Thursday, March 31, 2011

Goodbye to federal funding for 2012 candidates

By BETH FOUHY
Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) -- A cornerstone of U.S. politics since the 1970s, public funding of presidential campaigns may soon go the way of other relics of the era like long sideburns and lava lamps. Neither President Barack Obama nor any of the leading 2012 Republican contenders is expected to accept federal matching funds and the limits they impose.

In fact, opting to take public money to finance a presidential campaign this year is likely to be seen as the mark of a loser.

"I would be shocked if they took matching funds. I don't think that it's a successful model this time, or in the future," says GOP strategist Carl Forti. He's been an adviser to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and helped run American Crossroads, an independent group that raised millions to defeat Democratic candidates in 2010.

Obama's record-breaking fundraising in the 2008 campaign allowed him to abandon the public system in both the Democratic primaries and the general election. With his success as a benchmark, top-tier Republican candidates now are planning to go it alone.

The president, who has no Democratic primary race, may become the first candidate to raise $1 billion for the general election in 2012.

Republicans in a wide field must battle each other for the party's private donors. But the emergence of free-spending independent political groups - since the Supreme Court in 2009 cleared the way for unlimited corporate spending in campaigns - is expected to help close the imbalance between Obama and the GOP. Several of the Republicans also have immense personal wealth.

Presidential candidates of both parties once relied on money from the U.S. Treasury as an indispensible part of their budgets. Indeed, the ability to qualify for matching funds was considered an indication of a candidate's strength after the system was put in place following Watergate-era fundraising abuses. The system was intended to reduce candidates' dependence on large contributions from individuals and groups.

Money for the program comes from a voluntary $3 checkoff on Americans' income tax returns. The fund currently contains $195 million, which can be used only for presidential primary and general election campaigns and to subsidize the major parties' nominating conventions.

Over time, the program began to weaken. George W. Bush refused public funding in his 2000 and 2004 presidential primary campaigns but did accept the money in the general election. Several candidates in both parties opted out in the 2008 primaries, but others did accept matching funds, including Democrat John Edwards.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, the 2008 GOP nominee, turned down matching funds for the primaries but then took them in the general election - a move that severely hindered his ability to compete financially with Obama.

For this year's serious GOP candidates, refusing federal funds will be both liberating and daunting.

By refusing matching funds, candidates are potentially forfeiting a lot of money. Edwards received nearly $13 million in matching funds in the 2008 primary, and Joe Biden, now the vice president, accepted over $2 million for his primary run. McCain, the winner of the GOP nomination that year, accepted $84 million in federal funds for the general election, but that barred him from any private fundraising. Obama opted out of the system and raised $264 million.

For the general election this time, a qualifying party's nominee would get just under $90 million and would be prohibited from raising more privately. For the primaries it's more complicated: Qualifying candidates can receive a federal match of up to $250 for each contribution from an individual and must abide by both state spending limits and an overall spending limit of around $50 million.

Among the likely Republican candidates:

- Romney, a multimillionaire, turned down public funds in 2008. He raised $66 million and lent his campaign $44 million before eventually dropping out.

He's expected to enter the 2012 field soon and has begun assembling a list of "bundlers" who have been asked to raise $25,000 apiece. He has told donors he hopes to take in $50 million for the primaries - less than his 2008 run but an ambitious figure nonetheless. He has not indicated how much of his personal fortune he will commit.

- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich hopes to raise $30 million for the primaries, his advisers say. Gingrich has long solicited funds for several organizations including the independent American Solution for Winning the Future, which raised and spent $28 million in 2010.

- Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has a strong national fundraising base from his years as a lobbyist and as chairman of the Republican National Committee and Republican Governors Association. His advisers say he plans to refuse federal matching funds and has set a goal of raising $55 million for the primaries.

- Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty hopes to raise about $25 million for the primaries. Advisers say they don't believe he would accept matching funds. Pawlenty's campaign has deployed a 16-member national fundraising team aimed at starting an aggressive fundraising push April 1. He also has raised $4 million for three separate political action committees.

Other potential candidates have been less clear about their plans.

- Real estate developer Donald Trump says he will decide by June whether to join the field. Like Romney, he is very wealthy and has vast business connections.

- Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is expected to launch a campaign sometime this spring when he returns from China, where his is serving as U.S. ambassador. Huntsman has abundant personal wealth.

- Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, a tea party favorite weighing a run, raised more than $13 million for her 2010 re-election campaign and has a strong national fundraising base. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is also considering a run and is popular among many social conservatives.

- Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin are weighing bids but are considered less likely to run. Both have strong fundraising connections.

The big Republican field is off to a late start. Most 2008 contenders were in by early 2007 and were able to raise money in the first quarter of the year, between January and March. Most this time won't start until the second quarter, beginning April. 1.

"We have a very different environment than we did in 2008," said Dave Levinthal of the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign fundraising. "These candidates have all shown they have a proven ability to raise money. The problem is, if you have half a dozen or more relatively well-known Republicans running around, there is only so much cash to go around."

Some of the GOP-favoring private groups may get involved in the primaries, raising and spending money on behalf of candidates or targeting others for defeat. But many are likely to save their firepower for the general election.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/2/2012_SPURNING_CAMPAIGN_MONEY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-03-31-15-34-52

Ohio Collective Bargaining Restrictions Spark Strong Reaction From Police, Firefighters

First Posted: 03/31/11 08:03 PM ET
Updated: 04/ 1/11 12:25 AM ET

(AP) CLEVELAND — Unlike Wisconsin's high-profile effort to limit collective bargaining rights for public workers, Ohio's includes police and firefighters – who say it threatens the safety of officers and the people they protect.

Opponents have vowed to put the issue on the November ballot, giving voters a chance to strike the law down. The firefighters' union in Cleveland plans to hit the streets and help gather signatures.

Patrolman Michael Cox, a 15-year veteran of Cleveland's police force, said Ohio overlooked the inherent risks of police and firefighting work when lawmakers included them in the bill, which passed the Legislature on Thursday.

"We don't run from the house fire; we don't run from the gunshot," he said. "We're the guys that got to say, 'OK, we're going to go fix this problem real fast.'"

Under the Ohio plan, police and firefighters won't be able to bargain with cities over the number of people required to be on duty. That means they can't negotiate the number of staff in fire trucks or police cars, for instance.

Supporters of the bargaining limits say decisions on how to equip police and fire departments should be in the hands of city officials, not union members.

"Shouldn't it be the employer who decides what's safe and what's not safe?" said state Rep. Joseph Uecker, who was a police officer in the Cincinnati area for 15 years. "Don't you think they are the ones who should decide whether they should have one or two or three people in a car? That's what we call management rights."

Cleveland Police Officer Anthony Sauto is recovering after a bullet that pierced his leg a few months ago during a night shift on the west side of town. The wound will heal, but he worries that patrolling the streets will be even more dangerous when he returns to work.

"That's my No. 1 concern," Sauto said. "We put our lives on the line."

The 350,000 public workers covered under the bill can still negotiate wages and certain work conditions – but not health care, sick time or pension benefits. The measure also does away with automatic pay raises and bases future wage increases on merit.

Wisconsin's measure covers 175,000 workers but exempts police and firefighters.

Kasich has said his $55.5 billion, two-year state budget counts on unspecified savings from lifting union protections to fill an $8 billion hole.

In northeast Ohio, fear that a loss of bargaining will result in layoffs and further cutbacks is rippling through the law enforcement community.

One of the biggest worries is one-man patrol cars, said Steve Loomis, president of the city's local police union. Under the current contract, Cleveland police officers are required to have at least two officers in a patrol car when driving through certain neighborhoods, Loomis said.

Democrats have 90 days after Kasich signs the bill to gather more than 230,000 valid signatures to get it on the fall ballot. Loomis believes that if Senate Bill 5 goes unchallenged, the two-man rule will be the first thing to go.

"They're going to give up our safety for the illusion that there's more police on the street," Loomis said. "That's horrifying. Guys get killed."

And equipment that police officers say is vital but that the city says is too expensive – like computers in patrol cars, a rarity in Cleveland – will be harder to get without the complete bargaining process, Loomis said.

State lawmakers did make last-minute changes to the measure in the House that allow police and fire officials to bargain for vests, shields and other safety gear.

Mike Norman, secretary for Cleveland's local firefighters union, said that's a cold comfort compared with what he called an "all-out assault" on the union.

"Changes to the game supersede the topics that we're allowed to discuss," he said. "This isn't something that needed to be tweaked a little bit."

As Cleveland's population has declined in the past decade, so have its ranks of police officers. Two rounds of layoffs have left the police force more than 300 officers smaller since 2004.

The street crimes unit, which used to investigate prostitution and gambling, is no more. The auto theft unit was also disbanded. And a city that stretches 22 miles along Lake Erie no longer has a single police boat to patrol its own waters; that job is now left to the Coast Guard, Loomis said.

The Fire Department has lost more than 200 members and closed five companies since 2004. City Public Safety Director Martin Flask said all furloughed police and fire employees have been recalled to duty, but he acknowledged that staffing levels have declined in recent years.

"What this bill is going to do," Loomis said, "is allow bean counters and people who have never walked a step in our shoes, sitting behind a mahogany desk, to make decisions on our safety."

The office of Mayor Frank Jackson did not respond to requests for comment on the police and firefighters' complaints.

Like other public employees, law enforcement officials are also worried about things like rising health care costs. Youngstown firefighter Dave Cook, 43, thinks it will be tough to attract qualified candidates to the dangerous profession if health care costs go through the roof.

"Who's going to come into a police or fireman job when the starting pay is $24,000 a year?" he said. "What type of recruits are you going to get?"

On his way to work Thursday morning, Cleveland police Officer Henry Steel said most officers would support the effort to repeal the bill. But at work, he said, it will be business as usual.

"We're all professionals," he said. "We're going to do our job, period. We're going to do our job. We may not be too happy about it."

___

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Ann Sanner, Julie Carr Smyth and JoAnne Viviano in Columbus, and John Seewer in Toledo.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/ohio-collective-bargainin_1_n_843387.html

Electronic Frontier Foundation uncovers PATRIOT Act abuses

By Eric W. Dolan
Thursday, March 31st, 2011 -- 9:32 pm

The digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced Thursday it had discovered violations stemming from the FBI's use of expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Documents obtained by the group as the result of pending Freedom of Information Act litigation suggest that abuses of surveillance powers granted by the PATRIOT Act had been flagged by the FBI.

Congress passed a bill in February that extended the roving wiretap, "lone wolf" and "library records" provisions of the PATRIOT Act until May 27. The three provisions allow authorities to conduct surveillance without identifying the person or location to be wiretapped, permit surveillance of "non-US" persons who are not affiliated with a terrorist group, and allow law enforcement to gain access to "any tangible thing" during investigations, respectively.

FBI Director Robert Mueller told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the three provisions should be made permanent. He also told the committee he was "not aware of any" abuses resulting from the provisions.

Among the heavily-redacted documents obtained by the EFF is a report [PDF] showing that the FBI monitored young children for five days, despite the fact that none of the voices being monitored matched the language of the target. The report concluded that the roving wiretap violation occurred as a result of an inadequate review of the wiretap renewal application.

The documents were obtained as part of the EFF's ongoing FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project.

Congress is expected to pass a longer extension of the three controversial provisions of the PATRIOT Act, but some senators have vowed to amend the legislation to ensure American's civil liberties are protected.

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) has proposed an amendment to the bill that would require the government to describe the target of a roving wiretap "with particularity."

"Roving wiretaps, which do not require the government to specify the place to be bugged, are designed to allow law enforcement to track targets who evade surveillance by frequently changing phones," he explained. "Before the PATRIOT Act, roving wiretaps were only permitted for criminal investigations."

"Unfortunately, the PATRIOT Act did not include sufficient checks to protect innocent Americans from unwarranted government surveillance," Sen. Durbin continued. "Under current law, the FBI is not required to ascertain the presence of the target of the wiretap at the place being wiretapped, as it is for criminal wiretaps."



http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/31/electronic-frontier-foundation-uncovers-patriot-act-abuses/

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce Donation Plea: "Donations are Unlimited and Undisclosed."

For those who aren't aware, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) is a lobbying group. They have funded millions of dollars worth of slimy political attack ads over the years, all of them directed at Democrats and others that WMC perceives as liberal.

It should come as no surprise that they are seeking donations to smear Joanne Kloppenburg, candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Their plea for dollars is a perfect example of the need for campaign finance reform. They boast in the letter that donations to WMC are "unlimited and undisclosed."

 

In a letter dated March 24th, the president of WMC, James Haney, repeats the usual distortions about Kloppenburg, and praises her opponent as being fair, despite the Prosser campaign's statement that Prosser would be a conservative complement to Governor Scott Walker and the Republican state legislature.

The money quote, however is the one I mention in the title:

Click here to make a generous corporate contribution to counter their efforts.  Donations are unlimited and undisclosed.

The emphasis is not mine. it's in the letter.

It's even more disgusting when you read the fine print at the end. Even though the letter is obviously an outright request for money to support David Prosser and smear Joanne Kloppenburg, they "disclose" the following. This time the emphasis is mine:

Paid for by WMC Issues Mobilization Council, Inc.

WMC IMC is a special fund established by Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce to deliver the business message and promote grassroots activity to support the business agenda. WMC IMC is organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. Corporate contributions are accepted and kept confidential. There are no contribution limits under law. WMC IMC issue advocacy does not expressly advocate the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate, as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Wisconsin Supreme Court. (Buckly v. Valeo /Wisconsin State Elections Board v. WMC Issues Mobilization Council, Inc.) It is our understanding that your financial support for WMC-IMC is an unrestricted, general support grant and is not earmarked or targeted support for any specific WMC-IMC activity. While it is possible that a portion of your donation may be used for political purposes (such as supporting or opposing candidates) you are not donating specifically for the purpose of furthering any independent expenditure activity.

I know some will point out that the disclosure language is standard for all 501(c) organizations, including those that support liberal candidates. Perhaps, but it all stinks. This is not what democracy looks like, no matter who does it. Unlimited, anonymous donations are not free speech. They are bribes.

The election for Supreme Court is Tuesday, April 5th. Two Madison cab companies, including Union Cab, are offering free rides to the polls.

March 29, 2011--Madison, WI. Last week, Union Cab of Madison Co-operative’s Board of Directors has authorized free rides to and from Madison, WI polling places on April 5, 2011. Today, Badger Cab, Madison’s oldest cab company, has decided to join with Union Cab and also provide free rides.  Tom Royston, of Badger Cab, noted that “Badger has been part of the Madison community for over 65 years and is happy to support our community by helping people get to the polls.”

Originally posted to Giles Goat Boy on Thu Mar 31, 2011 at 09:44 AM EDT.


For those who aren't aware, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) is a lobbying group. They have funded millions of dollars worth of slimy political attack ads over the years, all of them directed at Democrats and others that WMC perceives as liberal.

It should come as no surprise that they are seeking donations to smear Joanne Kloppenburg, candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Their plea for dollars is a perfect example of the need for campaign finance reform. They boast in the letter that donations to WMC are "unlimited and undisclosed."

 

In a letter dated March 24th, the president of WMC, James Haney, repeats the usual distortions about Kloppenburg, and praises her opponent as being fair, despite the Prosser campaign's statement that Prosser would be a conservative complement to Governor Scott Walker and the Republican state legislature.

The money quote, however is the one I mention in the title:

Click here to make a generous corporate contribution to counter their efforts.  Donations are unlimited and undisclosed.

The emphasis is not mine. it's in the letter.

It's even more disgusting when you read the fine print at the end. Even though the letter is obviously an outright request for money to support David Prosser and smear Joanne Kloppenburg, they "disclose" the following. This time the emphasis is mine:

Paid for by WMC Issues Mobilization Council, Inc.

WMC IMC is a special fund established by Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce to deliver the business message and promote grassroots activity to support the business agenda. WMC IMC is organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. Corporate contributions are accepted and kept confidential. There are no contribution limits under law. WMC IMC issue advocacy does not expressly advocate the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate, as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Wisconsin Supreme Court. (Buckly v. Valeo /Wisconsin State Elections Board v. WMC Issues Mobilization Council, Inc.) It is our understanding that your financial support for WMC-IMC is an unrestricted, general support grant and is not earmarked or targeted support for any specific WMC-IMC activity. While it is possible that a portion of your donation may be used for political purposes (such as supporting or opposing candidates) you are not donating specifically for the purpose of furthering any independent expenditure activity.

I know some will point out that the disclosure language is standard for all 501(c) organizations, including those that support liberal candidates. Perhaps, but it all stinks. This is not what democracy looks like, no matter who does it. Unlimited, anonymous donations are not free speech. They are bribes.

The election for Supreme Court is Tuesday, April 5th. Two Madison cab companies, including Union Cab, are offering free rides to the polls.

March 29, 2011--Madison, WI. Last week, Union Cab of Madison Co-operative’s Board of Directors has authorized free rides to and from Madison, WI polling places on April 5, 2011. Today, Badger Cab, Madison’s oldest cab company, has decided to join with Union Cab and also provide free rides.  Tom Royston, of Badger Cab, noted that “Badger has been part of the Madison community for over 65 years and is happy to support our community by helping people get to the polls.”

Originally posted to Giles Goat Boy on Thu Mar 31, 2011 at 09:44 AM EDT.


http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/545141/wisconsin_manufacturers_and_commerce_donation_plea:_%22donations_are_unlimited_and_undisclosed.%22/#paragraph4

Former Gov. Lucey Leaves Prosser's Campaign, Endorses Kloppenburg

Lucey Resigns As Honorary Co-Chairman Of Prosser's Campaign
Posted: 8:33 pm CDT March 31, 2011
Updated: 9:13 pm CDT March 31, 2011

MADISON, Wis. -- Former Democratic Gov. Patrick Lucey is withdrawing his support for incumbent Justice David Prosser for Wisconsin Supreme Court and is throwing it to Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg.

Lucey released a statement to the media Thursday evening saying the campaign has revealed what he called "a disturbing distemper and lack of civility" in Prosser, though he did not cite specifics.

"I have followed with increasing dismay and now alarm the campaign of Justice David Prosser, whom I endorsed at the outset of his campaign and in whose campaign I serve as the honorary co-chairman," Lucey said in the statement. "I can no longer in good conscience lend my name and support to Justice Prosser's candidacy. Too much has come to light that Justice Prosser has lost that most crucial of characteristics for a Supreme Court Justice -- as for any judge -- even-handed impartiality. Along with that failing has come a disturbing distemper and lack of civility that does not bode well for the High Court in the face of demands that are sure to be placed on it in these times of great political and legal volatility."

At the same time, Lucey said he has continued to be impressed by Kloppenburg, saying she has shown the proper judicial temperament.

"(Kloppenburg) has adhered throughout the campaign to even-handedness and non-partisanship and has exhibited both promising judicial temperament and good grace, even in the heat of a fierce campaign," Lucey said.

Lucey said he has resigned as the honorary co-chairman of Prosser's campaign, and he is endorsing Kloppenburg for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The election is Tuesday.

The campaign between the Prosser and Kloppenburg has been contentious. A public-policy group recently calculated that spending on the race has reached $1.7 million.

A message left at Prosser's campaign was not immediately returned Thursday night.

Lucey served as Wisconsin's 38th governor. In his statement, he noted that he appointed to Wisconsin's Supreme Court "two quite different but equally principled justices" -- Shirley Abrahamson and Roland Day -- and that he has endorsed several more justices over the years.

http://www.channel3000.com/politics/27392391/detail.html

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Ed Schultz: The Economic State of the Middle Class is Tied to Union Membership

March 03, 2011 10:40 PM
By Heather
Download WMVDownload Quicktime

As Ed Schultz rightly pointed out on his show tonight, if you're not a member of a union and you don't think union membership has anything to do with your own economic prosperity, think again. As unions go, so goes the middle class in America.

Our friends over at Think Progress posted the same chart Ed had up tonight on where we're headed here -- GRAPH: As Union Membership Has Declined, Income Inequality Has Skyrocketed In The United States:

p>Across the country, right-wing legislators continue their attack on labor unions, claiming that they are saving their states money. Yet in waging these anti-labor campaigns, these politicians are ignoring one very simple fact: unions were a major force in building and sustaining the great American middle class, and as they declined, so has the middle class. As CAP’s Karla Waters and David Madland showed in a report they first published this past January, as union membership has steadily declined since 1967, so too has the middle class’s share of national income, as the super-rich have taken a larger share of national income than any time since the 1920s:

As they noted, it's not the only factor that has led to the severe income inequality in the United States, but it is certainly one of them, and unions are the last organized segment in America pushing back against so many policies that have been terrible for American workers. They're not just defending decent wages and benefits and protections in the workplace.

And one final note here on Ed Schultz and the coverage on his show for the last month or so since these protests first started in Wisconsin: I just want to thank him for shining a spotlight on what’s going on in Wisconsin and in other states and for giving the labor movement in this country a voice on cable television. The only place we’ve seen that is with some of MSNBC’s prime time and no one else has been doing what Ed has with getting out there with the protesters and with highlighting a lot of the local voices in Wisconsin. Good job, Ed.

And somehow you managed to do it without bringing on Ron Christie or some other right-wing hack to get their opinion on what’s going on with labor right now. Imagine that. I sincerely hope this is the type of journalism you’re going to continue to do instead of having two talking heads arguing with each other that inform your viewers about nothing that’s going to improve our economy or get Americans back to work, or keep our labor unions from being busted.

I was really upset when MSNBC let Keith Olbermann go, but he’s moving on and seems happy with the change and I do get Current TV here, so I plan on watching and recording his show once he’s back on the air and I’m getting over his leaving MSNBC even though it still irks me. My husband refuses to even watch the network at all now that he’s gone.

One of the things Ed acknowledged when he moved to the later time slot was that he was lucky enough to pick up Olbermann’s staff. I think it’s been good for his show to have them working with him. Keep up the good work Ed on behalf of labor and the working class in America and thank you to the staffers left from Countdown for giving him a hand as well.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/ed-schultz-economic-state-middle-class-tie

The Buying and Selling of the Pentagon (Part I)

Wednesday 30 March 2011
by: Dina Rasor, t r u t h o u t | Solutions

For the last seven weeks, we have been running Solutions columns on how to fix the Pentagon. With the DoD budget ballooning again and again over the past 40 years and the news yesterday that we have already spent $600 million in the first week in defending Libya from the air, there appears to finally be some movement to look into what is wrong with our defense spending. We have fired 191 cruise missiles at a cost of $288 million alone ($1.5 million per missile) - just one illustration on how we have spent too much for our weapons, and the Pentagon has admitted that it is unauditable and cannot successfully track most of its procurement money.

There was story yesterday by Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg Government that, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO):

About one in three major US Defense Department weapons programs since 1997 have had cost overruns of as much as 50 percent over their original projections ...

The overruns, found in 47 of 134 programs included in a study by the US Government Accountability Office, were enough to trigger a law that requires congressional notifications and potential termination. Only a single program has been terminated during that review process - the Bell Helicopter Textron $6.78 billion Army Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter, the GAO said.

What the GAO is not saying is that these are the overruns that the government knows about because there are many contractor and DoD program manager accounting tricks that hide overruns, including putting the extra expense in other programs that are not so closely monitored. Defense contractors and their buddies in the Pentagon are as good at hiding or deflecting overruns and manufacturing problems as General Electric is at dodging taxes.

I could go on for many more paragraphs about the problem and cite years and years of reports of fraudulent, wasteful and ineffective contracting, but most informed readers (especially Truthout readers) have heard of these horror stories for decades.

So, I wanted to concentrate and pull back the layers of problems and try to get down to basic incentives that would allow this to go on for generations of military and DoD civilian personnel. Each round of exposes triggered legislative reforms that were just reforms on paper, which were ignored by the bureaucracy, or real reforms that were deformed by a bureaucracy skilled in loopholes and slow rolls with few in the Congress or various administrations unwilling to commit to true oversight.

I don't believe that the US can make real changes to DoD procurement until we change the financial incentives of the individuals who work in this corrupt system. All other reforms can be deformed, and anyone who does not go along with this system, i.e. the Boy Scout types, are pushed out and most often have their careers destroyed if they don't go along with it. In this column, I will define the problem with the incentives for the people who work in this DoD/contractor system, and in next week's column, I will suggest tough solutions to change the very base of incentives for DoD personnel and the defense contractors.

For those who are interested in digging deeper on how this system got its start since World War II, I would suggest reading journalist Andrew Cockburn's excellent essay in the "Pentagon Labyrinth" called "Follow the Money."

Since I started working on reforming the Pentagon in 1979, I have found one of the most corrupting problems has been the revolving door, the insidious practice where DoD and Congressional personnel go to work for defense contractors or start work at defense contractors and move in and out of the government positions using their influence and inside knowledge to maximize the profits of the defense industry. There have been many attempts to curb this process such as making DoD officials register where they working after leaving the DoD and putting in one- or two-year cooling off periods where they cannot attempt to influence the government in programs that they worked in, but most of these reforms have been ignored or deformed. When Congress passed a law requiring that DoD keep a list of who went through the revolving door, the DoD decided that the list was not to be made public.

There have been decades of reports by the GAO on the problems of the revolving door, hearings by Congress and reports in the media with very little effect. As I wrote about in a Solutions column a few weeks ago, the revolving door with our officer corps is the worst because when senior officers retire with their military pensions and sell their souls to a defense contractor for money, it is devastating to the morale of the junior officer corps. The younger officers who don't believe in this corrupting practice get out of the service, and those who stay have to accept the undue influence of former officers to the detriment of national defense.

Thomas Amlie, while working within the Air Force, wrote the best explanation I have seen on the corrupting pressures with our officers, in a 1983 memorandum to his superiors. Dr. Amlie was the inventor of the Sparrow missile and had been the director of Naval Weapons Laboratory at China Lake. I included part of his memorandum in my 1985 book, "The Pentagon Underground":

The major problem with having a military officer in charge of procurement is his vulnerability. It turns out that not everyone can make general or admiral and our "up or out" policy forces people to retire. The average age of an officer at retirement is 43 years. Counting allowances, a colonel has more take home pay than a US Senator. At the age of 43, he probably has kids in or ready for college and a big mortgage and can't afford a large cut in his income. Besides, he is at the peak of his intellectual powers, is emotionally involved and doesn't want to quit. We throw him out anyway, no matter how good a job he is doing. Many of these officers, particularly the good ones who have spent most of their careers flying aircraft, operating ships or leading troops, do not have the skills which are readily marketable in the civilian sector. This nice man then comes around and offers him a job at 50k-75K [1983 dollars] per year. If he stands up and makes a fuss about high cost and poor quality, no nice man will come to see him when he retires. Even if he has no interest in a post-retirement job in the defense industry, he is taking a chance by making a fuss. The "system" will, likely as not, discover a newly open job in Tule, Greenland; Adak Alaska; or some other garden spot for which he and only he, is uniquely qualified. Thus, his family, as well as his career, suffers. To their everlasting credit, many fine officers have made a fuss anyway and suffered the consequences.

This is not the precarious situation that we should be putting our officers in and this practice is worse when our generals and admirals also go through the revolving door. I have spent many years trying to get the public, the media and members of Congress who want to curtail this damaging practice to understand that the defense contractors are not necessarily hiring and paying these officers and civilian personnel for influence peddling that they will do in the future, but instead, are hiring and rewarding them for what they did while they were in government service for the contractors. The rewards of the job are for "services rendered" to the contractors, such as helping to hide overruns and handing out waivers and change orders to help out malfunctioning contractors so they don't have to pay the costs to fix their own mistakes. The problem is that the high-level officers begin to see themselves as on the same team as the contractor and their success relies on the contractors' power and influence in the system.

This was revealed to me in a very startling way in the early 1980s when I was the director of the Project on Military Procurement (now Project on Government Oversight, POGO, where I still serve as treasurer and a member of the board of directors.) I received a call from one of my sources that he had some important documents for me. He was a source that was helping me with investigating the push to buy another run of the notorious C-5 cargo plane.

The first production run of the C-5A cargo plane was one of the worst overrun and technical failures that the Air Force had ever produced, but now Lockheed, the contractor for the C-5A, is pushing for another generation of this plane disaster, the C-5B. The Air Force had picked another plane for the replacement of the C-5A in 1981 to be built by McDonnell Douglas, but by 1982, Lockheed had pushed hard enough to change that decision and the DoD and Air Force fell behind the idea of making the C-5B and reversed their decision. It was widely suspected that Lockheed was able to turn the DoD and the Air Force around from their original decision because Lockheed needed a bailout because of their past failures. There were other potential planes for the job, such as the 747 cargo plane (hated by the Air Force brass because it was a commercial plane, but Boeing gave the Air Force an unsolicited proposal to use 747s for military cargo) and KC-10. We were examining the technical data and the costs of these other options to the C-5, especially given the history of the program under Lockheed.

Once the Air Force fell behind the new C-5B, they became one with Lockheed in pushing it in the media and the Congress. Usually this is done under the radar where the government helps the contractor lobby the Congress, but keeps their fingerprints off the dirty work. However, my source nervously handed me a thick document through the window of my car when I pulled up to see him on a Washington corner. He, uncharacteristically, said little and furtively walked away. Once I opened the document, I could see why. It was a lobby plan for the C-5B that coordinated the lobbying efforts of the DoD, Air Force and Lockheed, giving each group assignments and commingling their efforts so that they were virtually one. We knew that this had happened before, but I never thought anyone was dumb or arrogant enough to write it all down. Besides showing Lockheed's hold and power over the DoD and the Air Force, it was and is illegal for the executive branch to use appropriated funds to actually lobby the Congress. In the past, the executive branch and the DoD would have legislative liaisons, which were a fig leaf cover for lobbying because they claimed that they were just supplying needed information to the Congress. However, this time the government was caught as close in bed to the contractor as you can get.

The document was a 96-page computerized printout that gave various tasks to the DoD, Air Force and Lockheed. It was a coordinated effort that planned to use such "heavy hitters" as four-star generals, Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, the mayor of Atlanta, the secretary of the Air Force, the deputy secretary of the DoD and even President Reagan. There was very little emphasis on the substantive issues of which cargo plane would work best for delivering supplies to the troops, but rather, schemes on how to use pork barrel and horse trading to influence the Congress for the benefit of Lockheed's program.

One task had Lockheed writing up a draft for the secretary of defense to present to justify spending money to buy Lockheed's C-5Bs and the secretary of defense signed it and sent it to the top Armed Services committees. Another task was to have the Air Force and the DoD to get outside military organizations such as the American Legion and National Defense Council to lobby for the C-5B. Government agencies are not supposed to seek lobby support from outside groups.

Another task had Lockheed putting together strange political bedfellows to make sure that Lockheed got the C-5B, which was to be built in their plant in Marietta Georgia, an Atlanta suburb. They got Andrew Young, mayor of Atlanta and former civil rights champion, to work the Congressional Black Caucus to vote for the C-5B because he was told that the plane would bring 8,500 jobs to the area. It worked because major members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the plane. In the same task, Lockheed also had other members of Congress, including conservatives like Newt Gingrich, whose district was near the plant, lobby for the plane because of the jobs. The Air Force was tasked with taking pictures of the C-5 holding several helicopters and giving the photos to Lockheed so they could use them in full-page ads in major newspapers such as The Washington Post.

Probably the most grievous task that was in the lobby plan was for the Air Force and Lockheed to put the squeeze on the general who was in charge of the Military Airlift Command (MAC). The lobby plan said that the head of MAC, Gen. Jim Allen, prepared testimony to Congress for a hearing on airlift, but it was not strong enough for the C-5. It was well known that MAC was reluctant to have more C-5s, so his testimony was tempered to look at all the potential candidates for the new cargo plane. The Congress wanted to hear from this general because he was from the command that would be using this plane, yet when he arrived in town, his statement had to be "purified" - even being a four-star general did not allow him to speak freely to the Congress. A few years later, after a speech I gave on the C-5B lobby plan, an Air Force major told me that he had been an aide to General Allen during the controversy and that the general was very bitter about the interference with his testimony. This is exactly the problem I am concerned about: the forced corruption of a general, who did not have the integrity to testify truthfully, and the impression of this corrupt system on his junior officers. This type of corruption of the system went on for 96 pages in this document.

After we leaked this lobby plan to the press, the DoD was unapologetic and claimed it was the normal order of business. One of the excerpts from The Washington Post:

Air Force Lt. General Kelly H. Burke, who is responsible for the proposed C5 program, said yesterday: "You're just wrong if you think this is a highly unusual happening. Anytime you get competing views, it's customary for the government to work with those contractors whose views are congruent with the president's ... I do not want to sound platitudinous, but all you're seeing is democracy in action. This is the way the system is supposed to work.

In the uproar over this leaked lobby plan, Congress asked the GAO to investigate the government using its funding to lobby the Congress in lock step with a contractor. The GAO did a very thorough job and found that laws were broken. They sent evidence to the Reagan Justice Department for possible criminal and civil cases against various DoD and Air Force employees, but nothing was ever pursued.

So, you may be wondering why I dredged up all this information from the 1980s. One reason is that the C-5 lobby plan was a unique look into the system that has not been replicated (after this plan leaked, I am sure no contractor was dumb enough to ever write down their lobby efforts with the DoD again). Another is that I have spent several weeks exploring these same problems of revolving doors and the power of the defense contractors' money and influence on the DoD civilian personnel and officer corps, and have found that, in the past 25 years, there has been little change and fewer remedies that have curbed this system. In fact, as the DoD budget has risen to unprecedented heights since World War II and defense companies have merged to become very large entities, the corruption and undue influence on individuals who work for the DoD has gotten worse. I believe that until you change the daily incentives for the people who are responsible for the day-to-day workings in the DoD, nothing will change.

So, next week, in part two of this column, I will lay out what I believe are strong changes that need to happen. Many may believe that we can't get such tough measures enacted, but we must get control of a system that gives us missiles that are $1.5 million a pop and generations of other overpriced weapons that produce money and jobs for defense contractors and their DoD minions, but do not protect our troops or our country.

http://www.truth-out.org/the-buying-and-selling-pentagon-part-i68883

Here’s reason for us to fear fear itself

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

OK, put your books away. We’re having a pop quiz.

Below are four quotes. Each is from one of two sources: the Bible or the Koran, although, just to make things interesting, there’s also a chance all four are from one book. Two were edited for length and one of those was also edited to remove a religion-specific reference. Your job: identify the holy book of origin. Ready? Go:

1) “. . . Wherever you encounter [non-believers], kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post . . .”

2) “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

3) “If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ . . . do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death.”

4) “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”

All right, pens down. How did you do?

If you identified the first quote as being from the Koran (9:5) and the other three as originating in the Bible (Matthew 10:34, Deuteronomy 13:6-9, Numbers 31:17-18), I congratulate you on that degree in theology. If I have guessed correctly, most people will not have found it easy to place the quotes in their proper books. If I have guessed correctly, most people will have found a certain thematic similarity in them.

Yes, there is a point here: I wish people would stop cherry-picking warlike quotes from the Koran to “prove” the evil of Islam. You see this stuff all over the web. Just a few days ago, some anonymous person, angry with me for defending “Fascist/Nazi Islam” the writer says is trying to kill us all, sent me an e-mail quoting Koranic exhortations to violence to prove that Islam is a “religion of hate and murder.”

As rhetorical devices go, it is a cheap parlor trick, a con job to fool the foolish and gull the gullible and for anyone who has spent quality time with the Bible, its shortcomings should be obvious.

If not, see the pop quiz again. The Koran is hardly unique in its admonitions to take up the sword.

It is not my intention here to parse any of those troubling quotes. Let us leave it to religious scholars to contextualize them, to explain how they square with the contention that Islam and Christianity are religions of peace. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that, while both Christian and Muslim scholars will offer that context and explanation, only Christians can be assured of being taken at their word when they do.

Christians get the benefit of the doubt. Muslims get Glenn Beck asking a Muslim Congressman to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”

Because Christianity is regarded as a known — and a norm. Muslims, meantime, have been drafted since Sept. 11, 2001, to fulfill the nation’s obsessive, historic, paranoiac and ongoing need to rally against an enemy within. We lost the Commies, but along came the Islamo-fascists. The names change. The endless capacity for irrational panic remains the same.

As in people who send out e-mails insisting upon the rightness of holding over a billion people — that bears repeating: over a billion people — responsible for the actions of, what . . .? A few hundred? A few thousand?

Some of us use lies, exaggerations and rhetorical gobbledygook to instill in the rest of us that irrational panic they breathe like air. Yes, it is only sensible to fear the threat we face from terrorism. But panicked, irrational people are capable of anything.

Might be wise if we chose to fear that, too.

http://www.islamophobiatoday.com/2011/03/30/here%E2%80%99s-reason-for-us-to-fear-fear-itself/

Cornel West and the fight against injustice

http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/rizkhan/2011/03/201132863311584728.html

The Peak Oil Crisis: Edging Towards Recession

By Tom Whipple
30 March, 2011
Falls Church News-Press

As oil prices edge ever higher, more people are expressing concern about what this phenomenon is doing or could do to economic recovery. The conventional wisdom used to be that, in the U.S., whenever total national spending on oil products exceeded four percent of GDP the country went into recession. Elaborate charts have been produced showing how this happened in four of the recessions over the last 40 years. In 1974, 1981, 1991, and 2008 oil prices rose to levels anywhere from 4.5 to 9 percent of GDP just prior to the U.S. economy going into recession.

Only the recession caused by the dot.com bubble of 2001 did not involve unusually high oil prices. Three of the price spikes --1974, 1981, and 1991-- came as the result of disruptions to the oil supply from the Middle East, while the 2008 spike is now thought to have been caused by the demand for oil getting ahead of available supply. Each of these price spikes and subsequent recessions was followed by a drop in U.S. demand for oil. During the 1974, 1991, and 2001 recessions, oil demand dropped by about a million barrels a day (b/d). The 2008 recession cut U.S. demand by roughly two million b/d and the recessions of the early 80's cut demand by four million b/d.

So where do we stand in in the early spring of 2011? First, demand in the U.S. has bounced back about half way towards the 2007 high of over 21 million b/d from the winter of 2008-2009 low of about 18.5 million b/d. For the world as a whole however, consumption has recovered all the way back to a new high of 89 million b/d in February. This rebound has been so rapid that there again are concerns about demand outrunning supply. Prior to the outbreak of protests in the Middle East, the International Energy Agency (IEA) really had to stretch to come up with a scenario whereby steadily increasing demand from Asia and the oil producing states could be satisfied without a demand- and economy- killing price spike. The IEA's current scenario has the Chinese slowing the rate of increase in their demand for oil to half what it was last year and for the Saudis to use some of their spare capacity to satisfy whatever growth there is in 2011 for oil.

This scenario just might have worked out except for the Middle East uprisings and the fact that thus far in 2011 Beijing does not appear to be reducing the rapid increase in its demand for imported oil as much as necessary. With virtual cessation of oil exports from Libya likely for some time, the supply/demand situation has once again become extremely tight. Now the Saudis, helped by a couple of the other Gulf producers, are said to have increased production by 600,000 - 800,000 b/d to compensate for the lost Libyan production. The trouble was that much of the spare production capacity being used to replace the lost Libyan oil was the same spare capacity that was supposed to keep oil prices from spiking later this year.

The Saudis may still have more spare capacity that can be brought into production whenever the markets demand it - at least this is what they keep telling us. The organizations that are supposed to keep track of such things - International Energy Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy are for now agreeing with this claim.

In recent days, however, we have been starting to see doubts being raised by the major financial newspapers and some large financial institutions as to whether this rosy scenario of a combination of increased OPEC production and slower Chinese growth really portrays the rest of 2011.

With U.S. consumers burning about 140 billion gallons of gasoline a year, a $1 per gallon increase in gasoline prices drains $140 billion that might otherwise go for discretionary spending. In addition, another $140 billion or so would be drained from indirect consumer spending through higher prices for almost everything that has an oil component in its price. This is starting to sound like real money.

Most commentators employed by the financial press or financial service firms now are telling us that it will now take $120 a barrel oil over an extended period to wreak real harm to our economy. They quickly add that while oil prices may touch this price they are unlikely to stay there long enough to hurt economic recovery. If you are looking for a real optimist, then you might like Professor Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard who told an oil industry conference recently that it will take $160-$180 a barrel oil to drag down the economic recovery.

So there you have it: some analysts think our economic problems started when oil surged past $86 a barrel a ways back while others say "no, it is twice that much." In the meantime oil in London, which now is widely considered the real global benchmark price, has been hovering around $115 a barrel for the last two weeks, gasoline in California is now above $4 a gallon and consumer confidence is hitting recent lows. It's looking like we will have an interesting summer.

Tom Whipple is a retired government analyst and has been following the peak oil issue for several years.

http://www.countercurrents.org/whipple300311.htm

Losing Our Way

By BOB HERBERT
Published: March 25, 2011

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.

There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.

As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”

G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.

Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.

New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.



This is my last column for The New York Times after an exhilarating, nearly 18-year run. I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society. My thanks to all the readers who have been so kind to me over the years. I can be reached going forward at bobherbert88@gmail.com.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/opinion/26herbert.html?_r=4

On NBC, the missing story about parent company General Electric

By Paul Farhi, Tuesday, March 29, 8:24 PM

It’s the kind of accountability journalism that makes readers raise an eyebrow, if it doesn’t raise their blood pressure first. General Electric Co., reported the New York Times last week, earned $14.2 billion in worldwide profits last year, including $5.1 billion in the United States — and paid exactly zero dollars in federal taxes.

The front-page story drew widespread commentary in newspapers and on many Web sites. ABC News and Fox News, among others, were all over it.

But the story was conspicuously absent from the reportage of one news organization: NBC.

During its Friday broadcast, “NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams” had no time to mention that America’s largest corporation had essentially avoided paying federal taxes in 2010. Or its Saturday, Sunday or Monday broadcasts, either.

Did NBC’s silence have anything to do with the fact that one of its parent companies is General Electric?

NBC News representatives say that it didn’t. “This was a straightforward editorial decision, the kind we make daily around here,” said Lauren Kapp, spokeswoman for NBC News. Kapp declined to discuss how NBC decides what’s news or, in this case, what isn’t.

But to others, NBC’s silence looks like something between a lapse and a coverup. The satirical “Daily Show” on Monday noted that “Nightly News” had time on Friday to squeeze in a story about the Oxford English Dictionary adding such terms as “OMG” and “muffin top,” but didn’t bother with the GE story.

Ignoring stories about its parent company’s activities is “part of a troubling pattern” for NBC News, said Peter Hart, a director at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a liberal media watchdog group that often documents instances of corporate interference in news. He cited a series of GE-related stories that NBC’s news division has underplayed over the years, from safety issues in GE-designed nuclear power plants to the dumping of hazardous chemicals into New York’s Hudson River by GE-owned plants.

What’s more, Hart notes, NBC News has covered corporate tax-avoidance stories before — that is, when they didn’t involve GE. All three networks’ news divisions, according to Hart, have become reliable sources of publicity for their parents’ other corporate interests, doing news stories about upcoming sporting events or new TV shows carried on their own networks.

“It’s very curious,” Hart said. “Imagine if a different company were involved. If you changed the name to Citibank or Goldman Sachs, would NBC be interested in the story then? I suspect they would be.”

NBC’s news division didn’t avert its eyes entirely. The subject came up briefly on Rachel Maddow’s Friday-night program on MSNBC (“Why lower taxes when companies like this are already paying nothing?” she asked). Another MSNBC prime-time host, Lawrence O’Donnell, was sharply critical (“Shocking,” he called it). The subject was also raised during a panel discussion Friday on a CNBC program hosted by Larry Kudlow.

But those programs have a fraction of the audience of NBC’s top-rated nightly newscast or its leading Sunday public-affairs program, “Meet the Press,” which also didn’t delve into the subject. The MSNBC and CNBC shows also likely have less credibility than NBC’s venerable newscast and public-affairs program.

News organizations often wrestle with how to report on their own mistakes and those of their parent companies. ABC and Fox, for example, have been chided by critics over the years for glossing over unflattering news about their parent companies, the Walt Disney Co. and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., respectively.

The Washington Post has received its share of criticism for failing to disclose its corporate interests at times. However, it has often reported its own bad news, from its quickly ditched plan to host closed-door “salons” for government officials and big-money customers in 2009 to a recent series of plagiarized articles by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.

News outlets should “fight like hell” to cover their own dirty laundry because failing to do so hurts the organization’s credibility, said Kelly McBride, an ethics specialist at the Poynter Institute, a journalism-education institution.

“If people in your audience are savvy enough to raise the question of why you’re covering your own parent company differently than another company,” she said, “then it doesn’t matter what the answer is. You’ve undermined your credibility. The problem for any news organization is death by a thousand daggers.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/on-nbc-the-missing-story-about-parent-company-general-electric/2011/03/29/AFpRYJyB.html

Debt, Austerity and How to Fight Back

Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West
March 17, 2011

Editor's note: On Tuesday, April 5, hundreds of schools and community groups will participate in a teach-in on debt, austerity and how people are fighting back. From 2–3:30 pm (EST) a national teach-in will be streamed live from New York City, followed by local teach-ins and strategy discussions around the country. Read the call to action by Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West, check out the organizing guide and join the movement by attending or hosting a teach-in near you. Please see www.fightbackteachin.org for more information.

Wall Street Banks, American corporations and their political allies have declared a one-sided war on the American people. This war is being waged at our schools and colleges, the workplace and in our communities.

Today, Americans are working harder and earning less while corporate profits soar. As homeowners, consumers and students we see our wealth being stripped away by banks. Our government plunges into debt waging trillion-dollar wars. Meanwhile, our infrastructure erodes and climate change proceeds unchecked. Schools, daycare centers, senior citizen facilities, clinics, parks and firehouses are starved for funds so that corporations and the rich can get billions in tax breaks!

Corporate America’s unprovoked assault on working people has been carried out by manufacturing a need for fiscal austerity. We are told that there is no more money for essential human services, for the care of children, or better public schools, or to help lower the cost of a college education. The fact is that big banks and large corporations are hoarding trillions in cash and using tax loopholes to bankrupt our communities.

Spending on social needs is not the reason governments at all levels are facing massive budget short falls. Our debt and deficit problems are a direct result of corporate tax rollbacks, and the extortionist policies of banks and financial institutions that are engaged in a coordinated and massive wealth transfer from the American people to their own coffers.

The courageous actions by the citizens in Wisconsin are an inspiring defense of the core values of this country: a civil society based on freedom of association, ensuring that our communities have high quality public services—education, public safety and support for our elderly and most vulnerable—along with good jobs for all. The outpouring of support nationally shows the possibilities for challenging deepening economic inequality and political marginalization of the majority of the American people.

We are on the cusp of a great movement to resist and roll back that corporate domination by banks, energy companies and war profiteers. To join that movement and escalate the activism planned in the days, weeks and months ahead we are organizing a “National Teach-in on Debt, Austerity and How People Are Fighting Back.” The live web-streamed teach-in will be held on Tuesday, April 5, 2011, at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City, beginning at 2 pm (EST). Admission is free. Speakers from schools and communities around the country will be hosted by moderators Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West in New York City through a live webcast that you can join by organizing a teach-in on your own campus.

HOW TO ORGANIZE A PARTICIPATING TEACH-IN ON YOUR CAMPUS

Please join us in organizing this event and building a progressive social movement to fight the destructive power of corporate greed. College campuses around the country will be linked to the New York City teach-in via the Internet. Anyone with a connection can participate. After the web cast, each campus will have its own discussion of how students can join with unions and community organizations to escalate their own local campaigns.

It’s easy to take part. All you need to do is:

Reserve a room with WIFI or an Ethernet connection to receive the webcast feed, and to make sure that you have audiovisual capability to make it available to the audience. The room reservation for Tuesday April 5, 2011, should be for several hours across the afternoon (or starting at 11:00 am Pacific Coast Time). Allot time in your reservation for setting up and testing equipment and your Internet connection and to clean up afterward.

Identify a person who will take charge of the webcast hook-up from your end.

Identify a moderator, even if only to welcome people before the webcast.

Publicize the event. Use social media and seek coverage from local media including newspapers, student papers, radio stations and television.

Organize a few people to help set up and clean up afterwards.

And then add your own teach-in to the national program:

Invite local speakers and activists to address national or local topics following the webcast.

Identify local actions and organizing efforts around student debt, home foreclosures, predatory lending and other destructive actions by banks, increases in college tuition, the Dream Act, cuts in public services, daycare cutbacks, teacher lay-offs, attacks on unions etc. in which students and other community members can participate.

Seek co-sponsorship from student groups, local labor unions, churches and local activist organizations.

Prepare educational materials for distribution at the event and available online. Include information about national, state and local efforts opposing austerity and budget cuts.

Publicize the event—again.

As you develop your plans, please contact us for technical details about how to connect to the live webcast from New York City and that so we can help connect you to others in your area also planning events. Please see www.fightbackteachin.org.
Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West
March 17, 2011

http://www.thenation.com/article/159309/debt-austerity-and-how-fight-back

Back at You, Glenn Beck

Stephen Lerner
March 29, 2011

As an organizer, I go to a lot of meetings, panels and discussions and often leave feeling like I’m caught in the movie Groundhog Day, where I am reliving the same discussions and debates over and over again, and wondering if they hold any relevance for anyone else. That’s why I was so surprised when my secretly taped comments about the need to challenge Wall Street and corporate power using direct action, delivered on March 19 at the Left Forum in New York City, set off a right-wing firestorm.

A funny thing happened on the way home from the forum. Overnight I was transformed by Glenn Beck into an all-powerful agent of “economic terrorism.” Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz called for a federal investigation of me, and right-wing blogs claimed that my comments revealed a vast conspiracy to take over the country and the economy.

What did I say that led Beck to spend two nights attacking me and defending big banks and Wall Street CEOs?

I think I may have found part of the answer in what disgraced former Wall Street stock analyst Henry Blodget admitted when he echoed Beck’s wild theories on Business Insider. Describing my remarks, he wrote, “Many Americans will undoubtedly sympathize with and support them.”

So that was it: Beck, right-wingers and Wall Street sympathizers went ballistic because they knew the ideas I talked about are far from being a secret leftist conspiracy; in fact, they’re in sync with the thinking of most Americans. In my talk, I raised a very simple yet powerful idea: that homeowners, students, citizens and workers should make the same practical decisions Wall Street and corporate CEOs make every day—they should reject bad financial deals.

Beck and Wall Street are terrified that regular Americans will begin to challenge the double standard that allows one set of rules for the rich and another for the rest of us. They are petrified of the growing understanding, among people of diverse political backgrounds, that our country isn’t broke; that the tiny elite at the top has manipulated the economic crisis it created to grow even richer and more powerful while the rest of us suffer the consequences; and that Wall Street and corporations, sitting on record profits, are holding the country hostage, essentially threatening a capital strike if they don’t get further tax and regulatory breaks.

As long as Wall Street and the superrich feel secure and confident, they have no reason to negotiate a fair deal with the rest of us. Only by creating uncertainty and instability for them—by disrupting unfair business as usual—can we build the strength to challenge their stranglehold on our economy and our democracy.

But I don’t think it was just my theorizing about power relationships and the economy that set off such a frenzy. It was the prospect that average Americans could take a series of concrete and practical steps, including direct action and civil disobedience, to make Wall Street pay for the trillions it stole from us. Ordinary Americans have the power and the opportunity to go on offense right now—with the immediate goals of keeping millions of people in their homes and raising revenue for cities and states to save jobs and critical services.

Here’s how we can start:

§ Homeowners and students can stop paying unfair debt. If growing numbers of homeowners and students organize toward a loan strike—threatening to refuse to pay their toxic mortgages and student loans unless banks agree to negotiate lower rates—it could force banks to modify loans and provide relief to our families.

§ Citizens can demand that our governments stop doing business with bandit banks. Local governments conduct trilliions in business with Wall Street banks. That leverage can be used to force the banks to pay their fair share in taxes, renegotiate high-cost deals that are bankrupting taxpayers with astronomical interest rates, and stop foreclosures by reducing mortgage principals.

§ Public employees can use their collective bargaining power to protect taxpayer dollars. Teachers, nurses and other public employees can go to the bargaining table armed with solutions that would save billions, like renegotiating the toxic interest rate swaps that are costing taxpayers at least $1.8 billion a year nationally. Swaps were supposed to save taxpayers money, but they backfired when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates after the financial crash to help the banks. Now, as taxpayers deal with devastating cuts, the banks are using these swaps to suck millions out of government coffers. Imagine public employees voting to strike in order to pressure the city or state to use its power to protect taxpayers and critical services while also stopping foreclosures and stabilizing the housing market and tax base.

So let’s give Wall Street, Glenn Beck and the right something to be scared about. It’s time to use our collective power to challenge the economic and political stranglehold they have on our country.

http://www.thenation.com/article/159547/back-you-glenn-beck?page=full

Wikileaks Reader: An Index

By: fiver2011 Tuesday March 29, 2011 1:47 pm

too many links to repost...just go to the site!

http://my.firedoglake.com/fiver2011/2011/03/29/wikileaks-reader-an-index/

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The Real Story of Our Economy: Why Our Standard of Living Has Stalled Out

By Les Leopold, AlterNet
Posted on March 23, 2011, Printed on March 29, 2011

Do public sector workers earn more than private sector workers? Who cares? This boneheaded question has us fighting over the crumbs. (And the answer is no -- all credible studies show that when you account for educational levels, the total compensation packages are about the same.)

The real question is: Why have most workers seen their standard of living stall over the last generation?

The answer is both obvious and appalling. More and more of our nation’s wealth is going to the few, while the many have seen their real wages actually decline. It’s a disgrace.

It wasn’t always so. For more than a quarter century after WWII the fruits of America's productivity were shared with average working people, year in and year out. But what exactly was being shared?

What’s productivity and who gets its benefits?

Productivity is a crucial economic measure of the total output of goods and services in our economy per hours worked. It’s not based on pay levels, only on hours worked in the economy as a whole. In effect, it measures how much human labor power it takes to produce everything we have. It makes a real difference to our standard of living if it takes 10,000 hours rather than 1,000 to build a house.

Output per working hour, although imprecise, is the best way we have to measure our level of technique, organization, skill, effort and intellectual firepower. Sure, this measure has significant flaws because it doesn’t really measure our health or environmental quality. But it does indeed measure the material side of our standard of living. When productivity grows, a society has the means to solve many problems and the means to enhance working and living conditions…but only if the fruits of productivity are shared somewhat fairly.

Productivity and who gets it is the story of the last two generations of the American middle class – one that saw a tremendous rise in its standard of living, and one that saw its way of life stall and even crumble.

From 1947 to 1975, our output per worker hour grew by more than 75 percent. At the very same time, the real wages of the average worker rose by nearly the same amount. The rise of productivity and the rise in real wages turned our working people into the largest, most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. This dramatic upward movement in material conditions gave America its supreme bragging rights in the Cold War. No one could deny that democratic capitalism delivered the goods to working people, not just to elites.

Until it didn’t.

Neo-liberalism and the stalling of middle-class income

This upwardly mobile economy changed during the 1970s, and it wasn’t an accident. That’s when our nation’s leaders embarked on a series of policies that were supposed to break down stagflation and rebuild our economic miracle. We now call it neo-liberalism. That’s when we decided to unleash innovation through deregulation, especially financial deregulation. That’s when we lowered taxes on the wealthy. That’s when we pushed forward globalization. That’s when we stopped raising the minimum wage. That’s when we undercut the labor movement. All this was supposed to make the economy boom and reignite the post-WWII economic miracle.

These policies, not the blind actions of markets, broke open the cookie jar of productivity. And there was plenty in there to take: Since 1975, productivity increased by nearly 180 percent – meaning that we almost tripled what we could produce per hour of labor. But unlike the post-WWII period, it wasn’t shared. Here are the brutal facts:

* The average real wage of the non-supervisory production workers (which comprise 82.4 percent of total private non-farm employees) actually declined by 9 percent between 1975 and 2010.

* Meanwhile the top 1 percent saw their share of national income rise from 8 percent in 1975 to 23.5 percent in 2005

* More amazing still, the wage gap between the top 100 CEOs and the average worker jumped from $45 to $1 in 1970 to an unbelievable $1,723 to $1 in 2006

* Today after the crash, financial incomes are so enormous that in 2010, John Paulson, the top hedge fund manager, earned $2.4 million an HOUR (not a misprint), and his tax rate is less than yours

I like Ike

These statistics turned me into an Eisenhower communist. I realized that our great, conservative general and president stood for policies that would never have let our nation’s productivity cookie jar get robbed. Under Ike, those earning $3 million or more (in today’s dollars) faced marginal tax rates of over 90 percent. (Yes, there were loopholes that bought the effective rates down to 70 percent. But, what’s the effective rate on the rich today? About 16 percent.) And Ike ended the Korean War. And he named and took on the military-industrial complex, which today would probably get you impeached.

Of course, the '50s weren’t nirvana. Segregation and sexism haunted all areas of society. (And besides, we only had three TV channels and no Facebook.) But our standard of living was rising as were our expectations. We expected society to improve and this formed the basis of the explosion in social equality that swept the country, starting with the Civil Rights movement in the South under Ike’s rule.

But after Vietnam damaged our economy and social cohesion, Democrats and Republicans alike drank the Kool Aid of neo-liberalism. A few sips and you could believe that markets would solve everything. Sip some more and you realized that you didn’t need to govern at all. You only needed to get government out of the way (while also undercutting labor laws, removing trade barriers, permitting mega-mergers, destroying Glass-Steagall, passing tighter rules on debtors, etc.). Then out you go to make some real money. It the '50s, it was fabulous to become a millionaire. By the 1980s that was chump change. Unless you’re Bernie Sanders, becoming a politician put you on the fast track to Wall Street.

It’s not just that theft of society’s productivity is unfair. It’s also incredibly dangerous. We learned both in 1929 and in 2008 that when you combine financial deregulation with too much money in the hands of the few you get a casino, a bubble, and then a crash. In the most recent crash, the super-rich had so much capital they ran out of real investments in goods and services. So Wall Street came up with new exotic bets on subprime loans to soak up the excess capital. But the fundamental cause was that the super-rich walked off with years and years of productivity gains that should have gone to working people in the form of higher wages and benefits. Show me a worker who invests in synthetic CDOs.

Watching politicians pit public and private employees against each other is the cruelest joke of this entire crash.

First of all, there would be no state and local budget gaps were it not for the fact that the Wall Street crash destroyed more than 8 million jobs in a matter of months. In any rational world, the Wall Street gamblers would be paying reparations for the damage they’ve caused, rather setting record profits based on our bailouts.

Second, the richest hedge fund honchos are the glorious beneficiaries of a tax loophole that allows them to pay a maximum federal rate of 15 percent instead of 35 percent. Closing that loophole on just the 25 richest hedge fund managers produces twice the revenue as does Obama’s wage freeze on two million federal employees.

So join me in waving Chairman Ike’s little red book. Close the hedge fund loophole and jack up the top income tax rates – way up to where they belong. Raise the minimum wage and index it permanently to inflation. Invest in infrastructure and education to put our people back to work. And stop wasting our resources on war and weapons that no one needs, or on wasteful arguments about how many teachers and cops to fire.

Ike was a staunch capitalist and usually believed in the invisible hand of the market. But he wouldn’t be letting it give us the finger.

http://www.alternet.org/story/150343/the_real_story_of_our_economy:_why_our_standard_of_living_has_stalled_out?page=entire

Despite $3.2 Billion Tax Credit, GE To Demand Deep Cuts From Union. Shock Doctrine, Anyone?

March 29, 2011 06:00 PM
By Susie Madrak

My, they do take the Big Brass Ones award! They still don't get it. This country is so close to the edge, and they've decided to take it all the way over. (Maybe they figure workers should cover potential liability from their crappy nuclear power plants?) Mike Elk at Think Progress:

Last week, the New York Times reported that, despite making $14.2 billion in profits, General Electric, the largest corporation in the United States, paid zero U.S. taxes in 2010 and actually received tax credits of $3.2 billion dollars. The article noted that GE’s tax avoidance team is comprised of “former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.”

After not paying any taxes and making huge profits, ThinkProgress has learned that General Electric is expected to ask its nearly 15,000 unionized employees in the United States to make major concessions.

This year, 14 unions representing more than 15,000 workers will negotiate a new master contract with General Electric. Among the major concessions GE has signaled that it will ask of union workers is the elimination of a defined contribution benefit pension for new employees, a move the company has already implemented for its non-union salaried employees. Likewise, GE is signaling to the union that it will ask for the elimination of current health insurance plans in favor of lower quality health saving accounts, a move the company has already implemented for non-union salaried employees as well.

In addition, General Electric may ask some workers for a wage freeze. Since the recession began in 2007, GE threatened to close plants in Schenectady, NY and Louisville, KY unless workers took wage concessions and adopted two-tier wage structure. In an interview with ThinkProgress, Mark Haller, a machinist at General Electric locomotive factory in Erie, PA, said:

The company I work for paid no federal taxes last year, but we all get these mass emails from GE asking us to call our Congressman to fund the useless, alternative GE engine for the F-35. As taxpayers, we are subsidizing the profits of this company to a huge extent and now after making the company even more profitable, they are asking us to make concessions on pensions, benefits, and perhaps even wages. You wonder why there is a jobs crisis in this country with a guy like G.E. CEO Jeff Immelt heading the President’s Jobs Commission.

In 2003, union workers at 16 different General Electric factories engaged in a strike when G.E. proposed to cut their health care. Workers are mobilizing again this year. They have planned a rally that is expected to attract 10,000 workers from all over the country at the General Electric Locomotive Factory in Erie, PA on June 4th.

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/despite-32-billion-tax-credit-ge-dema

Florida Legislature proves once and for all that it is for sale

By Howard Troxler, Times Columnist
In Print: Sunday, March 27, 2011

These are harsh words for a Sunday morning, but the occasion screams out for them. I take them from the Bible; please forgive me.

The Florida Legislature proved this past week, once and for all, that it is the utter Whore of Babylon.

It is now legal in our state to pay off the Legislature directly. Who says so? The Legislature.

This is not a joke.

This is not satire.

This is Florida — where the laws of our democracy are now openly, officially For Sale.

On Thursday afternoon, with greedy lip-smacking speed, the Legislature voted to relegalize a bygone and corrupt institution, outlawed in this state for more than two decades, known as "leadership funds."

These "leadership funds" are campaign slush funds operated legally and officially by the leaders of the Legislature themselves:

The speaker of the Florida House and his chosen successor, the "speaker designate."

The president of the Florida Senate and his successor.

The leaders of the minority party in the House and Senate.

So now, just as it was in Florida's corrupt past, if you are an interest group that wants a law passed, you simply go to the leaders of the House and Senate …

And you pay them off directly.

I feel the need to repeat: This is not a joke.

This is now the law of Florida, as of Thursday — for they tripped over themselves to make it effective immediately.

And so this is our stewardship of the great nation birthed by Washington and Jefferson and preserved by Lincoln.

This is the American legislative process once practiced by Clay and Webster.

This is what we have come to.

"Lawmakers" walking around with open gunny sacks, selling the democracy, frankly, proudly, wickedly, shamelessly, amorally.

Good God.

• • •

If you tell yourself a lie, and if everybody around you tells the exact same lie, and it is vitally important that all of you believe it — then all of you will believe it.

Especially if you all profit from it.

And so every single person in Tallahassee who voted for this outrageously wicked law on Thursday will tell you exactly the same lie:

It's an improvement.

It's a reform.

Here is Tallahassee thinking. Here is how they rationalize it:

See, it will be better if interest groups can just pay off the Legislature directly. We will list the contributions in a separate report and everybody can see it. This will be more "transparent."

Yes, a nice, separate report! Makes me feel better!

Except for two tiny, teeny things:

1. The money is laundered anyway.

They turn right around and pour their ill-gotten money into local elections around the state to perpetuate their power. Local candidates Smith and Jones are still being bankrolled by corporations, or unions as the case may be, hidden through the leadership funds.

2. The second teeny, tiny problem is, in case I have not adequately mentioned it …

THE LEGISLATURE IS BEING PAID OFF

Good grief! Jehoshaphat! Are you kidding me? Are you kidding?

In what universe should the very writers of law in a democracy operate their own slush funds, into which those seeking favorable treatment can pour money?

Listen:

If you are personal friends with, or a fellow Rotary member of, a Florida legislator who voted for this — heck, if you are married to someone who voted for this — you will want to believe him or her. This is human nature. It is loyalty. It is understandable.

Ed Hooper of Clearwater. Peter Nehr of Tarpon Springs.

Jeff Brandes of St. Petersburg, who promised to take people to the "woodshed." (Did he mean, so they could give money there?)

Jim Frishe of St. Petersburg. Dana Young of Tampa. Will Weatherford of Wesley Chapel, the next speaker, whom I like tremendously.

I am sure that if you are among their friends or family, you will want to believe them. They will speak very smoothly about it.

But here is the reality. Here is the truth.

Legislators. Sworn to the sacred duty of writing the laws of a free people. Taking legal, direct payoffs from those seeking favorable laws.

If you can swallow that, then your moral relativism knows no bounds.

• • •

Here is who voted for this from our part of the state, and who voted against it.

Senators voting yes:

Dennis Jones, R-Treasure Island; Jack Latvala, R-St. Petersburg; Jim Norman, R-Tampa; Ronda Storms, R-Brandon.

Senators voting no:

Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey; Paula Dockery, R-Lakeland; Arthenia Joyner, D-Tampa.

House members voting yes:

Larry Ahern, R-Seminole; Jim Boyd, R-Bradenton; Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg; Rachel Burgin, R-Riverview; Richard Corcoran, R-New Port Richey; Jim Frishe, R-St. Petersburg; Rich Glorioso, R-Plant City; James Grant, R-Tampa; Shawn Harrison, R-Tampa; Ed Hooper, R-Clearwater; John Legg, R-New Port Richey; Seth McKeel, R-Lakeland; Peter Nehr, R-Tarpon Springs; Rob Schenck, R-Spring Hill; Jimmie Smith, R-Inverness; Greg Steube, R-Bradenton; Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel; Dana Young, R-Tampa.

House members voting no:

Janet Cruz, D-Tampa; Richard Kriseman, D-St. Petersburg; Betty Reed, D-Tampa; Darryl Rouson, D-St. Petersburg.

Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city!

[Last modified: Mar 26, 2011 10:54 PM]

http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/stateroundup/florida-legislature-proves-once-and-for-all-that-it-is-for-sale/1159953?r44b=no