Corruption Beyond Corruption

Who's Killing Financial Reform?

2010-02-20T04:39:00.001-08:00

http://www.commondreams.org/print/52547

February 5, 2010 by Robert Reich's Blog
Who's Killing Financial Reform?
by Robert Reich

Senator Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, scolded Wall Street representatives at a hearing Thursday for sending “an army of lobbyists whose only mission is to kill the common-sense financial reforms” needed by the public. “The fact is,” Dodd said, “I am frustrated, and so are the American people.” He charged that Wall Street’s intransigence was the reason for Congress’s failure to pass any bill to regulate the Street. “The refusal of large financial firms to work constructively with Congress on this effort borders on insulting to the American people who have lost so much in this crisis.”

In other words, it isn’t Congress’s fault. It isn’t the Senate Banking Committee’s fault. It certainly isn’t Dodd’s fault. The reason more than a year has passed since the biggest bailout in the history of the world and nothing has been done to prevent a repeat performance — even as the biggest banks are doling out more than $30 billion of bonuses, even as Goldman Sachs is awarding its big traders $16 billion in bonuses (more than the $13 billion Goldman collected from taxpayers via the bailout of AIG), even as AIG itself is handing out bonuses — the reason is … what, exactly, Senator? Because the Street has sent an army of lobbyists to Capitol Hill?

Call me old fashioned, but I thought Congress was in charge of passing legislation, not Wall Street.

Dodd left out the most telling detail, of course. Wall Street is where the campaign money is. Dodd of all people knows that. He’s been on the receiving end of lots of it over the years.

Wall Street firms and their executives have been uniquely generous to both political parties, emerging recently as one of the largest benefactors of the Democratic Party. Between November 2008 and November 2009, Wall Street firms and executives handed out $42 million to lawmakers, mostly to members of the House and Senate banking committees and House and Senate leaders. During the 2008 elections, Wall Street showered Democratic candidates with well over $88 million and Republicans with over $67 million, putting the Street right up there with the insurance industry as among the nation’s largest equal-opportunity donors.

Some Democrats are quietly grumbling that all the tough talk emanating from the White House in recent weeks — the President calling the Street’s denizens “fat cats” and threatening them with limits on their size and the risks they can take, even waiving a watered-down version of Glass-Steagall in their faces — is making it harder to collect money from the Street this mid-term election year. And the Street is quietly threatening that it may well give Republicans more, if the saber-rattling doesn’t stop.

Congress isn’t doing a thing about Wall Street because it’s in the pocket of Wall Street. Dodd’s outburst at the Street is like the alcoholic who screams at a bartender “how dare you give me another drink when all I’ve done is pleaded with you for one!”

Dodd is right about one thing. The American people are frustrated, and the failure of Congress to pass real financial reform is insulting. But in trying to place responsibility for this appalling failure on Wall Street, Dodd insults us even more.

© 2010 Robert Reich

Israeli Commander: 'We Rewrote the Rules of War for Gaza'

2010-02-03T14:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israeli-commander-we-rewrote-the-rules-of-war-for-gaza-1887627.html

February 3, 2010 by The Independent/UK
Israeli Commander: 'We Rewrote the Rules of War for Gaza'
Civilians 'put at greater risk to save military lives' in winter attack - revelations that will pile pressure on Netanyahu to set up full inquiry
by Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem

A high-ranking officer has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli army went beyond its previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian lives in order to minimise military casualties during last year's Gaza war, The Independent can reveal.

An Israeli soldier directs a tank outside the Gaza Strip in December 2008. (REUTERS)The officer, who served as a commander during Operation Cast Lead, made it clear that he did not regard the longstanding principle of military conduct known as "means and intentions" - whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon - as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter. A more junior officer who served at a brigade headquarters during the operation described the new policy - devised in part to avoid the heavy military casualties of the 2006 Lebanon war - as one of "literally zero risk to the soldiers".

The officers' revelations will pile more pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to set up an independent inquiry into the war, as demanded in the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, which harshly criticised the conduct of both Israel and Hamas. One of Israel's most prominent human rights lawyers, Michael Sfard, said last night that the senior commander's acknowledgement - if accurate - was "a smoking gun".

Until now, the testimony has been kept out of the public domain. The senior commander told a journalist compiling a lengthy report for Yedhiot Ahronot, Israel's biggest daily newspaper, about the rules of engagement in the three-week military offensive in Gaza. But although the article was completed and ready for publication five months ago, it has still not appeared. The senior commander told Yedhiot: "Means and intentions is a definition that suits an arrest operation in the Judaea and Samaria [West Bank] area... We need to be very careful because the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] was already burnt in the second Lebanon war from the wrong terminology. The concept of means and intentions is taken from different circumstances. Here [in Cast Lead] we were not talking about another regular counter-terrorist operation. There is a clear difference."

His remarks reinforce testimonies from soldiers who served in the Gaza operation, made to the veterans' group Breaking the Silence and reported exclusively by this newspaper last July. They also appear to cut across the military doctrine - enunciated most recently in public by one of the authors of the IDF's own code of ethics - that it is the duty of soldiers to run risks to themselves in order to preserve civilian lives.

Explaining what he saw as the dilemma for forces operating in areas that were supposedly cleared of civilians, the senior commander said: "Whoever is left in the neighbourhood and wants to action an IED [improvised explosive device] against the soldiers doesn't have to walk with a Kalashnikov or a weapon. A person like that can walk around like any other civilian; he sees the IDF forces, calls someone who would operate the terrible death explosive and five of our soldiers explode in the air. We could not wait until this IED is activated against us."

Another soldier who worked in one of the brigade's war-room headquarters told The Independent that conduct in Gaza - particularly by aerial forces and in areas where civilians had been urged to leave by leaflets - had "taken the targeted killing idea and turned it on its head". Instead of using intelligence to identify a terrorist, he said, "here you do the opposite: first you take him down, then you look into it."

The Yedhiot newspaper also spoke to a series of soldiers who had served in Operation Cast Lead in sensitive positions. While the soldiers rejected the main finding of the Goldstone Report - that the Israeli military had deliberately "targeted" the civilian population - most asserted that the rules were flexible enough to allow a policy under which, in the words of one soldier "any movement must entail gunfire. No one's supposed to be there." He added that at a meeting with his brigade commander and others it was made clear that "if you see any signs of movement at all you shoot. This is essentially the rules of engagement."

The other soldier in the war-room explained: "This doesn't mean that you need to disrespect the lives of Palestinians but our first priority is the lives of our soldiers. That's not something you're going to compromise on. In all my years in the military, I never heard that."

He added that the majority of casualties were caused in his brigade area by aerial firing, including from unmanned drones. "Most of the guys taken down were taken down by order of headquarters. The number of enemy killed by HQ-operated remote ... compared to enemy killed by soldiers on the ground had absolutely inverted," he said.

Rules of engagement issued to soldiers serving in the West Bank as recently as July 2006 make it clear that shooting towards even an armed person will take place only if there is intelligence that he intends to act against Israeli forces or if he poses an immediate threat to soldiers or others.

In a recent article in New Republic, Moshe Halbertal, a philosophy professor at Hebrew and New York Universities, who was involved in drawing up the IDF's ethical code in 2000 and who is critical of the Goldstone Report, said that efforts to spare civilian life "must include the expectation that soldiers assume some risk to their own lives in order to avoid causing the deaths of civilians". While the choices for commanders were often extremely difficult and while he did not think the expectation was demanded by international law, "it is demanded in Israel's military code and this has always been its tradition".

The Israeli military declined to comment on the latest revelations, and directed all enquiries to already-published material, including a July 2009 foreign ministry document The Operation in Gaza: Factual and Legal Aspects.

That document, which repeats that Israel acted in conformity with international law despite the "acute dilemmas" posed by Hamas's operations within civilian areas, sets out the principles of Operation Cast Lead as follows: "Only military targets shall be attacked; Any attack against civilian objectives shall be prohibited. A 'civilian objective' is any objective which is not a military target." It adds: "In case of doubt, the forces are obliged to regard an object as civilian."

Yedhiot has not commented on why its article has not been published.

Israel in Gaza: The soldier's tale

This experienced soldier, who cannot be named, served in the war room of a brigade during Operation Cast Lead. Here, he recalls an incident he witnessed during last winter's three-week offensive:

"Two [Palestinian] guys are walking down the street. They pass a mosque and you see a gathering of women and children.

"You saw them exiting the house and [they] are not walking together but one behind the other. So you begin to fantasise they are actually ducking close to the wall.

"One [man] began to run at some point, must have heard the chopper. The GSS [secret service] argued that the mere fact that he heard it implicated him, because a normal civilian would not have realised that he was now being hunted.

"Finally he was shot. He was not shot next to the mosque. It's obvious that shots are not taken at a gathering."

Five Supremes: Corrupt to the Core

2010-02-03T14:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Five-Supremes-Corrupt-to-by-Brent-Budowsky-100202-268.html

February 2, 2010
By Brent Budowsky

Testifying under oath during confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito offered assurances about their respect for legal precedent and the appropriate role of the judiciary.

The recent decision of the court overturning settled campaign finance law achieved through bipartisan action of the elected legislative and executive branches was contemptuous of precedent, aggressive in its political intent, extremist in its impact and radical in its usurpation of power against the elected branches of government.

The "anything goes" ethic of a politics held in wide disrepute now extends to five Supreme Court justices who rule that unlimited sums of unregulated money can be spent to buy power over our republic.

They hold in contempt the warning of Madison in Federalist 10 that special-interest factions could overwhelm the nation. They ignore the warnings of Washington about the dangers of foreign entanglements that may, under this decision, if not clarified, further corrupt the governance of the nation. They hold in contempt the time-honored truth of Lincoln that America is the land of the people, by the people and for the people, and not the property of the money, by the money and for the money at the expense of people who lack the money.

Under the Supreme Court decision, companies that received investment from Nazi financiers and armed the Nazi war machine could have spent unlimited money to destroy elected officials who opposed their agenda.

Under this decision, oil companies dependent on the good will of unfriendly nations, which receive investment from foreign sources, including some that covertly fund bin Laden and others who overtly despise Israel, could spend unlimited money to promote an agenda hostile to our own.

The sheer extremism of this decision, the contempt for legal precedent that preceded it and the confirmation testimony that promised to honor this precedent, the disregard for the widely held view that Washington is corrupted by money in the service of greed, will go down in history alongside the opinion that slaves were property of slave-owners.

This decision is reminiscent of the mercantilist view of King George III, in which the power of the few with money would colonize the many who lack it, a view anathema to the essence of our republic, a view that inspired the American Revolution fought to end it.

I propose that Congress pass an American Elections for Americans Only Act of 2010 that would prohibit unlimited, unregulated spending by American subsidiaries of foreign companies and firms or entities that benefit from foreign investment or capital.

This act would simply prohibit unlimited spending, clarify ambiguities in the court decision and require the court to decide whether foreign interests have free-speech rights to dominate American elections.

A recent Gallup poll found that 76 percent of Americans believe government should limit corporate political spending. There will be a tidal wave of public support for making American elections American-only.

Our system is corrupt to the core. If a special interest offered bags of cash in return for a politician's vote, it would be a criminal felony. Our system is designed to legalize what is essentially this transaction. The least we can do is not further globalize the corruption.

The Corpocracy Rules / For Now

2010-01-30T05:15:00.001-08:00

http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2010/01/27.html

January 27, 2010
The Corpocracy Rules / For Now
By Allen L Roland

Aided by a mind boggling decision by the Supreme Court allowing unlimited campaign spending by private interests ~ the Corpocracy, where corporate dollars trump individual votes, has revealed its ominous ruling presence and insatiable appetite for power, profit and control but also has set the stage for a major populist revolt.

Now that the Supreme Courthas ruled that corporations may buy and own as many congressman as they can afford ~ it's time for a widespread populist revolt particularly in this mid term election year.

As John Geyman noted last year in the Huffington Post ~ " The scope of corpocracy goes beyond what most of us realize.
According to a 2007 report of the Institute for Policy Studies, 51 of the top 100 economic entities in the world are corporations. Wal-Mart and Exxon Mobil each have higher annual revenues than the gross domestic product of Poland or Saudi Arabia. The top 200 corporations account for about one-quarter of total economic activity in the entire world."

Geyman goes on to reveal " that Most of these large corporations are multinational and largely immune from the laws of any one nation. They are free to set up partnerships of convenience across borders, seek out countries that best serve their interests, and often pay little or no taxes." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-geyman/corpocracy-vs-democracy-i_b_241452.html

This is a dangerous time for American where our Republic is rapidly morphing into a Plutocracy or government by the wealthy. FDR warned of this possibility in 1938 ~

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence is Fascism~ ownership of government by individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."
The game is on ~ the enemy has been identified ~ as activist groups organize and a few courageous politicians try to implement legislative stop gaps to this insidious corporate cancer but corporate groups are also ready to attack the legislators who dare to oppose them.

Forget Obama, whose allegiance to the corpocracy gained him the presidency, we all need to be involved in this upcoming battle of the people versusthe corpocracyand Bill Moyers sums up the stakesthis election year ~ "The game goes on and the insiders keep dealing themselves winning hands. Nothing will change~ nothing ~ until the moneylenders are tossed out of the temple, the ATM's are wrested from the marble walls, and we tear down the sign they've place on government - the one that reads, 'For Sale.'"

As ChrisHedges, who wroteEmpire Of Illusions, says "Our for-profit health care system makes money off of death, the same way our arms merchants make money off of death. And the inability within our country to face this reality, the inability in a corporatized media to even have this discussion is, I think, evidence of the power of the corporate state, which drives debate, which permits institutions that are morally bankrupt to have a seat at the table. And that is symptomatic of a society in deep decay."

We are beyond the point of no return and only a full fledged populist revolt can right this badly listing Republic. Under G.W. Bush, torture became legal and under Obama, bribery has just become legal.

Scandal: Albert Edwards Alleges Central Banks Were Complicit In Robbing The Middle Classes

2010-01-30T04:51:00.001-08:00

Go to URL to see graphs.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/scandal-albert-edwards-alleges-central-banks-were-complicit-robbing-middle-classes

Albert Edwards
Zero Hedge
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:20 EST

We apologize in advance for the New York Magazine-style headline, but this is a report that has to be read by all Senators who are preparing to reconfirm Bernanke for a second term. When voting for the Chairman, be aware that all of America will now look at you as the perpetrators who are encouraging the greatest inter and intra-generational theft to continue, and as prescribed by Newton 3rd law, sooner or later, an appropriate reaction will come from the very same middle class that you are seeking to doom into a state of perpetual penury and a declining standard of living.

America spoke in Massachusetts, and will speak again very soon if you do not send the appropriate signal that you have heard its anger - Do Not Reconfirm Bernanke.

You have been warned.

We present Albert Edwards' latest in its complete form as it must be read by all unabridged and without commentary. These are not the deranged ramblings of a fringe blogger - this is a chief strategist for a major international bank.

Theft! Were the US & UK central banks complicit in robbing the middle classes?

by Albert Edwards, Societe Generale

Mr Bernanke's in-house Fed economists have found that the Fed wasn't responsible for the boom which subsequently turned into the biggest bust since the 1930s. Are those the same Fed staffers whose research led Mr Bernanke to assert in Oct. 2005 that "there was no housing bubble to go bust"? The reasons for the US and the UK central banks inflating the bubble range from incompetence and negligence to just plain spinelessness. Let me propose an alternative thesis. Did the US and UK central banks collude with the politicians to 'steal' their nations' income growth from the middle classes and hand it to the very rich?

Ben Bernanke's recent speech at the American Economic Association made me feel sick. Like Alan Greenspan, he is still in denial. The pigmies that populate the political and monetary elites prefer to genuflect to the court of public opinion in a pathetic attempt to deflect blame from their own gross and unforgivable incompetence.

The US and UK have seen a huge rise in inequality over the last two decades, as growth in national income has been diverted almost exclusively to the top income earners (see chart below). The middle classes have seen median real incomes stagnate over that period and, as a consequence, corporate margins and profits have boomed.

Some recent reading has got me thinking as to whether the US and UK central banks were actively complicit in an aggressive re-distributive policy benefiting the very rich. Indeed, it has been amazing how little political backlash there has been against the stagnation of ordinary people's earnings in the US and UK. Did central banks, in creating housing bubbles, help distract middle class attention from this re-distributive policy by allowing them to keep consuming via equity extraction? The emergence of extreme inequality might never otherwise have been tolerated by the electorate (see chart below). And now the bubbles have burst, along with central banks' credibility, what now?

© Profs Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty

After reading Ben Bernanke's speech, once again denying culpability for the bubble, I really didn't know whether to laugh or cry (remember that Ben Bernanke, like Tim Geithner, was a key member of the Greenspan Fed). I feel like Peter Finch in the film Network, sticking my head out of the window and shouting "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Although criticism of the Fed (and the Bank of England) has now become louder and more widespread, I feel my longstanding derision for their actions during the so-called "good years" puts me in a stronger position than some to offer further comment.

Opening my 2002-2005 file of old weeklies I did not have to go any further than the first paragraph of the top copy (end of December 2005). "As far as Alan Greenspan's tenure at the Fed is concerned, we have spared few words of derision. We have made plain our views that the supposed US prosperity that has accompanied his tenure has been based on a grotesque mountain of debt. We have likened the economy to a Ponzi scheme which will ultimately collapse. He has allowed the funding of strong economic activity by mortgaging the US's future against one bubble (equity) and then another (housing), which is now beginning to implode". These are almost consensus thoughts now, but not then.

The pigmies that populate the political and monetary elites prefer to genuflect to the court of public opinion. Blaming the banks is simply a pathetic attempt to deflect the public fury from their own gross and unforgivable incompetence. We have stated before that banks are not the primary cause of the bust. Just as in Japan, a decade earlier, bank problems are a symptom of the bust. It is the monetary and regulatory authorities that are responsible for this mess. And it is not just obvious in retrospect. It was perfectly obvious from the beginning.

I was shocked by a recent survey of Wall Street and business economists, published in the Wall Street Journal (see 'Bernanke View Doubted', 14 Jan). Asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the proposition 'excessively easy Fed policy in the first half of the decade helped cause a bubble in house prices', some 42, or 74% agreed with the proposition. So unbelievably there are still 12 economists surveyed who did not agree! Even more incredible, a majority of academic economists did not agree with the proposition. Maybe they have sympathy for a fellow academic or maybe they actually believe the preposterous proposition that the western central banks were not in control of the bubbles which were primarily due to tidal waves of surplus savings washing across from Asia.

John Taylor shows this to be nonsense. There was no global savings glut (see chart below)

© John Taylor

John Taylor is well known for his famous "Taylor Rule" for the appropriate level of interest rates and he has been very vocal in his criticism of Fed laxity in the aftermath of the Nasdaq crash in his paper 'The Financial Crisis and Policy Responses: An Empirical Analysis of What Went Wrong', Nov. 2008 and elsewhere. His thesis is simple. Lax monetary policy caused the boom in housing upon which euphoric credit excesses were built. The subsequent bust was an inevitable mirror image of the boom. This simply would not have occurred had the Fed (and the Bank of England) acted earlier to tighten policy as shown in the Taylor's counterfactual profiles (see charts below).

© John Taylor

More recently, the San Francisco Fed published a paper this month showing that those countries which saw the steepest run-up in house prices over the last decade also saw the largest rise in household sector leverage (see charts below and here). Of course the causality runs both ways. Loose monetary policy generates higher borrowing which pushes up house prices. Subsequently this prompts other households to borrow against the rising value of their houses to finance consumption via net equity extraction.

© Federal Reserve Bank of San Franciso

Generally most commentators have fallen for the populist line that the banks are to blame. Very rarely does a leading commentator pin the blame where it deserves to be: on the central banks. Hence, I was very interested to read the Financial Times Insight column on Tuesday from the deep-thinking columnist, John Plender (interestingly his title in the print edition was "Blame the central bankers more than the private bankers" was changed to "Remove the punchbowl before the party gets rowdy" in the web edition).

Plender's point is classic Minsky. An unusually long period of economic stability, also known as The Great Moderation, engineered by Central Bank laxity inevitably created the conditions for the subsequent bust. "Central banks clearly bear much responsibility for past excessive credit expansion. The Fed's gradualist and transparent approach to raising rates in middecade also ensured that bankers were never shocked into a recognition that unprecedented shrinkage of bank equity was phenomenally dangerous. Despite the popular perception that financial innovation caused so much of the damage in the crisis, the rise in bank leverage was a far more important factor". His point that it takes guts to remove the punch-bowl when the party is in full swing is spot on. The Fed and the Bank of England were both gutless and spineless. Their love affair with The Great Moderation meant they simply were not prepared to tolerate a little more pain now to avoid a Minsky credit bust and massive unemployment later.

But what is the relationship, if any, between this extreme central bank laxity in the US and UK and these countries being at the forefront for the extraordinary rise in inequality over the last few decades (see cover chart)? And does it matter?

I was reading some typically thought-provoking comments from Marc Faber in his 'Gloom, Boom and Doom' report about current extremes of inequality. It reminded me that our own excellent US economists Steven Gallagher and Aneta Markowska had also written on this. To be sure, the rise in inequality has been staggering in the US in recent years (see charts below).

© Emmanuel Saez, University of California / Sudden Debt, USDA

It is well worth visiting the website of Emmanuel Saez of the University of California who has written extensively on this subject and now has updated his charts up until the end of 2008 (data available in Excel Format). The New York Times reported on the recently released Census Bureau data and showed not only that median income had declined over the last 10 years in real terms, but that this is the first full decade that real median household income has failed to rise in the US. What is also so interesting from Professor Saez's cross-sectional research is how inequality has clearly risen fastest in the Anglosaxon, freemarket economies of the US and the UK (also note that France, with much higher levels of equality, saw much more subdued growth in household leverage).

Our US economists make the very interesting point (similar to Marc Faber) that peaks of income skewness - 1929 and 2007 - tell us there is something fundamentally unsustainable about excessively uneven income distribution. With a relatively low marginal propensity to consume among the rich, when they receive the vast bulk of income growth, as they have, then the country will face an under-consumption problem (see 9 September, The Economic News. Marc Faber also cites John Hobson's work on this same topic from the 1930s).

Hence, while governments preside over economic policies which make the very rich even richer, national consumption needs to be boosted in some way to avoid underconsumption ending in outright deflation. In addition, the middle classes also need to be thrown a sop to disguise the fact they are not benefiting at all from economic growth. This is where central banks have played their pernicious part.

I recalled seeing another article from John Plender on this topic back in April 2008. His explanation for why there had been so little backlash from the stagnation of ordinary people's income at a time when the rich did so well was simple: "Rising asset prices, especially in the housing market, created a sense of increasing wealth regardless of income. Remortgaging homes over a long period of declining interest rates provided a convenient source of funds via equity withdrawal to finance increased consumption."

Now you might argue central banks had no alternative in the face of under-consumption. Or you might conclude there was a deliberate, unspoken collusion among policymakers to "rob" the middle classes of their rightful share of income growth by throwing them illusionary spending power based on asset price inflation. We will never know.

But it is clear in my mind that ordinary working people would not have tolerated these extreme redistributive policies had not the UK and US central banks played their supporting role. Going forward, in the absence of a sustained housing boom, labour will fight back to take its proper (normal) share of the national cake, squeezing profits on a secular basis. For as Bill Gross pointed out back in PIMCO's investment outlook 'Enough is Enough' of August 1997, "When the fruits of society's labor become maldistributed, when the rich get richer and the middle and lower classes struggle to keep their heads above water as is clearly the case today, then the system ultimately breaks down." In Japan, low levels of inequality and inherent social cohesion prevented a social breakdown in this post-bubble debacle. With social inequality currently so very high in the US and the UK, it doesn't take much to conclude that extreme inequality could strain the fabric of society far closer to breaking point.

Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction

2010-01-30T04:45:00.003-08:00

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/democracy_in_america_is_a_useful_fiction_20100124/

Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction
Chris Hedges
Truthdig
Sun, 24 Jan 2010

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d'état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

Much of the outrage expressed about the court's ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of "inverted totalitarianism."

Inverted totalitarianism represents "the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry," Wolin writes in "Democracy Incorporated." Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.

Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by "power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions," Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, as this court ruling illustrates, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes do. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation. This exploitation ensures that huge corporate campaign contributions are protected speech under the First Amendment. It ensures that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is interpreted as an application of the people's right to petition the government. The court again ratified the concept that corporations are persons, except in those cases where the "persons" agree to a "settlement." Those within corporations who commit crimes can avoid going to prison by paying large sums of money to the government while, according to this twisted judicial reasoning, not "admitting any wrongdoing." There is a word for this. It is called corruption.

Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.

There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are allowed to have virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on "American Idol." Mass emotions are directed toward the raging culture wars. This allows us to take emotional stands on issues that are inconsequential to the power elite.

Our transformation into an empire, as happened in ancient Athens and Rome, has seen the tyranny we practice abroad become the tyranny we practice at home. We, like all empires, have been eviscerated by our own expansionism. We utilize weapons of horrific destructive power, subsidize their development with billions in taxpayer dollars, and are the world's largest arms dealer. And the Constitution, as Wolin notes, is "conscripted to serve as power's apprentice rather than its conscience."

"Inverted totalitarianism reverses things," Wolin writes. "It is politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash."

Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media's censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.

"It seems a replay of historical experience that the bias displayed by today's media should be aimed consistently at the shredded remains of liberalism," Wolin writes. "Recall that an element common to most 20th century totalitarianism, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility towards the left. In the United States, the left is assumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of 'the left wing of the Democratic Party,' never of democrats."

Liberals, socialists, trade unionists, independent journalists and intellectuals, many of whom were once important voices in our society, have been silenced or targeted for elimination within corporate-controlled academia, the media and government. Wolin, who taught at Berkeley and later at Princeton, is arguably the country's foremost political philosopher. And yet his book was virtually ignored. This is also why Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, along with intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, are not given a part in our national discourse.

The uniformity of opinion is reinforced by the skillfully orchestrated mass emotions of nationalism and patriotism, which paints all dissidents as "soft" or "unpatriotic." The "patriotic" citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and possible terrorist attacks, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and the militarized state. This means no questioning of the $1 trillion in defense-related spending. It means that the military and intelligence agencies are held above government, as if somehow they are not part of government. The most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be monitored and archived. We endure more state control than at any time in American history.

The civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the Founding Fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist. Our government and judiciary have no real sovereignty. Our press provides diversion, not information. Our organs of security and power keep us as domesticated and as fearful as most Iraqis. Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, when it emasculates government, becomes a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force, best described as inverted totalitarianism, is plunging us into a state of neo-feudalism, perpetual war and severe repression. The Supreme Court decision is part of our transformation by the corporate state from citizens to prisoners.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, writes a column published every Monday on Truthdig. His latest book is "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle."

Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction

2010-01-30T04:45:00.001-08:00

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/democracy_in_america_is_a_useful_fiction_20100124/

Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction
Chris Hedges
Truthdig
Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:22 EST

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d'état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

Much of the outrage expressed about the court's ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of "inverted totalitarianism."

Inverted totalitarianism represents "the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry," Wolin writes in "Democracy Incorporated." Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.

Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by "power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions," Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, as this court ruling illustrates, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes do. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation. This exploitation ensures that huge corporate campaign contributions are protected speech under the First Amendment. It ensures that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is interpreted as an application of the people's right to petition the government. The court again ratified the concept that corporations are persons, except in those cases where the "persons" agree to a "settlement." Those within corporations who commit crimes can avoid going to prison by paying large sums of money to the government while, according to this twisted judicial reasoning, not "admitting any wrongdoing." There is a word for this. It is called corruption.

Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.

There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are allowed to have virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on "American Idol." Mass emotions are directed toward the raging culture wars. This allows us to take emotional stands on issues that are inconsequential to the power elite.

Our transformation into an empire, as happened in ancient Athens and Rome, has seen the tyranny we practice abroad become the tyranny we practice at home. We, like all empires, have been eviscerated by our own expansionism. We utilize weapons of horrific destructive power, subsidize their development with billions in taxpayer dollars, and are the world's largest arms dealer. And the Constitution, as Wolin notes, is "conscripted to serve as power's apprentice rather than its conscience."

"Inverted totalitarianism reverses things," Wolin writes. "It is politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash."

Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media's censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.

"It seems a replay of historical experience that the bias displayed by today's media should be aimed consistently at the shredded remains of liberalism," Wolin writes. "Recall that an element common to most 20th century totalitarianism, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility towards the left. In the United States, the left is assumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of 'the left wing of the Democratic Party,' never of democrats."

Liberals, socialists, trade unionists, independent journalists and intellectuals, many of whom were once important voices in our society, have been silenced or targeted for elimination within corporate-controlled academia, the media and government. Wolin, who taught at Berkeley and later at Princeton, is arguably the country's foremost political philosopher. And yet his book was virtually ignored. This is also why Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, along with intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, are not given a part in our national discourse.

The uniformity of opinion is reinforced by the skillfully orchestrated mass emotions of nationalism and patriotism, which paints all dissidents as "soft" or "unpatriotic." The "patriotic" citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and possible terrorist attacks, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and the militarized state. This means no questioning of the $1 trillion in defense-related spending. It means that the military and intelligence agencies are held above government, as if somehow they are not part of government. The most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be monitored and archived. We endure more state control than at any time in American history.

The civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the Founding Fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist. Our government and judiciary have no real sovereignty. Our press provides diversion, not information. Our organs of security and power keep us as domesticated and as fearful as most Iraqis. Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, when it emasculates government, becomes a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force, best described as inverted totalitarianism, is plunging us into a state of neo-feudalism, perpetual war and severe repression. The Supreme Court decision is part of our transformation by the corporate state from citizens to prisoners.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, writes a column published every Monday on Truthdig. His latest book is "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle."

Scientists in Stolen E-mail Scandal Hid Climate Data

2010-01-30T04:27:00.000-08:00

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7004936.ece?&EMC-Bltn=CANBI2F

Ben Webster and Jonathan Leake
Times Online
Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:09 EST

The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.

The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner's Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

The stolen e-mails , revealed on the eve of the Copenhagen summit, showed how the university's Climatic Research Unit attempted to thwart requests for scientific data and other information, and suggest that senior figures at the university were involved in decisions to refuse the requests. It is not known who stole the e-mails.

Professor Phil Jones, the unit's director, stood down while an inquiry took place. The ICO's decision could make it difficult for him to resume his post.

Details of the breach emerged the day after John Beddington, the Chief Scientific Adviser, warned that there was an urgent need for more honesty about the uncertainty of some predictions. His intervention followed admissions from scientists that the rate of glacial melt in the Himalayas had been grossly exaggerated.

In one e-mail, Professor Jones asked a colleague to delete e-mails relating to the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He also told a colleague that he had persuaded the university authorities to ignore information requests under the act from people linked to a website run by climate sceptics.

A spokesman for the ICO said: "The legislation prevents us from taking any action but from looking at the emails it's clear to us a breach has occurred." Breaches of the act are punishable by an unlimited fine.

The complaint to the ICO was made by David Holland, a retired engineer from Northampton. He had been seeking information to support his theory that the unit broke the IPCC's rules to discredit sceptic scientists.

In a statement, Graham Smith, Deputy Commissioner at the ICO, said: "The e-mails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland's requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information."

He added: "The ICO is gathering evidence from this and other time-barred cases to support the case for a change in the law. We will be advising the university about the importance of effective records management and their legal obligations in respect of future requests for information."

Mr Holland said: "There is an apparent Catch-22 here. The prosecution has to be initiated within six months but you have to exhaust the university's complaints procedure before the commission will look at your complaint. That process can take longer than six months."

The university said: "The way freedom of information requests have been handled is one of the main areas being explored by Sir Muir Russell's independent review. The findings will be made public and we will act as appropriate on its recommendations."

Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows

2010-01-30T04:20:00.001-08:00

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aaIuE.W8RAuU

David Reilly
Bloomberg News
Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:06 EST

The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week's congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.

Wednesday's hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.

We're talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system -- apart from the matter of AIG's bailout -- deserves further congressional scrutiny.

The New York Fed is in the hot seat for its decision in November 2008 to buy out, for about $30 billion, insurance contracts AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank AG, among others. That decision, critics say, amounted to a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been allowed to fail.

That move came a few weeks after the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department propped up AIG in the wake of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s own mid-September bankruptcy filing.

Saving the System

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was head of the New York Fed at the time of the AIG moves. He maintained during Wednesday's hearing that the New York bank had to buy the insurance contracts, known as credit default swaps, to keep AIG from failing, which would have threatened the financial system.

The hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform also focused on what many in Congress believe was the New York Fed's subsequent attempt to cover up buyout details and who benefited.

By pursuing this line of inquiry, the hearing revealed some of the inner workings of the New York Fed and the outsized role it plays in banking. This insight is especially valuable given that the New York Fed is a quasi-governmental institution that isn't subject to citizen intrusions such as freedom of information requests, unlike the Federal Reserve.

This impenetrability comes in handy since the bank is the preferred vehicle for many of the Fed's bailout programs. It's as though the New York Fed was a black-ops outfit for the nation's central bank.

Geithner's Bosses

The New York Fed is one of 12 Federal Reserve Banks that operate under the supervision of the Federal Reserve's board of governors, chaired by Ben Bernanke. Member-bank presidents are appointed by nine-member boards, who themselves are appointed largely by other bankers.

As Representative Marcy Kaptur told Geithner at the hearing: "A lot of people think that the president of the New York Fed works for the U.S. government. But in fact you work for the private banks that elected you."

And yet the New York Fed played an integral role in the government's bailout of banks, often receiving surprisingly free rein to act as it saw fit.

Consider AIG. Let's take Geithner at his word that a failure to resolve the insurer's default swaps would have led to financial Armageddon. Given the stakes, you might think Geithner would have coordinated actions with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Yet Paulson testified that he wasn't in the loop.

"I had no involvement at all, in the payment to the counterparties, no involvement whatsoever," Paulson said.

Bernanke's Denials

Fed Chairman Bernanke also wasn't involved. In a written response to questions from Representative Darrell Issa, Bernanke said he "was not directly involved in the negotiations" with AIG's counterparty banks.

You have to wonder then who really was in charge of our nation's financial future if AIG posed as grave a threat as Geithner claimed.

Questions about the New York Fed's accountability grew after Geithner on Nov. 24, 2008, was named by then-President- elect Barack Obama to be Treasury Secretary. Geither said he recused himself from the bank's day-to-day activities, even though he never actually signed a formal letter of recusal.

That left issues related to disclosures about the deal in the hands of the bank's lawyers and staff, rather than a top executive. Those staffers didn't want details of the swaps purchase to become public.

New York Fed staff and outside lawyers from Davis Polk & Wardell edited AIG communications to investors and intervened with the Securities and Exchange Commission to shield details about the buyout transactions, according to a report by Issa.

That the New York Fed, a quasi-governmental body, was able to push around the SEC, an executive-branch agency, deserves a congressional hearing all by itself.

Later, when it became clear information would be disclosed, New York Fed legal group staffer James Bergin e-mailed colleagues saying: "I have to think this train is probably going to leave the station soon and we need to focus our efforts on explaining the story as best we can. There were too many people involved in the deals -- too many counterparties, too many lawyers and advisors, too many people from AIG -- to keep a determined Congress from the information."

Think of the enormity of that statement. A staffer at a body with little public accountability and that exists to serve bankers is lamenting the inability to keep Congress in the dark.

This belies the culture of secrecy obviously pervasive within the New York Fed. Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns noted during the hearing that the bank initially refused to disclose even the names of other banks that benefited from its actions, arguing this information would somehow harm AIG.

'Penchant for Secrecy'

"In fact, when the information was finally released, under pressure from Congress, nothing happened," Towns said. "It had absolutely no effect on AIG's business or financial condition. But it did have an effect on the credibility of the Federal Reserve, and it called into question the Fed's penchant for secrecy."

Now, I'm not saying Congress should be meddling in interest-rate decisions, or micro-managing bank regulation. Nor do I think we should all don tin-foil hats and start ranting about the Trilateral Commission.

Yet when unelected and unaccountable agencies pick banking winners while trying to end-run Congress, even as taxpayers are forced to lend, spend and guarantee about $8 trillion to prop up the financial system, our collective blood should boil.

(David Reilly is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions express

The Bush-Packed Supreme Court Thinks Corporations Are People Too

2010-01-22T16:05:00.001-08:00

The Bush-Packed Supreme Court Thinks Corporations Are People Too
By Scott Klinger, AlterNet
Posted on January 22, 2010, Printed on January 22, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145323/

This week's Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case removes all limits on large corporations to finance and influence federal elections. In its ruling the court reverses a decades-old ruling barring companies from using their general funds to fund political campaigns, and guts pieces of the popular McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation. In so doing the Court implicitly embraces a 125 year-old precedent in the case of Santa Clara v. Santa Fe, where the Court first developed the legal doctrine of corporate personhood, explicitly granting corporations the same political and civil rights granted to human beings (historian Thom Hartmann discovered that the principle originated with a corrupt court clerk who added it to the case summary, rather than with the court itself).

But what if we accept corporate personhood as the current reality and instead focus on changing the rules so that corporations would also have to be bound by other limitations of humanity? How would corporations be different if they were indeed human-like?

If corporations were human, they would pause for sleep and recreation. When human families vacation, they frequently go to parks or natural places which they inherently recognize as part of the commons set apart from the marketplace. Many corporations know no such bounds; if resources are available, even in the nation’s National Parks, they will seek to develop them. Today’s modern corporations are 24/7 affairs that are always charging forward. The press for continuous growth and the need to deliver the next quarter’s earnings, make corporation’s urgency and intensity toward time a threat to many communities, which have other priorities like caring for children and elders, not the tireless quest to produce more profit.

If corporations were human, they would acknowledge their dependence on a healthy community for their well-being and contribute financially to the vibrancy of the community through payment of taxes. Fifty years ago, corporate taxes made up nearly 22 percent of the federal treasury receipts; today corporate taxes contribute less than 13 percent to the federal budget. The mindset of many large corporations is that of takers, looking to be supported by society with a stream of tax credits and preferential tax rates. According to a 2008 report by the Government Accounting Office, 25 percent of large U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes in 2005 (the latest year studied) despite reporting collective sales exceeding $1.1 trillion.

If corporations were human, they would recognize that their brains are only one of many vital organs. The brain, which provides the executive function for the body whole, nonetheless consumes a relatively modest share of the body’s nutrition. A brain that swells beyond a normal healthy state is a dire threat to the body and most often requires the dramatic intervention of surgery. An inhuman corporation provides ever-larger amounts of nutrition in the form of money to its executive function. These swollen levels of pay are a cancer that often results in excessive risk, putting both the corporation and society at risk.

If corporations were human, they would be accountable to society when they break the law and would be punished with a loss of their freedoms. When a person steals or murders, they are sent to prison, where they lose their freedom to practice their trade and to participate in the economic and political life of the community. When corporations produce products they know to be deadly, or withhold important information on the safety of their products are they not guilty of murder? When corporations submit fraudulent financial statements to investors, or engage in deceptive marketing practices that cost people their homes or their life savings, are they not guilty of felonious theft? Shouldn’t corporate criminals, particularly repeat offenders, be denied their freedom to practice business and have their license revoked?

If corporations were human, they would one day die. Unlike the finitude of human life, modern corporations can live forever under the law, growing in size and gaining political and economic power generation after generation.

It was not always so. When our nation was young, people recognized both the good things that business contributed but also the risks of concentrating too much power in the hands of businesses. Business charters were granted for a set period of time, commonly a generation, after which time the businesses would be dissolved. While businesses could still prosper and grow to have influence, they were kept from becoming "too big to fail"—a condition in which their size alone was a threat to the social order.

Corporations can’t have it both ways—insisting upon the political and civil rights that human beings are guaranteed under the Constitution, while at the same time refusing to live within the constraints of human life in terms of longevity, size, accountability and support of the communities that grant them their existence.

Scott Klinger is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Free Speech is for Those who Have Money

2010-01-22T15:49:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Free-Sppech-is-for-thse-wh-by-Yvona-Fast-100122-856.html

January 22, 2010
By Yvona Fast

By a 5-4 decision, a bitterly divided Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC, rolling back restrictions on how much money corporations can spend to support candidates. "The text and purpose of the First Amendment point in the same direction: Congress may not prohibit political speech, even if the speaker is a corporation or union," said Chief Justice John Roberts.

However, the first amendment - "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." - says nothing about how much money can or cannot be spent to make ones voice heard.

This ruling protects the free speech of those who have money. According to Senator Mitch McConnell (R): "With today's monumental decision, the Supreme Court took an important step in the direction of restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups by ruling that the Constitution protects their right to express themselves about political candidates and issues up until Election Day."

But what about the freedom of speech rights of poor Americans - those citizens who lack money for ad campaigns and campaign contributions? They will not be heard. This ruling will unleash a torrent of attack ads in upcoming elections. Corporations, unions, and others with money will have increased power to influence government decisions.

Freedom of speech and the right to dissent are cornerstones of our democracy. However, bribery is not free speech. Even before this decision, the voices of regular Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists. In Washington, there are more than 60 lobbyists for every member of Congress. We accuse other nations of corruption and bribery, but we have simply legalized it and called it lobbying.

This ruling ensures that the voices of Americans without money will be silenced by the ad campaigns and contributions of those who do. In the words of Senator Patrick Leahy (D): "There is clear reason for ordinary citizens to be concerned that this divisive ruling will, in reality, allow powerful corporations to drown out the voices of everyday Americans in future campaigns. This ruling is no doubt yet another victory for Wall Street at the expense of Main Street America."

Justice John Paul Stevens stated in the dissent. "The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation." Robert Weissman, president Public Citizen (a consumer advocacy group), stated: "Today's decision so imperils our democratic well-being, and so severely distorts the rightful purpose of the First Amendment, that a constitutional corrective is demanded."

President Obama called on Congress to respond to this decision. "With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. ... We are going to talk with bipartisan congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision."

Corporate Rule Now Unmasked, Open & Notorious

2010-01-22T15:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/SUPREME-COURT-DE-REGULATES-by-Paul-Lehto-100121-49.html

January 22, 2010
SUPREME COURT DE-REGULATES CORPORATE CAMPAIGN DONATIONS; Corporate Rule Now Unmasked, Open & Notorious
By Paul Lehto

In Live blogging starting today at 10am EST, in what law.com called "a rare if not unprecedented Thursday session" of the US Supreme Court, the court issued a 5-4 decision in Citizens United totaling 176 pages in length for all opinions (the longest of this term and in a while...) http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf

Scotusblog.com says this in live chat from the Supreme Court: "The Court's decision overturns the previously settled distinction between corporate and individual expenditures in American elections."
The five justice majority opinion, written by Kennedy, effectively declares that corporate treasury money has a constitutional right to be used in an unlimited fashion in campaign politics because it is protected by the First Amendment. This reverses approximately a century of congressional and state regulation of campaign finance. See http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf

The US Supreme Court case called Austin v. Michigan (494 U.S. 652 (1990)) is overruled.

The US Supreme Court case McConnell v FEC (2003) upholding limits on independent corporate expenditures is also overruled.

Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority on page 45, claims that unlimited corporate cash purchases only "ingratiation and access [which are] are not corruption". Yet everyone knows money is the decisive factor in winning elections - in all cases where the vote counts are not rigged.

Nonstop propaganda alters the will of the electorate and defeats the conditions for "free elections" which are elections free from corrupting influence, fraud, force or any other condition that prevents the true voice and will of the people from being heard. Certainly, nonstop propaganda is something that will affect and distort the true voice and will of any people.

Stevens, in partial dissent, wrote a 90 page dissent, joined by Sotomayor and Ginsburg and Breyer. Exactly what "Partial" means has to be sorted out still since this is breaking... The partial dissent by Thomas complains about the one part of the majority opinion upholding disclosure requirements. Without disclosure, the candidate contributions would be not only unlimited but effectively secret.

TECHNICALLY: The Citizens United case is reversed in part, affirmed in part, and remanded. However, the affirmed part is only as to requiring disclosure by Citizens United, the reversal is much bigger and strikes down any right on the part of the government to regulate corporations like Citizens United in any campaign activity.

Thus, non-voters, non-citizens and non-human beings in the form of corporations, with foreign money, or mob money, or you name it, can take to the airwaves and contribute directly to candidates in an unlimited fashion. And, they are only about one vote away, perhaps two, from making these unlimited contributions SECRET so we the people don't even know WHO is talking at us so long and loud, or who's funding it...

This is a revolution against democracy, because We the People are being handcuffed and rendered helpless (by the courts) to have any kind of order in campaign finance. Rights are supposed to protect We the People from our government. Now the Supreme Court has weaponized the Constitution for use against We the People in elections of representatives to hold OUR power.

The First Amendment applies to government powers but elections of CANDIDATES are totally unique and special because they do not make law. Corporations, where they have legitimate business interests, live to fight another day. They are not harmed even by total exclusion from financing candidate campaigns. Yet the Court has opened the floodgates so that every representative can be considered bought and paid for - NO MATTER WHAT THEIR POSITION OR VOTE IS. In the probably rare event such position is progressive, it's bought and paid for by progressive rich folks...
Make no mistake: The court thinks discrimination on the source of funds is unconstitutional, but using corporate treasury funds instead of PAC donations from individual officers means Someone else's money is being used -- either consumers who didn't consent to part of the purchase price funding politics, or shareholders who are almost never consulted about political activities or lobbying: they too are compelled into forced speech against their will.

The ONLY thing preventing corporate charities from spending money on political campaigns is 501(c)(3) federal law and regulations. These are federal laws of the same status as campaign finance regulations. One really has to wonder whether this will destabilize confidence in charities as well, who may decide to spend charitable contributions on politics and then challenge any restrictions on that as unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court went way out of its way to overrule a century of regulation of corporations (and unions, as well). After oral argument in this relatively minor case, they asked for a special round of briefing on the subject of overturning Austin v. Michigan and another case. So much for the doctrine of "constitutional avoidance" which holds that cases ought to be resolved on non-constitutional grounds if possible. Legal bloggers have pointed to several ways the case could have been resolved non-constitutionally, and in nay event overturning Austin et al was not an issue raised by the original pleadings before the court.

It's all about attempting to entrench corporate rule: But now it's all in the OPEN like never before. This openness is outrageous, but it's also helpful: the Mask of corporate rule is now off.

GOP Is Overjoyed At the Unprecedented Influence Corporations Will Now Have in Federal Campaigns

2010-01-22T15:09:00.000-08:00

By Staff, Think Progress
Posted on January 21, 2010, Printed on January 22, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.thinkprogress.org//145326/

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the conservative group Citizens United made a movie critical of Hillary Clinton but was barred from distributing it on local cable systems because federal courts said it “looked and sounded like a long campaign ad, and therefore should be regulated like one.” The Supreme Court then took up the case and in its much-anticipated decision, today ruled 5-4 to allow corporations and unions to spend unlimited funds in support for, or opposition of, federal candidates. The monumental ruling throws out a “a 63-year-old law designed to restrain the influence of big business and unions on elections.

One Republican attorney said that the new ruling basically turns the political landscape into the “Wild Wild West.” Another GOP election lawyer said that the ruling represents “a huge sea-change in campaign finance law. The Court went all the way. It really relieves any restrictions on corporate spending on independent advertising.”

As Common Cause noted, the ruling “will enhance the ability of the deepest-pocketed special interests to influence elections and the U.S. Congress.” U.S. PIRG called it a “shocking burst of judicial activism” that treats corporations “in the same manner as ordinary citizens.” Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 said the ruling will “create unprecedented opportunities for corporate ‘influence-buying‘ corruption.”

The ruling is a giant win for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the big corporations, which tend to donate heavily to Republicans. Many Republicans have therefore come out and praised today’s decision:

– Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX): “It is about a nonprofit group’s ability to speak about the public issue. I can’t think of a more fundamental First Amendment issue. … [The ruling could] open up resources that have not previously been available [for Republicans].” [NYT]

– Rep. Steve King (R-IA): “The Constitution protects the rights of citizens and employers to express their viewpoints on political issues. Today’s Supreme Court decision affirms the Bill of Rights and is a victory for liberty and free speech.” [Statement]

– Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN): “If the freedom of speech means anything, it means protecting the right of private citizens to voice opposition or support for their elected representatives. The fact that the Court overturned a 20-year precedent speaks volumes about the importance of this issue.” [Statement]

– Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY): The court took a step toward “restoring the First Amendment rights [of corporations and unions]. … By previously denying this right, the government was picking winners and losers.” [AP]

– RNC Chairman Michael Steele: “Today’s decision by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC, serves as an affirmation of the constitutional rights provided to Americans under the first amendment. Free speech strengthens our democracy.” [Statement]

– Senate Candidate Marco Rubio: “Today’s SCOTUS decision on McCain-Feingold is a victory for free speech.” [Statement]

The Court’s ruling also struck down part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation “that barred union- and corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns.” Sen. Russ Feingold called the Court’s ruling a “terrible mistake,” but pointed out that it “does not affect McCain-Feingold’s soft money ban, which will continue to prevent corporate contributions to the political parties from corrupting the political process.” “The Supreme Court chose to roll back laws that have limited the role of corporate money in federal elections since Teddy Roosevelt was president,” he said. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) reacted similarly, saying he was “disappointed” in the decision.

UPDATE Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) called the today's ruling the "worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case." First Read observes that in this case, Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to step beyond his promise to act like an umpire "to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat."

UPDATE Statement from President Obama: "With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington--while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates. That's why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less."

UPDATESen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) told the Huffington Post that she finds the ruling "regrettable" and "disappointing."

Senator Bernie Sanders Statement on Supreme Court Campaign Finance Ruling

2010-01-22T14:58:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Senator-Bernie-Sanders-Sta-by-Press-Release-100121-973.html

January 21, 2010
Senator Bernie Sanders Statement on Supreme Court Campaign Finance Ruling
By Press Release

WASHINGTON, January 21 Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued the following statement after the Supreme Court today overturned decisions that had curbed corporate campaign contributions:

"The ruling is going to open the flood gates for the largest corporations to spend unlimited resources electing those candidates who represent their interests. The ruling will, to a significant degree, give control of the political process in the United States to the wealthiest and most powerful institutions in the world and the candidates who support their agenda. Instead of democracy being about one-person one-vote, it will now be about the size of a company's bank account. The answer, in my view, is that Congress must move forward aggressively for public funding of elections," Sanders said.

In a 5-to-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, justices overruled a 1990 decision that upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates. The ruling also junked part of a 2003 decision that upheld the central provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Contact: Michael Briggs or Will Wiquist (202) 224-5141

Torture’s Loopholes

2010-01-22T14:36:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/opinion/21alexander.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

January 21, 2010
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Torture’s Loopholes
By MATTHEW ALEXANDER

TOMORROW will be one year since President Obama signed an executive order outlawing torture, yet our debate about interrogation methods continues. Though the president deserves praise for improving matters, the changes were not as drastic as most Americans think, and elements of our interrogation policy continue to be both inhumane and counterproductive.

Americans can now boast that they no longer “torture” detainees, but they cannot say that detainees are not abused, or even that their treatment meets the minimum standards of humane treatment mandated by the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (the so-called McCain amendment), United States and international law, or even Mr. Obama’s executive order.

If I were to return to one of the war zones today — as an Air Force officer, I was sent to Iraq to head an interrogation team in 2006 — I would still be allowed to abuse prisoners. This is true even though in my experience, torture or even harsh but legal treatment never got us useful information. Instead, such tactics invariably did just the opposite, convincing detainees to clam up.

The adoption last year of the Army Field Manual as the standard for interrogations across the government, including the C.I.A., was a considerable improvement. But we missed a unique opportunity for progress last August when the president’s task force on interrogations recommended no changes to the manual, which was hastily revised in 2006 in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

For example, an appendix to the manual allows the military to keep a detainee in “separation” — solitary confinement — indefinitely. It requires only that a general approve any extension after 30 days. Rest assured, there will be numerous waivers to even that minuscule requirement.

Yes, there are legitimate reasons to isolate detainees. Domestic law enforcement agencies do it to prevent suspects from colluding on alibis and allow investigators the leverage to use non-coercive interrogation techniques like confronting one detainee with the other’s statements.

But military interrogators do not operate in a vacuum. The consequences of their actions have far-reaching effects — like Al Qaeda’s exploitation of American abuse of prisoners as a recruiting tool. And, in any case, extended solitary confinement is torture, as confirmed by many scientific studies. Even the initial 30 days of isolation could be considered abuse.

If we truly wanted to come up with a humane limit on solitary confinement, we would look at the Golden Rule: what would we consider inhumane treatment if one of our own soldiers were captured by the enemy? My answer: Given the youth of our men and women in uniform, that number is probably around two weeks. This limit, however, should be determined by medical professionals, not soldiers or politicians.

The Army Field Manual also does not explicitly prohibit stress positions, putting detainees into close confinement or environmental manipulation (other than hypothermia and “heat injury”). These omissions open a window of opportunity for abuse.

The manual also allows limiting detainees to just four hours of sleep in 24 hours. Let’s face it: extended captivity with only four hours of sleep a night (consider detainees at Guantánamo Bay who have been held for seven years) does not meet the minimum standard of humane treatment, either in terms of American law or simple human decency.

And if this weren’t enough, some interrogators feel the manual’s language gives them a loophole that allows them to give a detainee four hours of sleep and then conduct a 20-hour interrogation, after which they can “reset” the clock and begin another 20-hour interrogation followed by four hours of sleep. This is inconsistent with the spirit of the reforms, which was to prevent “monstering” — extended interrogation sessions lasting more than 20 hours. American interrogators are more than capable of doing their jobs without the loopholes.

The Field Manual, to its credit, calls for “all captured and detained personnel, regardless of status” to be “treated humanely.” But when it comes to the specifics the manual contradicts itself, allowing actions that no right-thinking person could consider humane.

The greatest shame of the last year, perhaps, is that the argument over interrogations has shifted from debating what is legal to considering what is just “better than before.” The best way to change things is to update the field manual again to bring our treatment of detainees up to the minimum standard of humane treatment.

The next version of the manual should prohibit solitary confinement for more than, say, two weeks, all stress positions and forms of environmental manipulation, imprisonment in tight spaces and sleep deprivation. Unless we rewrite the book, we will only continue to give Al Qaeda a recruiting tool, to earn the contempt of our allies and to debase our most cherished ideals.

Fed makes ‘a killing’ on AIG contracts

2010-01-21T13:10:00.001-08:00

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a70659d4-0543-11df-a85e-00144feabdc0.html

Fed makes ‘a killing’ on AIG contracts
By Henny Sender in New York
Published: January 20 2010 00:00

The Federal Reserve is sitting on billions of dollars in paper profits from its controversial effort to unwind credit insurance contracts that AIG provided to banks such as Goldman Sachs, people familiar with the matter said.

The Fed rescue has generated criticism because the banks received 100 cents on the dollar for credit insurance they bought from AIG on collateralised debt obligations – financial instruments that promise the buyer cash flows from pools of bonds or loans. This had led to claims that AIG’s rescue was a “backdoor bail-out” of big banks.

However, the central bank is in a position to reap profits from this part of the rescue, which involved the purchase of the underlying CDOs by a New York Fed-financed vehicle, called Maiden Lane III, so that the insurance contracts written on them could be terminated.

At the time of their purchase, the CDOs had a face value of $62.1bn and a market value of $29.6bn. Now, the estimated market value of the CDOs is at least $45bn (£27.5bn), according to several people with direct knowledge of the portfolio.

“With the rally in the credit markets and tightening spreads, the Fed has made a killing – on paper,” said one person familiar with the portfolio.

The people familiar with the portfolio said that it would be difficult to sell all the CDOs because they are generally illiquid. A rapid sale of CDOs could also depress their prices.

At the time of the Fed intervention, the value of the CDOs insured by AIG was falling dramatically and AIG was facing a credit downgrade. AIG was being forced to post more collateral with the banks to which it sold credit insurance and the Fed feared that these demands would wipe out the insurer.

Following the rescue, the value of the CDOs in Maiden Lane III continued to fall, sinking to $20.7bn by March 31 2009. The portfolio’s value rose to $22.4bn by the end of September, the last date for which official statistics are available.

Maiden Lane III was funded with a $24.3bn loan from the New York Fed and $5bn in equity from AIG. Because the CDOs have continued to throw off cash, the balance on the Fed loan is now about $17bn, people familiar with the matter said.

If the CDOs in Maiden Lane III were sold, the proceeds would pay off the Fed loan first, followed by the AIG investment. The Fed would receive 67 per cent of any additional profits, and AIG 33 per cent.

The improvement in the Maiden Lane III portfolio comes as Fed officials face continuing controversy over the circumstances of the bail-out.

US Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who was New York Fed president at the time of the AIG rescue, is set to testify at a hearing on the matter by The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on January 27.

AIG declined to comment.

The Weimar Democrats

2010-01-21T12:29:00.000-08:00

Both parties lay in the filthy beds of the elites. All are corrupt! There needs to be campaign finance reform plus we need more new political parties that will represent the people instead of corporations!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Weimar-Democrats-by-Harvey-Wasserman-100120-819.html

January 20, 2010
The Weimar Democrats
By Harvey Wasserman

Massachusetts again reminds us why the Democrats are such losers.

They are terminal schizophrenics, driven mad by the corporate dominance of American politics. They cannot govern and make significant change at the same time because the system is geared to make doing so impossible.

Somehow, this core problem must be fixed, or we are lost as a nation, and probably as a species.

The currently prescribed role of the Dems is to be the "Party of the People." But they can't attain or retain office without cash flow from the very corporations that are the people's worst enemy.

They are thus politically bipolar. They can never offer meaningful cures for any of America's real problems because they must always return to the trough of the corporations that cause the bulk of them.

Because the modern global corporation has human rights (as defined by the 14th Amendment) but no human responsibilities, it is history's most powerful institution. It is above the law, shielded from debt, not accountable for damage to the public, to the people who work for them, or to the planet.

The Democratic Party is itself a corporation. Its principle business is to retain political office and to DEFER public attacks on the corporations that provide much of its cash flow.

The Democratic shtick is to market the PROMISE of change while making sure it doesn't happen.

Barack Obama took this to a high art while selling himself for the presidential nomination. Once he secured it, he abandoned any commitment to real change and moved to the corporate right.

His defining step was escalating the war in Afghanistan. More than half the federal budget goes to the military. All GOP/Tea Bagger talk of cutting deficits is nonsense. The right always wants more cash flow to their favorite corporations, the ones tied to war.

Thus when General-DuJour Stanley McChrystal used the corporate media to read the riot act about not impeding martial money, Obama snapped to attention and re-invaded Vietnam.

Not even a carefully -- desperately! -- planted Nobel Prize could deter his headlong leap into the Afghan abyss.

Not since Franklin Roosevelt has the public handed a greater mandate -- DEMAND -- for systemic change than for Barack Obama. Eight years of George W. Bush was the ultimate invitation.

But Obama has rejected the opportunities as fast as they've come. The litany from the Great Banker Bailout to the No Single Payer Non-Debate is too painful to repeat.

With such servility comes astonishing incompetence. Anyone from Massachusetts (I am a Boston-born native of Red Sox Nation) knows that the Fenway-averse Martha Coakley lost Ted Kennedy's seat the moment she mis-identified Bosox pitcher Curt Schilling as a "Yankees Fan." Either Karl Rove created her for laughs or some ranking Democrat had big money on her losing that seat.

Now the punditocracy will ceaselessly shry about Obama's need to "move to the middle." Of course, not a single American who opposed Obama in 2008 will be persuaded to vote for him in 2012 because he has moved to the right.

"Dead Center" defines this administration.

Like Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson before him, Barack Obama has been astonishingly effective in one thing -- alienating those who most avidly supported him. His number one enemy has been the base that put him in the White House.

Some liberals point confidently to disarray among the Republicans as a saving grace. This desperate delusion requires we forget Germany's Weimar regime, which made the same fatal mistake in the lead-up to World War II. Never underestimate the "outsiders" in a nation where millions are desperate.

There are no easy answers for this. In a corporate age, even the questions are hard to discern amidst the corporate fog of war and failure, So far, only dogged, unrelenting issue-by-issue campaigning has been proven effective.

Having taken office on the sales pitch of "Hope," the Democrats can be counted on only for timidity and incompetence.

The grassroots can do better. As always, that's where our true hope resides.

We're Executing Gitmo Prisoners and Calling It Suicide

2010-01-21T11:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/

Astonishing Report: We're Executing Gitmo Prisoners and Calling It Suicide
By Andy Worthington, Andy Worthington's Blog
January 21, 2010

It’s hard to know where to begin with this profoundly important story by Scott Horton, for next month's Harper’s Magazine (available on the web here), but let's try this: The three "suicides" at Guantánamo in June 2006 were not suicides at all. The men in question were killed during interrogations in a secretive block in Guantánamo, conducted by an unknown agency, and the murders were then disguised to look like suicides. Everyone at Guantánamo knew about it. Everyone covered it up. Everyone is still covering it up.

Establishing a case for murder -- and the disclosure of a secret prison at Guantánamo

The key to the discovery of the murder of the three men -- 37-year old Salah Ahmed al-Salami, a Yemeni, 30-year old Mani Shaman al-Utaybi, a Saudi, and 22-year old Yasser Talal al-Zahrani (photo, left), a Saudi who was just 17 when he was captured -- is Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, a former Marine who reenlisted in the Army National Guard after the 9/11 attacks, and was deployed to Guantánamo in March 2006, with his friend, Specialist Tony Davila. On arrival, Davila was briefed about the existence of "an unnamed and officially unacknowledged compound," outside the perimeter fence of the main prison, and explained that one theory about it was that "it was being used by some of the non-uniformed government personnel who frequently showed up in the camps and were widely thought to be CIA agents."

Hickman and Davila became fascinated by the compound -- known to the soldiers as "Camp No" (as in, "No, it doesn't exist") -- and Hickman was on duty in a tower on the prison's perimeter on the night the three men died, when he noticed that "a white van, dubbed the 'paddy wagon,' that Navy guards used to transport heavily manacled prisoners, one at a time, into and out of Camp Delta, [which] had no rear windows and contained a dog cage large enough to hold a single prisoner,” had called three times at Camp 1, where the men were held, and had then taken them out to "Camp No." All three were in “Camp No” by 8 pm.

At 11.30, the van returned, apparently dropping something off at the clinic, and within half an hour the whole prison "lit up." As Horton explains:

Hickman headed to the clinic, which appeared to be the center of activity, to learn the reason for the commotion. He asked a distraught medical corpsman what had happened. She said three dead prisoners had been delivered to the clinic. Hickman recalled her saying that they had died because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised. Davila told me he spoke to Navy guards who said the men had died as the result of having rags stuffed down their throats.

As Horton also explains:

The presence of a black site at Guantánamo has long been a subject of speculation among lawyers and human-rights activists, and the experience of Sergeant Hickman and other Guantánamo guards compels us to ask whether the three prisoners who died on June 9 were being interrogated by the CIA, and whether their deaths resulted from the grueling techniques the Justice Department had approved for the agency’s use -- or from other tortures lacking that sanction.

Complicating these questions is the fact that Camp No might have been controlled by another authority, the Joint Special Operations Command, which Bush's defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had hoped to transform into a Pentagon version of the CIA. Under Rumsfeld's direction, JSOC began to take on many tasks traditionally handled by the CIA, including the housing and interrogation of prisoners at black sites around the world.

The construction of the "suicide" narrative, and the widespread cover-up

This is disturbing enough, of course, and should lead to robust calls for an independent inquiry, but the problem may be that almost every branch of the government appears to be implicated in the cover-up that followed the deaths.

As Horton describes it, an official "suicide" narrative was soon established, and widely accepted by the media, if not by former prisoners and the dead men’s families. With extraordinary cynicism, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the commander at Guantánamo, not only declared the deaths "suicides," but added, "I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." What was not mentioned were the rags stuffed into the prisoners’ mouths, even though this knowledge was widespread throughout the prison. Horton adds that when Col. Mike Bumgarner, the warden at Guantánamo, held a meeting the following morning, "the news had circulated through Camp America that three prisoners had committed suicide by swallowing rags."

He also states:

According to independent interviews with soldiers who witnessed the speech, Bumgarner told his audience that "you all know" three prisoners in the Alpha Block at Camp 1 committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death … But then Bumgarner told those assembled that the media would report something different. It would report that the three prisoners had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. It was important, he said, that servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and email communications were being monitored.

Despite being "on-message," Bumgarner let slip to two visiting reporters from a US provincial newspaper -- the only ones who were not immediately hustled off the base -- that each of the men who had died "had a ball of cloth in their mouth either for choking or muffling their voices." As punishment for straying off the script, Bumgarner was soon suspended, and had his office searched by the FBI.

Just as cynical were the authorities' attempts to silence the prisoners and their attorneys. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which was assigned to investigate the deaths, confiscated every single piece of paper in the possession of the prisoners, and, a few weeks later, "sought an after-the-fact justification." As Horton explains:

The Justice Department -- bolstered by sworn statements from Admiral Harris and from Carol Kisthardt, the special agent in charge of the NCIS investigation -- claimed in court that the seizure was appropriate because there had been a conspiracy among the prisoners to commit suicide. [The] Justice [Department] further claimed that investigators had found suicide notes and argued that the attorney-client materials were being used to pass communications among the prisoners.

It is now apparent that the authorities were desperate to ensure that no word of the events of June 9 was disclosed from prisoners to their attorneys. As David Remes, the attorney for 16 Yemenis, explained, the effect of the seizure "sent an unmistakable message to the prisoners that they could not expect their communications with their lawyers to remain confidential," but as part of its mission to blame attorneys for the deaths, the authorities went so far as to claim that Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, had persuaded another prisoner, the British resident Shaker Aamer, to call for the deaths from his cell. Speaking to the BBC's Newsnight in October 2006, Zachary Katznelson, an attorney at Reprieve, explained that he was told by one of his clients in Guantánamo in August 2006 that interrogators were trying to blame Stafford Smith, saying that "it was Clive's idea, Clive's brainchild, that people had to commit suicide to bring attention to the base and to then force the government to close it."

As Horton reveals, far from being the mastermind of a triple suicide, Shaker Aamer was himself beaten severely on the night of the deaths. As I have explained in previous articles, Aamer, an eloquent, charismatic man, who stood up relentlessly for the prisoners' rights, was regarded as a leader within Guantánamo by both the prisoners and the prison authorities. Held in solitary confinement after the suppression of a short-lived Prisoners' Council, convened in the summer of 2005, for which he was the Secretary, he was, nevertheless beaten severely for two and a half hours on the evening of June 9, around the same time that the three other men were in "Camp No."

As Horton also notes:

The United Kingdom has pressed aggressively for the return of British subjects and persons of interest. Every individual requested by the British has been turned over, with one exception: Shaker Aamer. In denying this request, US authorities have cited unelaborated "security" concerns. There is no suggestion that the Americans intend to charge him before a military commission, or in a federal criminal court, and, indeed, they have no meaningful evidence linking him to any crime. American authorities may be concerned that Aamer, if released, could provide evidence against them in criminal investigations. This evidence would include what he experienced on June 9, 2006 …

In the years following the deaths in June 2006, every official response has been a whitewash. The NCIS reluctantly produced a report in August 2008, accompanied by a brief and unenlightening statement, which I discussed here, and in December 2009 the Seton Hall Law School produced a devastating analysis of the flawed report, which, as Scott Horton explains, "made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners' deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report -- a reconstruction of the events -- was simply unbelievable."

As for the accounts of Sgt. Hickman and three other men (including Specialist Davila), Horton explains that they offered their accounts willingly and were not approached to do so. The trigger was Hickman, whose tour of duty ended in March 2007. As Horton describes it, however, "he could not forget what he had seen at Guantánamo. When Barack Obama became president, Hickman decided to act. 'I thought that with a new administration and new ideas I could actually come forward,' he said. 'It was haunting me.'"

The Cover-Up Continues

Hickman approached Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall, and his son Josh (also a lawyer), and told his story, followed by the other three men. However, although the Denbeauxs approached the Justice Department, and had a meeting in February last year with Rita Glavin, the acting head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, John Morton, soon to be an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, and Steven Fagell, counselor to the head of the Criminal Division, little came of it. After hearing the whole sordid story, the officials thanked the Denbeauxs for "not speaking to reporters first and for 'doing it the right way,'" and, two days later, Mark Denbeaux was called by Teresa McHenry, the head of the Criminal Division's Domestic Security Section, who told him that she was starting an investigation and wanted to meet directly with Hickman.

Hickman met McHenry, and gave her the names and contact details of corroborating witnesses, but then the trail went cold. In April, "an FBI agent called to say she did not have the list of contacts" and "asked if this document could be provided again," and soon after, Steven Fagell and two FBI agents interviewed Davila, who had left the Army, and asked him if he would travel to Guantánamo to identify the locations of various sites. "It seemed like they were interested,” Davila told Horton. "Then I never heard from them again."

In late October, as Mark Denbeaux was preparing to unveil the Seton Hall report, there was brief communication with McHenry again, but on November 2, she called to say that the investigation was being closed:

"It was a strange conversation," Denbeaux recalled. McHenry explained that “the gist of Sergeant Hickman’s information could not be confirmed.” But when Denbeaux asked what that "gist" actually was, McHenry declined to say. She just reiterated that Hickman’s conclusions "appeared" to be unsupported. Denbeaux asked what conclusions exactly were unsupported. McHenry refused to say.

Horton notes correctly that "the Justice Department has plenty of its own secrets to protect," because it "would seem to have been involved in the cover-up from the first days, when FBI agents stormed Colonel Bumgarner’s quarters," which was "unusual." He also explains that, when the Justice Department sought court approval for the NCIS seizure of all the prisoners' letters:

US District Court Judge James Robertson gave the Justice Department a sympathetic hearing, and he ruled in its favor, but he also noted a curious aspect of the government's presentation: its "citations supporting the fact of the suicides" were all drawn from media accounts. Why had the Justice Department lawyers who argued the case gone to such lengths to avoid making any statement under oath about the suicides? Did they do so in order to deceive the court? If so, they could face disciplinary proceedings or disbarment.

In addition, Horton notes the role played by lawyers in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, who, of course, "had been deeply involved in the process of approving and setting the conditions for the use of torture techniques, issuing a long series of memoranda [widely known as the 'torture memos'] that CIA agents and others could use to defend themselves against any subsequent criminal prosecution.” Pointing a finger at Teresa McHenry, he explains that, "As a former war-crimes prosecutor, McHenry knows full well that government officials who attempt to cover up crimes perpetrated against prisoners in wartime face prosecution under the doctrine of command responsibility," and quotes Rear Admiral John Hutson, the former judge advocate general of the Navy, who told him:

Filing false reports and making false statements is bad enough, but if a homicide occurs and officials up the chain of command attempt to cover it up, they face serious criminal liability. They may even be viewed as accessories after the fact in the original crime.

In conclusion, Horton suggests that everyone charged with accounting for what happened on June 9, 2006 -- the prison command, the civilian and military investigative agencies, the Justice Department, and Attorney General Eric Holder -- "face a choice between the rule of law and the expedience of political silence," and, to date, have chosen the latter.

In passing, he mentions that the death of another prisoner in June last year -- a 31-year old Yemeni named Muhammad Salih -- also raises disturbing questions (as was reported by former prisoner Binyam Mohamed in an op-ed for the Miami Herald), and to this he could have added that the death of another Saudi, Abdul Rahman al-Amri, on May 30, 2007, also remains suspicious.

I urge you to read the whole report, as this précis has been little more than a way for me to try and grasp the main points presented in the article, which contains much more detailed and disturbing information, including shocking information about the autopsy (and information about the torture to which the men were clearly subjected), a touching meeting with Yasser al-Zahrani's father, General Talal al-Zahrani, and a detailed reiteration of some other important facts -- that none of the three men killed in June 2006 had any connection to terrorism, and that two had been cleared for release, but had not been told.

Despite studying Guantánamo on a full-time basis for nearly four years, this is one of the most chilling accounts of the prison that I have ever read, and one which should not only lead to an independent inquiry, but also to calls to press ahead with the closure of Guantánamo -- and the repatriation of as many prisoners as possible -- without further delay.

Scott Horton doesn't ask another pertinent question -- whether it is feasible that the three men died as a result of "enhanced interrogations" that went too far, or whether they were deliberately murdered. The panic that greeted the arrival of the corpses at the clinic on that dreadful day suggests the former, but on reflection it seems unlikely that three accidental deaths could occur in such a short space of time. As Guantánamo takes on a new name -- the Death Camp -- these doubts need to be addressed one way or another. Neither murder nor manslaughter is acceptable, of course, but neither is it acceptable for this disgraceful cover-up to continue.

As Yasser al-Zahrani’s father explained to Horton:

The truth is what matters. They practiced every form of torture on my son and on many others as well. What was the result? What facts did they find? They found nothing. They learned nothing. They accomplished nothing.

Andy Worthington is a writer and historian, and author of The Guantánamo Files.

Whistleblower reveals how insurers can game healthcare bill

2010-01-21T11:49:00.000-08:00

http://rawstory.com/2010/01/whisteblower-reveals-health-insurers-game-insurance-bill/

By Brad Jacobson
January 20th, 2010

Though Senate bill cuts 'pre-existing conditions,' it still allows insurance companies to create 'pre-existing' categories to raise rates

The Democrats' healthcare overhaul, billed as a monumental game-changer for Americans' health insurance coverage, provides numerous loopholes for health insurance companies which will allow them to raise rates to protect profit margins, a health insurance whistleblower says.

Wendell Potter, a twenty-year veteran of the insurance industry and former vice president of communications for Cigna, warns that current healthcare legislation does nothing to prevent the insurance industry from continuing its ongoing practice of increasingly shifting healthcare costs to consumers.

A form of bait-and-switch, such practices often set up individuals, families and small businesses for inadequate or unaffordable access and a continued looming threat of financial ruin. The overlooked element, Potter says, is that insurance companies will be able to claim they are reducing premiums by forcing more Americans to pay higher deductibles and offering less coverage.

“We talk a lot about affordability, and we talk about affordability of insurance premiums,” Potter told Raw Story in a nearly hour-long interview. “But when you talk about affordability, you need to talk about affordability of premiums plus out-of-pocket expenses.”

He said that there’s been a lot of discussion on how the Congressional Budget Office scored this legislation and what it says this legislation will cost the country in the long run, but little to no focus on how the legislation will directly impact individual Americans.

Potter pointed out, for example, that many plans -- even after consumers received proposed government subsidies to help pay for them -- would come with high deductibles that prohibit people from using their insurance or cause them the kind of financial hardships that healthcare reform was purported to prevent.

“What worries me,” he said, “is people who are forced to buy coverage and all they can afford to buy is a high deductible. And if they get really sick then they have to pay so much out of their own pockets that they’re going to be filing for bankruptcy and losing their homes.”

In the Senate bill, in particular, Potter noted, some people will be buying insurance that will only cover roughly 60 percent of their medical costs if they get sick.

“There are a lot of people who don’t have insurance now because they can’t afford premiums,” he said. “They certainly couldn’t afford premiums plus the out-of-pocket expenses in today’s market.”

Potter asserted that the current legislation will, in large part, simply move millions of people from being uninsured to underinsured, or from insured to underinsured. Citing a 2007 study by the Commonwealth Fund, he said there are already over 25 million Americans who fall into the category of the underinsured.

Potter also noted the deleterious effect of cost shifting on small businesses. Many small business owners will earn just enough to be denied subsidies.

“After a certain income level, there are no subsidies,” Potter explained. “But you still have to buy coverage. And I’m concerned that after you get above the median level of income, you’ll find that a lot of people who don’t get subsidies will probably be forced to buy coverage. But the only coverage they’ll be able to buy will make them underinsured.”

There’s also no prohibition in the legislation against insurance companies moving more and more people into high-deductible plans. Such plans, Potter argued, will help insurers' bottom lines because fewer policyholders will actually avail themselves of their insurance.

“When you have a benefit plan that requires people to pay a lot out of their own pocket, a lot of these people will never get to the point of using their insurance because they won’t go to the doctor or pick up their medicines to satisfy the deductible,” Potter told Raw Story.

“I see nothing in this legislation that essentially would protect people from losing their homes or filing for bankruptcy,” he added.

How insurance companies can still game the system

While prohibitions on such practices as denying healthcare to people with pre-existing conditions remain in the legislation, Potter noted that the Senate bill, in particular, provides the insurance companies with “all the flexibility they need” to more than make up for any profits lost due to new reform measures and to prevent people from accessing coverage.

He pointed out, for example, that “health factors” such as chronic diseases and age would continue to play into how much individuals can be charged in premiums and how many of them may be forced into high deductible plans.

“What they will be doing, what they can in the Senate bill, is charge people significantly more if they have certain health factors,” Potter said. “And it would be pretty much up to the industry to decide what those health factors are. You could have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes. You could be overweight, have a history of tobacco use. There definitely would be a wide range of things that the insurance industry would be able to look at and determine whether or not to charge you more.”

He also noted that the Senate bill would allow insurance companies to charge people who are older up to three times as much as those who are younger and, in the House bill, two times more than a younger person.

“And of course when people get older they develop more health factors,” Potter said. “So that is another way to get around the loss of revenue. Plus, of course, they would be able to get new revenue coming in from people who are younger and don’t have health factors that they charge more for.”

Moreover, he said, “They still would be getting a new revenue stream from people who are younger. So they’ll be getting significantly more in revenue. And those people are quite profitable too because they don’t file many claims.”

To justify this practice, Potter explained, insurers would claim that they’re providing lowered or discounted premiums to healthier people. But, in reality, premiums across the board are set so high that healthier people wouldn’t actually be receiving anything that could be considered a discount.

“Healthier people would be paying pretty much a standard rate at the end of the day,” said Potter, while the chronically ill and the aged would be paying exceptionally more on top of the already pricey standard rate.

Medical-loss ratio

The former insurance executive also says another element of the healthcare overhaul is receiving too little attention: the medical-loss ratio, which determines what percentage of health insurance premiums are spent on actual medical costs. The difference of just a few percentage points can mean billions of dollars to the insurance industry.

“We’re talking about big-time money here,” said Potter. “The insurance industry doesn’t want to have any restrictions on the medical-loss ratio. So they’ll be doing all they can to keep it from being enacted if possible.”

Some members of Congress, led by Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), proposed an amendment to require that 90 percent of consumer premiums go to medical costs, but Potter doesn’t think that’s likely to happen and said insurers will fight tooth-and-nail to set any minimum as low as possible. The Congressional Budget Office said that the 90 percent figure was too high and would basically drive insurers out of business, recommending 80-85 percent instead. Democrats are expected to embrace the lower figures in their final bill.

Potter cautioned that legislators need to keep an eye on how insurance companies define medical and administrative expenses. And he said that legislation should require companies to explain what they’re spending money on and what percentage in dollar amounts they’re spending.

“You can set the medical-loss ratio, but you need to make sure that it’s clearly understood what the components of the administrative expenses are,” Potter explained. “Because they can shift stuff around from one bucket to another and claim that what they’re actually spending is beneficial to the patient when it may not be.”

For example, he said they can easily meet an 85% standard if the definition enables them to categorize such items as disease management programs as paying for medical care. Currently, money spent on disease management programs is counted toward administrative costs.

Potter also noted that insurance companies have kept the issue of the medical-loss ratio -- something little understood by the American public -- “pretty much just a conversation between them, their shareholders and the analysts who cover them. They don’t talk about it anywhere else.”

Potter raised this complex but critical issue during his Senate testimony in June.

“Every decimal point makes a big difference,” he added. “We’re talking in the billions.”

The Israeli Rape of Palestine

2010-01-21T11:21:00.000-08:00

http://www.paltelegraph.com/columnists/peter-eyre/3686-the-israeli-rape-of-palestine

The Israeli Rape of Palestine
TUESDAY, 19 JANUARY 2010 09:17 ADDED BY PT EDITOR MAYSAA JAROUR

US, January 19, 2010 (Pal Telegraph) - I had the pleasure of speaking at the recent Palestine memorial week in London. It was on the first anniversary of that evil attack on Gaza during "Operation Cast Lead" in 2008/9. What I found incredible after my presentation was the total lack of knowledge and understanding of some of the main issues concerning Gaza and West Bank.

After my presentation I was inundated with media and members of the public asking questions about the facts that I had presented. My power point presentation appeared to come across in a type of "Shock and Awe" manner which took the audience completely by surprise, whilst at the same time almost left me totally unprepared for such a reaction.

No one really understand that all the assigned international borders in the Gaza offshore area are totally illegal and even those that were assigned under the Oslo Accord have been totally ignored by the Israeli Government. I was even more shocked to see that the people present had no idea of the wealth that is locked up in the Gaza Marine Area and how this became a tool in becoming the reason why Israel attacked Gaza on the 27th of December 2008. To me this was the main reason for the conflict as it was for Iraq and Afghanistan.

I went on to talk about the decimation of the Gaza fishing industry that was once a major source of income and nutrition for the Palestinians. Now we see that the Israeli Navy has not only closed down this valuable industry but has also caused the entire fish stock to be depleted in the immediate vicinity of the coastal strip.

We then covered the topic of the oil and gas reserves in the offshore area and how Israel has successfully manipulated the marine borders to its own advantage. I explained how these impoverished enclaves of Gaza and West Bank are left to survive on international handouts and aid when they have billions of dollars tied up in their own offshore territory. It proved to me that the US, UK and EU governments are hiding this fact and many other serious issues from the main stream public with the added support of all the media controlled outlets.

As my presentation progressed we came to the subject of weapons used by the Israeli IDF and the fact that almost all of them were totally illegal in their application on such a densely populated strip. Even today I see comments regarding the use of White Phosphorus (WP) as being against the Geneva Convention but nothing was said about the us of other weapons such as Flachette and DIME weapons that are also totally illegal. Last but not least was the mother of all crimes when the IDF used weapons containing uranium components on the residents of Gaza and continue to do so. These weapons were imported from the US under a Presidential approved agreement. I may also add at this point that Israel's own IMI also manufacture such weapons

It became so clear to me at this meeting that the public only know what they are told via the various media outlets and such topics are "Taboo" It was also interesting that no media attended from the west and all those that did attend were from such places as China, Iran, Turkey and other Middle East outlets......this alone must put an emphasis on the fact that the media is totally controlled. Maybe we should look at the owners of such media outlets and see a distinct connection between the international banking community, pro US/pro Israeli lobby groups and the notorious Christian and Jewish Zionist organizations who appear to control all aspects of life, especially the political and financial sectors.

When my topic focused on the use of weapons containing uranium components you could feel the change in the atmosphere. Many people were deeply shocked and could not believe that such weapons could be used. At this point I turned towards a group of Jewish supporters, one being a Rabbi and said to them that your country has not only used such weapons but that you have also nuked yourselves in doing so. I explained the consequences of a picture showing four bombs igniting in the strip. I further explained that the photograph was taken on the Israeli border and one can clearly see that the contamination from these weapons passed over the Israeli border with seconds of going off, owing to the strong sea breeze that was blowing at the time.

I listened to a lady in the audience who asked if we were aware of the fact that many political figures in senior position were Jewish and could this create a problem. Jeremy Corbyn an MP with the current Labour Party quickly dispelled the topic and suggested we did not go down this road. This was also supported by a Palestinian member of the panel who supported Corbyn's views.......I however took the microphone and advised the audience that the lady did have a valid point. I said "Maybe we are all not aware that Governments and Political figures are given huge sums of money in their respective election campaigns by the pro Israeli lobbyists" "The Conservative Friends of Israel, The Labour Friends of Israel and the Lib Dems etc all receive much money in return for favours or policies that support Israel"

Another member of the audience asked a question about the ongoing Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank but didn't really get a satisfactory response. Again I asked for the microphone and drew attention to the fact that everyone is talking about the settlements going in but no one is aware that over two thirds of West Bank is totally under the control of the Israeli Government and remains a no go zone for Palestinians. It was very clear that people really do need to read more about the real issues in Palestine by reading such papers as the Palestine Telegraph rather than the lack of such information from the mainstream media.

At this point I would like to refer to the maps that we all know so very well....the ones that show how Palestine has been reduced to the two small enclaves of today but did anyone see this map which shows a settlement called Petah Tikva that was chosen by its founders in 1878 as the first Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Could anyone have imagined that this tiny spec on the map would become the start of the Zionist's cancerous growth it has become today? As we have seen in more recent history the carefully orchestrated financial collapse of the world banking system and the emerging new world order has a distinct connection with this first Zionist settlement. Its ties lead to one extremely rich family name...that of the Rothschild's who funded the establishment of the Zionists first colony. It is hard to imagine that within a period of less than 5 years it would receive over 25,000 illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe and then grew at an alarming rate. The entire exercise had only one evil intention to acquire Palestinian land and turn it into Jewish land.

Little did the world know that one of Europe's richest Jewish families had started the demise of Palestine so many years ago which still continues to this day. This tiny settlement continued to grow in size and has became part of the greater Tel Aviv of today.

The legacy of this historical family who promoted the rape and pillage of land has now extended throughout the ancient land of Palestine. The Israel of today continues to take what it wants, whenever it wants. It continues to steal Palestinian land and now is trying to steal its natural resources of gas in the waters off Gaza while the World, the United Nations and the Arab League looks on!

Peter Eyre - Middle East Consultant - 18/1/2010

U.S. spending in Afghanistan plagued by poor U.S. oversight

2010-01-18T12:56:00.001-08:00

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/82448.html

Posted on Fri, Jan. 15, 2010
U.S. spending in Afghanistan plagued by poor U.S. oversight
Marisa Taylor | McClatchy Newspapers
January 15, 2010 01:08:41 PM

WASHINGTON — The U.S. has spent more than $732 million to improve Afghanistan's electrical grid since 2002, but delays and rising costs have plagued many of the projects in part because of poor oversight by the American government, a watchdog agency reports.

Of six projects under way in 2009, only one has been completed on time.

In the report released Friday, auditors with the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction blamed poor communication between U.S. officials and the two companies that are working on the majority of the projects.

While the U.S. Agency for International Development has relied on the companies, Louis Berger and Black & Veatch, for updates on projects, "that reporting has not always been timely or sufficient," the auditors said.

The companies also had trouble meeting deadlines for projects because of dangerous conditions.

In addition, Afghanistan began rebuilding its electrical grid without a concrete plan for how to approach such a complex effort, the auditors said.

In 2006, the USAID awarded the two U.S. companies a five-year, $1.4 billion joint contract to build many of the roads and energy projects that now are under way in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's electrical capacity has increased in the last eight years from 430 megawatts to more than 1,028 megawatts, a significant achievement in a country in which only about 6 percent of rural citizens have electricity, the auditors said.

However, it's unclear whether Afghanistan will be able to operate the system without foreign aid, they said.

One major hurdle is collecting enough money to keep the grid running, the report said. The reason: systemic corruption.

Afghans are more likely to try to bribe officials or rely on personal favors to connect to the system because of the country's byzantine bureaucracy. To get electricity legitimately, Afghans have to obtain as many as 25 signatures.

Friday's report came after another watchdog, the inspector general for the USAID, last fall found cost overruns and delays in two power plant projects overseen by Louis Berger and Black & Veatch.

In one case, a $300 million Kabul generating plant might not be able to operate to capacity because the Afghanistan government can't afford the diesel fuel to power it, which auditors said indicated poor planning by the U.S. government.

Auditors also blame lackluster oversight for about $40 million in cost overruns on the Kabul project. The U.S. government still can't calculate how much was lost on other projects because of inefficiency and waste, the officials said.

The audits confirm a McClatchy report in October that delays and cost overruns had plagued projects by Louis Berger and Black & Veatch.

The companies and the USAID say they've since taken steps to improve their oversight.

Afghanistan Reconstruction Inspector General Arnold Fields told McClatchy that his agency should have been created before 2008 so that waste and fraud could have been better detected.

The U.S. government "should have been more aggressive years ago," he said. "We're behind in terms of providing the oversight."

His agency currently has 41 ongoing investigations.

TSA lies exposed: Full-body scanner machines do save and transmit images, secret documents reveal

2010-01-18T11:50:00.000-08:00

http://www.NaturalNews.com/z027914_TSA_full-body_scanners.html

January 11 2010
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) The TSA has been lying to the American people about full-body scanners. The agency has insisted that these "digital strip search" machines are incapable of saving, storing or transmitting the images they take. This, we are told, makes it okay for people to be digitally strip-searched.

But secret documents uncovered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (www.EPIC.org) have revealed that these machines do indeed posses precisely such capabilities. According to TSA specification requirement documents that have been uncovered by the EPIC, all full-body scanners purchased by the TSA must have the ability to both save and transmit the scanned images of air passengers.

The documents were obtained by EPIC through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. They have also been shared with CNN, which has viewed the documents and published a story about what they reveal.

These documents contradict the claims of the TSA, which include the statement that "the system has no way to save, transmit or print the image."

TSA misleads the public
The TSA's own "imaging technology" page (http://www.tsa.gov/approach/tech/im...) claims, "This state-of-the-art technology cannot store, print, transmit or save the image. In fact, all machines are delivered to airports with these functions disabled."

That in itself is an interesting statement because by stating those functions are "disabled," it also admits that the machines inherently have these functions. And just because the machines are delivered with the functions disabled doesn't mean those functions can't be re-enabled at the flick of a switch.

In other words, these machines are designed and constructed with the ability to save, store and transmit the images.

"I don't think the TSA has been forthcoming with the American public about the true capability of these devices," said the Executive Director of EPIC, Marc Rotenberg in a CNN interview. "They've done a bunch of very slick promotions where they show people -- including journalists -- going through the devices. And then they reassure people, based on the images that have been produced, that there's not any privacy concerns. But if you look at the actual technical specifications and you read the vendor contracts, you come to understand that these machines are capable of doing far more than the TSA has let on." (http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/...)

In other words, the TSA is telling the public and the press one thing, but the machines they're buying are capable of something far more insidious, these documents reveal. Is the TSA intentionally lying to the public in order to mislead people over the real capabilities of these machines?

If these full-body scanners can save, store and transmit images, then it's only a matter of time before some rogue TSA employee finds a way to copy off the images or display them on the screen so that they can take snapshots with their own portable cameras.

The TSA says it's protecting your privacy. But its own scanner specification documents tell a different story: The TSA won't even buy these machines unless they can save, store and transmit revealing images of air passengers.

Pay at top Wall Street firms estimated at $145 billion in 2009

2010-01-17T03:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/bank-j16.shtml

Andre Damon
World Socialist Web Site
Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:35 EST

The Wall Street Journal published an estimate Thursday that total pay at the largest Wall Street firms reached $145 billion last year. The Journal's figure, based on preliminary figures, is more than any other year in history.

JP Morgan strengthened this prognosis Friday by announcing that it paid its employees $9.3 billion in 2009, 18 percent more than in 2008. The figure sets a new record for the bank, up from $7.9 billion in 2007 and $8.1 billion in 2006.

The high payouts came with an upsurge in profitability. JP Morgan said its fourth-quarter profits reached $3.3 billion, more than quadrupling over the same period a year ago, when the bank earned $702 million. Year-on-year profits nearly doubled, hitting $11.7 billion for 2009, up from $5.6 billion in 2008.

The Wall Street Journal's estimate of $145 billion in total compensation at the largest 38 financial companies is 18 percent higher than the 2008 figure of $123.4 billion, and six percent higher than the $137 billion paid out in 2007.

The estimate is larger than the combined yearly output of the world's 58 poorest countries. It is roughly equivalent to the economy of Egypt and Singapore. It is about 20 times the economic output of Haiti, where a massive earthquake has killed tens of thousands of people living in desperate poverty.

On average, employees at the major finance firms will each earn $149,192, up about $3,000 from 2007. The average, however, obscures the immense disparity between the tens of millions that will be allocated to top traders and executives and many janitors, receptionists, and technicians who face the same economic pressures as other workers.

The Wall Street Journal study expects the institutions to report $450 billion in revenues, up by a quarter from 2007. Pay is expected to amount to 32 percent of revenue, down from 40 percent last year.

In a move to assuage criticism of their compensation practices, the banks have said that they will pay a larger portion of their compensation in stock, as opposed to cash. But this does not alter the fact that they are paying more money than ever.

The banks responded to the study with their characteristic contempt for mounting popular anger. Most of the large banks that the Wall Street Journal contacted did not respond, but a spokesperson for Bank of America said that the study "distorts reality and is a disservice to our associates" because it does not use final data.

The rise in revenue, profits, and compensation was partly the result of the consolidation of the banking system. As numerous firms failed last year, they were bought up by their larger rivals. This gave the remaining companies more leverage to raise prices, extract higher fees, and consequently pay larger bonuses.

This massive payout is the direct product of the policy of the Obama administration, which has rejected any measures to curb executive pay or regulate the banks. Even the most token measures proposed in the wake of the financial crisis are being dropped from discussion. The Wall Street Journal reported that lawmakers are silently considering removing the call for a consumer protection regulator, which, despite its toothless character, was touted as a major safeguard that would help prevent another financial meltdown.

The political establishment sought to prepare the public for the payout announcements this week with a series of phony statements and staged hearings.

On Thursday, Obama gave a sharply worded press conference where he proposed a new tax on the banks that would raise $90 billion over ten years. Obama used the announcement as an opportunity to denounce the "irresponsible" and "outrageous" actions of the banks - actions that he has facilitated.

Even if it were to be passed - which is by no means certain - the new tax would amount to only six percent of the compensation pool that the banks handed out this past year.

Earlier in the week, four bank executives testified before an inquiry commission where they defended their conduct during the financial crisis. The issue of banker pay was raised only a handful of times, and whenever the question was raised, the bankers imperiously changed the subject or avoided answering.

This whole week of stage-managed inquiries and feigned outrage seeks to obscure a fundamental fact: in the midst of widespread social misery, poverty, and mass unemployment, the entire political establishment supports the right of the banks to plunder billions of dollars in social wealth.

The Truth about Haiti’s Suffering

2010-01-15T14:54:00.000-08:00

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16964

By Finian Cunningham
Global Research, January 14, 2010

Even in its hour of utter devastation, Haiti, the western hemisphere’s poorest country, teaches the rest of the world some valuable truths.

This Caribbean island nation of nine million people has right now a third of its population cut off from basic supplies of food, water, medicine or shelter. In the blink of an eye, the earthquake that hit the country has buried a capital city of three million people under rubble for which the eventual death toll may be between 100,000 and 500,000. Just like that.

Like shutting the proverbial stable door after the horse has bolted, the US and other world powers are promising to send emergency aid to Haiti. Well intentioned no doubt. But where was the aid and economic development assistance to Haiti – over half the population live on $1 a day and 80 per cent are classed as poor – in the years before this calamity?

Haiti’s poverty – as for other poor countries hit by natural disasters – leaves its people wide open to the kind of devastation that has befallen them. And make no mistake, Haiti’s poverty is not just bad luck or something inherently faulty about its natural resources and people. The country has been kept underdeveloped by decades of political and economic interference from Washington to ensure that this former slave colony continues to serve as a cheap source of agricultural exports to the US and as a labour sweatshop for American corporations making textiles and other consumer goods.

While Washington spends $1,000 billion on wars allegedly to combat the threat of terrorism, Haiti’s poor – whose country’s economy is valued at $7 billion – show us a sobering perspective on what a real threat to life looks like. We live in a physical world where floods, tsunamis, earthquakes happen. These disasters claim multiple more lives than the threats that the US is fixated on and spends multiples more money on. Can you imagine how many lives could have been saved in Haiti’s earthquake if a fraction of the money squandered on futile wars had been directed to economic and social development of that country?

Of course, the moral and sensible logic of that idea does not apply in a world dictated by Washington’s foreign policy. This is because of the imperatives and logic of US-led capitalism, which requires countries like Haiti to be kept in a state of poverty for the sake of corporate profit and which requires the fixation on illusionary threats to cover up its need to control geopolitical resources (mainly energy). This is the true face of the economic system that Washington and its allies impose on the world. And Haiti has pulled the mask of this ugly face.

The harrowing anguish and suffering of Haiti teaches us something else. Heart-rending reports of streets filled with corpses and blood running from under rubble, children crying for parents, parents digging with their fingers for children, the sound of dying voices pervading the darkness of night. This is the horror of hundreds of thousands of people suddenly engulfed by suffering. Some observers have compared what has happened in Haiti to the aftermath of an atom bomb being dropped. So the next time, Washington spokespeople airily float plans on Sunday morning chat shows to obliterate Iran – that other “serious threat” (meaning not serious threat) – we should remember: this is what human suffering on a massive scale looks like.

Remember ''Swine Flu''? President of the Council of Europe declares it a scam to pillage public purse

2010-01-15T14:28:00.000-08:00

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1242147/The-false-pandemic-Drug-firms-cashed-scare-swine-flu-claims-Euro-health-chief.html

Fiona Macrae
UK Daily Mail
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:44 EST

The swine flu outbreak was a 'false pandemic' driven by drug companies that stood to make billions of pounds from a worldwide scare, a leading health expert has claimed.

Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, accused the makers of flu drugs and vaccines of influencing the World Health Organisation's decision to declare a pandemic.

This led to the pharmaceutical firms ensuring 'enormous gains', while countries, including the UK, 'squandered' their meagre health budgets, with millions being vaccinated against a relatively mild disease.

A resolution proposed by Dr Wodarg calling for an investigation into the role of drug firms has been passed by the Council of Europe, the Strasbourg-based 'senate' responsible for the European Court of Human Rights.

An emergency debate on the issue will be held later this month.

Dr Wodarg's claims come as it emerged the British government is desperately trying to offload up to £1billion of swine flu vaccine, ordered at the height of the scare.

The Department of Health warned of 65,000 deaths, set up a special advice line and website, suspended normal rules so anti-flu drugs could be given out without prescription and told health and local authorities to prepare for a major pandemic.

Planners were told to get morgues ready for the sheer scale of deaths and there were warnings that the Army could be called in to prevent riots as people fought to obtain drugs.

But with fewer than 5,000 in England catching the disease last week and just 251 deaths overall, Dr Wodarg has branded the H1N1 outbreak as 'one of the greatest medical scandals of the century'.

He said: 'We have had a mild flu - and a false pandemic.'

He added the seeds of the scare were sown five years ago, when it was feared the much more lethal bird flu virus would mutate into a human form.

The 'atmosphere of panic' led to governments stockpiling the anti-flu drug Tamiflu and putting in place 'sleeping contracts' for millions of doses of vaccine.

Dr Wodarg said: 'The governments have sealed contracts with vaccine producers where they secure orders in advance and take upon themselves almost all the responsibility.

'In this way the producers of vaccines are sure of enormous gains without having any financial risks.

'So they just wait, until WHO says "pandemic" and activate the contracts.'

He also claims that to further push their interests, leading drug companies placed 'their people' in the 'cogs' of the WHO and other influential organisations.

He added that their influence could have led the WHO to soften its definition of a pandemic - leading to the declaration of a worldwide outbreak last June.

Dr Wodarg said: 'In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards, to alarm governments worldwide.

'They have made them squander tight healthcare resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the risk of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.'

He does not name any Britons with conflicts of interest.

But last year, the Daily Mail revealed that Sir Roy Anderson, a scientist who advises the Government on swine flu, also holds a £116,000-a-year post on the board of GlaxoSmithKline.

GSK makes anti-flu drugs and vaccines and is predicted to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic.

The Department of Health says that although the disease appears to be on the wane, it cannot rule out a third surge and urges all those entitled to the jab to have it.

Professor David Salisbury, the Government's head of immunisation said there were 'no grounds whatsoever' for Dr Wodarg's claims, saying people with conflicts of interest were kept out of the decision-making process.

A GSK spokesman said: 'Allegations of undue influence are misguided and unfounded. The WHO declared that H1N1 swine flu met the criteria for a pandemic.

'As WHO have stated, legal regulations and numerous safeguards are in place to manage possible conflicts of interest.'

The company, which still employs Sir Roy, said he had declared his commercial interests and had not attended any meetings related to the purchase of drugs or vaccine for either the Government or GSK.

Haitian Earthquake: Made in the USA

2010-01-15T14:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/14-13

January 14, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Why the Blood Is on Our Hands

by Ted Rall
As grim accounts of the earthquake in Haiti came in, the accounts in U.S.-controlled state media all carried the same descriptive sentence: "Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere..."

Gee, I wonder how that happened?

You'd think Haiti would be loaded. After all, it made a lot of people rich.

How did Haiti get so poor? Despite a century of American colonialism, occupation, and propping up corrupt dictators? Even though the CIA staged coups d'état against every democratically elected president they ever had?

It's an important question. An earthquake isn't just an earthquake. The same 7.0 tremor hitting San Francisco wouldn't kill nearly as many people as in Port-au-Prince.
"Looking at the pictures, essentially it looks as if (the buildings are of) breezeblock or cinderblock construction, and what you need in an earthquake zone is metal bars that connect the blocks so that they stay together when they get shaken," notes Sandy Steacey, director of the Environmental Science Research Institute at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. "In a wealthy country with good seismic building codes that are enforced, you would have some damage, but not very much."

When a pile of cinderblocks falls on you, your odds of survival are long. Even if you miraculously survive, a poor country like Haiti doesn't have the equipment, communications infrastructure or emergency service personnel to pull you out of the rubble in time. And if your neighbors get you out, there's no ambulance to take you to the hospital--or doctor to treat you once you get there.

Earthquakes are random events. How many people they kill is predetermined. In Haiti this week, don't blame tectonic plates. Ninety-nine percent of the death toll is attributable to poverty.

So the question is relevant. How'd Haiti become so poor?

The story begins in 1910, when a U.S. State Department-National City Bank of New York (now called Citibank) consortium bought the Banque National d'Haïti--Haiti's only commercial bank and its national treasury--in effect transferring Haiti's debts to the Americans. Five years later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to occupy the country in order to keep tabs on "our" investment.

From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines imposed harsh military occupation, murdered Haitians patriots and diverted 40 percent of Haiti's gross domestic product to U.S. bankers. Haitians were banned from government jobs. Ambitious Haitians were shunted into the puppet military, setting the stage for a half-century of U.S.-backed military dictatorship.

The U.S. kept control of Haiti's finances until 1947.

Still--why should Haitians complain? Sure, we stole 40 percent of Haiti's national wealth for 32 years. But we let them keep 60 percent.

Whiners.

Despite having been bled dry by American bankers and generals, civil disorder prevailed until 1957, when the CIA installed President-for-Life François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Duvalier's brutal Tonton Macoutes paramilitary goon squads murdered at least 30,000 Haitians and drove educated people to flee into exile. But think of the cup as half-full: fewer people in the population means fewer people competing for the same jobs!

Upon Papa Doc's death in 1971, the torch passed to his even more dissolute 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. The U.S., cool to Papa Doc in his later years, quickly warmed back up to his kleptomaniacal playboy heir. As the U.S. poured in arms and trained his army as a supposed anti-communist bulwark against Castro's Cuba, Baby Doc stole an estimated $300 to $800 million from the national treasury, according to Transparency International. The money was placed in personal accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere.

Under U.S. influence, Baby Doc virtually eliminated import tariffs for U.S. goods. Soon Haiti was awash predatory agricultural imports dumped by American firms. Domestic rice farmers went bankrupt. A nation that had been agriculturally self-sustaining collapsed. Farms were abandoned. Hundreds of thousands of farmers migrated to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince.

The Duvalier era, 29 years in all, came to an end in 1986 when President Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. forces to whisk Baby Doc to exile in France, saving him from a popular uprising.

Once again, Haitians should thank Americans. Duvalierism was "tough love." Forcing Haitians to make do without their national treasury was our nice way or encouraging them to work harder, to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Or, in this case, flipflops.
Anyway.

The U.S. has been all about tough love ever since. We twice deposed the populist and popular democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The second time, in 2004, we even gave him a free flight to the Central African Republic! (He says the CIA kidnapped him, but whatever.) Hey, he needed a rest. And it was kind of us to support a new government formed by former Tonton Macoutes.

Yet, despite everything we've done for Haiti, they're still a fourth-world failed state on a fault line.

And still, we haven't given up. American companies like Disney generously pay wages to their sweatshop workers of 28 cents an hour.

What more do these ingrates want?

Is Anyone Telling Us The Truth?

2010-01-11T12:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Is-Anyone-Telling-Us-The-T-by-Paul-Craig-Roberts-100108-422.html

Paul Craig Roberts
Oped News
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:02 EST

What are we to make of the failed Underwear Bomber plot, the Toothpaste, Shampoo, and Bottled Water Bomber plot, and the Shoe Bomber plot? These blundering and implausible plots to bring down an airliner seem far removed from al-Qaida's expertise in pulling off 9/11.

If we are to believe the U.S. government,Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged al-Qaida "mastermind" behind 9/11, outwitted the CIA, the NSA, indeed all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies as well as those of all U.S. allies including Mossad, the National Security Council, NORAD, Air Traffic Control, Airport Security four times on one morning, and Dick Cheney, and with untrained and inexperienced pilots pulled off skilled piloting feats of crashing hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center towers, and the Pentagon, where a battery of state of the art air defenses somehow failed to function.

After such amazing success, al-Qaida would have attracted the best minds in the business, but, instead, it has been reduced to amateur stunts.The Underwear Bomb plot is being played to the hilt on the TV media and especially on Fox "news." After reading recently that The Washington Post allowed a lobbyist to write a news story that preached the lobbyist's interest, I wondered if the manufacturers of full-body scanners were behind the heavy coverage of the Underwear Bomber, if not behind the plot itself. In America, everything is for sale. Integrity is gone with the wind.

Recently I read a column by an author who has a "convenience theory" about the Underwear Bomber being a Nigerian allegedly trained by al-Qaida in Yemen. As the U.S. is involved in an undeclared war in Yemen, about which neither the American public nor Congress were informed or consulted, the Underwear Bomb plot provided a convenient excuse for Washington's new war, regardless of whether it was a real attack or a put-up job.

Once you start to ask yourself about whose agenda is served by events and their news spin, other things come to mind. For example, last July there was a news report that the government in Yemen had disbanded a terrorist cell, which was operating under the supervision of Israeli intelligence services. According to the news report, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh told the Saba news agency that a terrorist cell was arrested and that the case was referred to judicial authorities "for its links with the Israeli intelligence services."

Could the Underwear Bomber have been one of the Israeli terrorist recruits? Certainly Israel has an interest in keeping the US fully engaged militarily against all potential foes of Israel's territorial expansion.

The thought brought back memory of my Russian studies at Oxford University where I learned that the Tsar's secret police set off bombs so that they could blame those whom they wanted to arrest. I next remembered that Francesco Cossiga, the president of Italy from 1985-1992, revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, a false flag operation under NATO auspices that carried out bombings across Europe in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The bombings were blamed on communists and were used to discredit communist parties in elections.

An Italian parliamentary investigation unearthed the fact that the attacks were overseen by the CIA. Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated in sworn testimony that the attacks targeted innocent civilians, including women and children, in order"to force the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security."

What a coincidence. That is exactly what 9/11 succeeded in accomplishing in the U.S.

Among the well-meaning and the gullible in the West,the supposition still exists that government represents the public interest. Political parties keep this myth alive by fighting over which party best represents the public's interest. In truth, government represents private interests, those of the office holders themselves and those of the lobby groups that finance their political campaigns. The public is in the dark as to the real agendas.

The U.S. and its puppet state allies were led to war in the Middle East and Afghanistan entirely on the basis of lies and deception. Iraqi weapons of mass destruction did not exist and were known by the U.S. and British governments not to exist. Forged documents, such as the "yellowcake documents," were leaked to newspapers in order to create news reporting that would bring the public along with the government's war agenda.

Now the same thing is happening in regard to the nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons program. Forged documents leaked to The Times (London) that indicated Iran was developing a"nuclear trigger" mechanism have been revealed as forgeries.

Who benefits? Clearly, attacking Iran is on the Israeli-U.S. agenda, and someone is creating the "evidence" to support the case, just as the leaked secret "Downing Street Memo" to the British cabinet informed Prime Minister Tony Blair's government that President Bush had already made the decision to invade Iraq and "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

The willingness of people to believe their rulers and the propaganda ministries that serve the rulers is astonishing. Many Americans believe Iran has a nuclear weapons program despite the unanimous conclusion of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies to the contrary.

Vice President Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives fought hard with limited success to change the CIA's role from intelligence agency to a political agency that manufactures facts in support of the neoconservative agenda. For the Bush Regime creating "new realities" was more important than knowing the facts.

Recently I read a proposal from a person purporting to favor an independent media that stated that we must save the print media from financial failure with government subsidies. Such a subsidy would complete the subservience of the media to government.

Even in Stalinist Russia, a totalitarian political system where everyone knew that there was no free press, a gullible or intimidated public and Communist Party enabled Joseph Stalin to put the heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution on show trial and execute them as capitalist spies.

In the U.S. we are developing our own show trials. Sheikh Mohammed's will be a big one. As Chris Hedges recently pointed out, once government uses demonized Muslims to get the new justice (sic) system going, the rest of us will be next.

‘Lord of the Flies’ at U.S. Embassy in Kabul?

2010-01-11T08:52:00.000-08:00

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32644749/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/

Private security contractor faces inquiry over allegations of lewd conduct

Video

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Contractors in Kabul under fire for 'lewd' photos
Sept. 2: Disturbing photos emerged Wednesday of brutal hazing by private security contractors hired to provide security at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan. NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reports.

NBC News and news services
updated 9:41 p.m. ET Sept. 2, 2009
WASHINGTON - A wide-ranging State Department inquiry into allegations of lewd behavior and sexual misconduct among the private security contractors guarding the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan could lead to the termination of the company's $189 million contract, a department spokesman said Wednesday.

The allegations made by an independent watchdog group describe "Lord of the Flies" conditions that include threats and intimidation and scenes of guards and supervisors in various stages of nudity at parties flowing with alcohol.

In at least one case, supervisors brought prostitutes into the quarters where the guards live, a serious breach of security and discipline, the Project on Government Oversight said. In other instances, members of the guard force have drawn Afghans into activities forbidden by Muslims, such as drinking alcoholic beverages.

"We expect to see prompt and effective action taken as a result of these investigations," the spokesman, Ian C. Kelly, told reporters. Other possible actions include rebidding the contract or replacing individual guards and supervisors employed by the contractor, ArmorGroup North America, he said.

Report alleges hazing
The State Department inspector general is leading the investigation of ArmorGroup. U.S. officials in Kabul also are conducting a review, Kelly said. And a team from the State Department's diplomatic security, management and contracting offices will go to Kabul to examine the situation.

ArmorGroup and the State Department came under fire Tuesday after the watchdog group said that the nearly 450 ArmorGroup guards live and work in an oppressive environment in which they are subjected to hazing and other inappropriate behavior by supervisors.

The situation has led to a breakdown in morale and leadership that compromises security at the embassy, where nearly 1,000 U.S. diplomats, staff and Afghan nationals work, according to the nonprofit group.

With insurgent attacks in Afghanistan increasing, any lapses in security put the diplomatic mission there at risk, the group said in a 10-page letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that details the results of its investigation of the guard force.

The State Department has been aware of ArmorGroup's failings, the letter said, but has failed to correct the problems. Instead, it has renewed the contract twice, with the most recent installment good through July 2010.

Kelly acknowledged that ArmorGroup has been notified eight times of poor performance since the original contract was awarded in March 2007.

Wackenhut Services, ArmorGroup North America's parent company, has not responded to requests for comment.

In a statement on Wednesday, the U.S. Embassy said it was aware of the POGO report. "Nothing is more important to us than the safety and security of all Embassy personnel — Americans and Afghan — and respect for the cultural and religious values of all Afghans," the embassy said.

"We have taken immediate steps to review all local guard force policies and procedures and have taken all possible measures to ensure our security is sound. We will work closely with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) to investigate the issues raised in this report, but cannot comment further on this ongoing investigation."

Danielle Brian, the Project on Government Oversight's executive director, said Wednesday the investigation of ArmorGroup should be handled by Congress, not the State Department.

"I do not have faith that the State Department will do a good job because they are equal partners in the problem," she said. "They've let this happen."

POGO via NBC News
Scenes of the alleged hazing by guards at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

‘Lord of the Flies’
Brian also said that she was given a copy of an e-mail that an ArmorGroup manager sent to guards telling them not to talk to government inspectors unless a supervisor is present. Such a restriction will make it difficult to do a thorough investigation, she said.

The Project on Government Oversight's findings are based on interviews with ArmorGroup guards, documents, photographs and e-mails that it said depict a "Lord of the Flies" environment. The reference is to the 1954 novel by William Golding about a group of British schoolboys who are stranded on a desert island and try, but fail, to govern themselves in a chaotic setting.

One e-mail from a guard describes lurid conditions at Camp Sullivan, the guards' quarters a few miles from the embassy. The message described scenes of abuse, including guards and supervisors urinating on people and "threats and intimidation from those leaders participating in this activity."

Photographs show guards and supervisors in various stages of nudity at parties that took place near the housing of other supervisors.

Multiple guards say these conditions have created a "climate of fear and coercion." Those who refuse to participate are often ridiculed, humiliated or even fired, they contended.

"There were some things going on in Kabul that we were not aware of, but we frankly should have been aware of," Kelly said.

ArmorGroup's management is aware of the conditions but has not stopped it or disciplined those responsible, the letter said. Two supervisors alleged to be the worst offenders have been allowed to resign and may now be working on other U.S. contracts, the group said.

The group's investigation found sleep-deprived guards regularly logging 14-hour days, language barriers that impair critical communications, and a failure by the State Department to hold the contractor accountable.

Spies like us ... Body of Lies

2010-01-11T08:50:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/14/thriller-ridley-scott#history-byline

An offer they couldn't refuse
The CIA is often credited with 'advice' on Hollywood films, but no one is truly sure about the extent of its shadowy involvement. Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham investigate
14 November 2008

Everyone who watches films knows about Hollywood's fascination with spies. From Hitchcock's postwar espionage thrillers, through cold war tales such as Torn Curtain, into the paranoid 1970s when the CIA came to be seen as an agency out of control in films such as Three Days of the Condor, and right to the present, with the Bourne trilogy and Ridley Scott's forthcoming Body of Lies, film-makers have always wanted to get in bed with spies. What's less widely known is how much the spies have wanted to get in bed with the film-makers. In fact, the story of the CIA's involvement in Hollywood is a tale of deception and subversion that would seem improbable if it were put on screen.

Body of Lies
Production year: 2008
Country: USA
Cert (UK): 15
Runtime: 128 mins
Directors: Ridley Scott
Cast: Alon Aboutboul, Carice van Houten, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Strong, Michael Gaston, Oscar Isaac, Russell Crowe, Vince Colosimo
More on this film

The model for this is the defence department's "open" but barely publicised relationship with Hollywood. The Pentagon, for decades, has offered film-makers advice, manpower and even hardware - including aircraft carriers and state-of-the-art helicopters. All it asks for in exchange is that the US armed forces are made to look good. So in a previous Scott film, Black Hawk Down, a character based on a real-life soldier who had also been a child rapist lost that part of his backstory when he came to the screen.

No matter how seemingly craven Hollywood's behaviour towards the US armed forces has seemed, it has at least happened within the public domain. That cannot be said for the CIA's dealings with the movie business. Not until 1996 did the CIA announce, with little fanfare, that it had established an Entertainment Liaison Office, which would collaborate in a strictly advisory capacity with film-makers. Heading up the office was Chase Brandon, who had served for 25 years in the agency's elite clandestine services division, as an undercover operations officer. A PR man he isn't, though he does have Hollywood connections: he's a cousin of Tommy Lee Jones.

But the past 12 years of semi-acknowledged collaboration were preceded by decades in which the CIA maintained a deep-rooted but invisible influence of Hollywood. How could it be otherwise? As the former CIA man Bob Baer - whose books on his time with the agency were the basis for Syriana - told us: "All these people that run studios - they go to Washington, they hang around with senators, they hang around with CIA directors, and everybody's on board."

There is documentary evidence for his claims. Luigi Luraschi was the head of foreign and domestic censorship for Paramount in the early 1950s. And, it was recently discovered, he was also working for the CIA, sending in reports about how film censorship was being employed to boost the image of the US in movies that would be seen abroad. Luraschi's reports also revealed that he had persuaded several film-makers to plant "negroes" who were "well-dressed" in their movies, to counter Soviet propaganda about poor race relations in the States. The Soviet version was rather nearer the truth.

Luraschi's activities were merely the tip of the iceberg. Graham Greene, for example, disowned the 1958 adapatation of his Vietnam-set novel The Quiet American, describing it as a "propaganda film for America". In the title role, Audie Murphy played not Greene's dangerously ambiguous figure - whose belief in the justice of American foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling consequences of his actions - but a simple hero. The cynical British journalist, played by Michael Redgrave, is instead the man whose moral compass has gone awry. Greene's American had been based in part on the legendary CIA operative in Vietnam, Colonel Edward Lansdale. How apt, then, that it should have been Lansdale who persuaded director Joseph Mankewiecz to change the script to suit his own ends.

The CIA didn't just offer guidance to film-makers, however. It even offered money. In 1950, the agency bought the rights to George Orwell's Animal Farm, and then funded the 1954 British animated version of the film. Its involvement had long been rumoured, but only in the past decade have those rumours been substantiated, and the tale of the CIA's role told in Daniel Leab's book Orwell Subverted.

The most common way for the CIA to exert influence in Hollywood nowadays is not through anything as direct as funding, or rewriting scripts, but offering to help with matters of verisimilitude. That is done by having serving or former CIA agents acting as advisers on the film, though some might wonder whether there is ever really such a thing a "former agent". As ex-CIA agent Lindsay Moran, the author of Blowing My Cover, has noted, the CIA often calls on former officers to perform tasks for their old employer.

So it was no problem for CBS to secure official help when making its 2001 TV series The Agency (it was even written by a former agent). Langley was equally helpful to the novelist Tom Clancy, who was invited to CIA headquarters after the publication of The Hunt for Red October, an invitation that was regularly repeated. Consequently, when Clancy's The Sum of All Fears was filmed in 2002, the agency was happy to bring its makers to Langley for a personal tour of headquarters, and to offer access to agency analysts for star Ben Affleck. When filming began, Brandon was on set to advise - a role he repeated during the filming of glamorous television series Alias.

The former agent Milt Beardon took the advisory role on two less action-packed attempts at espionage stories: Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd from 2006, which told an approximate version of the story of the famed CIA head of counter-espionage, James Jesus Angleton; and Charlie Wilson's War, the story of US covert efforts to supply the Afghan mujahideen with weaponry during the Soviet occupation of the 80s. In reality, this was a story that ended badly, as the Afghan freedom fighters helped give birth to the terrorists of al-Qaida. In the movie, however, that was not the case. As Beardon - who had been the CIA man responsible for the weapons reaching the Afghans - observed shortly before the movie came out, the film would "put aside the notion that because we did that [supply arms], we had 9/11".

Beardon's remark provides a clue to the real reason the CIA likes to offer advice to Hollywood, a clue that was expanded on by Paul Kelbaugh, the former associate general counsel to the CIA - a very senior figure in Langley. In 2007, Kelbaugh spoke at Lynchburg College of Law in Virginia - where he had become an associate professor - about the CIA's relationship with Hollywood. A journalist present at the lecture (who now wishes to be anonymous) reported that Kelbaugh spoke about the 2003 Al Pacino/Colin Farrell vehicle The Recruit. A CIA agent had been on set as a "consultant" throughout the shoot, he said; his real job, however, was to misdirect the film-makers. "We didn't want Hollywood getting too close to the truth," the journalist quoted Kelbaugh as saying.

Peculiarly, though, in a strongly worded email to us, Kelbaugh emphatically denied having said such a thing, and said he remembered "very specific discussions with senior [CIA] management that no one was ever to misrepresent to affect [film] content - EVER." The journalist stands by the original report, and Kelbaugh has refused to discuss the matter further.

So, altering scripts, financing films, suppressing the truth - it's worrying enough. But there are cases where some believe the CIA's activities in Hollywood have gone further - far enough, in fact, to be the stuff of movies. In June 1997, the screenwriter Gary DeVore was working on the screenplay for his directorial debut. It was to be an action movie set against the backdrop of the US invasion of Panama in 1989, which led to the overthrow of dictator Manuel Noriega. According to his wife, Wendy, DeVore had been talking to an old friend - the CIA's Chase Brandon - about Noriega's regime and US counternarcotic programmes in Latin America. Wendy told CNN: "He had been very disturbed over some of the things that he had been finding in his research. He was researching the United States invasion of Panama, because he was setting the actual story that he was writing against this; and the overthrow of Noriega and the enormous amounts of money laundering in the Panamanian banks, also our own government's money laundering."

At the end of that month, DeVore had been in Santa Fe, New Mexico, working on another project. He was travelling back to California when, at 1.15am on June 28, he called Wendy, a call she says has been excised from phone records. She told CNN she was "terribly alarmed" because he was speaking as though he were under duress. She was sure "someone was in the car with him". That was the last time Wendy DeVore heard from her husband.

A year passed, but the case refused to die and speculation mounted. Even the Los Angeles Times began contemplating CIA involvement. DeVore was presumed dead, but there was no body, and no end to the questions. Lo and behold, just nine days after the LA Times reported the case, DeVore's body was found, decomposing in his Ford Explorer, in 12 feet of water in the California Aqueduct below the Antelope Valley Freeway, south of Palmdale - a city located in "aerospace valley", so dubbed by locals for its reputation as a US military-industrial-complex stronghold - fuel to the fire for conspiracy theorists.

The coroner went on to declare the cause and manner of DeVore's death to be "unknown", but police eventually reached the tentative conclusion that the screenwriter's death was an accident: he had fallen asleep at the wheel, they said, before careening off the highway and into the water, where he drowned. But loose ends remain: DeVore's laptop computer containing his unfinished script was missing from his vehicle, as was the gun he customarily carried on long trips; after his disappearance, a CIA representative allegedly showed up at DeVore's house to request access to his computer; Hollywood private investigator Don Crutchfield noted that previous drafts of DeVore's script were inexplicably wiped from said computer during the same timeframe; police claimed that DeVore's vehicle careened off the highway, yet DeVore's widow was troubled by the absence of visible damage to the guardrail at the scene of the alleged accident; and how come no one noticed an SUV sitting in the water beneath a busy highway for a whole year? Perhaps the whole incident is too like a conspiracy movie to be a real conspiracy - but many remain troubled by De Vore's death.

Despite the CIA's professed desire to be more open about the role it plays in Holly-wood, it's hard to take its newfound transparency too seriously. After all, what use is a covert agency that does not act covertly, even if some of its activities are public? And if it is still not open about the truth of events decades ago, many of which have spilled into the public domain accidently, how can we be sure it is telling the truth about its activities now? The spy may have come in from the cold, but he still finds shelter in the dark of the cinema.

Is the Fed Acting Behind the U.S. Stock Market Rally?

2010-01-08T13:31:00.001-08:00

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2010/01/08/opinion/opinion_30119895.php

Is the Fed Acting Behind the U.S. Stock Market Rally?
Thanong Khanthong
The Nation
Fri, 08 Jan 2010

One of my good friends at Citibank recently sent me a story about Economics 101, or how the US government is managing the economy. Here it goes:

"It's a slow day in a little east Texas town. The sun is beating down, the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

On this particular day, a rich tourist from the East Coast is driving through town. He stops at the motel and lays a US$100 bill on the desk, saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.

As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel. The guy at the farmers' co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her services on credit.

The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner. The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything.

At that moment, the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves town.

No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and now looks to the future with a lot more optimism. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how governments are conducting business today."

This story is cynical, but it really hits the point. After the economic bubble burst, the US government is now scrambling to clean up the mess. The US Federal Reserve has already committed $8.2 trillion to bail out the financial system, as well as corporate debts. The US's annual gross domestic product is about $14.2 trillion.

Sprott Asset Management, a Toronto-based hedge fund, has recently cast doubt that the US government is coming clean on its bail-out. In fiscal year 2009, the US added another $1.88 trillion to its public debt, which had to be financed by the US Treasury issuing securities. The foreign and international buyers purchased $697.5 billion of US treasuries; the Federal Reserve, which is pursuing an aggressive money printing policy, $286 billion; and the household sector $704 billion.

But Sprott Asset suspects that something fishy is going on. For the household sector was loosely defined, and it does not seem that any parties, under the current economic conditions, have $704 billion to buy into US treasuries. It concluded that the real buyer behind the household sector was none other than the US Federal Reserve itself.

If that were to be the case, the Fed would have already become the major financier of the US deficit to the tune of $1 trillion. Since next year the US deficit will reach more than $2.2 trillion, we can expect the Fed to continue printing money to finance the massive US overspending.

Charles Biderman, CEO of TrimTabs, also suspects that the US Federal Reserve is behind the stock market rally since March 2009 (see here) Ever since, US stocks have soared by more than $6 trillion.

Biderman went through the list of traditional players in the US stock market. He found that US corporations were net sellers of equities. US retail investor funds were hardly buying equities. US retail investors were also not buying equities directly in any significant amount. Foreign investors were net buyers of US stocks at around $109 billion between April and October 2009. Hedge funds posted net outflow of $12 billion from April to November 2009. Pension funds were not making asset allocations.

Then who is the buyer behind the US stock market rally? The money must come from somewhere.

Biderman pointed out that the US Treasury and US Fed have been bailing out US banks and corporations in a desperate attempt to save the US economy. So it will not come as a surprise that may also have entered the stock market to boost US equities.

"We want to emphasize that we have no evidence that the Fed or the Treasury are throwing money into the stock market, either directly or indirectly. But if they are not pumping up stock prices, then who is?" he wrote.

If this is the case, then the whole US market is now rigged, with the Fed bailing out everything from banks, corporations, US Treasuries and US stocks.

The US Federal Reserve is not subject to any independent audit. So nobody is in a position to know its exact balance sheet. For now, the Fed has made some Americans happy, but the question is, what's next?

After Helping Gordon Gekko Evade the SEC, Will Geithner Finally Now Be Fired?

2010-01-08T12:09:00.000-08:00

Besides being fired, Geithner needs to go to jail for all kinds of economics crimes including fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, racketeering, theft, lying to congress, crimes against humanity, more, more, more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/geithner-after-helping-go_b_415166.html

David Sirota
January 7, 2010

Way back in May of 2009, I and other progressives said President Obama needed to fire Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner because he was either lying or incompetent when it came to AIG. Per the norm, we were lambasted as part of the supposed fringe for saying this, just as we were lambasted for saying that the no-strings-attached bailout was a blatant giveaway to Wall Street. Now, while I'm not going to say "I told you so," I will note it's become more acceptable to say Geithner must be fired - especially after a new report that Geithner's New York Fed instructed AIG to refuse to disclose to SEC regulators some of the worst financial shenanigans surrounding the AIG bailout.

As I'll show using characters from the movie Wall Street, this kind of thing makes Gordon Gekko and Bud Fox's shenanigans look petty.

For some history, the New York Fed, headed by Tim Geithner, bailed out AIG and then had the company famously pay back its creditors at 100 cents on the dollar. These creditors were huge banks that were taking big risky bets on mortgage-backed securities, and then buying "insurance" from AIG (more on this concept of "insurance" in a second) on potential losses on those bets. When the mortgage-backed securities lost their value in the housing bubble collapse and they called in their insurance, AIG was about to go under, until the New York Fed swept in.

If AIG had gone into bankruptcy like a normal corporation would have, there's little chance its creditors would have been paid back at 100 cents on the dollar. A bankruptcy judge or AIG shareholders/executives would have negotiated a much lower reimbursement rate. But because it was taxpayer money on the line, and because politically influential banks like Goldman Sachs can influence the government officials who made those reimbursement decisions*, AIG paid them in full with our taxpayer dollars. Put another way, the decision to pay back AIG's creditors in full with taxpayer cash was a massive giveaway/sweetheart deal to the big banks.

Well, you say, even if normal bankruptcy proceedings might not have paid back creditors at 100 cents on the dollar, ethically, shouldn't those creditors have gotten 100 cents on the dollar for an insurance policy? Well, maybe - if the insurance policy is real insurance. But what Goldman et. al bought from AIG wasn't insurance - it wasn't regulated like a regular insurance policy because it wasn't a regular insurance policy. It was simply another risky investment called a credit default swap that both the banks and AIG deceptively called "insurance." (The banks did this to allow them to show less risk on their books and thus be able to take more risk and AIG did this to sell more credit default swaps.) In fact, even calling Goldman and the other banks "creditors" of AIG isn't right - they were investors in AIG's risky schemes.

So, I'm sorry, no - when you take risks and then "cover" your risks by taking other risks, you aren't entitled - legally or ethically - to getting back 100 cents on the dollar on either set of risks. That's why they're called risks. Having the government pay out 100 cents on the dollar on those absurd risks is a taxpayer ripoff.

Now, if that sweetheart deal wasn't bad enough, we find out yesterday from Bloomberg News that the New York Fed instructed AIG executives to withhold information from the SEC about those sweetheart deals so as to prevent the public from finding out about them:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer's payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails (which you can see here), and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008.... The decision to pay the banks in full may have cost AIG, and thus taxpayers, at least $13 billion, based on the discount the insurer was seeking...

In a report published back in November of 2009, Treasury Inspector General Neil Barofsky said, "Federal Reserve officials provided AIG's counterparties with tens of billions of dollars they likely would have not otherwise received" and that "the default position, whenever government funds are deployed in a crisis to support markets or institutions, should be that the public is entitled to know what is being done with government funds." Clearly the default position was the other way around - the New York Fed instructed AIG to hide damning information about public money from the public.

To understand how grotesque this really is, consider it in terms of the movie Wall Street, with Gordon Gekko as the entire AIG corporation. You can follow this simple metaphor one of two ways: First, simply imagine that Geithner - not Saul Rubinek - was the consigliere helping Gekko evade the SEC. Or, think of the end of the movie when the SEC is actively investigating Gekko. Imagine that when SEC investigators strung up Bud Fox with a wire, the New York Fed - another branch of government - strung up Gekko with a ear piece, with Geithner or one of his aides on the other end telling Gekko how to answer Fox's questions so as to not disclose damning information.

Was the New York Fed's behavior legal or were they encouraging AIG to commit a criminal fraud? I'm not a lawyer so I don't know - but it sure seems like it could be, or at least should be. Either way, it's appalling to learn that one government agency was actively encouraging a private corporation to withhold information from another government agency, so as to prevent the public from finding out information (in this case, a sweetheart deal to huge banks) about the public's money - information that would seriously piss the public off.

The same man who orchestrated this is now heading the Treasury Department - the agency that is supposed to also be regulating banks. This is far more than a fox-in-the-henhouse situation - this is a Gekko-in-the-Treasury situation. And if it's not grounds for firing Geithner, then there are really no grounds to fire any government official for anything.

* Remember, the CEO of Goldman Sachs - which desperately wanted AIG bailed out because a bailout would mean it would get reimbursed billions - was the only one in the room when Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was helping make decisions about whether or not to bailout AIG.

N.Y. Fed Told AIG to Shield Payouts

2010-01-08T11:54:00.000-08:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704130904574644542588515508.html?mod=rss_Today's_Most_Popular

JANUARY 8, 2010
N.Y. Fed Told AIG to Shield Payouts
By SERENA NG and MICHAEL R. CRITTENDEN

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York told American International Group Inc. not to disclose key details of their agreements to make big payouts to banks in the insurer's regulatory filings in late 2008, according to a set of email exchanges released Thursday.

AIG later amended its regulatory filings several times over the following months and provided the information after the Securities and Exchange Commission requested more disclosure. Congress also pressured the insurer to release the names of banks that were paid off in full on $62 billion in bets on soured mortgage securities. The biggest payouts went to French bank Société Générale and to Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs Group Inc., AIG finally said publicly in mid-March 2009.

The government's handling of the AIG bailout continues to draw scrutiny and has created political difficulty for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who was president of the New York Fed when it first bailed out AIG in September 2008. He played a key role in the regional Fed bank's controversial November 2008 decision to make U.S. and European banks whole on their mortgage gambles with AIG, according to a government audit last year.

But a Treasury spokeswoman said Mr. Geithner wasn't involved in AIG's disclosure decisions, even though discussions about them took place in late November 2008, when he was selected as treasury secretary by President Obama. Mr. Geithner "played no role in these decisions and indeed, by Nov. 24, he was recused from working on issues involving specific companies, including AIG," the spokeswoman said.

"There was no effort to mislead the public," said Thomas Baxter, general counsel of the New York Fed, on Thursday. He said it was "appropriate" for the institution to comment on AIG's disclosures on transactions involving the New York Fed, "with the understanding that the final decision rested with AIG and its external securities counsel."

"Our focus was on ensuring accuracy and protecting the taxpayers' interests during a time of severe economic distress," Mr. Baxter said. Amid the financial crisis in late 2008, the Fed was reluctant to have AIG's trading partners identified because it feared such information would discourage other firms from doing business with the insurer and spark worries about the banks themselves.

An AIG spokesman declined to comment on the issue.

Copies of email exchanges from late November 2008 to March 2009 between lawyers representing AIG and the New York Fed were released by Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), ranking minority member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The emails show lawyers discussing what to disclose in AIG's December SEC filings about agreements the New York Fed and AIG's financial-products division struck to make banks whole on credit-default swap contracts they had purchased from AIG.

In a Nov. 25 email, Peter Bazos, an attorney at law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, which represents the New York Fed, wrote that certain agreements "do not need to be filed." One agreement contained the names of banks that received payouts from AIG. A Davis Polk spokesman declined to comment.

In response, an AIG in-house lawyer, Kathleen Shannon, said the company and its law firm Sullivan & Cromwell "believe that the better practice and better disclosure in this complex area is to file the agreements." She also wrote that staff at the SEC "would not be particularly happy with a decision to withhold the documents at this time."

Subsequent email exchanges in December 2008 showed extensive editing that lawyers for the New York Fed made to an AIG draft filing and press release. When AIG released its 8-K filing on Dec 24, it made mention of a list of its derivative transactions, but a schedule supposed to contain them was left blank.

Six days later, on Dec 30, the SEC sent a letter to Edward Liddy, AIG's CEO at the time, requesting revisions to the filing and more information about the agreement, including the list of derivative transactions. In mid- January 2009, AIG amended its filing and submitted the list of deals to the SEC, but its public filings didn't include the list, saying that "confidential treatment has been requested for the omitted portions."

In early March, Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn told a congressional hearing he couldn't reveal the names of AIG's counterparties or how much was paid to each of them, saying that information "would undermine the stability of the company and could have serious knock-on effects to the rest of the financial markets and the government's efforts to stabilize them."

Days after the hearing, AIG released the names of its counterparties, listing 16 banks that had received a total of $62.1 billion in payments as part of agreements to tear up their derivative contracts with the insurer.

Mr. Geithner has become a convenient target for lawmakers angered by how top officials went about bailing out the financial system. At a series of increasingly contentious hearings on Capitol Hill, Mr. Geithner was taken to task for events and actions that occurred both during and after his time at the New York Fed, from issues such as bonuses paid to AIG executives and the failure to negotiate aggressively with the insurer's counterparties.

Treasury spokeswoman Meg Reilly said what has been overshadowed is the fact that the government expects to be repaid in full, with interest, on the money it provided to buy the AIG-linked securities.

"Somehow that fact that the government's loan is 'above water' gets lost in all the consternation," Ms. Reilly said. The outstanding loan balance stood at $18.6 billion at the end of December, while the fair market value of the securities portfolio was $22.6 billion, according to Treasury figures.

Geithner and the AIG Emails: Scandal Is Only Tip of the Iceberg

2010-01-08T05:46:00.001-08:00

The authors are RIGHT!: RELEASE THE EMAILS!!!! If Geithner is innocent, the emails will prove it! If it's all dirty, well claw back the money!!!!

By Eliot Spitzer and William K. Black and Frank Partnoy, NewDeal 2.0
Posted on January 7, 2010, Printed on January 8, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145020/

In a December New York Times op-ed, we called for the full public release of AIG email messages, internal accounting documents and financial models generated in the last decade. This Thursday, a Bloomberg story revealed that under Timothy Geithner's leadership, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York told AIG to withhold details from the public about its payments to banks during the crisis. This information was discovered when emails between the company and the Fed were requested by representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The emails requested by Issa span five months beginning in November 2008. If five months of emails reveal information key to our understanding of the aftermath of the crisis, imagine what 10 years of emails could contribute to our understanding of its causes. We believe the AIG emails and other internal company documents are the 'black box' of the financial crisis. If we understand the failure of AIG, we will more fully understand the crisis -- what caused it and more importantly how to prevent it from happening again.

The emails today detail the efforts of the Fed to suppress the disclosure of payments made to banks such as Goldman, Sachs Group for reimbursement of their credit-default swap exposure. When the Treasury Department stepped in, AIG had at least $440 billion in credit-default swaps outstanding. The Fed, led by Tim Geithner, paid Goldman, Sachs Group and other banks 100 cents on the dollar for these instruments rather than negotiating a lower rate closer to the actual value, (estimated by some to have been as little as 20 cents). In testimony to the Congressional Oversight Panel, Tim Geithner insisted it was necessary to make these payments in full, arguing that even a small downward negotiation would prove catastrophic to the financial sector. Elizabeth Warren, head of the oversight panel has repeatedly challenged repeatedly this assertion.

Regardless the size of the payments, the Fed's request to suppress both their amount and the parties to whole these payments were made would not have come to light without the release of these emails. Without the rest of the emails, we will be unlikely to fully understand what led to the collapse of AIG and the financial markets. If we can't understand it, we will be unable to prevent it from happening again.

As such, today we are renewing our request for the full public disclosure of all AIG documents. We believe the government should put these documents on-line, thereby establishing an open-source investigation that would allow journalists and citizens the opportunity to piece together the story of what happened at AIG and in so doing more fully understand what happened in the broader financial collapse. AIG -- and more specifically its credit-default swaps exposure -- was an important contributing factor to the crash of the financial markets. What sets this company apart from others that played a role in the crisis is that we, the taxpayers, own it. As we noted in our original piece, US taxpayers bought 80% of AIG when they bailed the company out with $180 billion last year. As owners of the company, taxpayers are also owners of AIG. As owners of the company we can demand the release of these documents.

The taxpayer's stake in AIG is held by the A.I.G. Credit Facility Trust, whose three trustees are Jill M. Considine, a former chairman of the Depository Trust Company and a former director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Chester B. Feldberg, a former New York Fed official who was chairman of Barclays Americas from 2000 to 2008; and Douglas L. Foshee, chief executive of the El Paso Corporation and chairman of the Houston branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. We call on these three officials (interestingly all former Fed officials) to immediately release the documents we request.

The value of these documents, if it were ever in doubt, was certainly proved by Thursdays's revelations.

Release the emails.

Geithner's New York Fed Pushed AIG to Keep Sweetheart Deals Secret

2010-01-07T14:41:00.001-08:00

Isn't this called conspiracy, fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, theft, bank robbery, racketeering, CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY and more crimes as well?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/07/geithners-new-york-fed-to_n_414449.html

January 7, 2010 by The Huffington Post
by Shahien Nasiripour

An arm of the Federal Reserve, then led by now-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, told bailed-out insurance giant AIG to withhold key details from the public about overpayments that put billions of extra tax dollars in the coffers of major Wall Street firms, most notably Goldman Sachs.

With protestors in the background, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, in this Sept. 10, 2009 file photo, before the Congressional Oversight Panel hearing the financial markets.
(AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File) The sordid tale unfolds in a series of e-mails between the company and the New York Fed obtained by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and first publicly disclosed by Bloomberg News.

Taxpayers have committed about $182 billion to AIG. The under-regulated firm developed and sold complicated derivatives products without having adequate capital in place if those bets went bad, which they eventually did. The firm nearly single-handedly wrecked the entire financial system.

After the firm was given a taxpayer-funded backstop, one of its most controversial acts was to repay banks at 100 cents on the dollar for what was by that point nearly worthless insurance the banks had bought from AIG, known as credit-default swaps.

A brutal report issued in November by a government watchdog disclosed that AIG had actually been trying to negotiate better terms with the banks until - guess what? -- the New York Fed stepped in. The report held Geithner personally responsible, and led to renewed questions about his fitness for the job.

Now it turns out Geithner's people told AIG to delete references on draft regulatory filings to the sweetheart deals. And AIG then excluded any mention of them in its December 2008 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, keeping the information hidden from investors and the public.

"It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information to the SEC," Issa said in a statement. "The American taxpayers, who own approximately 80% of AIG, deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation's securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.

"This news ought to serve as a cautionary tale to those who advocate giving the Federal Reserve even more power over the U.S. economy. The lack of transparency and accountability is disturbing enough, but the outstanding question that remains is why the [New York Fed] didn't fight for a better deal for the American taxpayer. Clearly, the New York Fed wanted to suppress details and limit disclosure of the counterparty deal from the American people -- the only question is why?"

Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Wachovia got full value for their derivatives contracts with AIG, and taxpayers got stuck with the bill. In total, $27.1 billion of public money was transferred to companies that did business with AIG. It was largely seen as a "backdoor bailout" for firms like Goldman.

Instead of bargaining with AIG's numerous counterparties to resolve its billions of dollars in souring derivatives contracts, Geithner's team ended up having AIG pay top dollar for toxic assets -- "an amount far above their market value at the time," the November report noted. It described how the team led by Geithner failed nearly every step of the way.

And consider the timing of the newly discovered action. Reports first emerged that Geithner was being tapped for the Treasury secretary post on Nov. 21, 2008; the Senate confirmed his nomination on Jan. 26. Details of AIG's 100-cents-on-the-dollar payments to various banks with taxpayer-supported funds totaling in the billions, which would otherwise have become public no later than December, weren't disclosed to the public until March, when Geithner was already in office.

The Treasury's response this morning is, essentially, no harm no foul. Meg Reilly, a Treasury spokeswoman, released a statement: "In the transaction at the heart of this dispute... the FRBNY made a loan of $25 billion which is on track to be paid back in full with interest so that taxpayers will be made whole. Somehow that fact that the government's loan is 'above water' gets lost in all the consternation despite its mention on page 2 of the SIG-TARP report (and weekly updates on the FRBNY's web site

Copyright © 2010 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

West's Afghan War: From Conquest To Bloodbath

2010-01-07T11:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/West-s-Afghan-War-From-Co-by-Rick-Rozoff-100107-30.html

January 7, 2010
By Rick Rozoff

---------

"When the commander in Kabul asked Obama for the extra troops, he knew the USA would end up with one achievement, and that is more civilian casualties."

"Every time an American soldier gets killed, they bomb an entire village."

"This thing is going to be $5 billion to $10 billion a month and 300 to 500 killed and wounded a month by next summer. That's what we probably should expect. And that's light casualties."

---------

On December 29 the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) released figures demonstrating that Afghan civilian deaths had risen by 10 percent in the first ten months of 2009, from 1,838 during the same period a year earlier to 2,038. The majority of the killings were attributed to insurgent attacks, including those directed against U.S., NATO and government targets, but almost 500 civilians were killed by American and NATO forces.

Matters only grew worse last November and December, culminating in several massacres of Afghan civilians by Western forces at the end of the year.

In early December a NATO air strike killed thirteen civilians in Laghman province. One account also documents a deadly raid by American special forces there. "According to witnesses, US troops entered a number of houses near the provincial capital, Mehtar Lam, in an overnight operation. The victims included Mohammed Ismail, whose 10-year-old son, Rafiullah, described what happened: 'When the soldiers came to our house, my father asked them, "Who are you?" Then they shot him in the head and told us, "Be quiet and tell us where the weapons are."'" [1]

The chairman of the Laghman provincial council presciently commented on the killings that "When the commander in Kabul asked Obama for the extra troops, he knew the USA would end up with one achievement, and that is more civilian casualties." [2]

On the same day that the above-cited UN report was made public an air attack by U.S.-led warplanes killed four Afghans in the northern province of Baghlan. According to one report "A father and his three sons were reportedly among the [fatalities]. The raid also wounded eight others." [3]

A member of parliament from a neighboring province, Haji Farid, said after the aerial onslaught that "Every time an American soldier gets killed, they bomb an entire village." [4]

The following day a NATO missile strike killed seven Afghan civilians in Helmand province. According to the New York Times, "Neither NATO forces nor the Helmand governor's office gave a definitive number of dead, but reports from local people said that five to seven civilians had been killed, including three children." [5] Later a spokesman for the governor of the province confirmed that seven civilians had been slain and another wounded.

Far more atrocious news broke the same day, December 30, when, according to the next day's edition of The Times of London, "American-led troops were accused...of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten people dead" in Kunar province near the Pakistani border. [6]

U.S.-installed and -supported President Hamid Karzai dispatched an investigative team headed by former governor of Helmand province Assadullah Wafa to the scene of the massacre, dubbed by at least one news source as an Afghan My Lai.

A statement was later issued on the official website of the Afghan president that said in part: "The delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan village in Narang district of the eastern province of Kunar and took ten people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and ten, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead."

The delegation's head, Wafa, added that "US soldiers flew to Kunar from Kabul, suggesting that they were part of a special forces unit," and was quoted as saying "I spoke to the local headmaster. It's impossible they were al-Qaeda. They were children, they were civilians, they were innocent. I condemn this attack." [7]

The investigation he led established that eight of the victims were between the ages of 11 and 17. The slain students' headmaster, Rahman Jan Ehsas, described the details of Barack Obama's and top U.S. and NATO military commander Stanley McChrystal's new special operations-led counterinsurgency approach as it was applied to his pupils:

"Seven students were in one room. A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.

"First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside. That's why his wife wasn't killed." [8]

NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) attempted to both widen and evade responsibility for the murders by claiming "the raid was a joint operation and it was still under investigation," a ploy quickly exposed when "Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman Zaher Azimy said Afghan troops had not taken part." [9]

Demonstrators, particularly university students and their instructors, took to the streets in the provinces of Kabul and Nangarhar denouncing the rapidly escalating and by now routine slaughter of civilians, including children, by U.S. and NATO troops and warplanes. Their chants included "Obama! Obama! Take your soldiers out of Afghanistan!" and "Stop killing us!"

Professors and students at Kabul University passed a resolution demanding that NATO troops leave Afghanistan. [10]

Referring to the first of December's massacres, a Middle Eastern newspaper wrote, "The raid in the eastern province of Laghman this month followed a pattern that has become sadly familiar in Afghanistan over recent years. As is often the case, international forces insisted militants were killed, but local officials and villagers claimed the dead were civilians." [11]

With the increase of U.S. and other NATO nations' and partners' troops to over 150,000 in the near future and the announced shift from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency operations, the killing of Afghan civilians will grow exponentially.

On the other side of the border, Washington's and NATO's proclaimed AfPak war is no less murderous.

On January 2 Dawn News, Pakistan's first 24-hour English news channel, reported on its website that 44 CIA-directed Predator drone missile attacks last year had killed 708 people, only five of them alleged al-Qaeda and Taliban targets. "According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009.

"For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities....On average, 58 civilians were killed in these attacks every month, 12 persons every week and almost two people every day." [12]

There has been no diminution of such attacks. In the waning days of 2009 they were intensified. On December 27 "At least 13 people were killed in a suspected United States drone attack" in North Waziristan. "Following the strike, a U.S. B-52 jet plane, along with other spy planes, continued their flights over the tribal areas...." [13]

The preceding day another U.S. missile attack in North Waziristan killed three and wounded two people. "A statement from the [Pakistani] military Saturday said that a targeted airstrike at a compound in Orakzai had killed some civilians along with eight suspected militants." [14]

The U.S. launched deadly drone missile attacks in Pakistan's North Waziristan on both ends of the New Year. On December 31 "Five people were killed and at least two more injured" and on January 1 "A US pilotless aircraft fired a missile into Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal district" and "the attack destroyed [a] car and killed three people." [15]

In the second case a regional security official was quoted by Reuters as stating "The bodies were burned beyond recognition. We are trying to determine their identity." [16]

On January 3 five more people were killed in the same part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas by American drone attacks. However much the U.S., NATO and the Western media attempt to sanitize these killings, the Pakistani government figure - that over 99 percent of the victims are civilians - is a damning indictment of what can only be characterized as wanton war crimes.

A yearender feature in the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes reflected on 2009 and looked forward to this year.

"When President Barack Obama took office in January, he inherited a drifting and under-resourced war in Afghanistan, being fought with roughly 35,000 U.S. troops.

"Obama ordered 21,000 additional troops in March and then 30,000 more in December.

"In a little over a year, he will have nearly tripled their numbers, taking ownership of what he calls 'the war we must win.'

"[E]very step the president has taken represents an escalation of the war, now in its ninth year." [17]

Afghan and Pakistani civilians deaths have climbed correspondingly. They will rise even more in 2010 as the war, in its tenth calendar year, is broadened further and intensified in earnest.

For all the carnage wreaked on innocent Afghans and Pakistanis, a senior NATO intelligence officer told Western media representatives at a briefing on December 27 that "The Afghan Taliban have expanded their influence across Afghanistan and are now running a "full-fledged insurgency' with their own "governors' in all but one of the country's provinces." [18]

"In 33 out of 34 provinces, the Taliban has a shadow government...has a government-in-waiting, with ministers chosen" for the day the government falls in the unnamed official's words. [19]

Over eight years of bombing villages, conducting deadly raids against civilian households, multiplying projected American and NATO troops strength by a factor of fifteen since 2003 and extending the war into Pakistan have produced this result.

NATO's first ground war and its first armed conflict outside Europe has also cost the citizens of its own member states both blood and treasure.

Jeff Loftin, press officer of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, was recently quoted as confirming that last year 512 Western troops were killed in Afghanistan, the highest total for any year in the over eight-year war.

That number is over a third of the 1,481 ISAF fatalities (excluding American troops assigned to Operation Enduring Freedom) since the war began on October 7, 2001. The deaths include those of soldiers from NATO partner states Finland, Sweden and South Korea.

Germany, engaged under NATO command in its first combat operations since World War II, lost five soldiers last year, its highest number to date, and "Some 13,900 German soldiers served in Afghanistan this year [2009], up 1,700 from in 2008." [20]

"At least 70 Western soldiers died each month from July through October, virtually double the rate of the previous summer. In the past year, nearly 500 foreign troops have lost their lives in Afghanistan, including more than 300 Americans." [21]

On December 27 NATO announced the death of an American service member in a bomb attack in Afghanistan and the icasualties.org website calculated it to be the U.S.'s 310th of the year, double the 155 figure for 2008.

That number was also twice that of U.S. military deaths in Iraq in 2009, 148, the first time since 2003 that deaths in the first theater have been higher than in the second, and "Afghanistan is likely to become an even deadlier place for American forces as reinforcements are rushed there to battle insurgents." [22]

How much deadlier was first revealed on January 3 when four U.S. soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb attack in southern Afghanistan.

Former U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey, now an adjunct professor of international affairs at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, recently "traveled to the war zone...as an academic from West Point at the invitation of theater commander Gen. David Petraeus, commander of Central Command, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the operational commander in Afghanistan" and upon returning was cited by an armed forces news source as asserting that "Americans should prepare to accept hundreds of U.S. casualties each month in Afghanistan during spring offensives with enemy forces."

Regarding the New Year's surge, which will push U.S. troop strength to over 100,000 and combined U.S. and NATO numbers to over 150,000, he predicted that "this thing is going to be $5 billion to $10 billion a month and 300 to 500 killed and wounded a month by next summer. That's what we probably should expect. And that's light casualties." [23]

As many 500 American soldiers killed and injured monthly is in McCaffrey's estimate light casualties.

Another milestone in U.S. losses was marked on December 30 when a reported suicide bombing at the Forward Operating Base Chapman killed seven CIA agents, including the agency's station chief. The Wall Street Journal quoted a former American intelligence official describing the event as "Pearl Harbor for the agency," the second-largest loss in one day in the CIA's history, only the 1983 attack on the U.S.'s embassy in Lebanon, which resulted in eight agency deaths, exceeding it. "The base played a critical role in the CIA's significant operations in the country, including helping with drone attacks and informant networks in Pakistan." [24]

According to a former agency official interviewed by the newspaper, "That was one of the bases where they were paying people and running people and sending them into Pakistan." [25]

The White House of last year's Nobel Peace Prize recipient and the Pentagon of former CIA director Robert Gates, who in the past boasted of funding and arming the founders of two of the three groups he is now waging war against in Afghanistan and Pakistan [26], have promised to increase the bloodshed in South Asia this year to an unprecedented level. In this instance if in no other the government can be trusted to faithfully fulfill its pledge.

1) The National (United Arab Emirates), December 28, 2009
2) Ibid
3) Press TV, December 29, 2009
4) Ibid
5) New York Times, December 31, 2009
6) The Times, December 31, 2009
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6971638.ece
7) Ibid
8) Ibid
9) Reuters, December 30, 2009
10) Pakistan Observer, January 4, 2010
11) The National, December 28, 2009
12) Dawn News, January 2, 2010
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/18-over-700-killed-in-44-drone-strikes-in-2009-am-01
13) Xinhua News Agency, December 27, 2009
14) Associated Press, December 26, 2009
15) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 1, 2010
16) Press TV, January 1, 2010
17) Stars and Stripes, December 31, 2009
18) Reuters, December 27, 2009
19) Agence France-Presse, December 28, 2009
20) Brunei News, Agencies, January 1, 2010
21) Stars and Stripes, December 31, 2009
22) USA Today, December 31, 2009
23) Army Times, January 4, 2010
24) Wall Street Journal, January 1, 2010
25) Ibid
26) Afghan Warlords, Formerly Backed By the CIA, Now Turn Their Guns
On U.S. Troops
U.S. News & World Report, July 11, 2008
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/world/2008/07/11/afghan-warlords-formerly-backed-by-the-cia-now-turn-their-guns-on-us-troops.html?PageNr=2

Blackwater and the Khost Bombing: Is the CIA Deceiving Congress?

2010-01-07T11:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100111/scahill2

by JEREMY SCAHILL
January 6, 2010

A leading member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has told The Nation that she will launch an investigation into why two Blackwater contractors were among the dead in the December 30 suicide bombing at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. "The Intelligence Committees and the public were led to believe that the CIA was phasing out its contracts with Blackwater and now we find out that there is this ongoing presence," said Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in an interview. "Is the CIA once again deceiving us about the relationship with Blackwater?"

In December, the CIA announced that the agency had canceled its contract with Blackwater to work on the agency's drone bombing campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan and said Director Leon Panetta ordered a review of all existing CIA contracts with Blackwater. "At this time, Blackwater is not involved in any CIA operations other than in a security or support role," CIA spokesman George Little said December 11.

But Schakowsky said the fact that two Blackwater personnel were in such close proximity to the December 30 suicide bomber--an alleged double agent, who was reportedly meeting with CIA agents including the agency's second-ranking officer in Afghanistan when he blew himself up--shows how "deeply enmeshed" Blackwater remains in sensitive CIA operations, including those CIA officials claim it no longer participates in, such as intelligence gathering and briefings with valuable agency assets. The two Blackwater men were reportedly in the room for the expected briefing by the double agent, Humam Khalil Muhammed Abu Mulal al-Balawi, who claimed to have recently met with Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri.

"It's just astonishing that given the track record of Blackwater, which is a repeat offender endangering our mission repeatedly, endangering the lives of our military and costing the lives of innocent civilians, that there would be any relationship," Schakowsky said. "That we would continue to contract with them or any of Blackwater's subsidiaries is completely unacceptable."

Under the Obama administration, Blackwater continues to work for the Department of Defense, the State Department and, as evidenced by the December 30 bombing, the CIA in Afghanistan. The company even maintains its own forward operating bases in Afghanistan, including one along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. "This is the closest base to the [Pakistani] border," Blackwater's owner Erik Prince recently bragged to Vanity Fair. "Who else has built a fob along the main infiltration route for the Taliban and the last known location for Osama bin Laden?"

Blackwater has been working for the CIA since at least April 2002. Prince recently claimed he was personally a CIA asset, conducting clandestine black operations around the globe. In June, Leon Panetta reportedly told Congress he had canceled the CIA assassination program involving Blackwater.

While the CIA said in December that Blackwater only continues its security and support role for the CIA, NBC News reported that the Blackwater men were not doing security at the time of the blast. The two Blackwater operatives killed in the bombing have been identified as Jeremy Wise, a 35-year old ex-Navy SEAL, and 46-year-old Dane Clark Paresi.

Wars "R" Us: Making the World Safe for American Domination

2010-01-06T14:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Wars-R-Us-Making-the-Wo-by-Emily-Spence-100104-813.html

January 5, 2010
Wars "R" Us: Making the World Safe for American Domination
By Emily Spence

In Dee Pen destructive economic systems, there is a feedback loop wherein it becomes self-confirming that greed and aggression lead to gains rather than acts that involve "playing by the rules", sharing profits, cooperating and helping others to prosper. As activities on Wall Street and in transnational corporations confirm, successful players are expected to produce income by any means possible, pay workers as little as required, charge as much as can be obtained for products and always tap into new markets for an enlarged customer base. It, also, requires a perception to be created that some newly devised product is desirable and must replace the older versions for which there is often built-in obsolescence.

In any case, new markets must always be found in order to raise financial yields. Any corporate manager who did not strive to develop them would quickly find himself in an unemployment office in addition to his being blacklisted by former colleagues.

Moreover, new stocks of resources, the raw materials from which products are made, must be tapped for global industries regardless of whether the people in the regions supplying these stores want to share them or not. In a similar vein, large scale commercial operations heavily rely on fossil fuels in the obtainment of raw resources, haulage of them to manufacturing sites, production of finished products and transportation of merchandise to market. So a steady source of petroleum must, also, be guaranteed.

This entire process, therefore, requires government leaders in support of their countries' industries to wrestle control of needed goods. Simultaneously, they have to convince the public that there are solid reasons to carry out assaults in resource rich regions of the world -- places like the Caspian Sea, with its oil estimates ranging up to about 200 billion barrels or 15% of total world reserves. Add to this treasure the fact that the Caspian Sea, also, is believed to contain 4% of the world's proven reserves of gas according to the Congressional Research Service, an organization supplying bipartisan information to Congress, in its report titled "Caspian Oil and Gas: Production and Prospects".

Indeed, its author Bernard A. Gelb, a specialist in industry economics, states: "There is a likelihood of relatively large reserves of crude oil and natural gas in the Caspian Sea region, and a consequent large increase in oil and natural gas production from that area. Because diversity of energy sources and energy security are considerations in Congressional deliberations on energy policy, this prospect could play a role in such discussions. However, there are obstacles to increases in Caspian Sea region production of oil and gas [such as Russia's and Iran's unwillingness to hand Caspian Sea resources over to U.S. control] that may slow development." He goes on to add: "However, Iran now can compete somewhat with the BTC pipeline through oil "swaps" that ultimately divert Caspian region oil away from Western, including U.S., markets. Iran has enlarged its tanker terminal at Neka on the Caspian Sea coast, enhancing its capacity to deliver Caspian oil to refineries for local consumption, with an equivalent amount of Iranian oil exported through Persian Gulf terminals." [1]

Put alternately, uncooperative countries, such as Iran and Venezuela, with assets coveted by western corporations give the perfect excuse to western governments to demonize them, threaten them and seek out destabilization of their regimes. All the same, the maligned nations will not let their reserves be plundered whether bullied or not by outside groups willing to use any means possible to obtain their prizes.

Further, full government support of corporate goals is nearly always available. After all, members of Congress want huge donations for reelection campaigns.

At the same time, it becomes quickly clear about whose interests they, ultimately, serve (rather than the public's) when government officials' desire for these contributions, lucrative future jobs after exiting public service and maximization of personal profits from their financial holdings are added into the mix. Indeed, "members of Congress invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in business that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon". [2] So taken all together, these conditions provide plenty of motivation to keep the nation's war drums beating.

Therefore, wars are big business, most notably for investors and employees in the aerospace and defense industries. The related purposes, like the ones guiding most corporations, are hardly humanistic. Instead new sources of revenue, cheap resources from conquered lands, and new markets for products and services are the sine qua non.

Accordingly, the Pentagon and the corporations that supply goods and manpower for wars have one general intention in mind and that is not even to win wars. Winning wars would mean that money-spinning contracts and growth of the organizations' national and global influence would shrink. Jobs, then, would disappear, high salaries would not be commanded and gargantuan earnings would cut back if wars were, actually, won and, thus, completed.

Instead, the intention is to strengthen control of regions and their resources, open up new markets for one's own country's products, continually advance into new territories to create the same outcome and, eventually, dictate assorted policies across the entire world. Consequently, the U.S.A., despite having a $12T federal deficit, aims to advance its ongoing plans to have full-spectrum dominance over the economies, territories, politics, military affairs and other entire governments on a full global scale and in support of American enterprises.

It, also, means that an all-out attempt to quell the Taliban will take place since Afghanistan and Pakistan are both needed to move the fossil fuels to emerging markets and ensure that central Asian economies are tied to U.S. corporate interests rather than those of Russia and China. On account, it is critical that both latter nations be blocked if western dominion over Asian markets for obtainment of raw resources and sales of final products, i.e., fossil fuels, are to result.

In the same vein, American citizens are not much of a consideration. After all, markets and remuneration for oil and other supplies might be superlative in India, China or other lands with advancing economies and plenty of money to spare. As such, concern over protection of us from terrorists (the latest justification for carrying out assaults abroad in lands like Yemen) and any desire to improve the lives of peoples in the U.S. or developing countries are minor considerations at best. Instead, it is far more on the mark to ask, as did Woodrow Wilson: "Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?"

So one winds up wondering whether a moment will ever arrive in which the public can, actually, identify this origin for wars and rise up in resistance to such a degenerate state of affairs. As an alternative, the populace can continue to equate support of war with a patriotic spirit, enthusiastically wave flags every time that there's a parade with tanks and other weaponry, and endorse far-away assaults with hardly a dissenting murmur. Meanwhile war activities, themselves, increasingly bankrupt the country morally and financially.

As such, it is useful to bear in mind that warfare almost exclusively concerns resources and trade except for religious rivalries and the small scale fighting of feudal lords. With the desire to gain ever greater advantages for oneself and one's own group by taking these away from other subjugated groups, campaigns have always been perpetuated under false pretexts, especially so when energy supplies are involved.

It follows, then, that any politician not exhibiting Woodrow Wilson's stark honesty on this point is both a liar and a propagandist with the ulterior motive to control public perception so there is advancement of war. This understanding, if nothing else, should be absolutely clear.

At the same time, the use of contractors all but guarantees that the sort of public backlash that occurred from so many troops having been killed and injured in Vietnam will not be repeated. If there exists no mandatory conscription due to freelancers being used, American citizens will feel less threatened by war even though they are paying an exorbitant amount for it and for the aid to far-away lands that the U.S. government wants to influence through bribes.

And the bribes keep coming. For example, a record State Department and foreign aid budget, amounting $49 billion, cleared the House last summer.

So is it surprising that some Americans are furious that universal single-payer health care, infrastructure repairs, WPA-style jobs and budget relief for insolvent States in the union aren't adequately provided? Is it flabbergasting that they are outraged over Israel receiving $2.4B in foreign aid (ostensibly used to buy weapons primarily manufactured by U.S. companies) in 2008 with an additional $30B promised over the next 10 years period? Should there be annoyance that many other countries receiving aid, i.e., Egypt ($1.7B in 2008), have the funds slated to purchase armaments ($1.3B of that Egyptian total) and have less than sterling human rights records? In any case, USAID's total assets amounted to $26.1 billion as of September 2009. This huge amount will, certainly, help guarantee that many U.S. agendas abroad will be heartily followed by others.

Moving to become a largely authoritarian militaristic state, the U.S.A. shows little self-constraint as it forces its will, through a combination of buy-offs and assaults, wherever and however it pleases upon the rest of the world. As a result, it has to create a positive perception and ever larger gifts of money to acquire allies, certainly, fit the bill.

In addition, Americans no longer getting riled up because their sons were conscripted through a mandatory recruitment system, also, does so. Instead of a draft, the Pentagon will authorize, according to the Congressional Research Service, between 26,000 to 56,000 additional battlefield contractors in Afghanistan, which would total as a force between 130,000 to 160,000, or very nearly two for every single troop despite the added 30,000 troops recently authorized to ship off to Afghanistan.

In other words, outsourced war, while terribly expensive for taxpayers, seems the wave of the future as it doesn't foment comprehensive anti-war activism. As such, the act of killing will increasingly become a large scale, lucrative industry supported by U.S. taxes and overseas loans (most notably from China).

So if any unemployed American wants a job, all that he needs to follow is the money, which is increasing going into U.S. invasions largely carried out by private mercenaries. Besides, he has many options if he doesn't want to become an outworker.

For instance, he could join the armed forces, which offer plenty of opportunities for work since the U.S. government currently has over 1,000 military bases spread out across the world and roughly the same number on U.S. soil. He'd, also, have plenty of company as there, presently, exist 1,445,000 active-duty armed service members, 800,000 DOD civilian employees and 1.2 million National Guards, along with other reservists who are periodically tapped for Middle East ventures.

This vast setup translates to the U.S., with only 4% of the world's population, allocating more than $711B annually in military spending, which obviously burdens the taxpayer and removes funds from other programs that would, actually, serve human welfare at home and abroad. In addition, arrangement, obviously, does not lead to global security, nor the alleviation of poverty. If there is any doubt on these points, ask any Iraqi or Afghani his assessment.

Instead regions are destabilized, and the social and material structures that previously had contributed to human benefits largely are blown to smithereens. Even so, fighting insurgents, at least for the U.S.A., will continue to be a mainstay of foreign policy, as well as the U.S. economy, itself.

All in all, the following facts well lay out the course that, instead of heavy reliance on diplomacy, the U.S. leadership has chosen:

"US military spending accounts for 48 percent, or almost half, of the world's total military spending
US military spending is more than the next 46 highest spending countries in the world combined
US military spending is 5.8 times more than China, 10.2 times more than Russia, and 98.6 times more than Iran.
US military spending is almost 55 times the spending on the six "rogue" states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) whose spending amounts to around $13 billion, maximum. (Tabulated data does not include four of the six, as the data only lists nations that have spent over 1 billion in the year, so their budget is assumed to be $1 billion each)
US spending is more than the combined spending of the next 45 countries.
The United States and its strongest allies (the NATO countries, Japan, South Korea and Australia) spend $1.1 trillion on their militaries combined, representing 72 percent of the world's total.
The six potential "enemies," Russia, and China together account for about $205 billion or 29% of the US military budget."

"[T]he lion's share of this money is not spent by the Pentagon on protecting American citizens. It goes to supporting U.S. military activities, including interventions, throughout the world. Were this budget and the organization it finances called the 'Military Department,' then attitudes might be quite different. Americans are willing to pay for defense, but they would probably be much less willing to spend billions of dollars if the money were labeled 'Foreign Military Operations.'" [3]

In any case, anyone choosing to enter military service should keep in mind that contracting companies often show little loyalty to U.S. troops, nor a sense of responsibility for their actions when involving civilians of war torn countries. This lapse in accountability is clearly demonstrated by the shootings and the recent dismissal of charges against five Blackwater Worldwide security guards for civilian deaths in Iraq. [4]

So instead, there increasingly exist situations in which depraved indifference to life is exhibited. One of many such circumstances is this one describing KBR's seemingly deliberate neglect to inform in a timely fashion about troop exposure to a highly poisonous chemical, sodium dichromate, at a site in Iraq overseen by KBR. In addition, KBR is fighting a reparatory lawsuit related to the incident. After all, any deserved payout for damage and death is to be avoided at all costs as remuneration would, absolutely, impact company earnings.

Concerning the event:

"What upsets some of the Guardsmen most of all is that, after serving their country faithfully, they believe the Army and KBR let them down by not fully acknowledging or investigating their exposure to the toxic chemical or their serious health problems. Some suffered for years and only recently have a possible explanation why."

"[Sodium dichromate] had been used by Iraqi workers prior to the war to prevent corrosion in the pipes at the plant. There were hundreds of bags at the chemical at the plant, some of them clearly labeled.

"The mission's official military name was Task Force RIO ('Restoration of Iraqi Oil'). KBR got the contract.

"Six years later, some of the Guardsmen assigned to provide security for Task Force RIO at the plant are dead, dying or suffering from serious health problems--including rashes, perforated septums and lung disease. One of the foremost experts in sodium dichromate, Dr. Herman Gibb, says the Guardsmen's symptoms are consistent with 'significant exposure' to the chemical.

"KBR argues that the company is not to blame. The company says it told the Army about the dangerous chemical as soon as it was identified at the plant. That, the company says, was on July 25, 2003.

"But, international KBR documents contradict that claim, and indicate that the company became aware of the chemical at the site two months earlier." [5]

Of course, one cannot expect mercenaries and outside contractors operating in war zones to care much about the lives of troops or others. After all, their main loyalty is not to the U.S. military, nor the U.S.A. as a whole, but to the companies that hired them and through which they are being paid to do whatever they are told.

MacD Hill

Aside from war zone contracting firms, many other transnational consortiums are doing equally well during the economic downturn, as the multimillion dollar bonuses given to management of these power houses continually remind. One such company is McDonald's. In fact, its balance sheet even indicates that it has been wildly prospering since the recession worsened.

With always more deforested land available around the globe, impoverished peoples looking to make a fast buck are more and more turning to cattle ranching and soy farming for animal feed. So therein lies plenty of breaks for McDonald's.

Not having to subsume the environmental costs for its policies, it and several other fast food syndicates are cornering the market in sales for families wanting to eat out, but without the funds to dine at more costly eateries. So for the first quarter of 2009, sales went up and earned an impressive $979.5 million, a nearly 4% increase. The rest of the year followed suit despite fears that a strengthening dollar might lower gains due to the exchange rate for other currencies collected at overseas' sites.

However, the company's management in Oak Brook, Ill really needn't have worried. After all, there are over 31,000 restaurants worldwide, with more than 1.5 million workers operating in 119 countries on six continents with over 47 million daily customers. So major losses would hardly be in the picture given that the majority of people around the world are now struggling to make ends meet.

At the same time, these stats are bound to change for the better when even more populations are inundated by American armed forces bent on subduing them, inadvertently destroying local businesses and creating opportunities for ever more McDonald's workers forced to accept minimum wages as an alternative to no job in their newly destroyed lands. Like their impoverished American counterparts, who've been stripped of good jobs with decent wages in the mad rush towards globalized industry, they too can find the satisfaction of a secure employment position with a low salary and, at the end of a weary day, a happy meal as an extra perk.

As McDonald's leadership surely must know, bringing "democracy" to developing nations, eventually, has a big payoff for American businesses focused on wiping out the small scale competition like Mom and Pop restaurants overseas. If one can endure patient waiting, the further openings will be a veritable whopper. It's just a matter of time.

In the end, wars are successful commercial enterprises. As a result, they are, progressively, becoming the foundation for the new American economy. Especially this is so as former jobs are not coming back to the American shores in that it's cheaper for transnational companies to outsource and offshore work.

In relation, the Second World War not only jump-started the American economy in the aftermath of the Great Depression, it provided lots of employment prospects for many subsequent years on account of the need to rebuild across whole continents and in their devastated cities like London, Dresden, Mukden (now Shenyang) and Ningbo. This is not the case this time around due to the heavy reliance on outside contractors, who more often than not don't reconstruct much well at all, as the U.S. soldier electrocutions on a base in Baghdad and the Task Force RIO poisonings clearly demonstrate. In other words, they often are potentially dangerous and largely useless.

This all in mind, any financial and other benefits from warfare will not uplift Main Street. Instead, they increasingly will serve the special interests of corporations. As such, the economic downturn will continue to deepen throughout the U.S.A. while thousands of foreigners in assault zones are maimed and murdered.

Consequently, all that we can hope is that Russia and China will persist in making improvements in their own nations and the lives of their citizens. It's obvious that, if they were to mimic America's squandering of money in ever enlarging wars, the outcome wouldn't be good at all.

References

[1]"Caspian Oil and Gas: Production and Prospects", CRS Report for Congress Received through the CRS Web, Bernard A. Gelb; Resources, Science, and Industry Division at Caspian Oil and Gas: Production and Prospects[http://italy.usembassy.gov/pdf/other/RS21190.pdf].

[2] FINANCE: U.S. Lawmakers Invested in Iraq, Afghanistan Wars - ...[http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41893].

[3]"In Context: US Military Spending Versus Rest of the World" and "The Billions for 'Defense' Jeopardize Our Safety",Center For Defense Information at World Military Spending -- Global Issues [http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending].

[4]Blackwater Dismissal Risks Hurting Iraq Relations - WSJ.com [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126229226969112429.html].

[5] NBC News Investigation: Toxic water in Iraq - The Daily ... [http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn.com/articles/2120353.aspx].

The Biggest Game in Town

2010-01-06T13:21:00.001-08:00

Everyone in America should watch this video! Walter Burien knows what's he talking about! For more information, go to www.Cafr1.com

From http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2860538828528453481#

What's behind mandatory private health insurance

2010-01-06T13:08:00.000-08:00

Walter Burien is a good friend of mine and I think he's a *Hero*! Listen to him below and see why. You can learn more about this and the secret investments of government at www.Cafr1.com

Another bait and switch scam

From: http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/778.html

Who's Getting Rich From the Naked Full-Body Scanner Boom?

2010-01-06T12:40:00.000-08:00

By James Ridgeway, Mother Jones Online
Posted on January 6, 2010, Printed on January 6, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/144971/

Scan, baby, scan. That’s the mantra among politicians at all levels in the wake of the thwarted terrorist attack aboard a Detroit-bound passenger jet. According to conventional wisdom, the would-be “underwear bomber” could have been stopped by airport security if he’d been put through a full-body scanner, which would have revealed the cache of explosives attached to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s groin.

Within days or even hours of the bombing attempt, everyone was talking about so-called whole-body imaging as the magic bullet that could stop this type of attack. In announcing hearings by the Senate Homeland Security Commitee, Joe Lieberman approached the use of scanners as a foregone conclusion, saying one of the "big, urgent questions that we are holding this hearing to answer" was "Why isn’t whole-body-scanning technology that can detect explosives in wider use?" Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff told the Washington Post, "You’ve got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren’t easy to get at. It’s either pat downs or imaging, or otherwise hoping that bad guys haven’t figured it out, and I guess bad guys have figured it out."

Since the alternative is being groped by airport screeners, the scanners might sound pretty good. The Transportation Security Administration has claimed that the images "are friendly enough to post in a preschool," though the pictures themselves tell another story, and numerous organizations have opposed them as a gross invasion of privacy. Beyond privacy issues, however, are questions about whether these machines really work -- and about who stands to benefit most from their use. When it comes to high-tech screening methods, the TSA has a dismal record of enriching private corporations with failed technologies, and there are signs that the latest miracle device may just bring more of the same.

Known by their opponents as "digital strip search" machines, the full-body scanners use one of two technologies -- millimeter wave sensors or backscatter x-rays -- to see through clothing, producing ghostly images of naked passengers. Yet critics say that these, too, are highly fallible, and are incapable of revealing explosives hidden in body cavities -- an age-old method for smuggling contraband. If that’s the case, a terrorist could hide the entire bomb works within his or her body, and breeze through the virtual strip search undetected. Yesterday, the London Independent reported on "authoritative claims that officials at the [UK] Department for Transport and the Home Office have already tested the scanners and were not persuaded that they would work comprehensively against terrorist threats to aviation." A British defense-research firm reportedly found the machines unreliable in detecting "low-density" materials like plastics, chemicals, and liquids -- precisely what the underwear bomber had stuffed in his briefs.

Yet the rush toward full-body scans already seems unstoppable. They were mandated today as part of the "enhanced" screening for travelers from selected countries, and hundreds of the machines are already on order, at a cost of about $150,000 apiece. Within days of the bombing attempt, Reuters was reportingthat the "greater U.S. government shift toward using the high-tech devices could create a boom for makers of security imaging products, and it has already created a speculative spike in share prices in some companies."

Which brings us to the money shot. The body scanner is sure to get a go-ahead because of the illustrious personages hawking them. Chief among them is former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff, who now heads the Chertoff Group, which represents one of the leading manufacturers of whole-body-imaging machines, Rapiscan Systems. For days after the attack, Chertoff made the rounds on the media promoting the scanners, calling the bombing attempt "a very vivid lesson in the value of that machinery" -- all without disclosing his relationship to Rapiscan. According to the Washington Post:

Chertoff’s advocacy for the technology dates back to his time in the Bush administration. In 2005, Homeland Security ordered the government’s first batch of the scanners -- five from California-based Rapiscan Systems.

Today, 40 body scanners are in use at 19 U.S. airports. The number is expected to skyrocket at least in part because of the Christmas Day incident. The Transportation Security Administration this week said it will order 300 more machines.

In the summer, TSA purchased 150 machines from Rapiscan with $25 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds.

The Washington Examiner last week ran down an entire list of all the former Washington politicians and staff members who are now part of what it calls the "full-body scanner lobby":

One manufacturer, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, is American Science & Engineering, Inc. AS&E has retained the K Street firm Wexler & Walker to lobby for "federal deployment of security technology by DHS and DOD." Individual lobbyists on this account include former TSA deputy administration Tom Blank, who also worked under House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Chad Wolf -- former assistant administrator for policy at TSA, and a former aide to Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Tex., a top Senate appropriator and the ranking Republican on the transportation committee -- is also lobbying on AS&E’s behalf.

Smiths Detection, another screening manufacturer, employs top transportation lobbying firm Van Scoyoc Associates, including Kevin Patrick Kelly, a former top staffer to Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., who sits on the Homeland Security Appropriations subcommittee. Smiths also retains former congresswoman Helen Delich Bentley, R-Md.

Former Sen. Al D’Amato, R-N.Y., represents L3 Systems, about which Bloomberg wrote today: "L-3 has ‘developed a more sophisticated system that could prevent smuggling of almost anything on the body,’ said Howard Rubel, an analyst at Jefferies & Co., who has a ‘hold’ rating on the stock."

In forecasting the fate of the full-body scanners, we can turn to recent history, which saw the rapid rise -- and decline -- of the previous "miracle" screening technology. In the years following 9/11, dozens of explosive trace portals (ETPs) were installed in airports across the country, at a cost of about $160,000 each. These "puffer" machines -- so called because they blow air on passengers to dislodge explosive particles -- were once celebrated as the "no-touch pat down." But in a Denver test by CBS in 2007, a network employee was sprayed with explosives and then walked through the airport’s three puffers without any trouble. The machines also set off false alarms, and they frequently broke down, leading to sky-high maintenance costs.

After spending more than $30 million on the puffer machines -- most of them purchased from GE -- the TSA announced earlier this year that it was suspending their use. Only about 25 percent of the machines were ever even deployed at US airports. A report last month from the Government Accountability Office found that the TSA had not adequately tested the puffers before buying them.

What will happen if the full-body scanner goes the way of the puffer? Well, there’s always the next generation of security equipment: the Body Orifice Security Scanner, or BOSS chair. This contraption, which has an uncomfortable resemblance to an electric chair, is used in prisons, mostly in the UK, for tracing cell phones, shivs, and other dangerous contraband that’s been swallowed or inserted into body cavities by inmates. So far, it only detects metal, but you never know.

Give me a friendly German Shepherd any day.

‘Naked machines’ headed for airports

2010-01-06T12:38:00.000-08:00

http://oklahoma.watchdog.org/2010/01/05/naked-machines-headed-for-airports/

‘Naked machines’ headed for airports
Posted By Andrew Griffin On January 5, 2010

Oklahoma City expected to add body imaging machines at Will Rogers World Airport; Tulsa’s already in place

OKLAHOMA CITY – Will Rogers World Airport will get full body scanners like the one at Tulsa International, though at least one area resident says the “naked machines” will be enough to keep her from flying.

Following the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest flight 253, the federal Transportation Security Administration has ramped up plans to make sure airline travelers are thoroughly searched and even scanned in new machines.

Some travelers are not thrilled with the idea of having to go through the body scanners, or “naked machine,” as Norman resident and activist Kaye Beach calls them.

“The way I understand it, they have capability to record (the image), though they say they don’t. I’m sorry, but the ‘trust us’ route doesn’t work.”

“The airport route has gotten to be such a hassle and uncomfortable that I will pretty much not fly, unless there’s an emergency,” Beach said. “I will never go through a naked machine and my daughter will not go through a naked machine. It’s definitely altered my habits. I used to like to fly and liked going to airports. Not any more. I feel like a criminal going through there.”

Beach said that she is suspicious of people like former Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff who advocate body scanners and have interests in a company, the Chertoff Group with a client that makes the machines, according [1] to The Washington Post.

A report [2] out of Britain’s Guardian newspaper notes that detail may break child pornography laws there.

“It’s not about security. It’s about making these corporations billions of dollars. Would these scanners have even picked up the underwear bomber’s little rig there?” asked Beach.

Beach said “It’s a power thing. It’s a dignity thing.”

“It’s an affront to my dignity. This is America. We are not prisoners,” she said.

Karen Carney, spokeswoman at Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City said the airport is “on a list of airports” set to receive one of the body imaging machines, similar to the machine already in place at Tulsa International Airport.

Oklahoma Watchdog called Alexis Higgins at Tulsa International Airport seeking comment about the body imaging machines, but she referred all questions to the TSA.

“We haven’t had a lot of people calling about it,” Carney said. “We know there’s been a lot of discussion about it in the media.

Carney confirmed that passengers can opt out of going through the body scanners.

“It will be interesting to see how (the TSA rules) will change because they will probably change,” Carney said.

Andrea McCauley, spokesperson for the TSA at their Dallas-Fort Worth office which oversees the airports in Oklahoma City and Tulsa said during the first part of this year 150 RapiScan body imaging machines are expected to be installed at airports across America.

And there are already plans for hundreds more.

“We have funding for 300 additional body imaging machines,” McCauley said.

“They’re a very safe technology,” McCauley said. “The waves are less than talking on a cell phone for 10 minutes or when you take a typical airplane flight.”

Asked about concerns travelers’ naked bodies will be viewed by TSA agents in a hidden room, McCauley said TSA “takes these concerns very seriously.”

Privacy filters will be implemented “to ensure passengers’ privacy,” McCauley said.

“It’s absolutely optional,” McCauley said of passengers having to walk through the body imaging machines. “We understand some passengers don’t feel comfortable passing through them.”

Asked if passengers will be further scrutinized if they opt out of going through the body imaging machine and simply prefer a pat down, McCauley said they would not be treated any differently.

Both millimeter wave and “backscatter” technology will be implemented, McCauley said. Millimeter wave technology beams millimeter wave radio frequency energy over the surface of the body at high speed. This creates a three-dimensional image, showing the passenger’s naked body – genitalia and all – although facial features are blurred.

Backscatter technology uses low level X-rays to create a two-sided image. According to TSA.gov, they are testing backscatter with an algorithm applied to the entire image to “further protect passenger privacy.”

UPDATE (Jan. 6, 2010): Oklahoma Watchdog has been noting that a number of newspaper columnists have been supportive of the intrusive body scanning technology. Clytie Bunyan, business editor at The Oklahoman, wrote earlier this week that “Travelers should prepare for scans [3].” Bunyan argues that if travelers are made to feel safer by the use of these machines, then so be. “Some are complaining that they’re too intrusive – an invasion of their privacy. Who cares?”

Well, Ms. Bunyan, a lot of people care. They actually care about their dignity and rights as a human being. Why are passengers having to pay for the shortcomings of the government when every red flag was waving when it came to the terroristic inclinations of Umar AbdulMutallab? Ms. Bunyan, you are giving into tyranny far too easily. Such a shame.

And then there is Lyn Cockburn’s column [4] at the Edmonton Sun. I note this Canadian paper because I just experienced the invasive searches at the Calgary International Airport last week, following a trip to the Canadian Rockies. Ms. Cockburn, in her column headlined “The naked truth is it makes us safer,” writes that the body scanners are important, if they stop the “terrorists.” Ms. Cockburn said she is “happy to contribute my butt to airplane security” and has no problem with strangers viewing her naked body on a screen. She writes: “(I)t will only be viewed by a trained employee in a nearby – and enclosed – booth. This employee will never see your face.” An article in the Edmonton Sun notes that “Airport body scanners ‘good in the long run [5].’” The Canadians, it appears, have simply given up.

But then the calls for scanning are going even further, with a former European Union justice commissioner calling for passengers to have their insides scanned [6], in case a terrorist swallowed a capsule that can make the jihadist a “human bomb.” It’s clearly getting out of control.

By Andrew W. Griffin
andrew@oklahomawatchdog.org

Copyright 2010 Oklahoma Watchdog

New scanners break child porn laws

2010-01-05T13:48:00.000-08:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jan/04/new-scanners-child-porn-laws/print

New scanners break child porn laws
Alan Travis, home affairs editor
4 January 2010

The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.

Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to "virtual strip-searching" and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved.

Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.

They also face demands from civil liberties groups for safeguards to ensure that images from the £80,000 scanners, including those of celebrities, do not end up on the internet. The Department for Transport confirmed that the "child porn" problem was among the "legal and operational issues" now under discussion in Whitehall after Gordon Brown's announcement on Sunday that he wanted to see their "gradual" introduction at British airports.

A 12-month trial at Manchester airport of scanners which reveal naked images of passengers including their genitalia and breast enlargements, only went ahead last month after under-18s were exempted.

The decision followed a warning from Terri Dowty, of Action for Rights of Children, that the scanners could breach the Protection of Children Act 1978, under which it is illegal to create an indecent image or a "pseudo-image" of a child.

Dowty told the Guardian she raised concerns with the Metropolitan police five years ago over plans to use similar scanners in an anti-knife campaign, and when the Department for Transport began a similar trial in 2006 on the Heathrow Express rail service from Paddington station.

"They do not have the legal power to use full body scanners in this way," said Dowty, adding there was an exemption in the 1978 law to cover the "prevention and detection of crime" but the purpose had to be more specific than the "trawling exercise" now being considered.

A Manchester airport spokesman said their trial had started in December, but only with passengers over 18 until the legal situation with children was clarified. So far 500 people have taken part on a voluntary basis with positive feedback from nearly all those involved.

Passengers also pass through a metal detector before they can board their plane. Airport officials say the scanner image is only seen by a single security officer in a remote location before it is deleted.

A Department for Transport spokesman said: "We understand the concerns expressed about privacy in relation to the deployment of body scanners. It is vital staff are properly trained and we are developing a code of practice to ensure these concerns are properly taken into account. Existing safeguards also mean those operating scanners are separated from the device, so unable to see the person to whom the image relates, and these anonymous images are deleted immediately."

But Shami Chakrabarti, of Liberty, had concerns over the "instant" introduction of scanners: "Where are the government assurances that electronic strip-searching is to be used in a lawful and proportionate and sensitive manner based on rational criteria rather than racial or religious bias?" she said.

Her concerns were echoed by Simon Davies of Privacy International who said he was sceptical of the privacy safeguards being used in the United States. Although the American system insists on the deletion of the images, he believed scans of celebrities or of people with unusual or freakish body profiles would prove an "irresistible pull" for some employees.

The disclosures came as Downing Street insisted British intelligence information that the Detroit plane suspect tried to contact radical Islamists while a student in London was passed on to the US.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's name was included in a dossier of people believed to have made attempts to deal with extremists, but he was not singled out as a particular risk, Brown's spokesman said.

President Barack Obama has criticised US intelligence agencies for failing to piece together information about the 23-year-old that should have stopped him boarding the flight.

Brown's spokesman said "There was security information about this individual's activities and that was shared with the US authorities."

Group slams Chertoff on scanner promotion

2010-01-05T13:37:00.000-08:00

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/01/02/group_slams_chertoff_on_scanner_promotion/

Group slams Chertoff on scanner promotion
January 2, 2010

WASHINGTON - Since the attempted bombing of a US airliner on Christmas Day, former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff has given dozens of media interviews touting the need for the federal government to buy more full-body scanners for airports.

What he has made little mention of is that the Chertoff Group, his security consulting agency, includes a client that manufactures the machines. Chertoff disclosed the relationship on a CNN program Wednesday, in response to a question.

An airport passengers’ rights group on Thursday criticized Chertoff’s use of his former government credentials to advocate for a product that benefits his clients.

“Mr. Chertoff should not be allowed to abuse the trust the public has placed in him as a former public servant to privately gain from the sale of full-body scanners under the pretense that the scanners would have detected this particular type of explosive,’’ said Kate Hanni, founder of FlyersRights.org, which opposes the use of the scanners.

Chertoff’s advocacy for the technology dates to his time in the Bush administration. In 2005, Homeland Security ordered the government’s first batch of the scanners - five from California-based Rapiscan Systems. Rapiscan is one of only two companies that make full-body scanners in accordance with current contract specifications required by the federal government.

Currently 40 body scanners are in use among 19 US airports. The number is expected to skyrocket, at least in part because of the Christmas Day incident. The Transportation Security Administration has said it will order 300 more machines.

In the summer, TSA purchased 150 more machines from Rapiscan with $25 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds. Rapiscan was the only company that qualified for the contract because it had developed technology that performs the screening using a less-graphic body imaging system, which is also less controversial. (Since then, another company, L-3 Communications, has qualified for future contracts, but no new contracts have been awarded.)

-- Washington Post

Clinton donor list doesn't say who gave in '09

2010-01-05T13:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9CV4HFO0.htm

January 1, 2010, 2:10PM ET text size: TT
Clinton donor list doesn't say who gave in '09
By SHARON THEIMER and LARRY MARGASAK
WASHINGTON

Former President Bill Clinton's charity released a donor list Friday under an agreement with President Barack Obama to prevent conflicts with Hillary Rodham Clinton's role as secretary of state, but it failed to identify who gave in 2009, her first year in the Cabinet post.

The donor list disclosed by the William J. Clinton Foundation did show that conservative Richard Scaife, who bankrolled anti-Clinton investigations in the 1990s, pitched in money. Also, Saudi Arabia and Norway each donated in the range of $10 million to $25 million to the former president's charity. Several other foreign governments, including Kuwait, also participated. The biggest donors included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gave more than $25 million.

The contributors also included troubled insurance giant American International Group, banking industry fixture Citigroup, Inc. and entertain Barbra Streisand's foundation.

Clinton foundation spokesman Matt McKenna said that the Saudi government didn't send money to the foundation in 2009. He said the list doesn't single out those who contributed since Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state early last year, but rather identifies donors who have given over a period of years. Many of the names among the thousands on the list also appeared on the first list the Clintons released in December 2008, and there was no way to discern whether these donors also gave last year.

McKenna said that Friday's disclosure, nevertheless, complies with the memorandum of understanding the Clintons reached when Hillary Rodham Clinton took the secretary of state post.

The Clintons agreed to annually disclose the names of donors to the former president's foundation to address concerns about potential conflicts of interest between his fundraising abroad and his wife's role in helping to direct Obama administration foreign policy.

"I am deeply grateful to the many generous contributors who made it possible for my foundation to accomplish so much in 2009, including increasing the number of people on lifesaving HIV/AIDS treatment, helping cities reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and inspiring millions of children to lead healthier lives," Bill Clinton said in a written statement.

The William J. Clinton Foundation works in the United States and around the world on such issues as health care, particularly HIV/AIDS; climate change; and economic development. It also runs the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Ark., which includes Clinton's presidential library.

In addition to failing to say which donors gave in 2009, the foundation didn't identify individual contributors' employers, nationalities or any other details. It gave only ranges rather than precise donations, and didn't provide a fundraising total. It did say that more than 90 percent of the gifts it received last year were in donations of $250 or less.

An eye-catching name is Scaife, who financed investigations of Clinton by American Spectator magazine and backed other conservative groups that heaped criticism on the former president while he was in office.

Scaife contributed between $250,001 and $500,000. McKenna confirmed the donor listed as Richard Scaife was the same person.

As first lady, Mrs. Clinton called the activities of Scaife and others part of "a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president."

James Carville, Clinton's former campaign aide, once called Scaife "the archconservative godfather in (a) heavily funded war against the president."

The list shows that those giving the biggest money to the group over the years included many longtime Clinton friends and political supporters: prominent Democratic fundraisers, overseas businessmen and foreign governments including Saudi Arabia.

In addition to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates' foundation, Canadian mining tycoon and Radcliffe Foundation chief executive Frank Giustra, the Children's Investment Fund Foundation and UNITAID each gave more than $25 million.

Bill Clinton joined Giustra on a 2005 trip to Kazakhstan; within days after the pair met with Kazakhstan's president, Giustra's business lined up preliminary deals giving it rights to buy into uranium projects controlled by a Kazakhstan state-owned enterprise. Bill Clinton has said he had nothing to do with that.

In UNITAID's case, almost all of the money simply passed through the foundation to buy commodities, the foundation said.

Besides Norway and Saudi Arabia, those giving $10 million to $25 million included AUSAID, the Australian government's overseas aid program; longtime Democratic Party donors and fundraisers Stephen Bing and Fred Eychaner; and COPRESIDA, a Dominican Republic government agency formed to fight AIDS, whose donation passed through the foundation for commodity procurement.

Among the contributors of $5 million to $10 million were the Netherlands' Nationale Postcode Loterij, Irish Aid, the Elton John AIDS Foundation, the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative - Canada, and prolific Democratic donor Haim Saban and his family's foundation.

American International Group, the insurance giant bailed out by the U.S. government, gave $250,001 to $500,000 to the foundation, the list showed.

Several foreign governments gave $1 million to $5 million: Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Brunei Darussalam, the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office.

Other donors in that range included the Dubai Foundation; Swedish Postcode Lottery; Friends of Saudi Arabia; energy company Entergy; Streisand's foundation; Citi Foundation, the charity of the Citigroup banking and financial services company; Ethiopian-Saudi business tycoon Sheikh Mohammed H. Al-Amoudi; Saudi businessman Nasser Al-Rashid; international oil, gas and mining businessman Lukas Lundin; international steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal; and international wind power company Suzlon Energy Ltd., which has operations in at least 21 countries; Coca-Cola Co., and the Wal-Mart Foundation.

The Clintons were under no legal obligation to identify foundation donors. Presidents typically do not disclose the names of those who give to their foundations, even when the givers include foreign governments. Former President George W. Bush hasn't said who is contributing to construction of his presidential library in Texas, for example.

In addition to providing a foundation donor list, the Clintons agreed that new donations from foreign governments would be examined by government ethics officers. An Obama spokesman said at the time that the agreement would meet the incoming president's transparency promise and help to avoid potential conflicts of interest.

CIA reportedly ordered Blackwater to murder 9/11 suspect

2010-01-05T13:06:00.000-08:00

http://rawstory.com/2009/01/cia-reportedly-ordered-murder-911-suspect-hamburg/

By Diana Sweet
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 -- 8:48 am

In 2004, the CIA sent a team from the private security firm Blackwater, now Xe, to Hamburg to kill an alleged al Qaeda financier who was investigated for years by German authorities on suspicion of links to al Qaeda, according to a little-highlighted element in a Vanity Fair article to be published this month.

The report cited a source familiar with the program as saying the mission had been kept secret from the German government.

"Among the team's targets, according to a source familiar with the program, was Mamoun Darkazanli, an al Qaeda financier living in Hamburg who had been on the agency's radar for years because of his ties to three of the 9/11 hijackers and to operatives convicted of the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa," writes Vanity Fair's Adam Ciralsky.

"The CIA team supposedly went in 'dark,'' meaning they did not notify their own station -- much less the German government -- of their presence; they then followed Darkazanli for weeks and worked through the logistics of how and where they would take him down," reports the magazine.

Washington authorities, however, "chose not to pull the trigger," it said.

Story continues below...

Vanity Fair has reemerged as a powerful journalistic force in recent years, outing the long-secret "Deep Throat" source of The Washington Post's Watergate reporting.

Earlier reports revealed that the Bush Administration was considering a "targeted assassination" program -- in apparent breach of international treaties -- which would have put lethal targets on the backs of terror suspects beyond the reach of US law. The article adds that the CIA also considering taking out Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan (at left), believed to be the mastermind behind Pakistan's development of a nuclear bomb.

"Khan’s inclusion on the target list, however, would suggest that the assassination effort was broader than has previously been acknowledged," Ciralsky writes.

A source purportedly said: “They say the program didn’t move forward because [they] didn’t have the right skill set or because of inadequate cover. That’s untrue. [The operation continued] for a very long time in some places without ever being discovered. This program died because of a lack of political will.”

Berlin today denies any knowledge of the CIA operation, according to a German media outlet.

Green party parliamentarian Hans-Christian Stroebele told a local paper that it was the government's job to monitor foreign intelligence agencies operating in Germany.

"It can't be true that they knew nothing," Stroebele told the daily Hamburger Abendblatt.

Deutsche Welle, the German news source, further reports today that Federal prosecutors in Hamburg are conducting an investigation into the magazine's CIA assassination plot claims.

German authorities have previously investigated Darkazanli but never charged him; he was arrested in 2004 on a Spanish extradition request but released nine months later.

WHO ‘Swine Flu Pope’ under investigation for gross conflict of interest

2010-01-02T17:17:00.000-08:00

http://www.voltairenet.org/article163240.html

WHO ‘Swine Flu Pope’ under investigation for gross conflict of interest
by F. William Engdahl*

The man with the nickname “Dr Flu”, Professor Albert Osterhaus, of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam Holland has been named by Dutch media researchers as the person at the center of the worldwide Swine Flu H1N1 Influenza A 2009 pandemic hysteria. Not only is Osterhaus the connecting person in an international network that has been described as the Pharma Mafia, he is THE key advisor to WHO on influenza and is intimately positioned to personally profit from the billions of euros in vaccines allegedly aimed at H1N1.

9 DECEMBER 2009

Earlier this year the Second Chamber of the Netherlands Parliament undertook an investigation into alleged conflicts of interest and financial improprieties of the well-known Dr. Osterhaus. Outside of Holland and the Dutch media, the only note of the sensational investigation into Osterhaus’ business affairs came in a tiny note in the respected British magazine, Science.

Osterhaus’s credentials and expertise in his field were not in question. What is in question, according to a short report published by the journal Science, are his links to corporate interests that stand to potentially profit from the swine flu pandemic. Science carried the following brief note in its October 16, 2009 issue about Osterhaus:

"For the past 6 months, one could barely switch on the television in the Netherlands without seeing the face of famed virus hunter Albert Osterhaus talking about the swine flu pandemic. Or so it has seemed. Osterhaus, who runs an internationally renowned virus lab at Erasmus Medical Center, has been Mr. Flu. But last week, his reputation took a nosedive after it was alleged that he has been stoking pandemic fears to promote his own business interests in vaccine development. As Science went to press, the Dutch House of Representatives had even slated an emergency debate about the matter." [1]

On November 3, 2009 it appeared that Osterhaus emerged with at least the damage somewhat under control. An updated Science blog noted, “The House of Representatives of the Netherlands today rejected a motion asking the government to sever all ties with virologist Albert Osterhaus of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, who had been accused of conflicts of interest in his role as a government adviser. But Dutch health minister Ab Klink, meanwhile, announced a "Sunshine Act" compelling scientists to disclose their financial ties to companies.” [2]

The Minister, Ab Klink, reportedly a personal friend of Osterhaus, [3] subsequently issued a statement on the ministry’s website, claiming that Osterhaus was but one of many scientific advisers to the ministry on vaccines for H1N1, and that the Ministry “knew” about the financial interests of Osterhaus. [4] Nothing out of the ordinary, merely pursuit of science and public health, so it seemed.

More careful investigation into the Osterhaus Affair suggests that the world-renowned Dutch Virologist may be at the very center of a multi-billion Euro pandemic fraud which has used human beings in effect as human guinea pigs with untested vaccines and in cases now emerging, resulting in deaths or severe bodily paralysis or injury.

The ‘Bird Shit Hoax’

Albert Osterhaus is no small fish. He stands at the global nexus of every major virus panic of the past decade from the mysterious SARS deaths in HongKong, where current WHO Director Margaret Chan got her start in her career as a local health official. According to his official bio at the European Commission, Osterhaus was engaged in April 2003, at the height of the panic over SARS (Severe Acquired Respiratory Syndrome) in investigation of the Hong Kong outbreak of respiratory illnesses. The EU report states, “he again showed his skill at moving fast to tackle a serious problem. Within three weeks he had proved that the disease was caused by a newly discovered coronavirus that resides in civet cats, other carnivorous animals or bats.” [5]

Then Osterhaus moved on as SARS cases vanished from view, this time publicizing dangers of what he claimed was H5N1 Avian Flu. In 1997 he had already began sounding the alarm following the death in Hong Kong of a three-year-old who Osterhaus learned had had direct contact with birds. Osterhaus went into high gear lobbying across Holland and Europe claiming that a deadly new mutation of avian flu had jumped to humans and that drastic measures were required. He claimed to be the first scientist in the world to show that H5N1 could be transferred into humans. [6]

In a BBC interview in October 2005 on the danger of Avian Flu, Osterhaus declared, “…if the virus manages indeed to, to mutate itself in such a way that it can transmit from human to human, then we have a completely different situation, we might be at the start of the pandemic.” He added, “there is a real chance that this virus could be trafficked by the birds all the way to Europe. There is a real risk, but nobody can estimate the risk at this moment, because we haven’t done the experiments.” [7] It never did manage to mutate, but he was ready to “do the experiments,” presumably for a hefty fee.

To bolster his frightening pandemic scenario, Osterhaus and his lab assistants in Rotterdam began assiduously assembling and freezing samples of, well, bird shit, in an attempt to build a more scientific argument. He claimed that at certain times of the year up to 30% of all European birds acted as carriers of the deadly avian virus, H5N1. He also claimed that farmers working with hens and chickens were then exposed. Osterhaus briefed journalists who dutifully noted his alarm. Politicians were alerted. He wrote papers proposing that the far away deaths in Asia from what he termed H5N1 were coming to Europe, presumably on the wings or in the innards of deadly sick infected birds. He claimed that migratory birds were carrying the deadly new disease as far west as Rügen and Ukraine. [8] He conveniently ignored the fact that birds do not migrate east to west but rather north to south.

Osterhaus’ Avian Flu alarm campaign really took off in 2003 when a Dutch veterinary doctor became ill and died. Osterhaus claimed the death was from H5N1. He convinced the Dutch government to order slaughter of millions of chickens. Yet no other infected persons died from the alleged H5N1. Osterhaus claimed that that was simply proof of the effectiveness of the preemptive slaughter campaign. [9]

Osterhaus claimed that bird feces were the source, via air bombardment or droppings, onto populations and birds below. That was the vehicle for the spread of the deadly new Asian strain of H5N1 he insisted.

There was only one problem with the now voluminous frozen samples of diverse bird excrement he and his associates had collected and frozen at his institute. There was not one single confirmed example of H5N1 virus found in any of his samples. At a May 2006 Congress of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), Osterhaus and his Erasmus colleagues were forced to admit that in testing 100,000 samples of their assiduously saved bird feces, they had discovered not one single case of H5N1 virus. [10]

At a WHO conference in Verona in 2008 titled “Avian influenza at the Human-Animal Interface,” in a presentation to scientific colleagues undoubtedly less impressed by appeals to pandemic emotion than the non-scientific public, Osterhaus admitted that “A proper risk assessment of H5N1 as the cause of a new pandemic cannot be made with the currently available information.” [11] By then, however, his sights were already firmly on other possible pandemic triggers to focus his vaccination activities.

Swine Flu and WHO corruption

When no mass wave of human deaths from Avian Flu materialized and after Roche, maker of Tamiflu, and GlaxoSmithKline had banked billions of dollars in profits from worldwide government stockpiling of their dangerous and reportedly ineffective antiviral drugs - Tamiflu by Roche and Relenza by GlaxoSmithKline - Osterhaus and other WHO advisers turned to other greener pastures.

By April 2009 their search seemed rewarded as La Gloria, a small Mexican village in Veracruz, reported a case of a small child ill with what had been diagnosed as “Swine Flu” or H1N1. With indecent haste the propaganda apparatus of the World Health Organization in Geneva went into gear with statements from the director-general Dr Margaret Chan, about a possible danger of a global pandemic.

Chan made such irresponsible statements as declaring “a public health emergency of international concern.” [12] The further cases of outbreak at La Gloria Mexico were reported on one medical website as, “a ‘strange’ outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm.” [13]

Notably those were symptoms which would make sense in terms of the proximity of one of the world’s largest pig industrial feeding concentrations at La Gloria owned by Smithfield Farms of the USA. Residents had picketed the Smithfield Farms site in Mexico for months complaining of severe respiratory problems from the fecal waste lagoons. That possible cause of the diseases in La Gloria apparently did not interest Osterhaus and his colleagues advising the WHO. The long-awaited “pandemic” that Osterhaus had predicted ever since his involvement with SARS in the Guandgong Province of China in 2003, was now finally at hand.

On June 11, 2009 Margaret Chan of WHO made the declaration of a Phase 6 “Pandemic Emergency” regarding the spread of H1N1 Influenza. Curiously in announcing it, she noted, “On present evidence, the overwhelming majority of patients experience mild symptoms and make a rapid and full recovery, often in the absence of any form of medical treatment.” She then added, ”Worldwide, the number of deaths is small…we do not expect to see a sudden and dramatic jump in the number of severe or fatal infections.”

It later was learned that Chan acted, following heated debates inside WHO, on the advice of the scientific advisory group of WHO, or SAGE, the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts. One of the members of SAGE at the time and today was Dr. Albert “Mr Flu” Osterhaus.

Not only was Osterhaus in a key position to advocate the panic-inducing WHO “Pandemic emergency” declaration. He was also chairman of the leading private European Scientific Working group on Influenza (ESWI), which describes itself as a “multidisciplinary group of key opinion leaders in influenza [that] aims to combat the impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza.” Osterhaus’ ESWI is the vital link as they themselves describe it, “between the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin and the University of Connecticut, USA.”

What is more significant about the ESWI is that its work is entirely financed by the same pharma mafia companies that make billions on the pandemic emergency as governments around the world are compelled to buy and stockpile vaccines on declaration of a WHO Pandemic. The funders of ESWI include H1N1 vaccine maker Novartis, Tamiflu distributor, Hofmann-La Roche, Baxter Vaccines, MedImmune, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Pasteur and others.

Not to lose the point, the world-leading virologist, official adviser on H1N1 to the governments of the UK and Holland, Dr Albert Osterhaus, head of the Department of Virology at the Erasmus Medical College of Rotterdam, also sat on the WHO’s elite SAGE and served as chairman at the same time of the pharma industry-sponsored ESWI, which in turn urged dramatic steps to vaccinate the world against the grave danger of a new Pandemic they insisted could rival the feared 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.

The Wall Street bank, JP Morgan, estimated that in large part as a result of the WHO pandemic decision, the giant pharma firms that also finance Osterhaus’ ESWI work, stand to reap some €7.5 to €10 billion in profits. [14]

A fellow member of WHO’s SAGE is Dr Frederick Hayden, of Britain’s Wellcome Trust and reportedly a close friend of Osterhaus. Hayden also receives money for “advisory” services from Roche and GlaxoSmithKline among other pharma giants involved in producing products related to the H1N1 panic.

Chairman of WHO’s SAGE is another British scientist, Prof. David Salisbury of the UK Department of Health. He also heads the WHO H1N1 Advisory Group. Salisbury is a robust defender of the pharma industry. He has been accused by UK citizen health group One Click of covering up the proven links between vaccines and an explosive rise in infant autism as well as links between the vaccine Gardasil and palsy and even death. [15]

Then on September 28, 2009 the same Salisbury stated, “There is a very clear view in the scientific community that there is no risk from the inclusion of Thiomersal.” The vaccine being used for H1N1 in Britain is primarily produced by GlaxoSmithKlilne. It contains the mercury preservative Thiomersol. Because of growing evidence that Thiomersol in vaccines might be related to autism in children in the United States, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Public Health Service called for it to be removed from vaccines. [16]

Yet another SAGE member at WHO with intimate financial ties to the vaccine makers that benefit from SAGE’s recommendations to WHO is Dr. Arnold Monto, a paid consultant to vaccine maker MedImmune, Glaxo and ViroPharma.

Even more, the meetings of the “independent” scientists of SAGE are attended by “observers” who include, yes, the very vaccine producers GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Baxter and company. One might ask if the SAGE are supposed to be the world’s leading experts on flu and vaccines, why they would ask the vaccine makers to sit in.

In the past decade the WHO, in order to boost funds at its disposal entered into what it calls “public private partnerships.” Instead of receiving its funds solely from member United Nations governments as its original purpose had been, WHO today receives almost double its normal UN budget in the form of grants and financial support from private industry. The industry? The very drug and vaccine makers who benefit from decisions like the June 2009 H1N1 Pandemic emergency declaration. As the main financiers of the WHO bureaucracy, naturally the Pharma Mafia and their friends receive what has been called “open door red carpet treatment” in Geneva. [17]

In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in Germany, epidemiologist Dr. Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration, an organization of independent scientists evaluating all flu related studies, noted the implications of the privatization of WHO and the commercialization of health:

“…one of the extraordinary features of this influenza — and the whole influenza saga — is that there are some people who make predictions year after year, and they get worse and worse. None of them so far have come about, and these people are still there making these predictions. For example, what happened with the bird flu, which was supposed to kill us all? Nothing. But that doesn’t stop these people from always making their predictions. Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur.
SPIEGEL: Who do you mean? The World Health Organization (WHO)? Jefferson: The WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies. They’ve built this machine around the impending pandemic. And there’s a lot of money involved, and influence, and careers, and entire institutions! And all it took was one of these influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding... [18]

When asked if the WHO had deliberately declared the Pandemic Emergency in order to create a huge market for H1N1 vaccines and drugs, Jefferson replied,

“Don’t you think there’s something noteworthy about the fact that the WHO has changed its definition of pandemic? The old definition was a new virus, which went around quickly, for which you didn’t have immunity, and which created a high morbidity and mortality rate. Now the last two have been dropped, and that’s how swine flu has been categorized as a pandemic.” [19]

Conveniently enough, the WHO published the new Pandemic definition in April 2009 just in time to allow WHO, on advice of SAGE and others like Albert “Dr Flu” Osterhaus and David Salisbury, to declare the mild cases of flu dubbed H1N1 Influenza A to be declared Pandemic Emergency. [20]

In a relevant footnote, the Washington Post on December 8 in an article on the severity, or lack of same, of the world H1N1 „pandemic“ reported that, “with the second wave of H1N1 infections having crested in the United States, leading epidemiologists are predicting that the pandemic could end up ranking as the mildest since modern medicine began documenting influenza outbreaks.” [21]

Russian Parliamentarian and chairman of the Duma Health Committee, Igor Barinow has called on the Russian Representative to WHO in Geneva to order an official investigation into the growing evidence of massive corruption of the WHO by the pharmaceutical industry. “There are grave accusations of corruption within the WHO,” said Barinow. “An international commission of inquiry is urgently required.” [22]

[1] Martin Enserink, In "Holland, the Public Face of Flu Takes a Hit", Science, 16 October 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5951, pp. 350 – 351; DOI: 10.1126/science.326_350b.

[2] Science, November 3, 2009, "Roundup 11/3 The Brink Edition".

[3] Article from Dutch, "De Farma maffia Deel 1 Osterhaus BV", 28 november 2009.

[4] Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport, "Financiële belangen Osterhaus waren bekend Nieuwsbericht", 30 september 2009.

[5] European Commission, „Research“, Dr Albert Osterhaus.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Jane Corbin, Interview with Dr Albert Osterhaus, BBC Panorama, 4 October, 2005.

[8] Karin Steinberger, "Vogelgrippe: Der Mann mit der Vogelperspektive", Süddeutsche Zeitung, 20 October, 2005.

[9] Ibid.

[10] "Schweinegrippe—Geldgieriger Psychopath Auslöser der Pandemie?", Polskaweb News,

[11] Ab Osterhaus, "External factors influencing H5N1 mutation/reassortment events with pandemic potential", OIE, 7-9 October 2008, Verona, Italy. Download

[12] Health Advisory, Swine Flu Overview, April 2009.

[13] Biosurveillance, Swine Flu in Mexico- Timeline of Events, April 24, 2009.

[14] Cited in Louise Voller, Kristian Villesen, "Stærk lobbyisme bag WHO-beslutning om massevaccination" , Information, Copenhagen, 15 November 2009.

[15] Jane Bryant, et al, "The One Click Group Response: Prof. David Salisbury Threatens Legal Action", 4 March, 2009, Download.

[16] Prof. David Salisbury cited in, "Swine flu vaccine to contain axed additive", London Evening Standard and Gulf News, 28 September 2009, accessed in .

[17] Bert Ehgartner, "Schwindel mit der Schweinegrippe Ist die Aufregung ein Coup der Pharmaindustrie?"

[18] Tom Jefferson, Interview with Epidemiologist Tom Jefferson: ’A Whole Industry Is Waiting For A Pandemic’, Der Spiegel, 21 July 2009.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Louise Voller, Kristian Villesen, "Mystisk ændring af WHO’s definition af en pandemi", Copenhagen Information, 15 November 2009.

[21] Rob Stein, "Flu Pandemic Could Be Mild", Washington Post, December 8, 2009.

[22] Polskanet, "Russland fordert internationale Untersuchung", 5 December 2009.

Ex-Homeland Security Chief Chertoff Pushes Body Scanners, Abuses Public Trust

2010-01-02T07:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/31/AR2009123102821.html

January 1, 2010 by The Washington Post
Ex-Homeland Security Chief Head Said to Abuse Public Trust by Touting Body Scanners
by Kimberly Kindy

Since the attempted bombing of a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day, former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff has given dozens of media interviews touting the need for the federal government to buy more full-body scanners for airports.

Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, speaks at the ceremonial swearing-in of Paul J. Fishman, US Attorney for the District of New Jersey at Rutgers Law School in Newark, N.J., Monday, Dec. 14, 2009.
(AP Photo/Jeff Zelevansky)What he has made little mention of is that the Chertoff Group, his security consulting agency, includes a client that manufactures the machines. The relationship drew attention after Chertoff disclosed it on a CNN program Wednesday, in response to a question.

An airport passengers' rights group on Thursday criticized Chertoff, who left office less than a year ago, for using his former government credentials to advocate for a product that benefits his clients.

"Mr. Chertoff should not be allowed to abuse the trust the public has placed in him as a former public servant to privately gain from the sale of full-body scanners under the pretense that the scanners would have detected this particular type of explosive," said Kate Hanni, founder of FlyersRights.org, which opposes the use of the scanners.

Chertoff's advocacy for the technology dates back to his time in the Bush administration. In 2005, Homeland Security ordered the government's first batch of the scanners -- five from California-based Rapiscan Systems.

Today, 40 body scanners are in use at 19 U.S. airports. The number is expected to skyrocket at least in part because of the Christmas Day incident. The Transportation Security Administration this week said it will order 300 more machines.

In the summer, TSA purchased 150 machines from Rapiscan with $25 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds. Rapiscan was the only company that qualified for the contract because it had developed technology that performs the screening using a less-graphic body imaging system, which is also less controversial. (Since then, another company, L-3 Communications, has qualified for future contracts, but no new contracts have been awarded.)

Over the past week, Chertoff has repeatedly talked about the need for expanding the use of the technology in airports, saying it could detect bombs like the one federal authorities say Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, carried onto the Detroit-bound aircraft.

"We could deploy the scanning machines that we currently are beginning to deploy in the U.S. that will give us the ability to see what someone has concealed underneath their clothing," Chertoff said Wednesday in an interview on CNN. The incident on the Detroit-bound plane provided "a very vivid lesson in the value of that machinery," he said.

The proof that power corrupts

2009-12-30T15:16:00.000-08:00

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1239270/The-proof-power-corrupts-MPs-expenses.html

The proof that power corrupts (and no, it's not MPs' expenses)
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 11:17 AM on 30th December 2009

After a year of outrage at MPs' dodgy expenses and extortionate bank bonuses, it is a maxim few of us will need convincing about.

But psychologists have proven the obvious - that nothing corrupts quite like power.

Researchers found that those in authority are more likely to cheat, lie and feather their own nests than ordinary citizens at the bottom of the pile.

At the same time, the powerful are more likely to pass moral judgment on the behaviour of others.

The psychologists behind the study said they were astonished at the scale of 'moral hypocrisy' they found and how easily ordinary-people become corrupted when given the trappings of power.

A team from the Kellogg School of Management in Illinois carried out a series of experiments on volunteers through role playing games.

In one test, subjects who were told to assume the part of someone in power were found more likely to cheat at a dice game.

In another, the powerful were quickest to condemn those who speed but also most likely to drive too quickly themselves.

Researcher Adam Galinsky said: 'This research is especially relevant to the biggest scandals of 2009 and we look back on how private behaviour often contradicted the public stance of particular individuals in power.'

Sri Lanka: Five Years after Tsunami, Many Still without Shelter

2009-12-28T15:58:00.000-08:00

Go three articles down and see that almost a half a billion tsunami dollars for Sri Lanka is missing. Where did the money go????

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49804

Sri Lanka: Five Years after Tsunami, Many Still without Shelter
Amantha Perera
IPS News
Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:13 EST

Kalmunai, Sri Lanka. "We have been here for almost five years. So many promises have been made, but very few have been kept," complains Mohideen Nafia, 22, one of the survivors of the 2004 Asian tsunami still living in a temporary facility in the coastal town of Kalmunai, located 300 kilometres east of the capital, Colombo.

Newly married Nafia would have preferred a house of her own with her husband. But at the moment she has to make do with what amounts to a shelter, a one-room unit in a government-provided disaster camp, which the couple shares with Nafia's family of five and is located about a one kilometre from the beach.

Nafia hails from the Sainathimaruthu village in Kalmunai, a major domestic fishing hub that bore the brunt of what has been touted as one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. Three of its villages facing the sea - Maradamunai, Sainathimaruthu and Karathivu - suffered the heaviest damage at the time of the tsunami.

When the Asian tsunami, triggered by a 9.3-magnitude earthquake, hit the coasts of countries bordering the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26, 2004, hundreds of thousands of people across Asia were washed away at sea.

According to the International Federation of Red Cross some 226,000 people in 13 countries were killed in the aftermath of the tsunami. One of the hardest hit was Sri Lanka, along with India, Indonesia, and Thailand.

In the South Asian island state more than 35,000 people died, over one million were displaced, and some 100,000 houses were either damaged or destroyed by the tsunami.

At least one-third of the deaths, or some 10,000, were reported from the Ampara district that comprises Kalmunai, according to official government data. In the same district, approximately 27,000 houses were destroyed by the tsunami, the bulk of which was in Kalmunai. Villagers estimate that some 8,500 lives were lost in the densely packed beach at the height of the disaster.

Overall, the unprecedented disaster left a reconstruction bill of 330 billion rupees (3.2 billion U.S. dollars). The reconstruction effort was spearheaded by a government agency set up soon after the tsunami and which received the support of dozens of United Nations and other international agencies.

Sri Lanka's Reconstruction and Development Agency has since wound down as has the massive reconstruction effort. Still many are without homes they could call their own.

"Getting land for the new houses has been a big problem; we have to first locate the land. If it is privately owned, (we) buy it," says Ismail Thawfiek, the additional government agent for Sainathimaruthu village in Kalmunai, where Nafia hails from.

Most of the available lands are paddy or rice fields, which he says puts more pressure on otherwise limited public funds, as they need to be filled. "The biggest delay (in rebuilding the affected houses) has been in finding land and preparing it so that we can build the houses," Thawfiek says.

The lack of land has been exacerbated by the government's imposition of the no-build buffer zone along the Kalmunai coast. The then Sri Lankan government initially imposed a limit of 200 metres from the sea soon after the tragedy. Owing to pressure from the homeless survivors, it was later reduced to 65 m at Kalmunai and 100 m elsewhere in the tsunami-affected parts of the country, according to government officials

With just three days away from the fifth anniversary of the 2004 Asian tsunami, some 1,300 families, including Nafia's, are still waiting for their houses to be built, since the government imposed a no-construction buffer zone along the beach soon after the tsunami.

"Even after five years since the tsunami, there are still problems, there are still issues," admits Thawfiek.

Nafia's grief is understandable. The sense of despair gripping her is matched only by her deplorable living conditions. Tin roofs are rusting, dirty water stagnates near the front door step and large pools of rainwater and garbage rot behind the tents. Chickens raised by families roam the compound, where small children play marbles.

"Look at this," Nafia says, as she points to her squalid surroundings. It is "like living in hell. When it rains, it is all water, if it does not, it is all flies," she says while waving her hands to chase away the flies.

She adds that none of the international relief agencies that poured aid into the tsunami-hit areas like Kalmunai helped her build her house while others are still waiting for government promises to be fulfilled, notably the reconstruction of their tsunami-destroyed homes. "The life we knew before the tsunami is like a dream. I don't know why this happened to us."

"We will give them houses very soon next year," Thawfiek assures, arguing that the construction of new houses is moving according to plan once land has been located. At least 5,000 houses damaged by the tsunami in Kalmunai have either been reconstructed or repaired.

To date, there are at least 13 disaster camps - with at least 1,000 shelters out of an original 18,000 in the Ampara district - still spread through the coastal town while hundreds more that were displaced by the tsunami are still living with relatives.

Quite apart from Nafia's complaint, the Kalmunai beach appears to have returned to what it was before the deadly tsunami waves left a path of destruction. It is now is a hive of activity - fishermen tend to their nets on the beach while others attend to the large multi-day trawlers anchored just offshore.

"We have returned to what (our lives were) before the waves struck, maybe even better," says Mohideen Ajimal, one of the first fish wholesalers to return to the beach after the tsunami. Ajimal lost an infant son and a daughter to the disaster.

Pointing to the large boat repair yard that has been erected near his business premises, he says that it would never have been built if there was reconstruction effort after the tsunami. "We lost so much, but life has to go on, and it is better if life goes on better than before," he tells IPS.

Next to the new fishermen's society building is a tall red tower with loud-hailers pointing in all directions to warn the residents of any tsunami threat. "That helps too," says Ajimal as his eyes darted toward the tower.

Among the houses that have been rebuilt since the 2004 tsunami disaster are swanky new structures, painted in bright colours that stand out amid the dull sun-baked cement facades of others. They have been rebuilt by owners who could afford to finance them. New schools have also been constructed, replacing the damaged ones.

Yet, there are still remnants of the huge Asian tsunami waves' deadly foray inland in this predominantly Muslim town. In place of wall-to-wall houses that used to stand next to the beach before the tsunami struck are large, empty sandy patches. Wooden poles sticking out of mounds mark off the spots where thousands were buried.

On the side of the road that runs alongside the beach are the occasional houses or fishing huts that have been deserted by owners after the tsunami. They are bereft of roofs and window frames, having been washed away, decayed or carted away by thieves. Here goats seek shelter when the sun is too hot.

"We had a good house near the sea, but I lost two children and I don't want to go back," says Abdul Mannas, who has since moved to a new housing site about two km from the sea.

But at least the 35-year-old father of three is happy. He now lives in a new housing complex just outside Kalmunai town. "This house is smaller (than I had expected), but we are happier," he says. "We can build two-story houses or extensions if we want to." The houses at the French Friendship Village, where he lives, were built with the support of the French government.

Mannas says the he and others gladly vacated the protective zone. "It is death zone on the coast," he says. "I don't want to live there."

But for those living in small tin-roofed sheds like Nafia, where three or so families share the dimly lit units in the camp near the Jumma Mosque, the nightmare never ends, not since the tsunami struck the Indian Ocean. "We have waited long enough; five years is a long time," she rues.

The Parker Griffith Story Takes Some Curious Turns

2009-12-27T07:23:00.000-08:00

The fat cat wants to protect his selfish, self-serving, power-keeping, corrupt ass so he switched parties because the dems are going to suffer heavy losses this year. More, his constituents, former dem party members and supporters paid for the switch. Knives in everyone's backs!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Parker-Griffith-Story-by-Roger-Shuler-091224-950.html

December 24, 2009
The Parker Griffith Story Takes Some Curious Turns
By Roger Shuler
Cross Posted at Legal Schnauzer

The story of U.S. Rep. Parker Griffith (R-AL) and his switch from the Democratic to the Republican Party continues to evolve, with political intrigue brewing on several fronts.

Perhaps our favorite part of the story is that it inspired one of the most insightful statements about modern conservatism that we've ever read.

More on that in a moment. But first, let's examine the latest news on the Griffith front. Reporter Patricia C. McCarter of The Huntsville Times provides a solid overview. Here are some highlights:

* The Alabama Democratic Party (ADC) accused Main Street Strategies, Griffith's political-consulting firm, of downloading the party's voter identification data in the "wee hours" before Griffith changed parties. Here is the official ADC release, and Raw Story has a splendid overview piece on the controversy.

* Griffith said he did not commission a poll to determine his electability as a Democrat. But that contradicts a Congressional Quarterly report that said Griffith's office confirmed he did commission a poll.

* Griffith's press secretary, Sean Magers, resigned.

* Griffith predicted that he would be a presence on congressional committees, but he could not point to any agreement he has with Republicans regarding committee assignments.

Is Parker Griffith a two-faced phony? Raw Story found evidence that the answer is yes, considering that Griffith cited his opposition to health-care reform as a prime reason for leaving the Democratic Party. Reports Raw Story:

David Weigel at the Washington Independent notes that Griffith's denouncement of the health care reform effort doesn't jibe with his pro-health reform track record. Greg Sargent catches a May 2006 interview with then-State Senator Parker Griffith in which he refers to himself as a "life-long" Democrat and a supporter of "health care for all of the citizens."

Perhaps most importantly, we will be eternally grateful for Griffith's party switch because it inspired some brilliant writing from "DavidNYC" of Daily Kos.

In a diary titled "AL--05: Parker Griffith Can Lose," "DavidNYC" writes:

It's important to remember that to remain a member in good standing of the conservative movement, it isn't enough just to vote a certain way. You have to evidence a very particular tribal belonging - you need to hate the right people, be ignorant of the right facts, be fearful of the right bogeymen, and be arrogant about the whole enterprise. If you somehow fail this tribal litmus test, it doesn't matter how right-wing you are.

Talk about cutting to the chase. We raised the issue of American tribalism, and the dangers it presents, in a post the day after the November 2008 elections. We even noted the irony that we are fighting wars in two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, that are dysfunctional largely because of tribalism.

It took us more than a dozen paragraphs to make our point. But "DavidNYC" gets right to the ugly truth about conservatism in three short sentences.

Brilliant stuff. Thank you, Parker Griffith.

Operation Blue Lightning

2009-12-27T06:34:00.000-08:00

The Bush Family & the Drug Biz

Sri Lanka tsunami aid misappropriated: watchdog

2009-12-26T18:26:00.000-08:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091226/wl_sthasia_afp/srilankatsunamieconomygraft5years

Sri Lanka tsunami aid misappropriated: watchdog
Sat Dec 26, 11:42 am ET

COLOMBO (AFP) – Nearly half a billion dollars in tsunami aid for Sri Lanka is unaccounted for and over 600 million dollars has been spent on projects unrelated to the disaster, an anti-corruption watchdog said Saturday.

Berlin-based Transparency International demanded an audit of the money received by the Sri Lankan government to help victims of the Asian tsunami which hit the island on December 26, 2004, killing 31,000 people.

The group's Sri Lankan chapter said the public have a right to know how the aid money was spent as the tropical nation marked the fifth anniversary of the tsunami.

The group alleged that out of 2.2 billion dollars received for relief, 603.4 million dollars was spent on projects unrelated to the disaster.

Another half a billion dollars was missing, the group said.

"There is no precise evidence to explain the missing sum of 471.9 million dollars," the Transparency International statement issued in Colombo added.

An "audit should be done by the government to explain the utilisation of the money received and the challenges faced," the group said.

An government official declined comment Saturday on the allegations but Colombo has consistently rejected such accusations in the past.

An initial government audit in 2005 found that less than 13 percent of the aid had been spent, but there has been no formal examination since, Transparency International said.

Top 10 Ethics Scandals of 2009

2009-12-24T14:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.alternet.org/story/144780/top_10_ethics_scandals_of_2009

Top 10 Ethics Scandals of 2009
By CREW Staff, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
December 24, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144780/

EDITOR'S NOTE: Not a year goes by that isn't marred by scandal, but in the world of ethics, 2009 just might take the cake. This list of the year's top 10 ethics scandals was compiled by the staff of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington -- better known as CREW.

Let Them Eat Cake!

As the federal government authorized the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to bail out the nation's failing financial institutions, the Wall Street executives responsible for the financial meltdown awarded themselves $18.4 billion in bonuses. AIG, which is now 80 percent owned by American taxpayers, doled out $165 million in executive bonuses. Merrill Lynch authorized $3.6 billion in bonuses after receiving $10 billion from the government and on the brink of bankruptcy, $209 million of which went to 10 bankers alone. President Obama voiced the public's anger over the bonuses, stating, "It is shameful. And part of what we're going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint and show some discipline and show some sense of responsibility."

In June 2009, the White House appointed Kenneth Feinberg as "special master for compensation," more commonly known as the "pay czar," to oversee the compensation for senior executives and the top 100 earners at AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, General Motors, GMAC, Chrysler and Chrysler Financial, all companies that received money through TARP.

Although the pay czar is taking steps to limit bonuses, Wall Street expects to dole out bonuses 40 percent higher than 2008 levels, totaling an estimated $26 billion, by the end of 2009. The federal pay czar is currently trying to force AIG to cut back on $198 million in bonuses. Meanwhile, the government still awaits TARP repayments from some of these firms.

CREW's holiday wish: For the federal government's pay czar to exert his authority over bailed out firms to stop excessive bonuses, demonstrating that the government really does value the interests of Main Street at least as much as Wall Street.

The SEC: Failing to Catch Madoff Since '92

A series of reports from the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) Inspector General revealed the complete failure of the SEC to detect and prevent Bernard Madoff's $65 billion Ponzi scheme over a period of at least 16 years. The reports detail deep systemic problems within the SEC's Enforcement Division, the repeated incompetence of SEC staff, and the commission's seeming indifference when confronted time and again with unmistakable evidence of Madoff's massive fraud.

The first substantive complaint about the Madoff Ponzi scheme was filed in 1992 and resulted in an insufficient and inconclusive SEC inquiry. That complaint was followed by five additional complaints and multiple SEC inquiries that were again poorly executed and indeterminate. One of those complaints was filed by whistleblower Harry Markopolos, who first informed the SEC of Madoff's illegal operations in 2000. Markopolos followed up with the SEC numerous times, providing them with additional analysis and evidence. (One of his reports was titled, "The World's Largest Hedge Fund Is a Fraud.") After the scandal broke Markopolos was hailed as a hero. He testified before Congress, calling the SEC, "captive to the industry it regulates," and adding that it "roars like a lion and bites like a flea."

CREW's holiday wish: A new and completely reconstituted SEC with an enforcement division that understands how to enforce the vital laws that protect the public from schemers like Bernard Madoff.

Public Corruption Prosecutions Were So 2009

In 2009, the Supreme Court accepted three cases challenging honest services law, a provision in the federal mail-fraud statute making it illegal for public or private employees to "deprive another of the intangible right of honest services." A critical prosecutorial tool for fighting public corruption, this statute has been used to convict former Rep. William Jefferson, D-LA, and a large number of those involved in the Jack Abramoff scandal. During oral arguments, the Supreme Court justices focused on all the ways the statute can be misapplied, strongly suggesting they plan to limit the statute's breadth, if not hold it unconstitutional. Already, the prosecutors handling the case of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich have indicated they will re-indict the governor to delete the honest services fraud counts. In addition, Rep. Jefferson plans to ask the court to give him a new trial, though he was convicted of other charges in addition to honest services fraud.

CREW's holiday wish: For the honest services fraud statute to remain intact so the law can continue to be used to convict the likes of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Rep. Jefferson.

What, the FEC Is Supposed to Enforce (Not Gut) Campaign Finance Laws?

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is failing in its mandated mission to administer and enforce regulations governing the financing of federal elections. Violations of federal campaign finance law are likely to go unpunished thanks to the partisan deadlock that has rendered the FEC ineffectual. With three Republican and three Democratic appointees, the FEC consistently fails to take action against even the most egregious violations. As the Washington Post wrote in an op-ed on June 15: "The three Republican appointees are turning the commission into The Little Agency That Wouldn't: wouldn't launch investigations, wouldn't bring cases, wouldn't even accept settlements that the staff had already negotiated."

By not taking action against federal candidates who break the rules, the FEC is encouraging unethical campaign tactics that privilege money over principle. The FEC commissioners' failure to take their oversight mission seriously threatens to undermine campaign finance laws and further flood the electoral process with money. With a lack of campaign finance oversight, political influence on Capitol Hill will be bought by the highest bidder and the common good will be sacrificed to special interests.

CREW's holiday wish: A restructured FEC with an odd number of commissioners, as opposed to the current even six, would go a long way toward ending the deadlock and allowing the FEC to effectively enforce campaign finance laws.

How Sen. John Ensign Is Losing Friends and Alienating Constituents

On June 16, 2009, Sen. John Ensign, R-NV, confessed he had engaged in an affair with Cynthia Hampton, his campaign and PAC treasurer, who is married to Doug Hampton, the senator's then-administrative assistant. In his attempts to cover up the affair, Sen. Ensign likely violated multiple ethics regulations and laws. First, by terminating the Hamptons after the affair ended, Sen. Ensign may have engaged in sexual harassment. Second, the failure to disclose the $96,000 severance payment made to Cynthia Hampton likely was a criminal violation of campaign finance law. Most damning, Sen. Ensign conspired with Doug Hampton to help him violate the one-year lobbying ban for senior staff. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, does not come out all that well either. He admitted to serving as an intermediary between Sen. Ensign and Doug Hampton, but ludicrously claimed to be "counseling him as a physician and as an ordained deacon. That is privileged communication that I will never reveal to anybody. Not to the [Senate] Ethics Committee, not to a court of law, not to anybody." Sen. Coburn also helped Doug Hampton violate the lobbying ban by meeting with Hampton's lobbying clients at Hampton's request.

CREW's holiday wish: Sen. Ensign should resign and save us all from more excruciating details about his reprehensible conduct. More realistically, Sens. Ensign and Coburn should be investigated and held accountable for their actions.

Gov. Mark Sanford's Excellent Argentinian Adventure

In June, it was revealed that conservative Republican South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford had taken a secret trip to Argentina to see his mistress. In an effort to evade discovery, the governor told his staff he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail and cut off all communication, leaving the state without an acting governor, potentially in violation of the state Constitution. Later, Americans learned that Gov. Sanford had visited his mistress on several occasions and may have illegally used state funds to facilitate the affair.

On Dec. 16, 2009, the Judiciary Committee of the South Carolina State House voted not to impeach the governor but instead unanimously proposed censure for abuse of power. The State Ethics Commission is considering 37 charges against the governor for a variety of travel and campaign finance violations, which could result in thousands of dollars in fines and the state Attorney General is considering criminal charges. When the affair was exposed, Gov. Sanford resigned his post as chair of the Republican Governors Association. The question remains, why was Gov. Sanford's misconduct serious enough to force him to step down as chair of the RGA, but not bad enough for him to resign as governor?

CREW's holiday wish: For South Carolina's Attorney General and State Ethics Commission to find the governor violated state laws, forcing him (finally!) to do the honorable thing and resign. This would allow the state's government to focus on serving the citizens of South Carolina, where nearly one in four adults are unemployed.

Rep. Charlie Rangel and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year

In 2009, Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-NY, became the poster child for congressional corruption thanks to his flagrant violations of House rules. The House ethics committee is considering six separate matters: Rep. Rangel's lease of four rent-stabilized properties in New York, one of which he used as a campaign office; his use of congressional stationery to raise funds for the Charles B. Rangel Center at the City College of New York; his failure to report on his financial disclosure forms and to the IRS approximately $75,000 in rental income on a Dominican Republic villa; his legislative support for Nabors Industries in exchange for a donation to the Rangel Center; amendments to his personal financial disclosure records, disclosing at least $600,000 in unreported assets; and misuse of the House garage.

CREW, editorial boards across the country, and some members of Congress -- noting the irony of the chairman of the tax writing committee failing to pay taxes and filing inaccurate financial disclosure reports -- have called for him to resign his chairmanship pending the outcome of the ethics committee inquiry. As long as Rep. Rangel retains the confidence of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, however, his position remains secure.

CREW's holiday wish: For Rep. Rangel to resign his chairmanship pending the outcome of the ethics committee's investigation and that he (finally!) be held accountable for his misconduct.

Sure, the Senate Passed Ethics Legislation. Oh, Did You Think That Meant Something?

The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (HLOGA), which became law in 2007, required senators to identify themselves when using a "hold," a parliamentary maneuver that is frequently used to stall or stop legislation or presidential nominations. Prior to HLOGA, senators had been able to secretly and indefinitely place holds with no questions asked. To see if the new law was being enforced, CREW undertook a day-by-day review of the Senate Calendar, where these disclosures were supposed to be made, and found that a proper disclosure had been made only twice in over two years. Meanwhile, CREW found numerous examples of anonymous senators using this decidedly undemocratic tactic to block nominations and bills, including bills promoting government transparency, from seeing the light of day.

CREW's holiday wish: For the Senate ethics committee to investigate members who have placed secret holds in violation of HLOGA and for senators to abide by their promise – ironically, made in an ethics reform package, but promptly reneged upon – to end this cowardly practice.

Earmarks Traded for Campaign Contributions? CREW is Shocked. Shocked.

CREW has covered the ongoing saga of the now-defunct PMA Group since 2007, when we first added Rep. John Murtha, D-PA, to our Most Corrupt report for his involvement with the shady lobbying firm. The PMA Group, founded by former House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee aide Paul Magliocchetti, is under federal investigation for its role in an alleged influence trading and pay-to-play scheme to win contracts for its lobbying clients. Earlier this year it was reported that the PMA Group had been raided by federal agents as part of their investigation into the allegations. In addition to Rep. Murtha, the scandal has ensnared at least six other lawmakers in investigations by both the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) and the House ethics committee. Not surprisingly, the OCE advised against a formal investigation into the activities of at least four of those lawmakers, including Rep. Murtha.

CREW's holiday wish: For Congress to institute real ethics reform that would prevent these cozy relationships between lobbyists and members from taking hold in the first place; and for the House ethics committee to hold members involved in these pay-to-play schemes accountable for their actions.

No Really, Congress Will Drain the Swamp Next Year...Promise

This year, for the first time in Gallup's annual Honesty and Ethics of Professions poll, 55 percent of Americans said the honesty and ethical standards of "members of Congress" are low or very low. Despite vows to "drain the swamp" Congress continues to protect its own; not a single representative was publicly reprimanded or sanctioned by the House ethics committee in 2009 -- and it's not as if there were no offenders to choose from. Moreover, although the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) was created to strengthen ethics enforcement, there has been no noticeable change and ethics investigations still drag on for years. For example, after learning he was listed on a leaked House ethics committee memo as under investigation, Rep. Gary Miller, R-CA -- a member CREW has targeted for ethics violations -- fumed that he has heard nothing from the ethics committee several years after charges were first leveled. Rep. Miller told The Hill, "I gave them three big books of information -- proprietary, private information -- and I heard nothing back. Not a peep, and now this? To say that I am angry is a vast understatement."

There is also significant confusion regarding the roles of each ethics body, with both members and staffers expressing puzzlement over the dual track with both the ethics committee and the OCE investigating the same matters, such as in the case of members' involvement with the PMA Group. Another problem is the animosity between the two bodies. This fall, the turf battle boiled over into public view over charges against Rep. Sam Graves, R-MO, after the OCE found reason to believe there was an appearance of a conflict of interest, but the ethics committee exonerated the congressman while criticizing the OCE's investigative procedures.

CREW's holiday wish: For both the ethics committee and the OCE to work cooperatively to enforce ethics regulations and restore the public's trust in Congress.

Federal War Spending Exceeds All Spending By States

2009-12-24T12:03:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Federal-War-Spending-Excee-by-Sherwood-Ross-091223-676.html

December 23, 2009
Federal War Spending Exceeds All Spending By States
By Sherwood Ross

The U.S. spends more for war than all state governments combined spend for the health, education, welfare and safety of 308 million Americans.

Joseph Henchman, director of state projects for the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C., says the states collected a total of $781 billion in taxes in 2008.

For a rough comparison, according to Wikipedia data, the total budget for defense in fiscal year 2010 will be at least $880 billion and could possibly top $1 trillion. That's more than all the state governments collect.

Henchman says all American local governments combined collect about $500 billion in taxes. Add that to total state tax take and you get about $1.3 trillion. This means Uncle Sam's Pentagon is sopping up about as much money as all state, county, city, and other governmental units spend to run the country.

A question that describes the above and answers itself is: In what area can the Federal government operate where states and cities cannot tread? The answer is: foreign affairs---raising armies, fighting wars, conducting diplomacy, etc. And so Uncle Sam keeps enlarging this area. His emphasis is not on diplomacy, either.

For every buck spent by the State Department, which gets some $50 billion a year, the Pentagon spends $20. As for the Peace Corps, its budget is a paltry $375 million---hardly enough to keep the Pentagon elephant in peanuts.

Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz and finance authority Linda Bilmes write in their "The Three Trillion Dollar War"(W.W. Norton), "defense spending has been growing as a percentage of discretionary funding (money that is not required to be spent on entitlements like Social Security), from 48 percent in 2000 to 51 percent today. That means that our defense needs are gobbling up a larger share of taxpayers' money than ever before."

And they add, "The Pentagon's budget has increased by more than $600 billion, cumulatively, since we invaded Iraq." With its 1,000 bases in the U.S. and another 800 bases globally, the U.S. truly has become a "Warfare State." Today, military-related products account for about one-fourth of total U.S. GDP. This includes 10,000 nuclear weapons. Indeed, the U.S. has lavished $5.5 trillion just on nukes over the past 70 years.

No other nation has anything remotely like this menacing global presence. The Pentagon strengthens its grip by running joint "training" exercises with the military of 110 other nations, including outright dictatorships that suppress internal unrest.

The U.S. spends more on weaponry than the next dozen nations combined and is by far the No. 1 world arms peddler. "The government employs some 6,500 people just to coordinate and administer its arms sales program in conjunction with senior officials at American embassies around the world, who spend most of their "diplomatic' careers working as arms salesmen," writes Chalmers Johnson in "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire(Henry Holt)."

Chalmers goes on to say the U.S. military establishment today is "close to being beyond civilian control" and that despite its ability to "deliver death and destruction to any target on earth and expect little in the way of retaliation" it demands more and newer equipment "while the Pentagon now more or less sets its own agenda" and "monopolizes the formulation and conduct of American foreign policy."

How long will it be before this tyrannical, anti-democratic, colossus that is sucking up as much money for war as all states, counties and cities spend on peace---and which straddles the globe, boosts dictators, and beats the war drums---turns on its own people?

Michele Bachmann: Welfare Queen

2009-12-24T11:54:00.000-08:00

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/michelle_bachman_welfare_queen_20091221/

Michele Bachmann: Welfare Queen
Posted on Dec 22, 2009
By Yasha Levine

Michele Bachmann has become well known for her anti-government tea-bagger antics, protesting health care reform and every other government “handout” as socialism. What her followers probably don’t know is that Rep. Bachmann is, to use that anti-government slur, something of a welfare queen. That’s right, the anti-government insurrectionist has taken more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts thanks to corrupt farming subsidies she has been collecting for at least a decade.

And she’s not the only one who has been padding her bank account with taxpayer money.

Bachmann, of Minnesota, has spent much of this year agitating against health care reform, whipping up the so-called tea-baggers with stories of death panels and rationed health care. She has called for a revolution against what she sees as Barack Obama’s attempted socialist takeover of America, saying presidential policy is “reaching down the throat and ripping the guts out of freedom.”

But data compiled from federal records by Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit watchdog that tracks the recipients of agricultural subsidies in the United States, shows that Bachmann has an inner Marxist that is perfectly at ease with profiting from taxpayer largesse. According to the organization’s records, Bachmann’s family farm received $251,973 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2006. The farm had been managed by Bachmann’s recently deceased father-in-law and took in roughly $20,000 in 2006 and $28,000 in 2005, with the bulk of the subsidies going to dairy and corn. Both dairy and corn are heavily subsidized—or “socialized”—businesses in America (in 2005 alone, Washington spent $4.8 billion propping up corn prices) and are subject to strict government price controls. These subsidies are at the heart of America’s bizarre planned agricultural economy and as far away from Michele Bachmann’s free-market dream world as Cuba’s free medical system. If American farms such as hers were forced to compete in the global free market, they would collapse.

However, Bachmann doesn’t think other Americans should benefit from such protection and assistance. She voted against every foreclosure relief bill aimed at helping average homeowners (despite the fact that her district had the highest foreclosure rate in Minnesota), saying that bailing out homeowners would be “rewarding the irresponsible while punishing those who have been playing by the rules.” That’s right, the subsidy queen wants the rest of us to be responsible.

Bachmann’s financial disclosure forms indicate that her personal stake in the family farm is worth up to $250,000. They also show that she has been earning income from the farm business, and that the income grew in just a few years from $2,000 to as much as $50,000 for 2008. This has provided her with a second government-subsidized income to go with her job as a government-paid congresswoman who makes $174,000 per year (in addition to having top-notch government medical benefits). “If she has an interest in a farm getting federal subsidy payments, she is benefiting from them,” Sandra Schubert, director of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group, told Gannett News Service in 2007, when the subsidies to Bachmann were first publicly disclosed.

But Bachmann isn’t the only welfare recipient on Capitol Hill. As it turns out, there is a filthy-rich class of absentee farmers—both in and out of Congress—who demand free-market rules by day and collect their government welfare checks in the mail at night, payments that subsidize businesses that otherwise would fail. Over the past couple of decades, welfare for the super-wealthy seems to be the only kind of welfare our society tolerates.

In the 11 years for which the Environmental Working Group has compiled data, the federal government paid out a total of $178 billion to American farmers. We’re not talking about the Joads here. The bulk of subsidies go to the wealthy, not small farmers, as Ken Cook, the group’s president, explained to the Central Valley (Calif.) Business Times:

American taxpayers have been writing farm subsidy checks to wealthy absentee land owners, state prison systems, universities, public corporations, and very large, well-heeled farm business operations without the government so much as asking the beneficiaries if they need our money. ... Even if you live smack in the middle of a big city, type in a ZIP code and you’ll find farm subsidy recipients.

Chuck Grassley, the longtime Republican senator from Iowa who warns his constituents of Obama’s “trend toward socialism,” has seen his family collect $1 million in federal handouts over an 11-year period, with Grassley’s son receiving $699,248 and the senator himself pocketing $238,974. Even Grassley’s grandson is learning to ride through life on training wheels, snagging $5,964 in 2005 and $2,363 in 2006. In the Grassley family they learn early how to enjoy other people’s money.

Sen. Grassley railed against government intervention in the health care market, telling The Washington Times, “Whenever the government does more ... that’s a movement toward socialism.” As the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, he ought to know, especially because the government has done more for him and his kin than for Americans struggling with high medical bills and mortgages. Even the free-market think tank the Heritage Foundation criticized Grassley on his deep connections to farming interests and his stubborn lack of transparency.

Then there’s Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., whose family has been on the government take for at least the past 11 years, pocketing some $500,000. The senator recently held a “prayercast” with Michele Bachmann to beseech God to kill health care reform as soon as possible because it would bring an evil socialist spirit into America. Like Bachmann, Brownback has a fierce belief in God, the free market and a two-year limit on all welfare benefits—unless it’s welfare to rich Republicans who don’t need it.

Not surprisingly, Blue Dog Democrats are on board with this welfare-for-the-rich thing. Max Baucus, the fiscally conservative Democratic senator from Montana who did his best to sabotage the health care reform process before it ever began, collected $250,000 in taxpayer subsidies to his family’s farm while fighting to keep Americans at the mercy of free-market health insurance. Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, another Democrat, also helped hold the line against so-called socialized medicine for Americans who need assistance, even though her family farm business follows the socialized subsidy playbook to a T. The Lincolns pocketed $715,000 in farm subsidies over a 10-year period, and the senator even admitted to using $10,000 of it as petty cash in 2007. Democratic Rep. Stephanie Sandlin of South Dakota stayed true to her conservative free-market roots by voting against the public option. Meanwhile, her daddy, Lars Herseth, a former South Dakota legislator, collected a welfare jackpot of $844,725 paid out between 1995 and 2006.

That’s just the way the game is played these days. Republicans and conservative Democrats bitch and moan about the allegedly Marxist underpinnings of universal health care and do everything they can to deny struggling Americans access to social services. Meanwhile, many of them profit off taxpayers in a massive welfare program.

Farm subsidies have become so corrupt that payments sometimes go to dead people for years. Federal farm subsidies, which were originally meant to help struggling farmers survive, are now little more than taxpayer robbery, taking taxpayer wealth from working Americans and sending it to the have-mores. According to 11 years’ worth of Environmental Working Group data that tracks $200 billion in subsidies, the wealthiest 10 percent of “farmers” have collected 75 percent of the money. That’s exactly the kind of socialism that Rep. Bachmann and her elite ilk like.

Yasha Levine is a freelance journalist and editor of eXiled Online. You can contact him at levine@exiledonline.com.

How Wall Street Bought Barney Frank

2009-12-22T09:12:00.001-08:00

How Wall Street Bought Barney Frank
By Kevin Connor, AlterNet
December 22, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144454/

Few members of Congress are considered more liberal than Barney Frank. Gay, left-handed, and Jewish, as his biography’s title proudly proclaims, he clearly enjoys living in direct contravention of right-wing ideals.

A favorite conservative punching bag, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly have their tea party base convinced that it was actually Frank who sent the country into an economic tailspin, through some curious combination of incompetence, redistributive zeal, greed, and homosexuality. Beck’s conspiratorial chalkboards link Frank to the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, back to the community organization ACORN, and by implication, to the poor and undeserving. Naturally, liberals have responded by closing ranks around the congressman.

The pseudo-research of Fox News and friends, and their obsession with Fannie and Freddie -- hardly the root of all economic troubles -- have distracted from a core reality of Frank’s recent career in Congress. Since becoming the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee seven years ago, he has built a formidable Wall Street donor base, even by Washington’s standards; as the housing bubble grew, so too did his fundraising purse and his stature, in Congress and beyond.

In the course of this Wall Street-fueled fundraising blitz, Frank developed a web of relationships, alliances, and attachments to financial elites that have repeatedly undermined his independence on everything from bailout negotiations to the financial reform legislation that he recently shepherded through the House. And his friends in finance continue to extend -- and collect on -- their investment.

Frank on 'FIRE'

On one day in late July of this year, the Weiss family of Brookline, Mass. gave a whopping $24,000 to Barney Frank. He received maximum contributions of $4,800 each from Kara, an MFA student in Seattle; Judith, an undergraduate at UC Davis; Danielle, a psychology PhD at Tulane; and their parents, Bonnie and Andrew. (All campaign finance data is drawn from OpenSecrets.org and LittleSis.org.)

The Weiss daughters, who had previously given a grand total of two $250 contributions, would seem to be unlikely top contributors to Frank. But their father Andrew is a hedge fund manager, and therefore a key constituent of the powerful chairman of the House Financial Services committee.

Joining the Weiss family in funneling Wall Street dollars to Frank that day were two other hedge fund managers, Eric Vincent and Michael Inserra, and former Republican Congressman Richard Baker. Baker is president of the Managed Funds Association (MFA) -- the hedge fund industry’s main lobby -- and Inserra and Vincent are both board members.

Baker had testified before Frank’s committee just ten days earlier on the financial reform package snaking its way through the House. The MFA PAC cut Frank a $10,000 check a few days after the testimony.

By the time the House of Representatives passed financial reform legislation on Dec. 10, the bill reflected one of the hedge fund industry’s main asks -- lax oversight of the financial instruments known as over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. After the bill passed, financial analyst Chris Whalen told Bloomberg News that “the OTC reform has gotten to be basically irrelevant as far as change… compared with what we thought we were going to get over the summer, it’s night and day.”

Meanwhile, Frank supported Wall Street and the hedge funds on at least two points where they lost out. He opposed an amendment offered by Brad Sherman that forces hedge funds to pay into a systemic risk fund; it passed with the overwhelming support of the committee, 52-17. A bipartisan measure to audit the Federal Reserve also passed without Frank’s support.

The final bill was barely out of the House before Frank was on CNBC, claiming victory but cautioning that the Fed provision -- the most celebrated populist measure in the bill -- threatened the institution’s “independence.”

Maybe the Weiss family’s contributions had something to do with Frank’s lukewarm support for more substantial reforms. Or Baker’s, or Vincent’s, or the MFA’s. Or those of any one of the deep-pocketed Wall Street supporters that Frank has cultivated since rising to a leadership post on the financial services committee.

For years, Frank was a mediocre fundraiser. In 2002, he was ranked 185th out of 215 Democrats in the House in total fundraising take. Previous years were similarly unimpressive.

That all changed in late 2002, when he became the most important Democrat on the financial services committee, replacing Rep. John LaFalce. In the following election cycle, Frank increased his fundraising five-fold, from $268,000 to $1.4 million. He cruised to re-election, though Democrats failed to take back the House that year.

Due to his leadership of the finance committee, Frank derived the greatest share of his cash, and his newfound power, from Wall Street. He consistently raised more than 50 percent of his campaign contributions from the finance, insurance, and real estate industry, often referred to as “FIRE” -- essentially the bundle of interests that had the most to gain from the housing bubble. By contrast, before becoming ranking Democrat, the FIRE share of his money hovered around 25 percent.

Remarkably, only two members of the House have taken in a larger share of their money from Wall Street over the past two campaign cycles -- Paul Kanjorski, a Democrat, and Spencer Bachus, a Republican. And during the 2006 cycle, Frank took in more money from FIRE than any other Democratic member of the House, and all but a few Republicans.

In 2009, Frank has taken in 48 percent of his contributions from FIRE, more than $400,000. Only one Democrat, Jim Himes, has raised more from Wall Street. Melissa Bean, that darling of Wall Street, actually trails Frank by several thousand dollars.

To put Frank’s funding mix in perspective, for every 20 Wall Street donors calling his office, there are two union presidents, one healthcare executive, and a handful of activists and business executives in other industries. (Check out this awe-inspiring graph, to grasp this more fully.)

With all that big money behind him, it's no wonder Frank has gone virtually unchallenged in his recent electoral campaigns. And he has used his Wall Street war chest to fund other Democrats across the country, building his influence and power within the party. It is that power, both symptom and cause of his chairmanship of Financial Services, that made him the Democratic Party’s point man on the financial crisis in fall 2008.

For clues as to how Frank got there, we can look to Representative John LaFalce, Frank’s predecessor as the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, who was similarly dependent on FIRE.

In 1999, LaFalce was credited with being a key force behind landmark legislation in the history of financial deregulation -- the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

GLB, as it is known, tore down the walls between commercial and investment banks set up by the Depression-era Glass Steagall Act, paving the way for the creation of too-big-to-fail behemoths like Citigroup. Democrats were in the minority at the time, so LaFalce wasn’t chair of the House Financial Services Committee, but he was credited with making sure the financial modernization bill was of high priority to the Clinton administration.

Soon after the legislation passed, LaFalce and other key policymakers reveled in their victory by gorging themselves on a cake bearing the epitaph of Glass Steagall. And then there was LaFalce’s retirement party, in 2002, where two lobbyists representing Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and other financial interests sang a humorous tribute named “Big John.” LaFalce hailed from western New York, a region hit hard by financialization and de-industrialization, and far from the area he truly represented: Wall Street.

The staff is where it's at

Frank gladly inherited LaFalce's legacy. The Democratic wing of the financial services committee was still open for business. He indicated to the press that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act would not be re-considered, and he would keep key members of LaFalce’s team, including senior counsel Lawranne Stewart and chief of staff Jeanne Roslanowick.

By relying on Stewart and Roslanowick during the unfurling of the financial crisis, Frank has looked to the very enablers of the recent financial catastrophe to remedy the current situation. Both staffers played key roles in shaping the Clinton-era financial reforms that drove the U.S. economy to the brink last year. And as Frank negotiated bailouts and steered financial reform legislation through Congress, they’ve been two of his top lieutenants.

Roslanowick’s various biographies give her credit for playing an important role in crafting GLB, and LaFalce described her as “tough as nails and absolutely unyielding” in negotiations on consumer protections and community reinvestment. But it is unclear which policy questions she held her ground on as the bill’s sole achievements for consumers were toothless privacy reforms and ATM fee notifications, and its most significant community reinvestment provisions were attempts -- authored by GOP Sen. Phil Gramm -- to embarrass community groups.

Granted, it could have been much worse -- Gramm wanted to end the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) altogether -- but this was certainly not a consumer-oriented legislative achievement to hang one’s hat on. Consumer advocates called the GLB a massive giveaway to Wall Street, and Public Citizen would spend the next decade pointing to the negative effects of banking consolidation brought about by the bill.

In financial reform’s most recent iteration, Roslanowick and company appear to have forfeited on CRA once again. The bill gives the Consumer Financial Protection Agency no oversight of financial institutions on CRA issues.

Roslanowick’s fellow LaFalce/Frank staffer, Lawranne Stewart, has an embarrassing history with the financial products known as derivatives that the bill was supposed to address.

Stewart, now senior counsel at Financial Services, helped author the Clinton-era legislation that cleared the way for the great derivatives explosion of the Bush years, which eventually brought AIG to its knees in September 2008. From 1999 to 2001, she was Undersecretary of the Treasury Gary Gensler’s top lieutenant, and helped craft the legislation known as the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. In March, Senator Bernie Sanders put a hold on Gensler’s nomination as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, over concern for his role in shaping that legislation. Gensler was eventually confirmed, and has established himself as a tougher critic of Wall Street than was expected.

Stewart’s authorship of that legislation is evident in this celebratory email between Enron lobbyists sent on December 12, 2000.

Stewart passes the document containing “an amendment to the definition of ‘trading facility’ to exempt single dealer markets” along to her boss Gensler, who then forwards it to the lobbyist George Baker with the subject line “as discussed.” Baker then forwards it to derivatives lobbyist Ken Raisler, who then forwards it to Enron lobbyist Chris Long, who then passes it along to the rest of Enron’s lobbying team with a brief analysis, closing with: “They may cut a deal as early as this afternoon!”

Elements of this bill would later become known as the “Enron loophole,” which exempted energy trades from proper oversight and were believed to be behind historic spikes in fuel prices during the spring and summer of 2008. Though Democrats have blamed Senator Phil Gramm for the loopholes, Enron lobbyists were actually worried that Gramm would hold out for something too radically deregulatory, thereby putting their sought-after language in jeopardy. In any case, a compromise was reached, and Stewart played a key role in crafting the Enron-approved language.

Ironically enough, Stewart’s considerable personal fortune is derived from the murky world of international energy privatization, which Enron dominated until its demise. Her husband, Mark Kantor, worked in that field as an international project finance attorney at the law firm Milbank Tweed during the nineties. Milbank Tweed worked closely with Enron on numerous energy deals and off-balance-sheet financings, to the extent that the University of Calfornia filed suit against the firm in 1999. Kantor himself worked on at least one Enron-owned project, a Turkish power plant named Trakya Elektrik.

Indeed, the derivatives market reforms passed by the House this month look like they were written by an Enron attorney; the legislation exempts “end users,” a classification that loops in speculative financial engineers like Enron.

Two other Frank staffers passed through the Wall Street-D.C. revolving door in 2007 and 2008, but in opposite directions. His special counsel, James W Segel, lobbied for the Investment Company Institute, a mutual fund lobby, for ten years before joining Frank’s staff. Board members of ICI include representatives of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.

Michael Paese, Frank’s deputy staff director at the financial services committee until 2007, is now a registered lobbyist for Goldman Sachs. He has been lobbying Congress on issues related to financial reform for the past year. At least two other top Frank donors, Mitchell Feuer and Michael Berman, also lobby for Goldman Sachs.

Indeed, Frank’s ties to Wall Street are in evidence whenever he goes on television to articulate his vision for dealing with the financial industry. Bailouts help individuals, not companies, he told 60 Minutes, before accusing the host of attacking welfare and wanting to see people starve. After we bail the banks out, then we can tax them, he told Ed Schultz, who was criticizing the bailouts in a manner that Frank found “condescending.”

He may have a silver tongue, but Frank’s quips over the past year have sounded less than persuasive and more like the defensive posturing of a liberal beholden to Wall Street’s big money.

Can he be a good friend to both sides?

Last Wednesday, Rep. Melissa Bean and a coalition of New Democrats held up the financial reform process in order to win key concessions for Wall Street. Frank criticized her opposition, pointing to the influence of big banks, and entered a meeting with Bean and other leaders of the House.

Frank emerged, after about an hour, remarking that “the differences have been narrowed, and I think you’re getting something that both sides can live with.”

What were the two sides, exactly? Presumably, Frank counted himself among the reformers. But how could someone so dependent on Wall Street for fundraising dollars present any meaningful opposition to the financial industry’s agenda? Any tug-of-war inside that chamber would have consisted of everyone pulling in one direction, and all falling down.

The brief negotiation was certainly successful. Bean got what she wanted on derivatives regulation and federal preemption of state law. Frank got to pass a historic financial reform bill, all the while retaining his power as one of Wall Street’s chosen in Congress. The political theater was reminiscent of the great bailout negotiations of 2008, in which Frank and his liberal friends conceded hundreds of billions of dollars to the sinking Street.

The truly remarkable thing about the Barney Frank phenomenon is that liberal advocacy groups continued to treat the Congressman as an ally during the financial reform process. Public Citizen issued a press release that criticized parts of the bill, but thanked Frank for his work. Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake called him a “good progressive,” fighting the good fight against banking interests. ActBlue, the progressive political action committee, is Frank’s biggest donor this cycle.

Meanwhile, Frank has spent much of the last seven years cultivating relationships with individuals like Richard Baker and Andrew Weiss, Wall Street executives and lobbyists who leverage their influence to game the democratic process. The Weiss family and its hedge funds have actually outspent ActBlue on Barney Frank this cycle -- all during that fateful summer of 2009, when meaningful derivatives reform was still on the table.

The numbers don’t lie. Forget Fannie or Freddie -- Wall Street owns Barney Frank. He has been lifted to power by the entire class of Wall Street financiers that brought the U.S. economy to the brink.

Why should he abandon them now?

Kevin Connor is the co-founder of LittleSis.org, an involuntary facebook for powerful people. He is also the co-director of the Public Accountability Initiative.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144454/

How health lobbyists influenced reform bill

2009-12-21T15:08:00.001-08:00

http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/chi-health-lobbyists_bddec20,0,4862599.story

chicagotribune.com
TRIBUNE WATCHDOG
Former staffers of lawmakers from Harry Reid to Mitch McConnell push clients' agenda
Search our database to see who had the most influence on the health care bill
By Andrew Zajac
December 20, 2009

WASHINGTON

David Nexon had a big problem. An early version of national health care legislation contained a $40 billion tax aimed squarely at members of the medical device trade association he represents.

Nexon, a former adviser to the late Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, went to work. He marshaled 14 people like himself -- lobbyists who were once congressional aides, many of them from staffs of congressional leaders or committees that had a hand in crafting the health care overhaul.

When Senate Democrats unveiled their bill in mid-November, Nexon's handiwork was evident. The tax on device-makers was still large -- $20 billion -- but only half what it might have been without the efforts of Nexon and his fellow lobbyists.

Nexon's team is an illustration of how deeply the health care industry has embedded itself on Capitol Hill, using former aides of lawmakers and ex-lawmakers themselves.

An analysis of public documents by Northwestern University's Medill News Service in partnership with the Tribune Newspapers Washington Bureau and the Center for Responsive Politics found a revolving door between Capitol Hill staffers and lobbying jobs for companies with a stake in health care legislation.

At least 166 former aides from the nine congressional leadership offices and five committees involved in shaping health overhaul legislation -- along with at least 13 former lawmakers -- registered to represent at least 338 health care clients since the beginning of last year, according to the analysis.

Their health care clients spent $635 million on lobbying over the past two years, the study shows.

The total of insider lobbyists jumps to 278 when non-health-care firms that reported lobbying on health issues are added in, the analysis found.

Part of the lobbying pressure on current members of Congress and staffers comes from the powerful lure of post-congressional job possibilities.

"There's always a worry they may be thinking about their future employment opportunities when dealing with these issues, particularly with health care, because the stakes are so high and the breadth of the issues -- pharmacies, hospitals, doctors," said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz.

Lobbyists' earnings can dwarf congressional salaries, which currently top out at $174,000 annually for lawmakers and $156,000 for aides, though committee staff members can earn slightly more.

In the health care showdown, insider lobbying influence has magnified the clout of corporate interests and helped steer the debate away from a public insurance option, despite many polls indicating majority support from Americans, according to Rutgers University political scientist Ross Baker.

"It imposes a kind of conservative bias on the discussion," said Baker, himself a former Senate staffer.

The lineup of insiders working for clients with health care interests includes at least 14 former aides to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and at least 13 former aides to Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, the chairman of the Finance Committee and a key overseer of the health care overhaul.

Nexon, who is now senior executive vice president of the Advanced Medical Technology Association, is among at least a half-dozen former Kennedy aides lobbying on health care.

Nexon acknowledged the value of congressional connections, "but in the end, it's not who I know, it's what I know."

It makes sense to hire former staffers for the health care showdown because they tend to be "more generalists, dealing with a broad range of issues," something that is in demand for legislation that sprawls across at least a half-dozen federal agencies and encompasses issues ranging from tax policy to hospital reimbursement rates, according to Nexon. But specific issues also get specialized help. Earlier this year, the Christian Science Church hired a former Kennedy staffer, Carolyn Osolinik, and three of her colleagues at the Mayer Brown law firm, all veterans of Capitol Hill. The firm has been paid at least $110,000 so far to push a provision requiring insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments.

Phil Davis, a senior official of the church, said the church wanted access to decision makers. "The noise level goes sky high. It's hard to get in to talk to people," he said.

The largest insider lobbying cadre belongs to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, which employs at least 26 former congressional members and staffers, according to Medill/CRP research.

Two other drug interests, biotech firm Amgen Inc. and the Biotechnology Industry Organization trade group, with at least 24 and 16 insiders respectively, ranked second and fourth among reported hiring over the past two years of lawmakers' former staffers and members of committees considered in the analysis.

"The numbers shouldn't surprise anyone," said Ken Johnson, a PhRMA senior vice president. "Former staffers have a unique understanding of how the legislative process works. And when you are trying to advocate on behalf of smart public policies, you want smart people on your team."

But Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, a nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog group, had a harsher assessment, blaming "a toxic cocktail of insiders and money" for short-circuiting a government-run plan that would have competed with private insurers.

"We'll get a bill. And the president will sign it. But it'll be less than the country deserves," said Edgar, a former six-term member of the House.

Health care lobbyists increase their effectiveness by strategically targeting their campaign contributions or the donations of the interests they represent, Edgar said.

Health industry contributions to congressional candidates have more than doubled so far this decade, rising to $127 million in the 2008 election cycle from $56 million in the 2000 election, with disproportionate sums going to the party in power and to members of committees that oversee health care, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

But lobbyist and former Kennedy staffer Andrew Rosenberg said political conditions, not big money or the predispositions of lobbyists sidelined a public option.

"You could see this coming from a long way off. The Democratic Party is now the big tent party. They have to get to 60 votes. That is the reality," Rosenberg said. "It was going to have to be something that appeals to moderates" opposed to expanding government-run health insurance.

Israeli video confirms theft of Palestinian organs

2009-12-21T14:08:00.000-08:00

http://uruknet.info/index.php?p=m61270&hd=&size=1&l=e

Top pathologist says doctors also involved in organ stealing
Israeli video confirms theft of Palestinian organs
Al Arabiya
DUBAI (Al Arabiya) - December 20, 2009

An Israeli video confirmed accusations that Tel Aviv was illegally stealing organs from the dead bodies of Palestinians and justified the practice in the name of scientific research, press reports said Sunday.

The news of the harvesting of Palestinian organs was first published by a Swedish newspaper, which an outraged Israel denied, but according to the video corneas, hearts, bones and skin from the back were harvested from the bodies of dead Palestinians without authorization or permission from their families, the Palestinian Maan News Agency reported.

The 57-minute video was filmed by Yehuda Hiss, the director and chief pathologist at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine, and explains how he authorized organ theft, gave instructions to doctors to do so and said he would sometimes snatch the organs himself.

"The process started in the early 1980s and lasted till the end of 2000," Hiss, who heads the only place in Israel authorized to conduct autopsies in cases of unnatural death in Israel and the occupied territories, said in the video.

"We would not remove the entire eye," Hiss said. "We would just remove the cornea then close the eye back."

Hiss explained how he has also removed skin from the back of dead Palestinians and said the families of the dead never discovered the theft since they did not turn the body before burying it.

The skin was then said to have been given to soldiers who suffer from burns and in 1986 a skin bank was established in Israel.

Slap on the wrist

Bones, especially long ones, and parts of the heart were also regularly stolen.

"We donated the organs we took to hospitals," Hiss explained. "I specifically gave them to Tel Hashomer hospital because all the doctors there were my friends. I took no money in return, but four years later they gave us a microscope. We also gave organs to the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and they gave us an inter-body scan to film the contents of the corpse."

Israeli law prohibits taking organs from corpses without obtaining permission from the family of the deceased, which Hiss said he specifically instructed doctors not to do.

"We did it for the sake of research and medical progress," said Hiss, who admitted to having removed organs from 125 bodies without permission or authorization.

News of organ thefts led to the suspension of Hiss as director of the institute in 2005 but Israel’s top attorney decided not to press charges and Hiss ended up just being reprimanded and going back to his position at the institute.

The Israeli Ministry of Health responded to the tape by saying that everything was done in accordance with the law while hospitals that were named argued that the topic is old news and there is no point bringing it up again now.

(Translated from Arabic by Sonia Farid)

Who Really Owns the Assets of America

2009-12-20T15:19:00.000-08:00

Walter Burien is a personal friend of mine and his message about economics is one of the most important one on the planet!
His website is www.CAFR1.com It is one of my favorite websites!

Dr. No: Joe Lieberman Loves Campaign Cash More Than His Constituents

2009-12-17T12:00:00.000-08:00

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/199064-Dr-No-Joe-Lieberman-Loves-Campaign-Cash-More-Than-His-Constituents

Dr. No: Joe Lieberman Loves Campaign Cash More Than His Constituents
Ron Reagan
Air America
Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:31 EST

Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman has finally realized his life's goal of becoming America's foremost exemplar of hypocrisy and moral cowardice... and did I forget to mention dishonesty and small-minded spite? Let's throw those in the mix as well.

A quick review: three months ago, Lieberman sat down with the Connecticut Post and reiterated his long-standing position that a Medicare buy-in should be available for people 55 to 64 years old

Again, this is something Lieberman has been saying for years: it was central to his health care platform when he was Al Gore's running mate in 2000 and it was been his position ever since. That is, it was his position until it became part of the Senate's proposed health care legislation. At that point, the guy who'd made a Medicare buy-in the centerpiece of his health care reform philosophy suddenly morphed into Dr. No.

On CBS last weekend, in one brief outpouring of nausea-inducing self-interest, Lieberman managed to betray assurances he had reportedly given to the Senate leadership and a number of his Senate colleagues; contradict his own oft-stated position; and, just for good measure, attempt to mislead the country about the fiscal consequences of a Medicare buy-in. Contrary to what Lieberman is currently pretending to believe, a buy-in would not, according to the Congressional Budget Office, drive up the deficit.

What's going on here? Having heard no better explanation, I currently subscribe to what has become the conventional wisdom about the Senate's selfish pain-in-the-ass-in-chief: Lieberman is still piqued at Democrats for not only abandoning him (for the Democratic candidate) during his near-loss in his 2006 reelection race in Connecticut, but for not backing him as the candidate of choice for the Democratic Presidential nomination back in 2004. Anyone who witnessed his cozy "debate" with Dick Cheney in 2000 will have no trouble imagining why Democrats picked someone else as their standard-bearer.

But Lieberman is all about a sense of entitlement, and when he doesn't get was he considers his just due, he plots revenge: hence his support of John McCain in last year's Presidential race. That support rankled Dems plenty, but Joe promised to be a good team member again if only he was allowed to retain his committee chairmanship, and the Democratic leadership went along.

And what did they get in return? A stab in the back. Actually, they got multiple stab wounds. At every turn, Joe Lieberman has been a shiv in the side of those trying to pass health insurance reform.

Which brings us to the second reason for Joe's flip-flopping intransigence: money. The health insurance industry is big in Lieberman's home state and they've got deep pockets. The good Senator has reportedly received over a million dollars from the industry since 1998. So let's just call this what it is: bribery. Lieberman appears to want, more than anything else, to be the center of attention. Being the Senator from Connecticut doesn't hurt, and insurance industry dollars help keep him in the Senate limelight

Oh, and did I mention that Lieberman's wife, Haddassah--while not an actual registered lobbyist (that would be so tacky)--has for decades acted as a such for big lobbying outfits like Hill & Knowlton and APCO while doing time with pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Hoffman La Roche, both of whom have plenty of skin in the health reform game. Do you smell a conflict of interest in the Lieberman family? Well, don't hold your breath waiting for Joe to recuse himself.

This has long been the fatal flaw of American democracy: it's for sale. Joe Lieberman is just one more guy in a long line of elected officials who, once safely ensconsed in incumbency, abandon the people they're supposed to represent in favor of the check-bundlers who top off their campaign coffers. This is not a partisan matter--Republicans and Democrats are equally guilty--and Lieberman seems to be a mutant amalgam of both. But we can now see the real cost of refusing to publicly fund elections: one selfish little man like Joe Lieberman can stand in the way of doing right by the whole country.

More infuriating of all, he seems to be winning. The White House has apparently dispatched Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to tell Harry Reid to give Lieberman anything he wants, to just get him on board so we can break an inevitable Republican filibuster and get something--anything--to the President's desk by Christmas. And that is all in the service of distracting from an unpopular war in Afghanistan and an even more unpopular employment picture. This is how sausages are made. This is how mildly promising legislation is reduced to ineffectual pap.

As Jim Shea, columnist with the Hartford Courant wrote yesterday, "If you think you're sick of Joe Lieberman now, just wait until you're sick."

SOTT Comment: "In any society in this world, psychopathic individuals and some of the other deviant types create a ponerogenically active network of common collusions, partially estranged from the community of normal people... Their sense of honor bids them to cheat and revile that 'other' human world and its values at every opportunity." (Lobaczewski, 138)

"We could list various names ascribed to such organizations... gangs, criminal mobs, mafias... which cunningly avoid collision with the law while seeking to gain their own advantage. Such unions frequently aspire to political power in order to impose their expedient legislation upon societies in the name of a suitably prepared ideology, deriving advantages in the form of disproportionate prosperity and the satisfaction for their craving of power." (Lobaczewski, 158)

Joe Lieberman - Million Dollar Man for Health Industry

2009-12-17T11:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/opinion/16wed4.html

December 16, 2009
EDITORIAL
The Million-Dollar Man

First, Senator Joseph Lieberman — the former Democrat, current independent from Connecticut — rejected the so-called public health care option. Then he threatened to torpedo the entire health care reform bill if it allowed people over 55 to buy Medicare plans.

The aim of that idea, like the public option, is to provide more choice for consumers and more competition for the private insurance industry. And that industry, you will not be surprised to hear, has been very, very good to Mr. Lieberman.

What makes it all the more hypocritical is that Mr. Lieberman claims to want health care reform. And way back in September, the senator was publicly championing a Medicare buy-in.

In an interview with The Connecticut Post, he said he had been refining his views on health care for many years and was “very focused on a group post-50, or maybe more like post-55” whose members should be able to buy Medicare if they lacked insurance.

This week, when there actually seemed to be a compromise on health care that did not focus on Mr. Lieberman, he announced that he would block the package if the Democrats included a terrible idea — allowing people between 55 and 65 to buy Medicare.

He presented this as a principled effort to keep down federal debt, but when a Times reporter asked about his 180-degree turn, he said he had forgotten taking his earlier position until the Democratic leadership reminded him about it over the weekend.

Mr. Lieberman has taken more than $1 million from the industry over his Senate career. In his 2006 re-election campaign, he ranked second in the Senate in contributions from the industry. He doesn’t seem to have forgotten that.

The Senate bill was better with the public option, as weak as it was. The Medicare buy-in was an intriguing alternative. Still, even without either one, the Senate must pass this vital measure.

Now that Mr. Lieberman has gotten his way and everyone’s attention, he has a responsibility to move things forward. He can help persuade a wavering Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and a hesitant Republican, Olympia Snowe of Maine, to vote for the bill. Or has he also forgotten his commitment to health care reform?