sizzlin' gizzards

Kevin Baker from 2009: Barack Hoover Obama

2010-10-20T01:41:00.000-07:00

This is so on target that I almost couldn't stand to read it. Now it's over a year after it came out, and it's even more appropriate, which means the worst has happened.

Harpers.org:

Barack Hoover Obama:
The best and the brightest blow it again
By Kevin Baker
Three months into his presidency, Barack Obama has proven to be every bit as charismatic and intelligent as his most ardent supporters could have hoped. At home or abroad, he invariably appears to be the only adult in the room, the first American president in at least forty years to convey any gravitas. Even the most liberal of voters are finding it hard to believe they managed to elect this man to be their president.

It is impossible not to wish desperately for his success as he tries to grapple with all that confronts him: a worldwide depression, catastrophic climate change, an unjust and inadequate health-care system, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ongoing disgrace of Guant·namo, a floundering education system.

Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable—indeed he will refuse—to seize the radical moment at hand.
[. . .]

I've left out a very revealing bio of Herbert Hoover, new to me, about him starting from a Dickens-like life of hardship and working to become a very successful engineer, businessman, and general doer of good deeds all around the world. He was elected president with very much the same hopes, expectatons, and enthusiasm with which Obama was elected.

Here's the end of the article:

No doubt, President Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would claim that by practicing “the art of the possible,” they are ensuring that “the perfect does not become the enemy of the good.” But by not even proposing the relevant legislation, Obama has ceded a key part of the process—so much so that his retreat seems not so much tactical as a reversion to his core political beliefs.

A major theme of Obama’s 2006 book The Audacity of Hope is impatience with “the smallness of our politics” and its “partisanship and acrimony.” He expresses frustration at how “the tumult of the sixties and the subsequent backlash continues to drive our political discourse,” and voices a professional appreciation for Ronald Reagan’s ability to exploit such divisions. The politician he admires the most—ironically enough, considering the campaign that was to come—is Bill Clinton. For all his faults, Clinton, in Obama’s eyes, “instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being presented to the American people” and came up with his “Third Way,” which “tapped into the pragmatic, non-ideological attitude of the majority of Americans.”

This is an analysis consistent with Obama’s personal story. Like Herbert Hoover, Obama grew up as an outsider and overcame formidable odds—hence his constant promotion of personal responsibility and education. He came of age in a time when hardworking young men and women like him went to Wall Street or to Silicon Valley, and—once properly “incentivized” by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—seemed to save the national economy, creating what appeared to be great general prosperity while doing well themselves. There’s no need to do battle with these strivers and achievers, individuals as accomplished in their fields as Obama is in his. All that’s required is to get them back on their feet, get the money running again, and maybe give them a few new rules to live by, a new set of incentives to get them back on track.

Just as Herbert Hoover came to internalize the “business progressivism” of his era as a welcome alternative to the futile, counterproductive conflicts of an earlier time, so has Obama internalized what might be called Clinton’s “business liberalism” as an alternative to useless battles from another time—battles that liberals, in any case, tended to lose.

Clinton’s business liberalism, however, is a chimera, every bit as much a capitulation to powerful and selfish interests as was Hoover’s 1920s progressivism. We are back in Evan Bayh territory here, espousing a “pragmatism” that is not really pragmatism at all, just surrender to the usual corporate interests. The common thread running through all of Obama’s major proposals right now is that they are labyrinthine solutions designed mainly to avoid conflict. The bank bailout, cap-and-trade on carbon emissions, health-care pools—all of these ideas are, like Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 1993 health plan, simultaneously too complicated to draw a constituency and too threatening for Congress to shape and pass as Obama would like. They bear the seeds of their own defeat.

Obama will have to directly attack the fortified bastions of the newest “new class”—the makers of the paper economy in which he came of age—if he is to accomplish anything. These interests did not spend fifty years shipping the greatest industrial economy in the history of the world overseas only to be challenged by a newly empowered, green-economy working class. They did not spend much of the past two decades gobbling up previously public sectors such as health care, education, and transportation only to have to compete with a reinvigorated public sector. They mean, even now, to use the bailout to make the government their helpless junior partner, and if they can they will devour every federal dollar available to recoup their own losses, and thereby preclude the use of any monies for the rest of Barack Obama’s splendid vision.

Franklin Roosevelt also took office imagining that he could bring all classes of Americans together in some big, mushy, cooperative scheme. Quickly disabused of this notion, he threw himself into the bumptious give-and-take of practical politics; lying, deceiving, manipulating, arraying one group after another on his side—a transit encapsulated by how, at the end of his first term, his outraged opponents were calling him a “traitor to his class” and he was gleefully inveighing against “economic royalists” and announcing, “They are unanimous in their hatred for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Obama should not deceive himself into thinking that such interest-group politics can be banished any more than can the cycles of Wall Street. It is not too late for him to change direction and seize the radical moment at hand. But for the moment, just like another very good man, Barack Obama is moving prudently, carefully, reasonably toward disaster.

I dearly wish this wasn't so prescient.

Let's get down to Basics: Terrorism 101

2010-09-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

Washingtonsblog:

Sunday, September 12, 2010The Warped Mission of the American Military: "Out-Terrorize the Terrorists"

A number of American soldiers are blowing the whistle on the American military practice of indiscriminately killing Iraq civilians - by randomly firing bullets in a 360 degree circle - anytime that an improvised explosive device hits a U.S. soldier.
As Truthout notes:
Both [specialists Ethan McCord and Josh Stieber] say they saw their mission as a plan to "out-terrorize the terrorists," in order to make the general populace more afraid of the Americans than they were of insurgent groups.

In the interview with [Constitutional lawyer Scott] Horton, Horton pressed Stieber:

"... a fellow veteran of yours from the same battalion has said that you guys had a standard operating procedure, SOP, that said - and I guess this is a reaction to some EFP attacks on y'all's Humvees and stuff that killed some guys - that from now on if a roadside bomb goes off, IED goes off, everyone who survives the attack get out and fire in all directions at anybody who happens to be nearby ... that this was actually an order from above. Is that correct? Can you, you know, verify that?

Stieber answered:

"Yeah, it was an order that came from Kauzlarich himself, and it had the philosophy that, you know, as Finkel does describe in the book, that we were under pretty constant threat, and what he leaves out is the response to that threat. But the philosophy was that if each time one of these roadside bombs went off where you don't know who set it ... the way we were told to respond was to open fire on anyone in the area, with the philosophy that that would intimidate them, to be proactive in stopping people from making these bombs ..."

Terrorism is defined as:
The use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.
So McCord and Stieber are correct: this constitutes terrorism by American forces in Iraq.
Of course, America's institutionalized policy of torture (see this and this) is also terrorism. As I pointed out last year:
An article today in Der Spiegel describes a study on the use of torture over the last couple of thousand years:
A new book, ["Extreme Violence in the Visuals and Texts of Antiquity"] by Martin Zimmerman, a professor of ancient history in Munich, looks at current research into the kinds of violence that inspired "loathing, dread, horror and disgust."

In the ancient Far East, where there were large states peopled by many different ethnicities, leaders demonstrated their might by inventing ingenious new tortures and agonizing methods of execution -- as a way to keep the population obedient...

The issue of state-sanctioned torture to achieve political goals is still a current one.
The study reinforces what I wrote last year:
Listen to the testimony to Congress by a representative of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
"Governments that use torture intend to intimidate their citizens in order to maintain control; those who are tortured become examples of the consequences of dissent."
Indeed, this is a well-known tactic for brutal regimes. Take Zimbabwe, for example:
"Victims and eyewitnesses told Human Rights Watch that [Zimbabwe’s brutal regime] has set up detention centers . . . to round up and instill fear in suspected political opponents."
Torture is a form of terrorism, plain and simple.

As the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services director told Congress:
"... torture is the deliberate mental and physical damage caused by governments to individuals to ... terrorize society."
And the U.S. policy of assassinating people all over the world (including Americans) - without trial - is a form of terrorism as well.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new. As the former director of the National Security Agency said:
By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism - in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.

(the audio is here).

And as Truthout points out, the 360 degree firing on innocent bystanders is most definitely a war crime:
High-level orders to kill civilians in the context of retaliation for attacks on forces have already been successfully prosecuted as a war crime. In 1944, German SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler ordered the execution of civilians in the ratio of ten to one for every German soldier killed in a March 1944 attack by Italian partisans. Kappler was sentenced to life in prison. The executions took place in the Caves of Ardeatine in Italy, and were made into the subject of a movie starring Richard Burton. None of the lower-ranking soldiers who actually carried the order out were prosecuted.
***
The attack which spurred the World War II German commander's retaliatory executions, intended as collective punishment for not informing on partisans, was an IED planted in a garbage container. Kappler's rank was the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel.
The ironic thing is that top conservative and liberal terrorism experts say that torture and other war crimes increase terrorism and reduce national security.

And terrorism is bad for the economy as well.

Homeland Security at Work

2010-09-12T12:58:00.000-07:00

Does this sound familiar....?

savanahnow.com:

Effingham deputies call feds after arresting Russians with shovel, wire cutters outside Georgia Power plant
Posted: September 9, 2010 - 6:05pm | Updated: September 9, 2010 - 7:31pm

By DeAnn Komanecky
SPRINGFIELD — Effingham County sheriff deputies have reported the early Sunday morning arrest of three men to the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The men, two from Russia and one from Kazakhstan, were found near Georgia Power’s Plant McIntosh on Old Augusta Road about 1 a.m. Sunday after a ranger with the Department of Natural Resources reported a suspicious vehicle, Effingham County sheriff’s spokesman David Ehsanipoor said.

Deputies reported the men, who were inside a 1995 Nissan Pathfinder, had a machete, shovel, wire cutters and ski masks. One man also had black silk stockings in his front left pocket.

Arrested were Evgeniy Luzhetskiy, of Kazakhastan Nail Idiatullin and Rustem Ibragimov of Russia. All three reported they lived in Charleston, S.C., deputies reported.

The men were all charged with possession of tools during the commission of a crime.

The three were released after being interviewed by task force members, Ehsanipoor said.

"They did all have visas that allowed them to be here and are supposed to be leaving the country soon."

Here's your tax cut for the rich at work

2010-09-11T09:43:00.000-07:00

Let freedom ring's Talking Points Memo Blog:

What the wealthy did with their tax cuts

September 9, 2010, 12:31PM

According to the the U.S. census US capital investment in foreign countries has gone from $1.3 trillion in 2000 to $3.2 trillion in 2008 while at the same time the Bush tax cuts which overwhelmingly went to the wealthy cost 1.3 trillion per politifact. So the wealthy essentially took their tax cuts, intended per the Republicans to spur U.S. jobs, and invested them and more in foreign countries, not the U.S..

Wikipedia apparently not biased enough toward Israel

2010-09-08T23:30:00.000-07:00

John Caruso at the Distant Ocean:

Since I've written an entire series of posts explaining why Wikipedia is all but useless when it comes to political topics, and especially Israel, I found this amusing indeed:
This week in Jerusalem, two Israeli groups hoping to smite their online enemies, both domestic and foreign, began a course in the "Zionist editing" of Wikipedia entries.

At the opening seminar, attended by about 80 activists, one of the organizers, Naftali Bennett, said that the aim of the course is to make sure that information in the online encyclopedia reflects the worldview of Zionist groups. For example, he said, "if someone searches [for] 'the Gaza flotilla,' we want to be there; to influence what is written there, how it’s written and to ensure that it is balanced and Zionist in nature."

Hilarious, sure, but at the same time I always appreciate it when people are able to generate oxymoronic phrases like "balanced and Zionist in nature" without the slightest awareness of the contradiction. And I particularly liked this bit...:
Another of the course’s organizers, Ayelet Shaked of the My Israel movement, told Arutz Sheva, an Israeli news organization based in the West Bank, that the use of the word "occupied" in Wikipedia entries discussing Palestinian territory conquered by Israel in 1967 was just the kind of problem she hoped a new team of editors could help fix.

...since as I've written before, the only mention of "occupied" or any variant thereof in the Wikipedia page for Jerusalem used to be "The land currently occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is considered one of the top candidates for Golgotha and thus has been a Christian pilgrimage site for the past two thousand years." That was in 2007, and in looking at it now the situation is still knee-slappingly comical (though nanoscopically better). Go "fix" that "problem", you lying zealots!

The prize for the person who incorporates the most Zionist changes in Wikipedia entries is apparently a trip in a hot-air balloon over Israel. But that's not all; I've heard rumors that the prole who makes the most doubleplusgood efforts to rectify WikiError may even get a guided tour of the Ministry of Truth!

Somehow I missed this US Senate testimony by Brzezenski

2010-09-06T01:24:00.000-07:00

Here's the straight scoop from the guy who invented the concept of War in Afghanistan.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070206230803/http://www.senate.gov/%7Eforeign/testimony/2007/BrzezinskiTestimony070201.pdf

SFRC Testimony -- Zbigniew Brzezinski
February 1, 2007

Mr. Chairman:
Your hearings come at a critical juncture in the U.S. war of choice in Iraq,
and I commend you and Senator Lugar for scheduling them.

It is time for the White House to come to terms with two central realities:

1. The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity.
Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America’s
global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some
abuses are tarnishing America’s moral credentials. Driven by
Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional
instability.

2. Only a political strategy that is historically relevant rather than
reminiscent of colonial tutelage can provide the needed framework for
a tolerable resolution of both the war in Iraq and the intensifying
regional tensions.

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody
involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to
be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large.
A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure
to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility
for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S.
blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against
Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire
eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and
potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by
false claims about WMD’s in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the
“decisive ideological struggle” of our time, reminiscent of the earlier
collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism
and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi
Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl
Harbor attack which precipitated America’s involvement in World War II.

Retiring Chairman of Obama's Economic Council Totally Clueless

2010-09-06T01:10:00.000-07:00

Some say the elite have no contact with the real world.

Washington Post: (via Cryptogon)

Economist Christina Romer serves up dismal news at her farewell luncheon

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 1, 2010; 10:40 PM

Lunch at the National Press Club on Wednesday caused some serious indigestion.
It wasn't the food; it was the entertainment. Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, was giving what was billed as her "valedictory" before she returns to teach at Berkeley, and she used the swan song to establish four points, each more unnerving than the last:
She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn't understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn't have much of an idea about how to fix things.

What she did have was a binder full of scary descriptions and warnings, offered with a perma-smile and singsong delivery: "Terrible recession. . . . Incredibly searing. . . . Dramatically below trend. . . . Suffering terribly. . . . Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . . Economic nightmare."

Anybody want dessert?

At week's end, Romer will leave the council chairmanship after what surely has been the most dismal tenure anybody in that post has had: a loss of nearly 4 million jobs in a year and a half. That's not Romer's fault; the financial collapse occurred before she, and Obama, took office. But she was the president's top economist during a time when the administration consistently underestimated the depth of the economy's troubles - miscalculations that have caused Americans to lose faith in the president and the Democrats.

Romer had predicted that Obama's stimulus package would keep the unemployment rate at 8 percent or less; it is now 9.5 percent. One of her bosses, Vice President Biden, told Democrats in January that "you're going to see, come the spring, net increase in jobs every month." The economy lost 350,000 jobs in June and July.
This is why nearly two-thirds of Americans think the country is on the wrong track - and why Obama's efforts to highlight the end of U.S. combat in Iraq and the resumption of Middle East peace talks have little chance of piercing the gloom as voters consider handing control of Congress back to the Republicans.

Romer's farewell luncheon had been scheduled for the club's ballroom, but attendance was light and the event was moved to a smaller room. Romer, wearing a green suit, read brightly from her text - a delivery at odds with the dark material she was presenting. When she and her colleagues began work, she acknowledged, they did not realize "how quickly and strongly the financial crisis would affect the economy." They "failed to anticipate just how violent the recession would be."

Even now, Romer said, mystery persists. "To this day, economists don't fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did or why they cut labor so much more than they normally would." Her defense was that "almost all analysts were surprised by the violent reaction."

That miscalculation, in turn, led to her miscalculation that the stimulus package would be enough to keep the unemployment rate from exceeding 8 percent. Without the policy, she had predicted, unemployment would soar to 9.5 percent. The plan passed, and unemployment went to 10 percent.

No wonder most Americans think the effort failed. But Romer argued, a bit too defensively, against the majority perception. "As the Council of Economic Advisers has documented in a series of reports to Congress, there is widespread agreement that the act is broadly on track," she declared. Further, she argued, "I will never regret trying to put analysis and quantitative estimates behind our policy recommendations."
But the problem is not that Romer did a quantitative analysis; the problem is that the quantitative analysis was wrong. Inevitably, this meant that, as she acknowledged, "the turnaround has been insufficient."
And what to do about this? Here, Romer became uncharacteristically hesitant to make predictions. She suggested some "innovative, low-cost policies." But the examples she cited - a "national export initiative," new trade agreements and a "pragmatic approach to regulation" - aren't exactly blockbusters.

"The only sure-fire ways for policymakers to substantially increase aggregate demand in the short run are for the government to spend more and tax less," she said. But asked about the main Republican proposal, extending George W. Bush's tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000, Romer replied that doing so would be "fiscally irresponsible."

The truth is that the Obama administration is pretty much out of options. Any major new effort would be blocked by Republicans, who have few alternatives of their own. "What we would all love to find - the inexpensive magic bullet to our economic troubles - the truth is it almost surely doesn't exist," Romer admitted.

The valedictory was becoming more of an elegy. At the end of the depressing forum, the moderator read a question submitted by a member of the audience: "You seem like you'd be a lot of fun at parties. Are you?"

The economist blushed. "You'll have to just take it for granted," she said.

Like 8 percent unemployment.

The rigged card game that is the US Economy

2010-09-03T13:49:00.000-07:00

Washingtonsblog:

Friday, September 3, 2010

Government Policy Caused the Drought of Unemployment

The unemployment rate has risen again for the the first time in 4 months. I predicted a growing, long-term unemployment problem last year.

Indeed, the government's actions have directly contributed to the rising tide of unemployment.
The Government Has Encouraged the Offshoring of American Jobs for More Than 50 Years
President Eisenhower re-wrote the tax laws so that they would favor investment abroad. President Kennedy railed against tax provisions that "consistently favor United States private investment abroad compared with investment in our own economy", but nothing changed.
For the last 60 years, the tax benefits to American companies making things abroad has encouraged jobs to move out of the U.S.
The Government Has Encouraged Mergers
The government has actively encouraged mergers, which destroy jobs.
For example, 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 is nothing new.
Citigroup's former chief executive says that when Citigroup was formed in 1998 out of the merger of banking and insurance giants, Alan Greenspan told him, “I have nothing against size. It doesn’t bother me at all”.
And the government has actively encouraged the big banks to grow into mega-banks.
The Government Has Let Unemployment Rise in an Attempt to Fight Inflation
As I noted last year:
The Federal Reserve is mandated by law to maximize employment. The relevant statute states:
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy's long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.
***

The Fed could have stemmed the unemployment crisis by demanding that banks lend more as a condition to the various government assistance programs, but Mr. Bernanke failed to do so.

Ryan Grim argues that the Fed might have broken the law by letting unemployment rise in order to keep inflation low:
The Fed is mandated by law to maximize employment, but focuses on inflation -- and "expected inflation" -- at the expense of job creation. At its most recent meeting, board members bluntly stated that they feared banks might increase lending, which they worried could lead to inflation.

Board members expressed concern "that banks might seek to reduce appreciably their excess reserves as the economy improves by purchasing securities or by easing credit standards and expanding their lending substantially. Such a development, if not offset by Federal Reserve actions, could give additional impetus to spending and, potentially, to actual and expected inflation." That summary was spotted by Naked Capitalism and is included in a summary of the minutes of the most recent meeting...

Suffering high unemployment in order to keep inflation low cuts against the Fed's legal mandate. Or, to put it more bluntly, it may be illegal.

In fact, the unemployment situation is getting worse, and many leading economists say that - under Mr. Bernanke's leadership - America is suffering a permanent destruction of jobs.
For example, JPMorgan Chase’s Chief Economist Bruce Kasman told Bloomberg:

[We've had a] permanent destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs in industries from housing to finance.
The chief economists for Wells Fargo Securities, John Silvia, says:

Companies “really have diminished their willingness to hire labor for any production level,” Silvia said. “It’s really a strategic change,” where companies will be keeping fewer employees for any particular level of sales, in good times and bad, he said.
And former Merrill Lynch chief economist David Rosenberg writes:
The number of people not on temporary layoff surged 220,000 in August and the level continues to reach new highs, now at 8.1 million. This accounts for 53.9% of the unemployed — again a record high — and this is a proxy for permanent job loss, in other words, these jobs are not coming back. Against that backdrop, the number of people who have been looking for a job for at least six months with no success rose a further half-percent in August, to stand at 5 million — the long-term unemployed now represent a record 33% of the total pool of joblessness.
And see this.
In fact, the Fed intentionally curbed lending by banks in an attempt to stem inflation.
The Government Has Allowed Wealth to be Concentrated in Fewer and Fewer Hands
As I pointed out a year ago:
A new report by University of California, Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez concludes that income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression.
The report shows that:
Income inequality is worse than it has been since at least 1917
"The top 1 percent incomes captured half of the overall economic growth over the period 1993-2007"
"In the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth."
As others have pointed out, the average wage of Americans, adjusting for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1970s. The minimum wage, adjusting for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1950s. See this. On the other hand, billionaires have never had it better.
As I wrote in September:

The economy is like a poker game . . . it is human nature to want to get all of the chips, but - if one person does get all of the chips - the game ends.

In other words, the game of capitalism only continues as long as everyone has some money to play with. If the government and corporations take everyone's money, the game ends.

The fed and Treasury are not giving more chips to those who need them: the American consumer. Instead, they are giving chips to the 800-pound gorillas at the poker table, such as Wall Street investment banks. Indeed, a good chunk of the money used by surviving mammoth players to buy the failing behemoths actually comes from the Fed...
This is not a question of big government versus small government, or republican versus democrat. It is not even a question of Keynes versus Friedman (two influential, competing economic thinkers).

It is a question of focusing any government funding which is made to the majority of poker players - instead of the titans of finance - so that the game can continue. If the hundreds of billions or trillions spent on bailouts had instead been given to ease the burden of consumers, we would have already recovered from the financial crisis.
I noted in April:
FDR’s Fed chairman Marriner S. Eccles explained:
As in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

***
When most people lose their poker chips - and the game is set up so that only those with the most chips get more - free market capitalism is destroyed, as the "too big to fails" crowd out everyone else.
And the economy as a whole is destroyed. Remember, consumer spending accounts for the lion's share of economic activity. If most consumers are out of chips, the economy slumps.
And unemployment soars.
As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wrote yesterday:

Where have all the economic gains gone? Mostly to the top.
***

It’s no coincidence that the last time income was this concentrated was in 1928. I do not mean to suggest that such astonishing consolidations of income at the top directly cause sharp economic declines. The connection is more subtle.

The rich spend a much smaller proportion of their incomes than the rest of us. So when they get a disproportionate share of total income, the economy is robbed of the demand it needs to keep growing and creating jobs.

What’s more, the rich don’t necessarily invest their earnings and savings in the American economy; they send them anywhere around the globe where they’ll summon the highest returns — sometimes that’s here, but often it’s the Cayman Islands, China or elsewhere. The rich also put their money into assets most likely to attract other big investors (commodities, stocks, dot-coms or real estate), which can become wildly inflated as a result.

***

THE Great Depression and its aftermath demonstrate that there is only one way back to full recovery: through more widely shared prosperity.

***

And as America’s middle class shared more of the economy’s gains, it was able to buy more of the goods and services the economy could provide. The result: rapid growth and more jobs. By contrast, little has been done since 2008 to widen the circle of prosperity.

So through it's policies encouraging the offshoring of jobs, mergers, decreasing of economic activity to fight inflation, and allowing wealth to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the government has channeled water away from U.S. jobs, creating the worsening unemployment drought.
Note for Keynesians: As I have repeatedly explained, the government hasn't spent money on the right kind of things to stimulate employment. See this and this.

What Can Obama Really Do?

2010-09-02T02:31:00.000-07:00

2010 August 29

by Ian Welsh:

A zombie argument is going around about why Obama hasn’t accomplished liberal and progressive ends to the extent many would have liked him to:

Obama can’t do anything because he needs 60 votes in Congress and he doesn’t have them because Republicans and Dems like Lieberman and Nelson won’t vote for his programs.

This argument is misleading in one sense and incorrect in another. It is misleading in that it misrepresents how things get done in Congress. It is incorrect in that many liberal policies do not require the consent of Congress.

Let’s examine the misconceptions this zombie argument is built on.

Negotiation 101

Let’s look at how things get done in Congress. Obama apologists make the excuse that Obama couldn’t have passed a larger stimulus because he was forced to reduce the stimulus by $100 billion as it was. This line of reasoning demonstrates a misunderstanding of how negotiation (or Congress) works.

If Obama had wanted a $1.2 trillion stimulus, say, he should have asked for a $1.6 trillion stimulus. Then “moderate” Republicans and Dems could have negotiated him down $400K. This is basic negotiation, which anyone who has ever negotiated in a third world bazaar knows—you start off with an offer far higher (or lower) than what you’re willing to accept, and leave room for the inevitable haggling.

The same is true of health care reform. If you’re negotiating for a public option—if you actually want one, then you don’t throw single payer advocates out. You act as if that’s something you’re seriously considering, you talk about polls showing it has majority support, and you then “compromise” to a public option.

This sort of self-defeating, pre-negotation concession has been a repeated pattern for the Obama administration (assuming that Obama does seek Liberal ends).

Force It Through

Many liberal policies do not require the consent of congress.

The Bush tax cuts were pushed through under reconciliation. Most of health care reform, including a public option could have been accomplished the same way. The tactical choice was entirely at the discretion of the Democratic leadership.

If Obama and Reid can’t hold 50 votes, then the problem is them, not the policies themselves, or “how congress works”.

Congress: Who Cares about Congress?

Now, let’s talk about other issues. There are many areas where Obama does not need Congress’s approval.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Obama can issue a stop loss for any soldiers any time he wants. Bang, that’s it, at least for as long as he’s President.

HAMP (the program supposedly intended to help homeowners, which hasn’t): This program is totally under administrative control. If Obama wanted it to work, there’s nothing to stop him.

Habeas Corpus: Obama can give everyone in Gitmo their day in court. Restoring habeas corpus is totally at his discretion, and he has chosen not to.

Social Security: After Congress voted down a debt and deficit commission, Obama went ahead and created one anyway–and stacked it with people with track records of wanting to slash Social Security.

In short, Obama has managed to side-step Congress in order to work against Democratic policy positions (e.g., Social Security), but otherwise has ignored executive privilege when he wanted to continue Bush-era policies (e.g., detention without trial at Gitmo) or to ignore the rights and needs of everyday Americans (e.g., HAMP and DADT). To the Obama administration, Congress is a very selective obstacle.

Going Forward: What Obama Can Still Do

Not only could Obama rectify DADT, HAMP, Habeus Corpus, and his Social Security commission with a stroke of his pen, he can still do a great deal to help the economy. If he wants to.

TARP: Obama has complete control of the TARP funds, the majority of which have not been spent. (We’re talking over $500 billion in slush funds.) $ 500 billion is a lot of stimulus, if it’s done right. Cash for Clunkers, representing a tiny fraction of the total stimulus funds, massively goosed GDP while it was in effect.

Leaving aside direct stimulus, there are plenty of other helpful things Obama could do. For example, as a friend of mine noted, most distressed debt today is selling to collection agencies for less than 10 cents on the dollar (often under 5 cents). The Treasury could buy up $100 billion of that distressed debt at 10 cents on the dollar. Reclaim the money at 15 cents on the dollar through the IRS, and otherwise just write it off. You won’t make 50% profit, because some people can’t pay even 10%, but you’ll almost certainly make some profit. Roll the money over and buy up more debt. Keep doing it. (N.B. In the past such debt didn’t sell so cheap, mainly because in the past, pre-Bankruptcy “reform”, people who really couldn’t pay would declare bankruptcy, but now they can’t. Obama never made fixing that horrible bankruptcy bill a priority at all.) Folks would be absolutely thrilled by a way to deal with distressed debt. With the debt off their backs, they could spend again, so it would also be stimulative. There are plenty of other things that could be done with over 500 billion dollars to help ordinary people and goose the economy.

Breaking the Banks (and getting lending going again): The banks have been pretty ungrateful for the massive bailout they received. They have unilaterally increased credit card rates to gouge customers, have been gaming the market (so much so that one quarter many banks didn’t lose money on their trading operations even one day of the quarter), have fought against financial reform, and have generally acted against the interests of the majority of Americans. One might say “well, now that they’re bailed out, there is nothing we can do about it.”

Wrong.

The Fed still holds over $2 trillion in toxic waste from the banks. The banks still hold trillions of dollars of toxic waste. If sold on the open market this stuff would sell for, oh, about 5 cents on the dollar. If forced to mark the assets they are keeping on their books at inflated prices to their actual market value, I doubt there is a single major bank in the country which wouldn’t go bankrupt. Including Goldman Sachs.

So here’s what you do. As the Federal Reserve you sell $100 billion of the toxic waste on the open market. Set an actual price for it. Then you make the banks mark their assets to market value. They go bankrupt. You nationalize them. (Why not?–They are actually bankrupt after all, and they haven’t increased lending like they were supposed to; in fact, they have decreased it.) You make the stockholders take their losses and the bondholders too, then you reinflate the banks. (If the Fed can print trillions to keep zombie banks “alive” it can print money to reinflate nationalized banks.) The banks lend under FDIC and Fed direction, at the interest rates the Fed directs. The FDIC and Fed eventually break the banks up into a reasonable size. And while they’re at it, they get rid of the entire executive class which caused the financial crisis, and have the DOJ go over all the internal memos and start charging everyone who committed fraud. (Hint: that’s virtually every executive at a major bank.) Again, this is completely up to Obama–the DOJ answers to him.

Think Obama can’t do this without Bernanke? Wrong. Obama can fire any Fed Governor for cause and replace them during a Congressional recess with no oversight.* (”Cause” is never defined, but Obama can note that the Fed’s mandate includes maximum employment and not stopping the financial crisis in the first place is certainly plausible as cause as well.)

Obama had the power. Obama had the money. Obama has the power–and the money.

The idea that Obama, or any President, is a powerless shrinking violet, helpless in the face of Congress is just an excuse. Presidents have immense amounts of power: the question is whether or not they use that power, and if they do, what they use it for.

Obama has a huge slush fund with hundreds of billions of dollars and all the executive authority he needs to turn things around.

If Obama is not using that money and authority, the bottom line is it’s because he doesn’t want to.

Putting aside the question of what Obama could have accomplished already, if he wants to help everyday Americans, turn around Democratic approval ratings in time for the midterm elections, and leave behind him a legacy of achievemant, he can still do it. If he wants to.

ndnote:
*”2. Members Ineligible to Serve Member Banks; Term of Office; Chairman and Vice Chairman
The members of the Board shall be ineligible during the time they are in office and for two years thereafter to hold any office, position, or employment in any member bank, except that this restriction shall not apply to a member who has served the full term for which he was appointed. Upon the expiration of the term of any appointive member of the Federal Reserve Board in office on the date of enactment of the Banking Act of 1935, the President shall fix the term of the successor to such member at not to exceed fourteen years, as designated by the President at the time of nomination, but in such manner as to provide for the expiration of the term of not more than one member in any two-year period, and thereafter each member shall hold office for a term of fourteen years from the expiration of the term of his predecessor, unless sooner removed for cause by the President. “

12 USC 242

Ian Welsh explains how the right thing morally is usually also the best thing practically

2010-08-26T00:49:00.000-07:00

This is so true, and the fact that it's commonly ignored is so sad...

The right thing to do

2010 August 25

by Ian Welsh

What makes me saddest of all things in the world is this: the vast majority of the time the right thing to do morally is the right thing to do in terms of broad self-interest, and yet we don’t believe that and we do the wrong thing, thinking we must, thinking that we’re making the “hard decisions”.

This spans the spectrum of issues. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about foreign affairs, where the money used on Iraq and Afghanistan could have rebuilt America and made it more prosperous. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about health care, where everyone knew that the right thing to do was single payer or some other form of comprehensive healthcare, which would have reduced bankruptcies massively, saved 6% of GDP and massive numbers of lives. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the financial crisis, where criminally prosecuting those who engaged in fraud (the entire executive class of virtually ever major financial firm) and nationalizing the major banks, wiping out the shareholders and making the bondholders eat their losses was the right thing to do, and didn’t happen. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about drug policy, where the “war on drugs” has accomplished nothing except destabilizing multiple countries and giving the US the largest prison population proportional to population in the entire world and where legalizing marijuana, soft opiates and coca leaves would save billions of dollars, reduce violence, help stabilize Mexico and would help tax receipts. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about food, where we subsidize the most unhealthy foods possible and engage in practices which have reduced the nutritional content of food by 40% in the last half century. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about environmental pollutants, which have contributed to a massive rise in chronic diseases so great it amounts to an epidemic.

And on, and on, and on.

Now the fact is that there is no free lunch. When you spend money on war, you can’t spend it on education or health or crumbling infrasture or civilian technology. When you allow oligopolies to control the marketplace and buy up politicians, the cost of that is a decreased standard of living. When you refuse to deal effective with externalized health pollution, whether from soda pop or carcinogens, you pay for that with the death of people you care for from heart disease, cancer and other illnesses.

The response is “we have to do this to protect ourselves/to make a profit”.

No, you don’t. America would be more prosperous and just as safe if you didn’t waste trillions on wars and a bloated military whose purpose isn’t to protect you but to beat on foreigners (who is going to invade the US? No one. Next.) You would be happier if you did not allow health pollution because you and your loved ones would be healthier and it’s damn hard to be happy when you or your loved ones get cancer, or diabetes, or asthma and so on. Cheap consumer goods do not make up for it and the costs are so high that it’s questionable that the consumer goods ARE cheap—you’re just paying for them in illness and health care bills.

All of these things are moral wrongs. We know it’s wrong to invade other countries that haven’t attacked us. We know that it’s wrong to put illness inducing substances into the air or food. We know that we shouldn’t subsidize high fructose corn syrup and that if we’re going to subsidize food we should subsidize healthy food. We know that’s immoral, yet we do it anyway.

One of the great ironies of human society is that we create it ourselves, but as individuals and even groups we feel powerless to control what we created. We forged our own chains, and can’t get out of them.

But the first step to freeing ourselves from our chains is to stop telling ourselves that the moral thing to do isn’t the right thing to do in practical terms. The right thing to do… is the right thing to do. When we refuse to do the right thing, instead we impoverish ourselves and our loved ones, we make ourselves sick and we kill ourselves. When we do horrible things to other people, we make them hate us, and then they try and do horrible things to us.

Doing the wrong thing, the immoral thing, is almost never the practical thing if you care about the well-being of yourself, your children, your friends and your family. It always blows back. If you’re lucky, you may die before the cost comes to bear, but that’s only if you’re lucky, and in the American context, if you aren’t dead yet, you probably aren’t going to get lucky.

So do the right thing. Not just because it is the right thing morally, but because it’s the right thing to do for you and your loved ones in a very practical way.

Leaner, Meaner Capitalism at Work

2010-08-19T23:38:00.000-07:00

Mike Malloy was talking about this tonight.

A company gets new management, which decides to reward the 300 workers who enabled the company to go from a loss last year to a half billion dollar profit this year by docking them $1.50/hr, decimating their pension program, and generally behaving like greedy capitalist pigs. Three months later, the strike is still on, and the company is making more money than ever, thanks to strikebreaking scabs.

This is the first I've heard about it.

Here's the original story, from May of this year:

RWDSU.info:

Strike!: Mott's Wage Cuts Despite Huge Profits Forces Work Stoppage (5/23/10)

Over 300 full time manufacturing workers at the Mott’s plant in Williamson, New York, went out on strike this morning at 6 AM after company executives demanded painful wage cuts while the company enjoyed a record year of $550 million in profits. The work stoppage was caused as a direct result of the Mott’s (a subsidiary of Dr. Pepper Snapple Group) executives' unfair labor practices as they tried to peel away good jobs and wages, including not bargaining in good faith. The company had publicly declared an impasse and plans to implement their last contract terms, which offered nothing but a reduction in hourly wages and drastic healthcare and pension concessions for the skilled, dedicated workforce at the Williamson manufacturing plant.

“The workers that were forced to strike today are the same workers who helped make Mott’s the highly profitable company they are today, and they should not be treated like a bunch of rotten apples by overpaid executives,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, UFCW. “We understand that no one wins when there is a strike, but is very troubling and disturbing that such a profitable company as Mott’s would carve away a core relationship with their workforce all for corporate greed. Whittling down wage and benefit standards, while exponentially increasing CEO compensation is rotten business, and frankly unAmerican!”

RWDSU Local 220, which represents the workers, has been tirelessly negotiating to secure a fair and decent contract for months with Mott’s management. Despite the company’s profitability, Mott’s/Dr. Pepper Snapple have demanded givebacks, including a $1.50 per hour wage cut for all employees, a pension elimination for future employees and a pension freeze for current employees, a 20 percent decrease in employer contributions to the 401K and increased employee contributions toward health care premiums and co-pays.

Mott’s workers overwhelmingly rejected this offer and voted in favor of authorizing their negotiating committee at RWDSU Local 220 to call an unfair labor practice strike. The union has continued to demand that the company bargain in good faith in order to quickly reach a fair contract.

By contrast, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group President & CEO Larry D. Young has enjoyed a 113 percent salary increase over the last 3 years (or 28 percent each year). In 2009, Young's total compensation was $6,519,378.

Michael Leberth, president of RWDSU Local 220 said “the company has not budged from our reasonable and dignified offer and there will be no late night negotiations. We are tired of being juiced by such a profitable company.”

May is the busiest season for Mott’s apple juice and applesauce manufacturing as the demand for these family favorites is highest during the summer season.

The Williamson plant is the only plant that produces Mott’s applesauce, including high margin single serve packs, with 70 percent of the workforce in skilled labor categories. A labor dispute could damage the value of Mott’s family-friendly brand by associating it with corporate greed and union busting. Additionally, the product may suffer quality issues, as the skilled workforce is not easily replaceable. The Mott’s brand is responsible for more than $550 million worth of Dr. Pepper Snapple’s retail sales each year.

“Why would DPS, with millions in profit, risk interrupting production at a high volume plant?” asked Ira Bristol, who has worked at the plant for almost five years. “Destroying goodwill and creating this antagonistic atmosphere will badly hurt the production system and bottom line, not to mention negatively affect employee morale and tarnish the Mott’s good brand around the country.”

Here's a thumbnail of Dr Pepper Snapple—

ABCnews.go.com:

Since being spun out of U.K. conglomerate Cadbury Schweppes two years ago at around $25 per share, DPS shares have risen to nearly $40, and have more than doubled off of March 2009 lows. Last year, the company, which produces 50 brands, including Mott's juice, namesake brands Dr Pepper and Snapple, as well as 7-Up, Hawaiian Punch, A&W root beer and others, recorded $555 million in profits on more than $1 billion in revenues.

Here's where we're at now...

New York Times:

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: August 17, 2010

WILLIAMSON, N.Y. — After nearly 90 days of picketing in the broiling sun outside the sprawling Mott’s apple juice plant here in upstate New York, Michelle Muoio recognizes that the lengthy strike is about far more than whether the 305 hourly workers at the plant get a fatter or slimmer paycheck.
The union movement and many outsiders view the strike as a high-stakes confrontation between a company that wants to cut its labor costs, even as it is earning record profits, and workers who are determined to resist demands for wage and benefit givebacks.
“It’s disgusting, honestly, that they want to take things away from the people who made them profitable,” said Ms. Muoio (pronounced MOY-oh), a $19-an-hour machine operator who has worked at the plant 15 years.
The company that owns Mott’s, the beverage conglomerate Dr Pepper Snapple Group, counters that the Mott’s workers are overpaid compared with other production workers in the Rochester area, where blue-collar unemployment is high after years of layoffs at employers like Xerox and Kodak.
Chris Barnes, a company spokesman, said Dr Pepper Snapple was seeking a $1.50-an-hour wage cut, a pension freeze and other concessions to bring the plant’s costs in line with “local and industry standards.”
The company, which has 50 brands including 7Up and Hawaiian Punch, reported net income of $555 million in 2009, compared with a loss of $312 million the previous year. Its 2009 sales were $5.5 billion, down 3 percent.
With each passing week, the two sides have dug in deeper, doing their utmost to outmaneuver and undercut each other. Rain or shine, dozens of workers picket outside the plant each day, standing alongside a 15-foot-tall inflatable rat and a mock coffin emblazoned with “R.I.P. Corporate Greed.”
Rebecca Givan, a professor of industrial relations at Cornell, said the strike has taken on broader symbolism. “The union wants to tap into the public backlash against perceived corporate greed,” she said. “The company wants to emphasize the depressed local labor market.”
The strike has become so important because of the prominence of the brands and because of its unusual nature: a highly profitable company is taking the rare and bold step of demanding large-scale concessions.
Unlike previous battles, where American manufacturers have often sought to cut labor costs by threatening to close plants or move operations to the South or overseas, Dr Pepper Snapple is not making such threats.
For unions across the country, the stakes are high because if the Mott’s workers lose this showdown, it could prompt other profitable companies to push for major labor concessions. Such a lengthy strike is unusual at a time when work stoppages have become much less common than they once were.
Strikes and other work stoppages nationwide have plunged in recent decades, to 126 last year from 831 in 1990, according to the Bureau of National Affairs, as unions represent fewer workplaces and workers increasingly recognize the considerable pain and risk involved in walkouts.
“Companies have asked for concessions throughout the history of the labor movement because they’ve faced hard times and needed help to survive,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which represents the Mott’s workers. “Dr Pepper Snapple is different. They don’t even show the respect to lie to us. They just came in and said, ‘We have no financial need for this, but we just want it anyway because we figure we can get away with it.’ ”
Negotiations have not been held since May, and Dr Pepper Snapple says it has no intention of resuming them. The company has continued to operate the plant using replacement workers and says that production of apple juice and apple sauce is growing each day. Union officials say production is one-third of what it was before the walkout.
The Mott’s workers voted 250 to 5 to strike, walking out on May 23. They were furious about the company’s demands to cut their wages by about $3,000 a year, freeze pensions, end pensions for new hires, reduce the company’s 401(k) retirement contributions and increase employees’ costs for health care benefits. Dr Pepper Snapple said it was merely seeking to bring its benefits more in line with those of its other plants.
Even before the strike vote, workers were stewing, saying that management had begun treating them far worse after Cadbury Schweppes, the former owner, spun off its American beverages division in 2007, creating Dr Pepper Snapple.
The new management eliminated their bonuses, the summer picnic and the year-end holiday party for employees’ children, several workers complained.

Fidel Castro Fascinated by Book on Bilderberg Club

2010-08-19T02:10:00.000-07:00

Associated Press:

By WILL WEISSERT (AP) – 14 hours ago

HAVANA — Fidel Castro is showcasing a theory long popular both among the far left and far right: that the shadowy Bilderberg Group has become a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture.
The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article Wednesday that used three of the only eight pages in the Communist Party newspaper Granma to quote — largely verbatim — from a 2006 book by Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin.
Estulin's work, "The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club," argues that the international group largely runs the world. It has held a secretive annual forum of prominent politicians, thinkers and businessmen since it was founded in 1954 at the Bilderberg Hotel in Holland.
Castro offered no comment on the excerpts other than to describe Estulin as honest and well-informed and to call his book a "fantastic story."
Estulin's book, as quoted by Castro, described "sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists" manipulating the public "to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self."
The Bilderberg group's website says its members have "nearly three days of informal and off-the-record discussion about topics of current concern" once a year, but the group does nothing else.
It said the meetings were meant to encourage people to work together on major policy issues.
The prominence of the group is what alarms critics. It often includes members of the Rockefeller family, Henry Kissinger, senior U.S. and European officials and major international business and media executives.
The excerpt published by Castro suggested that the esoteric Frankfurt School of socialist academics worked with members of the Rockefeller family in the 1950s to pave the way for rock music to "control the masses" by diverting attention from civil rights and social injustice.
"The man charged with ensuring that the Americans liked the Beatles was Walter Lippmann himself," the excerpt asserted, referring to a political philosopher and by-then-staid newspaper columnist who died in 1974.
"In the United States and Europe, great open-air rock concerts were used to halt the growing discontent of the population," the excerpt said.
Castro — who had an inside seat to the Cold War — has long expressed suspicions of back-room plots. He has raised questions about whether the Sept. 11 attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. government to stoke military budgets and, more recently suggested that Washington was behind the March sinking of a South Korean ship blamed on North Korea.
Estulin's own website suggests that the 9/11 attacks were likely caused by small nuclear devices, and that the CIA and drug traffickers were behind the 1988 downing of a jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, that was blamed on Libya.
The Bilderberg conspiracy theory has been popular on both extremes of the ideological spectrum, even if they disagree on just what the group wants to do. Leftists accuse the group of promoting capitalist domination, while some right-wing websites argue that the Bilderberg club has imposed Barack Obama on the United States to advance socialism.
Some of Estulin's work builds on reports by Big Jim Tucker, a researcher on the Bilderberg Group who publishes on right-wing websites.
"It's great Hollywood material ... 15 people sitting in a room sitting in a room determining the fate of mankind," said Herbert London, president of the Hudson Institute, a nonpartisan policy think tank in New York.
"As someone who doesn't come out of the Oliver Stone school of conspiracy, I have a hard time believing it," London added.
A call to a Virginia number for the American Friends of Bilderberg rang unanswered Wednesday and the group's website lists no contact numbers.
Castro, who underwent emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006 and stepped down as president in February 2008, has suddenly begun popping up everywhere recently, addressing Cuba's parliament on the threat of a nuclear war, meeting with island ambassadors at the Foreign Ministry, writing a book and even attending the dolphin show at the Havana aquarium.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Democrats Go GOP on Tax Cuts

2010-08-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

Counterpunch.org:

August 18, 2010

Meandering Into the Midterm Elections

By ANTHONY DiMAGGIO

President Obama supports letting many of the Bush tax cuts expire. He’s defending the passage of a new round of tax cuts, promised to benefit America’s middle and working classes. These cuts, however, would continue to benefit the affluent, or those individuals earning more than $170,000 a year. CNN Money reports that the tax cuts promoted by Obama for the middle class would also reduce taxes for those making between $171,850 and $195,550. This group would now fall into a “sweet spot” that would reduce their payments from the 33 percent tax bracket down to the 28 percent tax bracket. In contrast, those individuals who make more than $200,000 would see their payments increase from the 36 percent bracket to the 39.6 percent bracket.

The increase in taxes for those making more than $200,000 is misleading, however. While these individuals would legally be required to pay more in terms of their tax bracket, they would nonetheless qualify for other tax reductions under Obama’s plan.

The details are provided by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). The organization reports that under Obama’s plan, “people making more than $1 million will receive more than five times the tax cut benefit, in dollar terms, as a middle class family making $50,000 to $75,000. The wealthy would qualify for cuts under the proposed extension of the income tax rate reductions and married filers’ reductions. In relation to the income tax, the CBPP estimates that those in the $200,000 to $500,000 income category would receive, on average, an 83 percent greater tax cut than those immediately below them earning more than $100,000 but less than $200,000. Those earning between $500,000 and $1 million would receive, on average, a 13 percent greater tax cut than those immediately below them making between $200,000 and $500,000. Finally, individuals earning more than $1 million would benefit from a 15 percent greater cut than those immediately below them making between $500,000 and $1 million. These numbers may sound confusing, but the major theme is really quite simple: as an individual’s (or a household’s) earnings increase into the six figures and beyond, they will be entitled to increasingly larger tax cuts under the Obama plan when compared to middle, working class, and poor Americans.

The Obama tax cuts, while clearly benefitting the middle class in many ways, will also represent a major pay day for America’s upper class. This apparently isn’t enough for Republicans in Congress, however. They complain that the rich should benefit from all the tax cuts granted under Bush, not merely some of them. They feel that any tax increases (relatively to the cuts the rich received in the last few years) are illegitimate. Nowhere is this position more clearly declared than by House of Representatives Republican Minority Leader John Boehner, who defends the Bush era tax cuts, which went overwhelmingly to the wealthiest one to five percent of Americans.

Boehner complains that “you can’t raise taxes in the middle of a weak economy without risking the double-dip in this recession…You cannot get the economy going again by raising taxes on those people who we expect to create jobs in America and to get the economy going again. If we want to solve the budget problem, we’ve got to have a healthy economy and we have to get our arms around the runaway spending that’s going on in Washington, D.C.”

The supply side notion (first advocated by the Reagan administration) claims that economic growth only comes from massive tax cuts directed toward the rich. This theory, although promising prosperity for America’s middle class and poor, has done little to deliver benefits to the masses. A careful study from the Economic Policy Institute finds that “the economy has little to show for the $860 billion in tax cuts” passed under Bush from 2001 to 2005. In this EPI report, Lee Price concludes that “by virtually every measure the economy has performed worse in this business cycle than was typical in past ones, including that of the early 1990s, which saw major tax increases.” The EPI compares the 2001 to 2005 business cycle to other cycles in history (a cycle being defined in economics as a period beginning with a contraction in national GDP, a trough period when contraction ends and expansion begins, a sustained expansion period, and a peak of growth). EPI finds that, in spite of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, “almost every broad measure of economic activity – GDP, jobs, personal income, and business investment, among others – has fared worse over the last four and a half years (again, 2001 to 2005) than in past cycles.”

The EPI’s findings raise serious questions about the effectiveness of tax cuts aimed at the rich in bringing about economic recovery. The worthlessness of tax cuts for the rich in assuring middle class prosperity has been reinforced over the last few years as well. The Bush tax cuts are set to expire this year. Since the 2008 economic collapse and ensuing recession, the Bush tax cuts (in addition to the massive infusion of TARP funds for American “too big to fail” banks) have not been sufficient to push the U.S. into a serious economic recovery at a time when those who still have jobs are working harder and harder for declining wages. It was not until this year that the recession formally ended (a recession being defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth), and economic growth has been rather anemic, at just over one percent for the second quarter of 2010.

One would think that all these negative signs would be enough to convince Republicans (and conservative Democrats) not to renew tax cuts for the wealthy. This, however, has not been the case. The Republican Party – aided by reactionary pundits in the media – continues to push tax cuts for the rich. They do this, not because these cuts promote strong recovery and prosperity for middle America, but because they subsidize Republicans’ primary constituency – the rich. Democrats have long been reliant on, and supportive of corporate power as well, so their relatively weaker support for tax cuts for the rich is not surprising either.

Rather than asking what the Democrats and Republicans should be doing to reduce the size of government (as both parties’ leaders are doing), we should be asking how the government should be expanding its efforts to help the needy during times of economic desperation. The Democratic expansion of Medicaid under the 2010 health care reform bill will certainly help America’s poor in terms of increasing the size of the social welfare state, but a far larger (and much needed) expansion in the form of establishing a universal health care, Medicare-for-all system, would do a lot more in reducing the suffering of vulnerable Americans. What also would help the country (in addition to the recent extensions of unemployment and state school funds passed by Democrats in Congress) is another stimulus, which should be passed prior to the 2010 midterm elections.

The Democratic Party has gone Republican in at two ways when it comes to the tax cuts: 1. by pushing for a market solution over expanding government social welfare services; and 2. by continuing the tax cuts to the rich, even if in a reduced form from the far larger, more extreme amount preferred by conservatives. The choice to promote tax cuts over increased social spending (on food subsidies for the poor and on a new stimulus) signals a privileging of the well off over the truly needy. Instead of helping preserve the jobs of state educators and other public employees through massive stimulus spending, the Democrats have instead chosen to grant tax cuts to those who already have jobs. Why this group should be prioritized over the unemployed is anyone’s guess. The Democratic approach signifies the party’s increasing embrace of the Republican themes that “the government is the problem,” and that the best way to promote economic recovery is to reduce government revenues, and “give the people more of their own money,” rather than use that money to help those who are the most desperate.

There are penalties to be paid for going Republican at a time when Republicans are just as unpopular as the Democrats in the public mind. The Democratic Party’s emphasis on unnecessary tax cuts, and its timidity in pushing for an expansion of government stimulus has left us in the desperate economic position we are in today. The party is willing to promote at least limited welfare spending, passing $34 billion in unemployment extension benefits, and an additional $26 billion to help states fill their deficits and stave off cuts in education and Medicare. These most recent education and Medicaid packages, however, came along with $10 billion worth of cuts in food aid to the poor. The recent Medicaid, school, and unemployment bills also total just $50 billion for the year (after adjusting for the food aid cuts), and this represents a small fraction of the hole in state deficits that needs to be filled.

The state deficits for 2010 were estimated to total $192 billion, according to the CBPP. State deficits for 2011 are estimated at approximately $120 billion. Allowing all the Bush era tax cuts to expire would produce an additional $217 billion in revenues for the federal government throughout 2010 and 2011, according to a recent study by the Brookings Institute and the Urban Institute. This amount is more than enough to plug in the $120 billion hole in the 2011 state budget deficits. It’s unlikely that the Democratic Party will take this route, however, in light of its increasing support for Republican mantras about the holiness of tax cuts as a means of economic stimulation.

Democrats could single handedly end the state budget crises that will (sadly) continue to grip the country over the next year. Instead, they will continue to meander throughout the rest of 2010, refusing to push any sort of stimulus on par with the $787 billion stimulus package passed in 2009. Democratic refusals to pass a second stimulus will all but guarantee continued economic stagnation – and possibly decline. The party’s incompetence and preference for the rich will likely come back to haunt it in the 2010 election, in which the American public will angrily (and rightly) throw out many Democrats due to their mishandling of the economic crisis.

Anthony DiMaggio is the editor of media-ocracy (www.media-ocracy.com), a daily online magazine devoted to the study of media, public opinion, and current events. He has taught U.S. and Global Politics at Illinois State University and North Central College, and is the author of When Media Goes to War (2010) and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008). He can be reached at: mediaocracy@gmail.com

"Financial Reform" Virtually Useless

2010-08-15T01:01:00.000-07:00

ConsortiumNews.com:

US Staggers Toward Dysfunction

Danny Schechter
August 14, 2010

[. . .]
The private sector is not creating jobs. The GOP is blocking the government from doing more stimulus programs while the system seems to be unraveling.

All the talk of cutting deficits by conservatives or ending tax cuts by liberals will not give the economy the boost it needs. There is a paralysis of analysis and a stalemate.

The markets were more freaked by the recent pessimism oozing from the Fed than any partisan punditry. The slowdown they are worried about has already doomed any heavily-hyped “recovery.”

And the public knows it, according to the recent polls.

What’s worse is that the tea leaves offer few signs of a turnaround any time soon even if General Motors is selling more cars — many, may we be reminded, in China.

(The GM CEO who last week took a nasty ingrate smack at GM being perceived as “Government Motors,” demanding the government sell all of its shares, has just announced he is leaving! I wonder why?)

The Carlyle Group is taking over while the automaker launches a new program of subprime lending, the very predatory deal-making that got them in trouble in the first place.

Does anyone ever learn from history, or care about how communities are being destroyed as a financial crisis becomes a social crisis at the grassroots level?

Check out what happened at that mall in Atlanta where thousands of people nearly rioted to get on a public housing waiting list.

The Congress returned from its recess to pass new monies to keep teachers teaching and cops patrolling. They did so by slashing food stamps so the unemployed and poor will have to cut back further.

What a trade-off.

As for insuring the stability of an increasingly volatile system, will the new financial reforms make any difference? It doesn’t look like it.

The New York Times reported, “As Wall Street scrambles to find the best and most profitable way to operate under the new financial reform law, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. — the firm that was expected to suffer the most under the legislation — could emerge practically unscathed.”

"We think we are well positioned to be a market leader under the new rules,” Jack McCabe, co-head of Goldman's derivatives clearing service business, was quoted as saying.

As for the law’s effect on Goldman, Richard Bove, a bank analyst at Rochdale Securities, said he had changed his view.

"I thought this company was going to be really harmed by this bill; now I've figured out that it's not going to happen," he said. "They should win big here."

That’s Goldman’s reason to celebrate its “big win” What about the others?

The truth is we will not know for a awhile, for a long while, for many, many years. So much for any sense of urgency even after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker said we are running out of time.

Bloomberg News explained why

“Many of the measures ordered by Congress and global regulators, aimed at cushioning the financial system in future crises, are years away from being implemented. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision plans to give the world’s banks until 2018 to comply with limits on how much they can borrow.

“Parts of the Volcker rule, a provision of the new Dodd-Frank Act that would force firms to cut stakes in in-house hedge funds and private-equity units, may not go into effect for a dozen years.”

“Based on our experience of government’s ability to execute these things effectively and in a timely way, we are almost uncovered now from any future financial risk for at least another 8 or 10 years, and that’s a little scary,” said Roy Smith, finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a former banker at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Economist Nouriel Roubini, one of the first to forecast our crisis, worries that major economies in Europe are at risk and could fall.

At the same time I am reading articles that contend, “The US is more bankrupt than Greece.” Another reports the IMF saying the US is bankrupt but most Americans don’t know it.

What else don’t we know?

At the same time, the folks who brought us this crisis are still riding high, making multi-million dollar “settlements” to cover up fraudulent practices. In recent weeks, Goldman Sachs, Countrywide and, now, Wells Fargo have just done that in part to avoid prosecutions.

Their CEOS are going on vacation to spend their ill-gotten gains, not to jail to pay for their crimes. And the “professional left” — whatever that is supposed to be – is more pissed at Robert Gibbs blathering at that podium than the banksters maneuvering behind the scenes.

Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this picture?

State of the Art Navy vs. State of the Art Missiles

2010-08-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

The implication here is that, if push comes to shove, the US Navy is a dinosaur waiting to become extinct. I heard a similar story the other day about how Iran has hundreds of these anti-ship ballistic missiles, should the US or Israel try something stupid. Just search on "iran dongfeng 21d"...

From Prairie2.com (whom I first heard on Mike Malloy's show):

Monday, August 9, 2010

Would you like rice with your Cold War Special?

The USS George Washington (CVN-73) spent the weekend cruising 200 miles off shore from Danang, The Socialist Republic of Vietnam. What’s going on you say, does Nike need negotiating leverage for that new sneaker plant? Officially the “G-Dub” was there to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the normalization of relations between the US and SRV. It did however bring along 4 million pounds of bombs, seventy aircraft and 6000 men and women ready to go to war at the sound of the claxon.

Based in Japan the “G-Dub” is widely believed to carry a typical deployment of 100 nuclear warheads. Japan has revealed recently that they have always turned a blind eye to this despite official policy prohibiting nuclear weapons on their soil.

Were the Vietnamese upset with this show of force just outside their territorial waters? No, in fact they could not have been more pleased as they chose the location. This is the part of the South China Sea that they claim as their own that includes a number of small islands known as the Spratly and Paracel Islands. These islands are the reason Hanoi and Washington are getting so cozy militarily.

The super carrier task force arrived off Vietnam having just completed joint exercises with South Korea and during the entire trip from Japan they were shadowed by a number Chinese warships. You see Beijing claims absolute sovereignty over the entire South China Sea, its islands, fishing grounds, oil & gas reserves and the sea lanes themselves. They don’t care much for trespassers but so far have been out gunned by the USN.

Vietnam has tried very hard to cultivate relations with the US, especially after the collapse of their primary benefactor, the Soviet Union. Before, during and after the US-Vietnam War, the Vietnamese were at war with China and repelled several invasion attempts that killed large numbers on both sides. The third and final invasion took place in 1979 and China withdrew after taking heavy losses but looted and laid waste to the northern part of Vietnam on the way out.

China has made no secret of the fact that at some point they intend to throw the US out of its South China Sea. To press home that point they have recently announced the pending deployment of a new generation of hyper-sonic anti-ship missile called the Dong Feng 21D. With a large conventional or nuclear warhead and a 900 mile range they are reportedly capable of defeating any counter measures and intercepting a moving target. Of course at 6000 miles per hour it closes the 900 miles in 9 minutes, so even at flank speed a carrier would only move maybe five miles, not quite like shooting fish in a barrel but close. Some reports are that the new missile may have a much longer range on the order of 2000 miles.

There is a debate about when the weapon will be deployable, it could be ten years or maybe less than two. There is no question that China is capable of producing such a weapon thanks to technology sharing by American companies like Boeing and Lockheed. In order to get access to cheap manufacturing, US companies are required to turn over information that prior to the Bush Administration people went to prison for giving up.

In short, the greed of American corporations has made possible a new Cold War. Of course FOX News is making the most it can from the tensions by hyping fear of the yellow peril. This allows the same “defense” contractors that gave China the technology to be able to sell even more hardware to the US military to counter this “unexpected” threat. China will of course increase their military spending, they can afford it and they have the factories. The right-wing is probably kidding itself that we can out spend China and destroy it like Reagan did to the Soviets. That wasn’t what really happened of course, the USSR was on an irreversible downward spiral long before Reagan, kind of like the one we are on. www.prairie2.com

Watching the Disintegration of the US Infrastructure

2010-08-08T15:18:00.000-07:00

This is so sad, and as is so often the case with sad things, so unnecessary.

Salon.com:

Friday, Aug 6, 2010 12:07 ET
What collapsing empire looks like
By Glenn Greenwald :
As we enter our ninth year of the War in Afghanistan with an escalated force, and continue to occupy Iraq indefinitely, and feed an endlessly growing Surveillance State, reports are emerging of the Deficit Commission hard at work planning how to cut Social Security, Medicare, and now even to freeze military pay. But a new New York Times article today illustrates as vividly as anything else what a collapsing empire looks like, as it profiles just a few of the budget cuts which cities around the country are being forced to make. This is a sampling of what one finds:

Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further -- it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation.

Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.

Even public safety has not been immune to the budget ax. In Colorado Springs, the downturn will be remembered, quite literally, as a dark age: the city switched off a third of its 24,512 streetlights to save money on electricity, while trimming its police force and auctioning off its police helicopters.

There are some lovely photos accompanying the article, including one showing what a darkened street in Colorado looks like as a result of not being able to afford street lights. Read the article to revel in the details of this widespread misery. Meanwhile, the tiniest sliver of the wealthiest -- the ones who caused these problems in the first place -- continues to thrive. Let's recall what former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson said last year in The Atlantic about what happens in under-developed and developing countries when an elite-caused financial crises ensues:

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or -- here's a classic Kremlin bailout technique -- the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk -- at least until the riots grow too large.

The real question is whether the American public is too apathetic and trained into submission for that to ever happen.

UPDATE: It's probably also worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month -- with a subheadline warning: "Back to Stone Age" -- which describes how "paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue." Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional. And it was announced this week that "Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free."

Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights -- or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State -- that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability? Anyway, I just wanted to leave everyone with some light and cheerful thoughts as we head into the weekend.

Latest October Surprise report from Robert Parry

2010-08-08T01:29:00.000-07:00

Consortiumnews.com:

October Surprise Cover-up Unravels

By Robert Parry
August 6, 2010

Not to belabor a point, but some die-hard defenders of the October Surprise cover-up continue to insist that there is real evidence debunking the now overwhelming case that Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign interfered with President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.
One defender claimed in a recent blog post: “calendars, eyewitness accounts, telephone logs and credit card receipts showed that [Reagan’s campaign chief William Casey] was in the United States and London at the time of the alleged meetings” in Madrid and Paris.

But that simply isn’t true. What is true is that a series of fabricated alibis for Casey and others have come apart at the seams, starting with the initial alibi that was concocted for Casey by The New Republic and Newsweek.
[. . .]

Official Social Security Report In!

2010-08-05T14:54:00.000-07:00

...and, of course, everything's just fine...

OurFuture.org:

What Social Security Report SAYS vs What They Tell You It Says

By Dave Johnson

August 5, 2010 - 1:59pm ET

The Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees today released their report on the Status of the Social Security and Medicare Programs. Here is what it says:

Social Security Just Fine Until At Least 2037

The summary of the report says, "The financial outlook for Social Security is little changed from last year. The short term outlook is worsened by a deeper recession than was projected last year, but the overall 75-year outlook is nevertheless somewhat improved..." and is otherwise fine until at least 2037 with no changes.

It is just fine forever, in fact, if we do something simple like raise the "cap" on earnings that are taxed to pay for the program. (That's right, when you make more than a certain income level you stop paying the tax!) Compare that to the military budget. We spend more than $1 trillion on military and related programs each year - more than every other country combined - and unlike Social Security that is completely "unfunded," and adds to the deficit.

Medicare Outlook Improved Substantially

The report also says, "The outlook for Medicare has improved substantially because of program changes made in the [Health Care Reform Bill]"

Those Are The Facts

Those are the simple facts: everything is fine. Everything will be fine. There are some things that should be changed to make them even more OK than they are. They are good programs that demonstrate that government works.

So What's The Problem?

The Social Security program collects money via the "payroll tax." Much, much more money -- trillions -- has been collected than needed to be paid out to cover the coming retirement of the "baby boomers," and the extra -- the "trust fund" -- was invested in US Treasury Bonds.

Under Reagan and then both Bushes that money was borrowed from the trust fund and used to give huge tax cuts to the wealthy. (Clinton was paying it back but Bush II cut taxes again for the wealthy.) Now those boomers are beginning to retire, and the trust fund money that was borrowed and given out to the rich is needed back to cover their retirement. The obvious solution is to get the money from where the money went. But those who it went to are trying to stop the obvious from happening. They say we should cut benefits, make us retire at 70, anything to keep them from paying back what is owed to the retirees.

Oh, and there is another conservative complaint about Social Security. Social Security is very successful and popular, and is a constant, living proof that government of the people, by the people and for the people works and works really well. Among a certain crowd, that just can't be allowed to stand.

So now, let the anti-tax, anti-government conservative bamboozlement begin.

Let The Bamboozlement Begin

The anti-government conservatives are using several approaches to undermine public confidence in the program (and therefore government). MoveOn.org has a "Top 5 Social Security Myths" page up that is worth looking at.

Myth: Social Security is going broke.
Myth: We have to raise the retirement age because people are living longer.
Myth: Benefit cuts are the only way to fix Social Security.
Myth: The Social Security Trust Fund has been raided and is full of IOUs.
Myth: Social Security adds to the deficit.

Please go to the website to learn the truth about these myths. And please answer with those facts when you hear people spreading these myths.

Let's see how the conservatives are doing at spreading myths today, and how the mainstream media covers it:

Heritage Foundation: Once Again, the Social Security Trust Fund Has No Money in It

Washington Times: Social Security in the red for first time ever (Note - that's only if you don't count the interest that the trust fund earns. Just more bamboozlement.)

FOX News: Social Security 2010 Outlays to Exceed Receipts

CNN: Social Security: More going out than coming in

NPR: 2010 Social Security Outlook: Not Great

CNBC: Social Security 2010 outlays to exceed receipts

That's just a quick sampling. Compare what these headlines lead you to believe to the facts above. When was the last time you saw a headline that reads, "Massive military budget causes huge federal deficit"? Right. Bamboozlement, plain and simple. Expect to see a lot more like these. Don't fall for it.

Social Security Is Not Broken

Social Security is not broken. If we fight the myths and the anti-government lies it will be there for all of us.

Here is a statement by Nancy Altman, co-chairman of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, a coalition of 60+ organizations, representing over 30 million Americans:

“Every year, the trustees’ reports become an excuse for fear mongering by those who should know better. This year, the news is especially good for Medicare, thanks to the enactment of health care reform. The news for Social Security is even better, revealing once again that Social Security’s promised benefits are fully affordable without benefit cuts and without increasing the retirement age. Poll after poll reports that’s what the American people want. Unfortunately, we know there are some in Washington, including a few members of the Administration’s fiscal commission, who will use this report to try to advance their agenda of cuts to Social Security benefits, including rising the retirement age. Politicians should stop scaring the American people. Social Security is strong and should be strengthened, not cut. The reality is the biggest threat to Social Security is the politicians in Washington who continue to play politics with this issue.”

Send a message to the politicians: No increase in the retirement age. No privatization. No Social Security cuts. Go to ourfuture.org/nosocialsecuritycuts.

Stan McChrystal and Lynndie England: Compare and Contrast

2010-08-04T13:57:00.000-07:00

Antiwar.com:

Code of Military Justice

by Jeff Huber, August 03, 2010

Gen. Stan McChrystal, United States Army, will leave active service with four stars instead of three because of a special waiver bestowed on him by President Barack Obama. One is supposed to hold four-star rank for three years before one can retire at that pay grade, something McChrystal obviously didn’t do, but Obama made nice and let him walk away with a full set of collar candy anyway. The extra star makes a staunch bit of difference in McChrystal’s retirement pay. He’ll start at $181,416 per year versus the measly $160,068 he would have received otherwise. But both of those amounts are chump change compared to what Mr. McChrystal is likely to knock down in his Beltway banditry career.

Noted counterinsurgency illusionist John A. Nagl, a retired Army light colonel and a Beltway bandit himself, says that “forcing” McChrystal to retire with three stars “would have sent a signal that he was out of favor.” Colleagues, according to the New York Times, say that because McChrystal kept his fourth star he’s not “radioactive,” so he can expect a bright future “as a well-paid outside consultant to the Pentagon or a government intelligence agency.” Don’t be shocked to see McChrystal named CEO of whatever Blackwater winds up calling itself next.

Retired three-star Beltway bandit Jack Keane, a key node in the war mafia’s AIPAC-neocon-Pentagon-Congress-White House connections, says of his protégé McChrystal, “Stan will land on both feet, make no mistake about that.”

Lynndie England, the marginally self-aware former private in the United States Army Reserve, was one of the few bad apples who took the fall for the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. She received no pension at all after she left the Army with a dishonorable discharge, and she couldn’t get back her civilian job as a chicken-plucker after she was released from military prison.

It took two trials by courts-martial to convict England. The judge in the first court-martial, Army Col. James Pohl, declared a mistrial because he doubted whether England was mentally competent enough to understand what a raw plea deal her incompetent military defense lawyers had wheedled her into. Pohl also questioned whether she possessed sufficient cognizance to discern right from wrong. The five officers on the second jury clearly had a more flexible conscience about making junior enlisted personnel the patsies for policies established at the four-star level and above; they sentenced her to a three-year term.

Torture was a key aspect of what “King David” Petraeus recently referred to as McChrystal’s “exceptional leadership” as commander of the infamous Joint Special Operations Command. As head of JSOC, McChrystal was directly responsible for the interrogation camp in Iraq known as NAMA, an acronym that stood for “Nasty A** Military Area.” The Camp NAMA motto was “No Blood, No Foul,” a slogan that reflected the interrogators’ philosophy that “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.” As one Pentagon official explained, “there were no rules there.” The Red Cross was never allowed into NAMA on order of Gen. McChrystal, who visited the place a number of times and who had a really darn good idea what was going on there.

Journalist Seymour Hersh called the JSOC part of an “executive assassination ring” that McChrystal ran under the direct control of Dick Cheney, who as vice president had no constitutional or legal authority in the military chain of command. Gen. Stan and his Howling Commandos, along with CIA hooligans, Blackwater yahoos-of-fortune, and other patriotic psychopaths, rubbed out God only knows how many “suspected” terrorists who were identified by intelligence beaten or bribed out of nefarious sources. There’s no telling how many innocent civilians were slaughtered in the process of these vigilante-style shoot-em-ups.

McChrystal has more blood on his hands than Macbeth and his wife put together, and he is as mendacious as he is murderous. His involvement in the cover-up of the Gardez Massacre, in which U.S. Special Forces destroyed evidence of collateral damage by digging their bullets out of the corpses of civilians, made his whitewash of the Pat Tillman fratricide affair seem venial by comparison, a petty sin that might be absolved with a fistful of Hail Marys.

By rights, McChrystal should be the gaunt, smirking face of American war atrocities, but he is far, far too special to be cast as a villain. Born of military nobility – his father was a two-star general – McChrystal learned early in life how to work his decoder ring and give the secret handshake. West Point Cadet McChrystal made his reputation as a bad boy, but he always knew just how far he could push things and still land on the safety network his father’s connections provided him.

It’s little wonder that he got away with MacArthur-magnitude insubordination when he used his 60 Minutes infomercial and other media tricks to corner Obama into going along with escalating the Bananastans* fiasco. And the Rolling Stone escapade was a stroke of passive-aggressive virtuosity. A diamond-studded parachute, it bailed McChrystal out of responsibility for the disaster he had created.

McChrystal is as made a guy as a guy can get made in the American war mafia. His bollixing of the Bananastans conflict has become the crown jewel of the Pentarchy’s** Long War strategy by making Obama’s July 2011 withdrawal date vanish like a wallet on a Chicago sidewalk. Will he ever go to trial for war crimes? Forget about it. A whole bunch of people in a lot of high places knew what McChrystal was up to and tacitly if not actively approved of it, and if he ever faces criminal charges, he’ll sing like Frank Sinatra.

Lynndie England grew up in a trailer park. In grade school she was diagnosed with severe learning disabilities. How she got into the Army Reserve is anyone’s guess. She doesn’t have friends in high places, or anywhere else for that matter. Upon her release from prison, she returned home with her son (by fellow Abu Ghraib felon Charles Graner) to West Virginia, where, according to a March 2009 Associated Press story, she “spends most of her days confined to her home.” She says she suffers from depression and anxiety, a claim one finds easy enough to believe.

She gets by on welfare and help from her parents. In 2007 she landed a spot on her local recreation board, but it was a non-paying position. Though she’s sent out hundreds of resumés, she can’t find a paying job. When one restaurant manager considered hiring her, the other employees threatened to quit.

People point and whisper, “That’s her.” England relates that one stranger sent her a note that suggested her mother should “shoot herself for raising somebody like me, and that I should kill my baby and kill myself, or give up my child for adoption, because the way I was raised they didn’t want him to turn into some evil monster, too.”

She has tried changing her appearance by dying her hair and wearing sunglasses and ball caps. “But it’s my face that’s always recognized,” says England, who never once directly or indirectly or on purpose or by accident caused the death of a single human being.

* The Bananastans are Afghanistan and Pakistan, our banana republics in Central Asia.

** The Pentarchy is the cabal of oligarchs who support and promote the Pentagon’s Long War agenda.

Social Security Myths

2010-07-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

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

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

2010-07-29T12:35:00.000-07:00

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:
Bailout money is being used to subsidize companies run by horrible business men, allowing the bankers to receive fat bonuses, to redecorate their offices, and to buy gold toilets and prostitutes
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.

Remembering the Lockerbie Bombing

2010-07-28T15:51:00.000-07:00

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

Man hit by six meteorites blames aliens

2010-07-28T15:06:00.000-07:00

Daily Telegraph.com:

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."

Osama Bin Lyin?

2010-07-27T10:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Shirley Sherrod's Dad

2010-07-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

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.

BP Blowout Well Con In Progress

2010-07-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2010-07-19T00:10:00.000-07:00

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

July 16, 2010

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.

Con of the Decade, parts 1 and 2

2010-07-18T15:07:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2010-07-18T11:50:00.000-07:00

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

by Ian Welsh:

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.

The real composition of the deficit

2010-07-17T12:40:00.000-07:00

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?":

Our Elected Leaders Love 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

Denninger shows why the Stock Market is a fraud

2010-07-09T13:27:00.000-07:00

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

via David Degraw:

Afghanistan: History Repeats Itself

2010-07-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

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.”

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

2010-07-06T11:39:00.000-07:00

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

What Actually Happened at the G20 Protests

2010-06-28T12:32:00.000-07:00

IanWelsh.net:

2010 June 28

by Ian Welsh

There’s been a lot of crying about “thugs and anarchists” in Toronto. I live about 4 blocks from where some of the vandalism occurred, though I wasn’t there at the time.

As best I can tell, what happened is that for about an hour, the Black Bloc protesters clearly and visibly prepared for action, with both the police and other, non-violent protesters able to see they were doing so. The number of Black Bloc vandals seems to have been between 50 to 100, certainly not more than 200. (The police had 20,000 men.)

The police actually withdrew, leaving behind police cars for the Black Block to torch. Which they then did. The Black Bloc then proceeded up Yonge street (the main north/south street in downtown Toronto), vandalizing as they went, and eventually many headed over to Queen’s Park, the Provincial capital. Two hours after the first violence, the police finally take action, ensuring that there are plenty of videos of police cars burning and vandalism that would not have occurred if they had taken action earlier.

According to the police, rather than confront a maximum of 200 protesters, they withdrew behind the barrier around the G20 meetings and let them vandalize downtown Toronto for 2 hours.

At the end of the day the people who matter never even saw any protests and the 1 billion dollar police presence and suspension of civil liberties was “justified” by vandalism and burning police cars.

Simply put, the police decided that they couldn’t spare say 2,000 out of their 20,000 men to stop 200 vandals. This was a deliberate decision to allow downtown to be vandalized.

I leave it as an exercise for readers to decide if this was a matter of incompetence, or if it was a deliberate strategy. And if it was deliberate strategy, just what they were trying to accomplish with their strategy.

Of course, along the way Canadian Civil Liberties observers were arrested as well, and protesters were not allowed to see lawyers.

I am ashamed to be Canadian today, and I am ashamed of my governments, at all levels.

some comments:

anderson permalink
It would not surprise me in the least to learn that the so-called vandals were false flag cops. And this would not surprise me, because Canadian cops (specifically Quebec Provincial Police) have been caught doing this not so long before, or rather, they were caught attempting to do something like this before.
“Police came under fire Tuesday, when a video surfaced on YouTube that appeared to show three plainclothes police officers at the protest with bandanas across their faces. One of the men was carrying a rock.”

Indeed, these were only the cops that the protesters had discovered. No one knew, and the cops certainly did not admit, just how many cops might have been so anarchically armed and costumed.

False flag cops have been a feature of political landscapes for decades. And they are there for a number of reasons, long and short term: to delegitimize protests generally, i.e. always make them look violent, and to delegitimize the particular protest and, more importantly, to provide the pretext to start the crackdown and arrests.

2010 June 28

Ian Welsh permalink

As I understand it they moved out from the cover of non-violent protesters for quite a substantial period of time.

I suspect that the businesses vandalized do not think that letting them run amok for two hours was the preferred solution. Nor was then cracking down on clearly non-violent protesters who had no black block amongst them at all.

2010 June 28

JustPlainDave permalink

We have a different understanding then. I debriefed with a number of friends and professional acquaintances who were there and they were unanimous on their accounts of how these guys operated. They had well thought out and executed TTPs - they suited up and changed into “colours” while in the crowd (with an organized outer screen providing cover for them), pulled their action while surrounded by other demo attendees (pretty commonly being accompanied by organized teams to watch their back and actively attempting to prevent other attendees from getting video/stills of the operators that would result in viable ids) and changed back into civvies either in the crowd while screened or after exfil from the demo.

Krugman Agrees with Hudson, but I suspect he doesn't know it...

2010-06-28T12:10:00.000-07:00

NYTimes.com:

The Third Depression

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: June 27, 2010
Recessions are common; depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.
Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.
We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.
And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.
In 2008 and 2009, it seemed as if we might have learned from history. Unlike their predecessors, who raised interest rates in the face of financial crisis, the current leaders of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank slashed rates and moved to support credit markets. Unlike governments of the past, which tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer.
But future historians will tell us that this wasn’t the end of the third depression, just as the business upturn that began in 1933 wasn’t the end of the Great Depression. After all, unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down rapidly. And both the United States and Europe are well on their way toward Japan-style deflationary traps.
In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.
As far as rhetoric is concerned, the revival of the old-time religion is most evident in Europe, where officials seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business confidence. As a practical matter, however, America isn’t doing much better. The Fed seems aware of the deflationary risks — but what it proposes to do about these risks is, well, nothing. The Obama administration understands the dangers of premature fiscal austerity — but because Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress won’t authorize additional aid to state governments, that austerity is coming anyway, in the form of budget cuts at the state and local levels.
Why the wrong turn in policy? The hard-liners often invoke the troubles facing Greece and other nations around the edges of Europe to justify their actions. And it’s true that bond investors have turned on governments with intractable deficits. But there is no evidence that short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy reassures investors. On the contrary: Greece has agreed to harsh austerity, only to find its risk spreads growing ever wider; Ireland has imposed savage cuts in public spending, only to be treated by the markets as a worse risk than Spain, which has been far more reluctant to take the hard-liners’ medicine.
It’s almost as if the financial markets understand what policy makers seemingly don’t: that while long-term fiscal responsibility is important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating.
So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.
And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

Europe’s Fiscal Dystopia: The “New Austerity” Road to Neoserfdom

2010-06-28T00:41:00.000-07:00

Michael Hudson at NewEconomicPerspectives.blogspot.com:

Somebody must take a loss on the economy's bad loans – and bankers want the economy to take the loss, to "save the financial system." From the financial sector's vantage point, the economy is to be managed to preserve bank liquidity, rather than the financial system run to serve the economy. Government social spending (on everything apart from bank bailouts and financial subsidies) and disposable personal income are to be cut back to keep the debt overhead from being written down. Corporate cash flow is to be used to pay creditors, not employ more labor and make long-term capital investment.
The economy is to be sacrificed to subsidize the fantasy that debts can be paid, if only banks can be "made whole" to begin lending again – that is, to resume loading the economy down with even more debt, causing yet more intrusive debt deflation.
This is not the familiar old 19^th-century class war of industrial employers against labor, although that is part of what is happening. It is above all a war of the financial sector against the "real" economy: industry as well as labor.
The underlying reality is indeed that pensions cannot be paid – at least, not paid out of financial gains. For the past fifty years the Western economies have indulged the fantasy of paying retirees out of purely financial gains (M-M' as Marxists would put it), not out of an expanding economy (M-C-M', employing labor to produce more output). The myth was that finance would take the form of productive loans to increase capital formation and hiring. The reality is that finance takes the form of debt – and gambling. Its gains therefore were made from the economy at large. They were extractive, not productive. Wealth at the rentier top of the economic pyramid shrank the base below. So something has to give. The question is, what form will the "give" take? And who will do the giving – and be the recipients?
The Greek government has been unwilling to tax the rich. So labor must make up the fiscal gap, by permitting its socialist government to cut back pensions, health care, education and other social spending – all to bail out the financial sector from an exponential growth that is impossible to realize in practice. The economy is being sacrificed to an impossible dream. Yet instead of blaming the problem on the exponential growth in bank claims that cannot be paid, bank lobbyists – and the G-20 politicians dependent on their campaign funding – are promoting the myth that the problem is demographic: an aging population expecting Social Security and employer pensions. Instead of paying these, governments are being told to use their taxing and credit-creating power to bail out the financial sector's claims for payment.
Latvia has been held out as the poster child for what the EU is recommending for Greece and the other PIIGS: Slashing public spending on education and health has reduced public-sector wages by 30 percent, and they are still falling. Property prices have fallen by 70 percent – and homeowners and their extended family of co-signers are liable for the negative equity, plunging them into a life of debt peonage if they do not take the hint and emigrate.
The bizarre pretense for government budget cutbacks in the face of a post-bubble economic downturn is that it will help to rebuild "confidence." It is as if fiscal self-destruction can instill confidence rather than prompting investors to flee the euro. The logic seems to be the familiar old class war, rolling back the clock to the hard-line tax philosophy of a bygone era – rolling back Social Security and public pensions, rolling back public spending on education and other basic needs, and above all, increasing unemployment to drive down wage levels. This was made explicit by Latvia's central bank – which EU central bankers hold up as a "model" of economic shrinkage for other countries to follow.
It is a self-destructive logic. Exacerbating the economic downturn will reduce tax revenues, making budget deficits even worse in a declining spiral. Latvia's experience shows that the response to economic shrinkage is emigration of skilled labor and capital flight. Europe's policy of planned economic shrinkage in fact controverts the prime assumption of political and economic textbooks: the axiom that voters act in their self-interest, and that economies choose to grow, not to destroy themselves. Today, European democracies – and even the Social Democratic, Socialist and labour Parties – are running for office on a fiscal and financial policy platform that opposes the interests of most voters, and even industry.
The explanation, of course, is that today's economic planning is not being done by elected representatives. Planning authority has been relinquished to the hands of "independent" central banks, which in turn act as the lobbyists for commercial banks selling their product – debt. From the central bank's vantage point, the "economic problem" is how to keep commercial banks and other financial institutions solvent in a post-bubble economy. How can they get paid for debts that are beyond the ability of many people to pay, in an environment of rising defaults?

The answer is that creditors can get paid only at the economy's expense. The remaining economic surplus must go to them, not to capital investment, employment or social spending.
This is the problem with the financial view. It is short-term – and predatory. Given a choice between operating the banks to promote the economy, or running the economy to benefit the banks, bankers always will choose the latter alternative. And so will the politicians they support.
Governments need huge sums to bail out the banks from their bad loans. But they cannot borrow more, because of the debt squeeze. So the bad-debt loss must be passed onto labor and industry. The cover story is that government bailouts will permit the banks to start lending again, to reflate the Bubble Economy's Ponzi-borrowing. But there is already too much negative equity and there is no leeway left to restart the bubble. Economies are all "loaned up." Real estate rents, corporate cash flow and public taxing power cannot support further borrowing – no matter how much wealth the government gives to banks. Asset prices have plunged into negative equity territory. Debt deflation is shrinking markets, corporate profits and cash flow. The Miracle of Compound Interest dynamic has culminated in defaults, reflecting the inability of debtors to sustain the exponential rise in carrying charges that "financial solvency" requires.
If the financial sector can be rescued only by cutting back social spending on Social Security, health care and education, bolstered by more privatization sell-offs, is it worth the price? To sacrifice the economy in this way would violate most peoples' social values of equity and fairness rooted deep in Enlightenment philosophy.
That is the political problem: How can bankers persuade voters to approve this under a democratic system? It is necessary to orchestrate and manage their perceptions. Their poverty must be portrayed as desirable – as a step toward future prosperity.
A half-century of failed IMF austerity plans imposed on hapless Third World debtors should have dispelled forever the idea that the way to prosperity is via austerity. The ground has been paved for this attitude by a generation of purging the academic curriculum of knowledge that there ever was an alternative economic philosophy to that sponsored by the rentier Counter-Enlightenment. Classical value and price theory reflected John Locke's labor theory of property: A person's wealth should be what he or she creates with their own labor and enterprise, not by insider dealing or special privilege.
This is why I say that Europe is dying. If its trajectory is not changed, the EU must succumb to a financial coup d'êtat rolling back the past three centuries of Enlightenment social philosophy. The question is whether a break-up is now the only way to recover its social democratic ideals from the banks that have taken over its central planning organs.

Kendra: BP is scamming us about cleaning up the mess

2010-06-27T02:33:00.000-07:00

Here's quite an interesting video, at least from the little of it I can understand:

It's a lady, a Gulf community organizer named Kendra Arnesen of Venice, Louisiana, telling of her experience of being allowed to poke around at BP and nosing around the cleanup efforts, and her conclusion that it's largely a scam to persuade folks that BP is trying hard to do the right thing.

For others who have as hard a time understanding it as I do, here is a transcript someone called Supernova wrote out and posted at Democratic Underground:

Edited on Thu Jun-24-10 02:49 PM by supernova
(supernova - comments in parentheses

... denotes pauses in speech)

++++++++++
Thank you

OK, I'm not really a speech-giver. You guys try to bear with me; I'll try to make this as painless as possible.

To explain to you where I live, I am indeed the one on the very end. I am at Point 5 on Highway 23 in South Plaquamines Parish, Louisiana. Keep in mind through what I have to say, is that I am the mother of a five year old little boy and an eight year old girl who look like their Dad.

That being said, when this first happened, I really didn't know what to do. Who to ask questions to. Who was going to give us answers. The first day we were introduced to anyone from BP they came into our building and said

"BP does business right"

Yeah! Can you believe that? "BP does business right and we're here to take care of everything, folks."

Well, 61 days later, that's a joke, to say the least. Just to give you guys kind of perspective of where I've been, four weeks ago, I set up at a town all meeting at IND pinned down all involved (inaudible 1:16 ) and I am disturbed bye the end of their speech. At any rate, I was invited the following week to go behind "enemy lines." They gave me, of all people, security clearance to go into the base of operations meetings in Venice, Louisiana eight days in. Open door invitation to sit like a fly on the wall. Can you believe it? It's really going on. They also gave me security clearance to go up to the Homer Incident Command Post which is over the entire region of Louisiana. I've been in Coast Guard planes all the way out to the site itself. Helicopters. Boat rides. I have been everywhere that anybody could ever want to go to get an inside look at what's really going on.

Now, I want to start by telling you guys I am not at all impressed. Someone told me this morning that they thought I had crossed over. Well, I picked a team a long time ago. My Father was a Commercial Fisherman. And my Husband's a Commercial Fisherman. Every man that I've known, loved, and respected is on the water. They're good men.

At any rate, for the past week I've heard in the OPS meeting "We need to cut costs."

(audience response incredulous)

Yes, (nodding head) That's what they've said, that they need to cut costs.

I almost came out of my chair the first time I heard it, but I'm trying to stay where I am because someone has to be on the inside overlooking and seeing as to what's going on around. That being said, where I've seen "cutting costs" is quite unfortunate. What we call in Venice... First we gotta understand this phrase: "Ponies and balloons."

Well, the only place I"ve ever seen "ponies and balloons" is at the circus. Right? At any rate, about a week and half in, I learned what "ponies and balloons" meant. "Ponies and balloons" means that every time an official is headed anywhere near here, they get a heads up.. All assets are deployed into the hardest hit areas. The official comes in, flies over, "good job, fellas" (waves), pats 'em on the back. When that official disappears out of the hardest hit area, so does 75%-80% of the response.

It's happening. It's happening every day. I'm watching it. I've seen it. I don't agree with it. Anyone in this room's not gonna agree with it. Anyone in our great nation's not gonna agree with it.

We are expendable to these people. We do not matter.

Now, I'm gonna get off that. I'm sorry I talk in circles, but that's the coonass in me. Y'all following me, just let me know..

At any rate, I'm gonna go into the health issues for a moment, if you don't mind.

I've sat through endless hours of meetings with BP's safety officers. I've sat through an hour and 45 minute meeting with the Coast Guard Safety Officers, both in the Homer Incident Command Post, as well as a gentleman from OSHA.

In order to obtain a respirator for our responders -- now this isn't just Commercial Fishermen -- I'm talking about Coast Guard members, all responders, people off the street. Everybody involved.

Number 1: They have to fill out an OSHA questionnaire

Number 2: They have to have a physical evaluation by a medical professional.

But, EPA is doing air monitoring. Everything's OK. It's great. (incredulous) Yeah, imagine that.

At any rate, there is in fact some act somewhere, OSHA's law, that volunteers have a right to wear a "volunteer respirator."

BUT, as we all know, BP has taken over our Gulf. BP rules right now, our Gulf. Bottom line, that's who's in charge of the situation. (raises volume and pitch) They couldn't even run their own company and they are in charge of this response!

I'm totally appalled!

They can't wear a "volunteer respirator" because they aren't properly trained. BP's rules are that they have to be properly trained in order to wear a respirator. Now, BP said that they will provide the training and they will provide a respirator.

BUT, every thing's OK. (according to the EPA) So, they don't need to be trained and they don't need a respirator. And as far as the "right to wear volunteer respiration?" Guess what? If you don' t follow BP's rules, you don't have a job. And that's what they told me.

Now, I asked them to discuss the seven men that were brought, one by helicopter and six by ambulance. I asked them if they were at liberty to discuss that with me. And they said, "Yes Ma'am, we are."

I guess these guys didn't realize who they were talking to.

Number 1 response from Mr Hayward was food poisoning. Four different boats, all in ... way , way from each other. Food poisoning.

Second response was heat exhaustion.

Then last Wednesday -- I'm sorry, Wednesday a week ago -- when I sat with OSHA and BP safety officers, the OSHA man informed me that all four boats took Pine-Sol, sprayed it all over their boats, and then sat and breathed in the fumes all day long and that's what caused the chemical poisoning.

Hold on a second! I've been on boats all my life. I've been with captains all over the place. When we spray something on our boat, we wash it right off. If not, it eats the paint off the boat. We take care of ourselves. So that right there was just a blatant out lie.

So, then I asked them, throwed one out of left field at them. I said, so what about the people of 9/11? He said, it's funny you asked about that. Because I was working that job. We were following them around with respirators, begging them to put them on. And he actually pointed the finger at our New York Firefighters.

(audience boos)

Yeah, (nodding)

They are dying a slow death as we sit in this room right now from chemical poisoning. Pointing the finger at them and saying that they turned around and gave him the one finger salute. And said, "We're not wearing a respirator, we're looking for our friends."

Trained firefighters? In New York? Are you serious?

I wanted to just slap him in the face! But, I was good.

At any rate, you know, my children have broke out in four rashes. My child broke out in a rash the first time. I took her to Florida for four days. It magically cleared up. I brought her back, she broke out again. I left, she cleared up. Now today, she broke out again. Not to mention that my beautiful, healthy, straight-A student, gorgeous daughter has a double-ear infection. Upper respiratory problems. I left and went to Baton Rouge, and as I drove back home, clearing the throat, the stickiness, the upper respiratory irritation.

You know, the bottom line here is this morning I contacted Miss Marla Cooper who is District 9 Councilwoman for Plaquamines Parish. And Miss Marla has three grandchildren in our area and she's just a great grandparent and a good Mom, and I told her, "Miss Marla, we have got to call an evacuation of our area. We can not allow our citizens to sit like we're out in the middle of the -- we are, this is on all three sides of my home -- I walk outside and there's a haze. They're called "bad air days." "Folks, stay inside, put your air conditioning on recirculation. Everything's just fine."

Why would we need to lock ourselves up in our house? You really think that's gonna cut it? Do you really think that's gonna make the situation better? No. It's not. Where do you think the air that's inside the house comes from? Outside of the house.

These people, they never cease to amaze me. The lack of humanity, here. I know that my Parish only makes up two percent (2%) of Louisiana's population , but does that make my people expendable?!

This is unacceptable!

They are slowly poisoning every person that I've ever been close to in my entire life and I'm standing here saying NO MORE!

Now, if I ruffle some feathers, and make some people mad. So be it. I don't care. My people are more important to me than their "bottom line." And that is *my* bottom line.

So basically, this whole "ponies and balloons" act -- if someone does not come in and properly oversee this response -- our marsh now is being used as a boom. an overworked (?) boom, a big, giant sponge. It's on both sides of us. It will fill up, it is filling up, constantly. We have heavy, heavy crude penetrating our marsh right now as we speak. They deploy , and then they pull 'em back in when the politicians leave and this is not acceptable!

They're not cleaning it up; they're covering it up! This is, we're barely into this. This could go on for years and years and they are already cutting costs! Cutting costs, cutting corners, taking shortcuts is why we are all sittin' in this room today.

(applause)

Enough is enough!

Now, as far as EPA, OSHA, NOAA, BP, and the federal government , they every one of them's in collaboration with each other. That comes from someone at the top of NOAA. That's who I've been talking to. They gave me someone at the top of NOAA. But, they're all in collaboration with BP.

Are you serious!?!

Who do these people work for? I thought these were our agencies to protect our better interests, our world, our Earth, our lives and what is going on here? Are we that dependent upon these ... banks? to just roll over and let them poison our world? and our people in it?

This is unacceptable.

A week after this started they wanna say "Nothing's happening. Nothing's dyin'. A week after the story, I traveled 70 miles east of the original site/ There was these shells floating all over the top of the water. Hundreds of thousands of them. They were empty because they were dead. I've never seen a shell float in my life. Dead. A week after.

Four weeks ago when the oil was trajected to hit the west side of our peninsula. I was so mad after I went down to Pascaloocha and seeing what wasn't being done there, that I got in my boat -- my dime, my time, -- and I took a trip. I was like (almost invited?) FOX national news on my boat. I traveled 10 miles from Red Pass to four bayous, to the east side of Grand Isle. Now the oil was trajected to hit that side of the peninsula.
30 miles! I did not run into one responder. I did not run into one piece of boom, hard or soft. 150 feet of sandbags on 150 miles stretch of shoreline.

This is unacceptable.

So, I decided on the way back, well let me just go out from the coast a little bit and see what's going on. I ran into oil 3/4 of mile off the coast. Not sheen. Crude. As I'm driving along back towards Red Pass (Pass or Path?) I look over the Gulf and I notice that there's big swarms of birds. That's not unusual. I figured they was diving on bait. But what where they diving into oil sheen? Because birds don't know any better. We're driving out towards the birds. I wanted to see what they were diving into. I wanted to know. As we get out to the birds, I don't know if you've been out on the water much, if you've seen a big school of fish. They have like a boil on the water. It looks like a pot boiling. The fish boil the water with their moves. As we drove into it, there was big Bull Reds (Bull Mouths?) with their mouths on top of the water , laying sideways , swimming upside down in a circle. Again, hundreds of thousands of them, school after school after school. They were dying. They were so disoriented that they were running into the side of my boat.

(audience member asks why the news isn't down there.)

That's a real good question. Fox national news swears it's on their website, but I've search it up and down. I've even, you know what. I've got the camera man's phone number in my purse right there. we can call him after and find out exactly where it's at. I've already been asking for it over and over again.

(applause)

And they won't give it to me. You know what? Everybody saying a "media blackout," "a media blackout." Yes ma'am there is a media blackout. Um. Sydney, Australia "60 minutes" came over and they did a real nice piece. I watched it on their website. The transcript is still there. 24 hours after the video hit the website, it disappeared.

You know, as far as the Fisherman can catch shrimp elsewhere comment, I want to make something real clear. We have bee fighting imports and regulations for the last 20 years. They have regulated us to the point as Commercial Fisherman, that my husband personally has seven different permits. The only thing that my husband does not do is oyster. So, if there is shrimp somewhere else, or we can use gill net or whatever we need to do in order to provide a food source for this country, a natural way to feed people, then somebody point me in that direction and let me know where it is, 'cause I've looked all over the place.

I came back here four and a half years ago and rebuilt on dirt because this is my home and I love Louisiana . I live right out in the middle of nowhere, boondocks. The bottom line here is, that if the country does not stand up and say "NO MORE!" we must take action. we cannot sit back, and if this stuff does not stop guys, this is gonna go global. It will destroy 1/3 of the world's water. Bank on it. They do not stop this, ever ocean is connected. It will go on and on and on as my daughter says "infinity+2"

Enoughs enough.

I'll take any questions after. Thank you for listening.

(Supernova again - if you listening and copy doesn't jibe le me know under the post and I can correct it in the next hour. I wasn't sure about the part where she said she took her boat out on the water, if she was saying that she took a FOX NEWS person out with her. That's what I get, with the story about the missing video, but I need help verifying.

It really sounds like she's a person who is a re pub who has seen, is seeing the light re: corporate ownership of our society.)

The Housing Bubble Was Based On Fraud

2010-06-26T13:55:00.000-07:00

by Ian Welsh:

Once again:

Recent filings by two Federal Home Loan Banks — in San Francisco and Seattle — offer an intriguing way to clear this high hurdle. Lawyers representing the banks, which bought mortgage securities, combed through the loan pools looking for discrepancies between actual loan characteristics and how they were pitched to investors.

You may not be shocked to learn that the analysis found significant differences between what the Home Loan Banks were told about these securities and what they were sold.

The rate of discrepancies in these pools is surprising. The lawsuits contend that half the loans were inaccurately described in disclosure materials filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Half of them were fraudulent.

Half

There would have been no housing bubble without widespread fraud. None.

Virtually every major bank executive in the US should be indicted for fraud. The fact that there aren’t even serious investigations, let alone indictments, tells you everything you need to know. Everyone in the system knows it was all fraud, they knew it at the time, and that is exactly why there are no real investigations.

Euphemisms to look out for: "the Bill Collapsed"

2010-06-25T23:30:00.000-07:00

Politico.com:

A Democratic-backed jobs and economic relief bill collapsed in the Senate on Thursday after failing for the third time to break through a wall of Republicans who rejected repeated entreaties to join in advancing the $100 billion-plus package, including aid for cash-strapped states and the unemployed.

No, the Bill didn't collapse. The Democrats pushing the bill collapsed. Big difference.

Until the Democrats actually force the Republicans to filibuster—for weeks on end if they want to—it seems to me the Democrats aren't really serious.

Is Tinnitis "phantom sound" similar to amputees' "phantom pain?"

2010-06-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

PhysOrg.com:

In a Perspective piece in the June 24 issue of Neuron, Josef P. Rauschecker, PhD, says that tinnitus should be thought of as a disorder akin to the "phantom pain" felt in an amputated limb.

Tinnitus starts with damage to hair cells in the cochlea of the inner ear. This damage forces neurons in the brain's auditory areas, which normally receive input from that part of the cochlea, to become overactive to fill in the missing sound, he says. That extra, unreal noise is normally inhibited - or tuned out - by a corrective feedback loop from the brain's limbic system to the thalamus, where all sensory information is regulated, before it reaches the cerebral cortex, where a person becomes conscious of the senses. But that doesn't happen in tinnitus patients due to compromised brain structures in the limbic system.

"Neurons, trying to compensate for loss of an external signal, fire to produce sound that doesn't exist in tinnitus patients, just like neurons send pain signals to someone who has lost a limb," Rauschecker says. "What both people have in common is that they have lost the feedback loops that stop these signals from reaching consciousness."

Rauschecker says this conclusion, from his research and from other leaders in the field, provides the first testable model of human tinnitus that could provide some new avenues for therapy. "If we can find a way to turn that feedback system back on to eliminate phantom sound, it might be possible one day to take a pill and make tinnitus go away," he says.
[. . .]
Research into tinnitus has become much more sophisticated of late, and is changing the common understanding of the disorder, Rauschecker says. "It has long been thought, and still is believed by many today, that tinnitus is a problem only of damaged hair cells in the inner ear, and if those hair cells are restored, tinnitus goes away."

The latest research suggests that while tinnitus may initially arise from such peripheral damage, it becomes a problem in the brain's central auditory pathways, which reorganizes itself in response to that damage, he says.
[. . .]
"Like phantom pain, the firing of central neurons in the brain continues to convey perceptual experiences, even though the corresponding sensory receptor cells have been destroyed," he says. "The brain fills in sensations in response to a deficit of input. Neighboring frequencies become amplified and expand into the vacated frequency range. It also happens to people with a hole in their retina. They don't see the hole because the brain fills in what is missing."

Imaging studies further show hyperactivity not only in auditory pathways of the cortex and thalamus but also in the non-auditory, limbic brain structures that regulate a number of functions including emotion. This limbic activation has been interpreted to reflect the emotional reaction of tinnitus patients to phantom sound, but research has now shown the limbic region normally blocks sound sensations sent from the auditory region that are not real. It does this by feeding sensations of sound that are not real back to a brain area in the thalamus (the thalamic reticular nucleus) that exerts inhibition on the sensory signals and can thus subtract the errant noise.

"This circuit serves as an active noise-cancelation mechanism - a feedback loop that subtracts sounds that should not be there," says Rauschecker. "But in cases where the limbic regions become dysfunctional, this noise-cancelation breaks down and the tinnitus signal permeates to the auditory cortex, where it enters consciousness."

Researchers have also found evidence that this inhibiting gating mechanism can be switched on and off, which explains why some tinnitus patients have a ringing sensation intermittently.
It remains unclear, however, why some individuals who have hearing loss do not develop tinnitus. Given that some people with tinnitus seem to be more susceptible to other disorders like chronic pain and depression, it could be that they have an independent, systemic vulnerability in one or more neurotransmitter systems in the limbic region," Rauschecker says. "That could explain why drugs that modulate neurotransmitters like serotonin appear to help some people out."

Insomnia is also linked to tinnitus, and not because ringing in the ears keeps patients awake, Rauschecker says. "Insomnia may cause tinnitus, and both may be related to serotonin depletion," he says. "It appears tinnitus is the auditory symptom of an underlying syndrome, which becomes evident in patients who happen to have a hearing loss," he says.
Therefore, identification of the transmitter systems involved in the brain's intrinsic noise cancellation system could open avenues for drug treatment of tinnitus, the authors say.

A New Internet Meme: Possible "once in a lifetime" solar storm possible in 2013 —

2010-06-24T10:42:00.000-07:00

The source of the meme in question is this "scientific" sounding sentence: "Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years. "

Telegraph.co.uk:

National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
[. . .]
A “space weather” conference in Washington DC last week, attended by Nasa scientists, policy-makers, researchers and government officials, was told of similar warnings.

While scientists have previously told of the dangers of the storm, Dr Fisher’s comments are the most comprehensive warnings from Nasa to date.

Dr Fisher, 69, said the storm, which will cause the Sun to reach temperatures of more than 10,000 F (5500C), occurred only a few times over a person’s life.

Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years.

They don't mention here that both these numbers are very rough averages. WIthout knowing that, this article doesn't make any sense at all, since an 11 year cycle would either coincide with a 22 year cycle every time, or would always miss it...

Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation.

That link about Dr. Fisher (from NASA) actually quotes him as saying is this:

"The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we're getting together to discuss."

Looks like someone at the Telegraph was speed reading...

So I googled the sentence "Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years. "

It does not exist on the NASA site.

It did, however, get 12,500 hits, mostly from sites that publish "scientific news" by and for people who have very little idea what they're talking about. I didn't find any of them older than the Telegraph article, but lots of them are from the same day.

"Throwing money at the problem (Afghanistan) exacerbates the problem"

2010-06-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

Funny. This sounds exactly like what I was getting at in the previous post below.

This is the final paragraph of the profile on General Stanley McChrystal in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone Magazine. He's seen to be a brilliant, driven, canny, crafty tactician with extraordinary experience and skill, all being squandered on a mistake. Brilliance in the service of a misguided mission seems to me a tragic blunder.

Rolling Stone.com:

After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. "Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. "A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word "victory" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.

This article appears in in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25.

Warlord cash flow is a positive feedback loop

2010-06-22T11:31:00.000-07:00

Follow the Money! Follow the Money! The secret to why we engage in useless, seemingly-counterproductive wars! What is the magic of Privatization? Why is it profitable to convince people to slaughter each other? Follow the Money!

Notice how the Warlords are filling exactly the same niche as Prince's ~~Blackwater~~ Xe, as are a large majority of the Taliban. Mercenaries. Roughly 60% of "our" forces in Afghanistan are now mercenaries.*

IanWelsh.net:

June 22, 2010

by Dave Anderson

The BBC, among many other news agencies, are reporting on a Congressional investigation into Afghan security contractors and the US supply lines. The gist of the story is simple; privatizing convoy protection means pumping massive amounts of money into warlords who have every incentive to inflate the need for their services while also minimizing their risk. That means staging elaborate ‘faux’ ambushes and paying off insurgent groups that are strong enough to overrun convoys that are under their protection.

The document states that trucks carrying food, water, fuel, and ammunition may be supplying up to $4 million (£2.7m) per week to the firms.

A US congressional committee is expected to hear the evidence on the investigation from senior officials at the US Department of Defense later on Tuesday.

‘Vast protection racket’The congressional subcommittee that carried out the investigation says that bribes are paid to the Taliban and virtually every governor, police chief and local military commander whose territory the convoys pass through.

One of the security companies in question is alleged to be owned by two cousins of the Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The report released late on Monday says the security agreements violate laws on the use of private contractors, as well as US Department of Defense regulations.

The report states that “although the warlords do provide guards and coordinate security, the contractors have little choice but to use them in what amounts to a vast protection racket”.

This is not surprising. Rumbles of this have been making the press for months now. Smart bloggers have been pointing out the logic and incentive structure of warlordism and decentralized armed groups cutting deals for local interests instead of American interests for even longer. The same basic set-up occurred in Iraq as local reconstruction funds were often paid to ‘respectable’ businessmen and tribal elites who then distributed the cash to their supporters as well as to insurgent groups through a bewildering array of kickbacks and sub-contractors to the subcontractors.The anti-government insurgencies in both Iraq and Afghanistan continued to grow as the US poured more money into each respective nation. The crumbs that fell off the US funded gravy train were more than sufficient to arm and sustain fighters who were able to deny the US its maximalist objectives. The more we spend in Afghanistan, the more crumbs we generate, and the more the Taliban and other anti-government and anti-US groups can raise. It is a nasty positive feedback loop that won’t be broken unless the United States, and more importantly Barrack Obama realizes he can take the short term domestic political hit of abandoning maximal goals and embracing a minimal and much cheaper goal set.

That is unlikely due to the revolt of the generals, fear of being called weak, a possibility of a Republican House in 2011, and the shut-down of the only Keynesian spending Blue-Dog Democrats and Republicans will support, military Keynesian spending.

*This from the Washington Post, 12-15-2010:

The CRS study says contractors made up 69 percent of the Pentagon's personnel in Afghanistan last December, a proportion that "apparently represented the highest recorded percentage of contractors used by the Defense Department in any conflict in the history of the United States." As of September, contractor representation had dropped to 62 percent, as U.S. troop strength increased modestly.

This from Bloomberg.com, 3-10-2009:

Vice President Joe Biden said at least 70 percent of Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan are mercenaries who could be persuaded to lay down their arms, stepping up U.S. calls for outreach to “moderate” elements of the insurgency.

An oddball Global Warming Analogy:

More energy retained in the global weather system=more energetic storms, more extremes of hot and cold, draughts and floods.

More money into a war=more graft and corruption, more mercenaries killing other mercenaries, as well as more civilians, breeding more energetic terrorist storms, as well as more extremes of all kinds.

This might require a post of its own...

Hypocrit Alert! NRA! Hypocrit Alert!

2010-06-20T11:03:00.000-07:00

Oh, and I suppose we could add the Republicans who bemoan the Democrats cutting this deal—like they're such big supporters of campaign finance reform... but it also highlights the unpleasant way politics works: cut deals with your biggest opponents just to pass anything.

Remember, passing this legislation (or something like it) was deemed the only recourse we have to the Supreme Court decision outlawing campaign finance limits...

Christian Science Monitor (csmonitor.com): (Via Truthout.org)

Did Democrats' deal with the NRA kill campaign finance reform?

At issue is a deal brokered by the House Democratic leadership to exempt the powerful National Rifle Association and others from disclosure requirements in a new campaign finance law.
by Gail Russell Chaddock, Staff writer / June 18, 2010 Washington
The derailing this week of the House Disclose Act gave Republicans – still reeling from Rep. Joe Barton’s “apology” to BP CEO Tony Hayward this week – a rare chance to gloat about the pitfalls of cozying up to special interests.

“Van Hollen’s carve-out for special interests has proven about as popular as first-time World Cup ref Koman Coulibaly’s blown call today, which cost the United States a victory,” said House Republican whip Eric Cantor (R) of Virginia in a blog today. His barb was aimed at Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D) of Maryland, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

At issue is a deal brokered by the House Democratic leadership to exempt the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) and others from disclosure requirements in a new campaign finance law. The legislation aimed to restore campaign finance limits stripped away by a controversial 5-4 US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which scrapped restrictions on when and how much corporations and unions can spend to influence elections.
The proposed law would ban some corporations from funding campaign ads and require others to disclose their top five donors in ads and on their websites.
“We believe voters have an absolute right to know who is spending money to try to influence their vote. And this will prevent big special interests from hiding behind front organizations, sham entities, to try and hide from the voter what they're doing. Nobody, nobody should be afraid of this transparency unless they have something to hide,” said Rep. Van Hollen in a press conference introducing the act on April 29.
But cribbing from President Obama’s playbook in cutting early deals with pharmaceutical companies and other potential opponents to move health care legislation, Democrats this week cut deals exempting the NRA as well as the Sierra Club, the Humane Society, and AARP from disclosure requirements in the bill.
The initial deal exempted organizations with more than 1 million members, in existence more than 10 years, with members in all 50 states, and no more than 15 percent of their funds from corporations. Only the NRA met those criteria. On Thursday, House leaders lowered the threshold to 500,000 members – a change that also exempted the Sierra Club, AARP, and the Humane Society.

The backroom deals set off a firestorm among the unexempted and their allies in the House, prompting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to postpone a vote that had been expected on Friday.

“We remain very troubled about the creation of two-tiers of coverage for this legislation and would prefer no exceptions at all," said Reps. Raul Grijalva (D) of Arizona and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D) of California, co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in a June 17 letter to Speaker Pelosi.
Meanwhile, business groups not part of the carveout rallied their own supporters on Capitol Hill, including moderates in the Blue Dog caucus, to resist the special deals.
“The political, special-interest nature of the legislation is reflected in the recent addition to the bill of the NRA exemption," says R. Bruce Josten, chief lobbyist for the US Chamber of Commerce.
“This ad hoc carve-out is specifically tailored to exempt the National Rifle Association from the bill’s key restrictions and burdens. The admitted purpose was to end the NRA’s opposition to the bill to secure passage,” he adds. “This is clear and unconstitutional discrimination in favor of one speaker and against others.”
House Democratic leaders remain committed to the legislation, including the NRA carve out, and expect to bring it back to the floor as soon as they can line up more votes.
The NRA initially backed the Supreme Court decision.
“This ruling is a victory for anyone who believes that the First Amendment applies to each and every one of us,” said NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre in a statement on Jan. 21. “This is a defeat for arrogant elitists who wanted to carve out free speech as a privilege for themselves and deny it to the rest of us; and for those who believed that speech had a dollar value and should be treated and regulated like currency, and not a freedom.
On May 26, the NRA had announced opposition to the bill as “intimidating speech,” but dropped opposition after the carveout.

New carbon/air battery stores 10x more energy than li-ion

2010-06-18T16:28:00.000-07:00

Like so many things I read over the decades in Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, flying car and personal submarines, I'll believe it when I see it for sale to the public.

Notice that this article is more than a year old... so, where is this miracle battery....?

www.Geek.com:

May. 20, 2009 (3:19 pm) By: Rick Hodgin

At the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, Professor Peter Bruce has developed a battery that uses air as a fuel, called STAIR (St. Andrews Air). Early tests show it has the potential to store 10x more energy than existing lithium-ion batteries for applications like electric cars, mobile phones and notebooks.

The project is funded for four-years and is well into its second year (ending June, 2011). He says, “Our results so far are very encouraging and have far exceeded our expectations”.

The rechargeable air-fueled STAIR battery follows current research efforts looking to replace the expensive lithium cobalt oxide electrodes in existing batteries with more porous carbon electrodes. These, by their very chemical nature, allows the lithium ions and electrons within the cell to react with oxygen in normal air, which acts as a reagent in place of the normal chemicals found inside of a sealed battery.

Should early tests prove out through continued research, such a design will be cheaper to produce than today’s lithium-ion batteries, while providing notably more power, up to 10x that of today’s traditional lithium-ion rechargeable batteries.

See CNet.

Rick’s Opinion

This new battery technology follows a lithium-sulfur battery announced yesterday created by researchers at Waterloo University.

In the past two years, I have seen several new battery technology’s announced. These have included a virus-battery by MIT, a re-vamped lithium-ion battery which can be fully charged and discharged in about 20 seconds, Hanyang University’s silicon-based anode adaptation for lithium-ion batteries, research related to carbon nanotubes being used in batteries, silicon nano-wire-based batteries (creating the 20-hour notebook), and the BetaBattery created by the National Science Foundation, which uses a porous-silicon diode to convert low levels of radiation into electricity.

This is a field of amazing research. It’s just very surprising that none of these amazing products, those promising 3x, 10x, 20x or longer battery lifes, have emerged yet.

Read more: http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/new-carbonair-battery-stores-10x-more-energy-than-li-ion-20090520/#ixzz0rFZrweEl

Top Ten Myths about Israeli-Palestine Conflict

2010-06-18T15:53:00.000-07:00

Over at the Foreign Policy Journal.com, Jeremy Hammond has collected quite an informative list.

You can get all of them on one page, or you can just go to the one that interests you the most:

Myth #1 – Jews and Arabs have always been in conflict in the region.

Myth #2 – The United Nations created Israel.

Myth #3 – The Arabs missed an opportunity to have their own state in 1947.

Myth #4 – Israel has a “right to exist”.

Myth #5 – The Arab nations threatened Israel with annihilation in 1967 and 1973

Myth #6 – U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 called only for a partial Israeli withdrawal.

Myth #7 – Israeli military action against its neighbors is only taken to defend itself against terrorism.

Myth #8 – God gave the land to the Jews, so the Arabs are the occupiers.

Myth #9 – Palestinians reject the two-state solution because they want to destroy Israel.

Myth #10 – The U.S. is an honest broker and has sought to bring about peace in the Middle East.

My favorite, because I've actually read the Old Testament, is Myth #8. It advances an argument I made to a friend just the other day.

No amount of discussion of the facts on the ground will ever convince many Jews and Christians that Israel could ever do wrong, because they view its actions as having the hand of God behind it, and that its policies are in fact the will of God. They believe that God gave the land of Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to the Jewish people, and therefore Israel has a “right” to take it by force from the Palestinians, who, in this view, are the wrongful occupiers of the land.
But one may simply turn to the pages of their own holy books to demonstrate the fallaciousness of this or similar beliefs. Christian Zionists are fond of quoting passages from the Bible such as the following to support their Zionist beliefs:
“And Yahweh said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him: ‘Lift your eyes now and look from the place where you are – northward, southward, eastward, and westward; for all the land which you see I give to you and your descendants forever. And I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth; so that if a man could number the dust of the earth, then your descendants could also be numbered. Arise, walk in the land through its length and its width, for I give it to you.” (Genesis 13:14-17)
“Then Yahweh appeared to him and said: ‘Do not go down to Egypt; live in the land of which I shall tell you. Dwell in the land, and I will be with you and bless you; for to you and your descendants I give all these lands, and I will perform the oath which I swore to Abraham your father.” (Genesis 26: 1-3)
“And behold, Yahweh stood above it and said: ‘I am Yahweh, God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants.” (Genesis 28:13)
Yet Christian Zionists conveniently disregard other passages providing further context for understanding this covenant, such as the following:
“You shall therefore keep all My statutes and all My judgments, and perform them, that the land where I am bringing you to dwell may not vomit you out.” (Leviticus 20:22)
“But if you do not obey Me, and do not observe all these commandments … but break My covenant … I will bring the land to desolation, and your enemies who dwell in it shall be astonished at it. I will scatter you among the nations and draw out a sword after you; your land shall be desolate and your cities waste … You shall perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up.” (Leviticus 26: 14, 15, 32-33, 28)
“Therefore Yahweh was very angry with Israel, and removed them from His sight; there was none left but the tribe of Judah alone…. So Israel was carried away from their own land to Assyria, as it is to this day.” (2 Kings 17:18, 23)
“And I said, after [Israel] had done all these things, ‘Return to Me.’ But she did not return. And her treacherous sister Judah saw it. Then I saw that for all the causes for which backsliding Israel had committed adultery, I had put her away and given her a certificate of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear, but went and played the harlot also.” (Jeremiah 3: 7-8)
Yes, in the Bible, Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, told the Hebrews that the land could be theirs – if they would obey his commandments. Yet, as the Bible tells the story, the Hebrews were rebellious against Yahweh in all their generations.
What Jewish and Christian Zionists omit from their Biblical arguments in favor of continued Israel occupation is that Yahweh also told the Hebrews, including the tribe of Judah (from whom the “Jews” are descended), that he would remove them from the land if they broke the covenant by rebelling against his commandments, which is precisely what occurs in the Bible.
Thus, the theological argument for Zionism is not only bunk from a secular point of view, but is also a wholesale fabrication from a scriptural perspective, representing a continued rebelliousness against Yahweh and his Torah, and the teachings of Yeshua the Messiah (Jesus the Christ) in the New Testament.

Afghan mineral deposits worth $3tn, says mining official

2010-06-18T00:09:00.000-07:00

Guardian.co.uk via Cryptogon:

Afghanistan's untapped mineral wealth is worth at least $3tn – triple a US estimate made this week – according to the government's top mining official.

Geologists have known for decades that Afghanistan has vast deposits of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and other prized minerals, but a US briefing this week put a startling$1tn price tag on the reserves. Minister of Mines Wahidullah Shahrani said today that he had seen geological assessments and industry estimates that the minerals were worth at least $3tn.Critics of the war questioned why the country's mineral wealth was being promoted at a time when violence was on the rise and the international coalition was under pressure to prove its counterinsurgency strategy was working. US officials argued that if Afghanistan was seen to have a bright economic future, it could help convince people that securing the country was worth the fight. It could also give Afghans hope, they said.

Cracks Show BP Battled Well Two Months Before Blast

2010-06-18T00:03:00.000-07:00

Bloomberg.com via Cryptogon.com:

By Alison Fitzgerald and Joe Carroll

June 17 (Bloomberg) -- BP Plc was struggling to seal cracks in its Macondo well as far back as February, more than two months before an explosion killed 11 and spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

It took 10 days to plug the first cracks, according to reports BP filed with the Minerals Management Service that were later delivered to congressional investigators. Cracks in the surrounding rock continued to complicate the drilling operation during the ensuing weeks. Left unsealed, they can allow explosive natural gas to rush up the shaft.

“Once they realized they had oil down there, all the decisions they made were designed to get that oil at the lowest cost,” said Peter Galvin of the Center for Biological Diversity, which has been working with congressional investigators probing the disaster. “It’s been a doomed voyage from the beginning.”

BP didn’t respond to calls and e-mails seeking comment. The company’s shares rose 22 pence to 359 pence today in London after the company struck a deal with the Obama administration yesterday to establish a $20 billion fund to pay cleanup costs and compensation. BP has lost 45 percent of its market value since the catastrophe.

On Feb. 13, BP told the minerals service it was trying to seal cracks in the well about 40 miles (64 kilometers) off the Louisiana coast, drilling documents obtained by Bloomberg show. Investigators are still trying to determine whether the fissures played a role in the disaster.

‘Cement Squeeze’

The company attempted a “cement squeeze,” which involves pumping cement to seal the fissures, according to a well activity report. Over the following week the company made repeated attempts to plug cracks that were draining expensive drilling fluid, known as “mud,” into the surrounding rocks.

BP used three different substances to plug the holes before succeeding, the documents show.

“Most of the time you do a squeeze and then let it dry and you’re done,” said John Wang, an assistant professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering at Penn State in University Park, Pennsylvania. “It dries within a few hours.”

Repeated squeeze attempts are unusual and may indicate rig workers are using the wrong kind of cement, Wang said.

Grappling Engineers

BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward and other top executives were ignorant of the difficulties the company’s engineers were grappling with in the well before the explosion, U.S. Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said today during a hearing in Washington.

“We could find no evidence that you paid any attention to the tremendous risk BP was taking,” Waxman said as Hayward waited to testify. “There is not a single e-mail or document that you paid the slightest attention to the dangers at this well.”

BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles and exploration chief Andy Inglis “were apparently oblivious to what was happening,” said Waxman, a California Democrat. “BP’s corporate complacency is astonishing.”

In early March, BP told the minerals agency the company was having trouble maintaining control of surging natural gas, according to e-mails released May 30 by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the spill.

Gas Surges

While gas surges are common in oil drilling, companies have abandoned wells if they determine the risk is too high. When a Gulf well known as Blackbeard threatened to blow out in 2006, Exxon Mobil Corp. shut the project down.

“We don’t proceed if we cannot do so safely,” Exxon Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson told a House Energy and Commerce committee panel on June 15.

On March 10, BP executive Scherie Douglas e-mailed Frank Patton, the mineral service’s drilling engineer for the New Orleans district, telling him: “We’re in the midst of a well control situation.”

The incident was a “showstopper,” said Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has consulted with the Interior Department on offshore drilling safety. “They damn near blew up the rig.”

The War Racket (latest installment)

2010-06-16T13:56:00.000-07:00

I just came across this post on Cryptogon.com:

Trillions in Resources & Funding Our Enemies
June 16th, 2010
Via: David Degraw:

Wherever there is a war, look for CIA/IMF/private military war profiteers covertly funding and supporting BOTH sides in order to keep the wars raging and the profits rolling in. As former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell explained: “Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the US military machine to turn.”

and it led me to David Degraw's site, which led me to these two stories of his, which are both exhaustive and exhausting to read, but amass a host of information into a pith, tragic narrative:

Af-Pak War Racket: the Obama Illusion Comes Crashing Down

Global War Racket Exposed: Trillions in Resources & Funding Our Enemies

BP's Deepwater Horizon Registered in Marshall Islands

2010-06-16T01:54:00.000-07:00

LATimes.com:

Foreign flagging of offshore rigs skirts U.S. safety rules

The Marshall Islands, not the U.S., had the main responsibility for safety inspections on the Deepwater Horizon.

By Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger, Tribune Washington Bureau
June 14, 2010 | 7:28 p.m.

Reporting from Washington —

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico was built in South Korea. It was operated by a Swiss company under contract to a British oil firm. Primary responsibility for safety and other inspections rested not with the U.S. government but with the Republic of the Marshall Islands — a tiny, impoverished nation in the Pacific Ocean.

And the Marshall Islands, a maze of tiny atolls, many smaller than the ill-fated oil rig, outsourced many of its responsibilities to private companies.

Now, as the government tries to figure out what went wrong in the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, this international patchwork of divided authority and sometimes conflicting priorities is emerging as a crucial underlying factor in the explosion of the rig.

Under International law, offshore oil rigs like the Deepwater Horizon are treated as ships, and companies are allowed to "register" them in unlikely places such as the Marshall Islands, Panama and Liberia — reducing the U.S. government's role in inspecting and enforcing safety and other standards.

"Today, these oil rigs can operate under different, very minimal standards of inspection established by international maritime treaties," said Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

Some offshore drilling experts, as well as some survivors of the explosion that led to the massive spill, say foreign registration also permitted a confusing command structure and understaffing — factors that may have contributed to the disaster.

Senior members of Congress — including Oberstar and House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick J. Rahall II (D-W.Va.) — have begun looking into the inspection and staffing issues. The House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation will hold a hearing Thursday on foreign-flagged rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

Different types of rigs are classified differently, and the Marshall Islands assigned the Deepwater Horizon to a category that permitted lower staffing levels.

"Over the years, the manning dwindled down and down," said Douglas Harold Brown, chief mechanic aboard the Deepwater Horizon, who had been assigned to the floating drilling rig since shortly after it was manufactured in 2000. "I believe that safety was compromised by this," he said in an interview.

Brown's lawyer and others say the Marshall Islands licensed the Deepwater Horizon in a way that allowed rig operator Transocean Ltd. to place an oil drilling expert — the so-called offshore installation manager — ahead of a licensed sea captain in making decisions on the day of the explosion.

The dual command structure created confusion that delayed an effective response to the growing crisis aboard the Deepwater Horizon, he and others allege.

Officials at Transocean and the Marshall Islands reject the claims. They say they fulfilled all requirements of the law and met the highest industry standards, and those of the Coast Guard.

Brian Kennedy, a spokesman for Transocean, called the complaints "egregiously unfounded and inflammatory." The disorganization reported by crew members who survived the Deepwater Horizon explosion was the result of a tragic and unexpected disaster, not deficiencies in manning or safety standards on the part of Transocean, Kennedy said.

"At the end of the day, I think the fact that 115 people got off the rig that night will be viewed as a testament to the training, skill and heroic acts of dozens of crew members," he said.

The Marshall Islands deputy maritime minister, Thomas Heinan, said the manning requirements aboard the Deepwater Horizon were "equal to those of the U.S. and in accordance with international standards."

A deepwater oil rig floats above the well, connected by thousands of feet of pipe, and is kept in position by thrusters and elaborate navigational systems.

Since World War II, thousands of ships and rigs from the U.S. and other industrialized countries have been registered in less-developed nations like the Marshall Islands.

Some members of Congress are expressing concern about the Marshall Islands and other countries that outsource their inspection responsibilities to private companies. Coast Guard officials confirm that more rigorous inspection procedures apply to the relatively small number of rigs registered in the U.S.

A foreign vessel will be reviewed by the Coast Guard, but the inspection is relatively cursory, relying on inspection reports prepared by outside firms that have been paid directly by the owners of the vessel.

The federal Minerals Management Service, which also has a role in overseeing offshore oil operations, deals only with issues "below the waterline" of the floating rig. It was not responsible for rig staffing, command structure or other above-water operations.

John Konrad, a licensed captain who publishes a maritime blog and is consulting with survivors, said oil rigs should be under the command of licensed sea captains.

"On the Deepwater Horizon you had the guy who does the drilling plans able to make the call on safety," Konrad said.

Such dual command structures would not be accepted for U.S.-flagged operations, experts say.

The Deepwater Horizon captain testified to investigators last month that he conferred with the drilling manager before he attempted to disconnect the rig. By the time a crew member decided on his own to push the emergency disconnect, it was too late.

Kennedy, the spokesman for Transocean, said, "Having two complementary positions that reflect the dual functionality of the rig, as the Horizon did, provides a clear but collaborative chain of command that has been employed by the industry for decades."

But Steven Gordon, a maritime lawyer in Houston representing Brown, six other survivors and the family of one of the 11 workers killed in the blast, said, "This course of action cost men their lives."

"It led to a jumble of disorganization on the Deepwater Horizon at the moment when organization was needed the most," he said.

Supreme Court: No Day in Court for Canadian Rendition Victim Maher Arar

2010-06-15T13:39:00.000-07:00

Here's the story from the Center for Constitutional Rights, the folks who represented the victim in court.

Again, it leaves us with the question, what exactly is the function of our judiciary?

CCRJustice.org:

CCR Calls on President, Congress to Apologize and Compensate Arar for Rendition to Torture in Syria

Contact: press@ccrjustice.org
June 14, 2010, New York – Today, the United States Supreme Court decided not to hear the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) case on behalf of Canadian citizen Maher Arar against U.S. officials for their role in sending him to Syria to be tortured and detained for a year. The decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which the Supreme Court declined to review, was decided on the legal ground that Congress, not the courts, must authorize a remedy. As a result, the substance of Mr. Arar’s case, first filed in January 2004, has never been heard and now never will be.

Mr. Arar said, “Today's decision eliminates my last bit of hope in the judicial system of the United States. When it comes to ‘national security’ matters the judicial system has willingly abandoned its sacred role of ensuring that no one is above the law. My case and other cases brought by human beings who were tortured have been thrown out by U.S. courts based on dubious government claims. Unless the American people stand up for justice they will soon see their hard-won civil liberties taken away from them as well.”

Last month, the Obama administration chose to weigh in on Mr. Arar’s case for the first time. The Obama administration could have settled the case, recognizing the wrongs done to Mr. Arar as Canada has done. (Canada conducted a full investigation, admitting wrongdoing, exonerated Mr. Arar, apologized, and paid him $10 million in damages for their part in his injuries.) Yet the Obama administration chose to come to the defense of Bush administration officials, arguing that even if they conspired to send Maher Arar to torture, they should not be held accountable by the judiciary.

Said CCR cooperating attorney David Cole, "The courts have regrettably refused to right the egregious wrong done to Maher Arar. But the courts have never questioned that a wrong was done. They have simply said that it is up to the political branches to fashion a remedy. We are deeply disappointed that the courts have shirked their responsibility. But this decision only underscores the moral responsibility of those to whom the courts deferred – President Obama and Congress – to do the right thing and redress Arar's injuries."

Lower courts concluded that Mr. Arar’s suit raised too many sensitive foreign policy and secrecy issues to allow his case to proceed, and that therefore it was the role of the political branches to authorize a remedy.

Mr. Arar alleges that the U.S. officials named in the suit conspired with Syrian officials to have him tortured in Syria, delivered Mr. Arar to his torturers, provided them with a dossier on him and questions to ask him, and obtained the answers tortured out of him. The legal arguments in the case revolved around whether U.S. officials can be sued for damages if that is the only remedy available to the victim, whether the officials acted “under color of foreign law” when they conspired with Syria to have Mr. Arar tortured there, and whether Mr. Arar has a right to pursue his claims under the Fifth Amendment and the Torture Victim Protection Act.

Said CCR Senior Attorney Maria LaHood, “The Supreme Court has effectively condoned torture by denying Maher’s right to seek a remedy. It is now up to President Obama and Congress to apologize to Maher for what the Bush administration did to him, to make clear that our laws prohibiting torture apply to everyone, including federal officials, and to hold those officials accountable.”

For more on Mr. Arar’s case, including a timeline and links to videos, court papers and other documents, go to http://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/arar-v.-ashcroft.

Katherine Gallagher of CCR, and Jules Lobel, professor at University of Pittsburgh Law School and CCR cooperating attorney, are co-counsel in Mr. Arar’s case.

The Center for Constitutional Rights represents other victims of the Bush administration’s programs, from Iraqis tortured and abused at Abu Ghraib prison to Muslim and Arab men rounded up and abused in immigration sweeps in the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11, to Guantánamo detainees and their families.

BACKGROUND

Mr. Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, was detained at JFK Airport in September 2002 while changing planes on his way home to Canada. The Bush administration labeled him a member of Al Qaeda and sent him not to Canada, his home and country of citizenship, but against his will to Syrian intelligence authorities renowned for torture. He was tortured, interrogated and detained in a tiny underground cell for nearly a year before the Syrian government released him, stating they had found no connection to any criminal or terrorist organization or activity.

In January 2004, just three months after he returned home to Canada from his ordeal, CCR filed a suit on Mr. Arar’s behalf against John Ashcroft and other U.S. officials, the first to challenge the government’s policy of “extraordinary rendition,” also known as “outsourcing torture.”

The Canadian government, after an exhaustive public inquiry, found that Mr. Arar had no connection to terrorism and, in January 2007, apologized to Mr. Arar for Canada’s role in his rendition and awarded him a multi-million-dollar settlement. The contrast between the two governments’ responses to their mistakes could not be more stark, say Mr. Arar’s attorneys. Both the Executive and Judicial branches of the United States government have barred inquiry and refused to hold anyone accountable for ruining the life of an innocent man.

Two Congressional hearings in October 2007 dealt with his case. On October 18, 2007 Mr. Arar testified via video at a House Joint Committee Hearing convened to discuss his rendition by the U.S. to Syria for interrogation under torture. During that hearing – the first time Mr. Arar testified before any U.S. governmental body – individual members of Congress publicly apologized to him, though the government still has not issued a formal apology. The next week, on October 24, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted during a House Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing that the U.S. government mishandled his case.

The Court of Appeals case was heard a second time in December 2008 before twelve Second Circuit judges after a rare decision in August 2008 to rehear the case sua sponte, that is, of their own accord before Mr. Arar had even sought rehearing. On November 2, 2009, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals en banc affirmed the district court’s decision dismissing the case.

In a strongly worded dissent, Judge Guido Calabresi wrote, “I believe that when the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.

sizzlin' gizzards

Kevin Baker from 2009: Barack Hoover Obama

Barack Hoover Obama: The best and the brightest blow it again

Let's get down to Basics: Terrorism 101

Homeland Security at Work

Does this sound familiar....?

Effingham deputies call feds after arresting Russians with shovel, wire cutters outside Georgia Power plant

Here's your tax cut for the rich at work

What the wealthy did with their tax cuts

Wikipedia apparently not biased enough toward Israel

Somehow I missed this US Senate testimony by Brzezenski

Retiring Chairman of Obama's Economic Council Totally Clueless

The rigged card game that is the US Economy

Friday, September 3, 2010

What Can Obama Really Do?

Ian Welsh explains how the right thing morally is usually also the best thing practically

Leaner, Meaner Capitalism at Work

Strike!: Mott's Wage Cuts Despite Huge Profits Forces Work Stoppage (5/23/10)

Fidel Castro Fascinated by Book on Bilderberg Club

Democrats Go GOP on Tax Cuts

Meandering Into the Midterm Elections

"Financial Reform" Virtually Useless

State of the Art Navy vs. State of the Art Missiles

Monday, August 9, 2010

Watching the Disintegration of the US Infrastructure

What collapsing empire looks like

Latest October Surprise report from Robert Parry

Official Social Security Report In!

What Social Security Report SAYS vs What They Tell You It Says

Stan McChrystal and Lynndie England: Compare and Contrast

Social Security Myths

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

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Remembering the Lockerbie Bombing

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

By Andrew I. Killgore

Improbable Cause

Statement by Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi Upon His Release

Man hit by six meteorites blames aliens

Osama Bin Lyin?

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Shirley Sherrod's Dad

Will Bunch at Huffington Post:

BP Blowout Well Con In Progress

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

Con of the Decade, parts 1 and 2

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

The real composition of the deficit

Denninger shows why the Stock Market is a fraud

Afghanistan: History Repeats Itself

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

I Happen to Have Marshall McLuhan Right Here

What Actually Happened at the G20 Protests

Krugman Agrees with Hudson, but I suspect he doesn't know it...

NYTimes.com:

The Third Depression

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: June 27, 2010

Europe’s Fiscal Dystopia: The “New Austerity” Road to Neoserfdom

Kendra: BP is scamming us about cleaning up the mess

The Housing Bubble Was Based On Fraud

Euphemisms to look out for: "the Bill Collapsed"

Is Tinnitis "phantom sound" similar to amputees' "phantom pain?"

A New Internet Meme: Possible "once in a lifetime" solar storm possible in 2013 —

"Throwing money at the problem (Afghanistan) exacerbates the problem"

Warlord cash flow is a positive feedback loop

Hypocrit Alert! NRA! Hypocrit Alert!

Did Democrats' deal with the NRA kill campaign finance reform?

At issue is a deal brokered by the House Democratic leadership to exempt the powerful National Rifle Association and others from disclosure requirements in a new campaign finance law.

New carbon/air battery stores 10x more energy than li-ion

Top Ten Myths about Israeli-Palestine Conflict

Afghan mineral deposits worth $3tn, says mining official

Cracks Show BP Battled Well Two Months Before Blast

The War Racket (latest installment)

BP's Deepwater Horizon Registered in Marshall Islands

Foreign flagging of offshore rigs skirts U.S. safety rules

The Marshall Islands, not the U.S., had the main responsibility for safety inspections on the Deepwater Horizon.

Supreme Court: No Day in Court for Canadian Rendition Victim Maher Arar

Barack Hoover Obama:
The best and the brightest blow it again