A SpringWind Blowing

I'm still alive and well

2010-09-20T01:40:00.000-07:00

Many changes over the last two years. I just ordered a camcorder and will be vlogging soon. this should be fun, informative and have some originality too it. I'll be searching for truth wherever it me be hiding.

Don't Be Brainwashed by Time's Lies of Omission and Sensationalism...

2010-08-01T21:41:00.000-07:00

TIME’s Epic Distortion of the Plight of Women in Afghanistan
Posted by derrickcrowe at 1:05 am
July 31, 2010

Article printed from speakeasy: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy

TIME Magazine has done its readers a disservice by grossly distorting how the Afghanistan War affects women. Learn the truth by watching this segment from Rethink Afghanistan: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=419294772434

Help us push back against TIME Magazine’s distortion of women’s issues in Afghanistan.

Tomorrow, TIME Magazine will treat newsstand customers everywhere to one of the most rank propaganda plays of the Afghanistan War. The cover features a woman, Aisha, whose face was mutilated by the Taliban, next to the headline, "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan." Far more people will see this image and have their emotions manipulated by it than will read the article within (which itself seems to be a journalistic travesty, if the web version is any indication), so TIME should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for such a dishonest snow job on their customers. Readers deserve better.

Let’s clarify something right off the top when it comes to this cover: Aisha, the poor woman depicted in the photograph, was attacked last year, with tens of thousands of U.S. troops tramping all over the country at the time. This isn’t the picture of some as-yet-unrealized nighmarish future for Afghan women. It’s the picture of the present.

Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) recently published report on this issue, The "Ten-Dollar Talib" and Women’s Rights, provides key context for the struggle for women’s political equality in Afghanistan:

Afghan women assert their rights in what is already a deeply hostile political environment. Any assessment of women’s rights, and indeed the prospects for long-term peace and reconciliation needs to be made in the context of the very traditional and often misogynistic male leadership that dominates Afghan politics. The Afghan government, often with the tacit approval of key foreign governments and inter-governmental bodies, has empowered current and former warlords, providing official positions to some and effective immunity from prosecution for serious crimes to the rest. Backroom deals with abusive commanders have created powerful factions in the government and Parliament that are opposed to many of the rights and freedoms that women now enjoy. As one activist told us, “We women don’t have guns and poppies and we are not warlords, therefore we are not in the decision-making processes.”

This is something that folks who put together TIME’s cover better understand right now: the fox is already in the hen-house. There is a very powerful set of anti-women’s-equality caucuses already nested within the Afghan government that the U.S. supports. These individuals and groups are working to reassert the official misogyny of the Taliban days already, independent of the reconciliation and reintegration process. Given the opportunity, these individuals and groups in the U.S.-backed government will manipulate the reconciliation and reintegration process and leverage armed-opposition-group participation in the process to push through policies they’d prefer already as compromises with their "opponents." This is why the propaganda of TIME’s cover is so pernicious: the women of Afghanistan are caught in a vice already, stuck between their opponents in the insurgency and in the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. If one is concerned about the rights of women in Afghanistan, the question is, how do we give women the most leverage possible in this situation?

Further, TIME’s incendiary headline, "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan," is a total misrepresentation of the issue discussed in the article. Here’s Aisha in her own words:

"They [the Taliban] are the people that did this to me," she says, touching her damaged face. "How can we reconcile with them?"

Here’s another quote from another woman that gets at the issue much better than TIME’s headline:

"Women’s rights must not be the sacrifice by which peace is achieved," says parliamentarian Fawzia Koofi.

And another quote:

"When we talk about women’s rights," Jamalzadah says, "we are talking about things that are important to men as well — men who want to see Afghanistan move forward. If you sacrifice women to make peace, you are also sacrificing the men who support them and abandoning the country to the fundamentalists that caused all the problems in the first place."

If we are to believe the setup on the cover and in the article, the women of Afghanistan see two options: the U.S. can "stay" and ensure the rights of women, or we can "leave" by route of selling them out. But that’s neither what the women’s quotes say nor what Human Rights Watch found when they interviewed 90 "working women and women in public life living in areas that the insurgents effectively controlled or where they have a significant presence to illustrate the current nature of the insurgency." While they found an intense anxiety over the consequences of the Taliban regaining a share of national power, they also found that:

"All of the women interviewed for this report supported a negotiated end to the conflict."

The quotes of the women in TIME’s article express anxiety about the Kabul government negotiated away women’s rights to warlord war criminals, not us "staying" or "leaving." See what TIME did there? They’ve taken these quotes from Afghan women and manipulated them to portray a false dilemma.

TIME Magazine throws out this useless bromide: "For Afghanistan’s women, an early withdrawal of international forces could be disastrous." Early compared to what? How can a pull-out almost a decade into a conflict be remotely described as "early?" Even if we build a shining utopia for women while U.S. troops were there in large numbers, women’s rights would evaporate the day after we departed if U.S. troops were the force holding them in place. That’s what Afghan Women’s Network’s Orzala Ashraf meant when she told Rethink Afghanistan that,

"I don’t believe and I don’t expect any outside power to come and liberate me. If I cannot liberate myself, no one from outside can liberate me."

The struggle is the liberation as Afghan women discover and use their power. Grassroots involvement in social struggle is what creates societies rooted in democratic values, not men with guns from other countries.

Although you wouldn’t know it from TIME’s editorializing within the article or from the horrendously misleading cover, the issue is not even remotely "if" we leave Afghanistan. We will. The questions are "When?" and "How?"

When

U.S. forces could stay for another twenty years in Afghanistan (would that still be "early?"), and even if they pound Kandahar into dust, no development in the war so far even remotely suggests the possibility of military force eliminating the Taliban as a significant political and armed force. Therefore, the war’s end would still involve some sort of political settlement that involves Taliban (unless, of course, the U.S. wants to guarantee the most ferocious civil conflict possible upon their exit by totally excluding them). At the end of that twenty years, we’d be faced with the same problems regarding the rights of women in Afghanistan, plus the effects of those years of war on the U.S. force and the Afghan population.

TIME’s depiction of the women’s rights issue is based on a faulty premise: that "staying" rather than "leaving" is having the effect of weakening an insurgency hostile to women’s rights. In fact, if we are to believe the official reports from the Pentagon to Congress, the opposite is true. As the first several months of President Obama’s escalation strategy played out, the military reports claim the insurgency gained in strategic and political power in the key areas of Afghanistan. As those trends continue, the political difficulties for women in the eventual reconciliation and reintegration processes increase. Prolonging the massive U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan makes it more likely that the regressive elements in the Kabul government will achieve their agenda through "compromise" with powerful insurgent elements during the reconciliation/reintegration processes.

Some sort of reconciliation process is going to take place. When it comes to securing the rights of women in Afghanistan, all other things being equal, sooner is better.

How?

American policymakers, if they are truly interested in the rights of women beyond their use in sloganeering, are going to have to start playing a higher-level game than they are at present. When President Obama took 35 minutes to explain his rationales for his escalation strategy, he didn’t mention women’s political equality once. If they hope to assist the women of Afghanistan struggling for political equality, they need to understand the game and to start playing catch-up ball, pronto.

The most important work is to prepare the field before the negotiations begin. That means two things: getting women in, and keeping the worst of the worst out.

Two bodies will undertake the lion’s share of work on the peace process in Afghanistan: the High Level Peace Council and the Joint Secretariat for Peace, Reconciliation and Reintegration Programs. According to HRW’s report, key assurances have not been given that women would have a meaningful seat at the table in decision-making capacities. At the time of the report’s publication, the High Level Peace Council had not been appointed, but the Joint Secretariat was effectively functioning and no women were included. The extent to which Afghan women can succeed at inserting themselves into the various levels of this process will be a major determinant in the amount of leverage they’ll have to help them defend their rights as the new Afghanistan takes shape. Afghan women’s advocates have shown some adeptness at this sort of agitation: during the Consultative Peace Jirga, women were promised only 10 percent representation. Through intense agitation, they obtained 20 percent. U.S. policymakers who want to help women in Afghanistan have to figure out how best to support the effort of women to get into these decision-making bodies and exert real influence. The U.S. is a prime funder of the Afghan government. It’s time to figure out how to use that leverage for this purpose. That’s why Human Rights Watch makes this key recommendation:

Make women’s meaningful participation in relevant decision-making bodies a precondition for funding reintegration programs, and ensure that reintegration funds benefit families and communities, including women, rather than individual ex-combatants.

That brings us to the touchy subject of keeping the worst of the worst out. This is a touchy subject because the obstacles to getting this done have come into being due to the active and tacit support of the United States.

Let’s talk about just a couple of these obstacles: Hajji Mohammed Mohaqiq and his Amnesty Law.

Mohaqiq was one of the leaders of the notorious Hezb-e Wahdat, which in late 2001-early 2002 targeted Pashtun civilians for violence because of their ethnic ties to the Taliban. According to Human Rights Watch, Hezb-e Wahdat was:

implicated in systematic and widespread looting and violence in almost every province under their…control, almost all of it directed at Pashtun villagers. …[T]here were several reports of rapes of girls and women. In Chimtal district near Mazar-e Sharif, and in Balkh province generally, both Hizb-i Wahdat [alternative English rendering of Hezb-e Wahdat] and Jamiat forces were particularly violent: in one village, Bargah-e Afghani, Hizb-i Wahdat troops killed thirty-seven civilians.

Mohaqiq’s militia also became widely feared and loathed for their practice of kidnapping young girls, “forcibly marrying” them (what a useless euphemism for rape), and ransoming them back to their parents. They seemed to especially enjoy snatching girls who were on their way to school, leading many parents to keep their girls home rather than risk their abduction and rape.

Following the overthrow of the Taliban, Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq managed to get himself appointed as a vice chair of the interim government and as Minister of Planning. During the 2002 loya jirga that set the basic shape of the new government, Hezb-e Wahdat was named by Human Rights Watch as one of the groups that used threats and intimidation against other delegates. Through their use of these thuggish tactics, Mohaqiq’s militia helped corrupt a process which many hoped would lead to greater civilian control relative to the warlords, but which led instead to the warlords’ solidifying their power. Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq, of course, retained his positions of power.

But here’s the real kicker: once legitimized, Mohaqiq was one of the masterminds of the widely condemned 2007 legislation that granted warlords amnesty for their war crimes during the civil war. The UN sharply condemned the amnesty law, declaring “No one has the right to forgive those responsible for human rights violations other than the victims themselves.” Thanks to outcry from the United Nations and human rights advocates (but pointedly, not from the U.S., UK, or the EU, who did not speak out against the law), the law was tabled.

But then came the absolutely corrupted 2009 election: Karzai promised to carve out a new province for Mohaqiq in exchange for his support in the election. Karzai "won," and President Obama declared the government "legitimate." Then, in January 2010, Karzai quietly slipped the Amnesty Law into effect, immunizing Mohaqiq for his crimes against women. Mohaqiq has since publicly decried Karzai’s moves toward negotiations with the Taliban, but even though he doesn’t support it, his handiwork is a malignant shaper of the process with regards to the rights of women.

Here’s HRW’s summary of the law:

The Amnesty Law states that all those who were engaged in armed conflict before the formation of Afghanistan’s Interim Administration in December 2001 shall “enjoy all their legal rights and shall not be prosecuted.” It also says that those engaged in current hostilities will be granted immunity if they agree to reconciliation with the government, effectively providing amnesty for future crimes. The law thus provides immunity from prosecution for members of the Taliban and other insurgent groups, as well as pro-government warlords, who have committed war crimes.

All through this process, the U.S. was either silent or supportive of these developments, and now the Amnesty Law stands as one of the threats most identified by Afghan women’s advocates to the progress of their political agenda during the reconciliation process. Those most dangerous to the women of Afghanistan–powerful fundamentalist warlords with a history of serious war crimes against women and girls–may find their way into influential negotiating positions where they can link up with their anti-women brethren already inside the Kabul government. The solution posited by Human Rights Watch and by women parliamentarians is to repeal the Amnesty Law and institute strong vetting processes that exclude the worst war criminals from the ballot or from political appointment while still allowing participation of their home tribes or groups. This solution goes hand in hand with that discovered last year by UK’s DFID to be preferred by those in insurgency-prone areas: a new "black list" standard for what crimes disqualify one from election or appointment, applied to everyone, including Taliban, other insurgents, or pro-Kabul-government figures.

As the reader can tell, the issue is far more complex than the farcical "stay or leave" choice framed up on TIME’s shameful propaganda cover art. The U.S.’s massive troop presence and the escalating instability is strengthening the hand of the political forces that want to roll back women’s political equality, so the longer we stay, the worse off women will be as they attempt to navigate the eventual political settlement of the conflict. Yet, U.S. inattention to (or outright malignant influence on) the factors shaping the field for that political struggle are affirmatively hurting the struggle for women’s political equality. We will leave the combat field, and we have to do it soon, and while we leave, we have to do our best to help shape a political field supportive of the Afghan women’s struggle to liberate themselves.

Pulling this off will require a deft hand, and it’s not clear whether the Kabul government or our own government, given the atrophied nature of the State Department, is up to the task. Given the vested interests who have a stake in the existence of the Amnesty Law, repealing it will be enormously difficult in Afghanistan’s political arena (and no one should let the U.S. off the hook for helping to shape this political environment through support for known warlords and war criminals). But what is clear is that using the rights of women as a justification for extending our massive U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan is a recipe for failure on this issue and for the betrayal and heartbreak of those who care about the fate of Afghan women.

Shorter version: TIME Magazine’ cover art is rank propaganda, and the current U.S. policy is failing women, badly.

Let's End the Longest War in U.S. History Now

2010-07-28T00:05:00.000-07:00

WikiLeaks Bombshell Docs Paint Afghan War as Utter Disaster -- Will We Finally Stop Throwing Money and Lives at This Catastrophe?
By Ray McGovern, Consortium News
Posted on July 26, 2010

The brutality and fecklessness of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan have been laid bare in an indisputable way just days before the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on whether to throw $33.5 billion more into the Afghan quagmire, when that money is badly needed at home.

On Sunday, the Web site Wikileaks posted 75,000 reports written mostly by U.S. forces in Afghanistan during a six-year period from January 2004 to December 2009. The authenticity of the material -- published under the title “Afghan War Diaries” -- is not in doubt.

The New York Times, which received an embargoed version of the documents from Wikileaks, devoted six pages of its Monday editions to several articles on the disclosures, which reveal how the Afghan War slid into its current morass while the Bush administration concentrated U.S. military efforts on Iraq.

Wikileaks also gave advanced copies to the British newspaper, The Guardian, and the German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, thus guaranteeing that the U.S. Fawning Corporate Media could not ignore these classified cables the way it did five years ago with the “Downing Street Memo,” a leaked British document which described how intelligence was "fixed" around President George W. Bush’s determination to invade Iraq.

The Washington Post also led its Monday editions with a lengthy article about the Wikileaks’ disclosure of the Afghan War reports.

Still, it remains to be seen whether the new evidence of a foundering war in Afghanistan will lead to a public groundswell of opposition to expending more billions of dollars there when the money is so critically needed to help people to keep their jobs, their homes and their personal dignity in the United States.

But there may be new hope that the House of Representatives will find the collective courage to deny further funding for feckless bloodshed in Afghanistan that seems more designed to protect political flanks in Washington than the military perimeters of U.S. bases over there.

Assange on Pentagon Papers

Wikileaks leader Julian Assange compared the release of “The Afghan War Diaries” to Daniel Ellsberg’s release in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers. Those classified documents revealed the duplicitous arguments used to justify the Vietnam War and played an important role in eventually getting Congress to cut off funding.

Ellsberg’s courageous act was the subject of a recent Oscar-nominated documentary, entitled “The Most Dangerous Man in America," named after one of the less profane sobriquets thrown Ellsberg’s way by then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

I imagine Dan is happy at this point to cede that particular honorific to the Wikileaks’ leaker, who is suspected of being Pfc. Bradley Manning, a young intelligence specialist in Iraq who was recently detained and charged with leaking classified material to Wikileaks.

An earlier Wikileaks’ disclosure -- also reportedly from Manning -- revealed video of a U.S. helicopter crew cavalierly gunning down about a dozen Iraqi men, including two Reuters journalists, as they walked along a Baghdad street.

Wikileaks declined to say whether Manning was the source of the material. However, possibly to counter accusations that the leaker (allegedly Manning) acted recklessly in releasing thousands of secret military records, Wikileaks said it was still withholding 15,000 reports “as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source.”

After Ellsberg was identified as the Pentagon Papers leaker in 1971, he was indicted and faced a long prison sentence if convicted. However, a federal judge threw out the charges following disclosures of the Nixon administration’s own abuses, such as a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

In public speeches over the past several years, Ellsberg has been vigorously pressing for someone to do what he did, this time on the misbegotten wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ellsberg also has praised Assange for providing a means for the documents to reach the public.

Ellsberg and other members of The Truth Telling Coalition established on Sept. 9, 2004, have been appealing to government officials who encounter “deception and cover-up” on vital issues to opt for “unauthorized truth telling.” [At the end of this story, see full text of the group's letter, which I signed.]

Emphasizing that “citizens cannot make informed choices if they do not have the facts,” the Truth Telling Coalition challenged officials to give primary allegiance to the Constitution, and noted the readiness of groups like the ACLU and The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to offer advice and support.

What’s New?

In a taped interview, Assange noted in his understated way that, with the Internet, the “situation is markedly different” from Pentagon Papers days. “More material can be pushed to bigger audiences, and much sooner.”

Also, the flow of information can evade the obstructions of traditional news gatekeepers who failed so miserably to inform the American people about the Bush administration’s deceptions before the Iraq War.

People all over the world can get “the whole wad at once” and put the various reports into context, which “is not something that has previously occurred; that is something that can only be brought about as a result of the Internet,” Assange said.

However, Assange also recognized the value of involving the traditional news media to ensure that the reports got maximum attention. So, he took a page from Ellsberg’s experience by creating some competitive pressure among major news outlets, giving the 75,000 reports to the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. Beginning Sunday afternoon, all three posted articles about the huge dump of information.

Assange noted that the classified material includes many heart-rending incidents that fit into the mosaic of a larger human catastrophe. These include one depicted in Der Spiegel’s reportage of accidental killings on June 17, 2007, when U.S. Special Forces fired five rockets at a Koran school in which a prominent al-Qaeda functionary was believed to be hiding.

When the smoke cleared, the Special Forces found no terrorist, but rather six dead children in the rubble of the school and another who died shortly after.

Role of Pakistan

Perhaps the most explosive revelations disclose the double game being played by the Pakistani Directorate for Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI). Der Spiegel reported: “The documents clearly show that this Pakistani intelligence agency is the most important accomplice the Taliban has outside of Afghanistan.”

The documents also show ISI envoys not only are present when insurgent commanders hold war councils, but also give specific orders to carry out assassinations — including, according to one report, an attempt on the life of Afghan President Hamid Karzai in August 2008.

Former Pakistani intelligence chief, Gen. Hamid Gul, is depicted as an important source of aid to the Taliban, and even, in another report, as a “leader” of the insurgents. The reports show Gul ordering suicide attacks, and describe him as one of the most important suppliers of weaponry to the Talban.

Though the Pakistani government has angrily denied U.S. government complaints about Gul and the ISI regarding secret ties to the Taliban and even to al-Qaeda, the new evidence must raise questions about what the Pakistanis have been doing with the billions of dollars that Washington has given them.

Two Ex-Generals Got It Right

We have another patriotic truth-teller to thank for leaking the texts of cables that Ambassador (and former Lt. Gen.) Karl Eikenberry sent to Washington on Nov. 6 and 9, 2009, several weeks before President Barack Obama made his fateful decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

In a somewhat condescending tone, Eikenberry described the request from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then commander of allied forces in Afghanistan, for more troops as “logical and compelling within his narrow mandate to define the needs” of the military campaign.

But then Eikenberry warned repeatedly about “unaddressed variables” like militants’ “sanctuaries” in Pakistan. For example, the ambassador wrote:

“More troops won’t end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries remain … and Pakistan views its strategic interests as best served by a weak neighbor.”

In Eikenberry’s final try at informing the White House discussion (in his cable of Nov. 9), the ambassador warned pointedly of the risk that “we will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves.”

At the time, it seemed that Eikenberry’s message was getting through to the White House. On Nov. 7, Der Spiegel published an interview with National Security Adviser (former Marine General) James Jones, who was asked whether he agreed with Gen. McChrystal that a substantial troop increase was needed. Jones replied:

“Generals always ask for more troops; I believe we will not solve the problem with more troops alone. You can keep on putting troops in, and you could have 200,000 troops there and Afghanistan will swallow them up as it has done in the past.”

However, McChrystal and his boss, then-Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus pressed the case for more troops, a position that had strong support from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former Vice President Dick Cheney, key hawks in Congress and Washington’s neoconservative-dominated opinion circles.

After months of internal debate, President Obama finally caved in and gave McChrystal nearly all the troops that he had requested. (McChrystal has since been replaced by Petraeus as commander of forces in Afghanistan.)

Despite the fact that the Wikileaks disclosures offer fresh support for the doubters on the Afghan War escalation, Jones acted as the good soldier on Sunday, decrying the unauthorized release of classified information, calling Wikileaks “irresponsible.”

Jones also lectured the Pakistanis:

“Pakistan’s military and intelligence services must continue their strategic shift against insurgent groups. The balance must shift decisively against al-Qaeda and its extremist allies. U.S. support for Pakistan will continue to be focused on building Pakistani capacity to root out violent extremist groups.”

[Note: Okay; he’s a general. But the grammatical mood is just a shade short of imperative. And the tone is imperial/colonial through and through. I’ll bet the Pakistanis are as much swayed by that approach as they have been by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s admonitions not to be concerned about India -- just terrorists.]

And regarding “progress” in Afghanistan? Jones added that “the U.S. and its allies have scored several significant blows against the insurgency.”

However, that’s not the positive spin that Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen was offering just four weeks ago. On his way to Kabul, again, Mullen spoke of “recent setbacks in the Afghan campaign.”

“We underestimated some of the challenges” in Marja, the rural area of Helmand province that was cleared in March by U.S. Marines, only to have Taliban fighters return. “They’re coming back at night; the intimidation is still there,” Mullen said.

Of the much more ambitious (and repeatedly delayed) campaign to stabilize the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, Mullen said: “It’s going to take until the end of the year to know where we are there.”

Would you say yes to an additional $33.5 billion for this fool’s errand?

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

© 2010 Consortium News All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/147636/

More Obama Broken Promises

2010-07-18T12:32:00.000-07:00

So much for Obama's promise to pull the feds off of busting people using and growing marijuana legally at the State and Local levels. I did not support Obama's election because I was certain he would use us and then dispose of us once elected. The color of a persons skin and the smoothness of ones tongue does not a progressive make. Also the pentagon is now saying we will be in Afghanistan at least another decade. At least Bush was pretty out-front about his agenda. I'm afraid the Obama presidency's purpose is to diffuse the progressive movement while coalescing the Right Wing. Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming....

Feds Raid Legal Marijuana Farm, Destroy Crops
By Steve Elliott, News Junkie Post
Posted on July 12, 2010

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration has flouted Mendocino County, California's newly enacted medical marijuana ordinance by raiding the first collective that had applied to the sheriff's cultivation permit program.

A multi-agency federal task force descended on the property of Joy Greenfield, the first Mendo patient to pay the $1,050 application fee under the ordinance, which allows collectives to grow up to 99 plants provided they comply with certain regulations.

Greenfield had applied in the name of her collective, "Light The Way," which opened in San Diego earlier this year. Her property had passed a preliminary inspection by the Mendo sheriff's deputies shortly before the raid, and she had bought the sheriff's "zip-ties" intended to designate her cannabis plants as legal.

In the days before the raid, Greenfield had seen a helicopter hovering over her property; she inquired with the sheriff, who told her the copter belonged to the DEA and wasn't under his control.

The agents invaded her property with guns drawn, tore out the collective's 99 plants and took Greenfield's computer and cash.

Joy was not at home during the raid, but spoke on the phone to the DEA agent in charge. When she told he she was a legal grower under the sheriff's program, the agent replied, "I don't care what the sheriff says."

When she returned to her house she found it in disarray with soda cans strewn on the floor. "It was just a mess," she said. "No one should be able to tear your house apart like that."

Greenfield called the raid a "slap in the face of Mendocino's government."

The DEA has been tight-lipped about the raid, but claims it was part of a larger investigation involving other suspects.

"Here Mendo is trying to step out in front by passing this ordinance, and what do the Feds do but raid the first applicant," said Greenfield's attorney, Bob Boyd of Ukiah.

"The DEA is stepping all over local authorities trying to tax and regulate," Boyd said.

Neither Boyd nor other locals believe that the sheriff tipped off the DEA or gave them any information about permit applicants.

Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman confirmed Friday that the property owner had the proper paperwork and the marijuana was legal in the eyes of the county.

"This was a federal operation and had nothing to do with local law enforcement," Allman said. "The federal government made a decision to go ahead and eradicate it."

Sheriff Allman has been highly supportive of efforts to bring local growers into the permit program. Nonetheless, observers fear the raid will have a chilling effect on medical cultivators, possibly causing supply problems for local patients.

"This raid is clear evidence that the DEA is out of control," said California NORML director Dale Gieringer. "A change in federal law is long overdue."

"In the meantime, the DEA needs a new director who will enforce Attorney General Holder's pledge not to interfere in state medical marijuana laws," Gierigner said.

The DEA is currently directed by Michele Leonhart, a Bush Administration holdover who has presided over numerous medical marijuana raids, and has obstructed research efforts to develop marijuana for medicine.

President Obama has renominated Leonhart to head the agency — a move strongly opposed by drug reformers, who are calling on the administration to honor its pledge of change.

© 2010 News Junkie Post All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/147506/

Just Announced by the Pentagon......at least Another Decade in Afghanistan

2010-07-17T12:02:00.003-07:00

America: Hooked on War and Getting Poorer

By Clancy Sigal, The Guardian
Posted on July 15, 2010

There's plenty of good money to be made /
Supplyin' the army with tools of the trade … – Country Joe and the Fish

I hallucinate easily, a hangover from time spent in an acid-rock commune in London in the fevered 60s. Most evenings when I switch on the television 6.30 news with its now cliched pictures of deep sea oil spurting from BP's pipe rupture, I see not bleeding sludge but human blood surging up into the Gulf of Mexico.

I've learned to trust my visions as metaphors for reality. The same news programmes, often as a dutiful throwaway item, will show a jerky fragment of Afghan combat accompanied by the usual pulse-pounding handheld shots of snipers amid roadside bomb explosions, preferably in fiery balls. My delusional mind converts this footage into a phantasmagoria where our M60 machine guns are shooting ammunition belts full of $1,000 bills.

Blood, oil, bullets … and cash.

Why is nobody talking about the Afghanistan adventure as a cause of our plunging recession? Or at least citing the 30-year-old endless war as a major contributory factor in wasting our money to "nation-build" in the Hindu Kush while our own country falls to pieces on food stamps, foreclosures and child poverty – one in five kids – that would put the world's poorest nations to shame?

Iraq was George Bush's war. But, as Republican party chairman Michael Steele correctly says, "Afghanistan is Obama's war of choice", and a losing proposition. Historically, Bush and Dick Cheney merely toyed with Afghanistan while visiting shock and awe on Iraq. But President Obama is really, really serious about it. He told us so on his campaign trail, but most of us refused to believe him. We told ourselves: oh, he's a closet pacifist, or he'll somehow find a way out of the impasse, thus sealing a devil's pact with our own consciences.

Obama's "way out" is to dig deeper in so that he'll be able to get out, it's said. Where have we heard that before? Exit strategy, my foot. Obama is a willing prisoner of his generals, the latest four-star foot-in-mouther being General George Casey, army chief of staff, who a few days ago confessed to CBS News that the US could face another "decade or so" of persistent conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. (He then fudged it, but the cat was out of the bag.)

Our Afghanistan war, which began in 1980 under the Democrats (by weaponising Afghan resistance to the Soviets), and is now truly a bipartisan war, is as bankrupt as our economy. No connection? None that I can hear from Republicans or Democrats and the "liberal base". The war without purpose or common sense is simply a given, like the weather. Other than a few lonely members of Congress, like Florida's Alan Grayson (who introduced a bill titled "The War Is Making You Poor"), the antiwar Texas libertarian Ron Paul and Illinois's Tim Johnson, hardly anybody in public life dares to make a connection between teachers' pink slips, personal bankruptcies (6,000 a day now), our rotting infrastructure, lengthening queues at unemployment offices, child poverty … and the war.

You won't hear a peep from mainstream liberals such as Keith Olberman or Rachel Maddow. Nor, when Pentagon-funded war industry jobs are on the line, from any of the congressional liberals in my Southern California delegation such as Henry Waxman and Maxine Waters, who, after routine grumbling, just voted for yet another $30bn for the lost war that shores up our local weapons and aerospace industries.

Nobody knows whether, if the Iraq-Afghan wars came to a miraculous stop and we shipped the troops home tomorrow, leaving the homegrown Pashtun and Hazara factions to fight it out among themselves, the money would automatically return to our failing economy. But it's a question worth asking out loud. In 2008 Obama Democrats junked the war as an election issue in favour of the economy, and they won by avoiding as a political third rail any connection between the trillions spent fighting colonial wars in the Middle East and the billions we refuse to spend on our own people.

As a people we Americans are hooked on a permanent war economy that only here and there, in drips and drabs, creates immediate jobs while undermining any long-term possibility of recovery. The good news is that contracts for new unmanned Predator drone bases have been awarded to deprived areas of South Dakota, Wisconsin and Missouri, much to the local citizenry's joy. Some stimulus.

© 2010 The Guardian All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/147567/

Get Cool in the Summer Heat.....

2010-07-07T12:26:00.000-07:00

My friend Mike from the Hippie Museum group puts together some pretty cool mixes in his podcasts. Check it out.

What if We Elected a Peace President and Nobody Came....

2010-06-16T20:08:00.004-07:00

Screen print can be purchased from Uchi Clothing Company

The U.S. War Addiction: Funding Enemies to Maintain Trillion Dollar Racket

By David DeGraw, DavidDeGraw.org
Posted on June 16, 2010

Editor's Note: With so many problems in the USA, it's no easy job to single out a handful of the most important, priority issues. But the enormous pile of wasted money spent on wars and the military-industrial complex has to be right at the top. Not only is the money spent an enormous destructive waste, but there's also the question of opportunity cost; just a fraction of war money could make major improvements to health care, schools and universities, and our decaying public infrastructure. The release of the Pentagon's Quadrennal Defense Review indicates that Obama intends to spend even more on war. David DeGraw's article below sheds some light on the madness of war spending and the serious attempts made by the racketeers to make our wars self-perpetuating to keep the cash rolling in; infuriating as it is sickening.

***

A few recent news items help expose the true drivers of current wars around the world.

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

Here’s an important glimpse of truth to seep through last week in the NY Times, via Raw Story:

US-backed ‘bribes’ in Afghanistan may be funding Taliban

On June 7, the day Afghanistan became America’s longest-ever war, the New York Times reported on an ongoing investigation poised to prove that private security companies “are using American money to bribe the Taliban” to fuel combat and thus enhance demand for their services. The news follows a “series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents,” the Times said.

“The American people are paying to prop up a corrupt government that may be using our money to pay private companies to drum up business by paying the insurgents to attack our troops,” [Kucinich] said…. The Times interviewed a NATO official in Kabul who “believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban.” [read more]

#2) On top of that report, Sunday’s headlines read, “Pakistani spy agency supports Taliban:”

Pakistan’s main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group’s leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, said a research report released Sunday.

The findings could heighten tension between the two countries and raise further questions about U.S. success in Afghanistan since Pakistani cooperation is seen as key to defeating the Taliban, which seized power in Kabul in the 1990s with Islamabad’s support.

U.S. officials have suggested in the past that current or former members of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, have maintained links to the Taliban despite the government’s decision to denounce the group in 2001 under U.S. pressure. [read more]

First off, these two reports are really not news at all. Reports of American tax dollars ending up in the hands of the Taliban have been coming out since the start of the war and the ISI, as the CIA has been well aware of for years now, has been playing both sides of this war and is pivotal in keeping the war going. Secondly, I have long wondered when the CIA / US military would start exposing all of this in the mainstream propaganda press as a pretext to further expand the war into Pakistan.

#3) As a result of all this, and not surprising at all to people who were paying close attention to Obama’s surge strategy, costs and death counts are quickly rising. Jim Lobe reports from Afghanistan that the “News is Bad.”

While U.S. officials insist they are making progress in reversing the momentum built up by the Taliban insurgency over the last several years, the latest news from Afghanistan suggests the opposite may be closer to the truth.

Even senior military officials are conceding privately that their much-touted new counterinsurgency strategy of “clear, hold and build” in contested areas of the Pashtun southern and eastern parts of the country are not working out as planned despite the “surge” of some 20,000 additional U.S. troops over the past six months.

Casualties among the nearly 130,000 U.S. and other NATO troops now deployed in Afghanistan are also mounting quickly. [read more]

#4) In a propaganda effort to spin away from all the latest bad news, the desperate US military has pulled this dusty old news report out of their back-pocket and launched a psychological operation in the NY Times to give a positive spin in hopes of further manipulating US public opinion:

U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves…. The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys. [read more]

In the process of this latest propaganda campaign, the Pentagon has unwittingly exposed two things that I will now jump on. A) The real reason why we are in this war to begin with: it’s all about natural resources. And B) All the BS statements about these “previously unknown deposits” clearly prove, yet again, that the NY Times is only too happy to play the role of a straight-up propaganda paper. For those of us paying attention, we’ve been reading reports about these minerals for the past decade! Roland Sheppard just sent this along:

“The New York Times, when it was beating the drums of war in 2002, failed to mention that the USGS published a report, at that time, Mines and Mineral Occurrences of Afghanistan Compiled by G.J. Orris and J.D. Bliss. Open-File Report 02-110. On page 16, they list as ‘Significant Minerals or Materials’ magnetite, hematite, chalcopyrite, covellite, chalcocite, cuprite, malachite, azurite, molybdenite, and native gold – lithium is mentioned on page 10 under ‘References.’”

So, from the very beginning, as I went into further detail in the past, the war in Afghanistan is all about resources. I’ll get back to the “Saudi Arabia of lithium” in a minute, here’s a brief excerpt from my prior report on another key resource in the region:

ORIGINS OF THE AFGHANISTAN OCCUPATION: “STRATEGY OF THE SILK ROUTE”

Up until 9/11, oil companies, with the help of the Bush administration, were desperately trying to work out a deal with the Taliban to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. One of the world’s richest oil fields is on the eastern shore of the Caspian sea just north of Afghanistan. The Caspian oil reserves are of top strategic importance in the quest to control the earth’s remaining oil supply. The US government developed a policy called “The Strategy of the Silk Route.”

The policy was designed to lock out Russia, China and Iran from the oil in this region. This called for U.S. corporations to construct an oil pipeline running through Afghanistan. Since the mid 1990s, a consortium of U.S. companies led by Unocal have been pursing this goal. A feasibility study of the Central Asian pipeline project was performed by Enron. Their study concluded that as long as the country was split among fighting warlords the pipeline could not be built. Stability was necessary for the $4.5 billion project and the U.S. believed that the Taliban would impose the necessary order. The U.S. State Department and Pakistan’s ISI, impressed by the Taliban movement to cut a pipeline deal, agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war for control of Afghanistan. [read more]

Then of course we have the war in Iraq, again from my previous report:

ORIGINS OF THE IRAQ OCCUPATION: CHENEY ENERGY TASK FORCE

As an AlterNet report put it: “In January 2000, 10 days into President George W. Bush’s first term, representatives of the largest oil and energy companies joined the new administration to form the Cheney Energy Task Force.”

Secret Task Force documents that were dated March 2001, which were obtained by Judical Watch in 2003 after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, contained “a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects…” They also had: “… a series of lists titled ‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts‘ naming more than 60 companies from some 30 countries with contracts in various stages of negotiation.

None of contracts were with American nor major British companies, and none could take effect while the U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iraq remained in place. Three countries held the largest contracts: China, Russia and France — all members of the Security Council and all in a position to advocate for the end of sanctions.

Were Saddam to remain in power and the sanctions to be removed, these contracts would take effect, and the U.S. and its closest ally would be shut out of Iraq’s great oil bonanza.”

Project Censored highlighted a Judicial Watch report that stated: “Documented plans of occupation and exploitation predating September 11 confirm heightened suspicion that U.S. policy is driven by the dictates of the energy industry. According to Judicial Watch President, Tom Fitton, ‘These documents show the importance of the Energy Task Force and why its operations should be open to the public.’”

So that’s the oil angle of this resource war, now back to the lithium angle. This longest war in US history is very similar to the even longer wars raging in Northern Africa, another resource rich paradise of death and destruction. In the late 1990s, CIA-connected corporations like Bechtel worked with NASA to conduct infrared satellite studies to discover mineral rich regions throughout the world. Other than the discoveries in South-Central Asia (Af-Pak region), Northern Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo region), emerged as a key source for future resources. In particular, the mineral coltan, which like lithium, is vital to powering most computer technology. Since Bechtel and NASA made these discoveries, a report from The International Rescue Committee revealed that an astonishing 5.4 MILLION Africans have been killed in the region. For some background, here’s an excellent report from July 2001, in Dollars and Sense magazine:

The Business of War in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dena Montague and Frida Berrigan

“This is all money,” says a Western mining executive, his hand sweeping over a geological map toward the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He is explaining why, in 1997, he and planeloads of other businessmen were flocking to the impoverished country and vying for the attention of then-rebel leader Laurent Kabila. The executive could just as accurately have said, ‘This is all war.’

The interplay among a seemingly endless supply of mineral resources, the greed of multinational corporations desperate to cash in on that wealth, and the provision of arms and military training to political tyrants has helped to produce the spiral of conflicts that have engulfed the continent – what many regard as “Africa’s First World War.” These minerals are vital to maintaining U.S. military dominance…” [read more]

For further detail, here’s Project Censored’s 2003 report:

American Companies Exploit the Congo:

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been labeled “the richest patch of earth on the planet.” The valuable abundance of minerals and resources in the DRC has made it the target of attacks from U.S.-supported neighboring African countries Uganda and Rwanda.

The DRC is mineral rich with millions of tons of diamonds, copper, cobalt, zinc, manganese, uranium, niobium, and tantalum also known as coltan. Coltan has become an increasingly valuable resource to American corporations. Coltan is used to make mobile phones, night vision goggles, fiber optics, and capacitators used to maintain the electrical charge in computer chips….

The DRC holds 80% of the world’s coltan reserves, more than 60% of the world’s cobalt and is the world’s largest supplier of high-grade copper. With these minerals playing a major part in maintaining US military dominance and economic growth, minerals in the Congo are deemed vital US interests.

Historically, the U.S. government identified sources of materials in Third World countries, and then encouraged U.S. corporations to invest in and facilitate their production. Dating back to the mid-1960s, the U.S. government literally installed the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, which gave U.S. corporations access to the Congo’s minerals for more than 30 years. However, over the years Mobutu began to limit access by Western corporations, and to control the distribution of resources. In 1998, U.S. military-trained leaders of Rwanda and Uganda invaded the mineral-rich areas of the Congo. The invaders installed illegal colonial-style governments which continue to receive millions of dollars in arms and military training from the United States. Our government and a $5 million Citibank loan maintains the rebel presence in the Congo. Their control of mineral rich areas allows western corporations, such as American Mineral Fields, to illegally mine. Rwandan and Ugandan control over this area is beneficial for both governments and for the corporations that continue to exploit the Congo’s natural wealth….

San Francisco based engineering firm Bechtel Inc. established strong ties in the rebel zones as well. Bechtel drew up an inventory of the Congo’s mineral resources free of charge, and also paid for NASA satellite studies of the country for infared maps of its minerals. Bechtel estimates that the DRC’s mineral ores alone are worth $157 billion dollars. Through coltan production, the Rwandans and their allies are bringing in $20 million revenue a month. Rwanda’s diamond exports went from 166 carats in 1998 to 30,500 in 2000. Uganda’s diamond exports jumped from approximately 1,500 carats to about 11,300. The final destination for many of these minerals is the U.S.” [read more]

And to close this out, let me return to “The Business of War” report by Dena Montague and Frida Berrigan. As you will see, you always have to follow the money, the bankers and our friends at the IMF are always at the root of global death and destruction, and are the true Masters of War:

“Today, the United States claims that it has no interest in the DRC other than a peaceful resolution to the current war. Yet U.S. businessmen and politicians are still going to extreme lengths to gain and preserve sole access to the DRC’s mineral resources. And to protect these economic interests, the U.S. government continues to provide millions of dollars in arms and military training to known human-rights abusers and undemocratic regimes. Thus, the DRC’s mineral wealth is both an impetus for war and an impediment to stopping it….

During his historic visit to Africa in 1998, President Clinton praised Presidents Kagame and Musevini as leaders of the ‘African Renaissance,’ just a few months before they launched their deadly invasion of the DRC with U.S. weapons and training….

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have knowingly contributed to the war effort. The international lending institutions praised both Rwanda and Uganda for increasing their gross domestic product (GDP), which resulted from the illegal mining of DRC resources. Although the IMF and World Bank were aware that the rise in GDP coincided with the DRC war, and that it was derived from exports of natural resources that neither country normally produced, they nonetheless touted both nations as economic success stories….

In January 2000, Chevron – the corporation that named an oil tanker after National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice – announced a three-year, $75 million spending program in the DRC, thus challenging the notion that war discourages foreign investment…. As one investor put it, “It is a good moment to come: it is in difficult times that you can get the most advantage.”….

In April 2001, a scathing UN report argued that Presidents Kagame and Museveni are “on the verge of becoming the godfathers of the illegal exploitation of natural resources and the continuation of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” The two leaders, the report alleged, have turned their armies into armies for business….

According to East African media reports, U.S. diplomats continue to view Rwanda and Uganda as “strategic allies in the Great Lakes region” and “would not want to upset relations with them at this time.” …. The IMF and World Bank have also indicated that their policies toward Rwanda and Uganda will remain unchanged….”

Famed two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient US Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler accurately summed up the situation when he said: “I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism…. The general public shoulders the bill. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones, Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.”

Sing it with me: (Lyrics substituted by SpringWind for actual recording in original article)

Masters Of War
------Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly.

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain.

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion'
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud.

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins.

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.

Read more of David DeGraw's work at DavidDeGraw.org.
© 2010 DavidDeGraw.org All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/147217/

Let's Get Moving....

2009-12-12T13:10:00.003-08:00

Transforming the Rust-Belt into a Green Belt

By , Blog for Our Future
Posted on December 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144489/

President Obama announced a new series of jobs initiatives Tuesday while at the Brookings Institute. (“Recovery Act Lite”?) His announcement came a few days after visiting Allentown, Pa., as the first stop on a listening tour on the economy. And the listening tour came a few days after the “White House Summit on Jobs and Economic Growth,” which brought together business, labor and policy leaders to wrestle down some solutions to the nation’s economic crisis and unemployment rate spike to double-digit territory.

The President committed to new jobs-creation programs, business tax cuts and ramped-up business loan programs, along with new infrastructure funding and help for communities. He pledged to recycle some of the repaid TARP funds to jump-start the banking credit system, which has been seriously stalled.

It’s good to see the renewed efforts, and some of these ideas may work well. We desperately need all the help we can get. But let’s return for a moment to Allentown.

Remember Allentown? It was memorialized by the Billy Joel song about the shutdown of nearby Bethlehem Steel. During the Town Hall meeting and company visits, we heard some inspirational stories of local entrepreneurs, about the increase in federal Small Business Administration funding, and how Allentown should be able to cash in on the green-jobs boom.

In researching this story, I remembered that the Bethlehem Steel Plant had been razed to make way for a casino. I wasn’t surprised. We also have a new casino in Pittsburgh (my home town), built on an old industrial waterfront site (and despite the hype of the recent G-20 event, the City of Pittsburgh is still bankrupt). When I read that the Las Vegas casino owners in Bethlehem had problems finding enough steel to build the new gambling site—well, that’s just another day in Allentown. Or Homestead…Youngstown …Flint…and hundreds of auto-belt rust-towns and now Florida, Arizona and California boom towns gone bust.

The real economic pain of Allentown and Bethlehem cannot be solved by heartwarming vignettes. The Lehigh Valley’s unemployment rate hovers near 10 percent, almost double a year ago, the fourth highest in Pennsylvania. Like innumerable hometowns in the commonwealth and beyond to Midwest-Great Lakes towns, we need significant, long-term federal investments to recover. We need banks to begin lending money again to local businesses, especially manufacturing firms. We need advanced manufacturing jobs if we are ever going to realize the green boom.

Casinos might be fun to visit (hey, I love the comps), but the jobs don’t replace hard industries that have been lost. Service, financial, retail and hospitality jobs just camouflage the sorry reality that vast waves of our money have actually disappeared into a dark hole called financialization. Financialization led to the herding of our savings and assets into short-term, risky bets that redlined entire regions, crowded out critical industry investments, and, ultimately, contributed to the market crash.

If we can’t find enough steel to build casinos today, how in the world will we build the green jobs industries of the future? Beth Steel was originally built to forge the steel for the nation’s rail systems. Where will we get the steel to build the Obama Administration’s proposed new high-speed rail system, the new wind farms, the new green buildings?

I’m all over the President’s Main Street Tour; I hope it continues for the next seven years. We should remember that we have not had a serious effort to rebuild our industrial communities since the roof began caving in around the time of the Joel song, circa the Reagan decade. So, we should support the new administration and Congress in many of these new initiatives. But it’s going to take more money still, and then all the cavalry we can muster.

Fortunately, there’s one source of money that we, the people, actually have a say over. We own the institutional investments markets, vast pools of around $24 trillion before the crash. While it’s our money— in pension and savings plans, insurance companies, endowments, foundations and deposits—we don’t control how it’s invested. For years, it’s been churning away, hollowing our hometowns. But we—steelworkers and teachers, insurance holders and foundation chiefs—could change that, with help from the president and Congress (and that includes re-regulating the financial markets).

For the past three years, I’ve been meeting innovative, successful investment managers across the U.S. and Canada who’ve done well by creating hundreds of thousands of good-paying, mostly union jobs and similar numbers of affordable housing units—and investing in the green economy. They have capitalized $30 billion-$35 billion in ready-to-invest assets, primarily through union and public pension fund investments. With some federal funding guarantees and partnerships, we could see these investors and dozens more bring a much larger, at-scale cavalry for economic recovery.

These responsible investment funds have invested in U.S. portfolio companies to build them up, not tear them down. They’ve restructured companies in trouble, stabilizing them and saving jobs, not stripping and flipping. They’ve increasingly invested in green buildings and sustainable housing, not subprime mortgage scams. They’ve expanded renewable energy and efficient transportation firms, including builders of windmills and hybrid buses, leading to green-collar jobs (often with union wages and benefits). They’ve invested large sums, prudently and profitably, for the long term. They’ve aligned their investments with the long-term interests of their beneficiaries.

Yes, we need a lot of new federal dollars, but we also need to marshal workers’ resources—our own money—for the long run. We can’t revive our hometowns via the “small is beautiful” mantra, nor the 1990’s Clinton free-trade delusion. It’s time real money was put to work to rebuild our communities, industry by industry, block by block, brick by brick.

We have the capacity to reconstruct our infrastructure, reinvigorate our cities and create that hoped-for green-jobs future. But first, together, we have to reclaim control of our money.

© 2009 Blog for Our Future All rights reserved.

Beware of the Green Police.....It's Not all Black and White / Good and Bad

2009-11-05T12:34:00.007-08:00

GM's Money Trees

By Mark Schapiro Tue November 3, 2009 4:00 AM PST

I am standing in the shadow of General Motors' $1 tree. It's a native guaricica, with pale white bark and a spreading crown that looms about 40 feet above my head. Hanging from its trunk is a small plaque that identifies it as tree No. 129. I've come here, to the verdant chaos of Brazil's Atlantic forest, to understand the far-reaching and politically explosive controversies taking shape in diplomatic corridors thousands of miles away over the fate of trees like this one.

No. 129 stands in the heart of the Cachoeira reserve in the state of Paraná—one of the last slivers of a forest that once blanketed much of the country's southeastern coast. Just 7 percent of the Atlantic forest remains, but it is still one of the Earth's richest centers of biodiversity, home to a wealth of plants and creatures comparable to the Amazon's. On the way here, our group—led by Ricardo Miranda de Britez and his team of forestry experts from the Brazilian conservation group Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education (SPVS)—walked past clusters of yellow-and-white orchids, stepped over the footprints of an ocelot, kept an eye out for the endangered golden lion tamarin, and were bitten by, it seems, every one of the thousands of species of insects native to the area.

But our journey is not focused on the rare creatures in the forest. It's about the forest itself—the trees that are our partners in respiration, inhaling carbon dioxide, exhaling oxygen, and storing the carbon in their trunks and leaves. That simple process makes them one of Earth's most potent bulwarks against climate change (a.k.a. a "carbon sink"); but when they are cut and burned, all that stored carbon is released into the atmosphere. Already, some 32 million acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed each year, an amount of land equivalent to the state of Mississippi's; deforestation, according to the United Nations, is responsible for roughly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions.

What will it cost to keep those trees standing? And who's going to pay for it? The challenge of assigning precise values to an increasingly rare commodity—wild trees—and indeed the question of whether they are a commodity at all, is one of the most hotly contested in the climate world.

IT WAS AN unusual deal that landed tree No. 129 at the center of the debate. Between 2000 and 2002, the US-based Nature Conservancy struck an alliance with three of the planet's leading carbon emitters: General Motors, Chevron, and American Electric Power. Together the corporations gave the environmental group $18 million to purchase 50,000 acres of Brazilian Atlantic forest, much of which had been degraded by grazing. Three reserves were created: Serra do Itaqui, financed with $5 million from AEP; Morro da Mina, paid for with $3 million from Chevron; and Cachoeira, underwritten by $10 million from GM. (GM's role in the project survived the company's bankruptcy, which means that No. 129 is now partially owned by you and me.) SVPS was brought in to manage the reserves, which together form one contiguous forest known as the Guaraqueçaba Environmental Protection Area. You'll see Guaraqueçaba promoted on the Nature Conservancy's website as an example of corporate partnerships that make "an invaluable contribution to the preservation of the planet's biodiversity." What you won't see is what the companies get out of the deal: the potentially lucrative rights to the carbon sequestered in the trees.

At tree No. 129, de Britez takes out a tape measure and unspools it around the trunk. We're at one of the 190 carbon dioxide measuring stations—each a group of trees with numbered plaques—scattered around the Guaraqueçaba forest. Documenting the bulk of the reserve's trees is an ongoing enterprise, like tracking tagged whales.

"We measure the biomass of these trees and their carbon sequestration," de Britez says as a ranger picks up the other end of the tape measure and writes down No. 129's stats. It's 3 feet in diameter and about 45 feet tall. He estimates the carbon it contains at 95 kilograms—just under one-tenth of a ton. At $10 a ton, the upper end of the range at which carbon offsets trade in the US, No. 129 is worth about $1. Scale up to the two to three tons of carbon per acre that de Britez estimates across the 50,000-acre reserve, and the potential payoff, in addition to the public relations value, comes into focus.

The trees in the Cachoeira reserve could never offset even a fraction of GM's total carbon footprint—a single Hummer H2 (which the company started producing the same year it signed on to the Guaraqueçaba project) would require about 50 trees to offset. But the Nature Conservancy and its partners aimed to use the Brazilian reserves as a test case for preserving forests via corporate carbon credits. "The investors wanted to be pioneers in the carbon-sink field," de Britez explains. "They had in mind to start working on this before other companies."

All three companies, as it happens, had aggressively lobbied the Clinton administration against signing the 1997 Kyoto climate accord and stayed mum when President Bush withdrew from it. But they hedged their bets, figuring that the Brazilian forests could be turned into offsets to sell in places (like Europe) where Kyoto's emission limits did apply, or could be held in reserve in case the US ever established its own limits.

By the time the companies were ready to begin preparing their credits for sale, however, the UN had refused to allow "avoided deforestation" projects—those that buy forestland and then promise not to cut the trees—as an offset for industries seeking to buy their way out of emission limits. Credits generated from projects like Guaraqueçaba were excluded from the international carbon market launched by Kyoto, a market that now accounts for more than $126 billion in offset transactions. The offsets could be sold, however, in the United States, where the $700 million domestic carbon offset market is unregulated (and where prices are generally half those of Kyoto-regulated offsets).

Manyu Chang, a forest scientist who is the coordinator for climate policy for the state of Paraná, explained the problem with avoided-deforestation credits to me at her office in the state capital of Curitiba. For starters, she said, trees—living beings, after all—are far less predictable than, say, windmills. They are subject to the vagaries of fires and disease, both of which are increasing due to climate change. Each species absorbs carbon at different rates depending on factors like the altitude, soil, and weather. Then there's the problem of "leakage"—when deforestation simply shifts from protected zones to unprotected ones, creating no overall emissions reduction. And finally, the UN did not want to open the door to a perverse sort of extortion: A country could threaten to open its lands to logging unless it was paid to not do so.

More fundamentally, Chang notes, when companies create reserves on already forested lands, their contribution to the fight against climate change is limited: "Do they get the credit for simply enhancing what was there already?" José Miguez, one of Brazil's top climate officials, told me that during the Kyoto talks his government opposed using its forests to enable northern industries to pollute more. "The forest is there," he said. "You can't guarantee it will absorb extra carbon. The General Motors plan gives a false image to the public in the United States. For us, they are pretending to combat climate change."

THERE IS ANOTHER vexing question inherent in preserving forests: What happens to the people who use the land? Efforts to protect biodiversity in the dwindling wildlands of the world have increasingly run into a discomfiting tension between the impulse toward absolute preservation and the needs of people—many of them indigenous—who have lived sustainably in forestlands for decades or centuries. Such tensions are playing out in the new economics of carbon offsets.

With a preserve designed in large part to safeguard stored carbon, a new set of imperatives comes into play. Turning trees into carbon credits requires knowing how to extrapolate from carbon measurements, like the ones of tree No. 129, to determine a forest's potential as a carbon sink. It requires knowing as precisely as possible how many trees there are and of what size—which means minimizing the unpredictable activities of human beings, as small scale as they might be.

Villagers like Jonas de Souza can no longer hunt in the forest they've used for generations.
For many generations, the Guaraqueçaba forest was home to the Guarani Indians, but their dominion waned as the Brazilian government encouraged subsistence farmers to settle and clear the land. Today the two populations coexist, living alongside the reserves or in communities nearby and relying on what remains of the forest for everything from food to building materials. There are more than a dozen villages around the three reserves, linked by dirt roads and river tributaries traveled by canoe. Most are home to just a few dozen people living in structures of wood and reeds. Jonas de Souza is a 33-year-old farmer who grew up a quarter of a mile from the forest that is now part of the GM-funded Cachoeira reserve. His family grows bananas, cocoa, and coffee on a small plot. He remembers hunting for small prey—roast paca, a large rodent, is a local delicacy—and collecting seeds and hearts of palm. But now, signs have gone up at the edge of the forest: No hunting, fishing, or removal of vegetation. A state police force, the Força Verde, or Green Police, patrols the three reserves, as well as a larger state-sanctioned preservation area, to enforce the restrictions.

"Now," says de Souza, "I don't have the right to go out and do what I used to do when I was 12, 14, 15 years old. I'd grab my fishing rod and get a fish to bring to my family or to feed myself. You don't have the right to walk into the forest to go and cut a heart of palm to eat. I'll get arrested and I'll be called a thief."

De Souza says he's found numerous relics of the Guarani—pipes, an axe, pottery, and burial items. The forest is valuable today, he notes, because his community and those who were here before them have taken good care of it. "We have been here, and still the forests haven't disappeared. Still the rivers aren't contaminated. Still the biodiversity isn't extinct."

Guarani children on their way home from school.
One of the goals of the Green Police is to prevent large-scale poaching, particularly of the endangered and highly valuable hearts of palm, as well as exotic primates and birds. Yet officers cited few arrests of individuals linked to major logging, palmito, or wildlife-smuggling enterprises when I joined them on patrol. Many of their enforcement efforts have focused on local people cutting a single palm for its succulent heart—or collecting wood to build their homes. "They're afraid of us," said Captain Lestechen, a patrol leader, as a group of young boys sitting on a bench eating a heart of palm quickly scattered at the approach of the Força Verde jeep.

Visiting the villages without the Força in tow, I heard numerous stories of people being harassed, arrested, and shot at while looking for food, wood, or reeds. Antonio Alves, a 35-year-old farmer and carpenter—we spoke as he carved a 15-foot log canoe—said he was arrested this year for chopping down a tree to fix his mother's home in Quara Quara.

Antonio Alves (above; his father-in-law, Valderica Dutra, is at left) had to leave his village near GM's preserve because he can no longer hunt and gather plants in the forest.
It's a stretch to call Quara Quara a village: It's a cluster of five cabins perched at the end of a small, silted waterway. The only way in is by canoe. Three of the homes have been abandoned—the residents left, Alves said, because they could no longer hunt and gather food in the forest. After his arrest, Alves spent 11 days in jail in Antonina, a one-hour canoe ride away. The lawyer defending him at trial, pro bono, was the town's mayor, Carlos Machado. Sitting in his expansive office in the town's colonial-era city hall, Machado told me that he's represented a string of people like Alves, villagers hauled into court on charges of violating the strict prohibitions in the reserves.

"I know he didn't go cut that tree down to speculate on the wood," Machado said. "It's one thing, the wood seller who is destroying [the forest]—this is very different from a caboclo [farmer] who cuts down a tree to build a fence." These distinctions, he said, have been missing from the policies created by the reserves and enforced by the Força Verde (whose officers have received training from SPVS, the Nature Conservancy's Brazilian partner). Machado has noticed a stream of migrants from the backwoods to his town, which is buckling under the strain. "Antonina is a small town that has few resources for generating income, few possibilities for people who come from the rural zone without skills and without the defenses to live in the urban environment. They stay in the outskirts of town, in the mangrove swamps, in irregular, inhospitable situations. It creates a lot of social problems for us...Through those conservation projects, they created a poverty belt around our town." The migrants also move west to Curitiba, said Machado, where they're often steered into prostitution or the drug trade.

By excluding villagers from the forests, says Jutta Kill, a researcher with the Forests and the European Union Resource Network who has spent months interviewing locals about the project, the reserves are pulling out the communities' lifeline. "In this area," she says, "everyone is cash poor but no one goes hungry. If you take the forest away, you take away everything. The preservation projects here are designed to generate offsets for the largest polluters, and they're doing it by cutting off people from the land." Few of the people here have motors on their boats, she notes; even fewer own cars. People with some of the smallest carbon footprints on Earth are being displaced by companies with some of the biggest.

Back in Curitiba, Chang, the state forestry expert, told me that the conservation groups were trying to create a "zero disturbance" environment in their forests. "Maybe that's a little obsolete," she said. "Maybe you [should] have 90 percent conservation, not 100 percent. That way you could include the community of people who live there." But that could undermine a system based on assigning a stable, reliable, and tradable value to a living ecosystem.

"The carbon idea is not really tangible to people in the community," Miguel Calmon, the Nature Conservancy's director of forests and climate in Latin America, acknowledges. Calmon says the conservation groups initially sponsored training programs for local community members in alternate sources of income—cultivating honeybees, organic bananas, local crafts—but the money ran out. Now, he says, the rules are clear: "You can't go into these private reserves. That land is not their land anyway. If you used to go [into the forest] from your house across the road, now you can't. That land is already owned."

The supply of forests for offsetting pollution in developed countries is, potentially, almost infinite. There are an estimated 90 billion tons of carbon in Brazil's forests alone, and billions of tons more are sequestered in Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and other nations with substantial tropical forests, which are considered the most vulnerable to deforestation. The world has a major stake in keeping all that carbon where it is. The question now being debated in Washington and Copenhagen is whether the fate of the forests—and their people—will rest on the ability of industries to pay for preserving distant trees rather than reducing emissions closer to home.

Comparing Obama to Nixon??? What Planet are They Living On???

2009-10-24T23:36:00.002-07:00

Remembering Nixon
October 23, 2009 2:25 pm ET - by Jamison Foser

The first year of Barack Obama's presidency has seen some absurd media memes, from nonexistent "death panels" to crazy birtherism. But for overall ahistorical (not to mention hysterical) audacity, it's tough to beat the past week's overheated comparisons of Barack Obama to Richard Nixon.

The Obama administration's purportedly "Nixonian" sin is its public criticism of Fox News, a cable channel that has repeatedly tied Obama to terrorists and compared him to Adolf Hitler. Having had enough, White House communications director Anita Dunn, press secretary Robert Gibbs, and others have said that Fox is less a news organization than a partisan political operation.*

Even if we stipulate for the sake of discussion that Fox is a news organization, that's tame stuff by the standards of previous White Houses. You'd be hard-pressed to find an administration that hasn't at times taken a more aggressive approach toward journalists. If you're thinking "Lincoln," think again. Faced with complaints about his administration's censorship of the press in 1863, Lincoln responded, "I think when an office in any department finds that a newspaper is pursuing a course calculated to embarrass his operations and stir up sedition and tumult, he has the right to lay hands upon it and suppress it, but in no other case."

And yet the Obama administration's criticism of Fox News -- criticism, not censorship or suppression of Fox's "reporting" -- was greeted with immediate howls of protest and allegations of Nixonian behavior.

Fox foot soldiers like Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck and right-wing bloggers like Instapundit led the way, of course, but that's to be expected. People who don't hesitate to compare Obama to Hitler and Mao Zedong cannot be expected to hesitate before comparing him to Nixon -- unless it is to consider whether such a comparison will be seen as a compliment, considering the source.

But Beck and O'Reilly were quickly joined by people who should know better. The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus wrote that the criticism of Fox "has a distinct Nixonian -- Agnewesque? -- aroma." NPR's Ken Rudin said the criticism is "almost Nixonesque" -- and this was no throwaway comment; Rudin drew out the comparison for a full paragraph. (To his credit, Rudin apologized for the comments the next day, calling them "boneheaded.") CNN's Anderson Cooper asked, "[D]oes the Obama White House have an enemies list?" and, "[D]o you see shades of Nixon here?" (Even Cooper's Republican guest, Kevin Madden, was unwilling to sign on to that premise.) Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik wrote, "I have compared the current administration to the White House of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, and believe me, I did not do that lightly."

The comparison is preposterous, as Salon's Joe Conason, Media Matters' Eric Boehlert, Washington Monthly's Steve Benen, and others have explained.

In short: The Nixon administration wiretapped journalists' phones and audited their taxes. G. Gordon Liddy and another Nixon henchman even plotted to murder Jack Anderson.** That's "murder" as in "kill." And "kill" as in "dead."

Meanwhile, Obama aides have publicly criticized Fox News for lying about their boss.

It is rather obvious that these are not the same things.

You know who would really be outraged by the comparison? Richard Nixon. If a Nixon aide had proposed dealing with a hostile entity like Fox News with a sternly worded public statement rather than a (literal) firebombing, he'd likely have been axed (with luck, figuratively) on the spot.

What makes the comparison of Obama and Nixon really astounding, however, is that the comparison wasn't made with President George W. Bush, whose administration engaged in warrantless domestic spying and other tactics that actually were reminiscent of Nixonian tactics.

In addition to spying on domestic environmental and poverty-relief organizations, Bush's FBI dug into reporters' phone records. Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice revealed that the NSA monitored the communications of "U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists." James Risen, the New York Times reporter who broke the warrantless wiretapping story, has said, "What I know for a fact is that the Bush administration got my phone records." The statements from Tice and Risen went all but ignored by the media, as Eric Alterman explained earlier this year.

As far as I can tell, The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus has never compared the Bush administration's surveillance of journalists to the Nixon administration's surveillance of journalists -- she has never described anything Bush did as "Nixonian." Neither has the Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik, who has repeatedly compared Obama to Nixon. Or NPR's Ken Rudin.

The Bush administration spied on journalists and who knows who else, and Marcus, Zurawik, and Rudin never once thought to note the similarities to Richard Nixon's surveillance of journalists and who knows who else. But Anita Dunn criticizes Fox News for lying, and all of a sudden, they think they're seeing the second coming of Chuck Colson and Gordon Liddy. The double standard and the lack of perspective are simply staggering.

Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.

*A brief response to the question some have raised about whether it is appropriate for the White House to decide what is or is not a news organization: Of course it is. The only question is whether it has drawn the line in the right place. Nobody would expect the White House to grant the Weekly World News or the Halliburton corporate newsletter or the author of the Republican National Committee's mass emails the same access they grant ABC and The New York Times. The question isn't whether the White House should make a determination about which news outlets to treat as a legitimate, it's whether it makes the right determinations.

**During last year's presidential campaign, the news media, which were so obsessed with Obama's ties to Bill Ayers, were unconcerned by John McCain's palling-around with Liddy. Then again, Liddy had merely plotted to murder a journalist; he didn't appear on CNN to criticize Fox News.

Copyright © 2009 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved.

If I Was President.....

2009-07-13T01:48:00.005-07:00

Let's Repower America - Environment California

2009-06-24T13:07:00.004-07:00

Hello Friends,

I've been gone for awhile but I'm back. I have been working on Environment California's campaign to get strong global warming legislation passed. It is coming down to the wire. Please, click on this link and watch the video at this link. The main argument against limits on global warming pollution is the cost. Try to imagine the cost if we do nothing. It is unimaginable.

Let's Repower America - Environment California

Shared via AddThis

Peace,

Alan

"He Outlasted The Bastards"...Happy Birthday Pete...

2009-05-04T14:42:00.007-07:00

Legendary Folk Singer & Activist Pete Seeger Turns 90, Thousands Turn Out for All-Star Tribute Featuring Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Bernice Johnson Reagon and Dozens More

From Democracy Now

Legendary folk singer, banjo player, storyteller, and political and environmental activist Pete Seeger turned ninety on Sunday. More than 18,000 people packed New York’s Madison Square Garden Sunday celebrate the man, the music and the movement. The all-star lineup included Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, Ani DiFranco, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Billy Bragg, Ruby Dee, Steve Earle, Arlo Guthrie, Guy Davis, Dar Williams, Michael Franti, Bela Fleck, Tim Robbins, Dave Matthews, Rufus Wainwright, John Mellencamp, Ben Harper, and Ritchie Havens. We speak with some of the musicians, play Seeger’s music and play excerpts from our hour-long interview with Seeger in 2004.

Highlights from Pete Seeger 90th birthday tribute:

AMY GOODMAN: Legendary folk singer, banjo player, storyteller, and political and environmental activist Pete Seeger turned ninety on Sunday. More than 18,000 people packed New York’s Madison Square Garden for a night of music in his honor on Sunday night. The concert was also a benefit for an environmental group Seeger founded to preserve the Hudson River, the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater.

The all-star lineup included Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, Ani DiFranco, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Billy Bragg, Ruby Dee, Steve Earle, Arlo Guthrie, Guy Davis, Dar Williams, Michael Franti, Bela Fleck, Tim Robbins, Dave Matthews, Rufus Wainwright, John Mellencamp, Ben Harper, and Ritchie Havens.

Pete Seeger has been an icon of American dissent and creative energy for almost seventy years. He performed with Woody Guthrie and the Weavers in the ’40s. In the ’50s, he opposed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt and was almost jailed for refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He helped popularize the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” and marched with Dr. Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. He was also a vocal critic of the Vietnam War and inspired a generation of protest singers. Later he became an important voice within the environmental and anti-nuclear movements.

Pete Seeger is now ninety years old and continues to perform and be politically active.

Bruce Springsteen, who sang Woody Guthrie’s original version of “This Land Is Your Land” with Pete Seeger at President Obama’s inauguration this year, headlined Sunday night’s concert and began with a moving tribute to Seeger.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: As Pete and I traveled to Washington for President Obama’s inaugural celebration, he told me the—he told me the entire story of “We Shall Overcome,” how it moved from a labor movement song and, with Pete’s inspiration, had been adopted by the civil rights movement.

And that day, as we sang “This Land Is Your Land,” I looked at Pete. The first black president of the United States was seated to his right. And I thought of—I thought of the incredible journey that Pete had taken. You know, my own growing up in the ’60s, a town scarred by race rioting, made that moment nearly unbelievable. And Pete had thirty extra years of struggle and real activism on his belt. He was so happy that day. It was like, Pete, you outlasted the bastards, man. You just outlasted them. It was so nice. It was so nice.

At rehearsals the day before, it was freezing. It was like fifteen degrees. And Pete was there, he had his flannel shirt on. I said, “Man, you better wear something besides that flannel shirt!” He says, “Yeah, I’ve got my long johns on under this thing.” I said—and I asked him, I said, “How do you want to approach ‘This Land Is Your Land’?” as it’d be near the end of the show. And all he said was, “Well, I know I want to sing all the verses. You know, I want to sing all the ones that Woody wrote, especially the two that get left out, you know, about private property and the relief office.” And I thought, of course, you know, that’s what Pete’s done his whole life: he sings all the verses all the time, especially the ones that we’d like to leave out of our history as a people, you know?

At some point—at some point, Pete Seeger decided he’d be a walking, singing reminder of all of America’s history. He’d be living archive of America’s music and conscience, a testament of the power of song and culture to nudge history along, to push American events towards more humane and justified ends. He would have the audacity and the courage to sing in the voice of the people.

Now, despite Pete’s somewhat benign grandfatherly appearance, you know, he is a creature of a stubborn, defiant and nasty optimism. He carries—inside him, he carries a steely toughness that belies that grandfatherly facade, and it won’t let him take a step back from the things he believes in.

At ninety, he remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country’s illusions about itself. Pete Seeger still sings all the verses all the time, and he reminds us of our immense failures, as well as shining a light towards our better angels in the horizon, where the country we’ve imagined and hold dear, we hope, awaits us. And on top of it, he never wears it on his sleeve. He’s become comfortable and casual in this immense role. He’s funny and very eccentric.

The song that—I’m going to bring Tommy out. And the song Tommy Morello and I are about to sing, I wrote it in the mid-’90s, and it started as a conversation I was having with myself. It was an attempt to regain my own moorings. And its last verse is the beautiful speech that Tom Joad whispers to his mother at the end of The Grapes of Wrath. It says, “Wherever there’s a cop beating a guy, wherever a hungry newborn baby cries, wherever there’s a fight against the blood and the hatred in the air, look for me, Mom. I’ll be there.” Well, Pete has always been there.

AMY GOODMAN: Bruce Springsteen honoring Pete Seeger on his ninetieth birthday Sunday night at Madison Square Garden. Back at the inauguration, Springsteen, Pete Seeger and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, Pete’s granson, sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial “This Land Is Your Land.”

PETE SEEGER: [singing with Bruce Springsteen and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger] I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

In the squares of the city, under shadow of the steeple
At the relief office, I saw my people
As they stood there hungry, I stood there whistling
This land was made for you and me.

A great high wall there tried to stop me
A great big sign there said private property
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing
That side was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island…

AMY GOODMAN: Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen and Tao Rodriguez-Seeger at the inauguration, singing those often forgotten words of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. As we continue with the tribute to Pete Seeger on his ninetieth birthday and the celebration of his environmental group Clearwater. I’m Amy Goodman, very happy to be back in New York.

During the concert on Sunday night, Pete Seeger came backstage and took a few questions from us reporters.

REPORTER: When you were writing “My Dirty Stream,” did you wonder, “Would it work?” Did you ever have doubts that things would get better on the river?

PETE SEEGER: No, I think I figured that sooner or later—I didn’t know it would happen so soon, frankly. But if the human race can keep the scientists from inventing two more foolish weapons, I think we’ve got time to solve our problems. The only question is science—scientists have a religion. They think that an infinite increase in empirical information is a good thing. Can they prove it? Of course not. It’s a religious belief. That’s science for you.

REPORTER: Hey, Pete. Down in the front here. Happy birthday, first off. What are your plans and goals for your hundredth birthday?

PETE SEEGER: I don’t expect to be around.

AMY GOODMAN: Hi, Pete. What are you proudest of accomplishing in these first ninety years? And can you start by saying your name?

PETE SEEGER: My name, I think, is Pete Seeger, but I’m losing my memory. I think the best thing I’ve ever done is stay married to an extraordinary person, who had three wonderful young people that we’ve raised and six wonderful grandchildren.

REPORTER: Hi, Pete. Back here.

PETE SEEGER: Who?

REPORTER: Hi, Pete. Back here. How are you doing? Happy birthday. Describe, if you will, what this night is like for you, to have all these great artists here honoring you.

PETE SEEGER: Well, normally I’m against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big. Look at the scalpers that got into the act with this particular evening, doubling the price of tickets. But it, needless to say, was a great honor, and these absolutely fantastic musicians.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Pete Seeger behind the stage. Well, singer-songwriter Joan Baez was also there last night. I caught up with her just before she went on stage.

JOAN BAEZ: I am Joan Baez, and my first experience with Pete Seeger was weaning me from rhythm and blues, which—as my parents badly wanted to do. They were horrified. They thought all rhythm and blues singers were dope addicts, even though they didn’t know what dope addicts were. So my auntie—they spirited me away with my auntie to a Pete Seeger show. And it was like a vaccine. Either it was going to take or not. And it took.

And I loved the music, and I discovered that this man did what my family, in a sense, had done for many years, which was, having become Quakers when I was eight years old, fused everything with their politics. And this was music and politics in a way that I had never known. But it was so natural to me, his music and what he did with his life. And I understood that very quickly.

And when I found out at an early age—I don’t know if this is myth or not, but when the press went to his house for an interview at one point, that he was on the roof tacking a few of the last shingles on, and he wouldn’t come down, and he was ready. I knew this was a man I wanted to follow for his political and musical events that he did. And so, I did. There was Harry Belafonte, Odetta and Pete. And I listened to Pete’s music endlessly and heard the stories about him and learned his songs and followed him.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Joan Baez. Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the all-female African American a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock and one of the original members of the SNCC Freedom Singers, also talked to reporters behind stage.

DR. BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON: I’m Bernice Johnson Reagon. I was born in Southwest Georgia in the country. And the first time I heard Pete Seeger was on TV with the Weavers doing the Hootenanny. But I didn’t know him as Pete Seeger.

I met him as a human being because of the Albany, Georgia civil rights movement in the 1960s. And he actually thought the singing in Southwest Georgia was so powerful that they should organize a singing group. And he talked about the Almanac Singers and the Weavers and said to Jim Forman of SNCC, “If you organized a group, you would have a group that could travel all over the country singing songs about the movement, and they might also bring financial support to the movement.” And so, Cordell Reagon, who was a SNCC field secretary, organized the first group of Freedom Singers. I was an alto, Rutha Harris was soprano, and Charles Neblett was bass. And Pete was really the person who actually identified that body of work. And in ’63, we traveled all over the country, and it—sometimes they called us the singing newspaper.

But he was really transformative in my life. And one of the important things about Pete is that he was married to a woman named Toshi. And the first time I did not go home for Christmas, I spent Christmas at the Seegers’. And Toshi booked the Freedom Singers, and I was the contact, so my foundation for the business part of music comes from Toshi Seeger. So, of course, when I had my first baby, and my baby was a girl, that girl’s name is Toshi Reagon. And so, the Seegers are powerful forces in my life and in my work.

The other thing that Seeger taught me was the idea of a working singer, that you did not have to be a star. You had to know you were a singer. You had to know what your music was. And you had to be willing to do it for the rest of your life, as long as you had voice. And people would keep up with you. They would catch up with you if you did not go away. And it was a very important model for a young singer. And as a Freedom Singer, we made $10 a week. It was the perfect way to start my career as a musician, but it was looking at Pete Seeger and his years and years of doing music as a part of struggle that really inspired me. He was a very important model.

And what’s incredible is that he has not—he has not broken stride in any way. So, now he is a ninety-year-old. If you live to be ninety, you could just take the whole thing to your grave, you know?

MIKE BURKE: Can you talk about Pete Seeger’s connection to the song “We Shall Overcome”?

DR. BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON: Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie went to Highlander Folk School during the 1940s. Zilphia Horton, the wife of Myles Horton, who was one of the founders of Highlander, was the music director. She taught Pete a song that had come to Highlander from people who went on strike from Charleston to the American Tobacco Company. And so, Pete took this song, and he said that he took it back home, and he was doing a lot of concerts for union organizing. And he said the song really didn’t do much.

But he made some changes. He changed “I” to “we.” And instead of “I’ll” or “I will,” which is the way we sing it as a church song, he said he changed it to “I shall,” because it sounded better. And he also added the verse, “We’ll walk hand-in-hand.”

And this song was taught at Highlander to the students who came there on Easter weekend 1960 after their sit-in work in Nashville, Tennessee. They took the song back home. And at an organizing meeting, the students who were sit-in leaders actually started to sing the freedom songs they had been doing. And Guy Carawan led this particular song, and they stood, and they joined hands. And from that point, this became the theme song of a movement.

And it is Pete Seeger who is the link. If you start with black people striking in Charleston, go into the one place in the South during the ’30s and ’40s where black and white people could organize together, Pete learning the song there, taking it north, including teaching it to Guy, who ended up back at Highlander. Myles Horton said that Highlander sort of incubated the song until it could be returned to black people organizing against racism. So Pete is a crucial and very important link, having things pass through him no matter where he was.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, one of the SNCC Singers and founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock.

This is Democracy Now!, as we turn now to an excerpt of an interview I did with Pete Seeger five years ago, right here in the firehouse in New York. I asked him about “We Shall Overcome.”

PETE SEEGER: In 1957, I went down to Highlander. Zilphia was dead, and Myles Horton, her husband, said, “We can’t have a celebration of twenty-five years with this school without music. Won’t you come down and help lead some songs?” So I went down, and Dr. King and Reverend Abernathy came up from Alabama to say a few words, and I sang a few songs, and that was one of them. Ann Braden drove King to a speaking engagement in Kentucky the next day, and she remembers him sitting in the back seat, saying, “‘We Shall Overcome.’ That song really sticks with you, doesn’t it?” But he wasn’t the song leader. It wasn’t until another three years that Guy Carawan made it famous.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll go back to that interview. But first, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello took a few questions from reporters last night, as well.

TOM MORELLO: Pete Seeger is a tremendous inspiration, not just for activist musicians, but I believe for all Americans, and a shining example of someone who combines uncompromising activism with heart and soul and a generous spirit. And his enormous catalog of fantastic songs, mixed with his bravery throughout his ninety years of life in standing up for social justice, is unparalleled in American history. And it’s a real honor to be with him here today to celebrate his birthday.

I think that Pete is one of the first links in a chain of musicians—before him, maybe Joe Hill, and after him, not just folk musicians like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, you know, Bruce Springsteen and, you know, those of us who—many on the bill today, including my own Nightwatchman, who try to follow—put our small feet in his big footsteps, but I also think he’s a link in the chain of groups like Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down and the Clash and Public Enemy, music that serves the purpose of social justice, but also music the stands on its own.

My first memory is not actually hearing Pete Seeger. It’s seeing his banjo and seeing the words written on it, because I was a fan of Woody Guthrie and his “This machine kills fascists.” And Pete had, you know, sort of a subtle twist on it, with “This machine surrounds hatred and forces it to remember,” and then I—“surrender.” And then I knew that there was a thoughtful man behind that banjo.

His antiwar stance, I think—you know, if one four-minute performance of a song could be credited with ending the Vietnam War, it was Pete Seeger on The Smothers Brothers Show, when he sang “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” in defiance of the censors and in defiance of the blacklist. And I think that was a really heroic moment in the antiwar crusade.

AMY GOODMAN: Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, as we turn again back to my 2004 interview with Pete Seeger. I asked him about “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” and how he made his anti-Vietnam War stance clear back in ’67, when he was on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

PETE SEEGER: Well, the Smothers Brothers were a big, big success on the CBS television. And way back the year before, I think in the spring of ’67, they said—CBS says, “Anything we can do for you? You’re right at the top. What can we do to make you happier?” And they said, “Let us have Seeger on.” And CBS said, “Well, we’ll think about it.” Finally, in October they said, “OK, you can have him on.” And I sang this song “Waist deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to push on.”

The tape was made in California, flown to New York. And in New York they scissored the song out. And now, the Smothers Brothers took to the print media and said, “CBS is censoring our best jokes. They censored Seeger’s best song.” And they got some publicity. And during November, December and January, the arguments went on. Finally, in February—no, pardon me, late January, late January of ’68, CBS said, “OK, OK, he can sing the song.” Six hours’ notice, I flew out to California.

I remember singing a batch of songs from American history, songs from the Revolution, like “Come ye hither, redcoats, you mind what madness fills. In our forest there is danger, there’s danger in our hills. Fall the rifles, the rifles in our hands shall prove no trifle.” I think I mentioned the hit song of 1814. It was the hit song: “Oh, say can you see.” And the song of the Mexican War, “Green grow the lilacs all sparkling with dew.” A love song. That’s why Yankees are called “gringos” in Mexico, from that song. And, of course, the Civil War, several good songs, not just “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but a batch of them. The Spanish-American War, Oscar Brown taught me this song. American soldiers in the Philippines, they were singing, “Damn, damn, damn the Filipinos. Cross-eyed kakiack ladrones. And beneath the starry flag, civilize them with a crag, and go back to our own beloved home.” I didn’t sing that.

But along come modern times. I sang “Waste Deep in the Big Muddy,” and this time only a station in Detroit cut it out. But the rest of the country heard it, so seven million people heard it. Who knows? Later that month, in late February, Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for re-election. The song would be probably just one more thing.

I honestly believe that the future is going to be millions of little things saving us. I imagine a big seesaw, and at one end of this seesaw is on the ground with a basket half-full of big rocks in it. The other end of the seesaw is up in the air. It’s got a basket one-quarter full of sand. And some of us got teaspoons, and we’re trying to fill up sand. A lot of people are laughing at us, and they say, “Ah, people like you have been trying to do that for thousands of years, and it’s leaking out as fast as you’re putting it in.” But we’re saying, “We’re getting more people with teaspoons all the time.” And we think, “One of these years, you’ll see that whole seesaw go zooop in the other direction.” And people will say, “Gee, how did it happen so suddenly?” Us and all our little teaspoons. Now granted, we’ve got to keep putting it in, because if we don’t keep putting teaspoons in, it will leak out, and the rocks will go back again. Who knows?

AMY GOODMAN: Pete Seeger. If you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. But we’re continuing with this tribute to Pete Seeger, who turned ninety years old on May 3rd, on Sunday. This is Pete Seeger singing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968.

PETE SEEGER: [singing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”]

It was back in 1942,
I was a member of a good platoon.
We were on maneuvers in Louisiana,
One night by the light of the moon.
The captain told us to ford a river,
That’s how it all begun.
We were knee deep in the Big Muddy,
The big fool said to push on.

Well, the Sergeant said, “Sir, are you sure,
This is the best way back to the base?”
“Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
‘Bout a mile above this place.
It’ll be a little soggy, but just keep slogging.
We’ll soon be on dry ground.”
We were waist deep in the Big Muddy,
The big fool said to push on.

The Sergeant said, “Sir, with all this equipment
No man will be able to swim.”
“Sergeant, don’t be a Nervous Nellie,”
The Captain said to him.
“All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I’ll lead on.”
We were neck deep in the Big Muddy
The big fool said to push on.

All at once, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain’s helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, “Turn around men!
I’m in charge from now on.”
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the captain dead and gone.

We stripped and dived and found his body
Stuck in the old quicksand…

AMY GOODMAN: Pete Seeger, singing the song he was forbidden to sing on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” Yes, that was him singing on The Smothers Brothers Show.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn back to the ninetieth birthday tribute of Pete Seeger—for Pete Seeger at Madison Square Garden. Among those who were there was singer-songwriter Steve Earle. He performed at the tribute. Before the concert, he spoke about the importance of Pete Seeger in his life.

STEVE EARLE: I don’t remember, you know, ever not being aware of Pete Seeger. It’s like, my age—the year I was born, 1955, is the year that Pete testified before HUAC, downtown New York City. And if you’ve ever seen those transcripts, he took the First Amendment like the Hollywood Ten did. He basically said that, you know, “You have no right to”—you know, basically, “You don’t have a right to ask me this. It’s the same thing as telling somebody who you voted for when you go into the booth, to tell somebody what political party that you belong to,” which is what the first question that everybody that went before HUAC was asked.

Nineteen sixty-six, when the blacklist effectively ended for Pete, you know, I saw Pete on the Smothers Brothers, and I became—you know, it’s like, by that time, I’m playing guitar, and the war is going on. And I was fourteen years old when I started really, you know, going out and playing, and I couldn’t get into places that served liquor, and that meant coffee houses. And I lived in a military town, and the Vietnam War was going on. So I heard about Pete Seeger almost immediately. And it’s kind of—it’s kind of huge.

I mean, I literally wrote a song about it, about the fact that, you know, people—we went through a period over the last few years when there was a lot of talk about what artists should be commenting on and what they shouldn’t be commenting on. And I was raised, partly because I knew who Pete Seeger was all my life, to believe that that was my job, that that’s what artists do, is you comment on the society that you live in. That’s my gig. That’s the way I was taught to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Steve Earle. Ani DiFranco was also one of the headliners. I caught up with her a few nights before in Madison, Wisconsin, when she was there for the hundredth anniversary of The Progressive magazine, before she flew to Pete Seeger’s ninetieth birthday in New York.

ANI DiFRANCO: My name is Ani DiFranco.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your thoughts about Pete on his ninetieth birthday?

ANI DiFRANCO: So glad I’m going to go to his ninetieth party, so happy that I was invited. It’s going to be an awesome group of people, fitting of an awesome fellow. I mean, I just—I feel grateful just to know the man, to have been in the room with him on more than one occasion and felt the power of his energy. You know, I’m so impressed by the fact that at his age he’s still engaged and informed and inspiring and inspired.

And, you know, I’ve been with him at, you know, big benefits and hootenannies, where it’s all disorganized and chaotic, and everybody starts griping at everybody else and forgets why we’re there. And then Pete walks in, and everybody remembers again, you know? So, you know, I just—I’m really glad that we get to gather together while he’s still with us and pour some of that love back into him that he’s been pouring into the world all this time.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you remember when you first heard Pete Seeger or a Pete Seeger song?

ANI DiFRANCO: Well, yeah. I’m not sure when I first heard a Pete Seeger song. I was probably really little, the folk canon was very much a part of my upbringing. So, almost before memory, I’m sure I heard his music. And then I met him at the Clearwater Festival that he and Toshi have been running for forever and contributing to the cleaning up of our Hudson River, and I shared the stage with him first there and on his home turf.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you have a favorite song of his?

ANI DiFRANCO: I don’t think so. You know, I think that, like any folksinger, it’s not about one song or one moment, you know, in a more of a pop model of music. It’s about a lifetime of—you know, it’s almost like every song that he’s offered is another verse, you know, in the great song of his life and of our society.

AMY GOODMAN: Both Ani DiFranco and Dar Williams performed at Sunday night’s tribute to Pete Seeger. But Dar Williams was also in Madison, Wisconsin, last week, where I spoke to her about Pete.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s Pete’s ninetieth birthday. What do you think? What are your thoughts about Pete?

DAR WILLIAMS: Well, first of all, Pete has set the standard for all of us musicians, ‘cause every time I do something that’s like a little vain or a little selfish, a little, you know, highlights in the hair, I think, “Pete would not do this.” You know, he’s just been—he’s been a person-to-person musician. And he actually said to me, like he was talking about somebody writing an article where they said that he was concerned about his career, and he said, “I never gave a ‘s’ about my career.” And I thought, that is exactly true, and it’s a real model to the rest of us artists.

And then there’s the—all of this straight-ahead, “unspotlighty,” you know, movement-to-movement contributions he’s made about stuff that—you know, I live close to him, so he just shows up at places that need a little boost. And it’s not glittery, and it doesn’t bring attention to him, but it helps every cause that he, you now, joins.

AMY GOODMAN: When do you remember first hearing Pete?

DAR WILLIAMS: Let’s see. Well, you know, as Peter said, you know, there are certain things that are just in your DNA. So, who knows when any of us first heard Pete? But I do remember a friend of mine working at a camp for disabled kids. And I was just out of college, and I was, you know, trying to figure out what my contribution to society would be. And he showed up and was—he sang “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain.”

And nobody really knew he was coming. It was a camp for disabled kids. You know, there was nothing—it was just he was there to sing music that would include people. And kids in wheelchairs were singing; kids were singing in sign language; kids with disabilities, with very limited abilities to, you know, participate, were participating.

All the counselors were in tears. I was in tears, because he was just—and I just thought, you know, that spirit of inclusiveness, that spirit of unity. Of all these different abilities, these kids who have this, you know, desire to express and be a part of it, he’s completely succeeded. You know? And everyone was going, “Whoo-hoo!”

That’s when I realized what his power was and that the power is—what Spalding Gray called like “horizontal.” You know, it wasn’t vertical, from on top of a mountain speaking down. It was radiating outwards. And that’s when I realized that that’s the kind of power, that if I ever had it, that’s the way I would do it. So, my cognizance of his power was around then.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you have any favorite songs that you think of when you think of Pete Seeger?

DAR WILLIAMS: You know, I think that “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” is a really—you know, some of these songs like that and “Turn, Turn, Turn” that really just sit us down in the eternal reality of what we have to work on, you know, what we have to break it down to, its simple elements, is—those are still really—hit me really strongly.

The other thing is, my favorite band growing up were The Byrds. Like, they were just so sexy and so, like, groovy, and their harmonies were beautiful. And they would sing “The Bells of Rhymney.” And I kind of feel like there’s something very deep and existential about that song. And it just shows the poetry that he did, as well as, you know, the simplicity in the messages. There was also deep poetry in what he was doing. So, that’s actually one of my favorite songs, “The Bells of Rhymney.”

AMY GOODMAN: What does it mean to you to be at the celebration, to be singing in Madison Square Garden with Pete and all of the people who love him?

DAR WILLIAMS: I think it’s a moment that many people are taking right now to acknowledge the people. And actually, after having seen the documentary about him, about how many years he spent going and singing to kids when he was blacklisted, you know, just finding a way to communicate. Aside from commerce, aside from his career, aside from what he knew what the future would bring, here he was just going from place to place. And I’ve met a lot of people who work that way, you know, go community to community, child to child, human to human. And here we are filling Madison Square Garden with a person who’s had that kind of—you know, who spoke in person to person. It’s not like he got a lot of advertising spots to advertise himself.

So, it’s a people’s victory that we all circle around a person and a person’s singing like that, you know. And the way that he actually—he’s probably mortified, because he’s probably like, “I was here to show you that you could sing, that you could participate. I’m not at the center. My job was to put you closer to the center of power and music and your voice.” Anyway, I think it’s—you know, not to lionize him, but I think that coming to Madison Square Garden is a part of us acknowledging that he had that power on us and that we feel completely united in what he, you know, sought out to achieve.

AMY GOODMAN: At Madison Square Garden, Dar Williams performed with the British folk musician Billy Bragg. He came to the back of the stage to speak with reporters last night about the influence of Pete Seeger’s music on his own politically conscious music.

BILLY BRAGG: Pete has been a constant since the days of Woody Guthrie, you know, and to meet with him and talk with him, with someone who, you know, rode the rails with Woody, who sang with Paul Robeson, who stood up against McCarthy, who marched with Dr. King—you know, I mean, he’s like a history of our tradition.

And, you know, I’m part of that sort of like political song tradition. And Pete is—he’s right through it. He runs through it like a—you know, like a constant stream. He reminds me of a redwood. He’s like a redwood, really. And we, you know, we see him standing tall in the forest.

And so, to be here today and be part of this—and particularly, as I was saying on stage, you know, he encouraged me to rewrite the words to “The Internationale,” which is like, you know, the national anthem of the left. I would never have even tried such a thing, had Pete not, you know, encouraged me to do it. And his belief in me and my ability to do that, that’s the influence he’s had on me.

AMY GOODMAN: Billy Bragg, what about Pete’s antiwar stance and combining that with his art and his music? How has that influenced you?

BILLY BRAGG: Very crucial, really crucial, because obviously, you know, the imperial wars that my country has been involved in, first in Northern Ireland and then moving on through the ‘80s in the Falklands and elsewhere around the world, you know, the antiwar songs that Pete wrote have a strong connection.

And he’s kind of influenced also with the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement in America was very strong politicizer around the world. You know, the Northern Ireland troubles began with a Catholic civil rights movement. That was the start of it, and that was influenced by the civil rights movement in the United States of America. So the culture of that battle kind of transferred to our culture. We sing the songs that Pete wrote or took part in popularizing, and we sing those, as well.

And we’re still, today, at antiwar, anti-capitalist demos, I sang “The Internationale”—last time I sang “The Internationale” was on the steps of the Bank of England at the G20 demonstration on April the 1st. So, you know, that connection of people coming around again to that tradition, I think, tonight is very, very timely.

AMY GOODMAN: British folk musician Billy Bragg. Hip-hop artist Michael Franti also spoke to reporters about the importance of Pete Seeger in his life.

MICHAEL FRANTI: My name’s Michael Franti. I have a group called Spearhead. And Pete is somebody who made it possible for—or made it OK, I should say, for artists to give a s-h-i-[deleted]. He made it possible for an artist to stand on the stage and speak from their heart about what they feel about going—that is going on in the world and not have any shame about it, you know.

And over the last eight or nine years, especially since the war started in Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been a lot artists who have closed down and a lot of media sources who have refused to open their doors and ears to those artists. And Pete is somebody who gave me, personally, the strength to continue, because as I look back in history, he was always on the side of peace and justice. And if you’re on that side, then history is always going to show that you were on the right side of things.

And so, that’s why I’m here. I’m grateful for Pete for shining that light and also being such a brilliant inspiration to, you know, not only the folk music world, but also his rhyming. He was a predecessor to rap music in a lot of his songs, so I appreciate it.

AMY GOODMAN: Hip-hop artist Michael Franti. As you can see, it was an all-star cast. As the Academy Award-winning actor Tim Robbins stepped off the stage, I had a chance to ask him about Pete Seeger.

TIM ROBBINS: I’m Tim Robbins. Pete Seeger is someone that I’ve been aware of pretty much all of my life. My dad was a folksinger. We were—we listened to his albums when we were kids. My dad’s group sung a few of Pete’s songs that he either wrote or unearthed. As a folklorist, he’s invaluable to the country as someone that has extended the life of so many different songs, be they sea shanties or Negro spirituals or workers’ songs or civil rights songs. He’s in all of our blood. You know, he’s part of who we are.

AMY GOODMAN: What did his antiwar stance mean to you as a performer, an artist, a musician and a political activist?

TIM ROBBINS: Well, you know, he had courage, you know? He did things that, you know, after being blacklisted for how many years? Fifteen, twenty years? The first thing he does on television is “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on CBS. You know, this is a man with courage, you know. One would hope that, you know, one could achieve that kind of conviction and courage in their life.

AMY GOODMAN: You just celebrated your fiftieth birthday. What do you want to be doing when you’re ninety?

TIM ROBBINS: I think I’ll be folk singing.

AMY GOODMAN: Tim Robbins. Well, today we’ll end this tribute to Pete Seeger in his own words. Back in our interview in 2004, the last question I asked Pete.

AMY GOODMAN: And for someone who isn’t so hopeful, who is listening to this right now, trying to find their way, what would you say?

PETE SEEGER: Realize that little things lead to bigger things. That’s what Seeds is all about. And this wonderful parable in the New Testament: the sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don’t grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don’t grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousand fold. Who knows where some good little thing that you’ve done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of?

AMY GOODMAN: Pete Seeger. Yes, he has turned ninety years old, May 3rd, 2009. Madison Square Garden was packed last night for the celebration of Pete Seeger and the Clearwater, the environmental group he founded, for which it was a fundraiser. You can check out their website at clearwater.org. If you want to check out our entire interview with Pete Seeger, more than an hour, you can go to our website at democracynow.org.

How Much Money Would You Save By Giving Up Your Constitutional Rights?

2009-05-02T14:09:00.004-07:00

U.S. Cities Increasing Use of Armed Mercenaries to Replace Police
By Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports
Posted on April 24, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/138180/

The United States is in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in its history. We see this in schools, health care, prisons, and certainly with the US military/national security/intelligence apparatus.

There are almost 200,000 "private contractors" in Iraq (more than U.S. soldiers) and President Barack Obama is continuing to use mercenaries there and in Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine. At present, 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget is going to private companies.

This privatization trend is hardly new, but it is accelerating. While events such as the Nisour Square massacre committed in September 2007 by Blackwater operatives in Baghdad show the lethal danger of unleashing mercenary forces on foreign soil, one area with the potential for extreme abuses resulting from this privatization is in domestic law enforcement in the U.S.

Many people may not be aware of this, but since the 1980s, private security guards have outnumbered police officers.

"The more than 1 million contract security officers, and an equal number of guards estimated to work directly for U.S. corporations, dwarf the nearly 700,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the United States," according to the Washington Post. Some estimate that private security operate inside the U.S. at a 5-to-1 ratio with police.

In New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of the city, private security poured in. Armed operatives from companies like Blackwater, Wackenhut, Intercon and DynCorp spread out in the city. Within two weeks of the hurricane, the number of private security companies registered in Louisiana jumped from 185 to 235.

In New Orleans at the time, I interviewed Israeli commandos from a company called Instinctive Shooting International as they operated an armed checkpoint on Charles Street after having been hired by a wealthy businessman. I also interviewed private guards who bragged of shooting "black gangbangers."

The abuses by private security guards in New Orleans and elsewhere has not to this day been thoroughly investigated. Moreover, the legality and constitutionality of the deployment of these modern-day Pinkertons needs to be seriously explained to the U.S. public.

Now it seems that some cities think it is a great idea to expand the use of these private forces using taxpayer funds.

The Wall Street Journal this week reported, "Facing pressure to crack down on crime amid a record budget deficit, Oakland is joining other U.S. cities that are turning over more law-enforcement duties to private armed guards. The City Council recently voted to hire International Services Inc., a private security agency, to patrol crime-plagued districts. While a few Oakland retail districts previously have pooled cash to pay for unarmed security services, using public funds to pay for private armed guards would mark a first for the city."

In a stunning development revealed late Wednesday night, Oakland dropped its plan to hire International Services Inc. after the firm's founder and two other executives were arrested on charges of defrauding the state of California out of more than $9 million in workers compensation.

Although this particular company may be going down in flames, that doesn't seem to deter Oakland's advocates for using private forces. According to the WSJ:

Ignacio De La Fuente, a city council member who led the drive to hire armed guards, said he will push to retain another security service. "There is still a very serious need for security in some of our more crime-plagued areas," he said. Before selecting [International Services Inc.], Mr. De La Fuente said, he and representatives of Oakland's police department interviewed security candidates and found nothing out of the ordinary.

Regardless of the specific company, this trend toward hiring private security companies is an ominous development. As it is, Oakland (and many other cities) have severe problems holding accountable police (and other law enforcement) for brutality and extrajudicial killings.

"Oakland, unfortunately, has had a history of treating the African American community unfairly," said George Holland Sr., an attorney who heads the Oakland chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "The community has a great distrust for police officers because they feel they can't be punished."

Most recently, the January execution-style killing of Oscar Grant, a 22-year old unarmed African-American man, on a Bay Area Rapid Transit train platform by a BART police officer, has sparked outrage. A decision is still pending on whether the officer in that case will be tried for murder. With activist groups already decrying the state of police/law enforcement oversight in the city, some powerful officials in Oakland want to use private armed operatives with fewer mechanisms for accountability than the police.

Why do some Oakland officials want this? On the one hand, the belief that it will bring security, but also to save money:

Hiring private guards is less expensive than hiring new officers. Oakland -- facing a record $80 million budget shortfall -- spends about 65 percent of its budget for police and fire services, including about $250,000 annually, including benefits and salary, on each police officer.

In contrast, for about $200,000 a year, the city can contract to hire four private guards to patrol the troubled East Oakland district where four on-duty police officers were killed in March. And the company, not the city, is responsible for insurance for the guards.

As in many cities, this is a contentious issue in Oakland, which has struggled to deal with substantial violence on the one hand and police brutality on the other. According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

The areas where the armed guards were supposed to have been deployed have a disproportionate share of homicides, assaults with deadly weapons and robberies. … The crime rate in the area, according to a 2003 blight study, is between 225 and 150 percent higher than the city as a whole.

Shortly after the Grant killing, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums tabled the hiring of the private guards, putting him in opposition to local city council members who faced pressure from businesses to hire private security guards to patrol the streets.

"The same way you had problems with a BART cop killing somebody, what happens if a guard who doesn't have the same training as a police officer shoots somebody?" said City Administrator Dan Lindheim. "It's not worth the risk."

Predictably, the Oakland police opposed the deployment of private security for union and overtime reasons.

John Macdonald, a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who did a study on private security for the Rand Corp. told the WSJ he opposes turning to a private security service to take the place of police officers: "If an unfortunate event were to happen," he says, "it could cost the public more in the long term than what the city believes it could save."

That's very true. But money is just one issue. More pressing is, who will be responsible if these guards kill an unarmed kid? What happens if they unlawfully detain people? The most urgent question now is what can the public can do to pre-emptively protect itself from unaccountable private forces?

Here are some questions (obviously there are many more) that should be publicly answered by Oakland and any other city that wants to use these private forces in a "law enforcement" capacity before these forces deploy on the streets:

* What training do these forces have in protection and respect for constitutional rights?
* What will the oversight system for these private forces consist of?
* Will these forces be required to produce documents and other information under state, local and federal Freedom of Information Act requests (and state and local equivalents)?
* Will these forces have arrest powers? If so, what about Miranda rights?
* Will these forces have authority to use lethal force? If so, what are the rules governing when they are "authorized" to pull the trigger?
* What happens if these private guards are accused of violating civil rights? Who gets sued?

Oakland is certainly not alone in looking to private security. This is an issue that is going to be increasingly popping up in cities across the US.

It is also becoming a major issue on the U.S.-Mexico border, as mercenary companies offer privatized border agents to the U.S. government.

If the public isn't vigilant, this will metastasize rapidly.

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at RebelReports.com.
© 2009 Rebel Reports All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/138180/

Who's Been Investing My Life???

2009-04-29T00:21:00.007-07:00

The Earth Is a Ponzi Scheme on the Verge of Collapse
By Matthew Stein, Huffington Post Posted on April 28, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135525/

Bernie Madoff sure made a name for himself, didn't he? First he made a name for himself as a "Wall Street Genius" whose coveted firm not only promised, but consistently delivered, extraordinarily high annual returns on investment, even when the economy was down. More recently he made a name for himself as the architect of the largest and most notorious "Ponzi Scheme" in history, bilking investors out of as much as 50 billion dollars!

So what is a Ponzi scheme, anyways? A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that promises, and delivers (at least for a while) exceptionally high and consistent financial returns to investors. These returns are paid to its investors from their own money, and the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned by bona fide income generating investments (such as manufacturing, mining, or rental income). In ways similar to "pyramid schemes" or "chain letters", in order for a Ponzi scheme to work, it must continuously attract an ever increasing pool of investment from unsuspecting customers, in order to provide an ever increasing supply of money to draw upon to maintain payments to its ever increasing pool of investors. The trick is to promise such glorious results that the greed factor overcomes its victim's common sense as they turn a blind eye to the fact that the scheme lacks a solid foundation and can't go on forever. It is absolutely critical to the success of all Ponzi schemes that an aura of respectability and impeccability be maintained for as long as possible, for as soon as suspicions spread concerning the fraudulent nature of the business, new investments dry up and the Ponzi scheme collapses, since it has no source of true earned income with which to maintain payments to investors.

So, is it true that we are running our planet like a Ponzi scheme? And if this is true, does it mean that we must inevitably face collapse, as all Ponzi schemes must eventually end in catastrophe?

The illusion that the "Free Market" is the logical savior of our world has been maintained by the promise of riches and an ever increasing standard of living and lifespan that has been demonstrated by the industrialized world for the past several hundred years. On the surface, who can look at the apparent success of America, and not come to that quick conclusion? However, when you look deeper, you will find that this success is built on a business model based upon exponential growth, and that this growth must be fed by a similar exponential growth in consumption of energy, natural resources, raw materials, and in the continuous expansion to new markets. All of this is well and good when the world has an abundant supply of undeveloped lands and unused resources, but it starts coming apart as that same world approaches its natural limits to growth and consumption.

Our world-wide Ponzi scheme got its start with the industrial revolution in Western Europe, and it was colonialism that provided ever increasing sources for the raw materials and markets that kept this giant Ponzi scheme rolling. It spread to America with the colonial takeover of vast untapped resources and huge tracts of lands previously occupied by Native American hunter-gatherers. As America industrialized, its population grew and its resources were drawn down, the giant Ponzi scheme continued to grow through globalization and it continued to feed its ever growing appetite by drawing down the natural resources in the world's oceans, forests, and more remote areas, and by expanding it markets into the farthest reaches of the globe. We are witness to a five hundred year run on this giant ever-expanding global Ponzi scheme, and unless we change the way we are playing this game, that run is now drawing dangerously close to a natural and catastrophic conclusion.

Here is a brief summary of a few current trends that illustrate my point:

1. Trees: About 1/2 of the world's forests are already gone (most were cut in the last 50 years), and a significant percentage of the rest are in trouble. At the current rate of destruction, it has been estimated that the world's rainforests will be completely eliminated within forty years. Trees play a necessary role in stabilizing our planet's weather, atmosphere and soils. A single large mature tree has the evaporative surface area on its needles or leaves equivalent to a 40 acre lake. A process called "desertification" occurs near areas that have been deforested once the trees stop recycling moisture back into the atmosphere to fall as rain somewhere down wind. A recent study shows that deforestation contributes roughly 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions every year.

2. Atmosphere: Global greenhouse gas emissions have increased by a factor of four since 1950. We have been burning fossil fuels for over 500 years, but half of all of those burned fuels have been consumed in the past thirty years! There is a scientific consensus to 90% certainty that these atmospheric changes will result in catastrophic, potentially civilization busting, climate changes within the next 50 years. Even if you do not believe in global warming, data indicates that the increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere (the primary greenhouse gas) caused by our rapidly increasing consumption of fossil fuels, is increasing the acidity of the oceans, and that if this trend continues much longer, it has the potential to kill most of the planktons, diatoms, and coral reefs of the ocean, knocking out the bottom of the food chain, killing most of the life in the oceans of the world, and destroying one of the legs of our world's oxygen cycle.

3. Oceans: 11 out of 15 of the world's major ocean fisheries are either already in collapse, or are in serious decline and danger of collapse. All large open ocean predatory fish, such as marlin and tuna, are already 90% depleted. By 2004, an estimated 20% of the world's coral reefs had been destroyed (up from just 11% in 2000), an additional 24% were close to collapsing, and another 26% were under long-term threat of collapse. A recent British government report showed a drop in the world's oceanic zooplankton of an astounding 73% since 1960. Zooplankton are a critical element in the bottom of the world's food chain as well as its oxygen cycle.

4. Oil and other fossil fuels: Our modern industrial global machine essentially eats, sleeps, and shits oil. Nearly all of the world's giant oil fields (they produce over half the world's oil) are mature and exhibit declining rates of oil production. In 2008, the International Energy Agency (IEA) shocked the world when it released an authoritative public study revealing that the world's oil fields are declining at an average rate of 9.1%, which is much faster than previously thought. Even with huge capital investments to implement Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) methods, this rate of decline would only improve to 6.4%. What does this mean? It means that if our world is to maintain its current rate of oil consumption (our world's recent globalization has been fueled by an annual oil production growth rate of something like 10%), then we would need to find and develop a Saudi Arabia's worth of oil every year for the next year or two from now to eternity--an impossible fantasy!

5. Soil: A third of the original top soil in the United States is now gone. It has been estimated that the world has from 50 to 100 years of farmable soil, using current farming practices. The US has cut soil losses to 18 times the rate of nature's replacement, the developing world averages a soil depletion rate of 36 times natural replacement, and China averages 54 times the rate of replacement.

6. Fresh water: Irrigated land comprises only 16% of the world's croplands, but produces 40% of the world's crop production. Many of the world's major rivers (China's Yellow River, America's Colorado River, the Nile, the Rio Grande, the Ganges, the Indus, the Amu Darya, the Syr Darya, and Africa's Chao Phraya) now run dry, or nearly dry, for significant parts of the year due to expanding irrigation and population demands. Unsustainable over pumping from aquifers is causing increasing salinity, lowering aquifer levels, and failed wells in many of the world's irrigated bread baskets, such as California's Central Valley, the US' giant south central Ogallala aquifer, China's grainbelt middle plains, India's principle breadbasket, North Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula.

If the previous list is not enough to convince yourself that we are operating a giant Ponzi scheme, and that we are running out of new sources of energy, untapped markets, and raw materials to keep it running, then the following two figures should open your eyes.

Figure 2. Ecological footprint by region.
(Illustration courtesy of Global Footprint Network)

Figure 2 depicts a scientifically calculated global footprint by region. What this show us is that if our current planetary population of nearly 7 billion people were to live like we do here in North America, we would need an Earth with 9 1/2 hectares worth of productive land per person to sustainably supply us with the necessary raw materials, and to absorb our wastes. Yet we now have only roughly 1.7 global hectares of usable land per person. This means that we would need roughly 5 1/2 earths to support our planet if everyone in the world averaged the consumption levels of North America!

Figure 3. Ecological footprint of humankind from 1961 to 2003.
(Illustration courtesy of Global Footprint Network)

Figure 3 shows us that back in the mid 1980's, when our world had just over half its current population, we first exceeded the capacity of our planet to continuously supply us with the food and raw materials that we consume, and to process our wastes. What this means, is that we have been consuming our planet's resources faster than they regenerate, and polluting its natural systems faster than they can recover. This "drawing down" of our resources, is essentially spending the money from investors (all of us) in this Ponzi scheme, and when the remaining "money" (the natural resources and ecosystems of our world) can't support the payments anymore, it will most certainly collapse!

Unfortunately, it's going to take more than minor changes in the way we do business to get off this giant Ponzi scheme. It will not be easy, but I do believe it is doable. For a good idea of what it is going to take to make the shift to sustainability and get off this Ponzi scheme, see my prior Huff Post blog, 12 Tips for the Sustainability Shift.

The question to ask ourselves, is do we wish to adopt the attitude of Mr. Madoff, saying essentially, "Fuck it! The world will do what the world will do, so I might as well enjoy one hell of a ride while it lasts!" Or do we decide to transform the way we do business, halt and reverse population growth and over-consumption, and collectively work together to nurture and rebuild the natural systems and biodiversity of our planet that are absolutely critical for supporting and maintaining a viable world for generation upon generation?

Matthew Stein is the author of When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency, from Chelsea Green.

© 2009 Huffington Post All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135525/

Feeling Pleasantly Lost These Days....

2009-04-17T14:20:00.000-07:00

Music Video:SO HARD TO FIND MY WAY (by Jackie Greene)

Music Video Code provided by VideoCodeZone.Com

This Is What We Are Sending More Troops To Die For?

2009-04-04T23:52:00.002-08:00

Brutal Law Strips Afghan Women of Rights -- Where's the Outrage?
By Marie Cocco, Washington Post Writers Group

Afghanistan's women are no longer in vogue.

It was only a few years ago that Laura Bush, who normally shied from causes that could be considered controversial, took up their banner. "The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists," the first lady said in a radio address shortly after President Bush launched the U.S-led invasion to overthrow the Taliban following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "The plight of women and children in Afghanistan is a matter of deliberate human cruelty, carried out by those who seek to intimidate and control."

That was then. This is now: Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just signed a law that forces women to obey their husbands' sexual demands, keeps women from leaving the house -- even for work or school -- without a husband's permission, automatically grants child custody rights to fathers and grandfathers before mothers, and favors men in inheritance disputes and other legal matters. In short, the law again consigns Afghan women to lives of brutal repression.

"This is really, really dangerous for everybody in Afghanistan," Soraya Sobhrang of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission said in a telephone interview from Kabul. Noting that violence against women already is rampant, Sobhrang said the new law effectively "legalizes all violence against women in Afghanistan."

The legislation zoomed through Afghanistan's parliament. Karzai, who faces elections in August, signed it in an apparent effort to placate conservative religious forces that are said to hold the balance of power in his re-election bid. The United Nations Development Fund for Women is still analyzing a final version of the legislation but says it is "seriously concerned." The law appears to contradict both the Afghan constitution, which guarantees equal rights for men and women, and international conventions on human rights.

The U.S. State Department has had no comment.

Afghanistan's women are, apparently, the latest casualty of the Obama administration's tilt toward realpolitik: ignore human rights violations -- whether they're in China or Russia or in the quiet misery of an Afghan villager's home -- in pursuit of larger foreign policy goals.

This contradiction between political rhetoric and policy reality has often been the American way. But now we have Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. When she was first lady, she championed the rights of women oppressed by the Taliban long before most Americans had ever heard of that radical regime. Clinton took the helm of the State Department vowing to elevate the cause of human and economic rights for women and girls -- a pledge she made again in The Hague this week at the end of a major conference on Afghanistan that was aimed at securing greater international cooperation on the desperate and disparate crises there.

"My message is very clear. Women's rights are a central part of American foreign policy in the Obama administration; they are not marginal, they are not an add-on or an afterthought," Clinton said in response to a general question about the situation confronting women in Afghan society. "You cannot expect a country to develop if half its population [is] underfed, undereducated, under-cared-for, oppressed, and left on the sidelines."

The secretary was not asked specifically about the new law. Among its other provisions, it guarantees that married men can have sex once every four nights and wives must submit. In effect, it legalizes marital rape. Sobhrang worries there may be worse to come. "They are talking about child marriage," she says.

Without pressure from the foreign powers that hold so much sway in Afghanistan, there was little that even the women in the country's parliament could do. Sobhrang faults those who were quiet in the face of the clear effort by a religious faction to reimpose medieval mores on a country that is in many ways a ward of the contemporary international community.

The ugly truth is that Afghanistan has long been sliding back into the violent chaos that is friendly political ground for the Taliban and other extremist groups. Women have, as usual, been among the chief victims.

There is indeed a lengthy and urgent to-do list for the Obama administration, which says it is determined to abandon a failing course. But that does not mean the United States should again fail Afghanistan's women.

To consign them to what Laura Bush correctly called "deliberate human cruelty" is cruelty itself.

Marie Cocco is a prize-winning syndicated columnist on political and cultural topics for The Washington Post Writers Group. She is a frequent commentator on national TV and radio shows.

© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/134818/

What Happened to Our Country While You Slept?

2009-03-28T19:25:00.005-08:00

The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com

This is part of a special AlterNet series on Obama's latest plans for a rescue of the bankers and Wall Street's toxic assets.
Read our editorial on the big picture.

Published by Rolling Stone

It's over - we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline - a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history - some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial - we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck - bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town - and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve - "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron - a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

I. PATIENT ZERO

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders - people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground - and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.

That guy - the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown - was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."

The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.

The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche." They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating - meaning it has close to zero credit risk.

Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.

The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts."

Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages - read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down - to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets - some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in.

Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told senior management, "You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do - leave me alone." Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative form of "insurance" to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS.

The CDS was popularized by J.P. Morgan, in particular by a group of young, creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan Mafia," as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the credit-default swap.

In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job.

When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators - from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency - accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.

What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan popularized into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, at least, there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your investments. Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the company promised to pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went bust. But as Cassano went on a selling spree, the deals he made differed from traditional insurance in several significant ways. First, the party selling CDS protection didn't have to post any money upfront. When a $100 corporate bond is sold, for example, someone has to show 100 actual dollars. But when you sell a $100 CDS guarantee, you don't have to show a dime. So Cassano could sell investment banks billions in guarantees without having any single asset to back it up.

Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope - it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.

In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come.

Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; Cassano himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone made their money - and then it all went to shit.

II. THE REGULATORS

Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Sen. Phil Gramm - a grinning, laissez-faire ideologue from Texas - had finished engineering the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor Hien Tsung invented paper money in 806 A.D. For years, Washington had kept a watchful eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great Depression, commercial banks - those that kept money on deposit for individuals and businesses - had not been allowed to double as investment banks, which raise money by issuing and selling securities. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression, also prevented banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business.

But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more "business-friendly." Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared?

The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Commercial banks - which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly with investment banks for customers - were driven to buy credit swaps to loosen capital in search of higher yields. "By ruling that credit-default swaps were not gaming and not a security, the way was cleared for the growth of the market," said Eric Dinallo, head of the New York State Insurance Department.

The blanket exemption meant that Joe Cassano could now sell as many CDS contracts as he wanted, building up as huge a position as he wanted, without anyone in government saying a word. "You have to remember, investment banks aren't in the business of making huge directional bets," says the government source involved in the AIG bailout. When investment banks write CDS deals, they hedge them. But insurance companies don't have to hedge. And that's what AIG did. "They just bet massively long on the housing market," says the source. "Billions and billions."

In the biggest joke of all, Cassano's wheeling and dealing was regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency that would prove to be defiantly uninterested in keeping watch over his operations. How a behemoth like AIG came to be regulated by the little-known and relatively small OTS is yet another triumph of the deregulatory instinct. Under another law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their regulator, provided they owned one or more thrifts (better known as savings-and-loans). Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire operation.

Making matters even more hilarious, AIGFP - a London-based subsidiary of an American insurance company - ought to have been regulated by one of Europe's more stringent regulators, like Britain's Financial Services Authority. But the OTS managed to convince the Europeans that it had the muscle to regulate these giant companies. By 2007, the EU had conferred legitimacy to OTS supervision of three mammoth firms - GE, AIG and Ameriprise.

That same year, as the subprime crisis was exploding, the Government Accountability Office criticized the OTS, noting a "disparity between the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees." Among other things, the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance specialist on staff - and this despite the fact that it was the primary regulator for the world's largest insurer!

"There's this notion that the regulators couldn't do anything to stop AIG," says a government official who was present during the bailout. "That's bullshit. What you have to understand is that these regulators have ultimate power. They can send you a letter and say, 'You don't exist anymore,' and that's basically that. They don't even really need due process. The OTS could have said, 'We're going to pull your charter; we're going to pull your license; we're going to sue you.' And getting sued by your primary regulator is the kiss of death."

When AIG finally blew up, the OTS regulator ostensibly in charge of overseeing the insurance giant - a guy named C.K. Lee - basically admitted that he had blown it. His mistake, Lee said, was that he believed all those credit swaps in Cassano's portfolio were "fairly benign products." Why? Because the company told him so. "The judgment the company was making was that there was no big credit risk," he explained. (Lee now works as Midwest region director of the OTS; the agency declined to make him available for an interview.)

In early March, after the latest bailout of AIG, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took what seemed to be a thinly veiled shot at the OTS, calling AIG a "huge, complex global insurance company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that was allowed to build up without any adult supervision." But even without that "adult supervision," AIG might have been OK had it not been for a complete lack of internal controls. For six months before its meltdown, according to insiders, the company had been searching for a full-time chief financial officer and a chief risk-assessment officer, but never got around to hiring either. That meant that the 18th-largest company in the world had no one checking to make sure its balance sheet was safe and no one keeping track of how much cash and assets the firm had on hand. The situation was so bad that when outside consultants were called in a few weeks before the bailout, senior executives were unable to answer even the most basic questions about their company - like, for instance, how much exposure the firm had to the residential-mortgage market.

III. THE CRASH

Ironically, when reality finally caught up to Cassano, it wasn't because the housing market crapped but because of AIG itself. Before 2005, the company's debt was rated triple-A, meaning he didn't need to post much cash to sell CDS protection: The solid creditworthiness of AIG's name was guarantee enough. But the company's crummy accounting practices eventually caused its credit rating to be downgraded, triggering clauses in the CDS contracts that forced Cassano to post substantially more collateral to back his deals.

By the fall of 2007, it was evident that AIGFP's portfolio had turned poisonous, but like every good Wall Street huckster, Cassano schemed to keep his insane, Earth-swallowing gamble hidden from public view. That August, balls bulging, he announced to investors on a conference call that "it is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of those transactions." As he spoke, his CDS portfolio was racking up $352 million in losses. When the growing credit crunch prompted senior AIG executives to re-examine its liabilities, a company accountant named Joseph St. Denis became "gravely concerned" about the CDS deals and their potential for mass destruction. Cassano responded by personally forcing the poor sap out of the firm, telling him he was "deliberately excluded" from the financial review for fear that he might "pollute the process."

The following February, when AIG posted $11.5 billion in annual losses, it announced the resignation of Cassano as head of AIGFP, saying an auditor had found a "material weakness" in the CDS portfolio. But amazingly, the company not only allowed Cassano to keep $34 million in bonuses, it kept him on as a consultant for $1 million a month. In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his fuck-ups. When asked in October why the company still retained Cassano at his $1 million-a-month rate despite his role in the probable downfall of Western civilization, CEO Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face that AIG wanted to "retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had." (Cassano, who is apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London, could not be reached for comment.)

What sank AIG in the end was another credit downgrade. Cassano had written so many CDS deals that when the company was facing another downgrade to its credit rating last September, from AA to A, it needed to post billions in collateral - not only more cash than it had on its balance sheet but more cash than it could raise even if it sold off every single one of its liquid assets. Even so, management dithered for days, not believing the company was in serious trouble. AIG was a dried-up prune, sapped of any real value, and its top executives didn't even know it.

On the weekend of September 13th, AIG's senior leaders were summoned to the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. Regulators from Dinallo's insurance office were there, as was Geithner, then chief of the New York Fed. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who spent most of the weekend preoccupied with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, came in and out. Also present, for reasons that would emerge later, was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. The only relevant government office that wasn't represented was the regulator that should have been there all along: the OTS.

"We sat down with Paulson, Geithner and Dinallo," says a person present at the negotiations. "I didn't see the OTS even once."

On September 14th, according to another person present, Treasury officials presented Blankfein and other bankers in attendance with an absurd proposal: "They basically asked them to spend a day and check to see if they could raise the money privately." The laughably short time span to complete the mammoth task made the answer a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, the bankers came back and told the government officials, gee, we checked, but we can't raise that much. And the bailout was on.

A short time later, it came out that AIG was planning to pay some $90 million in deferred compensation to former executives, and to accelerate the payout of $277 million in bonuses to others - a move the company insisted was necessary to "retain key employees." When Congress balked, AIG canceled the $90 million in payments.

Then, in January 2009, the company did it again. After all those years letting Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out insane bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano's old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly! Yes, that's right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the universe!

"We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats," AIG spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February.

"But didn't these 'highly expert people' basically destroy your company?" I ask.

Pretto protests, says this isn't fair. The employees at AIGFP have already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit's operations in an orderly fashion.

The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can't even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. "These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs," says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. "They don't function well without them."

IV. THE POWER GRAB

So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people - to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG - are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation's top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm's fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone - then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee - collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.

The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America - and in turn helped those companies slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street firms with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulatory measures. "We're moving to an oligopolistic situation," Kenneth Guenther, a top executive with the Independent Community Bankers of America, lamented after the Gramm measure was passed.

The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and - with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson - made a pitch to George Bush's SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In exchange, they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The discussion about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not a single representative of a major media outlet there to record the fateful decision.

Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU to drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, neither Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any regulating of the banks. They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five companies, whose combined assets came to total more than $4 trillion. But in the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the group had no director and did not complete a single inspection. Great deal for the banks, which originally complained about being regulated by both Europe and the SEC, and ended up being regulated by no one.

Once the capital requirements were gone, those top five banks went hog-wild, jumping ass-first into the then-raging housing bubble. One of those was Bear Stearns, which used its freedom to drown itself in bad mortgage loans. In the short period between the 2004 change and Bear's collapse, the firm's debt-to-equity ratio soared from 12-1 to an insane 33-1. Another culprit was Goldman Sachs, which also had the good fortune, around then, to see its CEO, a bald-headed Frankensteinian goon named Hank Paulson (who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government), ascend to Treasury secretary.

Freed from all capital restraints, sitting pretty with its man running the Treasury, Goldman jumped into the housing craze just like everyone else on Wall Street. Although it famously scored an $11 billion coup in 2007 when one of its trading units smartly shorted the housing market, the move didn't tell the whole story. In truth, Goldman still had a huge exposure come that fateful summer of 2008 - to none other than Joe Cassano.

Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Cassano's biggest customer, with $20 billion of exposure in Cassano's CDS book. Which might explain why Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with ex-Goldmanite Hank Paulson that weekend of September 13th, when the federal government was supposedly bailing out AIG.

When asked why Blankfein was there, one of the government officials who was in the meeting shrugs. "One might say that it's because Goldman had so much exposure to AIGFP's portfolio," he says. "You'll never prove that, but one might suppose."

Market analyst Eric Salzman is more blunt. "If AIG went down," he says, "there was a good chance Goldman would not be able to collect." The AIG bailout, in effect, was Goldman bailing out Goldman.

Eventually, Paulson went a step further, elevating another ex-Goldmanite named Edward Liddy to run AIG - a company whose bailout money would be coming, in part, from the newly created TARP program, administered by another Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari.

V. REPO MEN

There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs - a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression - was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid - well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.

That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.

Some aspects of the bailout were secretive to the point of absurdity. In fact, if you look closely at just a few lines in the Federal Reserve's weekly public disclosures, you can literally see the moment where a big chunk of your money disappeared for good. The H4 report (called "Factors Affecting Reserve Balances") summarizes the activities of the Fed each week. You can find it online, and it's pretty much the only thing the Fed ever tells the world about what it does. For the week ending February 18th, the number under the heading "Repurchase Agreements" on the table is zero. It's a significant number.

Why? In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump $25 billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury bills, U.S. securities and even mortgage-backed securities from institutions like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, who would then "repurchase" them in a short period of time, usually one to seven days. This was the Fed's primary mechanism for controlling interest rates: Buying up securities gives banks more money to lend, which makes interest rates go down. Selling the securities back to the banks reduces the money available for lending, which makes interest rates go up.

If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, you start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit crunch, around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more Repos than usual - $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank reserves were dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started injecting even more cash than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By late December, the number was up to $58 billion; by the following March, around the time of the Bear Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped to $77 billion. In the week of May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 billion - "out of control now," according to one congressional aide. For the rest of 2008, the numbers remained similarly in the stratosphere, the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of these short-term loans into the economy - until suddenly, at the start of this year, the number drops to nothing. Zero.

The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.

While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.

No one knows who's getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America's credit rating. Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions are even temporary at all - or whether they are being set up as permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders.

"They're supposed to be temporary," says Paul-Martin Foss, an aide to Rep. Ron Paul. "But we keep getting notices every six months or so that they're being renewed. They just sort of quietly announce it."

None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself - or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything." According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.

VI. WINNERS AND LOSERS

Stevens isn't the only person in Congress to be given the finger by the Fed. In January, when Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida asked Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn where all the money went - only $1.2 trillion had vanished by then - Kohn gave Grayson a classic eye roll, saying he would be "very hesitant" to name names because it might discourage banks from taking the money.

"Has that ever happened?" Grayson asked. "Have people ever said, 'We will not take your $100 billion because people will find out about it?'"

"Well, we said we would not publish the names of the borrowers, so we have no test of that," Kohn answered, visibly annoyed with Grayson's meddling.

Grayson pressed on, demanding to know on what terms the Fed was lending the money. Presumably it was buying assets and making loans, but no one knew how it was pricing those assets - in other words, no one knew what kind of deal it was striking on behalf of taxpayers. So when Grayson asked if the purchased assets were "marked to market" - a methodology that assigns a concrete value to assets, based on the market rate on the day they are traded - Kohn answered, mysteriously, "The ones that have market values are marked to market." The implication was that the Fed was purchasing derivatives like credit swaps or other instruments that were basically impossible to value objectively - paying real money for God knows what.

"Well, how much of them don't have market values?" asked Grayson. "How much of them are worthless?"

"None are worthless," Kohn snapped.

"Then why don't you mark them to market?" Grayson demanded.

"Well," Kohn sighed, "we are marking the ones to market that have market values."

In essence, the Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts handle things. "It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening the hood, and saying, 'I think it's fine,'" says Dan Fuss, an analyst with the investment firm Loomis Sayles. "The salesman says, 'Don't worry about it. Trust me.' It'll probably get us out of the lot, but how much farther? None of us knows."
When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary - a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. "We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension."

Count Sanders among those who don't buy the argument that Wall Street firms shouldn't have to face being outed as recipients of public funds, that making this information public might cause investors to panic and dump their holdings in these firms. "I guess if we made that public, they'd go on strike or something," he muses.

And the Fed isn't the only arm of the bailout that has closed ranks. The Treasury, too, has maintained incredible secrecy surrounding its implementation even of the TARP program, which was mandated by Congress. To this date, no one knows exactly what criteria the Treasury Department used to determine which banks received bailout funds and which didn't - particularly the first $350 billion given out under Bush appointee Hank Paulson.

The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout money, sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money to, Treasury responded - and this isn't a joke - by directing the panel to a copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly speechless by the response.

"Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. "That's not what we had in mind."

Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money," he says.

This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away - remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency - many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications.

"There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not," says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association.

Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit," says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking."

Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.

In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive - to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren't such a nightmare.

VII. YOU DON'T GET IT

The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner - himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm - picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.

In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets - the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.

God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs," said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system - transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.

© 2009 RollingStone.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/132859/

A New Kinder Gentler Liar as Commander-in-Chief

2009-03-27T12:34:00.006-08:00

Report: Despite Obama’s Vow, Combat Brigades Will Stay in Iraq

From Democracy Now

Nearly four weeks ago, President Obama declared that US combat operations would end in Iraq by August 2010. Despite Obama’s pledge, new evidence has emerged that the US plans to keep combat brigades in Iraq, but they will operate under a different name. Investigative reporter Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service reveals some of the brigade combat teams currently in Iraq will stay beyond August 2010 and will be renamed so-called “advisory and assistance brigades.”

Guest:

Gareth Porter, investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, we’d like to bring into this conversation the other major conflict in that part of the world: the war in Iraq. Nearly four weeks ago, President Obama declared that US combat operations would end in Iraq by August of 2010.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: As a candidate for president, I made clear my support for a timeline of sixteen months to carry out this drawdown, while pledging to consult closely with our military commanders upon taking office to ensure that we preserve the gains we’ve made and to protect our troops. These consultations are now complete, and I have chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next eighteen months. So let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31st, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Under President Obama’s plan, all combat troops will be pulled from Iraq but a transition force of up to 50,000 will remain after August of 2010. Despite the President’s pledge, new evidence has emerged that the US plans to keep combat brigades in Iraq, but they will operate under a different name.

AMY GOODMAN: Investigative reporter Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service has revealed some of the brigade combat teams currently in Iraq will stay beyond August 2010 and will be renamed so-called “advisory and assistance brigades.”

Gareth Porter joins us with Pratap Chatterjee here in New York. His latest article is called “Despite Obama’s Vow, Combat Brigades Will Stay In Iraq.” So, Gareth Porter, how do you know this? And what exactly is the plan, as you understand it?

GARETH PORTER: Well, the evidence of this plan to continue to keep combat brigades in Iraq past the August 31st deadline is very clear from looking into the military planning that has been done with regard to the brigade combat teams, the basic combat organization of the US Army in Iraq for the past six years. So I basically began to talk to some of the people who’ve been close to the military planning, specifically in the US Army, over the past few months. And there’s no secret about this, in fact.

What’s happening is that the basic combat organization in Iraq, the brigade combat team, is going to be slightly revamped by adding a few dozen, perhaps more than that, officers who will be doing the advising and assistance directly with the Iraqi military and police, perhaps some other institutions, as well—it’s not clear—but they will be added on top of the existing brigade combat team, rather than having any fundamental change in the structure of those organizations in Iraq. So, what we have is the same combat potential, same combat organization, which will remain on the ground in Iraq.

Now, there will be some drawdown. There’s no doubt about that. But the promise that President Obama made on February 27th that all combat brigades would be withdrawn from Iraq, that simply is not true. It’s not going to happen.

JUAN GONZALEZ: In other words, we’re not dealing with a situation that most people associate with non-combat troops, like engineers or construction units that are involved in some kind of infrastructure work. These are actually combat units, just renamed.

GARETH PORTER: Well, that’s exactly right. I mean, it’s not even that there is going to be military advisers who will be out in the field, you know, with the Iraqi units, which I think everyone understood would be the case. When they decided to call these now—they’re renaming the brigade combat teams the “advisory and assistance brigades.” So, I mean, that’s the—it’s the sleight of hand administratively that is being used now to cover the fact that essentially nothing has changed except the addition of, as I say, a few—a relative handful of advisers who will be added to the structures that already exist. But it’s not just people out in the field advising. It’s going to be the same infantry units. The same infantry companies that exist today in Iraq will still be there when the United States is supposedly bringing its combat troops or its combat brigades home.

AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Porter, I wanted to play for you a comment from Defense Secretary Robert Gates. On March 1st, he appeared on Meet the Press and was asked about the 50,000 troops President Obama plans to keep in Iraq after August 2010.

ROBERT GATES: They do have a very different mission, but that mission will be principally a training assistance advisory role. There will be a limited counterterrorism operations aspect to it, and we will still have some soldiers embedded with Iraqi units as part of the training effort. But it’s a very different kind of arrangement, and our soldiers will be consolidated into a limited number of bases in order to provide protection for themselves and for civilians who are out working in the Iraqi neighborhoods and countryside, as well. They will be called “advisory and assistance brigades.” They won’t be called “combat brigades.”

AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Porter?

GARETH PORTER: Well, of course, this was a very broad hint about what was to come. That is to say, he was essentially broadcasting, indirectly, without saying so explicitly, that the plan was to rename the brigade combat teams “advisory and assistance brigades,” a term that does not have “combat” in it, in order to suggest that there’s been a fundamental change in the structure of the units that are being deployed in Iraq. And, of course, it’s the—quite the opposite, in fact.
So, the real question here is, is why the corporate news media did not pick up on this obvious hint and begin to look into this question and report what the real plan was for relabeling these units as non-combat units, which are in fact going to continue to be combat units. In fact, what is really interesting here is that last December, as I point out in my article, the New York Times published an article which reported on planning that was being done in the Pentagon to re-label the existing units, combat units, in Iraq as non-combat units, and this was going to be, as the Times reported, a way in which the military could appeal to Obama to carry out his campaign promise, but still continue to keep combat brigades in Iraq.

So, this is exactly what has happened, but what’s interesting is that there’s been absolutely no reporting, until my story published yesterday, on the fact that this prediction by the New York Times back in December has now been realized.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Pratap Chatterjee, I’d like to ask you also about the issue of military contractors in Iraq, and obviously they’re also in Afghanistan in extensive numbers. And you were saying in the break, you were seeing comparisons with some of the same problems in the United States’ occupations in both countries.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, in addition to the troops that Gareth mentioned, there are civilian police trainers, and there are civilian army military trainers, who accompany, you know, Afghan units in Afghanistan and Iraqi units in Iraq, and they do training on the ground. And so, they are looking—in fact, the CEO of DynCorp, in his last investor call about a month ago, said, “We’re looking forward to actually a lot more work in Afghanistan based on what’s happening.” This is in February of 2009. So, the contractors are expecting a boom, because they expect to augment the military training teams.

They do this, as I mentioned, their Focused District Development training scheme in Iraq—in, I’m sorry, in Afghanistan. It’s actually sometimes very hard to keep these training schemes separated, because when you look at them, it’s the same trainers, it’s the same companies, and in fact, interesting enough, when you look at the GAO reports, the Department of Defense Inspector General reports, the same problems, whether you look, you know, at Fallujah or Najaf and the training problems that they had back in 2003 or the problems they’re having today in Khost, in Pakistan-Afghanistan. The same problems keep recurring. I keep thinking I’m reading a report about Iraq from 2003. Now I’ve suddenly realized I’m reading a GAO report from 2008.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, this issue of a continued policy from Iraq, which President Obama condemned—I mean, he was opposed to the war in Iraq, to Afghanistan. Gareth Porter, I wanted to ask you about this. I was on a flight from Grand Rapids this past weekend, and I sat next to a military consultant, been in the military for a long time, then aerospace industry, now a consultant. And he said, “Yes, this is great for the military contractors, the war.” But he said, as an American, he is baffled by President Obama pushing this surge and expanded war in Afghanistan. He said he is shocked by it, as many in the military are. And I wanted to ask you, Gareth, about, well, Lieutenant General Eikenberry, who has been nominated to be the US ambassador to Afghanistan. He is the former top US commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, now would be the main diplomatic representative for the United States.

GARETH PORTER: Yes, this is part of a trend not simply to have high-ranking military officers play some of the key policy roles and even diplomatic roles in the Obama administration. Of course, there’s James Jones as the National Security Adviser, as well as the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair. But in the case of Eikenberry as the new ambassador in Afghanistan, this is disturbing for more than one reason. He is both a very enthusiastic supporter of the idea that this should be a NATO affair in Afghanistan, that this should be a NATO war, and one of those who has been pushing the idea that unless NATO can show success in Afghanistan—/p>

AMY GOODMAN: We have ten seconds, Gareth.

GARETH PORTER: —then it’s not—it’s going to be in serious trouble as an institution. So there’s a question of whether some of these people are pushing the war, in part, at least, because of their affiliation, affinity to NATO.

AMY GOODMAN: Gareth Porter and Pratap Chatterjee, I want to thank you very much both for being with us.

Rethink Afghanistan....

2009-03-16T01:36:00.002-08:00

Proposed Focus of Congressional Hearings on Afghanistan and Pakistan
posted by Tom Hayden on Brave New Films Blog

President Obama is about to complete his Afghanistan review, and already has proposed $144 billion for Iraq/Afghanistan in FY2009, $130 in FY2010, and $50 billion as a place marker for FY2011 and beyond. These figures are optimistic and not yet broken down between Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. But Afghanistan funding from 2001 into 2009 has been $173 billion overall, according to the Congressional Research Service, and is certain to rise.

Two facts loom: if Obama sinks into a quagmire in Afghanistan/Pakistan, at the current rate of spending these wars will cost over one trillion in taxpayer dollars -direct and indirect- at the end of his first term. If American casualties continue increasing, they could be approaching a death toll of one thousand at the end of that term as well.

As Obama inherits Bush’s wars, this is an important moment for Congress to assert a new role in critical oversight and not repeat the dysfunctional deadlocks between the executive and legislative branches which led to so much secrecy, false accounting and mismanagement in Iraq. If the current Congress actively pursues oversight and insists on transparency and accountability, the media, interested public and peace movement will have the information necessary to play their critical functions in wartime.

Already there are some signs of a greater openness in the Obama era with the Justice Department’s disclosure of the Bush-era memos on presidential powers, permission for photo coverage of returning military coffins, and the promise to include war costs in the regular budgetary process. These are important steps away from the past. But make no mistake, the administration is expanding our military commitments in both Afghanistan and Pakistan without President Obama having completed his policy review. While few in Congress are ready to oppose the president over Afghanistan and Pakistan, now is the time for an independent review before the escalation deepens any further.

Congressional hearings are urgently needed on at least the following:

[1] EXIT STRATEGY AND TIMELINES. What goals will the administration set for Afghanistan and Pakistan, what measurements of progress will the administration employ, and who will monitor that progress? In the case of Afghanistan, the administration appears to be setting diplomatic/political goals, using military means; in Pakistan, the administration is setting certain military goals, especially the defeat of al-Qaeda, as well as diplomatic/political ones. Under the Bush presidency, Congress demanded exit strategies, timelines, and regular progress reports [benchmark assessment reports]. This Congress should require this administration to accurately measure progress towards its goals and be held accountable for that progress. Over time, the Congress will be divided between those who oppose and those who support the wars, but they should be united in expecting open debate, full disclosure, and standards of accountability from the new administration. Respected anti-war experts like Chalmers Johnson, William Polk, Juan Cole, Andrew Bacevich and Robert Fisk should be among those invited to testify.

[2] TRANSPARENT BUDGETING. The true costs of these wars should be readily available to Congress and the public, not hidden and minimized as during the Bush years. Experts like Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes should be asked to prepare testimony suggesting the best methodologies for estimating the direct and indirect costs of these wars over time, and the administration and Congress should adhere to those models in preparing and disclosing their budgets.

[3] DISCLOSURE OF CASUALTIES. The Bush administration was successful in blurring, hiding and downplaying estimates of civilian and military casualties, even American ones. As a result, there was never an agreed consensus on real casualty figures, and public outrage was hobbled. For these wars, rational guidelines for establishing casualty numbers should be agreed in the new Congress. John Tirman at MIT, the authors of the 2006 Johns Hopkins reports and the British Lancet surveys should be called to testify as to comprehensive and honest reporting methodologies for casualties - killed and wounded - among all civilians as well as military forces.

[4] CORRUPTION IN CONTRACTING. For Iraq, Congress finally created a special unit, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction [SIGIR], to monitor and report on billions of tax dollars lost on criminal waste, fraud and abuse. Will Congress extend the Special Inspector General’s mandate to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and provide greater oversight powers as needed? It should.

[5] HUMAN RIGHTS AND TORTURE. The prison at Bagram Airbase already is suspected of being another Abu Ghraib in the making. The administration should describe how its recent executive order on torture at Guantanamo applies to Afghanistan/Pakistan, how human rights standards will be enforced and funded, whether human rights lawyers and media will be allowed independent contact with detainees, and what limits if any will be placed on policies such as “preventive incarceration” and extra-judicial targeted assassinations which have been employed in Iraq. Critics of the Bush policies from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, ACLU, and reporters like Jane Mayer and Mark Danner should testify on transparency and accountability on human rights issues.

These are some examples of process reforms, as distinct from questions of whether these wars are in our interest and should be funded in the first place. Both tracks should be pursued at the same time. But since it is doubtful that the Democratic Congress, except for a prophetic few, will oppose the wars and cut funding anytime in the near future, the questions of greater disclosure, transparency and accountability become all the more important in the immediate furture. One can only hope that truth will not be the first casualty in the Obama wars. The peace movement, which was a major constituency in the 2006 and 2008 elections, has a right to expect a more open, evidence-based, legal and accountable set of policies in the coming wars than in the disgracefully-manipulated Iraq war. If the truth is fully disclosed, the American people will be better able to decide on whether to support these wars in the days ahead.

I Try Not To Worry......

2009-03-02T16:19:00.002-08:00

Music Video:I'M A WORRIED MAN (by Willie Nelson)

Music Video Code provided by VideoCodeZone.Com

No Small Change.....

2009-02-09T02:02:00.000-08:00

The Honeymoon is Over, Let's Get Serious Now....

2009-01-06T01:07:00.003-08:00

Obama's Perilous Compromise with Wall Street Looters
By Jeffrey Klein, Huffington Post Posted on January 5, 2009

Looters have taken over America's Treasury. The executives who successfully ransacked their own banks, investment funds and insurance companies have set their eyes on Obama's stimulus. Tragically, the architects of the current economic fiasco have been placed in charge of America's recovery.

President Obama has made an enormous mistake. Instead of cracking down on serial looters and complicit regulators, he wants to guarantee the financial sector's obligations, which are several times larger than America's economy. This is a Ponzi scheme far beyond Bernie Madoff's imagination. Simply put: The government is breaking the rules of capitalism to reward the most reckless capitalists.

Is it unfair to criticize President Obama before he and his experienced team have a chance to enact new laws and regulations? For guidance on this question, let's turn to the father of capitalism, Adam Smith. Here's how Smith concludes Wealth of Nations, Book I:

"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [the capitalists], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

Consider Obama's Economic Czar, Larry Summers, who comes fresh from heading a highly secretive hedge fund. As Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury, Summers championed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which led directly to the excessive risk-taking by newly enlarged financial entities deemed too big to fail when they failed. Additionally Summers and Robert Rubin lobbied intensely for legislation signed by Bill Clinton that forbid government oversight of derivatives, the toxic instruments that have poisoned balance sheets around the world. Summers' former deputy Tim Geithner, the new Secretary of the Treasury, has supervised more recent rip-offs. He bears significant responsibility for the Lehman Brothers' catastrophe and for the flawed Fannie Mae, Bear Stearns and AIG bailouts. At Geithner's confirmation hearing, he must be asked repeatedly why the looters were rewarded and why plans giving taxpayers more equity were rejected.

Sherlock Holmes was once famously asked by a Scotland Yard detective: "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?" Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." Detective: "The dog did nothing in the night-time." Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

Why haven't America's economists barked timely alarms? Are they blinded by their faith in markets? Perhaps the old saying should be reworked: In America, those who can, loot. Those who can't, teach wealth-friendly philosophies masquerading as hard science. In their mind-set, fraud is the province of Bernie Madoff, not Robert Rubin.

But what could be more criminal than Rubin's former employees, Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, awarding the sweetest of all bailout deals to Citi, where Rubin sits as a highly-paid senior counselor and director. Throughout his career Rubin has pushed for more complex risk instruments and less government regulation. How stupid does the quintessential Wall Street/Washington wise man think people are when he claims never to have heard of Citi's most toxic assets? And to brag that he's been "very involved" at Citi, but blames the company's excessive risk-taking on a presentation made one day by an outside consultant? After confessing such failures of oversight, an honest man would have resigned his posts.

Yet it's not only Rubin's acolytes who are pushing Obama's recovery plan. Experts from both parties have also endorsed it. The only catch? These are the same experts who were blind-sided by the mortgage security frauds that led to the credit freeze that triggered the de-leveraging that's plunged the world close to a Depression.

Does all this sound like a simple-minded diatribe? Perhaps it is. But when analyzing America's financiers, a simple-minded (as opposed to a naïve) approach may be best. For example, Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner thought that the banks they generously recapitalized with the taxpayers' money would begin lending again. Instead the banks used the bailout cash to buy other banks, issue dividends or simply profit on Treasury spreads - i.e., to make what bookies call their juice.

It's altogether possible that Barack Obama's recovery plan will bless sweetheart deals and generate enough public debt to destroy global confidence in our government's bonds. Foreigners, who own about half of all Treasuries, could stop funding America's deficit-driven recovery plan. During Obama's administration, the dollar might lose its reserve-currency premium.

Would all Americans then suffer equally? No. Those likely to profit most from Obama's stimulus before we go bust are his political allies, and especially his big donors. That's the nature of the doling-out beast. To minimize corruption, Obama must pro-actively prevent Chicago-style swindles. E.g., who owns the real estate adjacent to the infrastructure the government will build? What specific penalties will be incorporated into Obama's recovery plan to punish politically-connected profiteers?

If a spiraling out-of-control stimulus seems as if it's undermining the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, Obama's biggest donors will hedge their personal risk by parking some of their capital abroad. Have they've done so already? A senator should ask prospective nominees this question at their confirmation hearings.

Obama could be a different kind of president. His broad base of financial support ensures he won't lack funds for a reelection run. The dark side of Obama's presidency, however, is likely to come less from ethical failings than from his fondness for compromise.

You can't compromise with America's looters. They're too opportunistic. The economics team Obama assembled betrays his respect for elites and a caution that may doom his presidency. A bolder politician would stimulate the economy and simultaneously expose the moral violations at the core of our economic predicament. Leaders who sent the cops home need to be shamed, not promoted. Financiers who misled investors should be prosecuted, not bailed out. Attorney General nominee Eric Holder, the man who pardoned Marc Rich, doesn't seem likely to take up these tasks.

On Inauguration Day, President Obama will surely deliver an inspirational address. But the confidence he inspires will be worthless until he calls out and cuts off the thieves.

--------------------------

Jeffrey Klein is an investigative journalist who co-founded Mother Jones; directed exposes of Newt Gingrich, Big Tobacco and the introduction of offensive weapons into space; co-produced for The News Hour with Jim Lehrer a series on China's economy that won a Gerald Loeb Award; and taught journalism at Stanford, San Francisco State and Cal.

© 2009 Huffington Post All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/117219/

First They Steal Two Elections and Now Murder??

2008-12-22T12:39:00.003-08:00

Republican IT Specialist Dies in Plane Crash

A top Republican internet strategist who was set to testify in a case alleging election tampering in 2004 in Ohio has died in a plane crash. Michael Connell was the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove and created websites for the Bush and McCain electoral campaigns. Michael Connell was deposed one day before the election this year by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count in Ohio and his access to Karl Rove’s email files and how they went missing.

Guest:
Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media culture and communication at New York University. He is the author of several books, including Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 and Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too.

AMY GOODMAN: A top Republican internet strategist who was set to testify in a case alleging election tampering in 2004 in Ohio has died in a plane crash. Mike Connell was the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove and created websites for the Bush and McCain electoral campaigns. He also set up the official Ohio state election website reporting the 2004 presidential election returns.

Connell was reportedly an experienced pilot. He died instantly Friday night when his private plane crashed in a residential neighborhood near Akron, Ohio.

Michael Connell was deposed one day before the election this year by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count and his access to Karl Rove’s email files and how they went missing.

Velvet Revolution, a non-profit investigating Connell’s activities, revealed this weekend that Connell had recently said he was afraid George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw [him] under the bus.” Cliff Arnebeck had also previously alerted Attorney General Michael Mukasey to alleged threats from Karl Rove to Connell if he refused to “take the fall.”

Well, Mark Crispin Miller joins us now, a professor of media culture and communication at New York University, the author of several books, including Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 and Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too. Mark Crispin Miller us now in our firehouse studio.
Welcome to Democracy Now!

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: It’s good to be here, Amy. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Alright, well, we had you on right before the election, because that’s when Mike Connell was being deposed. This news that came out of his death in a plane crash on Friday night, talk about what you understand has happened.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, I cannot assert with perfect confidence that this was no accident, but I will say that the circumstances are so suspicious and so convenient for Rove and the White House that I think we’re obliged to investigate this thing very, very thoroughly. And that means, first of all, taking a close look at some of the stories that were immediately circulated to account for what happened, that it was bad weather. That was the line they used when Wellstone’s plane went down. There had been bad weather, but it had passed two hours before. And this comes from a woman at the airport information desk in Akron. We’re told that his plane was running out of gas, which is a little bit odd for a highly experienced pilot like Connell, but apparently, when the plane went down, there was an explosion, a fireball that actually charred and pocked some of the house fronts in the neighborhood. People can go online and see the footage that news crews took. But beyond the, you know, dubiousness of the official story, we have to take a close look at—and a serious look at all the charges that Connell was set to make.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, he had asked the Attorney General Mukasey for protective custody, because of threats to him and his wife?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: He reported threats to his lawyer, Cliff Arnebeck, and Arnebeck—also, Velvet Revolution heard from tipsters, as well, tipsters who also claimed that Connell’s life was at risk. Stephen Spoonamore, the whistleblower who was the first—who was the one to name Connell in the first place, also had an ear to the inside. He’s also very connected. And all these people were saying Rove is making threats, the White House is very worried about this case.

Having heard all this, Arnebeck contacted Mukasey, he contacted Nancy Rogers, who is the Ohio Attorney General, and he wrote a letter to the court, telling all of them that “This man should be in protective custody. He is an important witness in a RICO case. Please do something to look after him.” And they didn’t respond to this.

AMY GOODMAN: So, explain what this case is all about and exactly what Mike Connell has been doing over these last years. What does it mean to be Karl Rove’s IT guru?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, the lawyers in the case refer to him as a high-IQ Forrest Gump, by which they mean that he seems to have been present at the scene of every dubious election of the last eight years. We’re talking about Florida in 2000. We’re talking about Ohio in 2004. We’re talking about Alabama in 2002. He seems to have been involved in the theft of Don Siegelman’s re-election for governor. There’s some evidence that links him with the Saxby Chambliss-Max Cleland Senate race in Georgia in 2002. To be Karl Rove’s IT guru seems to have meant basically setting it up so that votes could be electronically shaved to the disadvantage of the Democrats and the advantage of Republicans.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “electronically shaved”? I mean, you’ve got all these precincts all over Ohio. They’re counting up their votes. What does he have to do with this?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, specifically, there’s a computer architecture setup called “Man in the Middle," which involves shunting the election returns from, you know, the state in question—in this case, Ohio—shunting them to a separate computer elsewhere. All of the election returns in Ohio in 2004 went from the Secretary of State’s website—this is Ken Blackwell—to a separate computer in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which was under the control of another private company called SMARTech.

So we have now two private companies: GovTech Solutions, which is Connell’s company, SMARTech, which is run by a guy named [Jeff] Averbeck. And the company—the third private company that managed the voting tabulators in Ohio was called Triad. All three of these companies worked closely together on election night in Ohio in 2004. It turns out that the state’s own IT person was sent home at 9:00 p.m. They said, “Go ahead. Go home. We’ll take care of this.” So that this trio of highly partisan and, let me add, Christianist companies basically took over the whole—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “Christianist”?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, they’re radical theocratic activists, particularly—particularly Triad and SMARTech. You know, they are fervently anti-choice.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Mike Connell was, in fact—many said that’s what motivated him through all of this, his fierce anti-abortion stance.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: He told—Connell told Spoonamore that one of the primary reasons why he helped Bush-Cheney steal elections was to save the babies. I do think, though, that we have to draw a distinction between Connell, on the one hand, and the Averbeck and the Rapp family, on the other hand, because Connell was far less ferocious in his political views. He was an ardent anti-abortionist, it’s true, but he wasn’t quite as hardcore as the others. And in fact, you know, he was a little bit alienated from the others, and that’s one of the reasons why he was inclined to talk, and so on.

But the fact is, to answer your question, that on election night in 2004, it had been Connell, with these other two companies working with him, who had managed the computer setup, enabling Ken Blackwell to study the maps of precincts and voter turnout very carefully and figure out how many votes they need. By shunting the data to Chattanooga, they kind of slowed down the data stream.

AMY GOODMAN: Wasn’t Karl Rove’s email also there in Chattanooga on some of these servers?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yes, yes. The same servers were used to host a whole bunch of highly partisan websites. And also, indeed, Karl Rove’s emails were on that server, too.

AMY GOODMAN: That have gone missing.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: That have gone missing. Incidentally, Stephen Spoonamore, again, the whistleblower who’s the one who named Connell, has told us—and I’ve seen his own contemporary notes—

AMY GOODMAN: And explain again who he was. Why was he in a position to whistleblow?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Stephen Spoonamore is a conservative Republican, a former McCain supporter and a very prominent expert at the detection of computer fraud. He’s the star witness in the Ohio lawsuit, right, in which Connell was involved. He has done extensive work of this kind, involving computer security, and had therefore worked with Connell, knew Connell personally and knew a lot of the people who were involved in the sort of cyber-security end of the Bush operation.

Despite his conservatism—or I suppose some would say because of it—he’s a man of principle—I mean, believes in the Constitution. He believes elections should be honest. He’s the one who came forward and named Connell.

And I have seen his notes of a conversation in which Connell asked Spoonamore how one would go about destroying White House emails. To this, Spoonamore said, “This conversation is over. You’re asking me to do something illegal.” But clearly, clearly—this is the important point—Mike Connell was up past his eyeballs in the most sensitive and explosive aspects of this crime family that, you know, has been masquerading as a political party.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did Fitrakis, the attorney who has brought the suit with Harvey Wasserman, the Ohio lawsuit, learn in the deposition of Mike Connell in the day before the election, which hardly got attention, considering it was the day before this historic election?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah. Harvey wasn’t part of it. Harvey writes articles with Bob. It’s Bob Fitrakis and Cliff Arnebeck are the attorneys. They learned very little. What they learned was that Bush-Cheney lawyer who accompanied Connell to the deposition was watching the whole thing like a hawk, repeatedly objected to questions. Connell was stonewalling like crazy at this deposition.

They only learned one thing. And that was, they got confirmation that it was Connell who brought these other private companies into the arrangement, in addition to his own GovTech Solutions. Again, there was Triad and SMARTech. It was Connell who brought those three companies into one unit, so that the three of them were, in effect, handling Ohio’s election returns on election night under Connell’s supervision. That’s what we learned.

We also know, Amy, that since the deposition—I want to make this clear; we said it before, I want to repeat it—that Connell has indicated very clearly a desire to talk further, to tell more, whether it’s his conscience bothering him or whether it’s fear of some kind of a perjury charge because of how vigorously he stonewalled at the deposition. He made it known to the lawyers, he made it known to reporter Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story, that he wanted to talk. He was scared. He wanted to talk. And I say that he had pretty good reason to be scared.

AMY GOODMAN: So why did he fly in—why did he pilot his own plane when he was so afraid?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, that’s a good question. We can’t ask him, unfortunately. I mean, this is kind of a grisly thought, but, I mean, I think we should be asking where the body is? We’re told that a trooper on the scene immediately identified Connell. But then we read elsewhere that there was nothing left but debris and that the fireball was enormous. So maybe he wasn’t on the plane. I mean, who knows, when you’re dealing with people as deep as these?
But the point is—I can’t stress this strongly enough—we’re dealing not just with a shocking accident, if that’s what it was, and a convenient one. We’re dealing not even just with a particular lawsuit that, you know, really requires vigorous promotion. The important point here is that this is all about our elections. That’s what this is about. This is about democratic self-government.
The fact that Obama won so handily has caused a lot of us to sit back and relax. There’s been a lot of popping of champagne corks and people drawing the conclusion that the system must work, because our guy won. Well, this is not a sports event. This is self-government.

In fact, the evidence strongly suggests—and we haven’t had a chance to talk about this since Election Day—that Obama probably won by twice as many votes as we think. Probably a good seven million votes for Obama were undone through vote suppression and fraud, because the stuff was extensive and pervasive, in places where you wouldn’t expect it.

The Illinois Ballot Integrity Project was monitoring the vote in DuPage County, right next door to Obama’s, you know, backyard, Cook County. And two of them, in only two precincts on Election Day, saw with their own eyes 350 voters show up, only to be turned away, told, “You’re not registered,” people who were registered, who voted in the primary. All but one of these people was black. That’s in Illinois.

People at the Election Defense Alliance have discovered, from sifting through the numbers, an eleven-point red shift in New Hampshire. That means that there’s a discrepancy in Obama’s disfavor, primarily through use of the optical scan machines, an eleven-point discrepancy in the Republicans’ favor, OK?

You start to combine this with all the vote suppression, all the disenfranchisement, all the vote machine flipping that went on in this election, you realize, OK, Obama won, but millions of Americans, most of them African American and students, you know, were not able to participate in any civic sense, ironically, a lot of the same people, you know, who would have been disenfranchised and were disenfranchised before the civil rights movement. So the fact that a black president was elected, while cause for jubilation, see, ought not to take place at the expense of a whole lot of our fellow citizens who seem to have been disenfranchised on racial grounds. My point is very simply this: We’ve got to get past the victory of Obama and look seriously at what our election system is like, or else, I promise you, see, the setup that was put in place in this last election, in 2004 and in 2000, OK, will still be there in 2010, still be there in 2012. So we’ve got to take steps to do something about it now.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, I want to thank you very much for being with us, professor of media culture and communication at New York University, most recent book Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008.

Dude You've Been Punked By Your Government....

2008-12-21T22:55:00.004-08:00

Did America Get Punk'd on the Bailout?
By David Sirota, Campaign for America's Future
Posted on December 18, 2008

Editor's note: David Sirota appeared on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show on Dec. 16 to discuss the bailout.

When I went on Rachel Maddow's show on Tuesday, she asked a question about the bailout that is really the question of our time: Did we get punk'd? As progressive bailout critics have been saying since the current Wall Street bailout was first proposed, the answer is yes.

As the Minneapolis Federal Reserve reports, the major claims about a credit crisis that justified Congress cutting a trillion-dollar blank check to Wall Street were demonstrably false. And new data and reports show they remain demonstrably false.

For instance, take a look at line 1 and line 5 of this December Federal Reserve report on bank lending. That's right -- you see no significant decrease in lending, and in some cases, an increase. Interbank lending has dropped some, but certainly not at the crisis levels the Bush administration and banks claimed.

Then take a look at this story from Reuters, recounting a big report from a widely respected financial analysis firm:

"The credit crunch is not nearly as severe as the U.S. authorities appear to believe, and public data actually suggest world credit markets are functioning remarkably well, a report [from Celent consulting] released on Thursday says. ... The report, much of which is based on U.S. Federal Reserve data, challenges a long list of assumptions one by one, arguing that there is indeed a financial crisis but that, on aggregate, the problems of a few are by no means those of the many when it comes to obtaining credit.

"It is startling that many of (Federal Reserve) Chairman (Ben) Bernanke and (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson's remarks are not supported or are flatly contradicted by the data provided by the very organizations they lead," said the report.

Regarding U.S. business access to credit, the report says: Overall U.S. bank lending is at its highest level ever; U.S. commercial bank lending is at record highs and growing particularly fast since May 2007; corporate bond issuance has declined, but increased commercial lending has compensated for this; [interbank] lending hit its highest level ever in September 2008 and remained high in October and that overall interbank lending is up 22 percent; the cost of interbank lending ... dropped to its lowest level ever in early November and remains at very low levels; [consumer credit] was at a record high in September; and local government bond issuance had continued at similar levels to those before the credit crisis, while bank lending for real estate reached a record level in October 2008, it says. (emphasis added)

Then there's this from the Wall Street Journal looking at a new study by the National Federation of Independent Business:

The report found that among small businesses "no 'credit crunch' has appeared to date beyond the normal cyclical tightening of credit." The NFIB found that worries about interest rates and financing were a concern to only 3 percent of respondents. ... By and large, the story of the NFIB report was that if credit is going untapped, it's largely because company operators are not choosing to pursue the credit. It's not that companies can't get the extra money, it's that they don't want or need it because of the broader slowdown in economic activity. (emphasis added)

That last point is the big one: The real crisis is in the real economy -- ya know, the real world of jobs, wages, health care premiums and pensions that Washington has totally ignored as it keeps writing checks to its well-heeled campaign contributors on Wall Street under the guise of a lending crisis. Adding insult to injury is the last thing I discussed with Rachel -- the fact that because the bailout money came with almost no strings attached, the financial-industry recipients of the taxpayer largesse are either hoarding the money, using it to pay shareholder dividends and executive bonuses, or devoting it to efforts to buy up smaller competitors.

So what to do?

First things first -- we have to pressure, cajole, lambaste and downright humiliate Wall Street stooges on Capitol Hill who claim nothing can be done. These are people like Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.. The recent subject of a scathing New York Times profile examining his complicity in the financial crisis, Schumer insisted to the Wall Street Journal that despite Congress' clear power to reform -- or even revoke -- the bailout, "there's not much we can do other than jawbone." It's the old Innocent Bystander Fable, designed to make us think Congress can do nothing other than keep forking over the money to campaign contributors. And it's a straight-up lie.

Second, Congress can reject the Bush administration's request to release the next $350 billion installment of no-strings-attached bailout money for Wall Street, if that request happens.

Third, Congress can add all the strings and oversight measures to the remaining money that bailout critics originally said were necessary. That means eliminating gaping loopholes in the executive pay limits; preventing the money from subsidizing shareholder dividends, forcing the government to buy voting shares of bank stock (rather than nonvoting stock, as it is doing today) so that regulators have the leverage to clean out bad bank management; following Britain's lead in making the money contingent on increased lending; and expanding the ways the money can be used so that it can be allocated to the real economy (i.e. manufacturing companies, etc.).

Finally, Congress can allocate the unspent bailout money to a robust economic-recovery package focused on job-creating infrastructure and health care priorities -- and Congress can pass that economic recovery package right now, rather than waiting for the next president.

Looking at what's gone on in the last three months, we see a classic example of Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" and subsequent disaster capitalism. Bailout critics were attacked as "irresponsible" by Establishment pundits and politicians -- even though the data showed that those pundits and politicians were using an admittedly real problem to manufacture the perception of a full-on earth-shattering crisis so as to justify the biggest taxpayer heist in contemporary American history. And though that data was largely ignored by the same media that beat the drum for the bailout, it is now becoming too compelling to ignore.

As the real economy is ignored by Washington, and as the government's own numbers expose the shameless dishonesty of the Beltway's bailout proponents, it's time for our leaders to listen to the real pragmatists, who have been right all along.

David Sirota is a best-selling author whose newest book, The Uprising, was released this month. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network -- both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota.

© 2008 Campaign for America's Future All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/113758/

Happy Christmas......Stop the Wars........Bring Our Troops Home!!!

2008-12-19T01:02:00.002-08:00

Music Video:
Happy Christmas by (John Lennon)

Music Video Code by Video Code Zone

Thank You Odetta For Your Light You Shared.....

2008-12-03T15:38:00.003-08:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Odetta Holmes dies at 77; folk singer championed black history, civil rights
By Randy Lewis and Mike Boehm

From the Los Angeles Times
December 3, 2008

Odetta, the classically trained folk, blues and gospel singer who used her powerfully rich and dusky voice to champion African American music and civil rights issues for more than half a century starting in the folk revival of the 1950s, has died. She was 77.

She was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City for a checkup in mid-November but went into kidney failure. She died there Tuesday of heart disease, her manager, Doug Yeager, told the Associated Press.

With a repertoire that included 19th century slave songs and spirituals as well as the topical ballads of such 20th century folk icons as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Odetta became one of the most beloved figures in folk music.

She was said to have influenced the emergence of artists as varied as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin and Tracy Chapman.

"The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta," Dylan once said. "From Odetta, I went to Harry Belafonte, the Kingston Trio, little by little uncovering more as I went along."

Her affinity for traditional African American folk songs was a hallmark of her long career, along with a voice that could easily sweep from dark, husky low notes to delicate yet goose bump-inducing high register tones.

"The first time I heard Odetta sing," Seeger once said, "she sang Leadbelly's ‘Take This Hammer’ and I went and told her how I wish Leadbelly was still alive so he could have heard her."

She was born Odetta Holmes in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930. Her father died when she was young and she moved to Los Angeles at age 6 with her mother, sister and stepfather. She took the surname of her stepfather Zadock Felious, but throughout her career she used just her given name.

And although Los Angeles wasn't as overtly racist as the Deep South, she suffered some of the same indignities that came with being black.

"We lived within walking distance of Marshall High School," Odetta told The Times some years ago, "but they didn't let colored people go there, so we had to get on the bus and go to Belmont High School."

She attended Los Angeles City College after high school and earned a degree in music.

Trained as a classical vocalist as a child, she won a spot with a group called the Madrigal Singers in junior high school. She also realized early that despite her classical training, her options in that area were going to be limited because of the racism at the time.

By 19, Odetta had turned her attention to other forms of music and landed a part in a production of "Finian's Rainbow" as a chorus member. When the musical went on the road to San Francisco, she went with it.

The trip marked an important crossroads in her emergence as a folk singer.

She met an old friend from school who had settled in the city's North Beach neighborhood, and during a visit Odetta was exposed to a late-night session of folk songs.

"That night I heard hours and hours of songs that really touched where I live," she told The Times. "I borrowed a guitar and learned three chords, and started to sing at parties."

The traditional prison songs that she learned in her early days hit home the hardest and helped her come to terms with what she called the deep-seated hate and fury in her.

"As I did those songs, I could work on my hate and fury without being antisocial," she recalled. "Through those songs, I learned things about the history of black people in this country that the historians in school had not been willing to tell us about or had lied about."

Odetta left the theater company in 1950 and took a job at a folk club in San Francisco. She soon began to tour and recorded her first album, "The Tin Angel," in 1954. She soon caught the attention of such folk-music icons as Guthrie, Seeger and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. She was a fixture on the folk music scene by the time the genre's commercial boom came in the late 1950s and early '60s.

She played at the Newport Folk Festival, the showcase event for folk music, four times between 1959 and 1965. She also had a recording contract with Vanguard Records, which at the height of the folk music craze was the genre's leading label.

Over the years, Odetta branched into acting, with dramatic and singing roles in film and television including "Cinerama Holiday," "Sanctuary" and "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman."

But traditional folk music remained her forte.

"The folk repertoire is our inheritance. Don't have to like it, but we need to hear it," she said. "I love getting to schools and telling kids there's something else out there. It's from their forebears, and its an alternative to what they hear on the radio. As long as I am performing, I will be pointing out that heritage that is ours."

In 1999, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Clinton. In 2004, she was a Kennedy Center honoree. A year later, the Library of Congress honored her with its Living Legend Award.

Information on survivors and funeral services was not immediately available.

Lewis and Boehm are Times staff writers.

randy.lewis@latimes.com

mike.boehm@latimes.com

Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times

Need I Say More? Thanksgiving is so fleeting.....

2008-11-29T01:05:00.002-08:00

Wal-Mart worker dies after shoppers knock him down

By COLLEEN LONG, Associated Press Writer Colleen Long, Associated Press Writer Sat Nov 29, 12:54 am ET

NEW YORK – A Wal-Mart worker was killed Friday when "out-of-control" shoppers desperate for bargains broke down the doors at a 5 a.m. sale. Other workers were trampled as they tried to rescue the man, and customers shouted angrily and kept shopping when store officials said they were closing because of the death, police and witnesses said.

At least four other people, including a woman who was eight months pregnant, were taken to hospitals for observation or minor injuries, and the store in Valley Stream on Long Island closed for several hours before reopening.

Shoppers stepped over the man on the ground and streamed into the store. When told to leave, they complained that they had been in line since Thursday morning.

Nassau police said about 2,000 people were gathered outside the store doors at the mall about 20 miles east of Manhattan. The impatient crowd knocked the man, identified by police as Jdimytai Damour of Queens, to the ground as he opened the doors, leaving a metal portion of the frame crumpled like an accordion.

"This crowd was out of control," said Nassau police spokesman Lt. Michael Fleming. He described the scene as "utter chaos."

Dozens of store employees trying to fight their way out to help Damour were also getting trampled by the crowd, Fleming said.

Items on sale at the store included a Samsung 50-inch Plasma HDTV for $798, a Bissel Compact Upright Vacuum for $28, a Samsung 10.2 megapixel digital camera for $69 and DVDs such as "The Incredible Hulk" for $9.

Damour, 34, was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead about 6 a.m., police said. The exact cause of death has not been determined.

A 28-year-old pregnant woman was taken to a hospital, where she and the baby were reported to be OK, said police Sgt. Anthony Repalone.

Police said criminal charges were possible in the case, but Fleming said it would be difficult to identify individual shoppers. Authorities were reviewing surveillance video.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., based in Bentonville, Ark., called the incident a "tragic situation" and said the employee came from a temporary agency and was doing maintenance work at the store.

"The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority," said Dan Fogleman, a company spokesman. "At this point, facts are still being assembled and we are working closely with the Nassau County Police as they investigate what occurred."

Kimberly Cribbs, who witnessed the stampede, said shoppers were acting like "savages."

"When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling 'I've been on line since yesterday morning,'" she said. "They kept shopping."

Shoppers around the country line up early outside stores on the day after Thanksgiving in the annual bargain-hunting ritual known as Black Friday. It got that name because it has historically been the day when stores broke into profitability for the full year.

___

AP retail writers Anne D'Innocenzio and Mae Anderson and contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press.

An open letter to President-elect Obama from Iraq Veterans Against the War

2008-11-12T14:01:00.002-08:00

Dear President-elect Obama,

Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War congratulate you on your victory, and we admire and respect both Senator John McCain and you for your strong, patriotic dedication and desire to fix the deep problems our country now faces.

We appreciate your inspiring words spoken at Grant Park in Chicago on Tuesday night - words which should give all Americans hope for our future. But we also remember the hope your words gave to many Americans in an August 2007 speech - especially those serving in our military: "Ending this war will be my first priority when I take office. There is no military solution in Iraq. Only Iraq's leaders can settle the grievances at the heart of Iraq's civil war."

Much has changed in our country since that speech, and the prevailing sentiment among Americans is that our faltering economy must now be your first priority. We understand and share their concern, but we believe that our faltering economy cannot be corrected if we continue the costly occupation of Iraq – an immense financial cost which is simply unsustainable. The American people are giving billions of dollars every week to continue an occupation that is draining our wallets, our respect, our security, and the lives of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi men, women, and children.

We fervently ask you to use all possible political and diplomatic pressure to quickly and completely end the occupation of Iraq. Though none of us know what the future will bring, we do know this: our service members are tired of an occupation seemingly without end, and they want to return home to their families.

And when our brave men and women return home, they need to be given full benefits, and adequate healthcare (including mental health) to repair their physical and emotional wounds. They deserve no less, and we as a country owe that care to them.

We also call on you not to ignore the humanitarian crises of enormous proportion that the Iraqi people continue to endure. Over four million Iraqis have been displaced or become refugees since the U.S. invasion of their country. Iraqi deaths are most accurately estimated at over 600,000 people, with many hundreds of thousands more having suffered physical and emotional injuries. The Iraqi people will be coping with the aftermath of our unjustifiable invasion and occupation of their country for generations to come. IVAW believes that it is the duty of our country to pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage we have caused to their lives, infrastructure, and culture.

We acknowledge the shift in focus from the war in Iraq to the war in Afghanistan. At the same time, Afghan President Karzai is calling for a change in strategy and Afghan families are mourning the deaths of their loved ones who have been killed in U.S. air strikes. We encourage you to listen to the Afghan people and U.S. veterans of that conflict before making any decision to escalate military force there.

We call on you to end the occupation of Iraq and repair our economy, and by doing so you will demonstrate that a "new dawn of American leadership" has arrived, a "defining moment of change" that will benefit and give hope to all Americans - young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled.

You once said that “change won’t come from the top. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.” We agree, which is why Iraq Veterans Against the War will continue organizing for an end to the occupation of Iraq, health care and benefits for returning veterans, and reparations for the Iraqi people. We hope that these are areas we can work together with you to address.

Respectfully,
Iraq Veterans Against the War

PAY ATTENTION AT THE POLLS!!!!!!!

2008-11-03T12:24:00.005-08:00

On Eve of Election Day, Is the Nation’s Voting System Ready? Reports of Irregularities Pour in from Across US in Record Early Voting

From Democracy Now, November 03, 2008

Election Day is one day away. Tomorrow, tens of millions of Americans will head to the polls. Is the nation’s voting system ready for the unprecedented turnout? In record early voting, more votes have been cast before Election Day than ever before. Already, reports of voting irregularities, long lines, malfunctioning machines and badly managed polling stations are pouring in from across the country. We speak to NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy.

Guest:
Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media culture and communication at New York University. He is the author of several books, most recently Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. His previous book is called Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too.

Report on PA voting filed by the American News Project,

AMY GOODMAN: Election Day is one day away. Tomorrow, tens of millions of Americans will head to the polls. Is the nation’s voting system ready for the unprecedented turnout?
Already, more votes have been cast before Election Day than ever before. As of Saturday night, there were some 27 million absentee and early votes in thirty states, according to the Associated Press. But already, reports of voting irregularities, long lines, malfunctioning machines and badly managed polling stations are pouring in from across the country.
Despite documented irregularities, about a quarter of all voters will use electronic machines that offer no paper record to verify their choice was accurately recorded. Voting rights groups have filed lawsuits against election officials in Pennsylvania and Virginia, saying they have not stocked enough paper ballots to prepare for the expected turnout.
In Colorado, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia, voters have reported using touch-screen machines that have flipped their votes to the wrong candidate or party. Meanwhile, Florida has switched to its third ballot system in the past three election cycles, and glitches associated with the transition have caused confusion at early voting sites.
This all comes in the wake of voter suppression tactics that have seen tens of thousands of voters potentially lose their right to vote. In the battleground state of Colorado, voter rights activists recently won a major victory after state officials agreed to reinstate tens of thousands of people whose names had been removed from the voter rolls.
Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media culture and communication at New York University. He is the author of several books, most recently Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000–2008. His previous book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too.
Welcome to Democracy Now!

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Thanks for having me back, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s start where I haven’t seen much mention, and that is this man, Mike Connell, in Ohio, testifying. Who is he? What is his relevance to the big day, to Election Day tomorrow?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, this event in a courtroom in Columbus may be one of the most important things to happen in this whole election and may be one of the most important things to happen in American history. I mean, this sounds hyperbolic, I know, but it is true.
Mike Connell is—has been named as Karl Rove’s computer guru since 2000. The lawyers in the case refer to Connell as a high-IQ Forrest Gump, because he’s been on the scene of every dubious election we’ve had over the last eight years, starting with Florida 2000.
Now, he has been named by a man named Stephen Spoonamore, S-P-O-O-N-A-M-O-R-E, who’s a very unusual and particularly unimpeachable kind of whistleblower. He’s a conservative Republican; he’s a former McCain supporter. But above all, he is a renowned and highly successful expert at the detection of computer fraud. He works for big banks. He works for foreign governments, the Secret Service. His job is to figure out how computers are used to steal money or information or votes. Well, he’s named a lot of people in the Bush-Cheney election subversion conspiracy. He has worked with them. He knows them personally. And months ago, he named Mike Connell and his company GovTech Solutions as having played a crucial role in the—basically the electronic subversion of the vote in Ohio in 2004. And Spoonamore has actually described the computer architecture that was used to do this.
Now, on the strength of this testimony, the lawyers in the case had the judge issue a subpoena to Mike Connell last week. Connell defied the subpoena; he was in contempt. Late last week, the lawyers filed a motion to compel compliance, and to everyone’s surprise and delight, the judge ordered Connell to appear today and to be deposed for two hours about his role in this longstanding electronic plot, basically, to flip votes towards the Republicans.
Some of this deposition will be sealed, and I have to tell you the part that’ll be sealed. Apparently, Rove has threatened Connell. He told him that if Connell did not take the fall for this whole thing, the Department of Justice would start investigating Connell’s wife Heather for improper lobbying practices. Now, that part of the deposition we’re not going to know the answers to. But what’s astonishing to me—

AMY GOODMAN: Who does she lobby for?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Various politicians and so on. Whether she’s guilty or innocent is beside the point, because, as we know, the Department of Justice is a cudgel in the collective hands of the Bush administration. This would be more selective prosecution.
But what’s really astonishing here is that Karl Rove could make that threat with such impunity. This shut Connell up, and he was, you know, earlier inclined to talk about what was going on. Then he got himself three very expensive Republican attorneys who promised that they would make sure he could not be deposed before Election Day. Well, hallelujah, he’s being deposed before Election Day. And the reason why—

AMY GOODMAN: Today.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Today. The reason why this is so important and the strategy behind the early part of this case all along has been that if we can shine a spotlight on the perpetrators of this kind of fraud before Election Day, make them nervous, make them pull in their horns, distract them, there’s a good chance that they might not try to do what they’re clearly ready to do, because, let me just add, Connell is on the McCain payroll. He’s working for McCain right now, and he specializes in a particular kind of computer architecture whose only purpose, Spoonamore says, is to steal votes.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to two issues. One, how do you know Karl Rove made these threats? That’s a very strong allegation.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, it is a very strong allegation that comes from the lawyers that the lawyers were evidently told by Connell or someone close to him. But this stuff has been on the website of Velvet Revolution. Raw Story has reported it. The media, however, has remained over-focused, of course, on ACORN, which is a nothing story. But let me make clear that the brouhaha over ACORN, right, this orchestrated propaganda drive about ACORN, has many distracting purposes, and one of them, I promise you, is to distract us from this case. This case is an Ohio RICO case. Well, lately, the Republicans filed an Ohio RICO case against ACORN. And I think the purpose—

AMY GOODMAN: RICO, meaning racketeering?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: It’s a racketeering case. Ohio has the strongest racketeering statute in the country. This is one of the reasons why the lawyers decided to go there and do this.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean he specializes in the computer architecture, the internet architecture, that can steal elections?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, it’s a system—if people go to the website for Velvet Revolution, particularly http://www.rovecybergate.com/, they’ll find the documents that Spoonamore has filed describing the setup that’s known as “Man in the Middle.” This happened in Ohio in 2004.
It involves shunting the data that comes from the website for the Secretary of State—I mean, the election returns—taking those election returns as they come to the website in real-time and shunting them to a computer somewhere else. What happened in 2004 was the election returns from Ken Blackwell’s website were shunted to a computer in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, under the control of a very partisan private company to which Connell was connected. The data was shunted to this strange computer in Chattanooga and then directed back to the Secretary of State’s website. As Connell—I mean, sorry, as Spoonamore has said, the only purpose of doing this Man in the Middle thing is to commit crime.
Bev Harris of Black Box Voting has lately reported that there are similar Man in the Middle setups in Colorado, Illinois and Kentucky. So it’s very important that tomorrow, when we’re out there engaging in election protection and working to make the turnout as large as it possibly can be, because the larger the turnout, the harder the theft, people have to be paying very close attention to the numbers. They have to be watching the traffic at different precincts, and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the issue of voting all over the country. What have—you’re following it very closely. You’re going to be with us Tuesday night for our five-hour broadcast, to be monitoring what’s happening in all the states, especially the key swing battleground states. What have you learned? It’s estimated about a quarter of people have already voted.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yes, an astonishing number of people have voted. And I take that as very good news, not because that necessarily ensures their votes will be safe; I take it as good news because it indicates to me that an awful lot of Americans understand that the voting apparatus that we have out there is untrustworthy, and they’re taking, you know, special steps to see to it that their votes count.
But what we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks is basically a replay, on steroids, if you will, of what we saw in 2004—vote flipping by machines in West Virginia, Texas, Tennessee and Missouri, that we know of. And let me make something clear, Amy. All the flips go in one direction. It’s all from Obama either to McCain or to Cynthia McKinney, as it happens.
We did hear of three people who claimed that their votes were flipped from McCain to Obama in Tennessee. But they’re all related to a Republican official. Their numbers are unlisted. And they told the local newspaper and not the election commission, so I have my doubts about those three cases.
But there have also been, as usual, very long lines in Democratic precincts only. We’re talking about a calculated kind of shortage that magically does not afflict Republican precincts, only Democratic ones.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, now, in these pre-voting, in these long early lines, not all precincts are open, right?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right, not all precincts. This is something that’s happening in some parts of the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Thirty-one states.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: And I want to make something clear here. Turnout on Election Day, massive turnout, unprecedented turnout, is all-important, because, again, the larger the turnout, the harder the theft. The more people show up at the polls, the better it is, which means that those people who vote early should also go out on Election Day and be physically present at the polls to help to build that national mass.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, I want to put off our break for a minute, because I want to play for you a piece from Pennsylvania and then get your comment. Pennsylvania, of course, a key battleground state, many believe could propel either John McCain or Barack Obama into the White House. The American News Project went to Pennsylvania to cover potential voting problems on Election Day. They filed this report.

REPORTER: Most polls suggest the presidential race in Pennsylvania is neck-and-neck, so the vote in Philly could easily determine whether the state goes red or blue. During the primary election on April 22nd, 2008, a strong warning sign of potential November 4th problems emerged when widespread machine breakdowns led to very long lines and lost votes. And with over 200,000 new voters in Philly, voter rights groups are worried that the city is unprepared for the upcoming surge in voting. And unfortunately for voters, the people in charge seem surprisingly unconcerned.

FRED VOIGT, Philadelphia Deputy Commissioner: Forget a long line. A long line is not justification for anything except waiting.

MARGE TARTAGLIONE (D), Chairwoman, Philadelphia Voting Commission: Anybody have anything to say now? Or forever hold their peace.

REPORTER: Your deputy commissioner Fred Voigt told me that “a long line is not justification for anything except waiting.” I was wondering if the commission has any response to that comment.

MARGE TARTAGLIONE: Did you see people waiting for baseball tickets all night long outside? Did you see the line that they wanted a new iPod? They all waited overnight and waited in line. Do you go to the supermarket? You see people waiting in line? They complain, they grumble, some of them. Some of them just talk. So what is the difference?

REPORTER: I’m sorry. Are you comparing voters who possibly have to work during the day to people who are standing in line to get an iPod or a Phillies ticket?

MARGE TARTAGLIONE: Yeah, it’s the same people. Same people. Same people. Come on! You’re mixing apples with—sit down!

ANGEL COLEMAN: It’s a right for every single person. I always vote, ever since I turned eighteen, the first election that I could vote in. It’s very, very important to me to be able to vote. I got to the school. I noticed that there were a lot more cars than in the past when I’ve come to a vote, and I thought, great, you know, there’s more people out voting. But then, when I got to the door, I noticed a couple people walking out, and people were saying that they didn’t get a chance to vote. The line was too long; they couldn’t wait. When I got inside, I definitely saw longer lines of people wanting to vote. And unfortunately, it wasn’t just that there were more people voting; it was that two out of three machines were broken down.

REPORTER: Single mother Angel Coleman has joined the NAACP and a coalition of groups called the Election Reform Network in suing the state of Pennsylvania. They hope to improve access to emergency paper ballots in case machines break down again. The groups argue that long lines amount to a form of voter disenfranchisement, and they note that the response of election officials to the impending crisis has been woefully inadequate.

ANGEL COLEMAN: This is real. This is a real problem. You know, it happened to me, it happened to the people that I saw walking out, it happened to the other people that were testifying in court with me yesterday. So this is a for real problem. This is all happening in Philadelphia to those people, to me. And it is representative of thousands of other people around the country.

MARGE TARTAGLIONE: I don’t want these stories going out there’s going to be long lines. These poor senior citizens are going to pick up the paper and say, “Oh, my god! Do I gotta wait two hours in line on my feet?” Never happened in Philadelphia. I’m tired of this propaganda that they put in, that they put in! Everybody wants a story. It’s going to be my story, the lines are going to be so long. Knock it off! Knock it off! Trying to run a smooth election. You can say what you want about me, I don’t care. Spell my name right.

REPORTER: Just hours after this hearing ended, a federal judge ruled in favor of Angel Coleman and the voters of Pennsylvania, which means that paper ballots will be issued as a backup to faulty machines. Officials like Voigt and Tartaglione are the ones responsible for implementing the court order.

AMY GOODMAN: That report, by American News Project. We’ll be getting reports from them throughout Tuesday night for the five-hour broadcast and Wednesday morning for our expanded two-hour broadcast the morning after. That voice, especially for our radio listeners who didn’t see her identified on the TV broadcast, was that of Marge Tartaglione. She said make sure you “spell my name right.” T-A-R-T-A-G-L-I-O-N-E. She is the chairwoman of the Philadelphia Voting Commission. Mark Crispin Miller, the significance of what she said—people wait all night for baseball tickets, they wait all night to get an iPhone—what’s the problem?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, that kind of contempt, that cavalier attitude towards people voting, and equating voting, which is like a crucial civic function, with waiting in line to get the latest toy, you know, demonstrates how weak a commitment these people have to democracy. I mean, she’s a Democrat, whoopee. All over the country, given how corrupt our political culture is, we have Democrats and Republicans essentially working together against the voters. The problem in Philadelphia with the long lines and so on, we’ve seen this elsewhere in the country. Just yesterday in Georgia, people were waiting over ten hours to vote. So this is something—

AMY GOODMAN: And who this disadvantages? You might say, well, everyone waits on the line.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: No, that’s just it. Here again, as with the vote flips, which go in one direction, the shortages afflict basically one side. They happen in the inner cities. They happen in Hispanic neighborhoods. They happen in college towns. You see? So these people give up; they have to go to work, and so on, and they can’t vote.

AMY GOODMAN: And even if the same—even if people from across the economic spectrum wait on the same line, the issue is, who can wait? If you’re a worker who’s got to get back to work, if you have to work that day, versus if you can take time off.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, that’s absolutely true. I’ve yet to hear, though, of any long lines afflicting, you know, the polling places in the suburbs or small towns, you know, where there’s a lot of Republican voters.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Mark Crispin Miller, voter assemblies, what are they?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, crucial, very important. I mean, there’s a lot of things people can do and must do on Election Day to keep this thing from being stolen. They’ve got to make sure they’re registered. They have to know the hotlines: 1-866-OUR-VOTE and 1-866-MY-VOTE-1. If anything happens to you on Election Day, if you’re told you’re not registered when you know you are, when people tell you that, you know—when the machine flips your vote, for example, when you’re intimidated, if there’s a police presence at the polls, if you get disinformation telling you your election day is the next day, anything at all happens, let somebody know. Call those numbers. If there are people from the media there, tell them. If there are Election Protection people there, tell them. But make sure the story gets out, because this is the kind of evidence that has to be gathered and preserved, because on election night, sure as shooting, on the networks they’ll all say, “Well, things went really well today. There were nowhere near as many problems as we thought there were.”
But finally, and most important, in the event something untoward happens and John McCain is right and he wins late at night on Election Day, as he recently said he’s going to do, any kind of an upset like that, people should be prepared to attend voter assemblies. This is something that’s being run by Liberty Tree as part of their pledge for No More Stolen Elections! The website is libertytreefdr.org. The aim here is to organize voter assemblies so that on November 5th people will turn out, nonviolently, convene, discuss what’s going on and press for the proper kinds of investigations.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you voted early, you think you should go back to the polls?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Not to vote, obviously. Even though I’m from Chicago, I don’t recommend that. I think people should go back to the polling places and be visible, be present, be out there. In other words, treat this Election Day not as your opportunity to make a political choice—of course it’s that or should be that; treat Election Day as a day for the assertion of your right to vote. That’s the all-important thing. And show this system that we’re not going to take our disenfranchisement lying down.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, I’ll see you right here tomorrow night, Tuesday night, with your computer, monitoring voting around the country. Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media culture and communication at NYU, New York University. Most recent book, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000–2008.

OK! The Party Is Almost Over......................

2008-11-02T23:34:00.003-08:00

What Happens After Election Day?
Memo to Progressives for Obama
By JOSHUA FRANK for CounterPunch

Unless John McCain has a bombshell of a scandal to drop on Barack Obama at the 11th hour, this election is beginning to look like it's in the bag for the Democrats. The Republicans will finally be kicked out of the White House and peace and calm will slowly return to Washington.

At least that's the message reverberating across the progressive landscape these days. One can almost hear a collective sigh of relief. Darth Cheney will be gone. Karl Rove will be forced to recoil, and President Bush can retire in ignorant bliss to his ranch in Crawford.

Ahhhh…

It is certainly comforting to believe the stars have aligned and progressive values are about to flood the Beltway. Barack Obama has campaigned on "Hope" and "Change" and we all but believe the guy is actually going to deliver on his varied promises.

But believing is what's caused so many to fall victim to Obama fever. You know the signs: they send you emails from MoveOn.org (claiming you're to blame for Obama's fictional loss) and hope-filled rants from Norman Solomon. They talk about Obama as if he's the next messiah, their wardrobe consists of more than two Obama shirts that they'll wear every day leading up to the election. They have a "Change" sign in their window and one in their front yard. It's as if they've become more or less Obama-zombies, just in time for Halloween.

No question the Obama strategists have accomplished what they set out to do. Just look at all they've achieved thus far: antiwar activists have exchanged their slogans for pro-Obama refrains despite the fact that their candidate inflates the alleged threat of Iran, wants to put more troops in Afghanistan and won't pull out of Iraq anytime soon.

Environmentalists have come out for Obama in large numbers, even though he thinks coal can be clean and nuclear energy can be safe. No big deal that he wants to drill baby drill off our coastal shores. At least the guy believes in global warming.

Or take the civil rights champions who have few qualms about his rabid support for FISA and the PATRIOT Act or social justice activists who aren't overly concerned that Obama condones the execution of convicts who have never murdered. Economic progressives, who would be the first to say the economic I.V. pumped into the Wall Street bloodline was hastily passed and rips off tax-payers, are the first to defend Obama's economic platform. No matter he supported the bailout without reservation. No matter his team of economic hit men includes a whole slew of Clintonite neoliberals like Robert Rubin. Obama is still their guy.

All of this wouldn't bother me much if it weren't for the overt hypocrisy so many progressives, and a few radicals, are exhibiting with their blind support for Obama. It's one thing to embrace pragmatic voting and lesser-evilism on the grounds that we don't really live in a true democracy. It's quite another to be excited about the prospect of electing a man who doesn't stand for the issues you do, and is in fact campaigning against them.

What will happen if Obama wins the electorate? Progressive Group Number One seems to believe he'll magically move left once inaugurated and is only running to the right in order to win the election. That position is a non sequitur and not worthy of real discussion as it's based on wishful thinking.

Progressive Group Number Two knows Obama is pretty damn conservative but is planning on voting "strategically," arguing that change comes in baby steps, yet they assure us they'll apply pressure once Obama's elected to get the little toddler strolling. A friend, who happens to be a professor at a large university, recently told me that he plans on coercing Obama by pressuring elected members of congress. He'll be "making a stink" and "scene," he assured me.

What a relief.

"The forces arrayed against far-reaching progressive change are massive and unrelenting. If an Obama victory is declared next week, those forces will be regrouping in front of our eyes -- with right-wing elements looking for backup from corporate and pro-war Democrats," Norman Solomon recently wrote in an article advising progressives to vote against their interests. "How much leverage these forces exercise on an Obama presidency would heavily depend on the extent to which progressives are willing and able to put up a fight."

Does Solomon even understand what it means to "put up a fight"? And what's with the notion that progressives will "apply pressure" once Obama wins? They have no cash and he's already going to receive most of their votes. What are they going to do to pressure him, poke him in his ribs? Cause a stink by farting through the halls of Congress? Obama may actually listen to us if he thought progressives were considering to vote for a guy like Ralph Nader, which is the point Nader seems to be making by campaigning in swing states this week. Nader knows how to put up a real fight, one not mired in hypotheticals and fear-mongering, so he's pressuring Obama where it matters most.

Of course, such a direct confrontation to Obama's backward policies ruffles the slacks of many devout liberals. But that is the point. Progressives are not flush with cash and as we all should know, flashing the almighty buck is usually the best way to grab a politician's attention. But the only thing we have at our immediate disposal now is votes. These crooks need us to get elected. Obama already has the majority of left-wing support shored up despite his resistance to embrace our concerns. Imagine if he had to earn our votes instead of receiving our support without having to do a thing for it?

So let's prepare for what's ahead. Obama may win next Tuesday, but what will happen to the movements that have been sidelined in order to help get the Democrats elected? What will become of the environmental movement after January 20? Will it step up to oppose Obama's quest for nuclear power and clean coal? Will the antiwar movement work to force Obama to take a softer approach toward Iran? Will they stop the troop increase in Afghanistan?

These are but a few of the questions I'd like progressive supporters of Obama to answer. I've yet to hear exactly how they will pressure an Obama administration. In fact, I don't think they will. George W. Bush will be gone and that will be enough for most. Progressives faced a similar confrontation in 1992 when Bill Clinton took office, but without much of a fight we saw neoliberalism take hold in the form of NAFTA and we endured the Telecommunications Act, Welfare Reform, a forest plan written by the logging industry, the dismantling of Glass-Steagall, the Iraq Liberation Act, and much much more.

What makes the Democrats believe that they even deserve our support now? President Bush has indeed been bad, but his most egregious policies were upheld and supported by the majority of Democrats. They gave Bush the green light to whack Saddam while they controlled the Senate. They supported the PATRIOT Act (Obama voted for its reconfirmation), the War on Terror, Bush's increased Pentagon budget, a no-strings Wall Street bailout and two awful Supreme Court confirmations. You may also remember that two years ago we ushered Democrats back into office with the belief that they might actually fight Bush on Iraq. Instead we've had nothing but complicity, with Democrats time and again supporting increased war funds.

I hope I'm not alone in saying that we deserve more than lofty rhetoric about "action" and "hope." We deserve a program for real progressive change -- the kind Democrats and Barack Obama will not bring as long as we give them our unconditional support.

Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the brand new book Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published by AK Press in July 2008.

He can be reached at: brickburner@gmail.com

now i'm no mad man, .................

2008-11-01T15:14:00.003-08:00

Turn up the volume, get out your dancing shoes, and enjoy a cut from my current favorite album "Dear Science" by TV On The Radio:

Music Video:
Dancing Choose by (TV On The Radio)

Music Video Code by Video Code Zone

Hey Buddy Can You Spare a Dime?

2008-10-28T23:49:00.003-08:00

Financial End Times

by Bennett Gordon for Utne Reader

Are Americans living in a recession or a financial apocalypse? Is now a time for prudent financial choices or a time to pray? Sean Cole reports for Marketplace that some economists are embracing the gloomy financial indicators as a sign that Armageddon is upon us. Cole talked to an “end times economist” who said that the current recession is God “saying that this world's financial system is built upon an unrighteous foundation.”

The financial system has become a religious cult of its own, Peter Laarman writes for Religion Dispatches. The financial crisis was caused in part by an adherence to “economism,” a creed that Laarman describes as “the notion that every part of human life is governed by economic considerations and that everything that happens—or at least everything that matters—is reducible to human monads pursuing their rational self-interest.”

Questions about financial regulation in the current presidential race should be treated with the same importance as religious questions, since the two have become so closely related. Laarman writes, “we are now in actual danger of losing what remains of democracy itself in our unseemly desire to enshrine the money-changing cult at the very center of the temple.”

“Whether you're a believer or not, maybe now is a good time to ask ourselves what we worship,” Cole said for Marketplace. That simple sentiment was applauded by Amy Frykholm, writing for Theoblog. Even if he didn’t mean to, Frykholm writes that Cole echoed Matthew 6:2, which reads, “Where your treasure is there your heart will be also”

Image by David Paul Ohmer , licensed under Creative Commons .

Wait a sec.......I'm a Christian From Ohio......

2008-10-22T13:36:00.004-07:00

Body Politics: The Source Of McCain's Odd Body Language, And The Gift It Brings

by Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks

Posted October 17, 2008 | 09:34 AM (EST) on Huffington Post

Never mind that when John McCain smiles, it looks about as warm and inviting as a moonlit New England country graveyard.

Never mind that he exhibits more twitches, tics and jaw-clenches than the night shift at a meth lab.

Never mind that he's started having prison-camp flashbacks such as addressing the citizens of a rally as "My fellow prisoners."

A long campaign and economic uncertainty can stress out anyone, whether he's a 72-year-old presidential candidate or just some average retirement-age guy who's trying to keep nine houses and a dozen cars running in tough economic times.

However, when he came out with his recent macho swagger about fear, we felt it was time to intervene. Specifically, he gave a prescription for fear that is dangerous. It's a method of dealing with fear that will drive you nuts if it doesn't kill you first. If you missed the actual quote, he said, "I know what fear feels like...I know what hopelessness feels like. I felt those things once before. I WILL NEVER LET THEM IN AGAIN..."

Straight-Talk Expresso

We feel compassion for him and the circumstances that brought him to make the fateful choice to seal out his emotions. It's a serious problem for him health-wise, but when he seeks to inflict it on the rest of us, it's time to set him straight. Here's a shot of straight-talk expresso for John McCain: When you won't let yourself to feel your natural, organic feeling of fear, you get out of touch with reality. If you won't acknowledge the existence of fear, you can't tell the difference between what you're really scared about and what you think you're scared about. You don't have a clue about what's going on inside you. You don't know whether there's a real threat out there or just something your mind is making up. You think life is dangerous, but the reality is just the opposite: you're dangerous to life.

Being driven by fear forces McCain/Palin to run a campaign based on fear. Their goal is not to convince people that they have a better plan for the future, but to make people scared to vote for the other guy.

There are a lot of things people are scared about right now:
•They're scared about losing their homes.
•They're scared about losing their jobs.
•They're scared the Republicans are going to steal the election. In fact, we've heard several people say that they're praying for a landslide, because otherwise the Republicans will find some way to steal it. If you think that's slightly paranoid, you're probably not a Democrat.

McCain/Palin want us to forget about our real fears and focus on something unreal. McCain/Palin want us to be scared about what they want us to be scared about. They have an advantage, because the things they want us to be scared about are a lot more fun than the things we're really scared about:
•McCain/Palin want us to be scared that Obama is "the other,"
not like us, not a real American.
•They want us to be scared that Obama might secretly worship another god.
•They want us to be scared that Obama pals around with terrorists and gets his spiritual counsel from an America-hating minister.

It's more fun to be scared about those things because it gives you the opportunity to blame somebody else for the fear. When you point the finger at someone else, it relieves the pressure inside you. If we're scared about those things, maybe we'll forget about what we're really scared about. McCain/Palin are saying: it's a jungle out there, folks, and let's make sure we keep it that way.

As budding psychotherapists 35 years ago, we were taught the essentials of how to help our clients deal with fear. The key principle can be stated simply: what you resist, persists. If you hold fear at arm's length, if you seal it out of your awareness, you sentence yourself to living every moment in a prison of fear. The more you try to seal it out, the more it pervades your life. The stonewall barrier McCain has proudly built to keep out his fear makes him a prisoner inside his own arrogance. His stubborn unwillingness to let in the normal human emotion of fear makes him propelled by it. In the Pink Floyd phrase, he's "blown on the steel breeze."

This much we can tell you from working up-close with more than twenty thousand people: The only real solution to fear is to let yourself acknowledge it and feel it until it dissipates. Fear is natural. Your body spent hundreds of thousands of years perfecting it. It's there to tell you important things like these:

There's a potential threat--pay attention.
There's a problem I don't have a solution to--look for one quick!

When you're scared, look to see if there's a real threat. Figure out what the problem is and get creative about solving it. Get good at distinguishing between real threats and imaginary threats we make up in our minds. Don't use the McCain Prescription for fear, by shutting it out of your awareness. For the sake of his health and for the safety of the rest of us, he should take counsel from another war hero, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf: "Any man who doesn't cry scares me a little." That's a piece of useful wisdom, and it points to why John McCain scares a lot of people.

If we could counsel John McCain at this moment in history, when he has squandered much of the honor and good will Americans used to grant him, we'd embrace him, look him in the eye and say this:

"Go ahead and let yourself feel scared. It's normal, it's human and it helps you connect with the rest of us. When you feel scared, let yourself feel it. Breathe with it. Dance with it. Above all, don't tempt the universe by shaking a fist at fear and saying that you will not acknowledge its existence. Doing that puts you on a collision course with the forces of nature, like shaking your fist at thunder and saying you're never going to listen to it again. Instead, let your fear in. Speak about it to the ones you love. If you're out in public, speak about it to them, too. Ultimately, love is the best cure for fear. If you really want to have a great relationship with yourself and other people, love your fear just as it is, and watch the miracles that unfold as a result."

What happens when you let yourself feel your fear is that it opens up a direct connection to your creativity. The more you're willing to open up and embrace your fear, the more creativity flows through you. We would never have believed that remarkable fact until we experienced the truth of it ourselves and saw it work its magic on many other people.

An Integrity Problem

Being cut off from fear or any emotion puts you out of integrity with yourself. As one our mentors, Jack Downing, M.D., put it, "Integrity glitches cause body twitches." The source of John McCain's odd display of twitches, jaw-clenches and chilly grins is a fault-line gap of integrity at the center of himself, a place where he has cut himself off from fear and the rest of us. He wants to become a super hero, The Man Without Fear. That's not a bad idea for a cartoon, but in real life it would be a disaster. In real life, we need real heroes, people who are willing to acknowledge fear and look within it, to the gift it brings.

The gift fear brings is the opportunity to love it and thereby grow our capacity for love and creativity. Sometimes our fears get so great that love is the only thing that will put those fears to rest. We all need to become experts at dealing with fear right now. We need to let ourselves feel our fears in a spirit of loving acceptance, so that our willingness to embrace our fears opens the floodgates of creativity that we will need to solve the problems we all face.

There's a lot of fear in the air right now to deal with. To make matters worse, the McCain/Palin campaign is working overtime to increase the amount of fear in our lives. McCain/Palin's handlers know that the more scared they can make people, the more easily people can be manipulated into voting against their own interests and good judgment.

John McCain has been roundly criticized of late for sowing seeds of fear and hate. It's going to be hard to talk him out of that tactic, though, because it got George W. Bush elected twice. We don't know yet if McCain will change tactics again and try to convince us that the pit bulls he's unleashed are actually nice puppy dogs. We should be skeptical of this tactic, though, because as the old saying goes, you can take the lipstick off a pit bull, but it's still a hockey mom underneath, or something like that.

My Sympathies in This Presidential Election Process....

2008-10-12T00:13:00.004-07:00

This shirt is designed by Ben Heine and sold by Urban Kleding

Success in the Middle East.....Are The Candidates Living In The Twilight Zone Or What???

2008-10-03T14:30:00.002-07:00

The Age of the Warrior”: Robert Fisk on the US Elections, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Israel-Palestine

From Democracy Now October 2, 2008

Guest:

Robert Fisk, bestselling author and journalist. He has reported from the Middle East for more than three decades and covered eleven major wars. He is one of the world’s most celebrated foreign correspondents and has been named British Press Awards’ International Journalist of the Year seven times. He is currently the Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. His previous books include Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanonand The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. His latest is a collection of his essays from The Independent called The Age of the Warrior.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The US strategy in Afghanistan is back in the news, just ahead of the vice-presidential debate tonight. The British ambassador to Afghanistan has been quoted in a French newspaper as saying that the American military strategy in that country is “destined to fail.” Ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles’s critical comments about the NATO operation in Afghanistan were part of a leaked memo from a French diplomat. He also said, “The coalition presence—particularly the military presence—is part of the problem, not the solution.”

The British ambassador’s leaked statements were published just as the top US commander in Afghanistan called for three additional combat brigades—that is, over 10,000 soldiers—to be immediately deployed to Kabul. General David McKiernan told reporters in Washington, D.C. Wednesday that Americans were facing a “tough fight” in Afghanistan that “might get worse before it gets better.”

AMY GOODMAN: As the US-led wars in the Middle East show no sign of abating, we turn now to a man who has chronicled eleven major wars in this part of the world and shows no sign of abating, himself. Robert Fisk is Britain’s most celebrated foreign correspondent, has borne witness to countless tragedies in the Middle East for over three decades.

Robert Fisk has been named British Press Awards’ International Journalist of the Year seven times. He is currently the Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. His previous books include Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon and The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. His latest is a collection of his essays and articles from The Independent; it’s called The Age of the Warrior. Robert Fisk joins us here in New York in our firehouse studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

ROBERT FISK: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, you’re traveling through this country in the midst of a major crisis and a war abroad. Talk about your observations.

ROBERT FISK: Well, I suppose the first thing is how similar the two things are. I mean, first of all, the Europeans were constantly advising more banking regulation, in case they got infected by any economic crisis. The United States, this had to be a free market, deregulation totally. In other words, once more, the United States did not listen to its foreign partners and allies, on economic issues this time.

Number two is, rushed into a quick fix for a rescue bailout without any really serious planning, like crossing the Tigris River without a plan for post-war Iraq.

And three, it’s the little people who get hit: the little Iraqis, in the hundreds of thousands, who’ve died; and, of course, poor Americans, for the most part, who join the Marines or the Reservists because they want to have a university education, they end up in Iraq, and they get killed. The little people, once more, are the people who are getting hit. They’re very parallel things, in my view. I can see it all the time.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, here, in this country, as the number of US casualties has declined, so has the attention in the media or in the public to the situation in Iraq, and everyone has now bought into the thought that things are getting better.

ROBERT FISK: Ha ha ha, yes. Look, the degree of ethnic cleansing that actually took place—genocidal, in some ways—and the fact that the Americans have now built walls through every community in every major city in Iraq, which has divided between the communities, means that there isn’t, in fact, any free flow of movement. There isn’t a country operating anymore.

But now, I mean, if you stand back a little bit and look at it like this, first of all, we went to Afghanistan, we won the war. Then we rushed off to Iraq and won the war. Then we lost the war in Iraq, or maybe we won it again. And then we’re going back to Afghanistan, where we seem to have lost the war, to win it all over again. And in due course, perhaps we’ll have to go back to Iraq. I mean, in my reports, I’m calling this Iraqistan. And now, we’ve actually got soldiers on foot turning up in Pakistan. I mean, has nobody actually stood back and said, “What on earth are we doing out there?” I mean, I calculated for our Sunday magazine that we now have twenty-two times as many military personnel per head of population as the Crusaders had in the twelfth century. You know, what are we doing?

It was a baker in Baghdad who asked me this very obvious question. He said, “Why are you”—“you” meaning Western military—“Why are you in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, French air base at Dushanbe running close as support for the British in Helmand province in Afghanistan? Why are your people going into Pakistan? Why are you in Afghanistan and Iraq? Why are you in Turkey? Why are you in Jordan and Egypt and Algeria? US Special Forces have a base outside Tamanrasset in the southern Sahara. Why are you in Bahrain? Why are you in Oman? Why are you in Yemen? Why are you in Qatar? Biggest US air base.” I didn’t have a reply.

But I was struck when I was having lunch on the West Coast a few days ago, by a very educated lady sitting next to me, saying, “But the Muslims wanted to take over the world, and they had already taken over France.” I mean, how does this happen? I mean, she might have told me that Martians had landed in New Mexico, only thing you could do to counter that kind of argument. It looks like somehow we’re on a brainwashing trip. And we’ve all bought the narrative. You know, we even have Mrs. Palin talking about victory in Iraq. It doesn’t feel it if you go to Iraq. It doesn’t feel it if you live there.

AMY GOODMAN: She also has talked about Iraq as being God’s war.

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, well, we’ve had some generals who’ve talked about that, too—haven’t we?—and kept their uniform on in church when they said it. You know, more and more, I look back on the early statements by bin Laden, statements we never actually read. The narrative is always “Is this bin Laden?” when he appears. “Is he ill? When did he make the statement? And have the CIA confirmed it’s his voice?” What his voice actually says is never of any interest to us.

But if you remember, he went on and on about crusaders, and he actually made a very important statement before we invaded Iraq, in which he called upon Muslims in Iraq to collaborate with Baath Party officials against the crusaders, on the grounds that Salahadin had collaborated with the non-Muslim Persians against the crusaders in the twelfth century. We missed all this. And this was the detonation that set off the insurgency.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you, at the debate, the presidential debate last Friday, we had the situation where the so-called candidate of peace—

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —Barack Obama, is talking about, well, we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, as if this is a game here that’s being played and we made a mistake in the game. And so, now we must go back to Afghanistan and possibly even into Pakistan.

ROBERT FISK: Look, I think you have to realize—and the Arabs do not, and I’ve been trying on Al Jazeera Arabic service to say this—it’s not going to make any difference who is the next president of the United States, as far as Southwest Asia and the Muslim world is concerned. I was in Qatar, actually, in the Al Jazeera Arabic studios when Obama made his famous Middle East trip. You know, he gave forty-five minutes to the Palestinians, twenty-four hours to the Israelis. And the Arabic anchorman turned to me. He said, “So, Robert, do you think Obama will win the election?” I said, “He’ll win the election for the Israeli Knesset. I don’t know if he’s going to get the presidency of the United States.” You know, we’ve got here a one-track policy into the Middle East by the United States, and it’s not going to change.

AMY GOODMAN: But, Robert, is that true? On the one hand, you have, yes, they don’t sound that different when it comes to, for example, Afghanistan. They agree that’s the main site of the war, the main candidates. But I guess it’s the question of what could happen next and what approach McCain or Obama would take.

ROBERT FISK: Look, the Taliban now control half of Afghanistan, not just at night, but in the day—during the day, too. There’s no doubt that Petraeus has got it right when he talks about things are going to get worse.

AMY GOODMAN: Petraeus.

ROBERT FISK: Petraeus. And there’s no doubt, too, that the famous British ambassador, Mr. Cowper-Coles—by the way, he’s in my book, and he’s the guy who persuaded the British, when he was ambassador to Saudi Arabia, not to continue with the bribes inquiry by the British fraud squad into arms sold to Saudi Arabia. He’s the guy who actually advised the fraud squad people to drop it.

AMY GOODMAN: And this involved Bandar Bush. This involved the former Saudi ambassador to the United States.

ROBERT FISK: Absolutely, it’s the same guy. I should add—I should just add that more than twenty years ago, a young diplomat in the Egyptian embassy—in the British embassy in Cairo advised me to drop one of our stringers in the region and take on another stringer who was rather favorable to the foreign office. I didn’t do as I was told. But that man was also Cowper-Coles. What a strange career he has!

However, let’s go back to your Obama thing. Look, at the end of the day, we cannot win in Afghanistan. The Taliban are not crossing porous borders. They don’t even acknowledge the border, because, for them, it’s Pashtunistan. The border was drawn by a British civil servant called Sir Mortimer Durand in the Victorian age, and no one there, apart from us, accepts that it’s there—and, I suppose, the Pakistani army.

And the fact of the matter is that we have no policy there. The Karzai government is totally discredited. Karzai himself only rules his palace, with the help of American mercenaries to protect him. His government is full of drug barons, warlords and criminals. And that includes the people down in Kandahar, which is virtually a lost city. The troops cannot enter Kandahar anymore. It’s gone, effectively, especially at night. You can’t go there. No Westerner can walk through the streets of Kandahar. And you don’t see any women, except in Kabul, who are not wearing burqas. You remember the famous liberation of women, equality, gender equality was coming? It’s all turned out to be totally false. And we’re going to win there? We’re going to win there?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, and, of course, the issue of Pakistan, to me, is the most frightening one of all, because—

ROBERT FISK: Absolutely.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —you’re talking about a country that is really almost a failed state at this point.

ROBERT FISK: We’ve been told that—the narrative is that the mad mullahs with black turbans and the crackpot Ahmadinejad of Iran—and he is a crackpot—are going to destroy Israel, and then, of course, they’re going to destroy the Palestinians, and they’ll get destroyed with all these nuclear weapons.

I’ve been saying for more than two years there is one nation in Southwest Asia, which is packed with Taliban supporters and al-Qaeda supporters, and it’s got a bomb, and it’s totally corrupted, from the shoeshine boy to the president, via its intelligence services and army, and it’s called Pakistan. And only now are we beginning to see Pakistan pop up. I bet you if you run a computer check in the next few months, Iran will go right down to the bottom of the page, unless Israel chooses to bomb it, and up will go Pakistan.

And suddenly, how do we deal with this country? It will be a whole crazed mixture, which is already symbolized by the fact that, first of all, we put troops in on the ground in Pakistan and infringed its sovereignty. Then, when the Marriott Hotel blows up, the FBI offers its help in finding out the criminals. I mean, are we friends, or are we enemies of Pakistan? We don’t even know that.

And we start talking, using phrases like “victory.” We should be talking about phrases like "justice for the people of the Middle East.” If you have justice, you can build democracy on it, and then we can withdraw all these soldiers. We’re always going—promising people in the Middle East democracy and packages of human rights off our supermarket shelves, and we’re always arriving with our horses and our Humvees and our swords and our Apache helicopters and our M1A1 tanks. The only future in the Middle East is to withdraw all our military forces and have serious political, social, religious, cultural relations with these people. It’s not our land.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, just before we went on air, this came over AP: suicide bombers targeted Shia worshippers as they left morning prayers at two Baghdad mosques, killing nineteen people, injuring fifty others. In a separate attack, gunmen fatally shot six people as they traveled in a minibus at Wajihiyah, a town sixty miles north of Baghdad.

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, well, and we won, and the surge was successful, and everything’s going back to ordinary life, and people—I mean, that map which we saw, the two maps coming up—it’s preposterous. I mean, I get phone calls from Iraqis in Damascus, when I’m in Beirut, saying, you know, “Can you help us stay in Syria? Can we come to Lebanon? We cannot go back to Baghdad.” And they’re still getting calls saying, you know, “If you come back to your house, you’ll be murdered.” This is not a success; it’s a hell disaster for all the peoples of the Middle East. I mean, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, southern Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank—I mean, is no one waking up to say that there is no hope there at the moment? You know, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel out in the Middle East.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you, you mentioned the West Bank, obviously, the original center of this entire conflict. The—

ROBERT FISK: I’m not sure it is the center anymore, by the way, but, yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Right. But the comments recently by Ehud Olmert, saying that—

ROBERT FISK: Look, Ehud Olmert is a has-been. He’s gone.

AMY GOODMAN: But he is prime minister.

ROBERT FISK: Just.

AMY GOODMAN: And he said you should give back the West Bank.

ROBERT FISK: Yes, but he’s going, Amy. He’s going. This is the same as all your generals who go out to fight in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and when they’re asked to comment to the press, they say, “Everything is going fine; it may be a tough battle,” and they salute and click their heels to Rumsfeld, or they did. And the moment they retire, they demand Rumsfeld’s resignation and say it’s all gone wrong. I mean, if only just one of them, just one, would say it in a press conference when they still had their uniform on, we might see a few changes coming about, but they don’t. They keep their—they go heel.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, we’ll end it there, but we’re going to do part two. Robert Fisk, bestselling author, journalist, writes for The Independent, currently the Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. His latest collection of essays and articles is called The Age of the Warrior.

Oh yes you can. Just hold my hand. I think that would help

2008-09-29T12:12:00.000-07:00

Music Video:
Bowl Of Oranges by (Bright Eyes)

Music Video Code by Video Code Zone

I'm Tired of The Tired Old Party Lines....Give Me Some Truth.....

2008-09-25T12:43:00.004-07:00

As Bush Admin Pushes $700B for Wall Street, Ralph Nader Asks, “Why Is There Need for a Bailout?”

Democracy Now September 25, 2008

As the Bush administration intensifies its pressure for Congress to quickly approve a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, we get reaction from Independent presidential candidate and consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Nader calls Democratic claims of White House concessions “wish fulfillment” and says the bailout might not be needed in the first place.

Guest:
Ralph Nader, Independent candidate for President and longtime consumer advocate.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The Bush administration is intensifying its pressure on Congress to quickly approve a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, despite warnings from economists and some governmental officials that the bailout could worsen the financial crisis.

Last night, President Bush held a prime-time address to warn the nation’s entire economy is in danger if the bailout is not approved as soon as possible.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The government’s top economic experts warn that without immediate action by Congress, America could slip into a financial panic, and a distressing scenario would unfold. More banks could fail, including some in your community. The stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet. Foreclosures would rise dramatically. And if you own a business or a farm, you would find it harder and more expensive to get credit. More businesses would close their doors, and millions of Americans could lose their jobs. Even if you have good credit history, it would be more difficult for you to get the loans you need to buy a car or send your children to college. And ultimately, our country could experience a long and painful recession. Fellow citizens, we must not let this happen.

JUAN GONZALEZ: [Wednesday] night’s address was the first time in his presidency that Bush delivered a prime-time speech devoted exclusively to the economy. His dire scenario about the state of the economy stood in stark contrast to his comments at his last press conference two months ago.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I think the system basically is sound. I truly do. And I understand there’s a lot of nervousness, and—but the economy is growing, productivity is high, trade’s up. People are working. It’s not as good as we would like, but—and to the extent that we find weakness, we’ll move. That’s one thing about this administration: we’re not afraid to making tough decisions.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, the President is holding an emergency summit at the White House with both John McCain and Barack Obama, as well as top leaders for Congress. The Wall Street Journal reports Democratic leaders are hoping to nail down details of the bailout measure early today.

On Wednesday, McCain said he would suspend his campaign to deal with the financial crisis. He called on Obama to postpone their debate Friday night, saying he would only attend if Congress approves a bailout package before then. Obama said the debate in Oxford, Mississippi at Ole Miss should go on as planned.

We’re joined on the phone right now by a presidential candidate who was not invited to Friday’s debate, Independent candidate Ralph Nader. The longtime consumer advocate has been a vocal critic of the Wall Street bailout.

Ralph Nader, welcome to Democracy Now! First, let’s start off with John McCain announcing that he is going to suspend his campaign and wants the debate cancelled.

RALPH NADER: Well, I think Senator McCain is showboating. I mean, what’s going on in Washington and Congress now is the Bush administration is trying to pull the Constitution out by its roots and demand that Congress give it a blank check, without any criteria, without any accountability, for $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. It’s not dependent on whether John McCain returns to Washington other than to vote. I think he’s turning his back on over 50 million American voters who expect him to show up in Ole Miss with Barack Obama and who have made arrangements to do so. He talks a lot about honor and commitment. I think he ought to change his mind and get down to Ole Miss.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Ralph, the Democrats are claiming that they’ve been able to get some key concessions from the administration on its original plan. They say now they’re going to be—they’re going to cap CEO pay for those who participate in this bailout and that they’re going to get some kind of government participation or investment in these firms, so that if they make profits later on, that—or these securities make profits later on, that the government will be able to participate. But your sense—are these real substantive changes, or is this basically cosmetics on a plan that shouldn’t be in place in the first place?

RALPH NADER: Well, so far, it’s wish fulfillment. If you watch what Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Banking Committee, said yesterday, nothing has really been decided.

And also, it’s not clear at all why a bailout is needed. That’s part of the stampede in the pack and the panic that Bush and Paulson and Bernanke are pushing Congress toward. You know, it’s eerily reminiscent, when you listen to Bush yesterday, of how he stampeded the Congress and the country into the criminal war invasion of Iraq in 2003. I mean, look at all his statements: this could do this, this would do that, farms failing, small business, tada, tada. The first question we have to ask as citizens is, why is there a need for a bailout?

The only conceivable purpose of Treasury intervention, said Roger Lowenstein in the New Republic recently, quote, "is to buoy the market using taxpayer funds by paying higher-than-market prices. After all, if the government merely intended to match the market, what would be the point?” end-quote. In other words, if these mortgage-backed securities are distressed, well, they’re going to fetch a lower price. There’s huge amount of money on the sidelines in Wall Street, everybody admits that. So, as a hedge fund manager basically said, look, if the price comes down lower than what the government is trying to keep elevated, we’ll buy this paper. Warren Buffett put $5 billion into Goldman Sachs this week. There’s a lot of money to go around.
It’s quite interesting how the Bush regime is creating its own panic. When the government keeps saying Chicken Little, Chicken Little, the market is going to react in a very nervous manner. It’s a reversal of what the government usually does, which is to counsel stability and patience, etc.

So, the first question Congress should ask in detailed hearings, which aren’t occurring, is simply, why is there need for a bailout? Second is, if there is a need for a bailout, why $700 billion? And third, if there is a need for a bailout, what kind of bailout? Taxpayer equity? So the taxpayer can recover if these companies make a profit, they can recover surplus, perhaps the way they did on the taxpayer bailout in 1979 with Chrysler, where Jimmy Carter demanded that Chrysler issue stock warrants to the Treasury, and Chrysler turned around, and the Treasury sold the warrants for a $400 million profit.

I don’t think the Democrats show any nerve that they are going to do anything but cave here. And the statements by Nancy Pelosi are not reassuring, which is, “Well, it’s the Republicans’ bill, you know. Let them take responsibility for it.” That doesn’t work. She’s the Speaker of the House. The Democrats have got to say, “Slow down. We’re not going to be stampeded into this bill by Friday or Saturday. We’re going to have very, very thorough hearings.” Otherwise, it’s another collapse, at constitutional levels, of the Congress before King George IV.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader. We’ll come back to this discussion. We’ll also be joined by Arun Gupta, who is the editor of The Indypendent and put out a letter on the internet that has just set the internet on fire, calling for a major protest today on Wall Street. It has gained steam. Many groups have signed on. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest on the phone with us from Pittsburgh, where he’s campaigning, is Ralph Nader, Independent presidential candidate. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Ralph, you mention how the Democrats themselves are being stampeded at this point by the Bush administration. In my column in the Daily News yesterday, I raised how another Democratic leader and another Democratic Congress handled a situation, even a more dire situation, in 1933, on the two days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as president, with thousands of banks crashing at that point, and he immediately shut down all the banks on his second day in office, called Congress into an emergency session and, over the next hundred days, adopted incredible legislation, including the Glass-Steagall Act, that we’ve mentioned quite often, on federal deposit insurance, aid to homeowners, farm subsidies, created the Tennessee Valley Authority, all in the midst of a crisis, probably the most progressive amount of legislation in the nation’s history, in any period. That’s a quite different approach. And he specifically criticized the banks and Wall Street as being at the root of the crisis.

RALPH NADER: That’s right. In those days, they had a serious solvency problem for these banks, which they don’t have, by and large, today. And that was admitted by Bernanke yesterday. Basically, Bernanke is saying, “Well, we’re doing this because the banks are contracting their credit, and this is affecting the economy.” Well, you can deal with that problem in a far better way than an ill-defined $700 billion bailout with total authority to the Treasury Secretary, with no judicial review, with no criteria and no reforms.

In other words, the Democrats should say, if they’re going to concede this bailout, is to say, “Well, we want comprehensive regulation and disclosure of the financial industry to make sure this doesn’t happen again. We want criminal prosecution of the crooks on Wall Street and disgorgement of their ill-gotten gains. We want a securities derivative tax and higher margin requirements to make speculators use their money, more of their money than other people’s money, like worker pension funds, to keep down speculation, as well as to produce revenues, which might lighten the tax load on working families. And we want to give shareholders control over the corporations they own.”

And they’re not even talking about these kinds of reforms. And this is the best time to get these reforms, because this is called a must bill on Congress—in Congress, and if Bush wants his package, he’s going to have to sign them. So, there’s no reciprocity here. It’s the usual fairly good questions by the Democrats at the hearings, but because they don’t follow through, they don’t have adequate leadership, it becomes a kind of posturing. It’s just maddening to watch how vague Bernanke and Paulson are in answering one question after another. It’s just an evasion, where they keep saying, “We need to do it. We need to do it.” And their Chicken Little material is conducted in closed session with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and the Republican leadership. It’s always in closed session.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Ralph Nader, something that isn’t vague are the emerging rallies against Wall Street bailout that are being held today in over a hundred cities. In Washington, protesters are gathering outside the Treasury Department at 4:00 p.m. Here in New York, a protest is set for 4:00 p.m., as well, in Bowling Green Park near Wall Street.

The day of action has been partly inspired by an email sent out Monday by New York journalist Arun Gupta. In the email, Gupta described the bailout as the biggest robbery in world history. Arun Gupta is a reporter and editor at The Indypendent newspaper here in New York. He joins us in the firehouse.

You’ve just been written up in BusinessWeek. Talk about this letter. Talk about what you are putting out there.

ARUN GUPTA: Well, I do a good bit of economic writing, and I was trying to decipher the plan this weekend, and it became quickly apparent to me that this is a financial September 11th, that the Bush administration was trying to use the shock of this crisis, the self-induced crisis in this case, to ram through legislation that was highly ill-considered in terms of the actual economic merits, on the one hand, and then, on the other hand, it was this extreme power grab that would give these huge sweeping new powers to the Treasury Department.

So I wrote up this email. I sat on it overnight, because I was hesitant to send it out. I’m a journalist, not an organizer. But after talking with a few people, they felt I should send it out, so I sent it out to about 150 activists, organizers and media folks that I know in New York City. And it just exploded. You know, I don’t take any special credit for it. I was just tapping into this huge amount of anger and resentment that was out there.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, when you say “exploded,” what was the response?

ARUN GUPTA: Well, I talked to people who, within one hour of me sending it out and then them—I encouraged people, “Please forward widely.” They told me that within less than an hour, they had received it back from five or six different people. By the end of the day, apparently, a lot of big groups started jumping on it, including unions. By the next day, it was being endorsed and variations were being forwarded by True Majority, Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice. And so, it was just—it really showed the power of the internet in a particular moment.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about these protests that are taking place around the country.

ARUN GUPTA: Well, it started, as you know—the idea is like gather in Wall Street, and I thought maybe it would be a dozen people, and we’d be standing on the sidewalk. But now it looks like there will be hundreds, even possibly thousands. And then, True Majority picked up the call, along with United for Peace and Justice, one of the main antiwar groups, and they said, you know, “Let’s have these day of actions around the country.”

So, all over the country now, there are going to be protests in various financial centers. I’ve been getting emails from people, you know, from every single corner of the United States, asking, you know, “What’s going on? How do we plug in?” And so, we’re just trying to point them to these websites. It’s like, look, here’s a list of the protests, or you can plan your own event. And this is really coming from across the political spectrum.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And as you said in your email, this is leaderless, and no main organization is in charge or no individual is in charge. Everyone is just participating themselves.

ARUN GUPTA: That’s what’s great about it. You know, when people say, “Who’s organizing this?” I say, “No one and everyone.” This was just a call to self-organize. And, you know, it’s like I’m just going to show up there as just one more person who’s against this ridiculous bailout, this giveaway to the rich.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, who is Henry Paulson? I mean, we know he worked for Nixon, was the aide to John Ehrlichman, the ex-con, the man who went to jail; then went off to Goldman Sachs; he and Alan Greenspan still being considered the economic wise men, even though this all happened under their watch.

RALPH NADER: That’s when you know the system is decayed and corrupt, that the people who brought us this disaster—Robert Rubin, with Bill Clinton pushing through the financial deregulation monster in 1999, which we opposed, which opened the gates for this kind of wild speculation and this casino capitalism, is still an adviser. He’s an adviser to Barack Obama. He’s an adviser to members of Congress. Henry Paulson cashed out at Goldman Sachs in 2006 a half-a-billion dollars. And now he goes to Washington to bail out his buddies.

The public outrage out there is really enormous. The calls coming into C-SPAN yesterday were overwhelmingly against this bailout, this outrageous inequity, this double standard between the guys at the top and the people who are going to have to pay the bills under this bailout, the taxpayers and the consumers.

Mr. Gupta is right in the sense that this is leaderless, but it’s got to be more than just a rally of protests. It’s got to demand something. It’s got to be focused. Otherwise, it will fritter away. We’ve had rallies on Wall Street. It’s a great place to have rallies. You can really congregate a lot of people, and the Wall Street guys look out the window, and they can see the people are coming.
But the first step is to slow down Congress. Once this bill is passed—and it’s a blanket bill. It’s only four pages, Amy, four pages of a $700 billion blank check, transferring congressional authority wholesale, and I think unconstitutionally, to the White House, King George IV at work again. Once it passes, then the chance for comprehensive regulation and all the other changes to make Wall Street accountable, instead of allow Wall Street to create a corporate state or what Franklin Delano Roosevelt called fascism, which is government controlled by private economic power, represented by people like Henry Paulson—once this happens, it’s not going to be reversible.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Ralph, what about the homeowners who were at the center of this crisis in foreclosure? A million Americans have lost their homes in recent years. There seems to be still no clear sense that any kind of bill will actually provide clear relief for people facing the loss of their homes.

RALPH NADER: You’re absolutely right, because Barney Frank was asked about that last night after the hearing, and he said, “This is a money proposition, if you’re going to deal with the homeowners. It’s not my Banking Committee; it’s Charlie Rangel’s House Ways and Means.” In other words, there’s nothing in this bill for homeowners. There’s everything in this bill to bail out the bankers who actually created this problem with these out-of-control speculative financial instruments.

AMY GOODMAN: Cynthia McKinney has offered to debate Barack Obama if he’s the only one who shows up at Ole Miss tomorrow. Are you also going to make that offer? And, Ralph Nader, would you consider, given the stakes of this election, encouraging your supporters in swing states to vote for Barack Obama?

RALPH NADER: Well, first, I’d be very happy to sit in the seat emptied by John McCain. But I think the stage can handle the only—only six presidential candidates. There aren’t enough electoral colleges to theoretically win the election. And second, I’m not at all impressed by Barack Obama’s positions on this so-called bailout. It’s just rhetoric. His Senate record has not reflected that at all.

As we campaign around the country—we’re now in forty-five states plus the District of Columbia, and we’re running five, six, seven percent in the polls, which is equivalent to nine, ten million eligible voters—we are going to try to rouse the public in a specific way: laser-beam focus on their senators and representatives. When these senators and representatives, if they allow this bailout deal in this general, vague manner to pass, when they go back home, they’re going to hit hornets’ nest. This is a situation where it doesn’t matter whether the people back home are Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, Nader-Gonzalez supporters. There’s such a deep sense of betrayal, of panic, of stampede, of surrender, of cowardliness in Congress, that it’s going to affect the election and the turnout.

I’d like Barack Obama, actually, to support the Nader-Gonzalez ticket.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Arun Gupta, people are bringing old junk to the protest today—records, old clothes, things they don’t want— to symbolize…?

ARUN GUPTA: That’s one of the themes, cash for trash, which is how this bailout bill is being characterized—in other words, that the government is giving the taxpayers’ good money for these worthless securities. So, many protesters are saying, well, let’s bring our own trash to Wall Street. We’ll create a junk pile and then ask the government to bail us out.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. Arun Gupta is the reporter and editor of The Indypendent newspaper here in New York, organizer of today’s protest on Wall Street. There will be more than a hundred other protests around the country. We’ll report on them tomorrow. Ralph Nader, Independent candidate for president, speaking to us on the campaign trail in Pittsburgh.

He Has No Heart But Is Embalmed And Robotized....

2008-09-24T20:20:00.003-07:00

Kissinger Instructs Palin On Finer Points Of Clandestine Carpet Bombing
September 24, 2008 | Issue 44•39 of The Onion

WASHINGTON—In preparation for her debate with Sen. Joe Biden next week, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin met with seasoned statesman and Nobel Peace Prize–winner Henry Kissinger yesterday to take advantage of his extensive foreign policy knowledge and expertise in carpet-bombing innocent civilians in nations with which the U.S. is not officially at war.

"Dr. Kissinger has given Gov. Palin thorough instructions for launching deadly covert military operations in tiny Southeast Asian countries in blatant disregard for human life and international law," said McCain campaign spokesperson Tracey Schmitt of Palin's brief consultation with the Nixon and Ford administrations' former secretary of state and national security adviser. "In addition, the governor now feels completely confident that, if she is ever required to step in for Sen. McCain to mastermind the toppling of a democratically elected but left-leaning South American government without congressional consent, she will be fully prepared."

Sources close to the campaign said that Palin's meeting with Vice President Cheney about how to claim executive supremacy for the purpose of bypassing constitutional limits on torture has been canceled since advisers feel she already has enough personal experience with the subject.

A Government of the People and for the Rich....

2008-09-19T17:23:00.005-07:00

Fixing Wall Street Won't Fix Our Economy
By Sally Kohn, Movement Vision Lab
Posted on September 19, 2008, by AlterNet

Sure, the CEOs and hedge fund managers were greedy. There's no question that wealth and the pursuit thereof led to the sub-prime fiasco and the decline of Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch and more. But what's really at play here is persistent poverty and Wall Street seeking to make a dime off the poor, consequences be damned, while Washington looks the other way.

The sub-prime crisis is the result of good people getting bad loans. Loans that triple or quadruple in interest rates, riddled with small print, are unbearable by most homeowners. But they are particularly unsustainable for low-income families working two or three jobs to make ends meet. Still, lenders scammed hardworking families with the promise of owning homes they really couldn't afford. And then greedy Wall Street managers, looking for a new way to squeeze a buck from an already bursting-at-the-seams economy, bundled up these bad loans into worse securities, sold them off, and tried to gain a profit as our national economy lost its shirt.

We could have averted the current financial crisis by creating affordable housing and good jobs, strengthening public education and providing health care and child care for all families, to help hardworking Americans thrive in the middle class instead of being pushed into poverty. We could have averted this crisis if we really cared about all families owning their own homes and created nationwide programs including affordable loans. (Even subsidized loans in the first place would have cost taxpayers less than what we're now spending bailing out Wall Street.) We could have averted this crisis if we put the needs of the majority of American families ahead of the needs of a small minority of greedy investors.

Now, 8,000 American families a day face foreclosure. But instead of prioritizing poor and even middle class families who are increasingly struggling, our government is spending billions and billions to bail out the Wall Street firms that created this crisis. Instead, we should be spending our taxpayer money to help the families who were taken advantage of in the "anything goes" unregulated financial system that years of misguided never-really-did-trickle-down economic policy created. These families need the government to help re-adjust their mortgages and cover bridge payments to avoid foreclosure.

The fundamentals of our economy are not sound. Real wages for the majority of American families have been declining while CEO salaries are at an all-time high. Health care costs and college tuition are crippling more and more families. The middle class is rapidly disappearing, and more and more of us find ourselves struggling while the gap between the rich and poor grows.

Instead of allowing Wall Street to profit off of poverty, we should fix our economy once and for all, to work better for all of us. We need universal health care, including a government-funded insurance option, to help families get out from under mounting health care debt. We need policies that reign in scam lending, from housing to the credit card industry. We need a nationwide living wage and a massive public jobs program, to address underemployment in our unstable economy while helping build essential shared infrastructure like public transportation and schools. We need new trade and immigration policies that work for working people on both sides to the border. And we need new corporate rules of the game that make big business accountable to communities and workers, not just greedy investors.

Wall Street and conservative economists have insisted that, in our laissez faire system, everyone is on their own. The poor were left on their own, to fend for themselves against twisted economic structures backed by the biggest institutions on Wall Street. Washington never left Wall Street on its own, and as Wall Street's scam deflates, Washington is coming to the rescue. But shoring up Wall Street won't make our economy work. We need to ensure that a greedy few can't exploit those who are struggling. Without poor people, this crisis would have never happened. If we prioritize ending poverty, and preventing more and more Americans from slipping into poverty, we can be sure it won't happen again.

Sally Kohn is the director of the Movement Vision Project of the Center for Community Change, which is interviewing hundreds of activists across the country to determine the progressive vision for the future of the United States.

© 2008 Movement Vision Lab All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/99383/