Social Security Administration, April 23, 2010
http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/240

7. "Trust Fund FAQs," Social Security Administration, February 18, 2010
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/ProgData/fundFAQ.html

8."To Deficit Hawks: We the People Know Best on Social Security," New Deal 2.0, June 14, 2010
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=89703&id=22136-1257984-Xfskukx&t=9

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This Just In—The Recession is Over, and all that Gulf Oil is Gone

The oil is still there, of course, just under the surface where it's not visible from the lofty view of the official media — just like the depression.

Washington's Blog:

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Mainstream Economists: "Mission Accomplished"


Numerous current stories show how disconnected mainstream policy-makers are from reality.

For example, Ryan Grim points out that there is an "unbelievable disconnect" between the American people (who are people are against the Afghanistan war) and Congress and the political elite (gung-ho to escalate this never-ending war):

Even after the Wikileaks revelations, even though there is no logical reason to be in Afghanistan, even though the war won't help the economy, and even though most Americans want us to get out, Congress keeps increasing funding for the endless war.

And Alan Blinder (economist, banking consultant and former Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System) and chief Moody's economist Mark Zandi wrote a paper yesterday called How We Ended the Great Recession:

How We Ended the Great Recession

A source on Capitol Hill sent this to me, telling me that the paper is making the rounds on the Hill.

In the paper, Blinder and Zandi congratulate the Bush and Obama administrations for saving us from the Great Depression 2.0:
Eighteen months ago, the global financial system was on the brink of collapse and the U.S. was suffering its worst economic downturn since the 1930s. The Great Recession gave way to recovery as quickly as it did largely because of the unprecedented responses by monetary and fiscal policymakers.
In other words: "Mission Accomplished".

In the real world, however, the economy is on the second leg down of the crash, and the government's policies have not addressed the real problems. See this and this (no wonder consumer confidence is plunging but Wall Street is partying like it's 1999).

Indeed, while Blinder and Zandi and Congress are patting themselves on the back for a job well done, the facts simply do not bear out their claims. As just one example, they claim that the TARP bank bailouts helped the economy. But as I pointed out in March 2009, the bailout money didn't actually go to any productive economic uses:

The bailout money is just going to line the pockets of the wealthy, instead of helping to stabilize the economy or even the companies receiving the bailouts:

  • A lot of the bailout money is going to the failing companies' shareholders
  • Indeed, a leading progressive economist says that the true purpose of the bank rescue plans is "a massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their top executives"
  • The Treasury Department encouraged banks to use the bailout money to buy their competitors, and pushed through an amendment to the tax laws which rewards mergers in the banking industry (this has caused a lot of companies to bite off more than they can chew, destabilizing the acquiring companies)
And as the New York Times notes, "Tens of billions of [bailout] dollars have merely passed through A.I.G. to its derivatives trading partners".

***

In other words, through a little game-playing by the Fed, taxpayer money is going straight into the pockets of investors in AIG's credit default swaps and is not even really stabilizing AIG.
The super-wealthy have been bailed out, and life is great for them. For everyone else, things are not so good.

The system is rigged to benefit the elites and their sycophants at the expense of the country. See this, this, this, and this.

And - because Congress members tend to be wealthy, and because they can engage in insider trading without having to worry about pesky things like the law - they continue (with only a handful of exceptions who challenge status quo thinking regarding finance and war) to make decisions which benefit their own bank accounts, instead of working for the American people.

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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Remembering the Lockerbie Bombing

The latest furor over BP's connection with the release of "the Lockerie Bomber" reminded me that the evidence against him was slim to the point of fabrication. I recalled something about the bomb's trigger mechanism being untraceable to the purported bomber.

With the vast resources of the internet it is simple to find the real story, or rather, the gaping holes in the popular story. I find it amazing that no one in what passes for the media has mentioned this.

On second thought, I guess it's not so amazing...

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:

Convicted Lockerbie Bomber Probably Not Guilty—So Who Is the Real Criminal?

By Andrew I. Killgore

Among those listening as Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond addresses the Scottish Parliament during a Sept. 2, 2009 debate on the release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi are members of UK Families-Flight 103 Dr. Jim Swire (c) and, to his left, Ken Evans, who lost several family members on board the flight. AFP photo/Derek Blair

On Aug. 21 Scotland freed Libyan intelligence officer Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi—convicted under Scottish law at a special court in The Netherlands of destroying Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on Sept. 21, 1988. Killed were 259 persons, including 189 Americans on board and 11 people on the ground. The terminally ill Megrahi, after dropping his second appeal, was released on compassionate grounds. Back in Libya, he continues to protest his innocence (see box).

Had Pan Am 103 followed its usual flight path it would have crashed at sea. But turbulent air over London’s Heathrow Airport when the Boeing 747 lifted off bound for New York led the pilot to tend slightly more northward than usual to get “above” the storm. As a result, when the bomb that destroyed the plane detonated 38 minutes later, the plane was over land, at Lockerbie. Inclement weather had thus spoiled what the criminals expected would be the perfect crime: no physical evidence and no witnesses to tell the tale.

Robert Black, professor of criminal law at Edinburgh University, told the writer that for the first two and a half years after the disaster, investigators focused on Palestinian Ahmad Jabril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) as the culprit. In 1991, however, pressure became so intense to focus on Libya that Black concluded that only the governments of the U.S. and Britain could be behind it. It was Black’s idea to hold the trial in The Netherlands under Scottish law and with Scottish judges.

At the Lockerbie trial so-called “key witness” Abdulmajid Gauci would identify Megrahi as the purchaser of certain items of clothing found at the crash site that Gauci claimed were purchased at his shop in Valetta, Malta. But on the witness stand Gauci proved to be a flop at identification. An FBI officer, Harold Hendershot, called to the witness stand to bolster Gauci’s testimony, also appeared to lack credibility.

Another puzzling aspect of the Lockerbie trial was that, despite the prosecution’s insistence that the bombing could only have been a two-man job, Megrahi’s co-defendant, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted. No explanation was ever forthcoming. A middle-aged American (judging by his accent) attending the trial was overheard by this writer on a BBC broadcast expressing uncertainty about the testimony: “I wonder who killed our relatives?”

Dr. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the crash, is sure that Gauci identified the wrong man. Swire is an unusual man. As an officer in the British army, he was trained in the use of plastic explosives. After completing his army national service, he worked for the BBC as an electronics engineer before studying medicine and becoming a practicing physician. Dr. Swire cannot accept as credible the Lockerbie trial’s technical details about the explosives that brought down Pan Am 103. He became a spokesman for relatives of British nationals killed in the crash. Overwhelmingly these relatives do not believe that Megrahi is guilty.

Dr. Swire is convinced that shopkeeper Gauci identified an innocent man as the bomber. In a Dec. 27, 2007 e-mail from Swire to this writer, Swire quoted Gauci as saying that Megrahi was “like” the man who bought clothes in his shop, but that the age and height were “very different.” Nevertheless, the Scottish judges accepted Gauci’s testimony.

Gauci reportedly now lives in Australia with a $2 million (some reports say $4 million) reward from the American government. According to the State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” Web site, since its inception in 1984 the program has paid $77 million to more than 50 people.

Improbable Cause

But the biggest reason for questioning the validity of the “Libya-did-it” scenario is the sheer improbability of placing a bomb on a plane in Valetta, Malta, bound for Frankfurt, Germany, there to be offloaded on a second plane bound for London, where it would be offloaded on a third plane bound for New York, to explode 38 minutes later. Common sense would dictate a far more simple scheme: load the bomb aboard a plane in London with a simple pressure mechanism to go off when the plane was safely out to sea 38 minutes after takeoff.

In his Dec. 27, 2007 e-mail, Swire discussed the “timer fragment” supposedly found at the crash site, part of a device made in Switzerland and supposedly sold to Libya. If true, this could mean that Megrahi theoretically could have set the bomb to go off 38 minutes after takeoff. But the Swiss timer turned out to indict the Lockerbie court rather than Megrahi. Edwin Bollier, the owner of MEBO which manufactured the alleged bomb trigger device, revealed that he had turned down an FBI offer of $4 million to testify that he had sold the device to Libya.

In the aforementioned e-mail, from which I am free to quote, Dr. Swire said the Lockerbie court heard of a “specialized timer/baroceptor bomb mechanism” made by the PFLP-GC in the Damascus suburbs. This device would explode within 30 to 45 minutes after takeoff, but was stable indefinitely at ground level. The court heard that these devices could not be altered. “Yet the court believed,” Swire wrote, “that Megrahi ‘happened’ to set his Swiss timer in such a way that it went off in the middle of the time window for the Syrian device, surviving changes of planes at Frankfurt and London.”

Dr. Swire told the BBC News of Aug. 20, 2009 that the prosecution at the Lockerbie trial failed to take into consideration the reported break-in of the Pan Am baggage area at Heathrow in the early morning hours of the day of Pan Am 103’s doomed flight.

Many of the British relatives of Pan Am 103 victims have come to believe that the bomb was loaded in London, and thus that Megrahi could not be guilty. These relatives and Dr. Swire were opposed to Megrahi’s withdrawing his second appeal on the grounds that further evidence would come out that might have pointed to the real culprit.

In a Jan. 4, 2008 e-mail, Dr. Swire warned that “there is some deep secret hidden in this tragedy which evokes virulent responses...when questions are raised.”

In an Aug. 20, 2009 e-mail response to this writer’s inquiry, Dr. Swire said “that it appears that the Iranians used the PFLP-GC as mercenaries in this ghastly business.” According to this theory, held by many who doubt Megrahi’s guilt, including CounterPunch’s Alexander Cockburn, Iran hired the PFLP-GC to avenge the July 3, 1988 shooting down by the USS Vincennes of an Iranian Airbus passenger plane, killing 290 passengers, including 66 children. The U.S. ship’s officers later received medals for heroism in combat.

Having lost his daughter in the Pan Am crash, and as an expert in explosives, Dr. Swire is uniquely qualified to examine the Pan Am tragedy. America and its mainstream media did not reflect credit on themselves by refusing to acknowledge questions about Megrahi’s guilt.

Dr. Swire may well be right in blaming the PFLP-GC for the tragedy. But this writer still has his doubts—because the ineptness of the trial and Washington’s fanaticism in pushing such a flimsy case against Libya leave an impression that it must be covering up for the real criminals. Somehow it seems unlikely that the U.S. would go to such lengths to protect Iran, much less the PFLP-GC.

Andrew I. Killgore is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.



SIDEBAR

Statement by Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi Upon His Release

Upon leaving HM Prison Greenock en route back to Libya, Abdel Basit al-Megrahi issued the following statement through his lawyers:

I am obviously very relieved to be leaving my prison cell at last and returning to Libya, my homeland. I would like to first of all take the opportunity to extend my gratitude to the many people of Scotland, and elsewhere, who have sent me their good wishes.

I bear no ill will to the people of Scotland; indeed, it is one of my regrets that I have been unable to experience any meaningful aspect of Scottish life, or to see your country. To the staff in HM Prison Greenock, and before that at HM Prison Barlinnie, I wish to express thanks for the kindness that they were able to show me.

For those who assisted in my medical and nursing care; who tried to make my time here as comfortable as possible, I am of course grateful. My legal team has worked tirelessly on my behalf; I wish to thank Advocates Margaret Scott QC, Jamie Gilchrist QC, Shelagh McCall and Martin Richardson together with the team at Taylor & Kelly, for all of their gallant efforts in my bid to clear my name. I know they share, in no small measure, my disappointment about the abandonment of my appeal.

Many people, including the relatives of those who died in, and over, Lockerbie, are, I know, upset that my appeal has come to an end; that nothing more can be done about the circumstances surrounding the Lockerbie bombing. I share their frustration. I had most to gain and nothing to lose about the whole truth coming out—until my diagnosis of cancer.

To those victims’ relatives who can bear to hear me say this: they continue to have my sincere sympathy for the unimaginable loss that they have suffered. To those who bear me ill will, I do not return that to you.

And, lastly, I must turn to my conviction and imprisonment. To be incarcerated in a far-off land, completely alien to my way of life and culture, has not only been a shock but also a most profound dislocation for me personally and for my whole family.

I have had many burdens to overcome during my incarceration. I had to sit through a trial which I had been persuaded to attend on the basis that it would have been scrupulously fair. In my second, most recent, appeal I disputed such a description.

I had to endure a verdict being issued at the conclusion of that trial which is now characterized by my lawyers, and the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, as unreasonable. To me, and to other right thinking people back at home in Libya, and in the international community, it is nothing short of a disgrace.

As a result of my surrender, and that judgment of the court, I had to spend over 10 years in prison. I cannot find words in my language or yours that give proper expression to the desolation I have felt. This horrible ordeal is not ended by my return to Libya.

It may never end for me until I die. Perhaps the only liberation for me will be death. And I say in the clearest possible terms, which I hope every person in every land will hear: all of this I have had to endure for something that I did not do.

The remaining days of my life are being lived under the shadow of the wrongness of my conviction. I have been faced with an appalling choice: to risk dying in prison in the hope that my name is cleared posthumously, or to return home still carrying the weight of the guilty verdict, which will never now be lifted. The choice which I made is a matter of sorrow, disappointment and anger, which I fear I will never overcome.

I say goodbye to Scotland and shall not return. My time here has been very unhappy and I do not leave a piece of myself. But to the country’s people I offer my gratitude and best wishes.

—Aug. 20, 2009

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Man hit by six meteorites blames aliens

Meteorite


A MAN who claims he is being targeted by extraterrestrials after a series of meteorite strikes on his house has now been hit by a sixth space rock in the space of a few years. Radivoje Lajic first came to international attention in 2008, shortly after the fifth meteorite had crashed into the roof of his house in the northern village of Gornji Lajici in Bosnia.

And now, within the past month, another rock has hit the roof of his house, in defiance of all the odds - making it six strikes since the plague of meteorites began in 2007. Experts at Belgrade University have confirmed that all the falling rocks he has handed over were meteorites. They are now trying to work out what exactly it is about his house that particularly attracts them. The strikes always happen when it is raining heavily, he says, never when there are clear skies.

Lajic has his own explanation, of course. After the fifth rock struck his house, he said: "I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don't know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit six times has to be deliberate."

50-year-old Lajic has had a steel girder reinforced roof put on the house to protect it from the alien bombardment - which he funded by selling one of the meteorites to a university in the Netherlands.

"I have no doubt I am being targeted by aliens," he adds. "They are playing games with me. I don't know why they are doing this. When it rains I can't sleep for worrying about another strike."

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Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Osama Bin Lyin?

Washington's Blog:

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Everyone knows that Osama Bin Laden confessed to 9/11 on videotape.

Admittedly, German experts say (rough English translation here) that the Bin Laden confession tape was mistranslated. But what do the Germans know, other than how to make beer?

Sure, an American computer expert says that a Bin Laden video released in 2007 was spliced together from earlier footage, and that:

There are so many splices that I cannot help but wonder if someone spliced words and phrases together. I also cannot rule out a vocal imitator during the frozen-frame audio. The only way to prove that the audio is really bin Laden is to see him talking in the video....

But he's just a pencil-neck computer geek, so why should we listen to him?

Yeah, Swiss scientists are 95% certain that an early post-9/11 Bin Laden tape was a fake. They conclude that all of the later Bin Laden tapes are probably fakes as well. But what do the Swiss know, besides banking and milk chocolate?

Okay, one of the world's top experts on Bin Laden - Bruce Lawrence of Duke University - says that recent Bin Laden tapes are fake. He also says that the tape in which Bin Laden confessed to 9/11 is a fake, and that the top Bin Laden experts in the Department of Homeland Security agree. But he must be a communist or something.

And it is interesting that - as confirmed by the Washington Post's Spy Talk columnist - the CIA admitted to faking a Bin Laden videotape using CIA personnel:

The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.

But that is obviously just an isolated incident which doesn't mean that any other Bin Laden tapes are fake.

Because everyone knows that America doesn't engage in propaganda.

Note: This essay does not have anything to do with 9/11 itself or Bin Laden's role in 9/11. It doesn't have to do with the war in Afghanistan. It focuses solely on the question of whether or not America ever engages in propaganda and disinformation.

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Thursday, July 22, 2010

Shirley Sherrod's Dad

Will Bunch at Huffington Post:


The Story Behind the 1965 Killing of Sherrod's Dad

For all the over-warped speed in initially getting that bogus version of the Shirley Sherrod story out there and pushing her our the door at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, other details in this story have been surprisingly slow to emerge. In particular, I'd been waiting to hear more about a comment from Sherrod on CNN that her father had been murdered by a white farmer in 1965.

Now we know a few details. Her dad was named Hosie Miller, and he was a deacon at Thankful Baptist Church in Newton, Ga., toward the southwest corner of the state. He was also a farmer who, according to CNN, grew corn, peanuts, cotton and cucumbers and raised hogs, cows and goats. Forty-five years ago, Hosie Miller was shot to death -- in the back, no less -- by a white farmer in what his daughter now describes as ostensibly a dispute over a few cows, although the exact circumstances were murky.

A grand jury investigated the case, and no one was charged. All of the grand jurors were white, as was typically the case before the passage of the landmark civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s. From that incident, a movement was born. Indeed, according to this article, Shirley Sherrod's mother -- Grace Hall Miller -- became the leader of the civil rights movement in Baker County after the killing, organizing marches and other protests from her home. The then 17-year-old Shirley Miller decided to stay in the South and become an activist; she soon married one of the leaders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, a man by the name of Charles Sherrod. Shirley Sherrod told CNN that ""I decided to stay in the South and work for change."

How unusual was it for a black man to be killed by a white man in the Deep South up through the mid-1960s with no one brought to justice. Way too common. We hear a lot about one particular killing in Mississippi -- the 1964 murder of a trio of civil rights activists that included two white college kids from up North -- but in reality dozens of black men were killed for taking a stand, for trying to vote or just on a whim. If you want to read something sobering, check out this letter (PDF) from 2007 from the Southern Poverty Law Center, asking the FBI to investigate some 74 additional unsolved deaths from the era.

For example:

Banks, Isadore - Marion, Ark., 1954

Banks' charred corpse was found chained to a tree. Black press reports speculated he was killed by whites who wanted his land. His property was later rented by white farmers.

Bolden, Larry - Chattanooga, Tenn., 1958

Bolden, 15, was shot by a white policeman. No arrests were made.

Brazier, James - Dawson, Ga., 1958

Brazier was beaten to death in front of his wife and children by two police officers. County Sheriff Z.T. Matthews was later quoted in the Washington Post saying, "There's nothing like fear to keep niggers in line."

Brewer, Thomas - Columbus, Ga., 1956

Brewer was instrumental in forming a local chapter of the NAACP in 1937. He was shot seven times outside his office by white politician Lucio Flowers. A grand jury failed to indict.

Brooks, Hilliard - Montgomery, Ala., 1952

Brooks was shot by a police officer after initially refusing to get off a city bus when the driver claimed he had not paid his fare. A coroner said the murder was justified because Brooks resisted arrest.

Brown, Charles - Yazoo City, Miss., 1957

A white man shot Brown, who was visiting the white man's sister. The Justice Department handed the case over to the state.

Brown, Jessie - Winona, Miss., 1965

The 1965 NAACP annual report claimed white farmer R.M. Gibson killed Brown.

Brumfield, Carrie - Franklinton, La., 1967

Brumfield was found shot to death in his car on a rural road. He was shot once in the chest with a .22-caliber revolver.

Brumfield, Eli - McComb, Miss., 1961

Police officer B.F. Elmore alleged self-defense after shooting Brumfield. Police claimed Brumfield jumped from his car with a pocket knife after police pulled him over for speeding.

Now that's just the letter, "B", OK? There's 65 more. And you'll notice that Hosie Miller -- gunned down by a white man in a dispute over cows -- isn't even on the list. You have to wonder how many more Hosie Millers there was in a place like Georgia.

Which I think puts an exclamation point on this week's hysteria over Shirley Sherrod. We've talked and written so much in the last decade, in the context of the Middle East especially, about the cycle of violence -- about how death and destruction and watching loved ones die sow the anger that causes the tragic pattern to repeat.

But there was a war right here in this country, too, not so long ago, with a surprisingly long list of victims. That violence is what started Shirley Sherrod on the road to who she is today -- it compelled here to stay in the South and fight, which is understandable, but then it led to her redemptive vision and her notion of transcending race, which -- given what happened to her own flesh and blood -- is nothing short of remarkable. Ironically, a surprising number of positive things have come out of this bizarre Sherrod tale -- but nothing more positive than resurrecting the forgotten memory of Hosie Miller.


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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

BP Blowout Well Con In Progress

BP is still keeping secret most of the information about the well—studies made before the license was given, current data, flow rates, sonar studies, etc.

Washington's blog:


Top Expert: There Were No Natural Seeps Within 3 Kilometers of Blown Out Well

University of California Berkeley engineering professor Robert Bea is one of the world's top experts on oil drilling disasters. Bea is an expert in offshore drilling and a high-level governmental adviser concerning disasters. He is also a member of the Deepwater Horizon Study Group.

As the Times-Picayune reported yesterday:

Scientists have discovered four gas "seeps" at or near BP's blown-out Macondo well since Saturday ...

***

Berkeley engineering professor Bob Bea has very little confidence in what’s been said publicly about the seeps.

He’s troubled that we’re just now hearing about seeps three kilometers away, because a survey of the seabed conducted before BP drilled its well didn’t indicate anything like that.

“There was nothing that indicated the presence of such a seep,” Bea said. “I wonder why we’re just now finding that out?”

BP has yet to release other ROV video that Bea’s study group requested more than a month ago about what may have been shots.
3 kilometers equals 1.9 miles, less than the 2 mile distance for the furthest seep discussed by the government to date.

I told you that the "natural seep" argument was a red herring.

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Monday, July 19, 2010

I remember when the Republican fundraisers were the crooks...!

the money quote, so to speak:

"Nemazee had been the national finance chairman of Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign."

AP:
Ex-Clinton fundraiser gets 12 years in prison

NEW YORK — A wealthy Manhattan investment banker who was once a top fundraiser for Hillary Rodham Clinton and other big-name Democrats has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for bank fraud.

Hassan Nemazee (hah-SAHN' nah-MAH'-zee) was sentenced Thursday in federal court in Manhattan.

He had reached a plea deal in March. He has admitted to three counts of bank fraud and one count of wire fraud.

Prosecutors say he forged signatures and concocted bogus account statements to conceal a scam in which he was using proceeds from new loans to pay off older ones.

Nemazee had been the national finance chairman of Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. He also raised money for President Barack Obama and other prominent Democrats.

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Sunday, July 18, 2010

Con of the Decade, parts 1 and 2

Charles Hugh Smith:



The Con of the Decade Part I (July 8, 2010)


The con of the decade (Part I) involves the transfer of private debt to the public (the marks), who then pays interest forever to the con artists.

I've laid out the Con of the Decade (Part I) in outline form:

1. Enable trillions of dollars in mortgages guaranteed to default by packaging unlimited quantities of them into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), creating umlimited demand for fraudulently originated loans.

2. Sell these MBS as "safe" to credulous investors, institutions, town councils in Norway, etc., i.e. "the bezzle" on a global scale.

3. Make huge "side bets" against these doomed mortgages so when they default then the short-side bets generate billions in profits.

4. Leverage each $1 of actual capital into $100 of high-risk bets.

5. Hide the utterly fraudulent bets offshore and/or off-balance sheet (not that the regulators you had muzzled would have noticed anyway).

6. When the longside bets go bad, transfer hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal guarantees, bailouts and backstops into the private hands which made the risky bets, either via direct payments or via proxies like AIG. Enable these private Power Elites to borrow hundreds of billions more from the Treasury/Fed at zero interest.

7. Deposit these funds at the Federal Reserve, where they earn 3-4%. Reap billions in guaranteed income by borrowing Federal money for free and getting paid interest by the Fed.

8. As profits pile up, start buying boatloads of short-term U.S. Treasuries. Now the taxpayers who absorbed the trillions in private losses and who transferred trillions in subsidies, backstops, guarantees, bailouts and loans to private banks and corporations, are now paying interest on the Treasuries their own money purchased for the banks/corporations.

9. Slowly acquire trillions of dollars in Treasuries--not difficult to do as the Federal government is borrowing $1.5 trillion a year.

10. Stop buying Treasuries and dump a boatload onto the market, forcing interest rates to rise as supply of new T-Bills exceeds demand (at least temporarily). Repeat as necessary to double and then triple interest rates paid on Treasuries.

11. Buy hundreds of billions in long-term Treasuries at high rates of interest. As interest rates rise, interest payments dwarf all other Federal spending, forcing extreme cuts in all other government spending.

12. Enjoy the hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments being paid by taxpayers on Treasuries that were purchased with their money but which are safely in private hands.

Since the Federal government could potentially inflate away these trillions in Treasuries, buy enough elected officials to force austerity so inflation remains tame. In essence, these private banks and corporations now own the revenue stream of the Federal government and its taxpayers. Neat con, and the marks will never understand how "saving our financial system" led to their servitude to the very interests they bailed out.

The circle is now complete: in "saving our financial system," the public borrowed trillions and transferred the money to private Power Elites, who then buy the public debt with the money swindled out of the taxpayer. Then the taxpayers transfer more wealth every year to the Power Elites/Plutocracy in the form of interest on the Treasury debt. The Power Elites will own the debt that was taken on to bail them out of bad private bets: this is the culmination of privatized gains, socialized risk.

In effect, it's a Third World/colonial scam on a gigantic scale: plunder the public treasury, then buy the debt which was borrowed and transferred to your pockets. You are buying the country with money you borrowed from its taxpayers. No despot could do better.


I would like to acknowledge Allan Dover and B.C. of Imperial Economics for helping to clarify my thinking on these topics.




The Con of the Decade Part II (July 9, 2010)


The con of the decade (Part II) involves sheltering the Power Elites' income while raising taxes on the debt-serfs to pay the interest owed the Power Elites.

The Con of the Decade (Part II) meshes neatly with the first Con of the Decade. Yesterday I described how the financial Plutocracy can transfer ownership of the Federal government's income stream via using the taxpayer's money to buy the debt that the taxpayers borrowed to bail out the Plutocracy.

In order for the con to work, however, the Power Elites and their politico toadies in Congress, the Treasury and the Fed must convince the peasantry that low tax rates on unearned income are not just "free market capitalism at its best" but that they are also "what the country needs to get moving again."

The first step of the con was successfully fobbed off on the peasantry in 2001: lower the taxes paid by the most productive peasants marginally while massively lowering the effective taxes paid by the financial Plutocracy.

One Year Later, No Sign of Improvement in America's Income Inequality Problem:

Income inequality has grown massively since 2000. According to Harvard Magazine, 66% of 2001-2007's income growth went to the top 1% of Americans, while the other 99% of the population got a measly 6% increase. How is this possible? One thing to consider is that in 2001, George W. Bush cut $1.3 trillion in taxes, and 32.6% of the cut went to the top 1%. Another factor is Bush's decision to increase the national debt from $5 trillion to $11 trillion. The combination of increased government spending and lower taxes helped the top 1% considerably.

The second part of the con is to mask much of the Power Elites' income streams behind tax shelters and other gaming-of-the-system so the advertised rate appears high to the peasantry but the effective rate paid on total income is much much lower.

The tax shelters are so numerous and so effective that it takes thousands of pages of tax codes and armies of toadies to pursue them all: family trusts, oil depletion allowances, tax-free bonds and of course special one-off tax breaks arranged by "captured" elected officials.

Step three is to convince the peasantry that $600 in unearned income (capital gains) should be taxed in the same way as $600 million. The entire key to the U.S. tax code is to tax earned income heavily but tax unearned income (the majority of the Plutocracy's income is of course unearned) not at all or very lightly.

In a system which rewarded productive work and provided disincentives to rampant speculation and fraud, the opposite would hold: unearned income would be taxed at much higher rates than earned income, which would be taxed lightly, especially at household incomes below $100,000.

If the goal were to encourage "investing" while reining in the sort of speculations which "earn" hedge fund managers $600 million each (no typo, that was the average of the top 10 hedgies' personal take of their funds gains), then all unearned income (interest, dividends, capital gains, rents from property, oil wells, etc.) up to $6,000 a year would be free--no tax. Unearned income between $6,000 and $60,000 would be taxed at 20%, roughly half the top rate for earned income. This would leave 95% of U.S. households properly encouraged to invest via low tax rates.

Above $60,000, then unearned income would be taxed the same as earned income, and above $1 million (the top 1/10 of 1% of households) then it would be taxed at 50%. Above $10 million, it would be taxed at 60%. Such a system would offer disincentives to the speculative hauls made by the top 1/10 of 1% while encouraging investing in the lower 99%.

Could such a system actually be passed into law and enforced by a captured, toady bureaucracy and Congress? Of course not. But it is still a worthy exercise to take apart the rationalizations being offered to justify rampant speculative looting, collusion, corruption and fraud.

The last step of the con is to raise taxes on the productive peasantry to provide the revenues needed to pay the Plutocracy its interest on Treasuries. If the "Bush tax cuts" are repealed, the actual effective rates paid on unearned income will remain half (20%) of the rates on earned income (wages, salaries, profits earned from small business, etc.) which are roughly 40% at higher income levels.

The financial Plutocracy will champion the need to rein in Federal debt, now that they have raised the debt via plundering the public coffers and extended ownership over that debt.

Now the con boils down to insuring the peasantry pay enough taxes to pay the interest on the Federal debt--interest which is sure to rise considerably. The 1% T-Bill rates were just part of the con to convince the peasantry that trillions of dollars could be borrowed "with no consequences." Those rates will steadily rise once the financial Power Elites own enough of the Treasury debt. Then the game plan will be to lock in handsome returns on long-term Treasuries, and command the toady politicos to support "austerity."

The austerity will not extend to the financial Elites, of course. That's the whole purpose of the con. "Some are more equal than others," indeed.

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Of Course Politicians Don’t Listen to Ordinary Citizens. Why Would They?

...a question I've found myself asking myself recently, and myself has not found a good answer...



2010 July 18

So, apparently 68% of Americans think that the political class doesn’t listen to them. After TARP, where calls were running between 100:1 to 1200:1 against, passed, the failure of Congress to get out of Iraq after 2006, the failure of the 70%+ supported public option, and on and on, the only mysterious thing is why it’s only 68%.

But why should the political class listen? They get the majority of their reelection funds from corporations and the rich. Their spouses and children are given good jobs by such donors, and if ordinary people do actually ever vote them out for not looking after their interests, well, as long as they went down doing what they were supposed to, they’ll still be very well taken care of.

Get elected, do what your corporate masters tell you to, and you’ll never ever have to worry about money ever again.

Only a sucker or an idealist would do anything else.

This is the fundamental problem with the US. There is no accountability for the political class. They and those who take care of them have made sure of it. Go to war with a nation which has never attacked the US based on a big lie propaganda campaign, or spy on millions of Americans, or torture, or deregulate the economy so that Wall Street can cash in and crash the economy, and hey, so what, there’s no cost for you.

And as long as there is no cost for them, they’ll keep doing it. Just like Wall Street, having been bailed out after crashing the world economy, will do it again. They got rich doing it, why wouldn’t they do it again.

They’d have to be suckers or idealists not to.

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Saturday, July 17, 2010

The real composition of the deficit

Michael Collins at the Agonist:


Why do elected leaders hate the citizens? Nihilists at the helm!


The graph to the right is from the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities. It shows the relative contribution of various factors to the deficit. It's not a full exposition, but take it for what it's worth. If we stopped the wars, restored the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest citizens, and ended TARP, we would make a huge contribution to reducing the current deficit.

So why hasn't that happened? Congress and the White House would rather kill people overseas, reward Wall Street failures, and coddle the wealthiest citizens than reducethe deficit.

The solutions aren't that hard. Will they take action? Of course not.

Why do those in charge hate the citizens of this country? It's a fair assumption to say that they do hate us when they avoid obvious and direct solutions to a major problem. Instead, they've put together a stacked entitlement commission to tombstone Social Security. By their actions, their program is clear. "The middle class is being systematically wiped out" by the current leaders.

They ALL know this. Most of them do absolutely nothing.

All but a very few should be fired in 2010, without regard to party. If the next crew does the same, fire them too.

Addition: Have all federal candidates sign a contract - strictly enforced A Contract with the Citizens. Stiff penalties,like walking the plank if they deviate.



...and here is an insightful commenter's answer to the question, "Why do our elected leaders hate the citizens?":

"Why do elected leaders hate the citizens?"

I used to agonise night and day over the relentless hollowing out of American ideals, jurisprudence and governance. It really pained and depressed me to witness it by the decade, to live through it year upon year, helpless to turn us from war and ruin to peace and prosperity. To see where America is headed in its blind and fearful groping for wealth and power and safety and to also know there is no steering or stopping this thing, that it runs on gravity -- cost me so much time wasted on organizing and protesting, working Party politics, reading and studying, writing and marching, crying and thinking and talking . . . if I'd put all that effort into permaculture gardening it would have done far more actual good here on Earth, under the sun and sky.

But I marched and protested and petitioned and voted and agonised over America's penchant for endless war until I couldn't do it any more, because I became numb. Literally wordless. Nothing more to write or say to anyone. Not when all the words in the world can't steer this thing. It is not in our hands, the steering wheel.

In the face of all passion, logic, ideals, humanity -- the American war machine rolls on, right over real lives, right over human beings, in this country and Over There in Eastasia. And Oceania. The whole world is divided into theaters of American warfare. It is the perennial business of America to make war, to make "the world safe for United Fruit Company." (Smedley Butler)

I once heard tell of a Beatnik out in California, in the early Fifties, who plunked down court fees and changed his name to Neil Ism. I laughed at the time, but one morning a couple years ago realized that I knew this man very well, without ever meeting him. And that he was years ahead of me. One fine morning he chose gardening, period.

For it has gradually dawned on me that America IS just a machine, and this has taken the sting out of losing my love, my country. She's not a shining goal or ideal to me anymore; she's not a vision of loveliness. She's a thing with wheels and treads, something you get out of the way of. Or don't.

There is actually no human being or group of human beings in definitive charge, no group of people with a philosophy of Gotterdammerung in mind. As far as human beings go, there is just the pursuit of happiness, to use Jefferson's fine euphemism for human beings seeking wealth, safety, freedom from wants, and power. Nope, the human beings running organizations, institutions, governments and corporations are not starkly different from John and Jane Q. Publick. One pant leg at a time, and all that.

Sure, there are lots more functioning sociopaths and psychopaths in the upper ranks of all large organizations, but their goals and actions are tempered by all the more balanced people within the organization. In a fully pathological organization you would routinely use flamethrowers and artillery on a daily basis against your competitors, even if they only represented a 1% chance of ever challenging you. It would be the logical thing to do, in the simple pursuit of self interest.

Very few modern organizations actually exercise this approach.

No, it isn't the people, putting their pants on in the morning in order to pursue happiness all day, that steer America.

It is the organizations themselves, viewed as persons, that are utterly ruthless, soul-less psychopaths. And they have come to steer America. The human beings, in their pants, are just along for the ride.

Corporations that are organized for profit -- in particular -- are quite insane in this regard. It is not a matter of them following the law -- the law says they are created to seek profit for their own 'self' and shareholders only, and can consider nothing else. Nor is it a matter of writing laws to restrain or regulate them -- they write the laws of the land now, and always have -- because wealth is influence is power.

The wealthiest 5000 families in America also belong in this category, for their lives entire are at the service of their great wealth. And, their wealth is entirely invested within huge, psychopathic corporations. There is no difference in the machinery.

Our original Constitution was heavily influenced to favor wealthy white men -- landowners, slaveholders and bankers -- over the working man, or any woman, slave, or native. These wealthy white men were the feudal lords of the day, their godly superiority over others and their right to write the laws based entirely on the fact and influence of their many possessions. The Constitution and all established law reflected their views before other views. It is so in almost every nation today. Wealth is influence is power, and the grip of wealth upon government only gets tighter over time, like a python's does.

Corporations, especially when legally considered to possess every right and trait of living human beings, are our current feudal lords, our Really Large Citizens. America's laws and government(s) not only favors them, it IS them, for they finance the electees, and the elections, and they write the laws for the electees to vote upon -- very often without reading or understanding them. In State legislatures and in Congress, voting is by Party, and Party answers to electoral power, which answers to funding, which comes from corporations, who have agendas to be put into legal standing.

Agendas that aim to increase their grip on government, and their freedom to operate unregulated, unchallengeable, untouchable, too big to fail. There comes a point when government becomes a nuisance.

Power increases itself, just as wealth increases itself. Right now, the corporations of America hold more power than they ever have before, more than they ever dreamed would be theirs, more than they know quite what to do with. They are drunk with it, and yet want more. There comes a point when government becomes a real nuisance.

It is these 'corporate persons' our government looks out and sees, standing tall between our shining seas. The government sees and serves these Really Large Citizens. As for you and me, ehhh, not so much.

We actual human persons out here, in our pants, are seen as cattle, mere fodder units (as the Bush Family calls us), put here by God or Happenstance to serve as laborers and consumers and debtors for the corporations -- and damn sure for nothing more. If we were algae or germs we would receive the same consideration as homo sapiens sapiens do in America today. We have a role to play in the affairs of the nation -- laborers, consumers and debtors -- and have been granted the latitude to either fit in or be smooshed, no more. And it just gets tighter this way.

Even the so-called voting of we humans is so pre-arranged between corporate-friendly candidates as to be mere kabuki -- we can vote Red Party or Blue Party and no more real choice is offered. Votes aren't even counted any more, just pretend-counted in the digital depths of black boxes no one can ever look into since they belong to a registered corporation which has the inalienable right to privacy. If there were more votes cast than there are people registered to vote there is no recount, and no recourse -- even in the courts.

"Why do elected leaders hate the citizens?"

Your very question is wrong, sir. An unfortunate misperception on your part.

Our elected leaders do not hate the citizens. No no. Dear God, how they love them! They cater to their every whim, they roll in the hay with them at all hours, they take them in and take them on by the half dozen like legendary Shakespearean whores -- as long as those citizens are corporate persons in good wealth well then it's "Roll Me Over And Do It Again!" Leave some money on the dresser.

Corporations are the America's citizens. Human beings are cattle. Your mistake is mistaking human beings for citizens.

OMG that is sooooo 18th Century!

Antifa July 16, 2010 - 5:04pm

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Friday, July 09, 2010

Denninger shows why the Stock Market is a fraud

and, coincidentally, why no regular small-time investor should still be in it...

via David Degraw:

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Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Afghanistan: History Repeats Itself

New Statesman: (via Cryptogon)
[. . .]

There has always been an absolute refusal by the Afghans to be ruled by foreigners, or to accept any government perceived as being imposed on the country from abroad. Now as then, the puppet ruler installed by the west has proved inadequate to the job. Too weak, unpopular and corrupt to provide security or development, he has been forced to turn on his puppeteers in order to retain even a vestige of legitimacy in the eyes of his people. Recently, Karzai has accused the US, the UK and the UN of orchestrating a fraud in last year’s elections, described Nato forces as “an army of occupation”, and even threatened to join the Taliban if Washington kept putting pressure on him. Shah Shuja did much the same thing in 1842, towards the end of his rule, and was known to have offered his allegiance and assistance to the insurgents who eventually toppled and beheaded him.

Now as then, there have been few tangible signs of improvement under the western-backed regime. Despite the US pouring approximately $80bn into Afghanistan, the roads in Kabul are still more rutted than those in the smallest provincial towns of Pakistan. There is little health care; for any severe medical condition, patients still have to fly to India. A quarter of all teachers in Afghanistan are themselves illiterate. In many areas, district governance is almost non-existent: half the governors do not have an office, more than half have no electricity, and most receive only $6 a month in expenses. Civil servants lack the most basic education and skills.

This is largely because $76.5bn of the $80bn committed to the country has been spent on military and security, and most of the remaining $3.5bn on international consultants, some of whom are paid in excess of $1,000 a day, according to an Afghan government report. This, in turn, has had other negative effects. As in 1842, the presence of large numbers of well-paid foreign troops has caused the cost of food and provisions to rise, and living standards to fall. The Afghans feel they are getting poorer, not richer.

There are other similarities. Then as now, the war effort was partially privatised: it was not so much the British army as a corp­oration, the East India Company, that provided most of the troops who fought the war for Britain in 1842, just as today both the British and the Americans have subcontracted much of their security work to private companies. When I visited the British embassy, I found that many of the security guards at the gatehouse were not army or military police, but from Group 4 Security. The US security contracts offered to Blackwater/Xe and other private security forces under Dick Cheney’s ideologically driven policy of privatising war are worth many millions of dollars.

Finally, now as then, there has been an attempt at a last show of force in order to save face before withdrawal. As happened in 1842, it has achieved little except civilian casualties and the further alienation of the Afghans. As one of the tribal elders from Jegdalek said to me: “How many times can they apologise for killing our innocent women and children and expect us to forgive them? They come, they bomb, they kill us and then they say, ‘Oh, sorry, we got the wrong people.’ And they keep doing that.”

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Jonathan Schwarz demonstrates exactly how the conspiracy of media censorship works, despite it's practitioners' protestations of ignorance

A Tiny Revolution:

I Happen to Have Marshall McLuhan Right Here

This is long and involved, but it may be my favorite post in the history of this blot.

PART ONE

Alex Perry, Africa bureau chief for Time, wrote a recent article about Congo that begins like this:

If you want to see what's wrong with Africa, take a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The size of Western Europe, with almost no paved roads, Congo is the sucking vortex where Africa's heart should be. Independent Congo gave the world Mobutu Sese Seko, who for 32 years impoverished his people while traveling the world in a chartered Concorde. His death in 1997 ushered in a civil war that killed 5.4 million people and unleashed a hurricane of rape on tens of thousands more.

PART TWO

Julie Hollar of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting pointed out:

...if you're going to charge Congo with being "what's wrong with Africa," you'd better give credit where credit is due. Independent Congo didn't give the world Mobutu; that gift belongs to the U.S. and Belgium, who supported the overthrow and assassination of democratically-elected Patrice Lumumba and helped prop up the horror that was Mobutu for decades afterward.

PART THREE

Alex Perry showed up in the comments section of Hollar's post and angrily berated her:

The idea that the US created Mobutu and maintained him in power belittles Africans and is typical of the kind of racism that dogs analysis of Africa...The US did not create Mobutu. They certainly did support him...The primary creator of Mobutu was Mobutu...

As for this lame idea that I, and the "mainstream media", are part of some giant conspiracy to lie, cover up, dissemble etc in the name of, I imagine, the "military industrial complex" or perhaps the CIA, what do you think happens here? Do you think I have a controller with a husky voice who directs my coverage by meeting me in badly lit subteranean car parks? Grow up. People who do my job die sometimes. I've known three myself. Do you really think we'd take those risk to tell lies? Your cheap and half-arsed conspiracies are insulting and infantile.

It's really an amazing freak-out by Perry; that's just part of it.

PART FOUR

Larry Devlin was the CIA's Station Chief in the Congo during most of the sixties, and just before his 2008 death, wrote a book about his experiences there.

Early in the book, Devlin describes the frustration the U.S. government felt with Patrice Lumumba, who was elected prime minister of the Congo as it gained independence from Belgium. This section, from p. 46, is about a July, 1960 meeting in Paris between Devlin, U.S. Ambassador to France Amory Houghton, U.S. Ambassador to Belgium William Burden, and U.S. Ambassador to the Congo Clare "Tim" Timberlake.

As you see, U.S. government officials straightforwardly told Henry Luce, the owner of Time, how to cover the Congo:

We moved onto Ambassador Houghton's office where we were joined by Ambassador Burden for more detailed talks concerning the Congo and its problems...During our discussions, Tim brought up a delicated matter: "Time magazine plans to do a cover story on Lumumba with his picture on the front of the magazine." He continued, "Celebrity coverage at home will make him even more difficult to deal with. He's a first-class headache as it is."

"Then why don't you get the story killed?" Burden asked. "Or at least modified?"

"I tried to persuade the Time man in Leopoldville until I was blue in the face," Tim replied. "But he said there was nothing he could do about it because the story had already been sent to New York."

"You can't expect much from a journalist at that level," Burden said pulling out his address book and flipping through the pages. He picked up the phone and put a call through to the personal assistant of Henry Luce, Time's owner.

Luce soon returned the call. After a brief, friendly exchange that made clear his personal relationship with Luce, Burden bluntly told him that he would have to change the Lumumba cover story. Luce apparently said that the magazine was about to go to press. "Oh, come on, Henry," Burden said, "you must have other cover stories in the can." They chatted for a few more minutes before Burden hung up.

A few days later in the United States we picked up a copy of the magazine with a new and different cover story. Lumumba had been relegated to the international section.

Devlin writes about another meeting in the U.S. soon afterward with CIA chief Allen Dulles, in which Devlin argued it was critical for the U.S. to maintain power in the Congo because it was one of the world's few sources of cobalt outside the Soviet Union. Devlin says he was "preaching to the converted."

PART FIVE

Time has an online archive of every issue they've ever published. Based on other events described by Devlin, the article about Lumumba that was moved to the inside of the magazine was almost certainly "Congo: The Monstrous Hangover" from the July 18, 1960 issue, or "Congo: Jungle Shipwreck" from July 25.

Devlin's story doesn't make clear whether the article's contents were changed or merely its placement. However, for Time's sake, I certainly hope the contents were changed too; both articles might as well be headlined "Crazed Africa Monkeys Rape the White Ladies."

PART SIX

This appears in the July 18, 1960 Time article:

The huge bonfires of joy died down in the cities of the Congo. The drums and tom-toms grew quiet. The last writhing dancers fell exhausted in the dust...

With a primeval howl, a nation of 14 million people reverted to near savagery, plunged backward into the long night of chaos. Tribe turned upon tribe. Blacks turned upon Europeans...

Prime Minister Lumumba gratuitously added new fuel to the flames. He...summoned the Belgian ambassador to make the fantastic charge that he had uncovered a Belgian plot to murder him. "The assassins were discovered and arrested in my residence," cried Lumumba. "They were armed to the teeth."

Lumumba was overthrown and murdered soon afterward by Congolese factions (including Mobutu) funded and supported by Belgium and the U.S.

PART SEVEN

In 2008, Alex Perry wrote an article for Time headlined "Come Back, Colonialism, All Is Forgiven." It's about a Congolese riverboat captain named Malu-Ebonga Charles who misses the old white masters terribly:

"On this river, all that you see — the buildings, the boats — only whites did that. After the whites left, the Congolese did not work. We did not know how to. For the past 50 years, we've just declined." He pauses. "They took this country by force," he says, with more than a touch of admiration. "If they came back, this time we'd give them the country for free."

PART EIGHT

None of this changes the fact that Time is a completely trustworthy source for information about Congo, and its edicts must never ever be questioned by the loony conspiracy racists of FAIR.

—Jonathan Schwarz

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