By Paul J. Balles
Paul J. Balles considers the USA’s use of the so-called “war on terror” as a cover for US state-sponsored terrorism against anyone who stands in the way of Washington’s global hegemonic ambitions or even questions US or Israeli policies.
Dissent is no longer the duty of the engaged citizen but is becoming an act of terrorism. (Chris Hedges)
It's ironic. It's hypocritical. It's a fraud. The "war on terrorism" branded by America is a propaganda cover for the worst terrorists in the world.
What was the invasion and occupation of Iraq but an act of terrorism? Everyone now knows that the faux war was born of a fraud. The deception had no legitimate purpose except to terrorize countries that (a) produce oil, (b) harbour Al-Qaeda or (c) threaten Israel.
Even the invasion of Afghanistan, considered a legitimate response to 9/11, could have been avoided. The Taliban appropriately asked the US to provide evidence of Osama bin Laden's complicity in the 9/11 affair before deporting him.
Instead, we attacked Afghanistan to the cheers of terrorizing avengers. "We'll show you what we do to those who terrorize America!" was the mantra. The USA is still terrorizing Afghanistan, thereby increasing Al-Qaeda cells.
The icing on the spread-fear cake has involved the USA terrorizing Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Not only are the countries America bombs terrorized. Every other country that might disobey our commands is threatened and made to fear for its existence.
Human life outside America and its stooges isn't worth a tinker's damn to terrorist America. Some 567,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died from American sanctions on Iraq. On 60 minutes in 1996, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said: "We think the price is worth it."
As of January 2010 and since the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, 1,366,350 Iraqi lives have been lost to terrorist slaughterers. "Never mind," you say? "The price is worth it. Beside, they’re only Muslims who want to multiply and take over the world."
Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and rendition programmes have been nothing but terrorizing to plant fear in the hearts and minds of any Arab or Muslim with negative feelings toward America.
Something about being a terrorist of "lesser breeds” tends to become a mindset that disregards national identities. Even Americans can become the objects of American terrorists. American Arabs and Muslims have been the objects of terrorism ever since 9/11.
According to Chris Hedges, “An Arab American, Syed Fahad Hashmi, made provocative statements, including calling America “the biggest terrorist in the world”. That led to his arrest and prosecution on trumped up charges, in much the same way that Professor Sami al-Aryan lost his job and freedom for being an outspoken critic of US and Israeli policy.
Hedges relates the terrorizing effect of these prosecutions even of American citizens. “The state,” he says, “can detain and prosecute people not for what they have done, or even for what they are planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deems seditious. The first of those targeted have been observant Muslims, but they will not be the last.
Chris Floyd points to incidents in countless towns and villages across America's terror war fronts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen where a multitude of grieving, angry Iraqis are further embittered against the American occupation by America's terrorist killings.
"You want to stop the 'radicalization' of young Muslims? Chris asks. "It's simple: stop killing innocent Muslims in wars of domination all over the world. Stop running ‘covert ops’ in every nation of the world (as Obama's ‘special envoy’ Richard Holbrooke admitted last week) – murders, kidnappings, corruption and deception that make a howling mockery of the very ‘civilized values’ these wars and ops purport to defend."
If America wants to stop terrorism, it needs to stop terrorizing the world.
Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.
http://www.redress.cc/americas/pjballes20100120
Sunday, January 24, 2010
The Supreme Court Just Handed Anyone, Including bin Laden or the Chinese Government, Control of Our Democracy
Friday 22 January 2010
by: Greg Palast | AlterNet
photo
(Photo: ImageMD; Edited: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)
In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations should be treated the same as "natural persons", i.e. humans. Well, in that case, expect the Supreme Court to next rule that Wal-Mart can run for President.
The ruling, which junks federal laws that now bar corporations from stuffing campaign coffers, will not, as progressives fear, cause an avalanche of corporate cash into politics. Sadly, that's already happened: we have been snowed under by tens of millions of dollars given through corporate PACs and "bundling" of individual contributions from corporate pay-rollers.
The Court's decision is far, far more dangerous to U.S. democracy. Think: Manchurian candidates.
I'm losing sleep over the millions — or billions — of dollars that could flood into our elections from ARAMCO, the Saudi Oil corporation's U.S. unit; or from the maker of "New Order" fashions, the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Or from Bin Laden Construction corporation. Or Bin Laden Destruction Corporation.
Right now, corporations can give loads of loot through PACs. While this money stinks (Barack Obama took none of it), anyone can go through a PAC's federal disclosure filing and see the name of every individual who put money into it. And every contributor must be a citizen of the USA.
But under today's Supreme Court ruling that corporations can support candidates without limit, there is nothing that stops, say, a Delaware-incorporated handmaiden of the Burmese junta from picking a Congressman or two with a cache of loot masked by a corporate alias.
Candidate Barack Obama was one sharp speaker, but he would not have been heard, and certainly would not have won, without the astonishing outpouring of donations from two million Americans. It was an unprecedented uprising-by-PayPal, overwhelming the old fat-cat sources of funding.
Well, kiss that small-donor revolution goodbye. Under the Court's new rules, progressive list serves won't stand a chance against the resources of new "citizens" such as CNOOC, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. Maybe UBS (United Bank of Switzerland), which faces U.S. criminal prosecution and a billion-dollar fine for fraud, might be tempted to invest in a few Senate seats. As would XYZ Corporation, whose owners remain hidden by "street names."
George Bush's former Solicitor General Ted Olson argued the case to the court on behalf of Citizens United, a corporate front that funded an attack on Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary. Olson's wife died on September 11, 2001 on the hijacked airliner that hit the Pentagon. Maybe it was a bit crude of me, but I contacted Olson's office to ask how much "Al Qaeda, Inc." should be allowed to donate to support the election of his local congressman.
Olson has not responded.
The danger of foreign loot loading into U.S. campaigns, not much noted in the media chat about the Citizens case, was the first concern raised by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who asked about opening the door to "mega-corporations" owned by foreign governments. Olson offered Ginsburg a fudge, that Congress might be able to prohibit foreign corporations from making donations, though Olson made clear he thought any such restriction a bad idea.
Tara Malloy, attorney with the Campaign Legal Center of Washington D.C. says corporations will now have more rights than people. Only United States citizens may donate or influence campaigns, but a foreign government can, veiled behind a corporate treasury, dump money into ballot battles.
Malloy also noted that under the law today, human-people, as opposed to corporate-people, may only give $2,300 to a presidential campaign. But hedge fund billionaires, for example, who typically operate through dozens of corporate vessels, may now give unlimited sums through each of these "unnatural" creatures.
And once the Taliban incorporates in Delaware, they could ante up for the best democracy money can buy.
In July, the Chinese government, in preparation for President Obama's visit, held diplomatic discussions in which they skirted issues of human rights and Tibet. Notably, the Chinese, who hold a $2 trillion mortgage on our Treasury, raised concerns about the cost of Obama's health care reform bill. Would our nervous Chinese landlords have an interest in buying the White House for an opponent of government spending such as Gov. Palin? Ya betcha!
The potential for foreign infiltration of what remains of our democracy is an adjunct of the fact that the source and control money from corporate treasuries (unlike registered PACs), is necessarily hidden. Who the heck are the real stockholders? Or as Butch asked Sundance, "Who are these guys?"
We'll never know.
Hidden money funding, whether foreign or domestic, is the new venom that the Court has injected into the system by its expansive decision in Citizens United.
We've been there. The 1994 election brought Newt Gingrich to power in a GOP takeover of the Congress funded by a very strange source.
Congressional investigators found that in crucial swing races, Democrats had fallen victim to a flood of last-minute attack ads funded by a group called, "Coalition for Our Children's Future." The $25 million that paid for those ads came, not from concerned parents, but from a corporation called "Triad Inc."
Evidence suggests Triad Inc. was the front for the ultra-right-wing billionaire Koch Brothers and their private petroleum company, Koch Industries. Had the corporate connection been proven, the Kochs and their corporation could have faced indictment under federal election law. As of today, such money-poisoned politicking has become legit.
So it's not just un-Americans we need to fear but the Polluter-Americans, Pharma-mericans, Bank-Americans and Hedge-Americans that could manipulate campaigns while hidden behind corporate veils. And if so, our future elections, while nominally a contest between Republicans and Democrats, may in fact come down to a three-way battle between China, Saudi Arabia and Goldman Sachs.
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." Palast investigated Triad Inc. for The Guardian (UK). View Palast's reports for BBC TV and Democracy Now! at www.gregpalast.com.
http://www.truthout.org/the-supreme-court-just-handed-anyone-including-bin-laden-or-chinese-govt-control-our-democracy56332
by: Greg Palast | AlterNet
photo
(Photo: ImageMD; Edited: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)
In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations should be treated the same as "natural persons", i.e. humans. Well, in that case, expect the Supreme Court to next rule that Wal-Mart can run for President.
The ruling, which junks federal laws that now bar corporations from stuffing campaign coffers, will not, as progressives fear, cause an avalanche of corporate cash into politics. Sadly, that's already happened: we have been snowed under by tens of millions of dollars given through corporate PACs and "bundling" of individual contributions from corporate pay-rollers.
The Court's decision is far, far more dangerous to U.S. democracy. Think: Manchurian candidates.
I'm losing sleep over the millions — or billions — of dollars that could flood into our elections from ARAMCO, the Saudi Oil corporation's U.S. unit; or from the maker of "New Order" fashions, the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Or from Bin Laden Construction corporation. Or Bin Laden Destruction Corporation.
Right now, corporations can give loads of loot through PACs. While this money stinks (Barack Obama took none of it), anyone can go through a PAC's federal disclosure filing and see the name of every individual who put money into it. And every contributor must be a citizen of the USA.
But under today's Supreme Court ruling that corporations can support candidates without limit, there is nothing that stops, say, a Delaware-incorporated handmaiden of the Burmese junta from picking a Congressman or two with a cache of loot masked by a corporate alias.
Candidate Barack Obama was one sharp speaker, but he would not have been heard, and certainly would not have won, without the astonishing outpouring of donations from two million Americans. It was an unprecedented uprising-by-PayPal, overwhelming the old fat-cat sources of funding.
Well, kiss that small-donor revolution goodbye. Under the Court's new rules, progressive list serves won't stand a chance against the resources of new "citizens" such as CNOOC, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. Maybe UBS (United Bank of Switzerland), which faces U.S. criminal prosecution and a billion-dollar fine for fraud, might be tempted to invest in a few Senate seats. As would XYZ Corporation, whose owners remain hidden by "street names."
George Bush's former Solicitor General Ted Olson argued the case to the court on behalf of Citizens United, a corporate front that funded an attack on Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary. Olson's wife died on September 11, 2001 on the hijacked airliner that hit the Pentagon. Maybe it was a bit crude of me, but I contacted Olson's office to ask how much "Al Qaeda, Inc." should be allowed to donate to support the election of his local congressman.
Olson has not responded.
The danger of foreign loot loading into U.S. campaigns, not much noted in the media chat about the Citizens case, was the first concern raised by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who asked about opening the door to "mega-corporations" owned by foreign governments. Olson offered Ginsburg a fudge, that Congress might be able to prohibit foreign corporations from making donations, though Olson made clear he thought any such restriction a bad idea.
Tara Malloy, attorney with the Campaign Legal Center of Washington D.C. says corporations will now have more rights than people. Only United States citizens may donate or influence campaigns, but a foreign government can, veiled behind a corporate treasury, dump money into ballot battles.
Malloy also noted that under the law today, human-people, as opposed to corporate-people, may only give $2,300 to a presidential campaign. But hedge fund billionaires, for example, who typically operate through dozens of corporate vessels, may now give unlimited sums through each of these "unnatural" creatures.
And once the Taliban incorporates in Delaware, they could ante up for the best democracy money can buy.
In July, the Chinese government, in preparation for President Obama's visit, held diplomatic discussions in which they skirted issues of human rights and Tibet. Notably, the Chinese, who hold a $2 trillion mortgage on our Treasury, raised concerns about the cost of Obama's health care reform bill. Would our nervous Chinese landlords have an interest in buying the White House for an opponent of government spending such as Gov. Palin? Ya betcha!
The potential for foreign infiltration of what remains of our democracy is an adjunct of the fact that the source and control money from corporate treasuries (unlike registered PACs), is necessarily hidden. Who the heck are the real stockholders? Or as Butch asked Sundance, "Who are these guys?"
We'll never know.
Hidden money funding, whether foreign or domestic, is the new venom that the Court has injected into the system by its expansive decision in Citizens United.
We've been there. The 1994 election brought Newt Gingrich to power in a GOP takeover of the Congress funded by a very strange source.
Congressional investigators found that in crucial swing races, Democrats had fallen victim to a flood of last-minute attack ads funded by a group called, "Coalition for Our Children's Future." The $25 million that paid for those ads came, not from concerned parents, but from a corporation called "Triad Inc."
Evidence suggests Triad Inc. was the front for the ultra-right-wing billionaire Koch Brothers and their private petroleum company, Koch Industries. Had the corporate connection been proven, the Kochs and their corporation could have faced indictment under federal election law. As of today, such money-poisoned politicking has become legit.
So it's not just un-Americans we need to fear but the Polluter-Americans, Pharma-mericans, Bank-Americans and Hedge-Americans that could manipulate campaigns while hidden behind corporate veils. And if so, our future elections, while nominally a contest between Republicans and Democrats, may in fact come down to a three-way battle between China, Saudi Arabia and Goldman Sachs.
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." Palast investigated Triad Inc. for The Guardian (UK). View Palast's reports for BBC TV and Democracy Now! at www.gregpalast.com.
http://www.truthout.org/the-supreme-court-just-handed-anyone-including-bin-laden-or-chinese-govt-control-our-democracy56332
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Watchdog groups warn: ‘Corporate globalization’ of US elections is upon us
By Stephen C. Webster
Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 -- 3:42 pm
The Supreme Court may have ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission days ago, but the decision's shockwaves are still rippling across American democracy.
"A majority of large businesses are now owned by foreign entities, and this means international corporations could pour tons of money into the United States political scene, potentially swaying the political climate," added Newsweek.
Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 -- 3:42 pm
The Supreme Court may have ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission days ago, but the decision's shockwaves are still rippling across American democracy.
Key among them is a concern first raised by Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote in his dissent that the court, by removing all prohibitions against corporate or union money in U.S. elections, "would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans."
"I guess this would be the corporate globalization of the U.S. electoral system," a blogger for watchdog group The Sunlight Foundation opined.
RELATED: 41 industry leaders call on Congress to halt corporate 'bribery'
In other words, The Sunlight Foundation noted, the Supreme Court "might support allowing foreign companies to spend freely in elections in the United States."
"A majority of large businesses are now owned by foreign entities, and this means international corporations could pour tons of money into the United States political scene, potentially swaying the political climate," added Newsweek.
The Center for Public Integrity specifically highlights foreign-owned corporations which operate U.S.-based subsidiaries. The group focused on CITGO Petroleum Company, purchased by Venezuela's state-run oil firm Petróleos de Venezuela in 1990. Through the association, Venezuelan socialist leader Hugo Chavez might conceivably "spend government funds to defeat an American political candidate, just by having CITGO buy TV ads bashing his target."
"And it’s not just Chavez," the Center continued. "The Saudi government owns Houston’s Saudi Refining Company and half of Motiva Enterprises. Lenovo, which bought IBM’s PC assets in 2004, is partially owned by the Chinese government’s Chinese Academy of Sciences. And Singapore’s APL Limited operates several U.S. port operations. A weakening of the limit on corporate giving could mean China, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and any other country that owns companies that operate in the U.S. could also have significant sway in American electioneering."
President Barack Obama, in his weekly YouTube address on Saturday, blasted the court's decision, saying that it "strikes at our democracy itself." He has ordered Congress to "develop a forceful response" to the court's move, but Newsweek notes that a significant reformation of U.S. election law may not be in place before the 2010 mid-term elections.
"If we do nothing then I think you can kiss your country goodbye," Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) told RAW STORY hours after the court's decision was announced. "You won't have any more senators from Kansas or Oregon, you'll have senators from Cheekies and Exxon. Maybe we'll have to wear corporate logos like Nascar drivers."
Anticipating the court's decision, Grayson has filed six bills to reform campaign finance.
The bills have names like the Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act and the Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act. The first slaps a 500 percent excise tax on corporate spending on elections, and the second mandates businesses to disclose their attempts to influence elections. More details are available on the congressman's Web site.
A prior version of this story misattributed a quote from The Sunlight Foundation.
http://rawstory.com/2010/01/blogger-the-corporate-globalization-electoral-system/
A partisan Supreme Court
The decision on campaign finance points to something more troubling than unlimited corporate contributions.
Tim Rutten
January 23, 2010
This week's Supreme Court decision granting corporations the right to spend unrestricted amounts of money supporting or opposing candidates in federal elections is so strained in its reasoning and so removed from the realities of American life that it would be grotesquely comedic, were its implications not so dire.
We're all familiar, of course, with the disenfranchisement of corporate America. It's common knowledge that the interests of big business are routinely ignored at every level of society, and that the deprivation of rights suffered by those unfortunates who populate its executive suites is a continuing affront to the national conscience. That, at least, was the suggestion of the strident tone taken by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. "If the 1st Amendment has any force," he wrote, "it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens or associations of citizens for simply engaging in political speech."
You would think that the federal prisons were overflowing with corporate martyrs to freedom of expression. This is reasoning ludicrous on its face and radical in its dismissal of judicial decisions stretching back to Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. The notion that corporate rights and individual rights -- particularly those recognized by the 1st Amendment -- are congruent is absurd. Do corporations have a right to freedom of religion, or just to those liberties that advance commercial interests?
As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in dissent: "If taken seriously, our colleagues' assumption that the identity of a speaker has no relevance to the government's ability to regulate political speech would lead to some remarkable conclusions. Such an assumption would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by 'Tokyo Rose' during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders. More pertinently, it would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans."
That's hardly the end of this decision's implications. Over time, it's bound to provide the rationale for overturning state and local electoral regulations based on federal law -- as those in Los Angeles are -- and will further undermine the influence of the parties at a time when U.S. politics seem increasingly chaotic.
That's true because, though corporate contributions to the parties continue to be regulated, expenditures made outside the parties on behalf of candidates now are unlimited. The predictable effect on parties is particularly odd from this court, given that one of the most distressing things about this decision -- considered in a sequence stretching back to Bush vs. Gore -- is that it demonstrates that this is a partisan court, willing to hand down sweeping decisions that ignore decades of jurisprudence based on five Republican votes.
That was not true of the activist court over which Chief Justice Earl Warren presided. At the time he was sworn in, Warren was the only member of the court appointed by a Republican president. Still, he inherited a group of justices deeply split over the overriding question of the day -- segregation -- and fashioned a unanimous rejection of legalized racial separation in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision. As The Times' Jim Newton -- Warren's biographer (and also my editor) -- has pointed out, "Before Fred Vinson, Warren's predecessor, died, the court was deeply split over Brown. At least three justices (Tom Clark, Stanley Reed and Vinson) were inclined to uphold Plessy vs. Ferguson in defense of segregation, and two others (Felix Frankfurter and Robert Jackson) were stymied by the question of how to overturn such a long-standing precedent. Vinson's death, which Frankfurter referred to as his first solid evidence of the existence of God, cleared the way for that impasse to be broken. Thus Warren achieved a unanimity that elevated the opinion above partisan or sectional politics." Can that be said of any major decision handed down by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s court?
That nonpartisan character survived throughout Warren's tenure and that of his successor, the Republican Warren E. Burger. Two other landmark decisions of that period -- Griswold vs. Connecticut, which recognized a constitutional right to privacy, and Roe vs. Wade -- were decided by 7-2 majorities. In the former, one of the dissenters, Hugo Black, was a Democrat; the other, Potter Stewart, a Republican. In the latter, one of the minority justices, Byron R. White, was a Democrat, and the other, William H. Rehnquist, a Republican.
Our current ability to predict Supreme Court decisions by weighing the issues against the two parties' programs is worse than melancholy. It marks a new low in our nation's descent into corrosive partisanship.
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rutten23-2010jan23,0,7043674,print.column
Tim Rutten
January 23, 2010
This week's Supreme Court decision granting corporations the right to spend unrestricted amounts of money supporting or opposing candidates in federal elections is so strained in its reasoning and so removed from the realities of American life that it would be grotesquely comedic, were its implications not so dire.
We're all familiar, of course, with the disenfranchisement of corporate America. It's common knowledge that the interests of big business are routinely ignored at every level of society, and that the deprivation of rights suffered by those unfortunates who populate its executive suites is a continuing affront to the national conscience. That, at least, was the suggestion of the strident tone taken by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. "If the 1st Amendment has any force," he wrote, "it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens or associations of citizens for simply engaging in political speech."
You would think that the federal prisons were overflowing with corporate martyrs to freedom of expression. This is reasoning ludicrous on its face and radical in its dismissal of judicial decisions stretching back to Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. The notion that corporate rights and individual rights -- particularly those recognized by the 1st Amendment -- are congruent is absurd. Do corporations have a right to freedom of religion, or just to those liberties that advance commercial interests?
As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in dissent: "If taken seriously, our colleagues' assumption that the identity of a speaker has no relevance to the government's ability to regulate political speech would lead to some remarkable conclusions. Such an assumption would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by 'Tokyo Rose' during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders. More pertinently, it would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans."
That's hardly the end of this decision's implications. Over time, it's bound to provide the rationale for overturning state and local electoral regulations based on federal law -- as those in Los Angeles are -- and will further undermine the influence of the parties at a time when U.S. politics seem increasingly chaotic.
That's true because, though corporate contributions to the parties continue to be regulated, expenditures made outside the parties on behalf of candidates now are unlimited. The predictable effect on parties is particularly odd from this court, given that one of the most distressing things about this decision -- considered in a sequence stretching back to Bush vs. Gore -- is that it demonstrates that this is a partisan court, willing to hand down sweeping decisions that ignore decades of jurisprudence based on five Republican votes.
That was not true of the activist court over which Chief Justice Earl Warren presided. At the time he was sworn in, Warren was the only member of the court appointed by a Republican president. Still, he inherited a group of justices deeply split over the overriding question of the day -- segregation -- and fashioned a unanimous rejection of legalized racial separation in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision. As The Times' Jim Newton -- Warren's biographer (and also my editor) -- has pointed out, "Before Fred Vinson, Warren's predecessor, died, the court was deeply split over Brown. At least three justices (Tom Clark, Stanley Reed and Vinson) were inclined to uphold Plessy vs. Ferguson in defense of segregation, and two others (Felix Frankfurter and Robert Jackson) were stymied by the question of how to overturn such a long-standing precedent. Vinson's death, which Frankfurter referred to as his first solid evidence of the existence of God, cleared the way for that impasse to be broken. Thus Warren achieved a unanimity that elevated the opinion above partisan or sectional politics." Can that be said of any major decision handed down by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s court?
That nonpartisan character survived throughout Warren's tenure and that of his successor, the Republican Warren E. Burger. Two other landmark decisions of that period -- Griswold vs. Connecticut, which recognized a constitutional right to privacy, and Roe vs. Wade -- were decided by 7-2 majorities. In the former, one of the dissenters, Hugo Black, was a Democrat; the other, Potter Stewart, a Republican. In the latter, one of the minority justices, Byron R. White, was a Democrat, and the other, William H. Rehnquist, a Republican.
Our current ability to predict Supreme Court decisions by weighing the issues against the two parties' programs is worse than melancholy. It marks a new low in our nation's descent into corrosive partisanship.
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rutten23-2010jan23,0,7043674,print.column
Expert lawyers to declare Iraq war illegal: reports
LONDON (AFP) – Two former government lawyers involved in the preparations for Britain's invasion of Iraq will testify at a public inquiry this week that the March 2003 conflict was illegal, reports said Sunday.
Their evidence will kick-start what was already expected to be an explosive few days at the Chilcot inquiry into the war, thanks to the appearance Friday of former prime minister Tony Blair, who led Britain into the conflict.
Michael Wood, the top legal advisor to the Foreign Office at the time, and his then deputy Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who quit her job in protest at the invasion, are both due to give evidence Tuesday.
According to The Independent on Sunday, Wilmshurst will reveal infighting between officials and ministers over the legality of deposing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein without explicit United Nations support.
She will say she was far from alone in having doubts about the case and say her boss, Wood, "clearly advised" that the war was illegal under international law, the paper said. He did not make this view public at the time.
A report in The Observer weekly confirmed that Wood was planning to tell the inquiry that the war was illegal because of the absence of a second resolution from the UN Security Council explicitly authorising the use of force in Iraq.
Britain's top legal advisor at the time, attorney general Lord Peter Goldsmith, gave the green light for military action under a UN resolution passed in November 2002, but critics claim he was pressured into it.
Goldsmith is due to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry on Wednesday.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100124/wl_mideast_afp/britainiraqmilitarypoliticsinquiry/print
Their evidence will kick-start what was already expected to be an explosive few days at the Chilcot inquiry into the war, thanks to the appearance Friday of former prime minister Tony Blair, who led Britain into the conflict.
Michael Wood, the top legal advisor to the Foreign Office at the time, and his then deputy Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who quit her job in protest at the invasion, are both due to give evidence Tuesday.
According to The Independent on Sunday, Wilmshurst will reveal infighting between officials and ministers over the legality of deposing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein without explicit United Nations support.
She will say she was far from alone in having doubts about the case and say her boss, Wood, "clearly advised" that the war was illegal under international law, the paper said. He did not make this view public at the time.
A report in The Observer weekly confirmed that Wood was planning to tell the inquiry that the war was illegal because of the absence of a second resolution from the UN Security Council explicitly authorising the use of force in Iraq.
Britain's top legal advisor at the time, attorney general Lord Peter Goldsmith, gave the green light for military action under a UN resolution passed in November 2002, but critics claim he was pressured into it.
Goldsmith is due to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry on Wednesday.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100124/wl_mideast_afp/britainiraqmilitarypoliticsinquiry/print
Olbermann on Supreme Court Campaign Finance Ruling
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
For more, visit the MSNBC Countdown page.
Transcript:
Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on the Supreme Court's ruling today in the case titled "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission."
On the cold morning of Friday, March 6th, 1857, a very old man who was born just eight months and thirteen days after the Declaration of Independence was adopted; a man who was married to the sister of the man who wrote "The Star Spangled Banner;" a man who was enlightened enough to have freed his own slaves and given pensions to the ones who had become too old to work read aloud, in a reed-thin voice, a very long document.
In it, he ruled on a legal case involving a slave, brought by his owner to live in a free state; yet to remain a slave.
The slave sought his freedom, and sued. And looking back over legal precedent, and the Constitution, and the America in which it was created, this judge ruled that no black man could ever be considered an actual citizen of the United States.
"They had for more than a century before been, regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
The case, of course, was Dred Scott. The old man was the fifth Chief Justice of the United States of America, Roger Brooke Tawney. And the outcome, he believed, would be to remove the burning question of the abolition of slavery from the political arena for once and for all.
The outcome, in fact, was the Civil War. No American ever made a single bigger misjudgment. No American ever carried the responsibility for the deaths and suffering of more Americans. No American ever was more quickly vilified. Within four years Chief Justice Tawney's rulings were being ignored in the South and the North.
Within five, President Lincoln at minimum contemplated arresting him. Within seven, he died, in poverty, while still Chief Justice. Within eight, Congress had voted to not place a bust of him alongside those of the other former Chief Justices.
But good news tonight, Roger B. Tawney is off the hook.
Today, the Supreme Court, of Chief Justice John Roberts, in a decision that might actually have more dire implications than "Dred Scott v Sandford," declared that because of the alchemy of its 19th Century predecessors in deciding that corporations had all the rights of people, any restrictions on how these corporate-beings spend their money on political advertising, are unconstitutional.
In short, the first amendment - free speech for persons - which went into affect in 1791, applies to corporations, which were not recognized as the equivalents of persons until 1886. In short, there are now no checks on the ability of corporations or unions or other giant aggregations of power to decide our elections.
None. They can spend all the money they want. And if they can spend all the money they want - sooner, rather than later - they will implant the legislators of their choice in every office from President to head of the Visiting Nurse Service.
And if senators and congressmen and governors and mayors and councilmen and everyone in between are entirely beholden to the corporations for election and re-election to office soon they will erase whatever checks there might still exist to just slow down the ability of corporations to decide the laws.
It is almost literally true that any political science fiction nightmare you can now dream up, no matter whether you are conservative or liberal, it is now legal. Because the people who can make it legal, can now be entirely bought and sold, no actual citizens required in the campaign-fund-raising process.
And the entirely bought and sold politicians, can change any laws. And any legal defense you can structure now, can be undone by the politicians who will be bought and sold into office this November, or two years from now.
And any legal defense which honest politicians can somehow wedge up against them this November, or two years from now, can be undone by the next even larger set of politicians who will be bought and sold into office in 2014, or 2016, or 2018.
Mentioning Lincoln's supposed ruminations about arresting Roger B. Tawney, he didn't say the original of this, but what the hell:
Right now, you can prostitute all of the politicians some of the time, and prostitute some of the politicians all the time, but you cannot prostitute all the politicians all the time. Thanks to Chief Justice Roberts this will change. Unless this mortal blow is somehow undone, within ten years, every politician in this country will be a prostitute.
And now let's contemplate what that perfectly symmetrical, money-driven world might look like. Be prepared, first, for laws criminalizing or at least neutering unions. In today's Court Decision, they are the weaker of the non-human sisters unfettered by the Court. So, like in ancient Rome or medieval England, they will necessarily be strangled by the stronger sibling, the corporations, so they pose no further threat to the Corporations' total control of our political system.
Be prepared, then, for the reduction of taxes for the wealth, and for the corporations, and the elimination of the social safety nets for everybody else, because money spent on the poor means less money left for the corporations.
Be prepared, then, for wars sold as the "new products" which Andy Card once described them as, year-after-year, as if they were new Fox Reality Shows, because Military Industrial Complex Corporations are still corporations. Be prepared, then, for the ban on same-sex marriage, on abortion, on evolution, on separation of church and state. The most politically agitated group of citizens left are the evangelicals, throw them some red meat to feed their holier-than-thou rationalizations, and they won't care what else you do to this corporate nation.
Be prepared, then, for racial and religious profiling, because you've got to blame somebody for all the reductions in domestic spending and civil liberties, just to make sure the agitators against the United Corporate States of America are kept unheard.
Be prepared for those poor dumb manipulated bastards, the Tea Partiers, to have a glorious few years as the front men as the corporations that bankroll them slowly unroll their total control of our political system. And then be prepared to watch them be banished, maybe outlawed, when a few of the brighter ones suddenly realize that the corporations have made them the Judas Goats of American Freedom.
And be prepared, then, for the bank reforms that President Obama has just this day vowed to enable, to be rolled back by his successor purchased by the banks, with the money President Bush gave them his successor, presumably President Palin, because if you need a friendly face of fascism, you might as well get one that can wink, and if you need a tool of whichever large industries buy her first, you might as well get somebody who lives up to that word "tool."
Be prepared for the little changes, too. If there are any small towns left to take-over, Wal-Mart can now soften them up with carpet advertising for their Wal-Mart town council candidates, brought to you by Wal-Mart.
Be prepared for the Richard Mellon Scaifes to drop such inefficiencies as vanity newspapers and simply buy and install their own city governments in the Pittsburghs. Be prepared for the personally wealthy men like John Kerry to become the paupers of the Senate, or the ones like Mike Bloomberg not even surviving the primary against Halliburton's choice for Mayor of New York City.
Be prepared for the end of what you're watching now. I don't just mean me, or this program, or this network. I mean all the independent news organizations, and the propagandists like Fox for that matter, because Fox inflames people against the state, and after today's ruling, the corporations will only need a few more years of inflaming people, before the message suddenly shifts to "everything's great."
Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh don't even realize it: today, John Roberts just cut their throats too. So, with critics silenced or bought off, and even the town assessor who lives next door to you elected to office with campaign funds 99.9 percent drawn from corporate coffers - what are you going to do about it? The Internet!
The Internet? Ask them about the Internet in China. Kiss net neutrality goodbye. Kiss whatever right to privacy you think you currently have, goodbye. And anyway, what are you going to complain about, if you don't even know it happened? In the new world unveiled this morning by John Roberts, who stops Rupert Murdoch from buying the Associated Press?
This decision, which in mythology would rank somewhere between "The Bottomless Pit" and "The Opening Of Pandora's Box," got next to no coverage in the right-wing media today, almost nothing in the middle, and a lot less than necessary on the left.
The right wing won't even tell their constituents that they are being sold into bondage alongside the rest of us. And why should they? For them, the start of this will be wonderful.
The Republicans, Conservatives, Joe Liebermans, and Tea Partiers are in the front aisle at the political prostitution store. They are specially discounted old favorites for their Corporate Masters. Like the first years of irreversible climate change, for the conservatives the previously cold winter will grow delightfully warm. Only later will it be hot. Then unbearable. Then flames.
And the conservatives will burn with the rest of us. And they'll never know it happened. So, what are you going to do about it? Turn to free speech advocates? These were the free speech advocates! The lawyer for that Humunculous who filed this suit, Dave Bossie, is Floyd Abrams.
Floyd Abrams, who has spent his life defending American freedoms, especially freedom of speech. Apparently this life was spent this way in order to guarantee that when it really counted, he could help the corporations destroy free speech.
His argument, translated from self-satisfied legal jargon, is that as a function of the First Amendment, you must allow for the raping and pillaging of the First Amendment, by people who can buy the First Amendment.
He will go down in the history books as the Quisling of freedom of speech in this country. That is if the corporations who now buy the school boards which decide which history books get printed, approve. If there are still history books. So, what are you going to do about it?
Russ Feingold told me today there might yet be ways to work around this, to restrict corporate governance, and how corporations make and spend their money. I pointed out that any such legislation, even if it somehow sneaked past the last U.S. Senate not funded by a generous gift from the Chubb Group would eventually wind up in front of a Supreme Court, and whether or not John Roberts is still at its head would be irrelevant.
The next nine men and women on the Supreme Court will get there not because of their judgement nor even their politics. They will get there because they were appointed by purchased presidents and confirmed by purchased Senators.
This is what John Roberts did today. This is a Supreme Court-sanctioned murder of what little actual Democracy is left in this Democracy. It is government of the people by the corporations for the corporations. It is the Dark Ages. It is our Dred Scott. I would suggest a revolution but a revolution against the corporations? The corporations that make all the guns and the bullets?
Maybe it won't be this bad. Maybe the corporations legally defined as human beings, but without the pesky occasional human attributes of conscience and compassion maybe when handed the only keys to the electoral machine, they will simply not re-design America in their own corporate image.
But let me leave you with this final question: After today who's going to stop them?
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Iraq invasion had no legal backing: Dutch report
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The Dutch government supported an invasion of Iraq that had no legal backing and did not fully inform parliament about its plans in the run-up to the conflict, a long-awaited investigation concluded on Tuesday.
The committee's scathing report, whose release was broadcast live on state television, also said that Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende had little to do with initial planning for the Netherlands' participation in the war.
"The United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq from the 1990s did not give a mandate to the US-British military intervention in 2003," the Dutch Committee of Inquiry on Iraq said in its 550-page report.
The Netherlands gave political support to the war because of a risk that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and to support its NATO allies the United States and Britain, who led the invasion, the committee said. It emerged later that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
The U.S.-led invasion probably also targeted "regime change" in Iraq but military intervention for this reason was not supported by international law and the Dutch government was aware of this, the committee said.
The report said the Dutch government did not adequately inform parliament in 2002 and 2003 about a U.S. request that it support planning for the invasion, and about the timing of Dutch logistical support for the invasion.
"It could have been much more complete. Information from intelligence and security services was handed out selectively," committee chairman Willibrord Davids told reporters.
Keeping information from parliament is considered "a political sin" in the Netherlands and is a reason for MPs to call for a minister's resignation.
Several party leaders immediately called for the government to answer questions in parliament.
BALKENENDE UNINVOLVED
Balkenende, prime minister now and in 2003, opposed an investigation for years but ordered one last February after the media questioned the legality of the Netherlands' support for the U.S.-led invasion.
He was handed the report on Tuesday and said he would study it before giving a reaction.
Balkenende did not attend the brief foreign affairs ministry meeting in August 2002 at which the decision was effectively taken to support the Iraq invasion, and was not actively involved in planning until February 2003, the committee said.
"This meeting, which only took a short time -- one of our interlocutors said it was not more than 45 minutes -- laid the basis for the cabinet's position which was maintained until the invasion in March 2003," Davids said.
"The Prime Minister ... left the matter of Iraq entirely to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Only after January 2003 did the Prime Minister take a strong interest in this," the report said.
Some top civil servants at the ministry had expressed doubts as to whether the invasion was backed by international law but these were made subordinate to other considerations, Davids said.
The Dutch cabinet resigned in 2002 over an official report which condemned the government's failure to prevent the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, the worst atrocity of the Bosnian war in which up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60B3A620100112?rpc=60
The committee's scathing report, whose release was broadcast live on state television, also said that Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende had little to do with initial planning for the Netherlands' participation in the war.
"The United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq from the 1990s did not give a mandate to the US-British military intervention in 2003," the Dutch Committee of Inquiry on Iraq said in its 550-page report.
The Netherlands gave political support to the war because of a risk that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and to support its NATO allies the United States and Britain, who led the invasion, the committee said. It emerged later that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
The U.S.-led invasion probably also targeted "regime change" in Iraq but military intervention for this reason was not supported by international law and the Dutch government was aware of this, the committee said.
The report said the Dutch government did not adequately inform parliament in 2002 and 2003 about a U.S. request that it support planning for the invasion, and about the timing of Dutch logistical support for the invasion.
"It could have been much more complete. Information from intelligence and security services was handed out selectively," committee chairman Willibrord Davids told reporters.
Keeping information from parliament is considered "a political sin" in the Netherlands and is a reason for MPs to call for a minister's resignation.
Several party leaders immediately called for the government to answer questions in parliament.
BALKENENDE UNINVOLVED
Balkenende, prime minister now and in 2003, opposed an investigation for years but ordered one last February after the media questioned the legality of the Netherlands' support for the U.S.-led invasion.
He was handed the report on Tuesday and said he would study it before giving a reaction.
Balkenende did not attend the brief foreign affairs ministry meeting in August 2002 at which the decision was effectively taken to support the Iraq invasion, and was not actively involved in planning until February 2003, the committee said.
"This meeting, which only took a short time -- one of our interlocutors said it was not more than 45 minutes -- laid the basis for the cabinet's position which was maintained until the invasion in March 2003," Davids said.
"The Prime Minister ... left the matter of Iraq entirely to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Only after January 2003 did the Prime Minister take a strong interest in this," the report said.
Some top civil servants at the ministry had expressed doubts as to whether the invasion was backed by international law but these were made subordinate to other considerations, Davids said.
The Dutch cabinet resigned in 2002 over an official report which condemned the government's failure to prevent the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, the worst atrocity of the Bosnian war in which up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60B3A620100112?rpc=60
America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 6:35PM GMT 10 Jan 2010
December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began.
The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters.
Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism.
The home foreclosure guillotine usually drops a year or so after people lose their job, and exhaust their savings. The local sheriff will escort them out of the door, often with some sympathy –– just like the police in 1932, mostly Irish Catholics who tithed 1pc of their pay for soup kitchens.
Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody's Economy.com expects another 2.4m homes to go this year. Taken together, this looks awfully like Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
Judges are finding ways to block evictions. One magistrate in Minnesota halted a case calling the creditor "harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive". We are not far from a de facto moratorium in some areas.
This is how it ended between 1932 and 1934, when half the US states declared moratoria or "Farm Holidays". Such flexibility innoculated America's democracy against the appeal of Red Unions and Coughlin Fascists. The home siezures are occurring despite frantic efforts by the Obama administration to delay the process.
This policy is entirely justified given the scale of the social crisis. But it also masks the continued rot in the housing market, allows lenders to hide losses, and stores up an ever larger overhang of unsold properties. It takes heroic naivety to think the US housing market has turned the corner (apologies to Goldman Sachs, as always). The fuse has yet to detonate on the next mortgage bomb, $134bn (£83bn) of "option ARM" contracts due to reset violently upwards this year and next.
US house prices have eked out five months of gains on the Case-Shiller index, but momentum stalled in October in half the cities even before the latest surge of 40 basis points in mortgage rates. Karl Case (of the index) says prices may sink another 15pc. "If the 2008 and 2009 loans go bad, then we're back where we were before – in a nightmare."
David Rosenberg from Gluskin Sheff said it is remarkable how little traction has been achieved by zero rates and the greatest fiscal blitz of all time. The US economy grew at a 2.2pc rate in the third quarter (entirely due to Obama stimulus). This compares to an average of 7.3pc in the first quarter of every recovery since the Second World War.
Fed hawks are playing with fire by talking up about exit strategies, not for the first time. This is what they did in June 2008. We know what happened three months later. For the record, manufacturing capacity use at 67.2pc, and "auto-buying intentions" are the lowest ever.
The Fed's own Monetary Multiplier crashed to an all-time low of 0.809 in mid-December. Commercial paper has shrunk by $280bn ($175bn) in since October. Bank credit has been racing down a hair-raising black run since June. It has dropped from $10.844 trillion to $9.013 trillion since November 25. The MZM money supply is contracting at a 3pc annual rate. Broad M3 money is contracting at over 5pc.
Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said the Fed is baking deflation into the pie later this year, and perhaps a double-dip recession. Europe is even worse.
This has not stopped an army of commentators is trying to bounce the Fed into early rate rises. They accuse Ben Bernanke of repeating the error of 2004 when the Fed waited too long. Sometimes you just want to scream. In 2004 there was no housing collapse, unemployment was 5.5pc, banks were in rude good health, and the Fed Multiplier was 1.73.
How anybody can see imminent inflation in the dying embers of core PCE, just 0.1pc in November, is beyond me.
Mr Rosenberg is asked by clients why Wall Street does not seem to agree with his grim analysis.
His answer is that this is the same Mr Market that bought stocks in October 1987 when they were 25pc overvalued on Shiller "10-year normalized earnings basis" – exactly as they are today – and bought them at even more overvalued prices in 2007, long after the property crash had begun, Bear Stearns funds had imploded, and credit had its August heart attack. The stock market has become a lagging indicator. Tear up the textbooks.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/6962632/America-slides-deeper-into-depression-as-Wall-Street-revels.html
Published: 6:35PM GMT 10 Jan 2010
December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began.
The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters.
Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism.
The home foreclosure guillotine usually drops a year or so after people lose their job, and exhaust their savings. The local sheriff will escort them out of the door, often with some sympathy –– just like the police in 1932, mostly Irish Catholics who tithed 1pc of their pay for soup kitchens.
Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody's Economy.com expects another 2.4m homes to go this year. Taken together, this looks awfully like Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
Judges are finding ways to block evictions. One magistrate in Minnesota halted a case calling the creditor "harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive". We are not far from a de facto moratorium in some areas.
This is how it ended between 1932 and 1934, when half the US states declared moratoria or "Farm Holidays". Such flexibility innoculated America's democracy against the appeal of Red Unions and Coughlin Fascists. The home siezures are occurring despite frantic efforts by the Obama administration to delay the process.
This policy is entirely justified given the scale of the social crisis. But it also masks the continued rot in the housing market, allows lenders to hide losses, and stores up an ever larger overhang of unsold properties. It takes heroic naivety to think the US housing market has turned the corner (apologies to Goldman Sachs, as always). The fuse has yet to detonate on the next mortgage bomb, $134bn (£83bn) of "option ARM" contracts due to reset violently upwards this year and next.
US house prices have eked out five months of gains on the Case-Shiller index, but momentum stalled in October in half the cities even before the latest surge of 40 basis points in mortgage rates. Karl Case (of the index) says prices may sink another 15pc. "If the 2008 and 2009 loans go bad, then we're back where we were before – in a nightmare."
David Rosenberg from Gluskin Sheff said it is remarkable how little traction has been achieved by zero rates and the greatest fiscal blitz of all time. The US economy grew at a 2.2pc rate in the third quarter (entirely due to Obama stimulus). This compares to an average of 7.3pc in the first quarter of every recovery since the Second World War.
Fed hawks are playing with fire by talking up about exit strategies, not for the first time. This is what they did in June 2008. We know what happened three months later. For the record, manufacturing capacity use at 67.2pc, and "auto-buying intentions" are the lowest ever.
The Fed's own Monetary Multiplier crashed to an all-time low of 0.809 in mid-December. Commercial paper has shrunk by $280bn ($175bn) in since October. Bank credit has been racing down a hair-raising black run since June. It has dropped from $10.844 trillion to $9.013 trillion since November 25. The MZM money supply is contracting at a 3pc annual rate. Broad M3 money is contracting at over 5pc.
Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said the Fed is baking deflation into the pie later this year, and perhaps a double-dip recession. Europe is even worse.
This has not stopped an army of commentators is trying to bounce the Fed into early rate rises. They accuse Ben Bernanke of repeating the error of 2004 when the Fed waited too long. Sometimes you just want to scream. In 2004 there was no housing collapse, unemployment was 5.5pc, banks were in rude good health, and the Fed Multiplier was 1.73.
How anybody can see imminent inflation in the dying embers of core PCE, just 0.1pc in November, is beyond me.
Mr Rosenberg is asked by clients why Wall Street does not seem to agree with his grim analysis.
His answer is that this is the same Mr Market that bought stocks in October 1987 when they were 25pc overvalued on Shiller "10-year normalized earnings basis" – exactly as they are today – and bought them at even more overvalued prices in 2007, long after the property crash had begun, Bear Stearns funds had imploded, and credit had its August heart attack. The stock market has become a lagging indicator. Tear up the textbooks.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/6962632/America-slides-deeper-into-depression-as-Wall-Street-revels.html
The case for economic rights
By Michael Lind
Monday, Jan 11, 2010 20:20 EST
FDR said it and it holds 66 years later: There are benefits and opportunities every American should expect to enjoy
Three score and six years ago, the greatest president of the 20th century gave one of his greatest speeches. On Jan. 11, 1944, in a State of the Union address that deserves to be ranked with Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" and King's "I Have a Dream" speech, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for recognition of a "Second Bill of Rights." According to FDR:
"This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights -- among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty. As our nation has grown in size and stature, however -- as our industrial economy expanded -- these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness."
Roosevelt did not argue that economic rights had superseded basic, old-fashioned political and civil rights. The argument of authoritarians and totalitarians that economic rights are more important than non-economic liberty was abhorrent to him. Instead, with the examples of the fascist and communist regimes of his time in mind, he argued that the purpose of economic rights was to support and reinforce, not replace, civil and political liberties:
"We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. 'Necessitous men are not free men.' People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all -- regardless of station, race, or creed."
President Roosevelt was not promoting economic rights that were necessarily enforceable in court, but rather economic benefits and opportunities that every American should expect to enjoy by virtue of citizenship in our democratic republic. Many of the rights he identified have been secured by programs with bipartisan support. These include "the right to a good education" (the G.I. Bill, student loans, Pell Grants, Head Start, federal aid to K-12 schools) and "the right of every family to a decent home" (federally subsidized home loans and tax breaks for home ownership). But even before the global economic crisis, the U.S. fell short when it came to full employment -- "the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation" -- and a living wage -- "the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation."
Roosevelt's vision was controversial at the time and is contested today. When it comes to providing a safety net for Americans, there are three distinct paradigms, which I would describe as economic citizenship, welfare corporatism and faith-based charity.
Supporters of faith-based charity among "theoconservatives" such as Marvin Olasky argue that modern social insurance like Social Security and Medicare was a mistake. The medieval British and colonial American systems of relying on religious institutions to care for the sick and poor should have been continued and built upon, with government subsidies to "faith-based institutions."
The secular business-class right, however, has shown little interest in faith-based charity, perhaps because it is difficult for rent-seeking bankers, brokers and other private sector actors to extract huge amounts of money from tax-exempt church hospitals and church soup lines. The right's preferred alternative to the progressive vision of economic citizenship is what I call "welfare corporatism." Whereas economic citizenship views protection against sickness, unemployment and old age as entitlements of citizens in a democratic republic, welfare corporatism treats these necessities of life as commodities like groceries or appliances, to be purchased in a market by people who are thought of as consumers, not citizens.
Let's contrast ideal versions of the two approaches. In the ideal America of economic citizenship, there would be a single, universal, integrated, lifelong system of economic security including single-payer healthcare, Social Security, unemployment payments and family leave paid for by a single contributory payroll tax (which could be made progressive in various ways or reduced by combination with other revenue streams). Funding for all programs would be entirely nationalized, although states could play a role in administration. There would still be supplementary private markets in health and retirement products and services for the affluent, but most middle-class Americans would continue to rely primarily on the simple, user-friendly public system of economic security. As Steven Attewell points out, the Social Security Act of 1935 was intended not merely to provide public pensions for the elderly but to establish a framework for a comprehensive system of social insurance corresponding to President Roosevelt's "right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment." Attewell writes: "We need to go back to the original drawing board -- the Social Security Act of 1935 -- to finish the job it began and create a truly universal and comprehensive social welfare state."
In the utopia of welfare corporatism, today's public benefits -- Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and, in a few states, public family leave programs -- would be abolished and replaced by harebrained schemes dreamed up by libertarian ideologues at corporate-funded think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Tax subsidies would be funneled to insurance companies, brokers and banks. Social Security would be replaced by a bewildering miscellany of tax-favored personal savings accounts. Medicare would be replaced by a dog's breakfast of tax subsidies for purchasing health insurance and personal medical savings accounts. Unemployment insurance would give way to yet another Rube Goldberg scheme of tax-favored unemployment insurance accounts. As for family leave -- well, if you're not wealthy enough to pay out of pocket for a nanny for your child or a nurse for your parent, you're out of luck.
The strongest case for economic citizenship instead of welfare corporatism is economic. Economic citizenship is more efficient and cheaper in the long run, because the government need only meet costs, while subsidized private providers must make a profit. The Democratic and Republican supporters of welfare corporatism justify their system of massive subsidies for for-profit healthcare and retirement security with the claim that market competition will keep down prices. If only that were true. Competitive markets are probably impossible to create, in the highly regulated insurance sector and the highly concentrated financial sector that sells private retirement goods and services.
It follows that a policy of subsidizing oligopolies and monopolies, via government subsidies to consumers, in the absence of government-imposed price controls, is a recipe for cost inflation, as the providers jack up their prices, sending the consumers back to Congress to demand even more public subsidies. By its very nature, welfare corporatism funnels public resources, in the form of tax breaks, to rent-seeking, predatory firms in the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector, with ever-swelling dead-weight costs on the economy. Welfare corporatism equals corporate welfare.
Unfortunately, most progressives have failed to make the case against the libertarian myth of market competition in the provision of social insurance. All too many, including President Obama, have made the too-clever-by-half argument that the public option would keep prices down by means of market competition. In other words, the center-left has borrowed a bogus argument about competition from right-wing free-market fundamentalism in order to defend a token public program that ceased to be of any interest once Obama and the Democrats in Congress ruled that Americans with employer-provided insurance would be banned from joining the public option. When you're reduced to parroting the opposition's erroneous theories, in the process of begging for a slight modification of the opposition's pet program, you clearly don't have the nerve or the patience to play the long game in politics.
In a response to one of my earlier columns, Will Marshall wonders how I can dare to criticize the legacy of Bill Clinton, a Democrat. My reasons should be clear by now. I am not a partisan Democratic operative focused on winning the next election. I am interested only in strengthening the republic through a gradual expansion of economic citizenship in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights. If this means criticizing Democratic presidents who expand welfare corporatism instead of economic citizenship, so be it.
As part of his opportunistic policy of triangulation between his own party and the opposition, Bill Clinton joined the Republicans in a three-pronged assault on New Deal economic citizenship. He and the Republican Congress abolished Aid to Families With Dependent Children, a flawed and unpopular means-tested program for the poor that should have been reformed as a national program rather than turned over to the states as the neo-Confederate right insisted. Instead of piecemeal expansion of single-payer healthcare, Clinton pushed a version of employer-based welfare corporatism plus subsidies that came out of the playbook of moderate Republicans like Nixon. And we now know that Clinton secretly agreed to support Newt Gingrich's drive to partly privatize Social Security, in return for dedicating the federal government's imaginary future surpluses to what was left of Social Security. In 2005, Will Marshall argued in favor of private accounts, on the grounds that they would soften up Americans for cuts in Social Security: "If today's workers start saving and investing more in stocks and bonds, the returns they earn would allow us to trim their Social Security benefits later, without reducing their overall standard of living."
While George W. Bush pushed for partial privatization of Social Security, he failed because of massive public opposition. But Bush and the Republican majority in Congress succeeded in enacting the Social Security drug benefit, a flawed but genuine expansion of economic citizenship. Clinton is the only president to have successfully supported the destruction of a New Deal entitlement, while Bush presided over the greatest expansion of the Rooseveltian entitlement system since Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare.
For his part, Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, rejected single-payer in favor of a moderately conservative welfare corporatist approach to healthcare reform. In contrast, Obama's proposal for student loan reform, an idea discussed in the Clinton years, would move in the right direction, away from welfare corporatism and toward economic citizenship, by replacing subsidized third-party lenders with direct government provision of student loans to needy college students.
Parties are coalitions of interest groups, they are not public philosophies, and presidents, great and minor, are and have to be opportunists. In contrast, reformers only have a chance of succeeding if they stick to their basic principles and keep their eyes on the prize. Progressives should support any politician, Democrat or Republican, who expands economic citizenship to the detriment of welfare corporatism, and they should oppose any politician, Democrat or Republican, who expands welfare corporatism to the detriment of economic citizenship.
Any more questions?
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2010/01/11/second_bill_of_rights?source=newsletter
Monday, Jan 11, 2010 20:20 EST
FDR said it and it holds 66 years later: There are benefits and opportunities every American should expect to enjoy
Three score and six years ago, the greatest president of the 20th century gave one of his greatest speeches. On Jan. 11, 1944, in a State of the Union address that deserves to be ranked with Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" and King's "I Have a Dream" speech, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for recognition of a "Second Bill of Rights." According to FDR:
"This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights -- among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty. As our nation has grown in size and stature, however -- as our industrial economy expanded -- these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness."
Roosevelt did not argue that economic rights had superseded basic, old-fashioned political and civil rights. The argument of authoritarians and totalitarians that economic rights are more important than non-economic liberty was abhorrent to him. Instead, with the examples of the fascist and communist regimes of his time in mind, he argued that the purpose of economic rights was to support and reinforce, not replace, civil and political liberties:
"We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. 'Necessitous men are not free men.' People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all -- regardless of station, race, or creed."
President Roosevelt was not promoting economic rights that were necessarily enforceable in court, but rather economic benefits and opportunities that every American should expect to enjoy by virtue of citizenship in our democratic republic. Many of the rights he identified have been secured by programs with bipartisan support. These include "the right to a good education" (the G.I. Bill, student loans, Pell Grants, Head Start, federal aid to K-12 schools) and "the right of every family to a decent home" (federally subsidized home loans and tax breaks for home ownership). But even before the global economic crisis, the U.S. fell short when it came to full employment -- "the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation" -- and a living wage -- "the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation."
Roosevelt's vision was controversial at the time and is contested today. When it comes to providing a safety net for Americans, there are three distinct paradigms, which I would describe as economic citizenship, welfare corporatism and faith-based charity.
Supporters of faith-based charity among "theoconservatives" such as Marvin Olasky argue that modern social insurance like Social Security and Medicare was a mistake. The medieval British and colonial American systems of relying on religious institutions to care for the sick and poor should have been continued and built upon, with government subsidies to "faith-based institutions."
The secular business-class right, however, has shown little interest in faith-based charity, perhaps because it is difficult for rent-seeking bankers, brokers and other private sector actors to extract huge amounts of money from tax-exempt church hospitals and church soup lines. The right's preferred alternative to the progressive vision of economic citizenship is what I call "welfare corporatism." Whereas economic citizenship views protection against sickness, unemployment and old age as entitlements of citizens in a democratic republic, welfare corporatism treats these necessities of life as commodities like groceries or appliances, to be purchased in a market by people who are thought of as consumers, not citizens.
Let's contrast ideal versions of the two approaches. In the ideal America of economic citizenship, there would be a single, universal, integrated, lifelong system of economic security including single-payer healthcare, Social Security, unemployment payments and family leave paid for by a single contributory payroll tax (which could be made progressive in various ways or reduced by combination with other revenue streams). Funding for all programs would be entirely nationalized, although states could play a role in administration. There would still be supplementary private markets in health and retirement products and services for the affluent, but most middle-class Americans would continue to rely primarily on the simple, user-friendly public system of economic security. As Steven Attewell points out, the Social Security Act of 1935 was intended not merely to provide public pensions for the elderly but to establish a framework for a comprehensive system of social insurance corresponding to President Roosevelt's "right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment." Attewell writes: "We need to go back to the original drawing board -- the Social Security Act of 1935 -- to finish the job it began and create a truly universal and comprehensive social welfare state."
In the utopia of welfare corporatism, today's public benefits -- Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and, in a few states, public family leave programs -- would be abolished and replaced by harebrained schemes dreamed up by libertarian ideologues at corporate-funded think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Tax subsidies would be funneled to insurance companies, brokers and banks. Social Security would be replaced by a bewildering miscellany of tax-favored personal savings accounts. Medicare would be replaced by a dog's breakfast of tax subsidies for purchasing health insurance and personal medical savings accounts. Unemployment insurance would give way to yet another Rube Goldberg scheme of tax-favored unemployment insurance accounts. As for family leave -- well, if you're not wealthy enough to pay out of pocket for a nanny for your child or a nurse for your parent, you're out of luck.
The strongest case for economic citizenship instead of welfare corporatism is economic. Economic citizenship is more efficient and cheaper in the long run, because the government need only meet costs, while subsidized private providers must make a profit. The Democratic and Republican supporters of welfare corporatism justify their system of massive subsidies for for-profit healthcare and retirement security with the claim that market competition will keep down prices. If only that were true. Competitive markets are probably impossible to create, in the highly regulated insurance sector and the highly concentrated financial sector that sells private retirement goods and services.
It follows that a policy of subsidizing oligopolies and monopolies, via government subsidies to consumers, in the absence of government-imposed price controls, is a recipe for cost inflation, as the providers jack up their prices, sending the consumers back to Congress to demand even more public subsidies. By its very nature, welfare corporatism funnels public resources, in the form of tax breaks, to rent-seeking, predatory firms in the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector, with ever-swelling dead-weight costs on the economy. Welfare corporatism equals corporate welfare.
Unfortunately, most progressives have failed to make the case against the libertarian myth of market competition in the provision of social insurance. All too many, including President Obama, have made the too-clever-by-half argument that the public option would keep prices down by means of market competition. In other words, the center-left has borrowed a bogus argument about competition from right-wing free-market fundamentalism in order to defend a token public program that ceased to be of any interest once Obama and the Democrats in Congress ruled that Americans with employer-provided insurance would be banned from joining the public option. When you're reduced to parroting the opposition's erroneous theories, in the process of begging for a slight modification of the opposition's pet program, you clearly don't have the nerve or the patience to play the long game in politics.
In a response to one of my earlier columns, Will Marshall wonders how I can dare to criticize the legacy of Bill Clinton, a Democrat. My reasons should be clear by now. I am not a partisan Democratic operative focused on winning the next election. I am interested only in strengthening the republic through a gradual expansion of economic citizenship in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights. If this means criticizing Democratic presidents who expand welfare corporatism instead of economic citizenship, so be it.
As part of his opportunistic policy of triangulation between his own party and the opposition, Bill Clinton joined the Republicans in a three-pronged assault on New Deal economic citizenship. He and the Republican Congress abolished Aid to Families With Dependent Children, a flawed and unpopular means-tested program for the poor that should have been reformed as a national program rather than turned over to the states as the neo-Confederate right insisted. Instead of piecemeal expansion of single-payer healthcare, Clinton pushed a version of employer-based welfare corporatism plus subsidies that came out of the playbook of moderate Republicans like Nixon. And we now know that Clinton secretly agreed to support Newt Gingrich's drive to partly privatize Social Security, in return for dedicating the federal government's imaginary future surpluses to what was left of Social Security. In 2005, Will Marshall argued in favor of private accounts, on the grounds that they would soften up Americans for cuts in Social Security: "If today's workers start saving and investing more in stocks and bonds, the returns they earn would allow us to trim their Social Security benefits later, without reducing their overall standard of living."
While George W. Bush pushed for partial privatization of Social Security, he failed because of massive public opposition. But Bush and the Republican majority in Congress succeeded in enacting the Social Security drug benefit, a flawed but genuine expansion of economic citizenship. Clinton is the only president to have successfully supported the destruction of a New Deal entitlement, while Bush presided over the greatest expansion of the Rooseveltian entitlement system since Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare.
For his part, Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton, rejected single-payer in favor of a moderately conservative welfare corporatist approach to healthcare reform. In contrast, Obama's proposal for student loan reform, an idea discussed in the Clinton years, would move in the right direction, away from welfare corporatism and toward economic citizenship, by replacing subsidized third-party lenders with direct government provision of student loans to needy college students.
Parties are coalitions of interest groups, they are not public philosophies, and presidents, great and minor, are and have to be opportunists. In contrast, reformers only have a chance of succeeding if they stick to their basic principles and keep their eyes on the prize. Progressives should support any politician, Democrat or Republican, who expands economic citizenship to the detriment of welfare corporatism, and they should oppose any politician, Democrat or Republican, who expands welfare corporatism to the detriment of economic citizenship.
Any more questions?
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2010/01/11/second_bill_of_rights?source=newsletter
Monday, January 11, 2010
President Obama, the CIA and the Master of the Cover-Up
Saturday 11 December 2010
by: Melvin A. Goodman, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
The Obama administration quietly announced Friday the appointment of John McLaughlin, former deputy CIA director, to head the internal investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Delta airliner headed for Detroit as well as the events leading to the shootings at Fort Hood in November.
With this appointment, President Barack Obama has assured that the culture of intelligence cover-up will continue. McLaughlin has participated in and sought to cover-up many of the CIA's most egregious failures and misdeeds of the past decade. When he left the CIA, he then served as the agency's chief apologist.
So, who is John McLaughlin? Most of official Washington and the mainstream media view McLaughlin as the mild-mannered, professorial CIA bureaucrat, who former CIA director George Tenet called the "smartest man he had ever met."
Few people understand, however, that McLaughlin played the most important role in making sure that the Bush administration received the intelligence that would be used and misused to justify the use of force against Iraq in 2003.
Washington insiders remember that it was CIA director Tenet who told President George W. Bush, "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk," in response to the president's demand for stronger intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to provide to the American people. Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the "slam-dunk" briefing to the president in January 2003.
McLaughlin was the "villain" behind the politicized intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the war. He perverted the intelligence process, ignored high-level briefings on the weakness of the intelligence on WMD and tried to silence David Kay, the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, when the weapons inspectors found no evidence of strategic weapons in Iraq.
When Kay returned to CIA headquarters from Baghdad, Tenet and McLaughlin made sure that Kay was given a tiny, windowless office at the end of a distant, deserted corridor undergoing construction. It had no secure phone or classified computer. Kay called it Siberia.
McLaughlin was also the villain behind the CIA's preparation of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in February 2003 that used phony intelligence to convince an international audience of the need for war. According to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Powell's chief of staff, Tenet and McLaughlin lied to the secretary of state about the sourcing of serious allegations dealing with Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain strategic weapons.
The most serious allegation came from an Iraqi con man known as "Curveball," who maintained that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories, a key charge in the phony intelligence to justify the Iraq war. German intelligence debriefed Curveball, and German intelligence officials warned the CIA that Curveball was unstable and that there was no validation for his claims. Tyler Drumheller, the chief of CIA's European Division, knew that Curveball was mentally unstable and a liar, and he urged McLaughlin to drop all references to the mobile biological labs from Powell's speech. McLaughlin ignored him, too.
Five weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Powell and McLaughlin shared a table at the White House correspondents' dinner, where McLaughlin, an amateur magician, agreed to perform a few magic tricks during a break in the action. The CIA deputy director conjured coins out of thin air and transformed a single dollar into a $100 bill; everyone at the table laughed except for Powell, who seemed tense and out of sorts.
According to Bob Drogin, who wrote an authoritative book on Curveball, Powell stared at McLaughlin and requested another trick. "Let's see you find the WMD in Iraq," an unsmiling Powell demanded. McLaughlin looked surprised and his broad grin faded. "We will," he replied, "they're there and we'll find them."
In addition to being one of the ideological drivers for the CIA's policies of torture and abuse, secret prisons and extraordinary renditions, McLaughlin demonstrated early in his career that he was a company man willing to do what was necessary to advance his career. In the 1980s, when CIA Director William Casey and his Deputy Robert Gates were "cooking the books" on intelligence dealing with the Soviet Union, Central America and Southwest Asia, McLaughlin offered no dissent.
When the CIA did an internal investigation of one of the worst examples of politicization of intelligence, the case for Soviet complicity in the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in 1981, McLaughlin made sure there were no references to politicization in the final report and made every effort to hide Gates' role in preparing the Papal plot intelligence assessment. When Gates' nomination as CIA director was in trouble during the confirmation process in 1991, it was McLaughlin who stepped forward to defend his former boss from charges of politicization.
President Obama has made many mistakes in his handling of the CIA and the intelligence community that could be attributed to his inexperience and his reliance on intelligence officials, who are themselves part of the culture of cover-up. He has named weak figures to the important posts of director of national intelligence and CIA director, and has named no one to replace the CIA's inspector general, who announced his retirement nearly 11 months ago.
His administration has threatened the British government with the cut off of sensitive intelligence if a British court revealed details of CIA renditions in Europe, and has resorted to a state security defense to prevent revelations of renditions policies in US courts as well.
President Obama has been unwilling to release photographs that document the conduct of torture and abuse by intelligence officers, and he has permitted the day-to-day operations of the CIA to remain in the hands of those operational officers, Steve Kappes and Mike Sulick, responsible for the program of renditions, detentions and interrogations. The president's early mistakes demonstrated that he simply didn't get it; the appointment of McLaughlin indicates that the president doesn't want to get it.
It is essential for President Obama to understand what went wrong in order to reform the CIA and take corrective actions. In relying on those individuals who have circled the wagons to protect themselves and the agency, the president has deprived himself of an opportunity to understand the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the shootdown of the missionary plane over Peru as well as the illegality of renditions, detentions and interrogations.
President Obama does not want to assign blame in these matters, but he will never remedy these problems if he fails to understand what went wrong.
http://www.truthout.org/article/president-obama-cia-and-master-cover-up
by: Melvin A. Goodman, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
The Obama administration quietly announced Friday the appointment of John McLaughlin, former deputy CIA director, to head the internal investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Delta airliner headed for Detroit as well as the events leading to the shootings at Fort Hood in November.
With this appointment, President Barack Obama has assured that the culture of intelligence cover-up will continue. McLaughlin has participated in and sought to cover-up many of the CIA's most egregious failures and misdeeds of the past decade. When he left the CIA, he then served as the agency's chief apologist.
So, who is John McLaughlin? Most of official Washington and the mainstream media view McLaughlin as the mild-mannered, professorial CIA bureaucrat, who former CIA director George Tenet called the "smartest man he had ever met."
Few people understand, however, that McLaughlin played the most important role in making sure that the Bush administration received the intelligence that would be used and misused to justify the use of force against Iraq in 2003.
Washington insiders remember that it was CIA director Tenet who told President George W. Bush, "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk," in response to the president's demand for stronger intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to provide to the American people. Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the "slam-dunk" briefing to the president in January 2003.
McLaughlin was the "villain" behind the politicized intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the war. He perverted the intelligence process, ignored high-level briefings on the weakness of the intelligence on WMD and tried to silence David Kay, the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, when the weapons inspectors found no evidence of strategic weapons in Iraq.
When Kay returned to CIA headquarters from Baghdad, Tenet and McLaughlin made sure that Kay was given a tiny, windowless office at the end of a distant, deserted corridor undergoing construction. It had no secure phone or classified computer. Kay called it Siberia.
McLaughlin was also the villain behind the CIA's preparation of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in February 2003 that used phony intelligence to convince an international audience of the need for war. According to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Powell's chief of staff, Tenet and McLaughlin lied to the secretary of state about the sourcing of serious allegations dealing with Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain strategic weapons.
The most serious allegation came from an Iraqi con man known as "Curveball," who maintained that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories, a key charge in the phony intelligence to justify the Iraq war. German intelligence debriefed Curveball, and German intelligence officials warned the CIA that Curveball was unstable and that there was no validation for his claims. Tyler Drumheller, the chief of CIA's European Division, knew that Curveball was mentally unstable and a liar, and he urged McLaughlin to drop all references to the mobile biological labs from Powell's speech. McLaughlin ignored him, too.
Five weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Powell and McLaughlin shared a table at the White House correspondents' dinner, where McLaughlin, an amateur magician, agreed to perform a few magic tricks during a break in the action. The CIA deputy director conjured coins out of thin air and transformed a single dollar into a $100 bill; everyone at the table laughed except for Powell, who seemed tense and out of sorts.
According to Bob Drogin, who wrote an authoritative book on Curveball, Powell stared at McLaughlin and requested another trick. "Let's see you find the WMD in Iraq," an unsmiling Powell demanded. McLaughlin looked surprised and his broad grin faded. "We will," he replied, "they're there and we'll find them."
In addition to being one of the ideological drivers for the CIA's policies of torture and abuse, secret prisons and extraordinary renditions, McLaughlin demonstrated early in his career that he was a company man willing to do what was necessary to advance his career. In the 1980s, when CIA Director William Casey and his Deputy Robert Gates were "cooking the books" on intelligence dealing with the Soviet Union, Central America and Southwest Asia, McLaughlin offered no dissent.
When the CIA did an internal investigation of one of the worst examples of politicization of intelligence, the case for Soviet complicity in the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in 1981, McLaughlin made sure there were no references to politicization in the final report and made every effort to hide Gates' role in preparing the Papal plot intelligence assessment. When Gates' nomination as CIA director was in trouble during the confirmation process in 1991, it was McLaughlin who stepped forward to defend his former boss from charges of politicization.
President Obama has made many mistakes in his handling of the CIA and the intelligence community that could be attributed to his inexperience and his reliance on intelligence officials, who are themselves part of the culture of cover-up. He has named weak figures to the important posts of director of national intelligence and CIA director, and has named no one to replace the CIA's inspector general, who announced his retirement nearly 11 months ago.
His administration has threatened the British government with the cut off of sensitive intelligence if a British court revealed details of CIA renditions in Europe, and has resorted to a state security defense to prevent revelations of renditions policies in US courts as well.
President Obama has been unwilling to release photographs that document the conduct of torture and abuse by intelligence officers, and he has permitted the day-to-day operations of the CIA to remain in the hands of those operational officers, Steve Kappes and Mike Sulick, responsible for the program of renditions, detentions and interrogations. The president's early mistakes demonstrated that he simply didn't get it; the appointment of McLaughlin indicates that the president doesn't want to get it.
It is essential for President Obama to understand what went wrong in order to reform the CIA and take corrective actions. In relying on those individuals who have circled the wagons to protect themselves and the agency, the president has deprived himself of an opportunity to understand the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the shootdown of the missionary plane over Peru as well as the illegality of renditions, detentions and interrogations.
President Obama does not want to assign blame in these matters, but he will never remedy these problems if he fails to understand what went wrong.
http://www.truthout.org/article/president-obama-cia-and-master-cover-up
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Sick With Terror
Posted on Jan 5, 2010
By Amy Goodman
The media have been swamped with reports about the attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now dubbed the “underwear bomber,” failed in his alleged attack, close to 300 people were spared what would have been, most likely, a horrible, violent end. Since that airborne incident, the debates about terrorism and how best to protect the American people have been reignited.
Meanwhile, a killer that has stalked the U.S. public, claiming, by recent estimates, 45,000 lives annually—one dead American about every 10 minutes—goes unchecked. That’s 3,750 people dead—more than the 9/11 attacks—every month who could be saved with the stroke of a pen.
This killer is the lack of adequate health care in the United States. Researchers from Harvard Medical School found in late 2009 that 45,000 people die unnecessarily every year due to lack of health insurance. Researchers also uncovered another stunning fact: In 2008, four times as many U.S. Army veterans died because they lacked health insurance than the total number of U.S. soldiers who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the same period. That’s right: 2,266 veterans under the age of 65 died because they were uninsured.
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama was fiery when he made his public statement after meeting with his national security team about the airline breach: In seeking to thwart plans to kill Americans “we face a challenge of the utmost urgency,” he said. He talked about reviewing systemic failures and declared we must “save innocent lives, not just most of the time, but all of the time.”
This is all very admirable. Imagine if this same urgency was applied to a broken system that causes 45,000 unnecessary deaths per year. Since stimulus funds will now be directed to supply more scanning equipment at airports, what about spending money to ensure mammograms and prostate exams at community health centers?
And then there’s the investigation of who is responsible for the attempted Christmas Day attack and getting “actionable intelligence” from the alleged bomber to prevent future attacks. All good.
We actually have “actionable intelligence” on why people die due to lack of health care, and how insurance companies actively deny people coverage to increase their profits, but what has been done about it?
The day before the underwear bomb incident, Christmas Eve, the U.S. Senate passed The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by a vote of 60 to 39. Obama described the bill as “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act passed in the 1930s.” Yet in order to get to that magic number of 60 Senate votes, the already weak Senate bill had to be brought to its knees by the likes of Sen. Joe Lieberman, from the health insurance state of Connecticut, and conservative Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska. The Senate and House versions of health insurance reform now have to be reconciled in conference committee.
The conference committee process is one that is little understood in the U.S. In it major changes to legislation are often imposed, with little or no notice. That’s why C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb sent a letter to congressional leaders Dec. 30 requesting access to televise the process. He wrote, “[W]e respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American.” Rather than simply grant access, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asserted that “there has never been a more open process.”
Yet Pelosi and the Democrats are now saying that the bills won’t even go through a formal conference committee, but rather through informal, closed-door sessions with key committee chairs. While this would circumvent Republican opportunities to filibuster, it would also grant a very few individuals enormous power to cut deals in much the same way that Sens. Nelson and Lieberman did. Since the health insurance, medical equipment and pharmaceutical industries spent close to $1.4 million per day to influence the health care debate, we have to ask: Who will have access to those few legislators behind those closed doors?
Wendell Potter, the former CIGNA insurance spokesperson turned whistle-blower, says he knows “where the bodies are buried.” Let’s be consistent. If we care about saving American lives, let’s take action now.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sick_with_terror_20100105/
By Amy Goodman
The media have been swamped with reports about the attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now dubbed the “underwear bomber,” failed in his alleged attack, close to 300 people were spared what would have been, most likely, a horrible, violent end. Since that airborne incident, the debates about terrorism and how best to protect the American people have been reignited.
Meanwhile, a killer that has stalked the U.S. public, claiming, by recent estimates, 45,000 lives annually—one dead American about every 10 minutes—goes unchecked. That’s 3,750 people dead—more than the 9/11 attacks—every month who could be saved with the stroke of a pen.
This killer is the lack of adequate health care in the United States. Researchers from Harvard Medical School found in late 2009 that 45,000 people die unnecessarily every year due to lack of health insurance. Researchers also uncovered another stunning fact: In 2008, four times as many U.S. Army veterans died because they lacked health insurance than the total number of U.S. soldiers who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the same period. That’s right: 2,266 veterans under the age of 65 died because they were uninsured.
On Tuesday, President Barack Obama was fiery when he made his public statement after meeting with his national security team about the airline breach: In seeking to thwart plans to kill Americans “we face a challenge of the utmost urgency,” he said. He talked about reviewing systemic failures and declared we must “save innocent lives, not just most of the time, but all of the time.”
This is all very admirable. Imagine if this same urgency was applied to a broken system that causes 45,000 unnecessary deaths per year. Since stimulus funds will now be directed to supply more scanning equipment at airports, what about spending money to ensure mammograms and prostate exams at community health centers?
And then there’s the investigation of who is responsible for the attempted Christmas Day attack and getting “actionable intelligence” from the alleged bomber to prevent future attacks. All good.
We actually have “actionable intelligence” on why people die due to lack of health care, and how insurance companies actively deny people coverage to increase their profits, but what has been done about it?
The day before the underwear bomb incident, Christmas Eve, the U.S. Senate passed The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by a vote of 60 to 39. Obama described the bill as “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act passed in the 1930s.” Yet in order to get to that magic number of 60 Senate votes, the already weak Senate bill had to be brought to its knees by the likes of Sen. Joe Lieberman, from the health insurance state of Connecticut, and conservative Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska. The Senate and House versions of health insurance reform now have to be reconciled in conference committee.
The conference committee process is one that is little understood in the U.S. In it major changes to legislation are often imposed, with little or no notice. That’s why C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb sent a letter to congressional leaders Dec. 30 requesting access to televise the process. He wrote, “[W]e respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American.” Rather than simply grant access, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asserted that “there has never been a more open process.”
Yet Pelosi and the Democrats are now saying that the bills won’t even go through a formal conference committee, but rather through informal, closed-door sessions with key committee chairs. While this would circumvent Republican opportunities to filibuster, it would also grant a very few individuals enormous power to cut deals in much the same way that Sens. Nelson and Lieberman did. Since the health insurance, medical equipment and pharmaceutical industries spent close to $1.4 million per day to influence the health care debate, we have to ask: Who will have access to those few legislators behind those closed doors?
Wendell Potter, the former CIGNA insurance spokesperson turned whistle-blower, says he knows “where the bodies are buried.” Let’s be consistent. If we care about saving American lives, let’s take action now.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sick_with_terror_20100105/
Monday, January 4, 2010
Court to Cops: Stop Tasing People into Compliance
# By David Hambling Email Author
# January 4, 2010 |
# 9:33 am |
The use of Tasers has become increasingly controversial over the last year, following high-profile cases such as the Tasering of a 10-year-old girl who had refused to take a shower and video of a 72-year-old great-grandmother who was Tasered following a driving offense. Now a federal appeals court in San Francisco has set down new rules for when police officers are allowed to use Tasers. In particular, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Tasers can’t be used simply to force a non-violent person to bend to an officer’s will. The court’s reason was that Taser’s X26 stun gun inflicts more pain than other “non-lethal” options:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/court-dials-back-taser-use-cops-cant-zap-to-force-behavior/
# January 4, 2010 |
# 9:33 am |
The use of Tasers has become increasingly controversial over the last year, following high-profile cases such as the Tasering of a 10-year-old girl who had refused to take a shower and video of a 72-year-old great-grandmother who was Tasered following a driving offense. Now a federal appeals court in San Francisco has set down new rules for when police officers are allowed to use Tasers. In particular, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Tasers can’t be used simply to force a non-violent person to bend to an officer’s will. The court’s reason was that Taser’s X26 stun gun inflicts more pain than other “non-lethal” options:
The physiological effects, the high levels of pain, and foreseeable risk of physical injury lead us to conclude that the X26 and similar devices are a greater intrusion than other non-lethal methods of force we have confronted.
The ruling followed a case in which an officer Tasered a man named Carl Bryan after pulling him over for driving with an unbuckled seat belt. Bryan was verbally abusive, but obviously unarmed and non-violent.
The use of Tasers as compliance tools — means for compelling behavior — has generated a huge amount of protest. For many, the famous “Don’t Tase me, bro” incident, in which student Andrew Meyer was Tasered at a political debate, signaled an alarming new form of oppression. (Others have accused Meyer of setting the whole thing up as a stunt.) Perhaps the distinguishing feature of the Taser, compared with other forms of enforcing compliance, is that it can be used with one finger. Police have always been able enforce their wishes using batons or manual force, but a Taser is a much easier option, and perhaps this makes it more prone to abuse. Whether it’s zapping an unruly student protester, an uncooperative 11-year-old or an abusive driver, the trite observation that power corrupts may have some truth here.
“It sounds like this court is attempting to raise the bar for non-lethal use of force,” retired Los Angeles Police Department Captain Greg Meyer told the Los Angeles Times. The ruling specifies that the Taser X26 and similar devices should only be used where there is “strong government interest [that] compels the employment of such force.” This rules out any situation in which there are alternative means of dealing with the situation. Some may see the new ruling as a great step forward for human rights. But there are reasons to be a little more cautious.
A recent study in the American Journal of Public Health looked at 24,000 cases in which police officers had used force, including Tasers, pepper spray, batons and manual methods. After controlling for factors such as the amount of resistance shown by the suspect, the study found that Taser use reduced the overall risk of injury by 65 percent. In other words, restricting Taser use could triple the number of injuries caused in this sort of incident.
It would be naïve to assume that there will not be any market response to the ruling. We have recently seen a rash of new devices aimed at police forces, including assorted laser dazzlers and pepper ball guns as Taser alternatives. There are also portable pain beams in prospect, both microwave and infrared laser varieties, not to mention various acoustic blasters. The ruling is likely to lead to more experimentation, both technical and in the courts, to find out just what the acceptable level of pain and suffering is and how it can best be delivered.
The ruling is also a potential boost for devices such as the LED Incapacitator, which does not rely on pain but other physiological effects (disorientation, loss of balance and nausea). Funding of more advanced non-lethal devices using assorted electromagnetic effects to paralyze or otherwise disable painlessly may also become more attractive.
Taser International is also likely to respond legally and technically. Having already developed several generations of Taser, the latest versions rely on muscular paralysis to incapacitate a target. The substantial pain is a side effect. A Taser that paralyzes without causing (perceived) pain would be an obvious avenue of research.
The new ruling is likely to have a significant effect on police on the streets. Many commentators will be watching evidence to support claims that it will make things better — or worse.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/court-dials-back-taser-use-cops-cant-zap-to-force-behavior/
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Move Your Money: A New Year's Resolution
Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson
Posted: December 29, 2009 06:02 PM
Too-big-to-fail banks are profiting from bailout dollars and government guarantees, and growing bigger. Tell us which community bank you use, and why.
Last week, over a pre-Christmas dinner, the two of us, along with political strategist Alexis McGill, filmmaker/author Eugene Jarecki, and Nick Penniman of the HuffPost Investigative Fund, began talking about the huge, growing chasm between the fortunes of Wall Street banks and Main Street banks, and started discussing what concrete steps individuals could take to help create a better financial system. Before long, the conversation turned practical, and with some help from friends in the world of bank analysis, a video and website were produced devoted to a simple idea: Move Your Money.
The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, the Big Four banks -- JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo -- all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.
Meanwhile, America's Main Street community banks -- the vast majority of which avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of -- are struggling. Many of them have closed down (or been taken over by the FDIC) over the last 12 months. The government policy of protecting the Too Big and Politically Connected to Fail is badly hurting the small banks, which are having a much harder time competing in the financial marketplace. As a result, a system which was already dangerously concentrated at the top has only become more so.
We talked about the outrage of big, bailed-out banks turning around and spending millions of dollars on lobbying to gut or kill financial reform -- including "too big to fail" legislation and regulation of the derivatives that played such a huge part in the meltdown. And as we contrasted that with the efforts of local banks to show that you can both be profitable and have a positive impact on the community, an idea took hold: why don't we take our money out of these big banks and put them into community banks? And what, we asked ourselves, would happen if lots of people around America decided to do the same thing? Our money has been used to make the system worse -- what if we used it to make the system better?
Everyone around the table quickly got excited (granted we are an excitable group), and began tossing out suggestions for how to get this idea circulating.
Eugene, the filmmaker among us, remarked that the contrast between the big banks and the community banks we were talking about was very much like the story in the classic Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life, where community banker George Bailey helps the people of Bedford Falls escape the grip of the rapacious and predatory banker Mr. Potter.
It was a lightbulb moment. And, unlike the vast majority of dinner conversations, the excitement over this idea didn't end with dessert. It actually led to something -- thanks in great part to Eugene and his remarkable team, who got to work and, in record time, created a brilliant, powerful, and inspiring video playing off the It's a Wonderful Life concept. Watch it below.
Within a few days, the rest of the pieces fell into place, including an agreement with top financial analysts Chris Whalen and Dennis Santiago, who gave us access to their IRA (Institutional Risk Analytics) database. Using this tool, everyone will be able to plug in their zip code and quickly get a list of the small, solvent Main Street banks operating in their community.
The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it's meant to be. It's neither Left nor Right -- it's populism at its best. Consider it a withdrawal tax on the big banks for the negative service they provide by consistently ignoring the public interest. It's time for Americans to move their money out of these reckless behemoths. And you don't have to worry, there is zero risk: deposit insurance is just as good at small banks -- and unlike the big banks they don't provide the toxic dividend of derivatives trading in a heads-they-win, tails-we-lose fashion.
Think of the message it will send to Wall Street -- and to the White House. That we have had enough of the high-flying, no-limits-casino banking culture that continues to dominate Wall Street and Capitol Hill. That we won't wait on Washington to act, because we know that Washington has, in fact, been a part of the problem from the start. We simply can't count on Congress to fix things. We have to do it ourselves -- and the big banks are the core of the problem. We need to return to the stable, reliable, people-oriented approach of America's community banks.
So watch Eugene's amazing video, then go to www.moveyourmoney.info to learn more about how easy it is to move your money. And pass the idea on to your friends (help make this video -- and this idea -- go viral!).
JP Morgan/Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America may be "too big to fail" -- but they are not too big to feel the impact of hundreds of thousands of people taking action to change a broken financial and political system. Let them gamble with their own money, not yours. Let's turn big banks into smaller banks. We'll all be better off -- and safer -- as a result.
Make it your New Year's resolution to move your money. We can't think of a better way to start 2010.
WATCH:
Too-big-to-fail banks are profiting from bailout dollars and government guarantees, and growing bigger. Tell us which community bank you use, and why.
UPDATE -- Credit Unions: Some commenters have written us suggesting that we also include credit unions. Like the FDIC for banks and thrifts, the National Credit Union Administration insures the deposits of credit unions and is a good resource for financial data on specific institutions. Credit unions do not disclose financial data in the same way as FDIC-insured banks. As a result, credit unions are not presently included in the IRA ratings database, which covers over 8,000 federally insured banks and thrifts. IRA is developing a method to rate credit unions in a way that is comparable to the IRA bank stress ratings. We'll be updating users of "Move Your Money" on this issue early in 2010.
For more info, go to: www.moveyourmoney.info
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/move-your-money-a-new-yea_b_406022.html?view=print
Posted: December 29, 2009 06:02 PM
Too-big-to-fail banks are profiting from bailout dollars and government guarantees, and growing bigger. Tell us which community bank you use, and why.
Last week, over a pre-Christmas dinner, the two of us, along with political strategist Alexis McGill, filmmaker/author Eugene Jarecki, and Nick Penniman of the HuffPost Investigative Fund, began talking about the huge, growing chasm between the fortunes of Wall Street banks and Main Street banks, and started discussing what concrete steps individuals could take to help create a better financial system. Before long, the conversation turned practical, and with some help from friends in the world of bank analysis, a video and website were produced devoted to a simple idea: Move Your Money.
The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, the Big Four banks -- JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo -- all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.
Meanwhile, America's Main Street community banks -- the vast majority of which avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of -- are struggling. Many of them have closed down (or been taken over by the FDIC) over the last 12 months. The government policy of protecting the Too Big and Politically Connected to Fail is badly hurting the small banks, which are having a much harder time competing in the financial marketplace. As a result, a system which was already dangerously concentrated at the top has only become more so.
We talked about the outrage of big, bailed-out banks turning around and spending millions of dollars on lobbying to gut or kill financial reform -- including "too big to fail" legislation and regulation of the derivatives that played such a huge part in the meltdown. And as we contrasted that with the efforts of local banks to show that you can both be profitable and have a positive impact on the community, an idea took hold: why don't we take our money out of these big banks and put them into community banks? And what, we asked ourselves, would happen if lots of people around America decided to do the same thing? Our money has been used to make the system worse -- what if we used it to make the system better?
Everyone around the table quickly got excited (granted we are an excitable group), and began tossing out suggestions for how to get this idea circulating.
Eugene, the filmmaker among us, remarked that the contrast between the big banks and the community banks we were talking about was very much like the story in the classic Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life, where community banker George Bailey helps the people of Bedford Falls escape the grip of the rapacious and predatory banker Mr. Potter.
It was a lightbulb moment. And, unlike the vast majority of dinner conversations, the excitement over this idea didn't end with dessert. It actually led to something -- thanks in great part to Eugene and his remarkable team, who got to work and, in record time, created a brilliant, powerful, and inspiring video playing off the It's a Wonderful Life concept. Watch it below.
Within a few days, the rest of the pieces fell into place, including an agreement with top financial analysts Chris Whalen and Dennis Santiago, who gave us access to their IRA (Institutional Risk Analytics) database. Using this tool, everyone will be able to plug in their zip code and quickly get a list of the small, solvent Main Street banks operating in their community.
The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it's meant to be. It's neither Left nor Right -- it's populism at its best. Consider it a withdrawal tax on the big banks for the negative service they provide by consistently ignoring the public interest. It's time for Americans to move their money out of these reckless behemoths. And you don't have to worry, there is zero risk: deposit insurance is just as good at small banks -- and unlike the big banks they don't provide the toxic dividend of derivatives trading in a heads-they-win, tails-we-lose fashion.
Think of the message it will send to Wall Street -- and to the White House. That we have had enough of the high-flying, no-limits-casino banking culture that continues to dominate Wall Street and Capitol Hill. That we won't wait on Washington to act, because we know that Washington has, in fact, been a part of the problem from the start. We simply can't count on Congress to fix things. We have to do it ourselves -- and the big banks are the core of the problem. We need to return to the stable, reliable, people-oriented approach of America's community banks.
So watch Eugene's amazing video, then go to www.moveyourmoney.info to learn more about how easy it is to move your money. And pass the idea on to your friends (help make this video -- and this idea -- go viral!).
JP Morgan/Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America may be "too big to fail" -- but they are not too big to feel the impact of hundreds of thousands of people taking action to change a broken financial and political system. Let them gamble with their own money, not yours. Let's turn big banks into smaller banks. We'll all be better off -- and safer -- as a result.
Make it your New Year's resolution to move your money. We can't think of a better way to start 2010.
WATCH:
Too-big-to-fail banks are profiting from bailout dollars and government guarantees, and growing bigger. Tell us which community bank you use, and why.
UPDATE -- Credit Unions: Some commenters have written us suggesting that we also include credit unions. Like the FDIC for banks and thrifts, the National Credit Union Administration insures the deposits of credit unions and is a good resource for financial data on specific institutions. Credit unions do not disclose financial data in the same way as FDIC-insured banks. As a result, credit unions are not presently included in the IRA ratings database, which covers over 8,000 federally insured banks and thrifts. IRA is developing a method to rate credit unions in a way that is comparable to the IRA bank stress ratings. We'll be updating users of "Move Your Money" on this issue early in 2010.
For more info, go to: www.moveyourmoney.info
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/move-your-money-a-new-yea_b_406022.html?view=print
Egypt: Rooftops Empower the Poor
Sunday 03 January 2010
by: Cam McGrath | Inter Press Service
Cairo - In one of the poorest and most populous neighborhoods of Cairo, Hussein Soliman and his family live in a small apartment that is a model of clean energy living.
The two solar panels and bio-gas unit on the roof of Soliman's building in Darb El-Ahmar provide hot water and cooking gas to his two-bedroom apartment, reducing his family's carbon footprint and energy costs. The clean energy appliances, made mostly from recycled material, have reduced his household's waste and have meant that "my gas and electricity bills are much less than before," says Soliman. They shaved nearly 50 percent off the utility bills.
Soliman ventured into clean energy in 2008 when he joined Solar CITIES (Connecting Community Catalysts and Integrating Technologies for Industrial Ecology Systems), a development initiative spearheaded by U.S. urban planner Thomas Culhane. The project leverages local experience and innovation to develop cheap and robust clean energy technologies adapted to the rigorous operating environment of Cairo's poorest neighbourhoods.
"There is no 'one size fits all' in development and part of the problem is precisely that so-called 'experts' come in and try to promote products and designs that are inappropriate for the local community," Culhane tells IPS.
Culhane and his German wife, Sybille, have brought on board as innovators the residents of the low-income neighborhoods in which they hope to make the greatest impact. Their designs for solar water heaters and bio-gas digesters have evolved through experimentation, group brainstorming sessions, and "jumping into dumpsters to find materials that might work."
Using recycled materials, Culhane's team was able to put together a solar water heating system for under 500 dollars. The system's solar panels are built from scrap aluminum, glass, old copper pipes and styrofoam insulation. It uses two recycled 200-litre shampoo barrels as tanks, one for storing the water heated by the panels and the other as a backup water supply.
Solar CITIES has built 35 solar water heaters in Egypt since 2007. Most of the systems, including 30 units built with USAID funding, are installed on rooftops in underdeveloped areas where frequent power and water cuts cause commercial systems to break down. Stacked tanks and a float valve, similar to the type used in toilets, allow the water heaters to overcome the water pressure fluctuations that lead to failures.
"It took a lot of experimentation because we had to find placements for cold and hot water input and output that would balance the changing flow rate, opening the float valves at the right time," Culhane says.
After a year of operation, Soliman says the only maintenance his homemade solar water heater has required is a twice-weekly washing of the panels to remove the dust buildup.
"The panels heat the water, which pipes carry down to the kitchen and shower," he explains. "We only need electricity to heat water in the winter, and only if we're using it after midnight."
The bio-gas digester that Soliman assembled on his roof - one of eight built by the Solar CITIES project - converts organic garbage into cooking gas. Moldy bread and table scraps are soaked in water overnight, then poured into a 1,000-litre plastic tank to decompose. A pipe carries the gas to a burner in the kitchen, while a spigot drains the effluent, which Soliman sells as organic fertiliser to upscale garden shops.
"I can use any organic waste from our kitchen to create gas," Soliman explains, while pouring a bucket of organic slurry into the tank's intake pipe. "The digester provides one hour a day of gas in winter, and two hours in summer."
The bio-gas unit's capacity for processing organic waste has taken on added value since the Egyptian government's decision last year to cull the country's pig population. Rotting heaps of kitchen waste, previously fed to hogs, have created a health hazard.
"My garbage man kisses me because I have the cleanest garbage on the block," Soliman boasts.
Moustafa Hussein, a career counselor for a local community development project, joined the Solar CITIES project in 2007 after a chance encounter with Culhane that sold him on the idea. The solar water heater he built on the roof of his apartment in Darb El-Ahmar provided hot water for his family until the dilapidated building collapsed three months ago.
His belief in the project unshaken, Hussein is now building another solar water heater, which he hopes to install on the roof of the temporary government housing where he now lives. He also wants to build a bio-gas unit.
"I'm planning to collect the organic waste from restaurants in the neighborhood to increase my gas output," he says. "I'll give the restaurants plastic bags and they can separate out the organics, and I'll collect the bags at the end of each day."
The biggest obstacle to any project in impoverished neighbourhoods is economics, says Hussein. Most area residents subsist on less than two dollars per day, and credit is difficult to obtain.
"It's hard to convince people here to invest in clean energy," says Hussein. "As a household why should they invest up to 1,000 Egyptian pounds (182 dollars) in bio-gas when it costs just six or seven for a butagas cylinder, which lasts two weeks and is much easier to handle?"
Due to Egypt's heavily subsidised gas and electricity, it may take up to 15 years to recover the costs of a Solar CITIES solar water heater or bio-gas digester. The cost recovery time is expected to fall as the government proceeds with plans to phase out energy subsidies in the coming four to seven years.
Hussein says having people who are part of the community involved gives the Solar CITIES initiative more credibility. But the project's success will ultimately depend on whether it can produce a cheap, durable and efficient model for the community.
"If the people see a good example, they will tell each other about it," he says. "Whether it succeeds of fails, everyone will know the same day."
http://www.truthout.org/topstories/010309jr1?print
by: Cam McGrath | Inter Press Service
Cairo - In one of the poorest and most populous neighborhoods of Cairo, Hussein Soliman and his family live in a small apartment that is a model of clean energy living.
The two solar panels and bio-gas unit on the roof of Soliman's building in Darb El-Ahmar provide hot water and cooking gas to his two-bedroom apartment, reducing his family's carbon footprint and energy costs. The clean energy appliances, made mostly from recycled material, have reduced his household's waste and have meant that "my gas and electricity bills are much less than before," says Soliman. They shaved nearly 50 percent off the utility bills.
Soliman ventured into clean energy in 2008 when he joined Solar CITIES (Connecting Community Catalysts and Integrating Technologies for Industrial Ecology Systems), a development initiative spearheaded by U.S. urban planner Thomas Culhane. The project leverages local experience and innovation to develop cheap and robust clean energy technologies adapted to the rigorous operating environment of Cairo's poorest neighbourhoods.
"There is no 'one size fits all' in development and part of the problem is precisely that so-called 'experts' come in and try to promote products and designs that are inappropriate for the local community," Culhane tells IPS.
Culhane and his German wife, Sybille, have brought on board as innovators the residents of the low-income neighborhoods in which they hope to make the greatest impact. Their designs for solar water heaters and bio-gas digesters have evolved through experimentation, group brainstorming sessions, and "jumping into dumpsters to find materials that might work."
Using recycled materials, Culhane's team was able to put together a solar water heating system for under 500 dollars. The system's solar panels are built from scrap aluminum, glass, old copper pipes and styrofoam insulation. It uses two recycled 200-litre shampoo barrels as tanks, one for storing the water heated by the panels and the other as a backup water supply.
Solar CITIES has built 35 solar water heaters in Egypt since 2007. Most of the systems, including 30 units built with USAID funding, are installed on rooftops in underdeveloped areas where frequent power and water cuts cause commercial systems to break down. Stacked tanks and a float valve, similar to the type used in toilets, allow the water heaters to overcome the water pressure fluctuations that lead to failures.
"It took a lot of experimentation because we had to find placements for cold and hot water input and output that would balance the changing flow rate, opening the float valves at the right time," Culhane says.
After a year of operation, Soliman says the only maintenance his homemade solar water heater has required is a twice-weekly washing of the panels to remove the dust buildup.
"The panels heat the water, which pipes carry down to the kitchen and shower," he explains. "We only need electricity to heat water in the winter, and only if we're using it after midnight."
The bio-gas digester that Soliman assembled on his roof - one of eight built by the Solar CITIES project - converts organic garbage into cooking gas. Moldy bread and table scraps are soaked in water overnight, then poured into a 1,000-litre plastic tank to decompose. A pipe carries the gas to a burner in the kitchen, while a spigot drains the effluent, which Soliman sells as organic fertiliser to upscale garden shops.
"I can use any organic waste from our kitchen to create gas," Soliman explains, while pouring a bucket of organic slurry into the tank's intake pipe. "The digester provides one hour a day of gas in winter, and two hours in summer."
The bio-gas unit's capacity for processing organic waste has taken on added value since the Egyptian government's decision last year to cull the country's pig population. Rotting heaps of kitchen waste, previously fed to hogs, have created a health hazard.
"My garbage man kisses me because I have the cleanest garbage on the block," Soliman boasts.
Moustafa Hussein, a career counselor for a local community development project, joined the Solar CITIES project in 2007 after a chance encounter with Culhane that sold him on the idea. The solar water heater he built on the roof of his apartment in Darb El-Ahmar provided hot water for his family until the dilapidated building collapsed three months ago.
His belief in the project unshaken, Hussein is now building another solar water heater, which he hopes to install on the roof of the temporary government housing where he now lives. He also wants to build a bio-gas unit.
"I'm planning to collect the organic waste from restaurants in the neighborhood to increase my gas output," he says. "I'll give the restaurants plastic bags and they can separate out the organics, and I'll collect the bags at the end of each day."
The biggest obstacle to any project in impoverished neighbourhoods is economics, says Hussein. Most area residents subsist on less than two dollars per day, and credit is difficult to obtain.
"It's hard to convince people here to invest in clean energy," says Hussein. "As a household why should they invest up to 1,000 Egyptian pounds (182 dollars) in bio-gas when it costs just six or seven for a butagas cylinder, which lasts two weeks and is much easier to handle?"
Due to Egypt's heavily subsidised gas and electricity, it may take up to 15 years to recover the costs of a Solar CITIES solar water heater or bio-gas digester. The cost recovery time is expected to fall as the government proceeds with plans to phase out energy subsidies in the coming four to seven years.
Hussein says having people who are part of the community involved gives the Solar CITIES initiative more credibility. But the project's success will ultimately depend on whether it can produce a cheap, durable and efficient model for the community.
"If the people see a good example, they will tell each other about it," he says. "Whether it succeeds of fails, everyone will know the same day."
http://www.truthout.org/topstories/010309jr1?print
Friday, January 1, 2010
Iraqis outraged as Blackwater case thrown out
By REBECCA SANTANA, Associated Press Writer Rebecca Santana, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD – Iraqis seeking justice for 17 people shot dead at a Baghdad intersection responded with bitterness and outrage Friday at a U.S. judge's decision to throw out a case against a Blackwater security team accused in the killings.
The Iraqi government vowed to pursue the case, which became a source of contention between the U.S. and the Iraqi government. Many Iraqis also held up the judge's decision as proof of what they'd long believed: U.S. security contractors were above the law.
"There is no justice," said Bura Sadoun Ismael, who was wounded by two bullets and shrapnel during the shooting. "I expected the American court would side with the Blackwater security guards who committed a massacre in Nisoor Square."
What happened on Nisoor Square on Sept. 16, 2007, raised Iraqi concerns about their sovereignty because Iraqi officials were powerless to do anything to the Blackwater employees who had immunity from local prosecution. The shootings also highlighted the degree to which the U.S. relied on private contractors during the Iraq conflict.
Blackwater had been hired by the State Department to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq. The guards said they were ambushed at a busy intersection in western Baghdad, but U.S. prosecutors and many Iraqis said the Blackwater guards let loose an unprovoked attack on civilians using machine guns and grenades.
"Investigations conducted by specialized Iraqi authorities confirmed unequivocally that the guards of Blackwater committed the crime of murder and broke the rules by using arms without the existence of any threat obliging them to use force," Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement Friday.
He did not elaborate on what steps the government planned to take to pursue the case.
The shootings led the Iraqi government to strip the North Carolina-based company of its license to work in the country, and Blackwater replaced its management and changed its name to Xe Services.
Five guards from the company were charged in the case with manslaughter and weapons violations. The charges carried mandatory 30-year prison terms, but a federal judge Friday dismissed all the charges.
U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina cited repeated government missteps in the investigation, saying that prosecutors built their case on sworn statements that the guards had given with the idea that they would be immune from prosecution.
That explanation held little sway with Iraqis outraged over the case.
Dr. Haitham Ahmed's wife and son were both killed in their car during the shooting.
"The rights of our victims and the rights of the innocent people should not be wasted," he said.
Iraqis have followed the case closely and said the judge's decision demonstrated that the Americans were considered above the law.
"I was not astonished by the verdict because the trial was unreal. They are using double standards and talking about human rights, but they are the first to violate these rights. They are killing innocents deliberately," said Ahmed Jassim, a civil engineer in the southern city of Najaf.
Dozens of Iraqis have filed a separate lawsuit alleging that Blackwater employees engaged in indiscriminate killings and beatings. That civil case was not affected by Urbina's decision and is still before a Virginia court.
Mohammed al-Kinani, whose son was killed, said he had been invited once to the U.S. by the Justice Department as a witness but said he went two more times after that to follow the case.
"I will not despair," he said.
Gen. Ray Odierno, the commanding general in Iraq, said he understood that people would be upset with the decision.
"Of course people are not going to like it, because they believe that these individuals conducted some violence and should be punished for it, but the bottom line is, using the rule of law, the evidence is not there," he said. "I worry about it because clearly there were innocent people killed in this attack."
Of all the private security companies that mushroomed in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion, Blackwater was the most well-known and vilified.
Their employees were at the center of what is considered one of the key moments of the war. A vehicle with four Blackwater employees driving through the western city of Fallujah, a center of the Sunni insurgency, was hit by gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades in March 2004. Their charred, mutilated bodies were dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates river.
The bloody incident was one of the key reasons the U.S. military attacked Fallujah in April 2004.
Another Blackwater guard, Andrew Moonen, was accused by the family of a guard for an Iraqi vice president of shooting and killing the guard without provocation on Christmas Eve of 2006 after Moonen got drunk at a party in the Green Zone and then got lost. Moonen's lawyer has described the incident as self-defense.
An October 2007 report by a House of Representatives committee called Blackwater an out-of-control outfit indifferent to Iraqi civilian casualties. Blackwater chairman Erik Prince told the committee that the company acted appropriately at all times.
Were the incident to happen again today, the legal outcome might be much different. The U.S.-Iraqi security pact that took effect Jan. 1, 2009, lifted the immunity that foreign contractors had in Iraq. A British security contractor accused of shooting two colleagues is currently being held in Iraq and could be the first Westerner to face an Iraqi court since the immunity was lifted.
___
Associated Press Writers Katharine Houreld, Saad Abdul-Kadir and Bushra Juhi contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100101/ap_on_bi_ge/ml_iraq_blackwater/print
BAGHDAD – Iraqis seeking justice for 17 people shot dead at a Baghdad intersection responded with bitterness and outrage Friday at a U.S. judge's decision to throw out a case against a Blackwater security team accused in the killings.
The Iraqi government vowed to pursue the case, which became a source of contention between the U.S. and the Iraqi government. Many Iraqis also held up the judge's decision as proof of what they'd long believed: U.S. security contractors were above the law.
"There is no justice," said Bura Sadoun Ismael, who was wounded by two bullets and shrapnel during the shooting. "I expected the American court would side with the Blackwater security guards who committed a massacre in Nisoor Square."
What happened on Nisoor Square on Sept. 16, 2007, raised Iraqi concerns about their sovereignty because Iraqi officials were powerless to do anything to the Blackwater employees who had immunity from local prosecution. The shootings also highlighted the degree to which the U.S. relied on private contractors during the Iraq conflict.
Blackwater had been hired by the State Department to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq. The guards said they were ambushed at a busy intersection in western Baghdad, but U.S. prosecutors and many Iraqis said the Blackwater guards let loose an unprovoked attack on civilians using machine guns and grenades.
"Investigations conducted by specialized Iraqi authorities confirmed unequivocally that the guards of Blackwater committed the crime of murder and broke the rules by using arms without the existence of any threat obliging them to use force," Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement Friday.
He did not elaborate on what steps the government planned to take to pursue the case.
The shootings led the Iraqi government to strip the North Carolina-based company of its license to work in the country, and Blackwater replaced its management and changed its name to Xe Services.
Five guards from the company were charged in the case with manslaughter and weapons violations. The charges carried mandatory 30-year prison terms, but a federal judge Friday dismissed all the charges.
U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina cited repeated government missteps in the investigation, saying that prosecutors built their case on sworn statements that the guards had given with the idea that they would be immune from prosecution.
That explanation held little sway with Iraqis outraged over the case.
Dr. Haitham Ahmed's wife and son were both killed in their car during the shooting.
"The rights of our victims and the rights of the innocent people should not be wasted," he said.
Iraqis have followed the case closely and said the judge's decision demonstrated that the Americans were considered above the law.
"I was not astonished by the verdict because the trial was unreal. They are using double standards and talking about human rights, but they are the first to violate these rights. They are killing innocents deliberately," said Ahmed Jassim, a civil engineer in the southern city of Najaf.
Dozens of Iraqis have filed a separate lawsuit alleging that Blackwater employees engaged in indiscriminate killings and beatings. That civil case was not affected by Urbina's decision and is still before a Virginia court.
Mohammed al-Kinani, whose son was killed, said he had been invited once to the U.S. by the Justice Department as a witness but said he went two more times after that to follow the case.
"I will not despair," he said.
Gen. Ray Odierno, the commanding general in Iraq, said he understood that people would be upset with the decision.
"Of course people are not going to like it, because they believe that these individuals conducted some violence and should be punished for it, but the bottom line is, using the rule of law, the evidence is not there," he said. "I worry about it because clearly there were innocent people killed in this attack."
Of all the private security companies that mushroomed in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion, Blackwater was the most well-known and vilified.
Their employees were at the center of what is considered one of the key moments of the war. A vehicle with four Blackwater employees driving through the western city of Fallujah, a center of the Sunni insurgency, was hit by gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades in March 2004. Their charred, mutilated bodies were dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates river.
The bloody incident was one of the key reasons the U.S. military attacked Fallujah in April 2004.
Another Blackwater guard, Andrew Moonen, was accused by the family of a guard for an Iraqi vice president of shooting and killing the guard without provocation on Christmas Eve of 2006 after Moonen got drunk at a party in the Green Zone and then got lost. Moonen's lawyer has described the incident as self-defense.
An October 2007 report by a House of Representatives committee called Blackwater an out-of-control outfit indifferent to Iraqi civilian casualties. Blackwater chairman Erik Prince told the committee that the company acted appropriately at all times.
Were the incident to happen again today, the legal outcome might be much different. The U.S.-Iraqi security pact that took effect Jan. 1, 2009, lifted the immunity that foreign contractors had in Iraq. A British security contractor accused of shooting two colleagues is currently being held in Iraq and could be the first Westerner to face an Iraqi court since the immunity was lifted.
___
Associated Press Writers Katharine Houreld, Saad Abdul-Kadir and Bushra Juhi contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100101/ap_on_bi_ge/ml_iraq_blackwater/print
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