US companies have avoided paying their fair portion of taxes by keeping more of their profits in overseas tax shelters, a new report reveals.

According to a new study by Audit Analytics, large US companies have boosted their overseas earnings by 15 percent last year to a record USD 1.9 trillion, while keeping their profits abroad to avoid paying taxes under the tax deferral law, Reuters said Thursday.

This is while offshore earnings have climbed by 70 percent over the past five years, the report added.

Meanwhile, corporations have been lobbying Congress to allow them to bring foreign profits home with little or no tax expenses.

Under the tax law, US-based companies are allowed to withhold paying taxes on foreign earnings as long as the earnings do not enter the United States.

Opponents of the law have argued against tax breaks for corporations who park profits offshore, though this proposal has fell short in Washington.

“It would probably be nice to have this money in our country being used in our economy, but at the moment we see it growing elsewhere,” said Don Whalen, with the research department at Audit Analytics.

Foreign tax havens cost the USD 150 billion per year in the form of lost tax revenues, according to the US Public Interest Research Group.

The average American taxpayer would have to pay an extra USD 1,026 in taxes to make up for the lost revenue of offshore tax havens by corporations and wealthy individuals.

GMA/SS

In a bullying gesture further hinting a direct US interference in Syrian domestic affairs, top American diplomat has demanded that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must step down as part of any political solution to the nation’s foreign-sponsored crisis.

US Secretary of State John Kerry insisted in Rome on Thursday that President Assad cannot be part of a transitional government in the continuing efforts by a US-led coalition of governments to find a political solution to the Syrian unrest, AFP reported.

Speaking just before a meeting with his Jordanian counterpart Nasser Judeh, Kerry claimed that all sides were working to “effect a transition government by mutual consent of both sides, which clearly means that in our judgment President Assad will not be a component of that transitional government.”

Kerry’s intrusive remarks came just days after his discussions with top Russian officials in Moscow as part of an intensifying campaign by Washington to stage a potential overthrow of the Syrian government, a major regional foe of its Israeli ally.

This is while Russian officials have reportedly reiterated their opposition to the growing effort by the US and its European and regional allies to further intervene in Syria’s internal affairs with the stated objective of removing President Assad from power.

Kerry also claimed that he had spoken with most of the foreign ministers from American allies involved in the anti-Damascus bid and that there is a “very positive response and a very strong desire to move to this conference and to try to find, at least exhaust the possibilities of finding, a political way forward.”

The development comes just days after Washington’s prime ally in the region, the Tel Aviv regime, attacked Syria twice in an act of aggression condemned by the UN and numerous other countries.

The Israeli attack was widely viewed as a move on behalf of foreign-backed insurgents in Syria to weaken the government and potentially pave the way for advancements by the rebels that include al-Qaeda-linked terrorist elements.

Kerry further announced that US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford had also met with Syrian opposition figures in Istanbul on Wednesday to “discuss the way forward,” the report added.

He also officially unveiled USD100 million (76 million euros) in additional US aid for “Syrian refugees,” almost half of which will go to help Jordan, which is struggling to cope with a

This article originally appeared on : Press TV

The US plans to provide an additional 100 million dollars in aid to “Syrian refugees” that have fled the nation to camps in neighboring Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon following a foreign-backed insurgency bid in the country.

US Secretary of State John Kerry plans to announce the new aid during a visit to Italy’s capital of Rome on Thursday to “help support 1.4 million civilians trapped by violence within Syria’s borders” in addition to those in the refugee camps, The Los Angeles Times reports on Thursday.

The additional aid, the report underlines, is part of an effort by the Obama administration to “deflect criticism that it is not doing enough to deal with a conflict that… threatens to engulf the broader Mideast region.”

Citing unnamed US officials that spoke on condition of anonymity, the report further claims that the aid “is not linked” to Washington discussions over whether it should send weapons and ammunition to the foreign-backed militant gangs in Syria in a major attempt to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power.

While some pro-Israeli senior US lawmakers are pushing for a direct US military intervention in Syria to “hasten” the ouster of President Assad, Obama administration officials have expressed fears that arming the insurgents may end up boosting the power of al-Qaeda-linked terrorists known to be among the militants fighting against the Damascus government.

According to the report, the additional American funds “will be administered by United Nations agencies” involved in running the refugee camps and “will include some cash payments to ‘civilians’ in Syria.”

It did not, however, elaborate on what kind of ‘civilians’ inside Syria would receive the cash payments and how.

The Syria crisis began in March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of soldiers and security personnel, have been killed in the violence.

The Syrian government says the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the militants are foreign nationals.

MFB/MFB

The US government plays a major role in wage disparity in the country by contracting out federal jobs to private contractors that pay their handsomely for hiring workers at low wages and few benefits, Press TV reports from Washington.

In a new report released by public policy organization Demos, there are nearly 2 million low-paying government funded jobs across the United States through federal contracts granted to private companies.

“We know that inequality is a tremendous problem in America. We know that low-wage work is a tremendous problem in America. We have working people that can’t afford to raise their families; can’t afford to put a roof over their head… even though they go to work every day. And we’re finding here that in some way we, the American people, are their employers; they’re working for us,” said Amy Traub, senior policy analyst at Demos.

According to the organization, hundreds of billions of dollars in federal contracts, grants, loans, concession agreements and property leases go to private companies that pay low wages, provide few benefits, and offer their employees “little opportunity to work their way into the middle class.”

This is while many of these US government contractors are rewarding their executives with inflated compensation, it notes.

Demos further cites a 2009 study by the Economic Policy Institute, which concludes that “employees of federal contractors are far more likely to earn poverty-level wages than workers employed directly by the federal government.”

In response to such findings, a new organization dedicated to low wage workers’ rights called Good Jobs Nation has been launched in Washington, DC, which is reportedly most affected by the trend since it is home to many federal agencies.

Many low wage workers hope that Good Jobs Nation will be a first step into earning them living wages and better quality jobs.

However, low wages do not appear to be the only problem. Government contracting jobs can reach salaries in hundreds of thousands of dollars, prompting concerns that the federal government effectively contributes to the persisting wealth inequality in the United States.

A Congressional hearing is due to be held in upcoming weeks in a bid to address the problem low wage jobs that are funded by American tax payers.

MFB/MFB

By John Chan
9 May 2013

In a marked escalation of Washington’s propaganda against China, the US Defence Department has the first time named the Chinese government and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as being responsible for major cyber attacks on Western corporations and the US government.

The 2013 annual Pentagon report on the Chinese military depicts China as an aggressor threatening global cyber security and regional stability in the Asia-Pacific. The purpose is to justify the ongoing American buildup of naval, air, space and cyberspace warfare capacities against China–all part of the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia.

The report declared: “The US government continued to be targeted for (cyber) instructions, some of which appear to be attributable directly to the Chinese government and military.” The paper claimed that China was using the information it gathered for the purposes of “building a picture of US defence networks, logistics, and related military capabilities that could be exploited during a crisis.”

The Pentagon further alleged that the Chinese government was engaged in massive espionage operations to obtain advanced US technology in order to support China’s military modernisation.

These accusations provoked angry reactions from Beijing. Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chungying said the Pentagon report “made irresponsible comments about China’s normal and justified defence buildup and hyped up the so-called China military threat.” She described the accusations of Chinese hacking activity as “groundless criticism and hype” that would “harm bilateral efforts at cooperation and dialogue.”

A People’s Daily commentary yesterday by Zhong Sheng–a pen name used by the Beijing leadership–said the real “hacking empire” was the United States, which was engaged in “espionage against not only against enemies but allies.” It said the US had a “cyber army” of 50,000 personnel, with 2,000 types of “cyber weapons.” Moreover, in 2011 Russia and China had proposed an “International Code of Conduct for Information Security” to the UN to prevent a “cyber arms race and war,” but the US alone had consistently opposed and blocked it.

A Global Times editorial yesterday advocated that China should respond in kind to the Pentagon accusations. “For instance, if the United States announced the formation of cyber war units, with stopping Chinese cyber attacks as the main justification, then China should pick a time to announce her own cyber war forces. The Americans should be let known that, it is they who had driven China to build a cyber army.”

The issue emerged three months

This article originally appeared on : World Socialist Web Site

By Bryan Dyne
9 May 2013

One-quarter of the bus drivers for the suburban Detroit area Walled Lake Consolidated School District (WLCSD) in Michigan called in sick Wednesday morning to protest the planned turnover of the school district’s bus transportation services to a private contractor, Dean Transportation.

As 11,000 of the roughly 15,600 students that attend WLCSD rely on school buses for transportation, the district, which serves Walled Lake and eight other surrounding cities and townships, was forced to close for the day. All-day child care for those in before- and after-school child care programs was offered by the district, and advance placement testing was relocated.

According to a union representative, the decision of the drivers to call in sick was made independently. The union made no further comment on the sickout.

In an attempt to vilify the bus drivers, WLCSD superintendent Kenneth Gutman stated, “Our kids will not be used as pawns.” This is similar to what was done during the New York City school bus strike, when billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg accused striking school bus drivers of attacking the children, when in fact it was his administration carrying out massive attacks on public education in the city.

The sickout was in response to the Walled Lake School Board of Education unanimously voting in favor of opening a contract with Dean Transportation. Gutman says that privatizing the school buses will save the district more than $1.4 million annually over the next three years, what he says is a necessary step to reduce the school district’s $10 million budget deficit. The district recently settled a contract with its 900 teachers, cutting their budget by $2 million, another part of this process.

Bids to privatize transportation were requested in February and reviewed over a 30-day period. Then, on April 22, WLCSD gave the transportation workers 10 days to come up with almost $1.5 million in concessions, or face privatization.

The privatization would force immediate layoffs for the more than 100 bus drivers and paraprofessionals that ride with children, who all work only part-time and currently only make an average of $18,000 a year. While the district has indicated that Dean will rehire 75 percent of the current drivers, it is not guaranteed. Moreover, while the district has told drivers that the pay, benefits and seniority of rehires will be protected, this is an unsubstantiated promise.

One requirement for being rehired is that the current WLCSD employees be

This article originally appeared on : World Socialist Web Site

By Naomi Spencer
9 May 2013

A new report on motherhood paints a devastating portrait of social conditions for poor women and their babies around the world. In both developing and industrialized countries, the first month of birth is the most dangerous of an infant’s life.

“State of the World’s Mothers,” a report from the humanitarian organization Save the Children, released May 7, finds more than three million babies die within the first month of their birth. A staggering one million infants die on the day they are born.

The US has by far the highest first-day death rate in the industrialized world. The report states, “An estimated 11,300 newborn babies die each year in the United States on the day they are born. This is 50 percent more first-day deaths than all other industrialized countries combined.” The 33 other industrialized countries for which data was collected recorded a combined total of 7,500 first-day deaths each year.

The report, done in conjunction with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, is the first global analysis of newborn day-of-death data. Its findings are an indictment of social inequality created by the capitalist system worldwide. Because the report analyzes 2011 statistics, it is likely that the ensuing year and a half have seen a worsening of these indices.

Within wealthy countries, a widening section of the working class are subject to poor living standards and extreme disparities in health care. Millions of Americans as a result fare little better–and in some aspects worse–than their counterparts in some of the poorest countries in the world.

Some US counties, clustered in the deep south, Indian reservations, and in Appalachia, as well as distressed urban centers such as Detroit and Cleveland, have mortality rates equivalent to those in “developing” countries, where 98 percent of all first-day deaths occur.

India recorded the largest number of first-day deaths: more than 300,000 per year. Nearly 90,000 Nigerian babies die the day they are born. Somalia registered the highest first-day death rate at 18 per 1,000 live births.

Save the Children estimated that an investment in four simple medical products costing between 13 cents and $6 each could save one million newborns every year. These products, including resuscitation devices and antiseptics, have been on the market for decades and would cost next to nothing to provide worldwide. That such investments have not been made is an exposure of the indifference of governments and global

This article originally appeared on : World Socialist Web Site

9 May 2013

On Tuesday, Wall Street celebrated a new milestone. The Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed through the 15,000 plateau, setting yet another record in a dizzying climb that has seen the benchmark index rise by almost 15 percent since the beginning of the year.

It took just two months after recovering all of its losses from the financial crash of September 2008 for the Dow to breach the 15,000 barrier. It rose 1,000 points from the 14,000 level in just 66 days.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index also hit a new record Tuesday, having gained 199 points since January. The Nasdaq Composite index closed at its highest point since November of 2000. The manic rise in US stocks is part of a global phenomenon. The FTSE All-World equity index on Tuesday rose to its highest level since June 2008.

The current explosion of stock prices expresses two essential tendencies. First, the disconnect between the process of wealth accumulation by the corporate-financial elite and the creation of real value through the production of goods has reached unprecedented heights. A financial aristocracy is concentrating ever more obscene levels of personal wealth in its hands entirely on the basis of financial speculation and manipulation, while the real economy continues to stagnate and decline.

The stock and bond markets are themselves mechanisms for economic parasitism and the further transfer of social wealth from the bottom to the top.

Second, the fundamental drive of capitalism, as Marx explained 146 years ago, to pile up wealth at one pole of society and poverty, misery and degradation at the other, is operating almost without restraint. The current stock bonanza reflects an explosive intensification of class tensions.

In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Dow has gained over 8,500 points, surging nearly 130 percent since it bottomed at 6,547 on March 9, 2009. That period of three years and two months has been an unmitigated disaster for the bulk of humanity, including the broad mass of working people in the United States.

The social disaster has worsened this year even as stock markets in the US and around the world continued their manic rise. Economic growth and job creation in the US have slowed from their already anemic pace, condemning millions of workers and youth to permanent unemployment or sweatshop jobs at poverty-level wages.

Unemployment in Europe, already at postwar record highs,

This article originally appeared on : World Socialist Web Site

By Andre Damon
9 May 2013

The Obama administration is close to announcing its support for a law that would force Google, Facebook and other Internet communications companies to build back doors for government wiretaps, according to an article in the New York Times Wednesday.

Such a measure would allow intelligence agencies, particularly the FBI, to monitor a vast array of communications, including Facebook messages, chats, and email using services such as Gmail.

The move comes as the National Security Agency’s sprawling new data center in Utah prepares to come online in September of this year. The facility is rumored to store data on the scale of trillions of terabytes, meaning that it can easily house the contents of every personal computer in the world.

Under the terms of the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, known as CALEA, hardware used to facilitate Internet and voice communications–the networks through which data is transmitted–must have the technical means to allow the government to conduct wiretaps.

The spying capabilities created in the context of this earlier law made possible the massive illegal domestic spying programs conducted under the Bush administration, and tens of thousands of ongoing secret court-approved wiretaps conducted under Obama. Under Bush, reports emerged that the government was essentially given full access to transmission systems by many Internet Service Providers (ISPs), such as AT&T.

US intelligence agencies were satisfied with these capabilities up until around 2010, when, in response to a series of security breaches, services such as Gmail and Facebook enabled encryption by default.

As a result of this move, communications using these services became inaccessible to conventional wiretapping, which relied on intercepting the (now encrypted) data traveling between users and routed by ISPs.

To offset the effects of encryption, the FBI has sought to force companies to create back doors for surveillance, with varying degrees of success. Following its purchase by Microsoft, Skype, the online chat and voice service, last year voluntarily reengineered its architecture to allow the US and other governments to monitor chat communications.

The FBI claims that, under current laws, Internet communications companies can effectively refuse to comply with a court-ordered wiretap by claiming that there is no practical way for them to allow the government to spy on their users’ communications.

The proposed law would force social networks and other communications companies to provide government access or face fines that, according to the Washington Post, would multiply exponentially and threaten companies

This article originally appeared on : World Socialist Web Site

By John Roberts
9 May 2013

The opposition People’s Alliance (PR) in Malaysia launched a campaign yesterday to challenge the result of Sunday’s election, denouncing it as fraudulent. Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim vowed on Tuesday to lead a “fierce movement to clean this country from election malpractices and fraud.”

Between 50,000 and 80,000 people, many dressed in black, defied police threats of arrest to attend the first opposition rally last night at the Kelana Jaya stadium, just outside the capital Kuala Lumpur. Anwar told supporters: “This is the beginning of a battle between the people and an illegitimate, corrupt and arrogant government.”

Police banned the rally, saying the PR had not applied for a permit. The opposition insisted that permission was not required for a rally at a “designated place of assembly.” In the event, the government, which has a long history of violent crackdowns on protests, backed away from an immediate confrontation.

There is widespread anger among opposition supporters over the election result. The ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition secured only 47 percent of the overall vote, yet won 133 seats–57 percent of seats in the 222-seat national parliament. The opposition gained just over 50 percent of the vote, but only 89 seats.

The election outcome is a product of a systematic gerrymander in favour of the rural ethnic Malay base of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the main BN partner. Over half the seats won by BN came from only three of the country’s 13 states, the largely rural Sabah and Sarawak in Borneo, and Johor near Singapore.

Opposition support was strong in urban areas, particularly among sections of the middle class. Ethnic Chinese and Indians, who comprise about 40 percent of the population, also deserted the government in droves. UMNO-led governments have systematically discriminated against the country’s minorities in favour of ethnic Malays, including in government jobs, education and business.

The opposition has alleged that the government was involved in widespread vote buying, ballot stuffing and the transporting of voters to key marginal electorates. After more than half a century in power, UMNO also has a stranglehold over the main media and the state apparatus.

Prime Minister Najib Razak has flatly denied any electoral malpractice and disputed the findings of two Malaysian think tanks that the election was “only partially free and not fair.” The think tanks’ timid report was co-funded by the Election Commission, the British and Canadian High Commissions in

This article originally appeared on : World Socialist Web Site

The US Air Force has stripped 17 officers of their authority for the control and launch of nuclear missiles after a string of unpublicized failings, a military official says.

The decision to suspend the officers was taken in April, after a March inspection of the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota that resulted in a “D” grade for the team, The Associated Press Reported on Wednesday.

The team was tested on its mastery of the Minuteman III missile launch operations system.

The Air Force had publicly described the inspection as a “success.”

The 17 officers were removed from duty of 24-hour shifts of watching over nuclear missiles that can strike targets across the globe.

“We are, in fact, in a crisis right now,” the group’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jay Folds, wrote in an internal email that was obtained by the Associated Press and confirmed by the Air Force.

The 17 officers represent almost 5 percent of the 91st Missile Wing’s missile launch staff and will now have to undergo 60 to 90 days of intensive refresher training on how to do their jobs.

The base has come under scrutiny for other incidents in recent years that raised questions about its security and oversight.

In August 2007, six cruise missiles loaded with W80-1 nuclear warheads were flown from Minot to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana before authorities discovered that the warheads hadn’t been removed for safety, as required.

Then Defense Secretary Robert Gates sacked the Air Force’s top military officer and civilian boss for the incident.

In a review of the incident in February 2008, the Defense Advisory Board blamed “process and systemic problems” that had “developed over more than a decade and have the potential for much more serious consequences.”

In July 2008, just five months after the blistering report was issued, three Air Force officers fell asleep at the controls of a component that contained old launch codes for nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The Minot base houses 150 nuclear-tipped Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles, a third of the US force of ground-based intercontinental missiles.

MN/AS

The US Department of Defense has relieved 17 Air Force officers of their responsibilities for the control and launch of intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles, a military official says.

GMA/SS

US border agents have been found shooting firearms across the Mexican border, killing at least six Mexicans on their native land, a report reveals.

Over the past five years, US agents have shot their guns across the border at least 10 times while killing six natives on Mexican land, a report published this month by the Washington Monthly has found.

“The picture that emerges from this investigation is of an agency operating with thousands of poorly trained rookies and failing to provide the kind of transparency, accountability, and clear rules of engagement that Americans routinely expect of law enforcement agencies,” said investigative reporter John Carlos Frey.

The comment came as Washington debates aspects of the immigration reform, including steps to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, expands visas for highly skilled immigrants and creates measures to strengthen border security.

Rights groups and activists, however, expressed concerns that the reform plan will bring new pressures on illegal immigrants.

“If we increase the Border Patrol force by thousands more, as you say, increase militarization at the border, I think we’re going to have more incidents here. We’re talking about dealing with immigration or immigrants in a militaristic way, as opposed to in a human way. And what we’re seeing now is the result of using guns instead of diplomacy,” said Frey.

Public support for immigration reform has been steadily mounting, with protest rallies routinely held up in major cities across the United States.

On any given day, there are 33,000 people detained by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who spend an average of 26.5 days behind bars. In 2011, ICE deported nearly 400,000 people, with an annual cost of USD 1.7 billion to hold immigrants.

GMA/KA

Police say a three-year-old boy has shot and killed himself after finding a gun in his uncle’s backpack in the US city of Tampa Bay.

Jadarrius Speights died on Tuesday after accidentally shooting himself with a 9mm gun in an apartment complex in the US state of Florida, local authorities said.

Police arrested 29-year-old Jeffrey Walker and charged him with culpable negligence, though only the toddler’s parents were present in the bedroom at the time of the shooting.

The incident was the fourth fatal shooting involving kids in the United States in the past month.

On April 30, a 5-year-old boy shot dead 2-year-old Caroline Sparks with a gun marketed as “My First Rifle” in the US state of Kentucky.

Authorities said on April 9 that six-year-old Brandon Holt died after being shot in the head by his four-year-old playmate in the US state of New Jersey.

On April 8, a four-year-old boy in the state of Tennessee shot and killed the wife of a sheriff’s deputy, using one of the loaded guns that he was showing off to a friend at his home.

The United States has for many years been engaged in shooting incidents, many of them in schools and universities. The country has been debating gun-control laws following a series of tragic shootings in the past months.

On December 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot twenty children and six adult staff members in a mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Before driving to the school, Lanza had shot and killed his mother at their Newtown home.

GMA/KA

Last August, Barack Obama told reporters at the White House:

‘We have been very clear to the Assad regime… that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilised.

‘That would change my calculus; that would change my equation.’

This was a clear threat to repeat the 2011 Nato assault which resulted in the overthrow and murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

So what is the evidence that Assad recently chose to do the one thing most likely to trigger a Western attack and similar fate?

On April 25, the White House claimed that US intelligence assessed ‘with varying degrees of confidence’ that ‘the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin’.

Having offered this caveated assertion, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel added:

‘We cannot confirm the origin of these weapons… but we do believe that any use of chemical weapons in Syria would very likely have originated with the Assad regime.’

He concluded:

‘As I’ve said, this is serious business — we need all the facts.’

A sceptical Alex Thomson, chief correspondent at Channel 4 News, commented:

‘WMD, the Middle East, and here we go again… Already a British prime minister is talking about a “war crime” whilst offering the British people no detailed evidence.’

Evidence included video footage said to show victims of chemical weapons foaming at the mouth.

Thomson offered a link to a detailed report of the 1995 sarin attack in Tokyo, noting: ‘am advised there’s no mention of any prominent bright, white foam at mouths’.

Thomson also asked, reasonably: ‘Why doesn’t any medic in the film wipe away the white foam on patients’ mouths — the basic paramedic fundamental to preserve an airway?’

On GlobalPost, Tracey Shelton and Peter Gelling questioned whether the filmed symptoms matched claims that sarin had been used:

‘In recent years, in other countries in the Middle East where security forces used tear gas on protesters, witnesses reported seeing victims foam at the mouth, convulse and twitch – the same symptoms seen in the Syrian victims.

‘The tell-tale sign of a sarin gas attack is myosis, or constricting of the pupils, and… tremors. While GlobalPost confirmed that some of the victims in the April 13 attack suffered from tremors, it was unable to confirm any of them had myosis.

‘Moreover, experts say an attack by sarin gas would cause virtually anyone who had come into contact with the toxin to immediately feel its effects. Exposure to even a very small amount of sarin could be lethal. While there were casualties in the Aleppo attack, most of the victims survived, which would not likely be the outcome of a sarin attack in a confined environment.’

Crucially, the White House accepted that: ‘The chain of custody is not clear.’ Middle East analyst Sharmine Narwanicommented:

‘That is the single most important phrase in this whole exercise. It is the only phrase that journalists need consider — everything else is conjecture of WMDs-in-Iraq proportions.

‘I asked a State Department spokesperson the following: “Does it mean you don’t know who has had access to the sample before it reached you? Or that the sample has not been contaminated along the way?”

‘He responded: “It could mean both.”‘

Alastair Hay, a toxicologist at the University of Leeds, cautioned:

‘To make a legal case — whether it’s against the Syrian government or opposition group — you need an ironclad chain of custody.

‘You need to be able to have somebody swear, if you like, that the material was in their custody at all times, whoever it is with before it gets to a laboratory.’

Narwani also questioned the claim that only the Syrian government has access to sarin:

‘In 2004, an IED roadside bomb — a common insurgent tactic — containing the nerve agent was detonated in Iraq. There are no guarantees whatsoever that chemical munitions have not found their way into the hands of rogue elements — or in fact that they are not producing them in small quantities themselves.’

A report in the Los Angeles Times offered other explanations:

‘Releases of poison gas could have occurred when soldiers loyal to the regime, which has been trying to secure and consolidate its dozens of chemical weapons sites, moved part of its stockpile, a U.S. Defense official said. Another possibility is that disloyal Syrian weapons scientists supplied chemicals to rebel fighters.

‘”The intel folks are taking a hard look at this, and they’re not certain,’ the Defense official said, speaking anonymously to discuss intelligence matters. “There’s no definite indication this was used against the opposition.”‘

Alex Thomson asked another sensible question:

‘Why did just a few people die — surely a large number of people would have died in a chemical attack, as in Halabja and Iran/Iraq war?’

In fact the quantities of chemicals said to be involved have been described as ‘microscopic’.

Dr. Jeffrey Lewis of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, also founder of Arms Control Wonk, a nuclear arms control and non-proliferation blog, wrote:

‘[T]he constant references to the “small scale” use becomes more clear – we don’t have multiple victims in a single use, as might be expected if the Syrians gassed a military unit or a local community. At most, we have two events in which only one person was exposed.

‘For all we know, these two poor souls stumbled into sarin canisters while ransacking a liberated Syrian military sites. I don’t say that to be callous, but rather because strange things happen on the battlefield. Remember, in 1991, U.S. troops detonated a pit of munitions at Khamisiyah in Iraq only to discover that the munitions contained sarin.’

Two events in which only one person was exposed! This reminds strongly of the moment when 11 empty artillery shells were found in an Iraqi bunker in January 2003. An ITN expert declared:

‘The real smoking gun of course would be if one of those shells was still found to contain a chemical mixture.’ (ITV Lunchtime News, January 17, 2003)

The remarkable suggestion, in 2003, was that a massive attack by 200,000 troops would be justified by the discovery of a single 122mm artillery shell with a range of four miles.

Other questions arise. Why would the Syrian government use the one weapon likely to trigger Western intervention when its use of highly destructive conventional weaponry appears to be reversing rebel gains, as indicated here and here? Writing for Foreign Policy in December, Charles Blair commented:

‘The regime would risk losing Russian and Chinese support, legitimising foreign military intervention, and, ultimately, hastening its own end. As one Syrian official said, “We would not commit suicide.”‘

It is easy to appreciate Robert Fisk’s view in the Independent that the claims are ‘theatre’, ‘a retold drama riddled with plot-holes’. If the media stage managers appeared to be offering some kind of informed consensus, it was for a reason:

‘Walk into a TV studio and they’re all reading newspapers. Walk into a newspaper office and they’re all watching television. It’s osmotic. And the headlines are all the same: Syria uses chemical weapons. That’s how the theatre works.’

Fisk added:

‘In two Canadian TV studios, I am approached by producers brandishing the same headline. I tell them that on air I shall trash the “evidence” — and suddenly the story is deleted from both programmes. Not because they don’t want to use it — they will later — but because they don’t want anyone suggesting it might be a load of old cobblers.’

The scepticism from Thomson, Fisk and others has been welcome indeed. Wider scepticism has doubtless been encouraged by the mixed messages from US officials. Corporate media performance has nevertheless been shocking.

In a leading article, ‘Stop him,’ the Sun told its readers on April 27:

‘After the carnage and slaughter in war-torn Syria comes a chilling new tactic from bloodthirsty tyrant Bashar al-Assad.

‘Chemical weapon attacks on his own people.

‘Evidence smuggled out of the divided nation confirms monster Assad’s regime has used nerve gas sarin.

‘Horrifying footage shows victims frothing at the mouth after the barbaric attacks.

‘Now, after months of rhetoric from statesmen and diplomats, momentum is growing for tough action.’ (Leading article, the Sun, April 27, 2013)

The Sun’s opinion does matter; its monthly combined reach in print and online is nearly 18 million. Its editors also quoted Cameron:

‘This should form for the international community a red line for us to do more.’

The tabloid responded:

‘Quite right, Prime Minister. Do nothing and the world is letting savage Assad evade justice — and condemning countless innocent Syrians to death.

‘This madman must be stopped.’

We can dismiss this as right-wing raving, if we like. But at what is supposed to be the opposite end of the media ‘spectrum’, the Guardian’s Ian Black wrote:

‘Syria illustrates a sort of Middle Eastern Murphy’s law — anything that can make things worse invariably happens: massacres, refugees fleeing to Jordan, tensions in Lebanon and Iraq, the use of chemical weapons…’

Black noted ‘the flurry over chemical weapons, leaving the impression that US “red lines” can be surprisingly flexible’.

As discussed, Obama’s ‘red line’ warning was of course directed at Assad. The Guardian’s Middle East editor was thus asserting that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons based on evidence which, as we have seen, is frankly risible.

In considering this same evidence, a Guardian leader observed:

‘Yet this week has also been marked by further claims that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad has been doing precisely the thing that Mr Bush said so confidently, but so wrongly, was at imminent risk of being done by Saddam Hussein 10 years ago.’

In fact, no-one had warned that the Iraq government might use chemical weapons against its own people. The alleged threat was of an attack on the West ‘within 45 minutes of the order being given’, or via Iraq’s al Qaeda contacts which, like the WMD, did not exist. The Guardian continued:

‘The use of chemical weapons is a war crime. It is a war crime even if it is committed by a state which, like Syria (or North Korea), is not a signatory to the international chemical weapons convention. The evidence for the use of chemical weapons is clearly suggestive, if the recent reports are reliable and substantiated, but it is also patchy and not yet fully contextualised.’

This weasel wording managed to point a finger of blame while simultaneously recognising the paucity of evidence.

How readily the Guardian referred to a possible Syrian ‘war crime’, while referring in the same editorial to Bush and Blair’s merely ‘mismanaged and hugely damaging invasion of Iraq in 2003′.

Criminals are usually not criticised for ‘mismanaging’ their crimes. Would the Guardian refer to al Qaeda’s ‘mismanaged’ attacks of September 11, 2001, or to Iraq’s ‘mismanaged’ 1990 invasion of Kuwait? The reference to a ‘mismanaged’ invasion implies that the Guardian does not view the war of 2003 as the supreme war crime it very clearly was.

The Guardian’s Dan Roberts noted that ‘initial samples and evidence trails have degraded’. The result:

‘Britain and the US are likely to have to wait for fresh evidence from further attacks before deciding whether to take a military response against the Assad government.’

This again affirmed that the Syrian government had probably used chemical weapons. Obviously it is for Britain and the US — the world’s designated police force by virtue of their spotless legal and moral records — to decide whether to attack yet one more nation. Bombing other countries is as normal as the air we breathe.

On May 2, the BBC commented:

‘The pressure to act has intensified in recent days after emerging evidence that Syria has used chemical weapons such as the nerve gas sarin.’

This, even though ‘existing evidence of alleged chemical weapon was not sufficient to trigger an international response’.

The Times, of course, had no doubts:

‘Reports of chemical attacks suggest a new terror against a captive people. Since protests against his rule erupted more than two years ago, President Assad has created a desert and called it peace…

‘There are now credible claims that the regime has used chemical weapons against civilians. Western nations ought much earlier in this crisis to have provided heavy weaponry for Syrian rebels to defend themselves. They should do so now.’ (Leader, ‘Assad’s Victims Need Arming,’ The Times, April 24, 2003)

The Times described the evidence as ‘harrowing and highly plausible’, particularly ‘photographs of victims foaming at the mouth. The symptoms would be consistent with poisoning by sarin.’ Not quite.

Returning to the other end of the media ‘spectrum’ (a short trip), an Independent leader commented:

‘Recent days have provided persuasive evidence that chemical weapons are being used in Syria… A widespread conclusion is that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is resorting to the use of such weapons against its own people.’

As we have seen, the ‘widespread conclusion’ is anything but.

Hopping back to the hard-right, the Daily Telegraph’s deputy editor, Benedict Brogan, responded to the sarin story with an article entitled, ‘A wary, weary West is leaving Syria in the butchers’ hands; Obama may talk of red lines, but the US and its allies simply don’t have the will to intervene.’

If that was not clear enough, Brogan added: ‘the CIA has endorsed the conclusions of MI6 and other intelligence agencies that chemical weapons probably were used’. (Brogan, Daily Telegraph, April 30, 2013)

That, of course, does not remotely justify the title. Nor does the next sentence:

‘Quite how, and by whom, remains a point of argument. Whether Assad himself ordered their deployment, or whether they were being tested in improvised form by a local commander, is unclear.’

These were the thinkable options. Other possibilities — that some agency other than the Syrian government might have used chemical weapons, or that they weren’t used at all — were presumably too outlandish to mention.

The Telegraph’s own analysis made a nonsense of Brogan’s response, noting that Senator John McCain, the leading American proponent of intervention, had ‘admitted that the chemical weapons evidence “may not be airtight”.’ It also quoted Hamish de Bretton Gordon, a former commanding officer of the Army’s chemical weapons unit who now runs consultancy SecureBio: ‘even if any sarin found was from a regime shell — the nerve agent could have been deployed accidentally or by a rogue squad’.

The Telegraph’s editors had previously commented:

‘President Bashar al-Assad’s use of nerve gas presents the British and Americans with an agonising dilemma.’

The editors sighed:

‘it was perhaps inevitable that, one day, credible evidence would implicate this amoral dictator in gassing his enemies’.

And, again, compare this damning verdict with the immediately following observation that the evidence is ‘persuasive but not conclusive’ and is not ‘as compelling as it might seem’.

This really is astonishing, in the strange world of media propaganda, news reports contradict editorials and headlines contradict content. The guiding ethic: ‘I want to believe!’ It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that media performance is shaped by state-corporate forces that are deeply invested in decades of war and the spoils that go with it.

The absurdity of the media rush to the required conclusion was emphasised 10 days later. On May 6, former Swiss attorney-general Carla Del Ponte, speaking for the United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria, ruffled many feathers when she said, ‘there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated. This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities’.

Del Ponte added:

‘We have no indication at all that the Syrian government have used chemical weapons.’

Although the UN quickly rowed back and the US demurred, this was impossible to ignore. Even the BBC, after a delay, posted the story half-way, then at the top, of its news homepage. This made a jarring contrast to the BBC’s usual propaganda performance on Syria. As Craig Murray, formerly Britain’s Ambassador to Uzbekistan, noted, corporate media are supplying ‘an extraordinary barrage of distorted propaganda to fool western populations over the course and meaning of events’.

Three brothers have been arrested in connection with the kidnapping of three women who were reported missing about a decade ago in the US city of Cleveland.

Brothers Ariel Castro, Pedro, and Onil were arrested on Monday in the abduction cases of Amanda Berry, 27, Gina DeJesus, 23, and Michelle Knight, 32, in the US state of Ohio between 2002 and 2004, authorities said on Wednesday.

The three women were rescued from the working-class Cleveland home also on Monday, after one of them managed to alert a neighbor, who broke down the door to free her and a six-year-old daughter – apparently born while she was in captivity.

The women were taken to a local hospital before being released to their families, as sources revealed that the women were raped and impregnated a combined five times with one of the victims having two or three miscarriages.

Meanwhile, neighbors criticized authorities for failing to take notice of suspected foul play as well as follow-ups on police visitations to the house between 2004 and 2011.

In 2012, four elderly women reported seeing women treated like animals. A little girl was also reported to have been constantly looking out of a basement window, though police failed to appear on those accounts.

Cleveland authorities also visited the home in 2011 after a neighbor saw a girl holding a baby and crying for help. The police knocked on the door several times but no one answered.

“I think once you get inside that home there’s going to be a lot of customization – hidden rooms, hidden doorways,” said former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole, adding that the suspect is a “sexual sadist…a very unusual individual motivated by keeping their victims for days, weeks, months and years.”

GMA/KA

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The new president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, is cast in Chavez’s mold.

On May 4, he called US president Obama the “grand chief of devils.”

Obama, who has betrayed democracy in America, unleashing execution on American citizens without due process of law and war without the consent of Congress, provoked Maduro’s response by suggesting that Maduro’s newly elected government might be fraudulent. Obviously, Obama is piqued that the millions of dollars his administration spent trying to elect an American puppet instead of Maduro failed to do the job.

If anyone has accurately summed up Washington, it is the Venezuelans.

Who can forget Chevez standing at the podium of the UN General Assembly in New York City speaking of George W. Bush? Quoting from memory: “Right here, yesterday, at this very podium stood Satan himself, speaking as if he owned the world. You can still smell the sulphur.”

Hegemonic Washington threw countless amounts of money into the last Venezuelan election, doing its best to deliver the governance of that country to a Washington puppet called Henrique Capriles, in my opinion a traitor to Venezuela. Why isn’t this American puppet arrested for treason? Why are not the Washington operatives against an independent country—the US ambassador, the counsels, the USAID/CIA personnel, the Washington funded NGOs—ordered to leave Venezuela immediately or arrested and tried for spying and high treason? Why allow any presence of Washington in Venezuela when it is clear that Washington’s intention is to make Venezuela a puppet state like the UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Japan, and on and on.

There was a time, such as in the Allende-Pinochet era, when the American left-wing and a no longer extant liberal media would have been all over Washington for its illegal interference in the internal affairs of an independent country. But no more. As CounterPunch’s Jeffrey St. Clair has recently made clear, the American left-wing remains “insensate to the moral and constitutional transgressions being committed by their champion”—the first black, or half-black, US president—leaving “Rand Paul to offer official denunciations against [Washington’s] malignant operations” against independent countries.

Against the Obama regime’s acts of international and domestic violence, “the professional Left, from the progressive caucus to the robotic minions of Moveon.org, lodge no objections and launch no protests.”

St. Clair has written a powerful article. Read it for yourself: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/03/the-game-of-drones/print

I think the American left-wing lost its confidence when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Chinese communists and Indian socialists turned capitalist. Everyone misread the situation, especially the “end of history” idiots. The consequence is a world without strong protests of Washington’s and its puppet states’ war criminal military aggressions, murder, destruction of civil liberty and human rights, and transparent propaganda: “Last night Polish forces crossed the frontier and attacked Germany,” or so declared Adolf Hitler. Washington’s charges of “weapons of mass destruction” are even more transparent lies.

But hardly any care. The Western governments and Japan are all paid off and bought, and those that are not bought are begging to be bought because they want the money too. Truth, integrity, these are all dead-letter words. No one any longer knows what they mean.

The moronic George W. Bush said, in Orwellian double-speak, they hate us for our freedom and democracy. They don’t hate us because we bomb them, invade them, kill them, destroy their way of life, culture, and infrastructure. They hate us because we are so good. How stupid does a person have to be to believe this BS?

Washington and Israel present the world with unmistakable evil. I don’t need to stand at the UN podium after Bush or Obama. I can smell Washington’s evil as far away as Florida. Jeffrey St. Clair can smell it in Oregon. Nicolas Maduro can smell it in Venezuela. Evo Morales can smell it in Bolivia from where he cast out CIA-infiltrated USAID. Putin can smell it in Russia, although he still permits the treasonous “Russian opposition” funded by US money to operate against Russia’s government. The Iranians can smell it in the Persian Gulf. The Chinese can smell it as far away as Beijing.

Homeland Security, a gestapo institution, has “crisis actors” to help it deceive the public in its false flag operations.

http://www.governamerica.com/black-ops/boston-bombings/110-fema-hiring-actors-to-run-live-terror-drills

The Obama regime has drones with which to silence American citizens without due process of law.

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/may042013/drones-boston-wh.php

Homeland Security has more than a billion rounds of ammunition, tanks, a para-military force. Detention camps have been built.

Are Americans so completely stupid that they believe this is all for “terrorists” whose sparse numbers require the FBI to manufacture “terrorists” in so-called “sting operations” in order to justify the FBI’s $3 billion special fund from Congress to combat domestic terrorism?

Congress has taxpayers paying the FBI to frame up innocents and send them to prison.

This is the kind of country American has become. This is the kind of “security” agencies it has, filling their pockets by destroying the lives of the innocent and downtrodden.

“In God we trust,” reads the coinage. It should read: “In Satan we follow.”

Recently, news reporters have been sounding almost giddy, saying that unemployment is dropping, housing prices are rising and the stock market is growing to new highs. But, these reports do not ring true with what people see around them. When you look beyond the sunny headlines, the sad reality is mirage recovery.

The economy is limping along with unemployment and underemployment remaining at high levels while the number of new jobs is still way too low. This is especially true for US youth, many of whom will soon be graduating. Increased housing prices represent Wall Street taking advantage of cheap loans from the Fed and profiting from the collapse by buying up real estate. It is another massive transfer of wealth to the wealthiest.

What economists have been emphasizing throughout the collapse remains true today — until the job market strengthens dramatically there will be no real recovery. Here is the latest on jobs, housing, health care and Obama’s appointments. The bottom line is that recovery will come from grassroots efforts to build local sustainable economies and put real pressure on those in power.

First, let’s look at jobs. Robert Reich points out that the jobs report really was not good news: “The Labor Department reports that 165,000 new jobs were created in April — below the average gains of 183,000 in the previous three months.” And, making the inadequate number of jobs worse is that “most of the new jobs now being created pay less than the ones that were lost.”

Heidi Shierholtz of the Economic Policy Institute puts things in perspective, noting the “unemployment rate hardly budged, moving just six-hundredths of a percentage point, from 7.57 percent to 7.51 percent” and describing this as “an ongoing disaster. We need 8.7 million jobs to get back to a healthy labor market.” She adds “it will take more than five years to return to the prerecession unemployment rate,” and points out that wages dropped substantially at a 4.8 percent annualized rate.

The former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for President Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, reviewed each category of jobs in the report and calls it fictitious. He notes the decline in construction jobs, the zero increase in manufacturing jobs, the minimal increase in energy jobs (despite all the hype about fracking and the US now being the number one oil producer in the world) and estimates that the real unemployment is 23% and that the government is exaggerating job growth by two-fold.

Economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research looks at the not so bright future writing: “Furthermore there are good reasons that job growth may prove slower going forward. Excluding inventory fluctuations the economy grew at just a 1.5 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter. It has grown at less than a 1.8 percent rate over the last year. This is well below the pace that would ordinarily be needed to keep the unemployment rate from rising.” Further, the impact of federal spending cutbacks are just beginning to be felt, so that there is not “enough momentum to make any substantial dent in unemployment in the foreseeable future.”

If we focus on youth, the job picture is even worse. High school and college seniors will be graduating into a dismal labor market, with college students deeply in debt. A summary of youth unemployment includes The New York Times reporting “The US has gone from having the highest share of employed 25- to 34-year-olds among large, wealthy economies to having among the lowest.” Also, young workers now have wages that are lower than in 2000.

The Economic Policy Institute released a detailed report on youth unemployment which they describe as “decimated job prospects and earnings for young workers.” They summarize:

“For young high school graduates, the unemployment rate is 29.9 percent, compared with 17.5 percent in 2007, and the underemployment rate is 51.5 percent, compared with 29.4 percent in 2007. For college graduates, the unemployment rate is 8.8 percent, compared with 5.7 percent in 2007, and the underemployment rate is 18.3 percent, compared with 9.9 percent in 2007.”

On top of this, wages have been in steep decline: “between 2000 and 2012, the wages of young high school graduates declined 12.7 percent, and the wages of young college graduates decreased 8.5 percent.” The report predicts a decade of struggle and low wages for this group.

Let’s look at housing next. Corporate media was hyper in their reporting of big gains in prices for housing. But, what is really going on?  Big investors are taking advantage of low interest rates thanks to the Federal Reserve and are buying up houses at low prices. They often buy at foreclosure or before houses go on the market and are crowding out people who want to buy a home to live in. Investors are purchasing homes to rent because the poor job market is making it hard for individuals to afford to own a home. In a few years, the investors will sell at a big profit, taking more from working families.

The housing market continues to have some important problems. “There are around 4.9 million loans that are either in the foreclosure process or that aren’t making their payments.” though banks have learned how handle this by “modifying loans or approving short sales.” So, the real losers are the home owners whose lifetime investment is destroyed.

And, in health care, economist Gerald Friedman describes how treating health care as a commodity has resulted in dramatically increased costs in premiums and co-pays. One of the big costs of health care are exaggerated pharmaceutical prices due to “evergreening” of patents that lengthen patent protection. One hundred prominent experts in leukemia point out, in an editorial in American Society of Hematology, that this practice is harming patients. When the government of India revolted against this practice, President Obama made it clear — profits for Big Pharma were more important than saving lives.

The bad economy for the vast majority of Americans is showing itself in many ways. One distressing report this week was the rapid rise in suicides among middle-aged Americans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports a rapid 28 percent increase in suicides among middle-aged Americans. More Americans died from suicides than automobile accidents for the first time starting in 2010.

This week we saw more examples that the economy and government are rigged in favor of the wealthiest. Apple avoided paying taxes by borrowing the largest corporate bond ever, $17 billion, at Fed-created low interest rates to buy back shares, increase its stock dividend and avoid paying US taxes. This was done despite the fact that Apple had $145 billion in cash and securities.  It’s a scam, but legal under laws rigged for the wealthiest. Apple might look cool in its advertisements but people should think “corporate criminal” when they see the Apple symbol.

Gary Rivlan writing in The Nation did a detailed review of how the banks undermined the already too weak, Dodd-Frank financial regulation. The banks had 3,000 lobbyists swarming the Capitol, six lobbyists for every member of Congress, before Dodd-Frank, but they did not stop when the bill passed. After passage they battled every stage of implementation by federal agencies. Annette Nazareth, a former top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Eugene Scalia, the son of the right-wing Supreme Court justice, led the fight with a particular focus on derivatives, Dodd-Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Big finance spent one billion on lobbying before the bill passed, and they spent even more after it passed on the lobbyists, lawyers, PR firms and think tanks shilling for them. That is how it is done in DC.

While big business is able to game the system, small business is being destroyed by it. The Economic Collapse Blog reports “the percentage of Americans that are working for themselves has never been lower in the history of the United States.” The decline in the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans has dropped from 11.3 under the first President Bush, to 7.8 under President Obama. They report “the percentage of “new entrepreneurs and business owners” dropped by a staggering 53 percent between 1977 and 2010.” Entrepreneurs, who take risks, innovate and, when they succeed, hire people, seem to be being killed off in the US economy. It does not portend well for the future.

Les Leopold describes the size of the corrupt economy’s impact, the “top 7% gained a whopping $5.6 trillion in net worth . . . while the rest of lost $669 billion. Their wealth went up by 28% while ours went down by 4%.” This transfer of wealth to the richest happened because of specific government policies.

This brings us to President Obama’s recent appointments which Jill Stein describes as a betrayal of the American people. In fact, they couldn’t be much worse for the public interest. He has been appointing campaign donors and big-time finance bundlers. At Commerce, Penny Pritzker will become the first female Secretary of Commerce. While we support female leadership, did he have to pick someone who cashed in on the housing bubble, crashing a bank after ripping off working class people? She’s actually a two-fer, not only a bankster, but a race-to-the bottom employer who mistreats workers at her family-owned Hyatt hotels.

And, then there is the US Trade Representative, who will finish the negotiations on the disastrous Trans-Pacific Partnership. Michael Forman, a former Citigroup executive from 1999 to 2008, was part of the team that ran the bank into the ground with risky investments and rip-offs of consumers. It is no surprise that he left as the bank was bailed out by the federal government to work for Obama.

The final appointee spent decades as a lobbyist in Washington, DC as a representative of big business and as a venture capitalist. Tom Wheeler was nominated to chair the Federal Communications Commission. It is hard to imagine Wheeler acting in the public interest with his background, so consumers can expect higher cable bills and more concentration of industry in the future.

It should be evident to all now that since President Obama no longer has to answer to voters, he is not promoting policies for the people. His administration has become even more plutocratic. He still needs to raise money for the Obama Presidential Center, so a cabinet of millionaires and now billionaires, will certainly be good for fundraising.

Despite the bad news, it does not have to be this way. The solutions are evident. As Dean Baker points out “There are many more ways to spend money that will put people back to work, but the key is to get such spending back on the political agenda.” What to spend on, Heidi Shierholtz recommends: “fiscal relief to states and substantial additional investment in infrastructure.”  Robert Reich says the time to focus “on jobs and inequality, it’s now. But don’t hold your breath.” The political agenda in Washington, DC shows no sign of even considering sensible policies. It is not going to get better unless there is a revolt from the American people who say “NO MORE.”

The future can be defined by the people; we must have the confidence that we can create it. We have no doubt — we can and we must. Look for our article on alternative currencies and economies on May 8 in TruthOut. There is a lot we can do now to opt out of Wall Street. An important finding is that shifting spending from big box stores to independent businesses by just 10% in Michigan was extrapolated to “generate an annual economic impact of nearly $200,000,000 and create 1300 jobs with over $70,000,000 in payroll.” The power to create recovery is in our hands and communities.

This article is based on a weekly newsletter for ItsOurEconomy.us. To sign up for the free newsletter, click here.

Kevin Zeese JD and Margaret Flowers MD co-direct It’s Our Economy and are organizers of the Occupation of Washington, DC.  They co-host Clearing the FOG on We Act Radio 1480 AM Washington, DC and on Economic Democracy Media. Their twitters are @KBZeese and @MFlowers8.

US officials continued to press for war against Syria yesterday, dismissing United Nations investigator Carla del Ponte’s statement that Western-backed opposition forces, not the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, had used chemical weapons.

Del Ponte’s comment, based on an investigation including extensive interviews by UN officials, tore to shreds the lie with which Washington has tried to justify its drive to war–namely, that it is attacking Syria to protect the people from Assad’s use of chemical weapons. (See also: “UN says US-backed opposition, not Syrian regime, used poison gas”).

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney summarily rejected del Ponte’s report without offering a shred of evidence to refute her statement. “We are highly skeptical of any suggestions that the opposition used chemical weapons. We find it highly likely that any chemical weapon use that has taken place in Syria was done by the Assad regime. And that remains our position,” Carney stated.

 There is every reason to believe, in fact, that the opposition has used chemical weapons, as it has apparently received training on such weapons from the US or allied forces. According to a CNN report in December, the US has dispatched contractors and mercenaries for the purpose of training the rebels to “secure stockpiles and handle [chemical] weapons sites and materials.”

Opposition forces have received numerous shipments of weapons and equipment overseen by the United States and allied regimes such as Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Last December, opposition fighters posted a video on YouTube showing them testing chemical weapons and declaring their readiness to use them.

Taking their lead from Carney, US lawmakers issued calls for a full-scale attack on Syria. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (Democrat of New Jersey) submitted legislation that would officially authorize the Obama administration to arm the so-called “rebels.”

“The Assad regime has crossed a red line that forces us to consider all options,” Menendez said in a written statement, treating as fact the completely unsubstantiated claim, refuted by del Ponte, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against the opposition.

Over the weekend, Senator John McCain (Republican of Arizona) asserted that Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons use has been crossed and that the time had come for a “game-changing” escalation against Syria.

Senator Bob Casey (Democrat of Pennsylvania) asserted the existence of a “broad consensus” in favor of the US and its allies creating a “safe zone” inside Syria. This would involve large-scale air strikes against Syrian air defenses and the carving out of a significant portion of Syrian territory under the control of the imperialist powers.

Senator Robert Corker (Republican of Tennessee), a senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, stated on Tuesday: “I do think we’ll be arming the opposition shortly.” Corker went on to say that “we do have to change the equation… The moderate opposition groups we support are not as good at fighting.”

The senators’ calls for war come amid stepped-up military planning against Syria. On Monday, the New York Times reported that the US, Britain and France are secretly discussing coordinated air strikes for the purpose of imposing a no-fly zone over Syria. The newspaper also reported that the US military, which has been working out plans to attack Syria for months, has been told by the Obama administration to step up its planning and coordinate it with key American allies.

The braying for war from Congress and the media follows Israeli air strikes against Syria last Thursday and Sunday. There are reports that 42 Syrian soldiers were killed by Israeli strikes near Damascus.

A Hezbollah representative claimed that the Israeli attacks were launched in support of the opposition groups: “This shelling is an attempt at giving a morale boost to the terrorists and takfiris [extremists] and all those who are fighting to destroy Syria from within,” he said.

One purpose of the Israeli strikes was to test Syria’s air defense capacities amid preparations for massive air strikes by the US, France and Britain. According to Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Israel’s success does indicate that the purely military risks in enforcing some form of no-fly or no-move zone are now more limited than when the fighting in Syria began.”

Cordesman made clear that imposing a so-called “no-fly zone” would involve large-scale war: “It would take a massive US air and cruise missile attack… difficult for even two carrier groups to carry out and sustain.”

A May 7 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, “The Non-Intervention War,” made the case for a major war against Syria. The Journal wrote, “The US could still steer this conflict toward a better outcome if Mr. Obama has the will. At this stage this would require more than arming some rebels. It probably means imposing a no-fly zone and air strikes against Assad’s forces. We would also not rule out the use of American and other ground troops to secure the chemical weapons.

“The immediate goal would be to limit the proliferation of WMD, but the most important strategic goal continues to be to defeat Iran, our main adversary in the region. The risks of a jihadist victory in Damascus are real, at least in the short term, but they are containable by Turkey and Israel.”

The US is preparing for yet another imperialist war on the scale of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Though cynically advertised to the American public as an extension of the so-called “war on terror” against Al Qaeda, the goal of such a war will be to consolidate US imperialism’s control over the entire Middle East and its vast energy resources. The US ruling elite is not concerned about defeating “the terrorists,” who are in fact its allies.

The ease with which the Obama administration dismissed reports of Al Qaeda-linked opposition forces mounting attacks with chemical weapons is particularly significant, especially as lies about Al Qaeda acquiring WMD were a major pretext for invading Iraq. This underlies the long-running and continuing alliance between US imperialism and the most reactionary Islamist forces.

Starting in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, during the Soviet-Afghan war, US intelligence oversaw the arming of Islamist forces, including Osama bin Laden, who went on to fight as shock troops in US-backed wars in the Balkans and the Caucasus in the 1990s. While certain elements of Al Qaeda were targeted by the US after the September 11 attacks, Washington’s political connections with these forces were maintained during the 2000s.

For its 2011 Libyan war and now in Syria, the US mobilized Al Qaeda-linked forces of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and, in Syria, the Al-Nusra Front.

Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to Moscow on Tuesday, attempting to gain Russian support for US regime-change efforts in Syria. Together with China, Russia has vetoed three separate UN resolutions condemning Assad for his government’s crackdown on the US-backed “rebel” groups.

“The United States believes that we share some very significant common interests with respect to Syria–stability in the region, not having extremists creating problems throughout the region and elsewhere,” Kerry declared.

The United States and Russia reportedly agreed to organize a conference on the war that both the Assad regime and the opposition would attend.

Nevertheless, Kerry received a chilly welcome from Putin, who kept him waiting for hours and reportedly fiddled with his pen distractedly while Kerry spoke. The Russian Foreign Ministry released a statement, implicitly critical of US policy, that declared: “The further escalation of armed confrontation sharply increases the risk of creating new areas of tension and the destabilization of the so-far relatively calm atmosphere on the Lebanese-Israeli border.”

Two weeks after the Rana Plaza building collapse, global retail giants that source their garments in Bangladesh such as Walmart, Primark, Benetton and others are engaged in a cynical public relations exercise to distance themselves from the tragedy and preserve their image and their profits.

As of yesterday, the official death toll had reached 705, with hundreds more injured, making the collapse the worst industrial disaster in country’s history and one of the worst ever in the world. Rana Plaza is typical of the thousands of shoddily built, unsafe sweatshops in Bangladesh employing workers at $38 a month to churn out orders for some of the world’s largest corporations.

A well rehearsed media operation swung into action as soon as news of the April 24 disaster began to emerge. The well-resourced PR departments of the corporations directly or indirectly involved immediately issued statements expressing their “shock” and “sadness” over the loss of life. Most attempted to deny any involvement with the five garment factories housed in the building, no doubt advised by their equally well-resourced legal departments. A few acknowledged their connection to the Rana Plaza suppliers.

The crocodile tears and declarations of “shock” are completely hypocritical. The very reason some of the best known international brands source their goods in Bangladesh is that the country has the lowest costs–not only low wages, but low overheads due to the lack of regulation. Safety and building standards exist largely on paper, as the government employs very few inspectors to enforce the codes in a country that is notorious for corruption and bribery.

Many corporations maintain a façade of concern by setting guidelines for their suppliers backed by a system of “audits”, supposedly to ensure that standards are met. Auditing for safety and working conditions has become an industry in itself, in which non-government organisations (NGOs) are involved. The guidelines are ignored and orders are commonly subcontracted to smaller sweatshops. The audits are little more than occasional nuisances as manufacturers cut costs to meet the price demanded.

One monitoring group, the Business Social Compliance Initiative, based in Brussels, has admitted that its auditors approved two of the garment factories inside Rana Plaza on behalf of their clients. The structural soundness of the building was simply not on the check list.

The sheer scale of the Rana Plaza disaster, which has horrified people around the world, has compelled the retail giants to consider moving their business elsewhere. The New York Times highlighted the fact last week that the Walt Disney Company, the world’s largest licenser with annual sales of nearly $40 billion, had issued a directive in March ordering an end to the production of branded merchandise in Bangladesh and several other countries. Disney products had been found in the ruins of the Tazreen Fashion factory that was gutted by fire last November, killing 112 workers.

At the time, the fire was the country’s worst industrial disaster. However, Disney’s directive to pull out was a purely commercial decision. The cost to its corporate image simply outweighed the relatively small impact on its profits, as only a tiny proportion of its products are produced in Bangladesh. In its statement, Disney announced that production would be phased out over a year. It left the door open to returning if factories began cooperating with the Better Work program jointly run by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the International Finance Corporation, connected to the World Bank.

Corporations that are in no position financially to withdraw have called on the services of the ILO, the trade unions and various NGOs to pressure the Bangladeshi government and manufacturers to make cosmetic changes to safety and building standards. Last week, the Bangladesh Garment Manufactures & Exporters Association (BGMEA), which is desperate to retain its global customers, met with representatives of 40 buyers, including H&M, JC Penny, Gap, Nike, Li & Fung and Tesco. It promised to carry out building inspections of all its members.

Some corporations, such as Primark, are promising to pay compensation of around $1,200 to each of the families of the victims of the Rana Plaza disaster. Walmart, which was directly implicated in the Tazreen Fashion disaster, has refused to pay what amounts to hush money, but has donated $1.6 million towards a token fire safety training program in Bangladesh. The amounts are a pittance, undoubtedly calculated through the methods of cost-benefit analysis used by Disney to reach its decision.

The European Union, acting on behalf of Europe’s retailers, issued a statement last week threatening to withdraw preferential trade access to EU markets for Bangladesh. Foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and trade commissioner Karel De Gucht declared that the EU was considering “appropriate action” to “incentivise responsible management of supply chains involving developing countries.” Some 60 percent of Bangladesh’s garment exports go to Europe.

The EU posturing has nothing to do with improving the lot of Bangladeshi workers. EU officials told the Financial Times that the withdrawal of trade preferences would be “an extreme measure” which was “unlikely” to take place. As one European Commission official told the newspaper, the statement directed at Bangladeshi authorities was only to “put a fire under their feet a little bit.”

If trade preferences were withdrawn, or major corporations followed Disney’s example, the impact on the Bangladesh economy would be devastating. Garments constitute about 80 percent of the country’s exports and more than 3 million workers are directly employed in the industry. Many would lose their jobs, compounding the widespread poverty that already afflicts the Bangladeshi masses.

Moreover, any corporate exits from Bangladesh would only be to another cheap-labour platform, possibly with even lower costs. Burma (Myanmar) is being touted as a possible alternative, where the military-dominated regime would ensure a docile workforce with few safety regulations. The rush to meet the new demand would ensure that buildings were flung up in a similar haphazard and shoddy fashion. Other possibilities include Pakistan, where nearly 300 workers died in a Karachi garment factory fire last September, or the sweatshops in countries such as Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Haiti.

Far from improving safety standards and working conditions, the corporate giants are engaged in a dog-eat-dog competition against their rivals that is intensifying amid the global breakdown of capitalism. The relentless drive for profits is undermining the health, safety and living standards not only of workers in the developing countries, but also in the economically advanced nations. The only means for ending the tragic loss of life and limb is a unified -struggle by workers throughout Asia, Europe, the US and the world to put an end to the outmoded capitalist system.

Haaretz reported on March 24th, “Jihadists, not Assad, apparently behind reported chemical attack in Syria“.

 UN investigator Carla Del Ponte said that there is strong evidence that the rebels used chemical weapons, but that there is not evidence that the government used such weapons:

But the U.S. is blaming the Syrian government for the attacks in Syria.

So who’s right?

The Global Post reported on April 30th:

A closer analysis, however, raises doubts and highlights the challenge of confirming whether the Syrian government—or anyone else—is using chemical weapons…. Looking at video and photos obtained by GlobalPost at the scene, experts say the spent canister found in Younes’ [a victim’s] house and the symptoms displayed by the victims are inconsistent with a chemical weapon such as sarin gas, which is known to be in Syria’s arsenal.

 Here’s a picture of the spent canister:

The GlobalPost continues:

Looking at video and photos obtained by GlobalPost at the scene, experts say the spent canister found in Younes’ house and the symptoms displayed by the victims are inconsistent with a chemical weapon such as sarin gas, which is known to be in Syria’s arsenal. Sarin is typically delivered using artillery shells or spray tanks, not in the grenade-like device found in this Aleppo attack and in other similar attacks reported in recent days.

***

Watch the full, unedited video here

While analysts have not been able to identify the canister, they said tear gas, some kind of generated smoke, as well as any number of chemicals found in military munitions and devices, could also have been responsible. Chemicals used for riot control are not prohibited by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.

***

Experts say an attack by sarin gas would cause virtually anyone who had come into contact with the toxin to immediately feel its effects. Exposure to even a very small amount of sarin could be lethal. While there were casualities in the Aleppo attack, most of the victims survived, which would not likely be the outcome of a sarin attack in a confined environment.

The Washington Post reported yesterday:

Adding to the doubts, some analysts are now wondering if the attack might have actually involved chlorine, which is also a chemical weapon but can be bought over-the-counter. A March Reuters story described a possible chemical attack in the northern town of Khan al-Assal, near Aleppo, after which residents said they could smell chlorine. The Telegraph reported at the time that Syrian regime forces accused rebels of using a homemade chlorine solution in the attack.

***

Perhaps adding some credibility to fears that Syrian rebels could potentially use chlorine, militants in neighboring Iraq used chlorine bombs several times in 2007. Some Syrian fighters with the Islamist rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra are believed to have ties to Iraqi extremists.

CNN notes:

Al Qaeda in Iraq detonated a series of crude chlorine bombs in Iraq from late 2006 through mid-2007.

***

Charles Faddis, who headed the CIA’s operations against al Qaeda in Iraq’s chlorine bomb network, told me in 2010: “[T]he attacks are not being particularly successful. The people are dying in the blast, but fortunately nobody is dying from chlorine.”

The GlobalPost reported on May 5th:

Doctors in Turkey say initial tests of blood samples from victims of a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria last month are negative for sarin gas.

***

It could have been tear gas or some other kind of generated smoke, normally used for riot control, some weapons experts said.

In other words, those who question the claim that it was the Syrian government which used chemical weapons have photographic and other evidence on their side.

Rebels Have More Motive than Government …

The Washington Post reported yesterday:

As Foreign Policy’s Blake Hounshell points out, Khan al-Assal was a regime-controlled area at the time, which suggests that if anyone were to attack it, it would probably be rebels. (Hat tip to Hounshell for resurfacing these March articles.)

Similarly, Tony Cartalucci points out that the Syrian government has no motivation to use chemical weapons. And Lew Rockwell argues:

Of course anyone whose brain fired on more than one cylinder should have questioned why in the hell the Syrian government would use in such a limited and militarily insignificant way the one weapon it knew would likely bring on a US and NATO Libya-style intervention. It made no sense at all for the Syrian government to use “just a little” sarin – not enough to do more than kill a few people, nothing to alter the course of the war – knowing about “red lines” and a US/Saudi/Qatari/Israeli/Turk bloodlust to invade.

On the other hand, it made all the sense in the world for the insurgents to release some sarin here and there, make some videos of the victims, and email the links to some very willing Israeli generals and McCainian rabid warhawks in the US and their absurd poodles in the UK and France.

CNN points out that the Syrian rebels have had chemical weapons training.

Neoconservatives planned regime change in Syria — and throughout the Middle East and North Africa — 20 years ago.  And carrying out acts of violence and blaming it on the Syrian government as an excuse for regime change — i.e. false flag terror — was discussed over 50 years ago by British and American leaders.

A top Bush administration official says it’s hard to say who used chemical weapons — if anyone — and that the chemical weapons attack may have been an Israeli false flag attack.

And the American government has previously falsely blamed its enemies for chemical weapons attacks. For example, the American government gave chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein … which he then used on Iran and on his own Kurdish population. The American government attempted to blame Iran for the chemical weapons attack on Iraq’s Kurds … just as the U.S. is trying to blame the Syrian government for the attacks in Syria.

And see this.

And the “rebels” in Syria that the U.S. has been arming and otherwise supporting are Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, the New York Times reported last week that virtually all of the rebel fighters are Al Qaeda terrorist.

But the war-hungry mainstream media — just as in Iraq — is pushing half-truths and bogus claims.

On May 1, Obama nominated Watt to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).

It replaced the Federal Housing Finance Board (FHFB), the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (DHUD).

It did so following their statutory merger. FHFB regulates Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and 12 Federal Home Loan Banks.

If approved, Watt will replace Edward DeMarco. Since August 2009, he’s been acting director. Change.org called him the “single biggest obstacle to meaningful economic recovery.”

He blocked reducing the burden of underwater homeowners. Fire DeMarco, urged Change.org.

In January 2013, Public Citizen headlined “Bank of America Settlement Needs Another Look,” saying:

It should be investigated to assure proper oversight. It questioned DeMarko’s $3.5 billion FHFA settlement. He claimed it’s “in the best interest of taxpayers.”

It’s “restitution for bad loans leading up to the financial crisis.” It represents “a quarter of a percent of the $1.4 trillion original value of the loans.”

According to Public Citizen’s financial policy advocate Bartlett Naylor:

“Obviously there is a huge disconnect between the amount Bank of America is paying as part of the settlement and the financial harm caused to taxpayers by the bad mortgages the bank was selling.”

“The deal needs closer scrutiny so we can be sure we don’t just create an incentive for banks to engage in the same kind of bad behavior in the future.”

On July 31, 2012, Paul Krugman called for DeMarko’s firing. He “just rejected a request from the Treasury Department (to) offer debt relief to troubled homeowners.”

“(D)eciding whether debt relief if a good policy for the nation as a whole is not (his) job….This guy needs to go.”

In March 2012, Naked Capitalism called DeMarko a convenient scapegoat. It was to divert attention from the “abject failure” of Obama and key Democrats “to come up with remotely adequate solutions to the housing mess.”

Complicit with congressional Republicans, they refused to get tough on banks. Failure prevents recovery. If Obama wanted to help underwater homeowners, he “could have used the hundreds of billions of dollars available under TARP to do so.”

No congressional authorization is required. Instead of doing the right thing, he yielded to monied interests. He’s done so throughout his tenure.

He consistently threw troubled homeowners under the bus. If he’s approved, they’ll remain there with Watt. Naked Capitalism calls him “a prototypical bank-friendly Democrat.”

For over a decade, Goldman Sachs lobbyist Joyce Brayboy was his chief of staff. His former legislative Counsel, Hilary West, now lobbies for JPMorgan Chase. Watt was absent during its “London Whale” hearings.

On June 27, 2012, the Charlotte Observer headlined “Mel Watt lies low on banking, finance issues; ‘they are not listening.’ ”

“Since Dodd-Frank, all quiet on finance front for Charlotte Democrat.” As other House Financial Services Committee members questioned JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Watt attended another meeting.

When he arrived, it was too late. “He left early, without speaking”. At a time when banks have found themselves in political firestorms, Watt has made fewer floor speeches on banking  and introduced fewer bills on the subject.”

“And he hasn’t issued a single public statement on banking in the two years since Dodd-Frank passed.”

Commercial banks are among his largest donors. On May 2, the Center for Public Integrity headlined “Mel Watt enjoys close ties to financial industries,” saying:

He “has plenty of friends in the financial services industry.” He’s gotten “more campaign money from financial interests than any other industry or special interest.”

Since entering Congress in 1992, he got “$1.33 million in campaign contributions from the finance, real estate and insurance industries.”

Commercial banks are his biggest donors. Among others they include Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy and securitize about 90% of all new mortgages. They guarantee these loans. They’re a crucial part of the housing market. They’re vital to banks’ profitability.

Fannie and Freddie contributed to Watt’s campaigns from 2004 until they collapsed in 2008. According to Public Citizen’s Bartlett Naylor:

Watt’s “neither a champion nor a source of frustration. He is not somebody that we can count on to lead the charge” for responsible reform.

He “represents thousands of constituents who work for Bank of America. And that complicates his responsibility to ensure that Bank of America does not jeopardize the health of the nation….”

Appointing Watt may replace one Wall Street favorite with another. He helped get Dodd-Frank legislation passed. Wall Street lobbyists wrote the bill. It masqueraded as reform. It was business as usual.

Bill Black called it “notable for its incoherence and complexity.” It’s easy for clever lawyers to undercut reform. Doing so “further weakens an Act that begins weak.”

America experiences “recurrent intensifying financial crises.” It shows past lessons aren’t learned. Policies adopted “produced even more criminogenic environments.”

Real financial reform “could have been written in three pages.” One sentence could restore Glass-Steagall. Another could abolish the 2000 Commodities Futures Modernization Act.

It legitimized swap agreements and other hybrid instruments. Doing so opened a pandora’s box of trouble. It prevented regulatory oversight of derivatives and leveraging. It turned Wall Street sharks loose on unwary investors. Until it collapsed, it let Enron fleece investors.

It sailed through the House and Senate. Clinton signed it into law. He did so a month before leaving office.

Dodd-Frank fell far short of reform. Banks and other financial enterprises operate like before. Watt helped facilitate business as usual.

On October 30, 2009, Bloomberg headlined “Federal Reserve Policy Audit Legislation ‘Gutted,’ Paul says.”

Ron Paul introduced legislation several times to abolish the Fed. On February 26, 2009, he sponsored HR 1207: Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009.

Despite 320 co-sponsors, it died in committee. Paul was a House Financial Services Committee member. Watt chaired a domestic monetary policy and technology subcommittee panel.

Paul said he eliminated “just about everything” while preparing legislation for formal consideration. At the time, his spokesman didn’t comment. He said Watt wasn’t available to be interviewed.

He represents North Carolina’s 12th district. It includes Charlotte. It’s Bank of America’s headquarters. It’s the “biggest US lender,” said Bloomberg.

Naked Capitalism believes House Republicans will block his nomination. “And given that (he’d) be highly unlikely to do more than make symbolic policy changes and would likely trade meaningful putback settlements for that, we should count ourselves lucky.”

On May 5, Charles Johnson headlined “Housing nominee Mel Watt helped create the subprime crisis,” saying:

He helped “borrowers with poor credit buy homes with no down payment.”

In 2002, Watt, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, BB&T, and UJAMMA “announce(d) Pathways to Homeownership.” Doing so downplayed risks. They should have been highlighted.

Watt’s role in deregulating Fannie and Freddie came after they “spent billions in his congressional district.” In 2002, an estimated 82,000 Charlotte-area residents got risky loans.

They and others nationwide “led to the housing bubble and financial crisis.” Charlotte was one of the hardest hit cities.

In 2001, Watt helped initiate “With Ownership, Weath (WOW).” It “sought to add one million black households to the ranks of America’s homeowners by 2005.”

It set low standards to obtain mortgages. It let recipients buy homes they couldn’t afford. In July 2012, Bloomberg said over 1.5 million Americans aged 50 or older lost homes since the housing market collapse. So did many younger ones.

Many others teeter on foreclosure. The housing crisis is far from over. Low-income households are hardest hit. They remain most vulnerable. Instead of avoiding a irresponsible policy maker, Obama wants him as Federal Housing Finance Agency head.

In announcing his nomination, he said:

“Mel has led efforts to rein in unscrupulous mortgage lenders. He’s helped protect consumers from the kind of reckless risk-taking that led to the financial crisis in the first place.”

“And he’s fought to give more Americans in low-income neighborhoods access to affordable housing.”

Others think Obama’s choice lets a fox guard the hen house. He’s beholden to financial interests that control him.

Whether the Senate accepts or rejects him remains to be seen. It may not matter. If rejected, Obama can install him by recess appointment.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

http://www.dailycensored.com/fannie-and-freddie-in-good-hands-with-mel-watt/

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Recent Israeli airstrikes on Damascus have once again shed light on a defining western-led policy when it comes to the Middle East: strategic moral expediency. Once again, the counterproductive, and age-old policy of: “the enemy of my enemy: is my friend,” crops up in the realm of western foreign policy in the Middle East.

What is so counterintuitive for most, or, what most of the western “news” media are subverting or pretending not to recognise: is the recent Israeli strikes prove outright that Israel, acting on behalf of the US, is fighting on the same side as Al Qaeda in Syria. Western efforts to bolster supposed ‘moderate rebels’ have clearly only bolstered what has always been the main demographic of the militant ‘opposition’: Salafi/Jihaddi inspired and fomented militias, that do not espouse anything close to democracy. Apart from the obvious clash of religious ideology, strategically speaking, actually ousting Assad is where the radical Islamic militants and Bibi may differ. Bibi and Co. would no doubt be more than happy to see a much weakened Assad Government stay in some sort of power, and allow the Syrian conflict to rumble on for twenty years. Ideally, for Israel and the US the aim is a ‘Balkanized’ array of weak statelets. What Israel and the US do not want, is a strong and stable Syria, or Levant, or Greater Middle East for that matter; unless those ‘strong’ states fall under the auspices of the USA. (eg: KSA, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Jordan, Turkey et al)

This is another blatant example of western Government’s moral expediency when it comes to strategic objectives. Let’s not forget, it was the CIA that enabled the creation of Al Qaeda: in US attempt’s to “give Russia its Vietnam” during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

In this instance it has also been proven that the CIA, through mainly Saudi Arabia and the ISI, (Pakistani intelligence service) fomented, exploited and manipulated young, unemployed conservative Sunni muslim men from across the globe, to go and wage a holy war against the US’ number one enemy. This was not to enable any form of democracy or self-determination in Afghanistan, it was simply a war game: to bog down the Soviet Forces and ultimately bring about the end of the Soviet Union. Inevitably, the US and its clients enabling such radical anti-western ideologues to play as pawns in its geopolitical strategies, is where blowback comes into play, but is this ultimately a desired outcome? To create the perpetual enemy? One that is no real threat to ‘the homeland’, (or the elites that comfortably reside within) but can be exploited and manipulated to both leverage and attack US enemies. Or be used as a tool to suppress domestic populations and civil liberties, under the false guise of “National Security” and “the War on Terror”.

Long ago, the Bush administration made a concerted effort to consolidate, and expand on its economic and military ties with its predominantly autocratic Sunni leaders in the region. These are portrayed as attempts to curb the “Shiite crescent” or, realistically: pressure Iran into submission. This is not a new phenomenon, Since its UK-led inception, the West has enjoyed a “special relationship” with the brutal monarchy of Saudi Arabia. As empire crossed the Atlantic post WWII, so did these key relationships. (Though the UK still likes to pretend it is more than a Special Forces sub-contractor for the Pentagon.) This is both an economic necessity, and a strategic one for western powers. One crucial element we learn in Seymour Hersh’s enlightening piece “The Redirection”, is the Bush administrations willingness to use its Sunni allies in the region to fund, foment and propagate radical Islamic militants to subvert/leverage the Assad Government in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran’s resistance to US/Israeli/GCC hegemony. The sectarian division of Syria has been long-planned by these allies, one would be an utter fool to deny its now evident outcome.

Most Syria analysts with an ounce of honesty now fully admit the vast majority of supposed “rebels” are Salafi/Jihaddi inspired militants, or at least under the leadership and funding of such ideologues. Indeed, the US terrorist designated-militant jiahddi group linked directly to Al Qaeda: Jahbat al Nusra, have long been the prominent fighting force in Syria. This is no coincidence. While the US and its Gulf allies feign innocence, and claim the millions of dollars and thousands of tons of military aid they have provided has been allocated to ‘moderate rebels’: it is in fact the Salafi/Jihaddi groups that have risen and gained in quality and size of arsenal, recruitment, and success on the ground.

The military tide has most definitely changed in the SAA’s favour in recent weeks, the Syrian Army has routed the Salafi/Jihaddi militants in several key areas; this is the reasoning behind Israels recent raids on Damascus. It beggars belief that Assad, currently fighting for his life and his Governments stake in Syria, would move substantial quantities of sophisticated weapons out of Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The US and its allies (clients) are panicking, the “Redirection” has not gone precisely according to plan, (does US strategy ever go to plan?) and is currently reeling out of control. The extremist proxies Gulf autocrats have fomented and armed are a law unto themselves, and the ‘opposition in exile’ is as incoherent and incapable today, as it was on the day of its US/Qatari/Saudi creation. Whether the US has finally reneged on its proxies in Syria, and pulled the plug on its clients attempts to supply heavy weaponry remains to be seen. It is virtually impossible for the US to step up its overt military aid to jihaddi militants, so it must fall back on Israel. There are two key reasons for this. First, the Israel military is already an international pariah, with no credibility to lose in the middle east, the US is trying to hold on to what little credibility it has. Second, US jets using an Arab client’s airfield to launch strikes on a fellow Arab nation, would provide far too much domestic political backlash for the KSA, or any other client to allow it. Time and US perseverance may force someone into this role. But using Israel makes it irrelevant. The Jordanian Monarchy has already allowed Israeli drones to use its airspace, and as we know has been staging a huge multinational special forces base on Syria’s border, for quite some time.

One cannot honesty look at the current situation in Syria; the plethora of available evidence of Salafi/Jihaddist militants since the start of the conflict; the main donors and funders of supposed “freedom fighters”, and still deem it as anything other than a regional war. Instigated by the Bush administration and its GCC clients, and dutifully carried out by the Obama administration and the Neo-Con hawks that sway foreign policy in Washington. The ultimate goal was the swift overthrow of the Syrian Government, and leaving behind another failed state; incapable of resistance to US/Israeli/GCC hegemony in the region. That ship has sailed, the false democratic ‘revolution’ is long over. The SAA has regained in confidence and is winning its offensive, the media war on the Syrian Government seems also to be coming to a grinding standstill. Apart from the “massacre” and “chemical weapons” agitprop from Western and Gulf outlets, there is not much more they can throw at them. Much to the Wests chagrin, the Syrian government is still standing; it still has a strong and well equipped army that is winning its chosen battles; it still has popular support within its borders, and crucially, it still has the backing of international allies.

One cannot imagine if this were still being purported as a “grassroots democratic uprising,” that the US would be eager to use Israel and give the Assad regime such a propaganda coup. It is too late for falsehoods now, and desperate times call for desperate measures. What remains to be seen is whether the recent Israeli strikes were a precedent of more to come, an attempt to prolong the internal conflict and “level the playing field”, or simply, a provocation toward Iran.

Phil Greaves is a UK based writer/analyst, focusing on UK/US Foreign Policy and conflict analysis in the Middle East post WWII. http://notthemsmdotcom.wordpress.com/

Most of the world’s governments no longer use the death penalty. Among wealthy nations there is one exception remaining. The United States is among the top five killers in the world. Also in the top five: the recently “liberated” Iraq.

But most of the United States’ 50 states no longer use the death penalty. There are 18 states that have abolished it, including 6 in this new millennium, including Maryland this week. Thirty-one states haven’t used the death penalty in the past 5 years, 26 in the past 10 years, 17 in the past 40 years or more. A handful of Southern states – with Texas in the lead – do most of the killing.

The progress is slow and painful. Mississippi is right now having trouble deciding whether to spare a man just because he might be innocent. Maryland has perversely left five people waiting to be killed while banning the death penalty for any future cases. Next-door in Virginia we hold second place behind Texas and continue to kill.

Virginia electrocuted a man named Robert Gleason in January. Since then, Texas has killed four men, Ohio two, and Florida, Oklahoma, and Georgia one each – all by lethal injection. Since 1973, there have been 141 exonerations from death row nationwide, including an innocent Virginian who came within days of being killed.

If you’re convicted of killing a white person in Virginia, you’re over three times as likely to receive the death penalty as you would be if the victim had been black. The injustice and backwardness is staggering, but so is the lack of democracy. Only a third of Virginians tell pollsters they favor the death penalty.

The evil of the death penalty is not limited to the instances in which it is used – or to the corrosive influence it has on our culture. The death penalty primarily serves as a valuable chip in plea bargaining. Want someone to plead guilty, whether or not they actually are guilty? Threaten them with the death penalty. Who needs trials by jury (now used in under 2% of cases) when you have that kind of tool? And who has time for them when you’ve overloaded the system by treating drug use as a crime?

Remarkably, a former commonwealth’s attorney here in Charlottesville, Va., named Steve Deaton is campaigning for his old job with a commitment to never use or threaten to use the death penalty.

“I believe the death penalty is barbaric and has no place in modern Charlottesville courts,” Deaton says, reversing the electoral wisdom of many decades, which firmly holds that candidates must pretend to believe the death penalty is just and righteous and a deterrent to crime, even if the public thinks that’s nonsense.

“I am calling for a moratorium on death penalty prosecutions,” says Deaton. “During the past 20 years – that is, the term of the incumbent Commonwealth’s Attorney – a number of capital murder charges have been brought against some people, almost all of them poor.  Then the charge is often used as a bargaining chip to get the defendant to plead guilty to murder and accept a life sentence.  This practice of using the threat of death to plea bargain is legal, and under current ethical standards, considered ethical.  However, I find such a practice appalling. By engaging in this practice the prosecutor is tempting fate: what if their threat doesn’t work and the case goes to a jury?”

Many in Charlottesville oppose the death penalty. Deaton explains the very real possibility that it will nonetheless be employed here: “The notion that no Charlottesville jury will return a death sentence is misleading. In a capital murder case the jury has to be ‘death qualified,’ meaning that the jurors must believe in the death penalty.  Such a jury is not representative of the community!  Studies have shown that a ‘death qualified jury’ is also much more likely to convict.”

Deaton points out that prosecutors have a great deal of discretion: “A prosecutor does not have to bring a capital murder charge. They have the option of bringing a regular murder charge instead.”

If elected, Deaton intends to use the enormous discretion given to prosecutors to try to make punishments more reasonably fit crimes, including so-called drug crimes. While Charlottesville City Council failed by a vote of 3-2 in February to end jail time for possession of marijuana, Deaton intends to charge those possessing marijuana with a different charge: disorderly conduct. It’s technically a higher level charge – a Class 1 misdemeanor – but it does not carry the draconian punishments of loss of driver’s license, subjection to drug testing, ruined college acceptance and student loan prospects, immigration status, etc. “If a person makes a mistake, they should be punished. They shouldn’t have their lives ruined,” Deaton says.

Deaton aims to counter mass-incarceration, not add to it. “The state has built a new $100 million prison in Grayson County and there is talk of expanding our local jail,” he says. “All of this in spite of declining crime rates.  It is time to stop feeding the prison-industrial complex. I believe the goal of the justice system should be to empty out spaces in the jails and prisons – not to fill every available space!”

Of course, the system of mass incarceration creates a caste system by stamping the scarlet F of “Felon” on those released, no matter how many years of their lives are wasted in cages. Deaton favors restoring rights, including voting rights, for people convicted of nonviolent felonies.

Charlottesville has a chance to give the death penalty in Virginia a big push toward the door, which would help the United States and the world along that path. As Charlottesville only elects Democrats (and packs the full range of great to awful candidates into that one party) the election for Deaton is effectively the June 11^th primary. Anyone in Charlottesville can vote in that primary, without swearing any loyalty to any party. And anyone else can help to spread the word or donate to the campaign.

David Swanson’s books include “War Is A Lie.” He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook. 

An 83-year-old nun and two peace activists have been put on trial for breaching an enriched uranium complex in the United States, while protesting against nuclear weapons.

Sister Melissa Kirby, Michael Walli, and Greg Boertje-Obed have been charged with sabotage and destruction of federal property after they broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee last July, a federal official told court proceedings on Tuesday.

Authorities said the trio cut perimeter fences and walked through the complex for hours, spray-painting slogans and hammering on walls before they were finally caught.

The activists were protesting against “the criminality of this 70-year industry” including the making and refurbishing of “nuclear weapons at Y-12 [which] is both illegal under US and international law, and it is also immoral. Ultimately, we are required to follow the law of love and our consciences.”

“We spend more on nuclear arms than on the departments of education, health, transportation, disaster relief and a number of other government agencies that I can’t remember,” said the nun.

The incident exposed a major embarrassment for the US government, as they had to shut down operations for over two weeks at the nuclear sector’s equivalent of Fort Knox.

“It hurt our credibility and that credibility is tied to nuclear deterrence…It was an embarrassment for the Y-12 plant and the people who work there. It was an embarrassment for the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Agency) and the DOE (Department of Energy),” said Steven Erhart, manager of the nuclear site.

The Oak Ridge facility is the main site where enriched uranium is processed and stored during the production of nuclear weapons.

According to the United Nations, the US — which is the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons against human beings — has conducted over 1,000 nuclear tests since 1945.

GMA/KA

[1] German surrenders in Italy and on Lüneburg Heath: Germany Surrenders 1945, Washington, DC, 1976, pp. 2-3.

[2] Germans want separate surrender or at least gain time: Herbert Kraus, “Karl Dönitz und das Ende des Dritten Reiches”»,in Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed.), Ende des Dritten Reiches- Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs: Eine perspektivische Rückschau, Munich and Zürich, 1995, pp. 4-5, 12; Germany Surrenders 1945, p. 6; Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Die Amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, Munich, 1995, pp. 687, 965-67; Helene Keyssar and Vladimir Pozner, Remembering War: A U.S.-Soviet Dialogue, New York and Oxford, 1990, p. 233.

[3] Germans profit from delay: Henke, op. cit., pp. 967-68.

[4] Questionable procedures in Reims: Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, New York, 1968, p. 387; Germany Surrenders 1945, p. 8.

[5] Ceremony in Berlin: Germany Surrenders 1945, pp. 8-9.

[6] Kolko-quotation: Kolko, op. Cit., p. 388.

According to the White House, Israel has the right to defend itself (1). I would argue that it doesn’t. Based on the theft of another people’s land and denial of their right to return to the homes from which they fled or were driven, Israel no more than any other thief has the right to defend itself.

Judging by its indulgent attitude to Israeli aggressions, Washington claims that Israel has the right to defend itself in any way it pleases: by unprovoked airstrikes across international borders; by meting out collective punishment; by carrying out extrajudicial assassinations; by invasions and occupations; and through other outrages against international law, sovereignty and humanity. In fact, by doing what the United States, itself, regularly does.

The White House says that the most recent Israeli aggression, airstrikes carried out over the last few days against Syrian military facilities, were intended to stop a shipment of advanced surface-to-surface missiles from Iran to the Lebanese resistance organization, Hezbollah. Striking a dissenting note, The New York Times reported that, “Some American officials are unsure whether the new shipment was intended for use by Hezbollah or by the Assad government.” (2) Which means the airstrikes may have nothing to do with Israel “defending itself” and everything to do with Tel Aviv helping Syria’s Sunni rebels in what is, in large measure, a sectarian war, inflamed by outside interference, against an Alawi-dominated state that has (from Washington’s perspective) the wrong attitude to US free enterprise and (from Israel’s) the wrong attitude to the dispossession of the Palestinians. Or it may be that the missiles were intended for the Syrian military, but the Israelis struck as a precaution, in case the missiles were indeed destined for Hezbollah.

While indulging Israel for its aggressions, Washington denies North Korea the right to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles for self-defense, for the obvious reason that North Korea’s self-defense is self-defense against the United States. Likewise, the threat posed to Israel of Iranian-made Fateh-110 missiles in Hezbollah’s hands is that they bolster the resistance organization’s ability to defend both itself, and its benefactor, Iran, from Israeli attack. It’s no secret that Israel has been threatening war on Iran for some time on grounds that Iran’s civilian nuclear energy industry may, at some point, provide Tehran with the capability of developing what Israel already has in abundance: nuclear weapons.

What’s more, if Israel has the right to defend itself, why not Syria? It’s not as if the Assad government’s actions, in defense of secular pan-Arabism, have come anywhere close to matching the level of barbarity regularly visited by the Zionist regime on its opponents in defense of its settler ideology, or in helping to promote the imperial interests of its American benefactor and sponsor.

Earlier, the White House declared that Syria’s use of chemical weapons against terrorist insurgents would be a redline whose crossing would trigger a strong US response, presumably direct US military intervention in Syria’s civil war. Recent claims by Israel, France, Britain and one US intelligence agency of evidence that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against rebel forces–evidence the White House says is inconclusive–touched off a controversy over whether the Obama administration had blundered in setting a redline, and whether failure to act on even weak evidence undermines US credibility.

Lost in the polemic is the telling reality that Washington has set no redline for the insurgents’ use of the same weapons.

And that can’t be because there are no grounds to believe rebel forces would use deadly gas against Syrian loyalists. The UN independent commission of inquiry on Syria says there are strong, concrete suspicions that the rebels have used sarin gas (but has no evidence the Syrian government has deployed chemical weapons against the rebels.) (3)

Okay, let’s assume that the UN’s strong and concrete suspicions do reflect the rebels’ actual use of sarin gas against loyalist forces.

The obvious question (unasked as far as I can tell by the mass media) is where did the rebels’ chemical weapons come from? Were they captured from the Syrian military, or procured through a supplier of the rebels’ other weapons–Saudi Arabia, Qatar or a NATO state?

And does the United States plan to act on the UN’s strong and concrete suspicions?

The answer to the first question is uncertain. As to the second, the US might intervene to secure the rebels’ chemical weapons if the weapons have been captured from the Syrian army by Jihadists acting independently of US control, but it would likely be done quietly, to avoid raising embarrassing questions about the rebellion putting dangerous weapons into the hands of Islamists who might use them later against US targets (including, if the Assad government falls, a US-client regime in Damascus.)

On the other hand, if the weapons have been used by US-controlled opposition factions, an intervention won’t occur, unless the weapons were used without US approval. If so, measures–again quiet ones–will likely to be taken to curb their use, or to use them only at Washington’s direction.

Another possibility is that Washington colluded in the weapons’ use.

Clearly, Washington’s chemical weapons standards are contigent (sic: contingent) and not absolute. The redline against the Syrian defense forces provides Washington with a pretext for direct and open military intervention against Damascus when and if intervention is feasible. Since no intervention against the rebel forces is desired–on the contrary, only intervention on their behalf is on the agenda–a rebel redline is unnecessary, and restrictive. It’s not the use of chemical weapons that Washington opposes, but their use by a government fighting for survival against US predations. Anyone else can use chemical weapons with impunity so long as it’s done in the service of US foreign policy goals.

Finally, we might ask whether the country that has the greatest store of weapons of mass destruction, is the world’s largest manufacturer of them, and has been the most ardent user of them, would act to stop their use by rebel forces it has backed against a pan-Arab nationalist regime it has for decades sought to overthrow? Again, subject to the condition the rebels were under US control, not likely.

The United States professed opposition to weapons of mass destruction is entirely one-sided. It is applied selectively to governments and organizations that it, itself, or its proxies, are opposed to, typically because they have the wrong attitude to US free enterprise, or the wrong attitude to their proxies’ plunder of the land, natural resources and markets of other people.

Notes

1. Sam Dagher, Nour Malas and Joshua Mitnick, “Strikes in Syria raise alarm”, The Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2013.
2. Anne Barnard, Michael R. Gordon and Jodi Rudoren, “Israel targeted Iranian missiles in Syria attack”, The New York Times, May 4, 2013.
3. “Syrian rebels may have used Sarin” Reuters, May 5, 2013: “UN: ‘Strong suspicions’ that Syrian rebels have used sarin nerve gas,” Euronews, May 6, 2013.

While the Pentagon’s modernization budget for the pre-emptive nuclear option is a modest ten billion dollars (excluding the outlay by NATO countries). the budget for upgrading the US arsenal of “strategic nuclear offensive forces” is a staggering $352 billion over ten years. (See Russell Rumbaugh and Nathan Cohn,“Resolving Ambiguity: Costing Nuclear Weapons,” Stimson Center Report, June 2012).

These multi-billion military outlays allocated to develop“bigger and better nuclear bombs” are financed by the massive economic austerity measures currently applied in US and NATO countries.

The war economy is largely funded by compressing all categories of civilian government expenditure. In the US, these refurbished state of the art nuclear bombs are largely funded by the dramatic cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Humanity is at a dangerous crossroads. America is a “Killer State”. The gamut of economic austerity measures impoverish the American people while generously funding the “Killer State” through multi-billion dollar contracts with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon et al.

War preparations to attack Iran are in “an advanced state of readiness”. Hi tech weapons systems including nuclear warheads are fully deployed.

At the height of an Economic Depression, “War is Good for Business”.

Escalation is part of the military agenda. While Iran, is the next target together with Syria and Lebanon, the US-NATO military agenda also threatens Russia, China and North Korea.

The Western media, the Washington Think Tanks, the scientists and politicians, in chorus, obfuscate the untold truth, namely that war using nuclear warheads threatens the future of humanity.

The real threat to global security emanates from the US-NATO-Israel alliance.

The main actors in the Iran pre-emptive nuclear warfare

Thermo-nuclear weapons are deployed by the three “official” Nuclear Weapons States (NWS) of the Atlantic Alliance, namely the US, the UK and France. The official NWS status is established under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Five other NATO member countries (categorized under the NPT as“non-nuclear states”), namely Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey, possess an arsenal of B61 tactical nuclear warheads or “mini-nukes” (Made in America) which are deployed under national military command and are targeted at Iran. The B61 can be delivered by a variety of different aircraft.

Are these five countries in violation of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty of which they are signatories?

In relation to ongoing war plans, the US-NATO-Israel military alliance includes a total of nine countries which possess a nuclear weapons arsenal:

The three official NWS (US, UK, France) plus the five“Undeclared Nuclear States” (Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Turkey) plus the State of Israel (Undeclared Nuclear State). With the exception of Israel, these countries are signatories of the NPT.

Pre-emptive Nuclear Warfare

While reports tend to depict the tactical B61 bombs as a relic of the Cold war, the mini nukes are the preferred weapons system for pre-emptive nuclear war. Were an attack directed against Iran to be launched involving the deployment of B61 bunker buster nuclear bombs, these five countries, with Turkey and Italy in the forefront, would play a major strategic role.

The involvement of these five “non nuclear states” as major actors in a US sponsored pre-emptive nuclear war raises the issue of definition and categorization of nuclear weapons states. In the words of Time Magazine:

“Is Italy capable of delivering a thermonuclear strike?…
Could the Belgians and the Dutch drop hydrogen bombs on enemy targets?…

Germany’s air force couldn’t possibly be training to deliver bombs 13 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, could it?…

Nuclear bombs are stored on air-force bases in Italy, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands – and planes from each of those countries are capable of delivering them.” (“What to Do About Europe’s Secret Nukes.” Time Magazine, December 2, 2009)

The Time report is careful not to address the fundamental question. Are Turkey and Italy nuclear weapons states? The B61s are described as a leftover from the Cold War. The issue of post 9/11 pre-emptive warfare is not mentioned:

“These weapons are more than a historical oddity, says Time. They are a violation of the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) … that provides a legal restraint to the nuclear ambitions of rogue states.” (Ibid).

While Iran does not possess nuclear weapons capabilities as confirmed by the latest US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the nuclear weapons potential of these five countries —including delivery procedures— are formally acknowledged.

These five countries possess WMDs, yet they do not constitute—in the eyes of public opinion— a threat to global security. Moreover, at no time have these five countries been designated as “rogue states” or “undeclared nuclear weapons states”.

US and NATO military documents attest to the fact that the B61 is the weapon of choice of pre-emptive nuclear war as opposed to the larger thermo-nuclear bombs of the Cold War era. Moreover, were military action to be launched against Iran, these five countries would play a key role in the delivery of B61 bunker buster bombs with nuclear warheads.

The US had originally supplied some 480 B61 thermonuclear bombs to these five “non-nuclear states”, as well as to the United Kingdom, which is categorized as a Nuclear Weapons State (NWS). (See map below)

Casually disregarded by the Vienna based UN Nuclear Watchdog (IAEA), the US has actively contributed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in Western Europe and Turkey. While, some of these bombs were decommissioned as a result of political pressures, particularly in Belgium and Germany, the US —in liaison with NATO— has launched a multi-billion dollar modernisation program of its tactical nuclear weapons arsenal.

According to the National Resources Defense Council (August 2007), the number of B61 nuclear bombs in Europe has been reduced from 480 to 350, following the removal of 130 bombs from the Ramstein airbase in Germany.

As part of this European stockpiling and deployment, Turkey, which is a partner of the US-led coalition against Iran along with Israel, possesses some 90 thermonuclear B61 bunker buster bombs at the Incirlik air base. (National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe, February 2005). This is all the more significant in view of the “reconciliation” and renewed bilateral military cooperation between Ankara and Tel Aviv in the wake of President Obama’s March visit to Israel.

The stockpiling and deployment of tactical B61 (including the B61-11 earth penetrating warhead) in these five “non-nuclear states” are intended for targets in the Middle East. In accordance with “NATO strike plans”, these thermonuclear B61 bunker buster bombs (stockpiled by the“non-nuclear states”) could be launched against Iran, Syria and Russia:

“The approximately 480 nuclear bombs in Europe [350 according to 2007 estimate] are intended for use in accordance with NATO nuclear strike plans, the report asserts, against targets in Russia or countries in the Middle East such as Iran and Syria.

The report shows for the first time how many U.S. nuclear bombs are earmarked for delivery by non-nuclear NATO countries. In times of war, under certain circumstances, up to 180 of the 480 nuclear bombs would be handed over to Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey for delivery by their national air forces. No other nuclear power or military alliance has nuclear weapons earmarked for delivery by non-nuclear countries.”

Does this mean that Iran or Russia, which are potential targets of a nuclear attack originating from one or other of these five so-called non-nuclear states should contemplate defensive pre-emptive nuclear attacks against Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey? The answer is no, by any stretch of the imagination.

While these “undeclared nuclear states” casually accuse Tehran of developing nuclear weapons, without documentary evidence, they themselves have capabilities of delivering nuclear warheads, which are targeted at Iran. To say that this is a clear case of“double standards” by the IAEA and the “international community” is a understatement.

While political pressures have been exerted in recent years towards decommissioning the stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons, the arsenal of B61 bunker buster bombs with nuclear warheads remains fully operational. In the case of a conflict with Iran, mini nukes in the five non nuclear states would be actively deployed in liaison with NATO, which has fully endorsed the doctrine of nuclear pre-emption. According to the Pentagon:

… keeping these weapons in Europe is that they allow NATO members to participate in shaping alliance nuclear policy [i.e. pre-emptive nuclear doctrine]. In this view, transatlantic ties are strengthened when the risks and costs of deploying and securing nuclear weapons are shared between the US and the respective host nations. (Quoted in “Parting words: Gates and tactical nuclear weapons in Europe”. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 14 July 2011)

Modernising the Mini-Nukes Arsenal

The decommissioning of the B61 nukes stockpiled in Western Europe and Turkey is a smokescreen. The European tactical nuclear weapons project is not being phased out as some reports have suggested. Quite the opposite. In 2010, the US National Nuclear Security Administration initiated a program “to refurbish and extend the life of the B61 bomb” at an initial estimated cost of 4 billion dollars (Ibid). By 2012, the mini nukes refurbishing program had skyrocketed to $10 billion. (US Department of Defence, Case Independent Cost Assessment for B61 LEP, Washington, July 13, 2012)

Described by the Federation of American Scientists, as “a gold plated nuclear bomb project”, this initiative consists in modernizing the existing pre-emptive nuclear arsenal of B61 tactical nuclear weapons deployed in the five undeclared nuclear states. Moreover, a new version of the B61 bunker buster bomb is envisaged: the B61-12. The latter is to be developed for deployment in Western Europe and Turkey with the backing of NATO and the German government, (Federation of American Scientists, November 2012).

The Obama administration and Congress have pushed the program forward despite the enormous cost … of refurbishing such complex weapons … Advocates, including the Obama administration..

Germany: Nuclear Weapons Producer

Among the five “undeclared nuclear states”, “Germany remains the most heavily nuclearized country with three nuclear bases (two of which are fully operational) and may store as many as 150 [B61 bunker buster ] bombs” (National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe. In accordance with “NATO strike plans”, these tactical nuclear weapons are also targeted at the Middle East.

While Germany is not categorized officially as a nuclear weapons state, it produces nuclear warheads for the French Navy. It stockpiles tactical nuclear weapons (Made in America) and it has the capabilities of delivering nuclear weapons. Moreover, The European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company — EADS , a Franco-German-Spanish joint venture, controlled by the powerful Daimler Group is Europe’s second largest military producer, supplying France’s M51 nuclear missile.

Germany imports and deploys tactical nuclear weapons from the US. EADS produces nuclear warheads which are exported to France. Yet Germany is classified as a non-nuclear state.

Dangerous Cross Roads

The tactical nuclear weapons deployed by the five non declared nuclear states are under national command and could be used in a pre-emptive US-NATO sponsored nuclear attack against Iran.

Tactical nuclear weapons are also deployed by Israel.

While it is unlikely that nuclear weapons would be used at the outset of an attack, they could be envisaged as part of a scenario of military escalation.

It is, therefore, important that public opinion in Western Europe, Turkey and Israel be made aware of the consequences of pre-emptive warfare and that political pressures be exerted on the governments of these 5 countries, with a view to blocking the deployment of the B61 nuclear warheads in their respective military bases as well as withdrawing outright from ongoing US-NATO pre-emptive war plans directed against Iran.

Tactical nuclear weapons are in essence slated to be used against non-nuclear states in the middle East. Their use was contemplated in both the Iraq war in 2003 as well against Libya in 2011.

The focus on tactical nuclear weapons (mini-nukes) as part of the conventional war arsenal, does not mean that the the US and its allies have scrapped the idea of using their arsenal of larger strategic thermonuclear weapons. While the latter would not be used against a non-nuclear state in the Middle East, they are deployed and targeted against Russia, China and North Korea.

For those who believe the use of thermonuclear nuclear weapons belongs to a bygone era, think twice.

For further details on the dangers of Nuclear War, see the author’s most recent book: Towards a World War III Scenario:The Dangers of Nuclear War, Global Research, Montreal, 2011.

Originally published by RT-Edge. The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

The US state of Delaware has become the nation’s 11th state to legalize same-sex marriage in a largely political move led by President Barack Obama’s Democratic Party to establish the divinely-forbidden practice as a national norm.

Delaware State Senate approved the so-called marriage bill 12 to 9 on Tuesday, sending it to the states Democratic Governor Jack Markell, who signed it into law.

This is while homosexuality and same-sex marriage has clearly been condemned by all divine religions in the world as forbidden and widely regarded as contrary to human natural instincts.

The move was widely viewed by US observers as part of a rapid shift on the issue that is establishing same-sex marriage the norm in liberal parts of the nation that are largely governed by lawmakers from the Democratic Party in which Zionist Jews and homosexuals hold major influence.

The move in Delaware, combined with Rhode Island’s passage of a similar bill last week, means that same-sex marriage is currently legal in most of the Northeast United States, from Maine through Maryland, with the exceptions of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where its Republican Governor Chris Christie has blocked a marriage bill passed by the Legislature.

Supporting same-sex marriage has become “almost a requirement for the Democratic Party’s elected officials, at least on the national level,” according to local media analysts, and the move toward legalization in Democratic-leaning states seems likely to continue.

So far, however, there has been little sign of a shift in more conservative, Republican-leaning states, suggesting a major divide across the US on the issue, which may persist for many years.

MFB/MFB

Activist group Anonymous has announced a major global protest effort on the ground and online to mark the 100th day of the hunger strike waged by captives held at US Guantanamo military prison to object to their indefinite detention without charges or trials.

“We stand in solidarity with the Guantanamo hunger strikers. We will shut down Guantanamo,” said an online statement posted by the activist group on Tuesday.

Describing the American military detention and torture facility as a “concentration camp” and “and ongoing war crime,” Anonymous further called on its supporters to join three days of massive protests from May 17 through 19 against the prison camp.

According to official figures by prison authorities, out of the 166 captives held at the US military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, over 100 have joined the hunger strike with at least 21 being forced-fed to prevent their demise, a move that rights groups have condemned as torture.

This is while inmate lawyers have put the number of hunger strikers at 130 or more. They further say that dozens of the detainees remain in captivity years after being cleared for release.

Anonymous did not elaborate on how it would go about prompting the shutdown of the notorious prison camp but vowed that “twitterstorms, email bombs and fax bombs” would be part of its anti-Guantanamo campaign this month.

It further posted phone numbers for the White House, US Southern Command and the Pentagon on its website, calling on supporters to “phonebomb” US authorities with calls against Guantanamo’s prison camp.

“Guantanamo Bay must be closed at once, and the prisoners should be either returned to their home countries or given a fair trial in a federal court. Guantanamo Bay is an ongoing war crime. Anonymous will no longer tolerate this atrocity,” their statement added.

The group also censured the Obama administration’s failure to deliver on his promise to close down the detention facility and further lashed out at military administrators of the camp for force-feeding some hunger strikers, a move that was dismissed by the UN as torture and in violation of international law.

The hunger strike by Guantanamo inmates initially began in early February over charges of mistreatment by prison guards, including the mishandling of copies of the Quran in possession of the detainees.

MFB/MFB

The US Defense Department has released a survey study showing a 35 % climb in sexual assault cases in the military, just two days after an officer leading Air Force’s sexual assault prevention programs was himself detained and charged with sexual battery.

The Pentagon report, released on Tuesday, estimates that 26,000 American military service members were sexually assaulted in 2012, a major heap from 19,000 such cases reported during 2010.

In a separate report, also published on Tuesday, the US military further said that it recorded 3,374 sexual assault reports in 2012, up from 3,192 in the previous year, indicating that many sexual assault victims continue not to report the crimes out of fear of vengeance or lack of justice under the military’s system of prosecution.

This is while an Air Force Lt. General reversed a guilty verdict in late 2012 in a major sexual assault case involving a senior air force commander.

According to Pentagon officials, out of the 26,000 male and female soldiers that responded the sexual assault survey, 6.1 % of women and 1.2 percent of men said they had been subjected to sexual assault in the past year, ranging from rape to “unwanted sexual touching.”

Responding to the survey study and the arrest of the officer leading sexual assault prevention programs in the Air Force for sexually assaulting a woman while drunk, top US officials and congressional lawmakers expressed anger about the seemingly unstoppable sexual assault trend among the American armed forces.

“The bottom line is, I have no tolerance for this,” said President Barack Obama. “If we find out somebody’s engaging in this stuff, they’ve got to be held accountable, prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged. Period.”

Obama, however, did not at all protest the recent reversal of a guilty verdict of a top Air Force commander for persistently engaging in sexual assault offenses against female subordinates.

Female lawmakers at a Tuesday hearing of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, however, expressed outrage at testimonies offered by two senior Air Force officers, suggesting that they were making progress in “ending” the sexual assault problem in their branch.

“If the man in charge for the Air Force in preventing sexual assaults is being alleged to have committed a sexual assault this weekend,” said New York’s Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, “obviously there’s a failing in training and understanding of what sexual assault is, and how corrosive and damaging it is to good order and discipline.”

Gillibrand was referring to the arrest of the 41-year-old Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Krusinski for sexually handling a woman in parking lot of a restaurant in Arlington, Virginia.

Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, meanwhile, announced at the same hearing that she was holding up the nomination of Lt. Gen. Susan Helms to become the vice commander of the Air Force’s Space Command due to her unexplained decision to reverse guilty verdict of the Air Force commander convicted of sexual assault.

McCaskill said she wanted more information about why General Helms overturned a jury conviction in the sexual assault case last year.

MFB/MFB

Should We Kill Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?

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Posted on May 7, 2013

AP

By Bill Blum

According to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, more than 70 percent of Americans support the death penalty for 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev if he is found guilty of perpetrating the Boston Marathon bombing.

So, will the Obama administration and the Department of Justice, ever determined to stay tough in the war on terror and safeguard the nation’s security, give the people what they want? The answer, contrary to popular sentiment, is probably not.

Tsarnaev will be eligible for execution if convicted on federal charges of using a weapon of mass destruction and maliciously destroying property resulting in death. And the carnage wrought at the marathon–three people dead and more than 260 wounded, some badly burned, others requiring amputations–was horrific. Surely then the administration, which has ordered lethal drone strikes of dubious legality abroad, has no scruples about the morality of imposing capital punishment at home.

It doesn’t, but the Obama administration is nothing if not pragmatic. In the end, the White House and the DOJ will likely opt to avoid the risks inherent in taking the Tsarnaev case to trial and thereafter weathering a long and drawn-out appeal, and instead offer Tsarnaev a deal to plead guilty and be sentenced to life in prison in return for future cooperation in the government’s continuing investigation.

Despite all its bravado, the Obama administration–and the Bush one before it–entered into plea bargains in several high-profile terrorism prosecutions, including those of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber; and Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber. And although none of those cases involved capital crimes, as no bombs were ignited and no one was killed, the most notable terror prosecution the DOJ actually sought the death penalty in–the 2006 case of 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui–ended with a jury verdict recommending against it. Instead, Moussaoui was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In endorsing a plea with Tsarnaev, the administration would be following form and, above all, playing the odds. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since the restoration of the federal death penalty in 1988, the government has tried a total of 190 such cases involving 281 defendants. Some of the cases were resolved before reaching a verdict, but in the instances in which juries were tasked with choosing between life and death, they imposed 143 life sentences and 72 death ones.

Jurors, as opposed to members of the public responding anonymously to opinion polls, have a hard time playing God and condemning other people to die. Yet that is exactly what the current system of capital punishment, in place both at the federal level and in the 32 states that retain the death penalty, calls upon them to do. It also helps explain the risks federal prosecutors face in pressing for the death penalty against Tsarnaev.

Under the rules of “guided discretion”–the name given to the version of capital punishment that the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision of Gregg v. Georgia ruled constitutional–juries must balance and weigh specified aggravating and mitigating factors relating to the charged offense, as well as the defendant’s background and character, to determine who should live and who should be executed. In the federal system, aggravating factors include a defendant’s prior felony convictions and whether the offense presently charged was committed in a “heinous, cruel, or depraved” manner. Mitigating factors include the absence of a prior criminal record and whether the defendant acted under duress, suffered from a severe mental or emotional disturbance or was a relatively minor participant in the charged crime.

Under the federal statutes that will apply to Tsarnaev, moreover, the government will be required to provide advance notice to the defense of the specific aggravating factors it will try to prove, and it will have the burden of proving those factors beyond a reasonable doubt. Tsarnaev, by contrast, will be required to prove mitigating circumstances only by a preponderance of the evidence, a far more lenient standard. 

It’s easy to see from the extensive news coverage of the bombings that Tsarnaev will have at least three mitigating factors he can bring up–his youth and clean prior criminal history, and the claim that he acted under the dominance of his older, more evil and now-deceased brother. He will also have at his disposal a group of very experienced lawyers from the federal public defender’s office as well as renowned San Diego attorney Judy Clarke, whose past clients have included Susan Smith, who was convicted of drowning her two children in South Carolina; the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski; Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph; and Gabrielle Giffords assailant Jared Loughner. All faced the death penalty and all, with Clarke’s guidance, avoided it.

Sparing Tsarnaev’s life–should that come to pass–will undoubtedly be welcomed by those who want to see capital punishment abolished as a barbaric relic of the past. Still, any comfort that abolitionists or progressives may take should be measured and brief. The erosion of civil liberties in the post 9/11 era will continue unabated, as will the use of capital punishment generally.

Since 1990, according to Amnesty International, an average of three countries each year have abolished the death penalty, and today more than two-thirds of the world’s nations have ended capital punishment in law or practice. The U.S. is not among them. Presently, there are 61 people awaiting execution in federal prisons, while more than 3,000 others are housed on death rows at the state level.

Even if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev doesn’t join them, a massive amount of work will remain to be done before this country joins the vast majority of the civilized world and outlaws the death penalty, not simply as cruel and unusual punishment, but as a phony and ineffective means of deterring deadly crime, even in the name of national security.

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Stephen Hawking Boycotts Israel

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Posted on May 7, 2013

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Professor Stephen Hawking in the form of Lego.

Perhaps the most famous living scientist is backing out of a major conference in Jerusalem over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Hawking came under pressure from an international campaign, but says he made the decision after hearing from his contacts in Palestinian academia.

The Guardian explains:

Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president’s conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres’s 90th birthday.

Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking’s approval described it as “his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there”.

According to the paper, Hawking has been to Israel four times previously, and after the 2008-2009 bombardment of Gaza, he compared the situation to “South Africa before 1990.”

–Posted by Peter Z. Scheer. Follow him on Twitter: @peesch.

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By Mike Head
8 May 2013

Australia’s military conducted a training exercise in Sydney’s central Martin Place at 1 a.m. last Thursday, involving about 50 heavily-armed Special Air Services (SAS) commandos. It was one of the most visible mobilisations of troops in a city centre during any of the frequent domestic exercises conducted since 2001 on the pretext of combatting potential terrorist threats.

Although staged on a far smaller scale, there were strong similarities to the martial law-style lockdown imposed on the US city of Boston two weeks earlier, which included curfews, house-to-house searches, roadblocks, and the shutdown of transport.

During the hour-long exercise, soldiers effectively sealed off the surrounding area, which houses major banks and finance houses. According to the Daily Telegraph, soldiers “kept guard at checkpoints”, “secured the area” and maintained “sentry positions.”

The Telegraph described the scene as follows: “[A] convoy of dark Toyota 4WDs, with their spotlights blazing, sped down Macquarie St and burst onto Martin Place to unload a team of highly specialised Australian Defence Force counter-terrorism soldiers.

“With rifles drawn, faces covered in balaclavas and gas masks, and night vision goggles perched on their helmets, about 50 camouflaged soldiers fanned out through Martin Place in near-perfect silence in search of mock terrorists that had overtaken the underground Martin Place train station.”

A media alert issued by the military two days earlier referred to “counter- terrorism training exercises,” justifying the operation in broad terms, saying it was “conducted to ensure that the Australian Defence Force has the highest level of capability to support Australia’s national interests.” This language raises many issues. Exactly what are these “national interests” and what other preparations are being made by the government and the military to protect them?

According to the media alert, the Martin Place operation was just one of a number to be conducted in and around Sydney between April 30 and May 10, some in conjunction with the state police. There was to be a “maritime training exercise” around the waters surrounding two Sydney Harbour naval bases, an exercise at Sydney Airport, and helicopter training around the Holsworthy army base, Parramatta gaol and the Sydney International Equestrian Centre.

“The soldiers involved in these exercises will be carrying weapons and tactical equipment, and will also use simulation ammunition and hand-held pyrotechnics as part of the training,” the alert stated, but “local residents and bystanders should not be alarmed if they notice an increased movement of vehicles, military personnel and helicopters.”

Defence Media Operations refused to answer a written list of questions from the W orld S ocialist W eb S ite about the exercises, including about which units were involved, when the operation was planned, whether the frequency of exercises would increase in the light of the Boston bombings, and what legal powers were invoked.

The defence media office would only confirm that exercises were conducted “in and around Sydney” and that “all relevant authorities were consulted.” Its email message concluded: “In order to protect operational techniques, tactics and procedures, Defence is unable to provide imagery or further detail regarding this activity.”

Wide legal powers do exist to deploy the military internally, along the lines seen in Boston. Military callout legislation was introduced, with no public debate, in 2000, on the pretext of protecting the Sydney Olympics, and expanded in 2006, in the name of shielding the Melbourne Commonwealth Games.

In an “emergency,” two government ministers or the armed forces chief can call out the military. Soldiers can then can seize buildings, places and means of transport, detain people, search premises and seize possessions. If the ministers declare a “general security area,” these powers expand to include personal searches, erection of barriers and stopping means of transport. If a “designated area” is declared within a general security zone, troops can control all movements of traffic and people, and issue directions to individuals.

Military personnel can also interrogate people and order the handing over of documents. No one has the legal right to refuse on the grounds of self-incrimination. Instead, they can be jailed for non-compliance.

These powers can be invoked in broad and vague circumstances–a supposed threat to “Commonwealth interests” or “critical infrastructure,” or the danger of undefined “domestic violence.” These terms could cover any eruption of major social unrest. They go well beyond combatting terrorism, which has also been defined in sweeping terms, with the potential to cover many traditional forms of political or industrial protest.

Since 2001, military-police operations have been conducted every year to accustom public opinion to the sight of heavily-armed troops in cities and suburbs. Far from scaling back these exercises, the Labor governments of Rudd and Gillard have widened their scope, beyond “counter-terrorism.”

In Canberra last July, for example, residents of suburban Belconnen were subjected to low-flying helicopter movements and simulated bomb explosions. That exercise was held, according to a military statement, to ensure that “the highest level of capability” existed for “times of civil emergency.”

Two weeks later, the army’s Special Operations Command conducted a fortnight of “maritime counter-terrorism and emergency response scenario training” around Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay. The purpose was said to be wider than responding to a terrorist threat. Special Operations Commander Australia, Major General Gus Gilmore, said the military “provides support to civil authorities, should it be required in the event of a civil emergency.”

Over the past decade, the SAS has spearheaded the Australian involvement in the US-led invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, specialising in night-time raids on homes, in which countless civilians have been killed. During the same period, two SAS contingents have been established for domestic interventions–Tactical Assault Group (TAG)-East, based in Sydney, and TAG-West, based in Perth.

The simultaneous deployment of the SAS at home and abroad underscores the close connection between the drive to war–with the Gillard government unconditionally backing Washington’s preparations for war against China–and plans to suppress popular resistance to the agenda of militarism and austerity.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard is acutely aware of the potential for political and social unrest. In 2011, she personally held a discussion with Australian Federal Police chief Tony Negus to review the measures that would be taken in response to riots like those that had just occurred in Britain (see: “In wake of British riots, Australian government preparing for youth unrest”).

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By Fred Mazelis
8 May 2013

The hunger strike involving more than 100 detainees at the Guantanamo prison camp entered its fourth month this past Monday.

Lawyers for the detainees, most of whom have been held without charges for more than 11 years, said that up to 130 of the 166 detainees remaining at Guantanamo have joined the strike, which began on February 6. US officials admitted that the number was more than 100, nearly two-thirds of the prisoners.

The detainees are being held indefinitely, without being charged or tried. Hope for eventual release is evaporating and their lawyers are unable, after years of fruitless appeals, to give them any reason for optimism.

President Barack Obama has done nothing to carry out his promise to close Guantanamo. The diplomatic office charged with resettling detainees who had been cleared for release was closed several months ago. Military authorities have requested $200 million for renovating the prison camp, preparing for its use far into the future.

Under these conditions, as US Army Captain Jason Wright, the attorney for several of the detainees, explained, “The hunger strike is a political protest.”

The current protest began to rapidly expand after events of February 6, when the authorities began a noticeably more punitive regime. Guards reportedly confiscated all “comfort items.” A four-page affidavit from one of the detainees, an Afghan, Obaidullah, declares, according to a report in the Miami Herald, “When the soldiers conducted their searches, I and other detainees saw US soldiers rifling through the pages of many Qurans and handling them roughly. This constitutes desecration. It has not been searched in five years.”

The British Independent newspaper, in its edition of May 5, provided an account, based on first-hand reports, of the actual conditions at Guantanamo, including the gruesome procedure of force-feeding.

“Twice a day, the 23 most weak are taken into a room,” the newspaper reported. “Their wrists, arms, stomach, legs and head are strapped to a chair and repeated attempts are made to force a tube down their noses to their stomachs. It is an ugly procedure as they gag and wretch, blood dripping from their nostrils.”

The US authorities claim the force-feeding is aimed at preventing suicides, which would deepen the political crisis already facing the US government over the brazen violations of international law that Guantanamo has come to symbolize all over the world.

These techniques are not motivated by the slightest concern for the detainees. Guantanamo inmates have reported that the feeding tubes, instead of being left in, are inserted twice daily for maximum pain and discomfort. These methods are a vindictive effort to punish those participating in the protest and discourage others from joining the hunger strike. In this respect, however, they have been a miserable failure, as the protest grows both in numbers and in worldwide impact.

It has become increasingly clear that many detainees are prepared to starve themselves to death. As one of them, British citizen Shaker Aamer, told his attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, “It is possible that I may die in here. I hope not, but if I do die, please tell my children that I loved them above all else, but that I had to stand up for the principle that they cannot just keep holding people without a trial, especially when they have been cleared for release.”

Jason Wright described his client Obaidullah as a 115-pound “bag of bones.” Obaidullah said he was “losing all hope… 11 years of my life have been taken from me.”

“When I walked into the room he was demonstrably changed,” said Wright. “He said, ‘They won’t treat us with dignity, they are treating us like dogs.’ There is an urgency. It is clear that if this hunger strike continues there will be deaths. These men are going to die in this prison for nothing. It is an absolute outrage.”

Another attorney, Omar Farrah, told Agence France-Presse that he was “stunned by how much my clients are resolved” to continue the hunger strike, even in the face of death. “They have nothing to lose,” he said. “They want to live, they want to live with freedom and dignity.”

Shaker Aamer was approved for release more than five years ago. He is among a total of 86 prisoners whom even US authorities admit they have no reason to hold, but who remain in Guantanamo for reasons that are themselves violations of international law and elementary human rights. The White House has refused to release more than 50 Yemeni detainees because of alleged Al Qaeda activity in that country.

A total of 779 detainees have passed through the Guantanamo camp since it opened in January 2002. Almost all of them are guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As Stafford Smith explained, they were captured in Pakistan or Afghanistan and “sold to the Americans for a reward.” They are collateral damage in the effort of the Bush administration, supported by the Democrats and continued by Obama, to give human form to the enemy in the “war on terror.” The US government, both under Bush and Obama, continues to arrogate to itself the right to determine the fate of these men, in a method of imprisonment that recalls the Middle Ages.

Most prisoners are being held in solitary confinement in empty windowless cells, according to the Independent. They have been stripped of all possessions and the air conditioning has been turned all the way up to create maximum discomfort. Guards deliberately disturb prayer times and sleeping at night.

Moroccan detainee Younous Chekkouri spoke to his lawyers via telephone, describing sleeping on a concrete floor and using his shoes as a pillow. “Pain starts immediately when I’m on the floor,” he said. “Pain in my neck, pain in my chest. Finally, at night they gave us blankets. It was very cold. Water is now a privilege. They are treating us like animals.”

Many of the detainees have lost about one-third of their weight. Usually, once this figure reaches 40 percent of normal body weight, starvation sets it, with the body consuming muscles and vital organs.

The determination of the detainees has aroused the anger of millions around the world, while op-ed columns and other statements reflect the growing awareness of the political catastrophe that the prison camp has become for the US government. California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who earlier had called for a ban on transfers of detainees to Yemen, has now changed her stance and called on Obama to expedite these shifts before the crisis gets any worse.

An online petition is being circulated by Colonel Morris Davis, former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo. The petition, calling on Obama to either free the detainees or put them on trial, secured more than 137,000 signatures in a few days.

Newspaper editorialists, lawyers and others have called Guantanamo a stain on America’s global image. Whatever the White House and Congress do in the coming weeks and months, however, nothing will erase this stain. It is not against the American people, but against the US ruling class and its obedient servants in both political parties. History will record the barbarism of Guantanamo as a symptom of the economic decay and moral bankruptcy of American capitalism.

By Thomas Gaist
8 May 2013

US officials continued to press for war against Syria yesterday, dismissing United Nations investigator Carla del Ponte’s statement that Western-backed opposition forces, not the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, had used chemical weapons.

Del Ponte’s comment, based on an investigation including extensive interviews by UN officials, tore to shreds the lie with which Washington has tried to justify its drive to war–namely, that it is attacking Syria to protect the people from Assad’s use of chemical weapons. (See also: “UN says US-backed opposition, not Syrian regime, used poison gas”).

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney summarily rejected del Ponte’s report without offering a shred of evidence to refute her statement. “We are highly skeptical of any suggestions that the opposition used chemical weapons. We find it highly likely that any chemical weapon use that has taken place in Syria was done by the Assad regime. And that remains our position,” Carney stated.

There is every reason to believe, in fact, that the opposition has used chemical weapons, as it has apparently received training on such weapons by the US or allied forces. According to a CNN report in December, the US has dispatched contractors and mercenaries for the purpose of training the rebels to “secure stockpiles and handle [chemical] weapons sites and materials.”

Opposition forces have received numerous shipments of weapons and equipment overseen by the United States and allied regimes such as Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Last December, opposition fighters posted a video on YouTube showing them testing chemical weapons and declaring their readiness to use them.

Taking their lead from Carney, US lawmakers issued calls for a full-scale attack on Syria. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (Democrat of New Jersey) submitted legislation that would officially authorize the Obama administration to arm the so-called “rebels.”

“The Assad regime has crossed a red line that forces us to consider all options,” Menendez said in a written statement, treating as fact the completely unsubstantiated claim, refuted by del Ponte, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against the opposition.

Over the weekend, Senator John McCain (Republican of Arizona) asserted that Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons use has been crossed and that the time had come for a “game-changing” escalation against Syria.

Senator Bob Casey (Democrat of Pennsylvania) asserted the existence of a “broad consensus” in favor of the US and its allies creating a “safe zone” inside Syria. This would involve large-scale air strikes against Syrian air defenses and the carving out of a significant portion of Syrian territory under the control of the imperialist powers.

Senator Robert Corker (Republican of Tennessee), a senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, stated on Tuesday: “I do think we’ll be arming the opposition shortly.” Corker went on to say that “we do have to change the equation… The moderate opposition groups we support are not as good at fighting.”

The senators’ calls for war come amid stepped-up military planning against Syria. On Monday, the New York Times reported that the US, Britain and France are secretly discussing coordinated air strikes for the purpose of imposing a no-fly zone over Syria. The newspaper also reported that the US military, which has been working out plans to attack Syria for months, has been told by the Obama administration to step up its planning and coordinate it with key American allies.

The braying for war from Congress and the media follows Israeli air strikes against Syria last Thursday and Sunday. There are reports that 42 Syrian soldiers were killed by Israeli strikes near Damascus.

A Hezbollah representative claimed that the Israeli attacks were launched in support of the opposition groups: “This shelling is an attempt at giving a morale boost to the terrorists and takfiris [extremists] and all those who are fighting to destroy Syria from within,” he said.

On purpose of the Israeli strikes was to test Syria’s air defense capacities amid preparations for massive air strikes by the US, France and Britain. According to Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, “Israel’s success does indicate that the purely military risks in enforcing some form of no-fly or no-move zone are now more limited than when the fighting in Syria began.”

Cordesman made clear that imposing a so-called “no-fly zone” would involve large-scale war: “It would take a massive US air and cruise missile attack… difficult for even two carrier groups to carry out and sustain.”

A May 7 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, “The Non-Intervention War,” made the case for a major war against Syria. The Journal wrote, “The US could still steer this conflict toward a better outcome if Mr. Obama has the will. At this stage this would require more than arming some rebels. It probably means imposing a no-fly zone and air strikes against Assad’s forces. We would also not rule out the use of American and other ground troops to secure the chemical weapons.

“The immediate goal would be to limit the proliferation of WMD, but the most important strategic goal continues to be to defeat Iran, our main adversary in the region. The risks of a jihadist victory in Damascus are real, at least in the short term, but they are containable by Turkey and Israel.”

The US is preparing for yet another imperialist war on the scale of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Though cynically advertised to the American public as an extension of the so-called “war on terror” against Al Qaeda, the goal of such a war will be to consolidate US imperialism’s control over the entire Middle East and its vast energy resources. The US ruling elite is not concerned about defeating “the terrorists,” who are in fact its allies.

The ease with which the Obama administration dismissed reports of Al Qaeda-linked opposition forces mounting attacks with chemical weapons is particularly significant, especially as lies about Al Qaeda acquiring WMD were a major pretext for invading Iraq. This underlies the long-running and continuing alliance between US imperialism and the most reactionary Islamist forces.

Starting in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, during the Soviet-Afghan war, US intelligence oversaw the arming of Islamist forces, including Osama bin Laden, who went on to fight as shock troops in US-backed wars in the Balkans and the Caucasus in the 1990s. While certain elements of Al Qaeda were targeted by the US after the September 11 attacks, Washington’s political connections with these forces were maintained during the 2000s.

For its 2011 Libyan war and now in Syria, the US mobilized Al Qaeda-linked forces of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and, in Syria, the Al-Nusra Front.

Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to Moscow on Tuesday, attempting to gain Russian support for US regime-change efforts in Syria. Together with China, Russia has vetoed three separate UN resolutions condemning Assad for his government’s crackdown on the US-backed “rebel” groups.

“The United States believes that we share some very significant common interests with respect to Syria–stability in the region, not having extremists creating problems throughout the region and elsewhere,” Kerry declared.

The United States and Russia reportedly agreed to organize a conference on the war that both the Assad regime and the opposition would attend.

Nevertheless, Kerry received a chilly welcome from Putin, who kept him waiting for hours and reportedly fiddled with his pen distractedly while Kerry spoke. The Russian Foreign Ministry released a statement, implicitly critical of US policy, that declared: “The further escalation of armed confrontation sharply increases the risk of creating new areas of tension and the destabilization of the so-far relatively calm atmosphere on the Lebanese-Israeli border.”

By Peter Schwarz
8 May 2013

The so-called NSU trial began on Monday at the Higher Regional Court (OLG) in Munich. The principal defendant, 38-year-old Beate Zschäpe, stands accused of forming the National Socialist Underground (NSU) together with Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos. She faces allegations of complicity in 10 murders and of particularly hazardous arson and attempted murder.

The trio, who lived for 13 years under false identities under the eyes of the German security agencies, are believed to have committed 10 murders, two bomb attacks and numerous bank robberies. Except for a female police officer, those murdered were exclusively immigrants who died as a result of racially motivated attacks.

Zschäpe herself has not been charged in any of the fatal shootings. But she is accused of sharing responsibility for all the NSU crimes due to her membership in the organisation. Following the death of Böhnhardt and Mundlos, who allegedly killed themselves after they were discovered by the police, she also set the trio’s flat on fire, seriously endangering the life of a neighbour.

Four men are on the dock along with Zschäpe.

The neo-Nazi and long-serving Thuringia National Democratic Party (the extreme right-wing NPD) functionary Ralf Wohlleben is indicted for aiding and abetting murder. He is said to have helped the NSU after it went underground and procured the weapon that was used in most of the murders. Wohlleben, like Zschäpe, has been remanded in custody.

Carsten S. is also accused of complicity in murder for passing the murder weapon on to the trio. The 33-year-old is alleged to have renounced neo-Nazi involvement years ago. He has made a formal confession of his role in the events.

André E. is answerable to abetting a robbery and a bomb attack. He and his wife, Susanne, are said to have been close friends with the NSU trio up until their detection.

Holger G. is believed to have helped the NSU procure identity documents and another weapon. Like Carsten S., he has submitted a detailed confession.

In addition to the federal prosecutor, approximately 80 plaintiffs–who are either associates of the murder victims or members of their families–are involved in the NSU proceedings. Seven of the attorneys of these plaintiffs gave a press conference in Munich last Sunday. They made it clear that they expect the proceedings to uncover the background to the NSU and its operations. According to a joint statement from the attorneys, it is very difficult to imagine that the NSU had consisted of only three dangerous right-wing extremists.

“It is not our aim to achieve maximum punishment for the accused in the shortest possible time. What we are most interested in achieving is the broadest possible clarification of how these crimes eventuated”, said attorney Angelika Lex, counsel for the widow of Theodore Boulgarides, who was murdered in Munich on June 15, 2005.

Lex stressed that her client wanted to know how her husband came to be selected and spied upon, and why he became a victim of the NSU. She also wanted to know what networks in contact with the killers were able to aid them and what the authorities knew about the murder.

Representing the daughter of Mehmet Kubasik, who was murdered in Dortmund, attorney Sebastian Scharmer said: “We are not concerned about securing a conviction of the five defendants as soon as possible. We intend making the failure of the state an issue in this trial”.

Scharmer is convinced that the NSU consisted of more than 100 people, among whom were undercover agents from the secret service. He wants to clarify why the three members of the NSU–who were known to the authorities–had not been arrested in 1998, who financed the NSU, and what role undercover agents played in the gang’s crimes.

“Since neither the investigating authorities nor any of the parliamentary inquiry committees have been able to fully explain the circumstances surrounding the offences, we will now endeavour to pursue this task”, Scharmer said. He criticised the federal prosecutor for excluding from the indictment any reference at all to the failure of the state investigative bodies.

Attorney Alexander Kienzle, representing the family of Halit Yozgat, who was murdered on April 6, 2006, said in an interview with the taz newspaper that the family expects that “in transparent constitutional proceedings the involvement and knowledge of state authorities will be clarified”.

He said the family members themselves had become the subject of an investigation immediately after the deed and were required to offer investigators transparency into the most private areas of their lives. “They now expect this transparency to be mirrored by that of the intelligence agencies and police authorities”, added Kienzle.

The Munich OLG and the office of the federal prosecution have made clear that they are not willing to meet the plaintiffs’ expectations of a comprehensive clearing up of the case. They will try to restrict proceedings to inquiry into the immediate circumstances surrounding the events and focus exclusively on the defendants.

Court president Karl Huber said the court would not be another inquiry committee. It would concentrate on “the core task”–i.e., it would “conduct proper criminal proceedings, that could not be challenged in an appeal court, and verify if the defendants were guilty according to criminal law”.

In advance of the proceedings, presiding judge Manfred Götzl had pointedly displayed his contempt for the concerns of victims and the public interest in the trial. Only 50 media representatives were allowed to attend the much too small courtroom, and these failed to include a single member of the Turkish media, although 8 of the 10 murder victims were of Turkish origin.

Only after a ruling by the Supreme Court did the Munich OLG reassign seating for the media–this time, through a lottery excluding major national media bodies that could have delegated legally trained journalists.

The federal prosecutor is planning a monumental trial lasting more than two years. It has compiled 600 folders with 280,000 pages of investigation files and will summon 600 witnesses. The indictment alone consists of 488 pages. But much of this detail–such as the brand of shampoo used by Zschäpe–is largely irrelevant to an assessment of the murders. The background to the crimes, however, remains in the dark.

At the press conference, the co-plaintiffs’ attorneys were confident they will be able to penetrate the obstructive stance of the federal prosecutor and the court.

Attorney Scharmer explained that they were intent on finding out more than what was mentioned in the indictment, and on making the background of the NSU a subject of the proceedings. “These questions cannot be suppressed. And we will ask them”, he said.

Representing the children of Enver Simsek, who was murdered in Nuremberg, attorney Stephen Lucas added that the plaintiffs had not only been victims of the murder of their family members; they were also victims of misguided official investigations, where “negligence or intent may well have played a role”.

By a WSWS reporting team
8 May 2013

Retired workers living in a rent-subsidized senior housing building are facing eviction in downtown Detroit. New owners who recently took over their apartment building have given the elderly residents on fixed income a year to clear out so they can raise rents to “market rates.”

The evictions at the 127-unit, 12-story residential building on Griswold–which follows a similar action against more than 300 residents at the Henry Street apartments in nearby Cass Corridor–is part of the plans by real estate developers and the city’s emergency manager to gentrify the downtown and Midtown areas.

A new partnership called 1214 Griswold Apartments, created by the Broder & Sachse real estate firm in Birmingham, recently purchased the apartment building in the Capitol Park district downtown, according to the Detroit Free Press. On March 29, residents were given notice that the new owners would terminate the Section 8 contract with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and that HUD rent subsidies would expire on March 31, 2014. Giving seniors one year to move, the notice said the new owners “anticipate the asking market rent will exceed the rental subsidy available under the current HUD mobile voucher program.”

Griswold Apartments in downtown Detroit

Like the Henry Street residents, the retirees are being tossed out on the street and told to rely on HUD vouchers to find a place to live. “This time next year, I’ll be homeless,” Samuel, a 68-year-old retired factory worker who has lived at the apartments for 12 years, told the WSWS.

“What happens if the HUD vouchers aren’t accepted? A piece of paper isn’t a roof over your head. And they pass out the vouchers in December. That means that we have to search for apartments in the winter. None of us can go out then. It’s too cold.”

Samuel gave WSWS reporters a tour of his carpeted apartment, which is approximately 800 square feet in size and furnished with comfortable couches and chairs. The wall facing outside was covered by mostly one large window, allowing natural light to stream in.

“All my life I just wanted a stable place to live and peace of mind. This is a very nice place and this was supposed to be my resting place. The apartments are large enough to feel like a small home. There is a recreation room and social area on the third floor.

“I felt fortunate when I came here. I pay $150 a month and Section 8 and HUD pays the rest. Where else will I find a place that is as comfortable as here? I hate to leave. It’s the same with others, some have been here for 20 to 25 years.

“If we could get assistance to move, and if they had new houses ready for us, it would be alright. But all HUD has promised us is a voucher to relocate. Where can we go? There are a lot of places that don’t accept HUD vouchers. The average age here is 75, and most everyone is disabled.”

Another tenant commented about the changes taking place downtown, particularly the fact that Quicken Loans executive and multi-billionaire Dan Gilbert is buying up buildings across the city. “Gilbert doesn’t care about us, about the little man. To me, he acts like he wants to buy Detroit. He’s doing a damn good job of it. He’s bought all these buildings around us. Money talks and he’s got enough money to do it. And if you don’t have enough money, forget it.

“I’ve believe he’s been planning this a long time. People have been coming down here taking pictures, everyday, in the last few years. I knew something was going to jump off. It’s outrageous. We don’t have a place to go. Gilbert has his name everywhere.

“A lot of us thought this was going to be our last stop. We weren’t going to move out. We have tenants that are 90 years old. Many people have been here for thirty years. We love Griswold. We don’t want to move.”

Cleaster Snerling

Cleaster Snerling added, “The total rent is a little more than $800. The new owners want to charge $1600 after the renovations.”

Cleaster explained that the building was designed as low-income subsidized housing for seniors. “The rent goes according to your income. HUD pays the rest. You sign a lease for one year, and you get a voucher from the government that pays for most of it. A small amount is out of pocket. Since we only get the voucher once a year, we have to wait until December before we get a new one, before we can start looking for new homes. Even then, we don’t know what we’re going to do.”

The life-and-death concerns of Griswold residents are of no concern to the corporate and political establishment in Detroit, which is seeking to restructure the city, using the dictatorial powers of Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, to benefit the wealthy bondholders and other corporate interests. Along with mass evictions, city workers are facing attacks on pensions and wages, while Orr eyes the city water system, Belle Isle recreation area and other public assets as targets for privatization.

“The landscape has changed dramatically in a short period of time,” Steve Morris, managing partner for the Mohr Partners real estate firm in Farmington Hills, told the Free Press. “Thousands of young people are in the area where they need to walk to work and to buy their staples. It’ll be a home run.”

In fact, the newer residents of the downtown area, many who work for moderate wages at Quicken Loans and other downtown businesses, will be forced to double and triple up to pay the exorbitant rents in local apartment buildings that have quickly been leased out. George W. Jackson Jr., president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., told the Free Press projects like the 1214 Griswold conversion are needed to grow the market for downtown living and to boost the city’s tax base. He said there was an “abundance” of other housing available for low-income residents. “Detroit probably has more affordable housing than any other major city in the country.”

While there are thousands of abandoned and rotting structures around the city, there is in fact an acute shortage of affordable housing. The number of renters has sharply increased as homeowners have been forced from their homes by foreclosures and the calamitous fall in home values.

In January, an estimated 5,000 people from the metropolitan Detroit area, including many homeless, single mothers or disabled workers, lined up overnight in nearby Taylor to get Section 8 housing vouchers. Police shut down the distribution after people in the line, which grew to a mile long, were told all 1,000 available vouchers had been given out.

8 May 2013

Two weeks after the Rana Plaza building collapse, global retail giants that source their garments in Bangladesh such as Walmart, Primark, Benetton and others are engaged in a cynical public relations exercise to distance themselves from the tragedy and preserve their image and their profits.

As of yesterday, the official death toll had reached 705, with hundreds more injured, making the collapse the worst industrial disaster in country’s history and one of the worst ever in the world. Rana Plaza is typical of the thousands of shoddily built, unsafe sweatshops in Bangladesh employing workers at $38 a month to churn out orders for some of the world’s largest corporations.

A well rehearsed media operation swung into action as soon as news of the April 24 disaster began to emerge. The well-resourced PR departments of the corporations directly or indirectly involved immediately issued statements expressing their “shock” and “sadness” over the loss of life. Most attempted to deny any involvement with the five garment factories housed in the building, no doubt advised by their equally well-resourced legal departments. A few acknowledged their connection to the Rana Plaza suppliers.

The crocodile tears and declarations of “shock” are completely hypocritical. The very reason some of the best known international brands source their goods in Bangladesh is that the country has the lowest costs–not only low wages, but low overheads due to the lack of regulation. Safety and building standards exist largely on paper, as the government employs very few inspectors to enforce the codes in a country that is notorious for corruption and bribery.

Many corporations maintain a façade of concern by setting guidelines for their suppliers backed by a system of “audits”, supposedly to ensure that standards are met. Auditing for safety and working conditions has become an industry in itself, in which non-government organisations (NGOs) are involved. The guidelines are ignored and orders are commonly subcontracted to smaller sweatshops. The audits are little more than occasional nuisances as manufacturers cut costs to meet the price demanded.

One monitoring group, the Business Social Compliance Initiative, based in Brussels, has admitted that its auditors approved two of the garment factories inside Rana Plaza on behalf of their clients. The structural soundness of the building was simply not on the check list.

The sheer scale of the Rana Plaza disaster, which has horrified people around the world, has compelled the retail giants to consider moving their business elsewhere. The New York Times highlighted the fact last week that the Walt Disney Company, the world’s largest licenser with annual sales of nearly $40 billion, had issued a directive in March ordering an end to the production of branded merchandise in Bangladesh and several other countries. Disney products had been found in the ruins of the Tazreen Fashion factory that was gutted by fire last November, killing 112 workers.

At the time, the fire was the country’s worst industrial disaster. However, Disney’s directive to pull out was a purely commercial decision. The cost to its corporate image simply outweighed the relatively small impact on its profits, as only a tiny proportion of its products are produced in Bangladesh. In its statement, Disney announced that production would be phased out over a year. It left the door open to returning if factories began cooperating with the Better Work program jointly run by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the International Finance Corporation, connected to the World Bank.

Corporations that are in no position financially to withdraw have called on the services of the ILO, the trade unions and various NGOs to pressure the Bangladeshi government and manufacturers to make cosmetic changes to safety and building standards. Last week, the Bangladesh Garment Manufactures & Exporters Association (BGMEA), which is desperate to retain its global customers, met with representatives of 40 buyers, including H&M, JC Penny, Gap, Nike, Li & Fung and Tesco. It promised to carry out building inspections of all its members.

Some corporations, such as Primark, are promising to pay compensation of around $1,200 to each of the families of the victims of the Rana Plaza disaster. Walmart, which was directly implicated in the Tazreen Fashion disaster, has refused to pay what amounts to hush money, but has donated $1.6 million towards a token fire safety training program in Bangladesh. The amounts are a pittance, undoubtedly calculated through the methods of cost-benefit analysis used by Disney to reach its decision.

The European Union, acting on behalf of Europe’s retailers, issued a statement last week threatening to withdraw preferential trade access to EU markets for Bangladesh. Foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and trade commissioner Karel De Gucht declared that the EU was considering “appropriate action” to “incentivise responsible management of supply chains involving developing countries.” Some 60 percent of Bangladesh’s garment exports go to Europe.

The EU posturing has nothing to do with improving the lot of Bangladeshi workers. EU officials told the Financial Times that the withdrawal of trade preferences would be “an extreme measure” which was “unlikely” to take place. As one European Commission official told the newspaper, the statement directed at Bangladeshi authorities was only to “put a fire under their feet a little bit.”

If trade preferences were withdrawn, or major corporations followed Disney’s example, the impact on the Bangladesh economy would be devastating. Garments constitute about 80 percent of the country’s exports and more than 3 million workers are directly employed in the industry. Many would lose their jobs, compounding the widespread poverty that already afflicts the Bangladeshi masses.

Moreover, any corporate exits from Bangladesh would only be to another cheap-labour platform, possibly with even lower costs. Burma (Myanmar) is being touted as a possible alternative, where the military-dominated regime would ensure a docile workforce with few safety regulations. The rush to meet the new demand would ensure that buildings were flung up in a similar haphazard and shoddy fashion. Other possibilities include Pakistan, where nearly 300 workers died in a Karachi garment factory fire last September, or the sweatshops in countries such as Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Haiti.

Far from improving safety standards and working conditions, the corporate giants are engaged in a dog-eat-dog competition against their rivals that is intensifying amid the global breakdown of capitalism. The relentless drive for profits is undermining the health, safety and living standards not only of workers in the developing countries, but also in the economically advanced nations. The only means for ending the tragic loss of life and limb is a unified -struggle by workers throughout Asia, Europe, the US and the world to put an end to the outmoded capitalist system and establish a rationally planned world socialist economy to meet the pressing needs of humanity.

Peter Symonds

The man who killed 12 people and injured 70 others at a movie theater in a Denver suburb in the largest mass shooting in US history wants to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, his lawyers say.

According to documents filed by James Eagan Holmes’ attorneys in Arapahoe County District Court on Tuesday, the plea will be formally requested at a hearing scheduled for May 13.

Following objections from Holmes’ lawyers, who say the 25-year-old is mentally ill, a judge entered a not guilty plea in March, saying the former student could change his plea later.

Prosecutors in the trial said in April that they would pursue the death penalty.

If the new plea is accepted by the judge, Holmes will be taken to a psychiatric hospital in Colorado to be checked for insanity.

The trail, which is scheduled for February 2014, was initially planned for August, and it is not known whether the new plea will defer it further.

Holmes, who is also accused of booby-trapping his apartment in the town of Aurora, was studying neuroscience in a Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado-Denver graduate school, according to university spokeswoman Jacque Montgomery.

Armed with an assault rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol, he opened fire during a screening of the new Batman movie, The Dark Night Rises, in the Century Theater Cinema 16 in the town of Aurora, Colorado in the early hours of July 20, 2012.

He also hurled a gas canister into the theater before he began shooting.

Ten people were killed at the cinema and two others died after they were transferred to a nearby hospital.

The police arrested the masked gunman, who was wearing a bullet-proof vest, in the parking lot of the cinema.

According to a US Defense Department statement, three members of the US military were injured in the incident.

MHB/AS

by Thomas Sowell

Recently by Thomas Sowell: Is Thinking Obsolete?

If there is ever a contest for words that substitute for thought, “diversity” should be recognized as the undisputed world champion.

You don’t need a speck of evidence, or a single step of logic, when you rhapsodize about the supposed benefits of diversity. The very idea of testing this wonderful, magical word against something as ugly as reality seems almost sordid.

To ask whether institutions that promote diversity 24/7 end up with better or worse relations between the races than institutions that pay no attention to it is only to get yourself regarded as a bad person. To cite hard evidence that places obsessed with diversity have worse race relations is to risk getting yourself labeled an incorrigible racist. Free thinking is not free.

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the government has a “compelling interest” in promoting diversity — apparently more compelling than the 14th Amendment’s requirement of “equal protection” of the law for everybody.

How does a racially homogeneous country like Japan manage to have high quality education, without the essential ingredient of diversity, for which there is supposedly a “compelling” need?

Conversely, why does India, one of the most diverse nations on Earth, have a record of intergroup intolerance and lethal violence today that is worse than that in the days of our Jim Crow South?

Even to ask such questions is to provoke charges of unworthy tactics, and motives too low to be dignified with an answer. Not that the true believers in diversity could answer anyway.

Among the candidates for runner-up to “diversity” as the top word for making thought obsolete is “fair.”

Apparently everyone is entitled to a “fair share” of a society’s prosperity, whether they worked 16-hour days to help create that prosperity or did nothing more than live off the taxpayers or depend on begging or crime to bring in a few bucks.

Apparently we owe them something just for gracing us with their presence, even if we feel that we could do without them quite well.

At the other end of the income scale, the rich are supposed to pay their “fair share” of taxes. But at neither end of the income scale is a “fair share” defined as a particular number or proportion, or in any other concrete way. It is just a political synonym for “more,” dressed up in moralistic-sounding rhetoric. What “fair” really means is more arbitrary power for government.

Another word that shuts down thought is “access.” People who fail to meet the standards for anything from college admission to a mortgage loan are often said to have been denied “access” or opportunity.

But equal access or equal opportunity is not the same as equal probability of success. Republicans are not denied an equal opportunity to vote in California, even though the chances of a Republican candidate actually getting elected in California are far less than the chances of a Democrat getting elected.

By the same token, if everyone is allowed to apply for college admission, or for a mortgage loan, and their applications are all judged by the same standards, then they have equal opportunity, even if the village idiot has a lower probability of getting into the Ivy League, and someone with a bad credit history is less likely to be lent money.

“Affordable” is another popular word that serves as a substitute for thought. To say that everyone is entitled to “affordable housing” is very different from saying that everyone should decide what kind of housing he or she can afford.

Government programs to promote “affordable housing” are programs to allow some people to decide what housing they want and force other people — taxpayers, landlords or whatever — to absorb a share of the cost of a decision that they had no voice in making.

More generally, making various things “affordable” in no way increases the amount of wealth in a society above what it would be when prices are “prohibitively expensive.” On the contrary, price controls reduce incentives to produce.

None of this is rocket science. But if you don’t stop and think, it doesn’t matter whether you are a genius or a moron. Words that stop people from thinking reduce even smart people to the same level as morons.

May 8, 2013

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.

The Best of Thomas Sowell

Copyright © 2013 Creators Syndicate

by Thomas Sowell

Recently by Thomas Sowell: Is Thinking Obsolete?

If there is ever a contest for words that substitute for thought, “diversity” should be recognized as the undisputed world champion.

You don’t need a speck of evidence, or a single step of logic, when you rhapsodize about the supposed benefits of diversity. The very idea of testing this wonderful, magical word against something as ugly as reality seems almost sordid.

To ask whether institutions that promote diversity 24/7 end up with better or worse relations between the races than institutions that pay no attention to it is only to get yourself regarded as a bad person. To cite hard evidence that places obsessed with diversity have worse race relations is to risk getting yourself labeled an incorrigible racist. Free thinking is not free.

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the government has a “compelling interest” in promoting diversity — apparently more compelling than the 14th Amendment’s requirement of “equal protection” of the law for everybody.

How does a racially homogeneous country like Japan manage to have high quality education, without the essential ingredient of diversity, for which there is supposedly a “compelling” need?

Conversely, why does India, one of the most diverse nations on Earth, have a record of intergroup intolerance and lethal violence today that is worse than that in the days of our Jim Crow South?

Even to ask such questions is to provoke charges of unworthy tactics, and motives too low to be dignified with an answer. Not that the true believers in diversity could answer anyway.

Among the candidates for runner-up to “diversity” as the top word for making thought obsolete is “fair.”

Apparently everyone is entitled to a “fair share” of a society’s prosperity, whether they worked 16-hour days to help create that prosperity or did nothing more than live off the taxpayers or depend on begging or crime to bring in a few bucks.

Apparently we owe them something just for gracing us with their presence, even if we feel that we could do without them quite well.

At the other end of the income scale, the rich are supposed to pay their “fair share” of taxes. But at neither end of the income scale is a “fair share” defined as a particular number or proportion, or in any other concrete way. It is just a political synonym for “more,” dressed up in moralistic-sounding rhetoric. What “fair” really means is more arbitrary power for government.

Another word that shuts down thought is “access.” People who fail to meet the standards for anything from college admission to a mortgage loan are often said to have been denied “access” or opportunity.

But equal access or equal opportunity is not the same as equal probability of success. Republicans are not denied an equal opportunity to vote in California, even though the chances of a Republican candidate actually getting elected in California are far less than the chances of a Democrat getting elected.

By the same token, if everyone is allowed to apply for college admission, or for a mortgage loan, and their applications are all judged by the same standards, then they have equal opportunity, even if the village idiot has a lower probability of getting into the Ivy League, and someone with a bad credit history is less likely to be lent money.

“Affordable” is another popular word that serves as a substitute for thought. To say that everyone is entitled to “affordable housing” is very different from saying that everyone should decide what kind of housing he or she can afford.

Government programs to promote “affordable housing” are programs to allow some people to decide what housing they want and force other people — taxpayers, landlords or whatever — to absorb a share of the cost of a decision that they had no voice in making.

More generally, making various things “affordable” in no way increases the amount of wealth in a society above what it would be when prices are “prohibitively expensive.” On the contrary, price controls reduce incentives to produce.

None of this is rocket science. But if you don’t stop and think, it doesn’t matter whether you are a genius or a moron. Words that stop people from thinking reduce even smart people to the same level as morons.

May 8, 2013

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.

The Best of Thomas Sowell

Copyright © 2013 Creators Syndicate

Alex Jones talks to Lew Rockwell about American fascism and the power of peace.

• Lew Rockwell: Archives
• Murray Rothbard’s essay: Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy

Alex Jones talks to Lew Rockwell about American fascism and the power of peace.

• Lew Rockwell: Archives
• Murray Rothbard’s essay: Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy

by Jonathan Goodwin
Bionic Mosquito

Recently by Jonathan Goodwin: Germanic Roots

The Birth of Western Economy, Robert Latouche

Based on this book by Robert Latouche, I have previously written about the fall of Rome and the beginnings of medieval society. Latouche next moves on to various aspects of the decentralized monetary and economic system of Merovingian society (described as “anarchy” by Latouche), and the transition toward centralization attempted by Charlemagne — a transition that, fortunately for those who favor decentralization, did not last for long after his death.

This story is a shining light on a successful period of anarchy — not Rothbard’s anarchy, but certainly the absence of a centralized state acting as sovereign. This possibility was realized as Rome fell, and was reborn after the attempts toward centralization of Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire.

Merovingian Decentralization

As previously noted, Latouche is favorable toward state-centralization — both regarding Rome and later Charlemagne. Although I disagree with his conclusions, I find his approach helpful; he has clearly distinguished periods of state-governance from decentralized governance. In any case, his factual observations of the economic landscape are priceless.

In the Merovingian period that came after Rome and that preceded Charlemagne, Latouche notes changes in the monetary systems. During this time, money for daily use moved from gold toward silver:

The theory that the Merovingians kept to the gold standard and that the Carolingians replaced it by an exclusively silver coinage is incorrect and altogether too flattering to the Merovingians. The reality was less simple.

It seems to me that the issue has nothing to do with flattery, but recognition of market forces at work in a less developed economy, as was the case after Rome. During Merovingian time, silver became more prominent as the money metal. Most important, this was not by decree of any king — the Merovingian currency was not controlled by public authorities. Latouche describes this lack of central control as negligence — in reality it was something more like an open market.

Through the negligence of the kings, coining in the Frankish kingdom became the monopoly of coiners.

There were multiple coiners; how could this be a monopoly? It is the fact that coinage was by non-state actors that concerns the author. Latouche recognizes no government authority outside of state authority. The Merovingian period was a time of individual and community governance, based on sacred oath and with the Church as a constant backdrop. There was government; it just wasn’t government by a state.

After listing the several areas where the Merovingian kings did not exercise sovereign authority, instead granting “the privilege of immunity” to “influential laymen,” the author laments…

Never in our history has the conception of the state known so complete an eclipse. Numerous churches obtained privileges of immunity; many enjoyed that of minting money….

That first sentence brings such a smile to my face! Latouche goes on to identify several churches that held such a privilege of immunity.

What is meant by “immunity”? Gary North recently wrote on this subject:

The issue is immunity from state sovereignty. A declaration of such immunity is a declaration of legitimate sovereignty.

North cites Robert Nisbet:

So-called diplomatic immunities are but the last manifestation of a larger complex of immunities which once involved a large number of internal religious, economic, and kinship authorities.

This was a normal feature of political life in the Middle Ages. Again, from North:

Which rights were protected by medieval institutions, and which were not? Remember, “rights” mean “legal immunities from governments.” It means the right of self-government.

The people of the Early Middle Ages before and after Charlemagne recognized and enjoyed such rights.

Returning to Latouche: he decries the varying weights and quality of the coinage produced by these multiple Churches — but isn’t this an expected and natural process of a market? Multiple producers compete on price and quality. Further, isn’t this to be expected in a market that, at the time, was quite local — with little need for commonality from region to region? Eventually, it seems to me, the market would move naturally toward commonality for the sake of efficiency as markets developed.

The author describes the evolution from gold coinage to silver that occurred under the Merovingians:

Under the Merovingians, silver was minted earlier and on a larger scale than has previously been thought; nor was it the shortage of gold which finally established its supremacy, but the preferences of the northern peoples and the requirements of internal trade.

Gold was hoarded. Given the relatively low value of the traded goods, this would seem to be reasonable. Silver sufficed for the trade of the time. It appears the transition was driven by the market.

This liking for silver coinage marks an evolution which was taking place during the late seventh century. The gold solidus and even the triens were on the way out.

Charlemagne and the Push Toward Centralization

Charlemagne, unlike his Merovingian predecessors, had a powerful desire to unite an empire. The author praises the centralizing and law-giving activities of the Carolingian kings.

Pepin the Short, then Charlemagne, and their counselors, must be given credit for their efforts to reform the economy at its roots by starting with a purification of the coinage. …the Carolingian monetary system…was monometallic, the silver denier, of good weight and alloy…. This reform was not empirical but systematic and the rulers imposed it on their peoples by a series of hard-hitting Capitularies.

The system was “imposed” by “hard-hitting Capitularies.” This seems rather coercive….

The basic and most vital feature of these reforms was the generalization of the silver standard which was made compulsory.

It is interesting to note: Charlemagne attempted to take advantage of the consolidation toward silver that was already occurring naturally in the marketplace. The market was moving in this direction anyway:

In actual fact things had been moving in that direction for more than a century past, for the percentage of gold in the solidus and the triens had become so insignificant that these coins were discredited and almost wholly supplanted in circulation by the Merovingian denier.

The state only took over what the market had previously created.

Charlemagne’s great merit lay in legalizing the existing situation and giving it his blessing….

The market seemed to be doing just fine, without the “blessing” of a usurper. What glory can be rightly claimed in a transition that was already occurring? The market was not developed sufficiently to require gold as money.

…it would have been absurd to put large quantities, or even quite a small amount, of gold into circulation to supply markets which were essentially agrarian and handled only modest transactions.

But of course the market figured this out already. Charlemagne’s coercion in the coin was not necessary, at least not for market reasons.

The Carolingians strove to maintain its legal weight and percentage of pure silver in order to prevent it from becoming a mere token money, a coinage of inflation, and took vigorous, even unpopular, steps to impose it on their subjects and encourage its circulation.

If the Carolingian coin was superior (not “mere token money”), why did Charlemagne have to “impose” this on the people? Why was the coinage unpopular? Is it possible that these people of the Middle Ages understood the danger of sovereign control over the coin?

Further Capitularies were issued in the period 794 to 864 (extending past Charlemagne’s reign); these forced subjects to accept payment in the state’s coinage — legal tender laws. However, offenders were numerous, as evidenced by the multitude of instructions given to the public in hope of breaking down the resistance to the coinage. Of course, state violence for violations was introduced:

If the offender was a free man, the fine was 15 solidi; the fine was a beating if the offender was a serf.

Nothing changes — the powerful get a slap on the wrist, the meek get many slaps.

This lamentable reversion [after the demise of the Carolingian Empire] to the mistakes of the Merovingian era were all the easier since both Charlemagne, with all his prestige, and also his immediate successors, had great difficulty in getting these currency reforms accepted. The unpopularity of the measures showed itself in an obdurate suspicion and refusal to accept the new coins put into circulation.

But if the measures were so great, why weren’t these embraced? Why would the people choose to revert to so-called “mistakes”? Were they merely ignorant barbarians? Or did they know to hide from the state?

Charlemagne was determined to keep the monopoly of coining exclusively for the Palace Mint and right up to his death persisted in his resolve…. He failed in his aim, and his successors were too weak to follow up his plan successfully.

A market-derived and accepted system will survive any one individual’s demise — the market is far greater than any one man. It does not require force. It does not require strong political leaders. It merely requires a market.

More Central Planning

Charlemagne’s attempts at control through coercion were not limited to the coin. In 789, Charlemagne published the Admonitia generalis, of which Clause 81 offers further economic controls:

It concerns the Sabbath rest and gives a list of menial tasks forbidden on Sundays….Nor are women to do any work connected with cloth….The list is significant….

He was determined to have an inventory of the assets owned by the many great estates (the better to tax you with, my dear):

On several occasions he ordered an inventory to be made of these estates, and the Capitulary known as the Brevium exempla, only a fragment of which has been preserved, shows us how personal property and real estate were to be catalogued.

Further centralization and control was attempted in other areas of economic life:

‘Throughout the whole of the realm’ [Charlemagne] wrote, ‘weights and measures must be identical and accurate.’

The aim was ambitious; different provinces had different measures. Why would uniformity across an entire empire be necessary in an agrarian, localized economy? The author provides his answer:

…the human reason which lay behind this decree [was] to prevent those who sold from cheating or robbing those who bought.

Is this really so? The economy was primarily local — everyone knew each other in the local trade, neighbor knew neighbor. If an individual cheated, sanction was sure to follow, up to and including expulsion from the community — tantamount to a death warrant in that society.

It is doubtful Charlemagne was concerned about cheating. It is more likely he wanted uniformity to make taxing easier. In any case, the people did not easily submit.

Wait, There is More

For those who call for a banning of interest, you will find in Charlemagne a hero:

Christian and even clerical inspiration are plainly discernible in the rigorous measures taken by Charlemagne and his successors to forbid the lending of money at interest. It had been practiced in the Merovingian period.

The banning of interest: one of many monetary crank theories only possible through the power of state coercion. The Biblical basis for the banning of interest was not (and most certainly is not) a settled matter; Gary North, to name the one person who has more thoroughly studied the Bible for economic principles, proposes no such ban (see chapter 7). The Bishop of Verdun, apparently, saw no problem with interest either:

This bishop regarded the payment of interest as the natural accomplishment of the loan, and as an ordinary transaction which was obviously fair and above-board.

The Church forbade clerics to engage in the practice, however Charlemagne was the first ruler to extend the practice to laymen. Such a change could only be implement by degrees: first that the ban should apply to laymen, but with no punishment attached; then, a short time later, and in a time of famine, the term usury was defined in significant detail, through the Capitulary of Nijmegen in 806; and further tightened the clauses in a famine of 809. Finally, in an undated Capitulary (presumably written after these others), a heavy fine is outlined:

‘We wish no one’, he declares, ‘to exact any further interest in any circumstance whatever. Anyone who does so will be made to pay the fine laid down for breaking the ban.’ This fine amounted to 60 salidi.

While not a good reason to disallow a private transaction for charging interest, it should be kept in mind that in the time of the Early Middle Ages, there was no heavy industry or large-scale trade — lending was not typically for the purpose of large capital formation. Primarily, lending occurred in the need of purchasing current foodstuffs — the borrower was starving and without alternatives for survival.

In addition to making illegal the means by which a starving man might be able to acquire foodstuffs, Charlemagne enacted price controls in an attempt to keep prices at lower levels (note, price controls came coincident with the issue of his new coins):

That was why, at the Synod of Frankfurt in 794, Charlemagne, who had just issued his new deniers, fixed in agreement with the Fathers of the Council the maximum retail price for the main corn crops.

These price controls covered crops such as oats, barley, rye, and wheat — eventually on bread as well. Charlemagne, in an act described as kindness and as setting a good example, sold his crop at prices even lower than the maximum price. Of course, another way to look at this is that he was bankrupting the competition, something he could afford to do given the control he had over the economy….

The price controls were in place both in ‘normal’ times and in times of famine. You can imagine the result.

On the pretense of ensuring that transactions were carried out in an honest manner, Charlemagne, in the Capitulary of 803…

…forbids the sale of gold vases, silver, slaves, pearls, horses, and other animals at night-time and insists on such purchases being made in public.

One might view this as an attempt to kill the black (night-time) market.

It’s ALWAYS About War

The author suggests the reason behind Charlemagne’s actions — the Church!

In the sphere of economics, as in all others, his line of conduct was determined by the Holy Scripture and of the Church Fathers…. It would therefore be pointless to look for an original economic or political programme in his Capitularies.

But would it be “pointless” to look beyond the Church for a reason behind Charlemagne’s actions? Well, no; it isn’t pointless. The author himself spills the beans, making irrelevant his comment about being pointless to look for a program:

Side by side with the requirements of Christian morality went military necessities.

Whoops! Did the author really mean to write this? Where’s Laurence Vance? The church and the military, side by side!

The Carolingian economy was a war economy. Each year of Charlemagne’s reign was marked by a campaign the preparations for which made heavy demands on the imperial economy…. It is interesting to note that many of the Capitularies were introduced in the Spring, obviously with an eye to the summer campaign, and they were intended partly to put the inhabitants of the Empire into a state of readiness.

North, quoting Nisbet:

If there is any single origin of the institutional State, it is in the circumstances and relationships of war. The connection between kinship and family, between religion and the Church, is no closer than that between war and the state in history.

War. It’s always about war.

After the Fall: The Return of Anarchy

This story comes with a happy ending. Carolingian control over markets died, thankfully, not long after Charlemagne died — his Empire broke up less than a half a century after its creation. The author lauds the intent and accomplishments of this Emperor:

The experiment was in fact an interesting one…a reorganization based on sound Christian morals and not altogether divorced from military considerations, an economy which was clerical in inspiration, a war economy from which capitalism was quite deliberately banished by the general veto on lending at interest.

Sound Christian morals in concert with military considerations. I really, really need to find Laurence Vance!

Latouche bemoans this anarchic quality of the period before and after Charlemagne. He describes the term “anarchy,” and explains his view of the time:

The word anarchy is here used in its strict etymological sense: absence of authority and the bankruptcy of the sovereign state. It was an evil which had been undermining Gaul and Western Europe ever since the Great Invasions, and which Charlemagne and the early Carolingians did not succeed in curing. The responsibility for it must be placed fairly and squarely on the Merovingian rulers.

As regards the bankruptcy of the sovereign state, Latouche is quite correct. However, is the sovereign state the only source for governance? Referring again to North:

Is civil government the only true government? Does it alone possess legitimate sovereignty? Defenders of the modern state insist that this is the case, and that it should be the case.

Latouche is one of these defenders, answering affirmatively. He does not recognize the sovereignty as exercised during the Merovingian period before and (through its close relative) after the fall of Charlemagne — a sovereignty exercised at decentralized levels of society, but not a sovereignty that would look completely familiar to advocates of free-market anarchy today. For example, there was little concern of individual rights. Again, from North:

Then what of individual rights? This was not a major concern in the medieval era. Why not? Because the individual’s rights were defended by institutions other than the civil government.

Then, quoting Nisbet:

In the medieval world there was relatively little concern with positive, discrete rights of individuals, largely because of the differences of political power and the reality of innumerable group authorities. But when the consolidation of national political power brought with it a destruction of many of the social bodies within which individuals had immemorially lived in taken refuge, when, in sum, law became a more centralized and impersonal structure, with the individual as its unit, the concern for positive, constitutionally guaranteed rights of individuals became urgent. European governments may have sought often, and successfully prolonged periods, to resist claims of individual right, but it is hard to miss the fact that states (England, for example) which became the most successful, economically as well as politically, had the earliest constitutional recognition of individual rights, especially property. In retrospect, however, we see that it was the sheer impact of the State upon medieval custom and tradition, with the consequent atomizing and liberating effects, that, more than anything else, precipitated the modern concern with positive individual rights.

Today we look back to the political philosophies underpinning written constitutions as liberating, when in fact these were the result of — and ensured the longevity of — the state as the sole sovereign entity to which man, on earth, could appeal. The Magna Carta is heralded as a milestone toward liberal society, when in fact it represented the loss of the limited sovereignty of other, competing institutions.

When there is only the individual against the state, individual rights become paramount. However, in an environment of multiple and competing sovereignties the need is not so great.

Latouche looks at the issue of immunities granted by the king — immunities that captured this diverse, decentralized sovereignty, represented by these competing institutions:

The practice of immunity, the essential aim of which was exemption from taxation, became widespread and this serious abdication of responsibility reached such vast proportions that it soon went far beyond the realm of finance. Vast tracts of the kingdom were completely outside the jurisdiction of the central authority, since the king expressly forbade his officials to enter the immunists’ domains for the purposes of carrying out their administrative duties.

Did the king grant immunity against his well-being? Not likely. In many ways, the king was equal to the nobles — the king had no higher position in the law than did the nobles. The basis for society was individual, based on sacred oath and grounded in the teaching of the Church. There was respect for property. Rights were defined and respected based on this. The king had no power to act outside of the old, good law. He was king of a decentralized society, one not governed solely by a state but by entities based on family, community, and Church.

Again, from North:

What is the meaning of sovereignty? It is the lawful, legitimate authority to invade all rival institutions, and to be immune to invasion by them. In modern thought, it is possessed only by the State. In this sense, the state possesses what in earlier eras in the West would have been identified with God. But God’s sovereignty was assumed to be delegated to legitimate institutions: the family and the church. It is also delegated to the individual. The state’s sovereignty is not delegated, except under stress.

The people of the Early Middle Ages, both before and after Charlemagne, understood this. They would cringe in horror at the barbarity of the modern state. From North again, citing Walter Lippmann, who wrote in 1929:

A state is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and Democrats.

This definition, so true today, is completely alien to the world of the Middle Ages — the so-called Dark Ages. For those looking for an example in history where state sovereignty was minimal to non-existent, and where life functioned well and in many cases in a more classically-liberal fashion (including attitudes toward women and slavery) than in almost any period under state control, the Merovingians of the so-called Dark Ages and their post-Carolingian philosophical descendants offer a shining example.

Reprinted with permission from the Bionic Mosquito.

May 8, 2013

Copyright © 2013 Bionic Mosquito

The Best of Jonathan Goodwin

by Jonathan Goodwin
Bionic Mosquito

Recently by Jonathan Goodwin: Germanic Roots

The Birth of Western Economy, Robert Latouche

Based on this book by Robert Latouche, I have previously written about the fall of Rome and the beginnings of medieval society. Latouche next moves on to various aspects of the decentralized monetary and economic system of Merovingian society (described as “anarchy” by Latouche), and the transition toward centralization attempted by Charlemagne — a transition that, fortunately for those who favor decentralization, did not last for long after his death.

This story is a shining light on a successful period of anarchy — not Rothbard’s anarchy, but certainly the absence of a centralized state acting as sovereign. This possibility was realized as Rome fell, and was reborn after the attempts toward centralization of Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire.

Merovingian Decentralization

As previously noted, Latouche is favorable toward state-centralization — both regarding Rome and later Charlemagne. Although I disagree with his conclusions, I find his approach helpful; he has clearly distinguished periods of state-governance from decentralized governance. In any case, his factual observations of the economic landscape are priceless.

In the Merovingian period that came after Rome and that preceded Charlemagne, Latouche notes changes in the monetary systems. During this time, money for daily use moved from gold toward silver:

The theory that the Merovingians kept to the gold standard and that the Carolingians replaced it by an exclusively silver coinage is incorrect and altogether too flattering to the Merovingians. The reality was less simple.

It seems to me that the issue has nothing to do with flattery, but recognition of market forces at work in a less developed economy, as was the case after Rome. During Merovingian time, silver became more prominent as the money metal. Most important, this was not by decree of any king — the Merovingian currency was not controlled by public authorities. Latouche describes this lack of central control as negligence — in reality it was something more like an open market.

Through the negligence of the kings, coining in the Frankish kingdom became the monopoly of coiners.

There were multiple coiners; how could this be a monopoly? It is the fact that coinage was by non-state actors that concerns the author. Latouche recognizes no government authority outside of state authority. The Merovingian period was a time of individual and community governance, based on sacred oath and with the Church as a constant backdrop. There was government; it just wasn’t government by a state.

After listing the several areas where the Merovingian kings did not exercise sovereign authority, instead granting “the privilege of immunity” to “influential laymen,” the author laments…

Never in our history has the conception of the state known so complete an eclipse. Numerous churches obtained privileges of immunity; many enjoyed that of minting money….

That first sentence brings such a smile to my face! Latouche goes on to identify several churches that held such a privilege of immunity.

What is meant by “immunity”? Gary North recently wrote on this subject:

The issue is immunity from state sovereignty. A declaration of such immunity is a declaration of legitimate sovereignty.

North cites Robert Nisbet:

So-called diplomatic immunities are but the last manifestation of a larger complex of immunities which once involved a large number of internal religious, economic, and kinship authorities.

This was a normal feature of political life in the Middle Ages. Again, from North:

Which rights were protected by medieval institutions, and which were not? Remember, “rights” mean “legal immunities from governments.” It means the right of self-government.

The people of the Early Middle Ages before and after Charlemagne recognized and enjoyed such rights.

Returning to Latouche: he decries the varying weights and quality of the coinage produced by these multiple Churches — but isn’t this an expected and natural process of a market? Multiple producers compete on price and quality. Further, isn’t this to be expected in a market that, at the time, was quite local — with little need for commonality from region to region? Eventually, it seems to me, the market would move naturally toward commonality for the sake of efficiency as markets developed.

The author describes the evolution from gold coinage to silver that occurred under the Merovingians:

Under the Merovingians, silver was minted earlier and on a larger scale than has previously been thought; nor was it the shortage of gold which finally established its supremacy, but the preferences of the northern peoples and the requirements of internal trade.

Gold was hoarded. Given the relatively low value of the traded goods, this would seem to be reasonable. Silver sufficed for the trade of the time. It appears the transition was driven by the market.

This liking for silver coinage marks an evolution which was taking place during the late seventh century. The gold solidus and even the triens were on the way out.

Charlemagne and the Push Toward Centralization

Charlemagne, unlike his Merovingian predecessors, had a powerful desire to unite an empire. The author praises the centralizing and law-giving activities of the Carolingian kings.

Pepin the Short, then Charlemagne, and their counselors, must be given credit for their efforts to reform the economy at its roots by starting with a purification of the coinage. …the Carolingian monetary system…was monometallic, the silver denier, of good weight and alloy…. This reform was not empirical but systematic and the rulers imposed it on their peoples by a series of hard-hitting Capitularies.

The system was “imposed” by “hard-hitting Capitularies.” This seems rather coercive….

The basic and most vital feature of these reforms was the generalization of the silver standard which was made compulsory.

It is interesting to note: Charlemagne attempted to take advantage of the consolidation toward silver that was already occurring naturally in the marketplace. The market was moving in this direction anyway:

In actual fact things had been moving in that direction for more than a century past, for the percentage of gold in the solidus and the triens had become so insignificant that these coins were discredited and almost wholly supplanted in circulation by the Merovingian denier.

The state only took over what the market had previously created.

Charlemagne’s great merit lay in legalizing the existing situation and giving it his blessing….

The market seemed to be doing just fine, without the “blessing” of a usurper. What glory can be rightly claimed in a transition that was already occurring? The market was not developed sufficiently to require gold as money.

…it would have been absurd to put large quantities, or even quite a small amount, of gold into circulation to supply markets which were essentially agrarian and handled only modest transactions.

But of course the market figured this out already. Charlemagne’s coercion in the coin was not necessary, at least not for market reasons.

The Carolingians strove to maintain its legal weight and percentage of pure silver in order to prevent it from becoming a mere token money, a coinage of inflation, and took vigorous, even unpopular, steps to impose it on their subjects and encourage its circulation.

If the Carolingian coin was superior (not “mere token money”), why did Charlemagne have to “impose” this on the people? Why was the coinage unpopular? Is it possible that these people of the Middle Ages understood the danger of sovereign control over the coin?

Further Capitularies were issued in the period 794 to 864 (extending past Charlemagne’s reign); these forced subjects to accept payment in the state’s coinage — legal tender laws. However, offenders were numerous, as evidenced by the multitude of instructions given to the public in hope of breaking down the resistance to the coinage. Of course, state violence for violations was introduced:

If the offender was a free man, the fine was 15 solidi; the fine was a beating if the offender was a serf.

Nothing changes — the powerful get a slap on the wrist, the meek get many slaps.

This lamentable reversion [after the demise of the Carolingian Empire] to the mistakes of the Merovingian era were all the easier since both Charlemagne, with all his prestige, and also his immediate successors, had great difficulty in getting these currency reforms accepted. The unpopularity of the measures showed itself in an obdurate suspicion and refusal to accept the new coins put into circulation.

But if the measures were so great, why weren’t these embraced? Why would the people choose to revert to so-called “mistakes”? Were they merely ignorant barbarians? Or did they know to hide from the state?

Charlemagne was determined to keep the monopoly of coining exclusively for the Palace Mint and right up to his death persisted in his resolve…. He failed in his aim, and his successors were too weak to follow up his plan successfully.

A market-derived and accepted system will survive any one individual’s demise — the market is far greater than any one man. It does not require force. It does not require strong political leaders. It merely requires a market.

More Central Planning

Charlemagne’s attempts at control through coercion were not limited to the coin. In 789, Charlemagne published the Admonitia generalis, of which Clause 81 offers further economic controls:

It concerns the Sabbath rest and gives a list of menial tasks forbidden on Sundays….Nor are women to do any work connected with cloth….The list is significant….

He was determined to have an inventory of the assets owned by the many great estates (the better to tax you with, my dear):

On several occasions he ordered an inventory to be made of these estates, and the Capitulary known as the Brevium exempla, only a fragment of which has been preserved, shows us how personal property and real estate were to be catalogued.

Further centralization and control was attempted in other areas of economic life:

‘Throughout the whole of the realm’ [Charlemagne] wrote, ‘weights and measures must be identical and accurate.’

The aim was ambitious; different provinces had different measures. Why would uniformity across an entire empire be necessary in an agrarian, localized economy? The author provides his answer:

…the human reason which lay behind this decree [was] to prevent those who sold from cheating or robbing those who bought.

Is this really so? The economy was primarily local — everyone knew each other in the local trade, neighbor knew neighbor. If an individual cheated, sanction was sure to follow, up to and including expulsion from the community — tantamount to a death warrant in that society.

It is doubtful Charlemagne was concerned about cheating. It is more likely he wanted uniformity to make taxing easier. In any case, the people did not easily submit.

Wait, There is More

For those who call for a banning of interest, you will find in Charlemagne a hero:

Christian and even clerical inspiration are plainly discernible in the rigorous measures taken by Charlemagne and his successors to forbid the lending of money at interest. It had been practiced in the Merovingian period.

The banning of interest: one of many monetary crank theories only possible through the power of state coercion. The Biblical basis for the banning of interest was not (and most certainly is not) a settled matter; Gary North, to name the one person who has more thoroughly studied the Bible for economic principles, proposes no such ban (see chapter 7). The Bishop of Verdun, apparently, saw no problem with interest either:

This bishop regarded the payment of interest as the natural accomplishment of the loan, and as an ordinary transaction which was obviously fair and above-board.

The Church forbade clerics to engage in the practice, however Charlemagne was the first ruler to extend the practice to laymen. Such a change could only be implement by degrees: first that the ban should apply to laymen, but with no punishment attached; then, a short time later, and in a time of famine, the term usury was defined in significant detail, through the Capitulary of Nijmegen in 806; and further tightened the clauses in a famine of 809. Finally, in an undated Capitulary (presumably written after these others), a heavy fine is outlined:

‘We wish no one’, he declares, ‘to exact any further interest in any circumstance whatever. Anyone who does so will be made to pay the fine laid down for breaking the ban.’ This fine amounted to 60 salidi.

While not a good reason to disallow a private transaction for charging interest, it should be kept in mind that in the time of the Early Middle Ages, there was no heavy industry or large-scale trade — lending was not typically for the purpose of large capital formation. Primarily, lending occurred in the need of purchasing current foodstuffs — the borrower was starving and without alternatives for survival.

In addition to making illegal the means by which a starving man might be able to acquire foodstuffs, Charlemagne enacted price controls in an attempt to keep prices at lower levels (note, price controls came coincident with the issue of his new coins):

That was why, at the Synod of Frankfurt in 794, Charlemagne, who had just issued his new deniers, fixed in agreement with the Fathers of the Council the maximum retail price for the main corn crops.

These price controls covered crops such as oats, barley, rye, and wheat — eventually on bread as well. Charlemagne, in an act described as kindness and as setting a good example, sold his crop at prices even lower than the maximum price. Of course, another way to look at this is that he was bankrupting the competition, something he could afford to do given the control he had over the economy….

The price controls were in place both in ‘normal’ times and in times of famine. You can imagine the result.

On the pretense of ensuring that transactions were carried out in an honest manner, Charlemagne, in the Capitulary of 803…

…forbids the sale of gold vases, silver, slaves, pearls, horses, and other animals at night-time and insists on such purchases being made in public.

One might view this as an attempt to kill the black (night-time) market.

It’s ALWAYS About War

The author suggests the reason behind Charlemagne’s actions — the Church!

In the sphere of economics, as in all others, his line of conduct was determined by the Holy Scripture and of the Church Fathers…. It would therefore be pointless to look for an original economic or political programme in his Capitularies.

But would it be “pointless” to look beyond the Church for a reason behind Charlemagne’s actions? Well, no; it isn’t pointless. The author himself spills the beans, making irrelevant his comment about being pointless to look for a program:

Side by side with the requirements of Christian morality went military necessities.

Whoops! Did the author really mean to write this? Where’s Laurence Vance? The church and the military, side by side!

The Carolingian economy was a war economy. Each year of Charlemagne’s reign was marked by a campaign the preparations for which made heavy demands on the imperial economy…. It is interesting to note that many of the Capitularies were introduced in the Spring, obviously with an eye to the summer campaign, and they were intended partly to put the inhabitants of the Empire into a state of readiness.

North, quoting Nisbet:

If there is any single origin of the institutional State, it is in the circumstances and relationships of war. The connection between kinship and family, between religion and the Church, is no closer than that between war and the state in history.

War. It’s always about war.

After the Fall: The Return of Anarchy

This story comes with a happy ending. Carolingian control over markets died, thankfully, not long after Charlemagne died — his Empire broke up less than a half a century after its creation. The author lauds the intent and accomplishments of this Emperor:

The experiment was in fact an interesting one…a reorganization based on sound Christian morals and not altogether divorced from military considerations, an economy which was clerical in inspiration, a war economy from which capitalism was quite deliberately banished by the general veto on lending at interest.

Sound Christian morals in concert with military considerations. I really, really need to find Laurence Vance!

Latouche bemoans this anarchic quality of the period before and after Charlemagne. He describes the term “anarchy,” and explains his view of the time:

The word anarchy is here used in its strict etymological sense: absence of authority and the bankruptcy of the sovereign state. It was an evil which had been undermining Gaul and Western Europe ever since the Great Invasions, and which Charlemagne and the early Carolingians did not succeed in curing. The responsibility for it must be placed fairly and squarely on the Merovingian rulers.

As regards the bankruptcy of the sovereign state, Latouche is quite correct. However, is the sovereign state the only source for governance? Referring again to North:

Is civil government the only true government? Does it alone possess legitimate sovereignty? Defenders of the modern state insist that this is the case, and that it should be the case.

Latouche is one of these defenders, answering affirmatively. He does not recognize the sovereignty as exercised during the Merovingian period before and (through its close relative) after the fall of Charlemagne — a sovereignty exercised at decentralized levels of society, but not a sovereignty that would look completely familiar to advocates of free-market anarchy today. For example, there was little concern of individual rights. Again, from North:

Then what of individual rights? This was not a major concern in the medieval era. Why not? Because the individual’s rights were defended by institutions other than the civil government.

Then, quoting Nisbet:

In the medieval world there was relatively little concern with positive, discrete rights of individuals, largely because of the differences of political power and the reality of innumerable group authorities. But when the consolidation of national political power brought with it a destruction of many of the social bodies within which individuals had immemorially lived in taken refuge, when, in sum, law became a more centralized and impersonal structure, with the individual as its unit, the concern for positive, constitutionally guaranteed rights of individuals became urgent. European governments may have sought often, and successfully prolonged periods, to resist claims of individual right, but it is hard to miss the fact that states (England, for example) which became the most successful, economically as well as politically, had the earliest constitutional recognition of individual rights, especially property. In retrospect, however, we see that it was the sheer impact of the State upon medieval custom and tradition, with the consequent atomizing and liberating effects, that, more than anything else, precipitated the modern concern with positive individual rights.

Today we look back to the political philosophies underpinning written constitutions as liberating, when in fact these were the result of — and ensured the longevity of — the state as the sole sovereign entity to which man, on earth, could appeal. The Magna Carta is heralded as a milestone toward liberal society, when in fact it represented the loss of the limited sovereignty of other, competing institutions.

When there is only the individual against the state, individual rights become paramount. However, in an environment of multiple and competing sovereignties the need is not so great.

Latouche looks at the issue of immunities granted by the king — immunities that captured this diverse, decentralized sovereignty, represented by these competing institutions:

The practice of immunity, the essential aim of which was exemption from taxation, became widespread and this serious abdication of responsibility reached such vast proportions that it soon went far beyond the realm of finance. Vast tracts of the kingdom were completely outside the jurisdiction of the central authority, since the king expressly forbade his officials to enter the immunists’ domains for the purposes of carrying out their administrative duties.

Did the king grant immunity against his well-being? Not likely. In many ways, the king was equal to the nobles — the king had no higher position in the law than did the nobles. The basis for society was individual, based on sacred oath and grounded in the teaching of the Church. There was respect for property. Rights were defined and respected based on this. The king had no power to act outside of the old, good law. He was king of a decentralized society, one not governed solely by a state but by entities based on family, community, and Church.

Again, from North:

What is the meaning of sovereignty? It is the lawful, legitimate authority to invade all rival institutions, and to be immune to invasion by them. In modern thought, it is possessed only by the State. In this sense, the state possesses what in earlier eras in the West would have been identified with God. But God’s sovereignty was assumed to be delegated to legitimate institutions: the family and the church. It is also delegated to the individual. The state’s sovereignty is not delegated, except under stress.

The people of the Early Middle Ages, both before and after Charlemagne, understood this. They would cringe in horror at the barbarity of the modern state. From North again, citing Walter Lippmann, who wrote in 1929:

A state is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and Democrats.

This definition, so true today, is completely alien to the world of the Middle Ages — the so-called Dark Ages. For those looking for an example in history where state sovereignty was minimal to non-existent, and where life functioned well and in many cases in a more classically-liberal fashion (including attitudes toward women and slavery) than in almost any period under state control, the Merovingians of the so-called Dark Ages and their post-Carolingian philosophical descendants offer a shining example.

Reprinted with permission from the Bionic Mosquito.

May 8, 2013

Copyright © 2013 Bionic Mosquito

The Best of Jonathan Goodwin

by Fred Reed

Recently by Fred Reed: Terrorism in Boston

Every farm boy and columnist learns early on what not to step in. Some subjects are too sensitive to write about unless you have a hidden bunker in Patagonia. The two most explosive, oddly enough, are not race, feminism, or Israel. They are Star Trek, and the Macintosh computer. Play with these, and you play with death.

I used PCs more or less contentedly until my wife bought me a back-up computer with Windows 8, which I thought would be an upgrade of Win 7. No. It is a vile marketing platform aimed at illiterate adolescents with cell phones — malign, an affront to civilization, probably designed by misanthropic garden slugs.

Having paid for this monstrosity, I decided that there was nothing wrong with Microsoft Corp. that couldn’t be cured by blowing it up. If you think this extreme, try Windows 8.

In high dudgeon, and all intermediate altitudes of dudgeon, I bethought me of Apple. Extreme times call for extreme measures. Whatever crimes Cupertino might have committed, or not have committed, I was sure that it didn’t foist Windows 8 on the innocent.

I had no particular feelings about the Mac, for or against. I knew that people who had them also had a peculiar emotional attachment to them. It worried me, about the people, not the computer. I mean, a carpenter doesn’t bond with his claw hammer. A friend once described the MacIntosh as “a fashion accessory for the conforming nonconformist.” Well, yeah. On the other hand, Mac-heads were usually well on the bright side.

I was not interested in abnormal psychology, but in computers, so I resolved to ask practical-minded friends, not Mac-heads, about these fructiform machines. Actual Mac-users had the chill objectivity I associate with Salafi terrorists. I started with a buddy who does networking and database manage for medium-sized companies. I knew he had a MacBook Pro. Did he like it?

He said, “It’s cute, well-designed, and I’d buy another one, but when I have work to do, I need a PC.” Ah. Why? “Because the network analysis software I need doesn’t exist for the Mac, and their database and spreadsheet applications are toys.”

Hmmm. I didn’t want to analyze networks or fiddle with data bases, which left “cute and well-designed.” Nothing wrong with that.

Next I asked a friend who is webmaster for a major site. He had started with Apple and migrated to PCs “for practical reasons.” Well, he said, if you want to do really heavy-duty graphics or edit major films, the Mac is probably still better. And the operating system is more robust. Other than that, you pay a lot more for not much.

Hmmm. “A lot more” meant a few hundred green ones, which are getting cheaper fast. “Robust operating system” had its appeal. Windows 7 is a wonderful operating system, except that it doesn’t work very well. I wearied of getting “Internet Explorer has stopped working,” and “Edit add-ons to speed up browsing” messages that I couldn’t turn off. Further, when I used the otherwise admirable Magnifier, whenever I changed web pages the font often whooped up to pixilated enormousness for five seconds, dropped to normal size, then did it again. Did Bill Gates personally hate me? What had I done to him?

Meanwhile, I talked to a few more of the Salafi terrorists. It didn’t help. If you want intelligent thoughts regarding the Mac, it is better to talk to people who don’t have one. Attempts to probe the consciousness of Mac-heads usually went like this:

Mac-head: “Mac is better.” Me: OK, how is it better? “It just is.” Ah, I see. How is it just is? “It’s easier to use.” How is it easier to use? “It just is.” “How is it just is?” Round and round the mulberry bush.

They said things like “The Mac’s hardware is better than the PC´s.” At this point I realized that most Apple cultists didn’t know much about computers. For example, they didn’t understand that the Macintosh is a product, while PC is a specification. Only Apple can make a Mac. Anybody can make a PC. Thus on one hand you have manufacturers on a level with back-alley abortionists who use cheap power supplies that smoke like the audience at a Grateful Dead concert, and hard drives with a Mean Time Between Failure of five minutes or until next Wednesday, whichever comes first. On the other hand, you have solidly built PCs such as Dell’s Latitudes, serious boxes aimed at businessmen.

Ferret-like, I pursued the questions. I asked a retired computer guy, who now repairs people´s laptops as a hobby, where Macs stood in reliability. “A bit above mid-pack.” OK.

A question that came to mind was why, if Macs were as great as their parishioners held, why didn’t everybody use them? Big business, for example. IT guys at Fortune Five Hundred companies were gimlet-eyed cost-benefit types, sentimental as gallstones. There had to be a reason why they didn’t buy Macs.

There was. One fellow explained that Microsoft was not just Windows but a lot of heavy-duty, forty-weight software for servers and SQL and other things that commerce needs to rob the public efficiently. Apple didn´t have all this stuff. I resolved that if I wanted to link 10,000 computers in my house, I would definitely go Microsoft. Thing was, I didn’t.

He explained further that the earth crawls with Microsoft-certified techs who can fix Uncle Gates’ software. Not true of Apple.

Hmmm redux. I was beginning to think of the Mac as an intensely personal computer for smart people who didn’t want to know techno-wizzygobble about driver incompatibility and interrupt hierarchies: a computer, not a puzzle.
Nothing wrong with that. It was how I looked at my refrigerator: Shut up, stay cold, and keep your internal workings to yourself.

Meanwhile I had bought an iPad. It was, as we used to say in Alabama, slicker than snot on a cat´s ass. Cute, yes, and well-designed, oh yes. For someone who doesn’t see well, it was infinitely better than a Kindle, and intentionally so. So far it hasn’t done anything annoying. Absolutely a fine gadget.

It seemed to me that, aside from allegedly having an operating system that wouldn’t make me want to rip its guts out, the difference between Mac and PC is that Apple is a closed company, while PC isn’t. With PCs you have flexibility. There is a far wider range of hardware and software available. At my current stage of life, this is exactly what I don´t want.

With Apple it´s apparently a few sizes fit all, but what there is works well with the rest of what there is. Simple machines for technically simple people who, however intellectually demanding their actual work may be, want as little to do with computers as possible. Nothing wrong with that.

Them’s my thoughts, anyway. Now I gotta run. My flight leaves for Patagonia shortly.

May 8, 2013

Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam, and A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about Mexico. Visit his blog.

Copyright © 2013 Fred Reed

The Best of Fred Reed

by Fred Reed

Recently by Fred Reed: Terrorism in Boston

Every farm boy and columnist learns early on what not to step in. Some subjects are too sensitive to write about unless you have a hidden bunker in Patagonia. The two most explosive, oddly enough, are not race, feminism, or Israel. They are Star Trek, and the Macintosh computer. Play with these, and you play with death.

I used PCs more or less contentedly until my wife bought me a back-up computer with Windows 8, which I thought would be an upgrade of Win 7. No. It is a vile marketing platform aimed at illiterate adolescents with cell phones — malign, an affront to civilization, probably designed by misanthropic garden slugs.

Having paid for this monstrosity, I decided that there was nothing wrong with Microsoft Corp. that couldn’t be cured by blowing it up. If you think this extreme, try Windows 8.

In high dudgeon, and all intermediate altitudes of dudgeon, I bethought me of Apple. Extreme times call for extreme measures. Whatever crimes Cupertino might have committed, or not have committed, I was sure that it didn’t foist Windows 8 on the innocent.

I had no particular feelings about the Mac, for or against. I knew that people who had them also had a peculiar emotional attachment to them. It worried me, about the people, not the computer. I mean, a carpenter doesn’t bond with his claw hammer. A friend once described the MacIntosh as “a fashion accessory for the conforming nonconformist.” Well, yeah. On the other hand, Mac-heads were usually well on the bright side.

I was not interested in abnormal psychology, but in computers, so I resolved to ask practical-minded friends, not Mac-heads, about these fructiform machines. Actual Mac-users had the chill objectivity I associate with Salafi terrorists. I started with a buddy who does networking and database manage for medium-sized companies. I knew he had a MacBook Pro. Did he like it?

He said, “It’s cute, well-designed, and I’d buy another one, but when I have work to do, I need a PC.” Ah. Why? “Because the network analysis software I need doesn’t exist for the Mac, and their database and spreadsheet applications are toys.”

Hmmm. I didn’t want to analyze networks or fiddle with data bases, which left “cute and well-designed.” Nothing wrong with that.

Next I asked a friend who is webmaster for a major site. He had started with Apple and migrated to PCs “for practical reasons.” Well, he said, if you want to do really heavy-duty graphics or edit major films, the Mac is probably still better. And the operating system is more robust. Other than that, you pay a lot more for not much.

Hmmm. “A lot more” meant a few hundred green ones, which are getting cheaper fast. “Robust operating system” had its appeal. Windows 7 is a wonderful operating system, except that it doesn’t work very well. I wearied of getting “Internet Explorer has stopped working,” and “Edit add-ons to speed up browsing” messages that I couldn’t turn off. Further, when I used the otherwise admirable Magnifier, whenever I changed web pages the font often whooped up to pixilated enormousness for five seconds, dropped to normal size, then did it again. Did Bill Gates personally hate me? What had I done to him?

Meanwhile, I talked to a few more of the Salafi terrorists. It didn’t help. If you want intelligent thoughts regarding the Mac, it is better to talk to people who don’t have one. Attempts to probe the consciousness of Mac-heads usually went like this:

Mac-head: “Mac is better.” Me: OK, how is it better? “It just is.” Ah, I see. How is it just is? “It’s easier to use.” How is it easier to use? “It just is.” “How is it just is?” Round and round the mulberry bush.

They said things like “The Mac’s hardware is better than the PC´s.” At this point I realized that most Apple cultists didn’t know much about computers. For example, they didn’t understand that the Macintosh is a product, while PC is a specification. Only Apple can make a Mac. Anybody can make a PC. Thus on one hand you have manufacturers on a level with back-alley abortionists who use cheap power supplies that smoke like the audience at a Grateful Dead concert, and hard drives with a Mean Time Between Failure of five minutes or until next Wednesday, whichever comes first. On the other hand, you have solidly built PCs such as Dell’s Latitudes, serious boxes aimed at businessmen.

Ferret-like, I pursued the questions. I asked a retired computer guy, who now repairs people´s laptops as a hobby, where Macs stood in reliability. “A bit above mid-pack.” OK.

A question that came to mind was why, if Macs were as great as their parishioners held, why didn’t everybody use them? Big business, for example. IT guys at Fortune Five Hundred companies were gimlet-eyed cost-benefit types, sentimental as gallstones. There had to be a reason why they didn’t buy Macs.

There was. One fellow explained that Microsoft was not just Windows but a lot of heavy-duty, forty-weight software for servers and SQL and other things that commerce needs to rob the public efficiently. Apple didn´t have all this stuff. I resolved that if I wanted to link 10,000 computers in my house, I would definitely go Microsoft. Thing was, I didn’t.

He explained further that the earth crawls with Microsoft-certified techs who can fix Uncle Gates’ software. Not true of Apple.

Hmmm redux. I was beginning to think of the Mac as an intensely personal computer for smart people who didn’t want to know techno-wizzygobble about driver incompatibility and interrupt hierarchies: a computer, not a puzzle.
Nothing wrong with that. It was how I looked at my refrigerator: Shut up, stay cold, and keep your internal workings to yourself.

Meanwhile I had bought an iPad. It was, as we used to say in Alabama, slicker than snot on a cat´s ass. Cute, yes, and well-designed, oh yes. For someone who doesn’t see well, it was infinitely better than a Kindle, and intentionally so. So far it hasn’t done anything annoying. Absolutely a fine gadget.

It seemed to me that, aside from allegedly having an operating system that wouldn’t make me want to rip its guts out, the difference between Mac and PC is that Apple is a closed company, while PC isn’t. With PCs you have flexibility. There is a far wider range of hardware and software available. At my current stage of life, this is exactly what I don´t want.

With Apple it´s apparently a few sizes fit all, but what there is works well with the rest of what there is. Simple machines for technically simple people who, however intellectually demanding their actual work may be, want as little to do with computers as possible. Nothing wrong with that.

Them’s my thoughts, anyway. Now I gotta run. My flight leaves for Patagonia shortly.

May 8, 2013

Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet Nam, and A Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about Mexico. Visit his blog.

Copyright © 2013 Fred Reed

The Best of Fred Reed

Mark Sanford Beats Stephen Colbert’s Sister in Congressional Race

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Posted on May 7, 2013

AP/Rainier Ehrhardt

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford crosses the street after voting at a polling place in Charleston, S.C.

Yes, the same Mark Sanford who, as governor of South Carolina in 2009, blew off Fathers’ Day for a love jaunt to Argentina, just convinced the bible belt voters of South Carolina to give him another chance.

The AP has called South Carolina’s first congressional district for Sanford, who was running against Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch, sister of comedian Stephen Colbert. Mitt Romney won the district, which has not gone to the Democrats in three decades, by 18 points in the 2012 election.

Sex advice columnist and hypocrite watchdog Dan Savage tweeted the following in response to Sanford’s apparent victory:

Perhaps the comical endorsement of Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt, who called Sanford a “sex pioneer,” put the former governor over the top.

–Posted by Peter Z. Scheer. Follow him on Twitter: @peesch.

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Reid Blasts ‘Schoolyard Bully’ Cruz, Stewart Recaps the NRA Convention, and More

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Posted on May 7, 2013

Class Warfare: Majority Leader Harry Reid took to the Senate floor to renounce Sen. Ted Cruz on Tuesday after the Texas Republican objected to Reid’s move to create a conference committee of Democrats and Republicans to work on the budget. “My friend from Texas is like the schoolyard bully,” an angry Reid began. “He pushes everybody around and is losing, and instead of playing the game according to the rules, he not only takes the ball home with him but changes the rules. That way no one wins except the bully who tries to indicate to people he has won.” Cruz responded, “I wasn’t aware we were in a schoolyard.” And things just got more heated from there. (Read more)

The Marrying Kind: Delaware became the 11th state to allow same-sex couples to wed after legalizing gay marriage Tuesday. The bill was passed by the state Senate on a 12-9 vote and was signed immediately after by Democratic Gov. Jack Markell. Under the new law, gay couples will be allowed to marry beginning July 1. As the L.A. Times noted, same-sex marriage is legal in virtually the entire northeast portion of the U.S. stretching from Maine to Maryland now, with the notable exceptions of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. (Read more)

Shedding Light: Chris Christie revealed Tuesday that he secretly underwent gastric band surgery this year in order to help him lose weight. The famously overweight governor of New Jersey insisted he did it for his family, and not for political reasons. “I know it sounds crazy to say that running for president is minor, but in the grand scheme of things, it was looking at Mary Pat and the kids and going, ‘I have to do this for them, even if I don’t give a crap about myself,’ ” he said at a news conference. Christie, who is up for re-election and favored to win, says he also didn’t want to become a role model for obese people. He added, “All I want to be is a role model for my children.” (Read more)

Under the Gun: In the wake of plummeting poll numbers after her vote against expanding background checks on firearm purchases, Sen. Kelly Ayotte is doing some serious political spinning. In an op-ed published Monday, the New Hampshire Republican writes that she actually does support gun checks. “Out of state special interests are running false ads attacking me and even lying about my efforts to prevent gun-related violence,” she insists. “I want to set the record straight: I support effective background checks and in fact voted recently to improve the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).” Of course, that still doesn’t change the fact that she voted against the bipartisan compromise put forth by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., that would have expanded background checks to include the sales of weapons at gun shows and on the Internet. (Read more)

Video of the Day: Did you miss the National Rifle Association’s convention in Houston over the weekend? Not a problem. “The Daily Show” has you covered with its recap of the annual event in a segment called “The Good, The Bad & The Crazy.” Bonus: Some of Jon Stewart’s favorite comedic targets–including Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck–were among the convention’s featured speakers. Diehard “Daily Show” fans can already guess where this going.

–Posted by Tracy Bloom.

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Anyone who’s played any kind of video game knows we feel some vicarious involvement when we’re playing. But researchers at the University of Michigan and Penn State have taken that notion a step further, illustrating just how little our brain distinguishes between what we’re experiencing and what’s on the screen.

According to a study released today, our assumptions about what our avatars are “feeling” may actually alter our perception of that virtual world–similar to the way our bodily experiences can affect perception in the real world.

Most of us are familiar with real life examples of how bodily experiences like emotion and physical strain can affect our perception. Legal anecdotes and ample research show that eyewitness testimony is famously unreliable, in part because memory can be distorted by emotion and prejudice.

A study published in 2009 suggested that people view heights as being significantly greater when viewed from above (the riskier view) than from below (the safer view). Likewise, previous studies suggest that the incline of a hill, for example, appears steeper when we’re wearing a heavy backpack than when we aren’t–a phenomenon known as “embodied perception.”

An avatar, as Michigan State University’s Frank Biocca argued in 1997, is “the representational medium for the mind.” Taking a cue from the kinds of virtual reality training undertaken in the military and by athletes, researchers for the new study guessed that the links between what’s going on in these outward representations of our minds would be intimately linked with this phenomenon of embodied perception.

Turns out they were right, but only under certain conditions. For example, a user wearing a backpack in real life was no more likely to view a virtual hill as steeper than someone not wearing one. Users whose randomly-assigned avatars were wearing virtual backpacks, likewise, did not perceive virtual hills as significantly steeper than users whose randomly-assigned avatars weren’t wearing them.

[…]

Read the full article at: motherboard.vice.com

By Owen Jarus | LiveScience

An ancient astronomical alignment in southern Peru has been discovered by researchers between a pyramid, two stone lines and the setting sun during the winter solstice. During the solstice, hundreds of years ago, the three would have lined up to frame the pyramid in light.

The two stone lines, called geoglyphs, are located about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) east-southeast from the pyramid. They run for about 1,640 feet (500 meters), and researchers say the lines were “positioned in such a way as to frame the pyramid as one descended down the valley from the highlands.”

Using astronomical software and 3D modeling, the researchers determined that a remarkable event would have occurred during the time of the winter solstice.

“When viewed in 3D models, these lines appear to converge at a point beyond the horizon and frame not only the site of Cerro del Gentil [where the pyramid is], but also the setting sun during the time of the winter solstice,” the research team wrote in a poster presentation given recently at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Honolulu.

Archaeologists have discovered a pyramid in southern Peru, built between 600 B.C. and 50 B.C. ago, would have aligned with two stone lines and the setting sun during the winter solstice. Here, a 3D model shows the event that happened at the Cerro del Gentil pyramid during the winter solstice. The two stone lines frame the pyramid with the sun setting directly behind it. This alignment may have had cosmological significance for the people who lived there.

“Thus someone viewing the sunset from these lines during the winter solstice would have seen the sun setting directly behind, or sinking into, the adobe pyramid,” they write. “Thus the pyramid and the linear geoglyph constitute part of a single architectural complex, with potential cosmological significance, that ritualized the entire pampa landscape.” (The word “pampa” stands for plain.)

The flattop pyramid is 16 feet (5 m) high and was built sometime between 600 B.C. and 50 B.C., being reoccupied somewhere between A.D. 200 and 400. Finds near the pyramid include textiles, shells and ceramics. The stone lines were constructed at some point between 500 B.C. and A.D. 400.

Researchers have found about 50 of these stone lines, the longest of which runs close to nearly 1 mile (1,500 meters). Many of these lines point to nearby settlements and their pyramids. The lines date to somewhere between 500 B.C. and A.D. 400.

Lines, settlements and pyramids

But this discovery is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Researchers have found about 50 of these stone lines so far in a flat, dry area near the pyramid. The longest of the lines runs for nearly a mile (about 1,500 m). These lines are straight and made out of rock, unlike the Nazca Lines in southern Peru which were etched into the earth by removing the topsoil and include depictions of animals and plants.

Interspersed with these lines, researchers have also found more than 200 cairns (rock piles). The biggest of these cairns is about 50 feet (15 m) in diameter. Cairns can be found throughout the world and sometimes contain human burials, the examples found here, however, do not.

[…]

Read the full article at: livescience.com

Tune into Red Ice Radio:

Troy McLachlan & Theodore Holden – Hour 1 – Cosmos in Collision: Antique Solar System, Neanderthals & Modern Man

Maria Wheatley – Hour 1 – Geodetic System of Earth Energies and Ley Lines

Ross Hamilton, Jim Vieira & Hugh Newman – Hour 1 – Giants, Mound Builders & Etheric Energy

John Major Jenkins – Hour 1 – 2012 Galactic Alignment & The End of the Mayan Calendar

John Major Jenkins – Galactic Alignment 2012 & Mayan Cosmology

Michael Tellinger – Adam’s Calendar & Slave Species of God

Adrian Gilbert – The Orion Mystery & The Invisible College

Hugh Newman – The Olmecs & Megalithic Cultures

Josh Reeves – The Lost Secrets of Ancient America

Freddy Silva – Ancient Sacred Sites, Giants, Our Ancestors & Places of Power

Joseph P. Farrell – The Grid of the Gods

Helen Sewell – The Astrology of 2012, Influence of the Outer Planets: Uranus, Neptune & Pluto

Related Articles
Nazca lines ripped up by quarrying operations in Peru
Nazca Lines May Be a Labyrinth
Visible Only From Above, Mystifying ’Nazca Line’ Wheels Discovered in Mideast (2011)
Mysterious elk-shaped geoglyph discovered in Russia
Astronomical alignments were vital in Mesoamerica
Mayan ball court was celestial marker used to observe solstices
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Latest News from our Front Page

Carla Del Ponte said testimony from victims and doctors had given rise to “strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof”.

But the commission stressed that it had not reached any “conclusive findings”.

The US said it had no information to suggest rebel fighters had used sarin.

In recent weeks, Western powers have said their own investigations have found evidence that government forces have used chemical weapons.
’Highly sceptical’

In an interview with Swiss-Italian TV on Sunday, Ms Del Ponte, who serves on the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, said: “Our investigators have been in neighbouring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals.

“According to their report of last week, which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated.”

Sarin, a colourless, odourless gas which can cause respiratory arrest and death, is classed as a weapon of mass destruction and is banned under international law.

[…]

US officials in Washington also played down Ms Del Ponte’s comments.

“The fact of the matter is – as we have said, and I have said many times – that we are highly sceptical of suggestions that the opposition could have or did use chemical weapons,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

“We find it highly likely that any chemical weapon use that has taken place in Syria was done by the Assad regime. And that remains our position.”

Read the full article at: bbc.co.uk

Everything We Know About What’s Happened Under Sequestration

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Posted on May 7, 2013

Shutterstock illustration of American candle burning.

By Theodoric Meyer, ProPublica

This article was originally published by ProPublica.

When the annual White House Easter Egg Hunt faced cancellation this year due to the package of mandatory budget cuts known as sequestration, the National Park Service kicked into high gear. It rescued the event 2014 held since 1878 2014 with money from “corporate sponsors and the sale of commemorative wooden eggs,” according to the Washington Post.

The nation’s airline passengers also caught a break last month when Congress passed (and President Obama quickly signed) a bill allowing the Federal Aviation Administration to shift some funds and halt the furloughs of air traffic controllers that had been blamed for long flight delays around the country.

But other programs haven’t been so lucky. Children in Indiana have been cut from the federally funded Head Start preschool program, and one Head Start program in Maine is being cut altogether. Furloughs have begun for employees of agencies from the U.S. Park Police to the Environmental Protection Agency. And cuts to Medicare have forced cancer clinics to turn away thousands of patients who are being treated with drugs the clinics can no longer afford.

We’ve taken a look at what’s actually happened in the two months since sequestration took effect.

Remind me, what is sequestration again?

Remember the clash over the debt ceiling back in 2011?

When Republicans and Obama struck a deal to raise it, they created a “super committee” of six Democrats and six Republicans and gave them three and a half months to hash out $1.2 trillion worth of cuts to the federal budget over the next decade. If they failed, a package of automatic cuts designed to slash funding to programs dear to both parties (military spending, in the Republicans’ case, and Medicare and other domestic programs in the Democrats’) would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2013.

Needless to say, the super committee failed, leading to the cuts we’re seeing now.

How does this fit in with the “fiscal cliff”?

Sequestration was one element of the so-called “fiscal cliff,” which also included a number of other spending cuts and tax increases. Congress passed a last-minute deal Jan. 1 to blunt the cliff’s impact, which included pushing back the effective date for sequestration to March 1. While Obama and members of Congress spoke out against sequestration in February 2014 Senate Democrats announced a plan to put it off for another 10 months 2014 those efforts failed to stop the cuts.

So what’s happened since March 1?

The indiscriminate cuts affected a wide range of federal programs and departments, making them difficult to track. (Even the White House struggled to explain exactly which programs they’d hit while it was denouncing them.) Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters Feb. 28 that sequestration would have “a rolling impact, an effect that will build and build and build.”

Congress passed a bill, signed by Obama on March 26, to spare a few programs from cuts this year, including an infant nutrition program, the nuclear weapons program and funding for security at U.S. embassies abroad 2014 a sensitive area since the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, last September. The bill also gave some agencies, including the Pentagon, more flexibility in carrying out the sequester. And last week, Congress quickly passed (and Obama signed) a bill allowing the F.A.A. to scrap its furloughs of air traffic controllers, which had been blamed for long flight delays. But neither bill reduced the total amount the government is required to cut 2014 $85 billion, or about 2.3 percent of the $3.6 trillion federal budget 2014 by the end of the fiscal year in October.

Gotcha. What has all this done to the economy?

The Congressional Budget Office estimates sequestration will cost around 750,000 jobs in total, and forecasters think it could reduce economic growth by half a percentage point this year. But two months into sequestration, the effects are difficult to see. The economy added a relatively respectable 165,000 jobs in April, the Labor Department reported (though the federal government shed 8,000 jobs during the same period). And defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which warned that the sequester would lead to layoffs, have seen only a slight decline in their business.

Indeed, there’s at least one slice of the workforce that seems to be benefitting from sequestration: Washington lawyers. Contractors short on cash have hired attorneys to help them restructure loan payments.

Do we know any more about what’s been affected?

Yes. Sequestration is still playing out, but here’s what we know has happened so far:

Congress:

While lawmakers’ salaries are exempt from cuts, sequestration hasn’t spared congressional offices, which have had to slash spending by 8.2 percent. “Magazine subscriptions have been canceled,” the Washington Post reported. “Constituents are getting e-mail instead of snail mail. Invoices are getting a second look.” Sequestration has also cut into funding for the overseas fact-finding trips lawmakers often take, known as “codels.” House Speaker John A. Boehner, a Republican, has banned his caucus from using military aircraft for codels.

The White House:

While the egg hunt was saved, the White House announced in March that it would stop giving tours due to sequestration. (Republicans criticized the decision, with Rep. James Lankford of Oklahoma calling it “a dramatic overreaction.”) The White House has also furloughed 480 Office of Management and Budget staffers, and the president will voluntarily return 5 percent of his salary. Sam Kass, the assistant White House chef, has said he is also being furloughed. But Roll Call reported that the White House 2014 which spent “more than a month of dodging questions” about the effects of sequestration on West Wing staffers 2014seems to have been spared from deep cuts.

Federal Agencies:

A few agencies, such as Department of Veterans Affairs, are mostly exempt from the sequester.

But the budget cuts have hit most others, sometimes with unpredictable consequences. After sequestration forced Yellowstone National Park to cut $1.75 million from its $35 million budget, the park 2014 run by the National Park Service 2014 trimmed its payroll and decided to cut back on snowplowing, which would delay the park’s opening. Plowing was saved only when the Cody and Jackson Hole, Wyo., chambers of commerce, fearing the economic impact of a late park opening, kicked in $170,000.

In Washington, agency after agency is planning to furlough its employees. “The Department of Housing and Urban Development,” the Washington Post reported, “will shut down for seven days starting in May, after concluding that staggering furloughs for 9,000 employees would create too much paperwork.” The Internal Revenue Service will also shut down almost entirely on furlough days. And Department of Labor employees have already started taking their furlough days, which they can do a half-day at a time.

(The Justice Department and the State Department, however, have managed to avoid furloughs.)

The Department of Labor is also planning to lay off 30 of the 74 lawyers it hired to work through a backlog of mine-safety citations that are under appeal. The department had hired the lawyers after a 2010 explosion at a mine run by a company that had received many such citations but fought them, preventing regulatory action against it. The move will save the Labor Department $2.1 million.

And while air traffic controllers won’t be furloughed, it’s unclear whether the FAA will follow through on its plans to close 149 airport control towers, most of them at rural airports. New Jersey officials, for instance, remain uncertain whether the Trenton, N.J., airport tower will be closed or receive a reprieve.

Meanwhile, IRS furloughs have the potential to be counterproductive. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew told a House Appropriations subcommittee in April that the cuts would lead the IRS to answer fewer calls and take longer to respond to taxpayer questions.

“It will also lead to fewer enforcement actions and reduce revenue collection,” Lew said 2014 which could cost the government money rather than saving it.

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U.S. Weighs Syrian Intervention, Despite The Consequences

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Posted on May 7, 2013

U.S. Navy/MC2 Edwin L. Wriston

A U.S. Soldier wears a mask to protect himself from a dust storm in Baghdad, Iraq, June 27, 2009.

By William Pfaff

The present debate in the United States over making policy for a Middle East that has been profoundly changed by the events of the past three years unhappily echoes past policies that failed. They were intended to promote democracy and usually took the form of military intervention.

The most important current argument is over intervention in the Syrian civil war. But to what American purpose? As always, democracy promotion, Washington says. Is this either politically or militarily feasible in Syria today? What contribution does intervention make to the question most on Americans’ minds today: what relevance has this to America’s domestic terrorist threat?

The civil war in Syria was originally an uprising against abuses by the predominantly Alawite government of President Bashar al-Assad, a family and sectarian dictatorship which has enjoyed support in the past of secular groups as well as Christians and Muslim minorities. The opposition is largely Sunni Muslim, including the Muslim Brotherhood and other jihadists, fighting the established government of a largely Shia population, supported by Iran, and currently by Russia and China. An American intervention would align Washington with groups which elsewhere it opposes. The logic of this is not apparent.

The Syrian war already offers signs of engaging groups in Lebanon, drawing the unfortunate Lebanese towards a conflict where they have nothing to gain. Israel envisages the possibility of getting at Iran by way of its Syrian ally. Again, enlargement of the war serves no visible American interest, which is restored stability in the region.

The undeclared war between Iran (and its client, the Hezbollah organization) and Israel, motivated by Iran’s contention (via its departing president) that Israel has no place in the Middle East, having been created as the result of an attempted genocide of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany, and therefore a European problem that should be settled in Europe and not at the expense of an Arab people. This, of course, is purely a propaganda provocation, although true enough.

Israel’s avowed motive in its confrontation with Iran is to defend its existence, believed threated by Iran’s presumed but unproven project to arm itself with nuclear weapons with which it would have the military means to attack Israel. This despite the logical certainty that Israel would preemptively or simultaneously use its large nuclear strike force to annihilate Iran.

As these are mutually absurd eventualities, it is evident to both sides, and to foreign observers, that this conflict will continue to be, as it is now, a non-nuclear struggle for regional influence and power by the two most important Middle Eastern states–unless Israel, losing patience, and with the consent if not collaboration of the United States, carries out a massive conventional attack on Iran to destroy, for the indefinite future, the latter’s military and industrial power and potential.

This undoubtedly would also be acknowledged in Washington as an allied contribution to continuation of the “war against terrorism, extremism and disorder,” currently being conducted by American drone attacks in Yemen and the Horn of Africa, with new facilities being developed for drone and other possible operations in West Africa, the Sahara and the Maghreb. Thus two new theaters seem under consideration in Washington.

This is while American and NATO forces continue the war in Afghanistan, which increasingly intrudes into Pakistan. The enemies there are Taliban, and elsewhere jihadists of various religious allegiances but united in their enmity toward the U.S. because of its past or present military or mercenary interventions in Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere in East Africa.

This is seen by many of its victims as part of what now is widely believed by Muslims to be a “crusade” against Islam–an American “war of civilizations” as forecast by Professor Samuel Huntington and initiated by President George W. Bush under the influence of American neoconservatives allied with Israeli Zionists.

Meanwhile, Israel’s undeclared war of territorial expansion against the Palestinians is enlarging with the new settlements under construction near Jerusalem. This is land that was assigned to a Palestinian Arab state by the U.N. Security Council in 1948, when Mandate Palestine was partitioned.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry proposes new Arab-Israeli talks, and Prime Minister Netanyahu has politely offered a “pause” in the illegal construction. The Palestinians now have proclaimed themselves the (occupied) State of Palestine, so-recognized by the U.N. General Assembly and the overwhelming majority of General Assembly members, various U.N. agencies including UNESCO. However, it has not been recognized by the U.N. Security Council, due to an American veto. It has enraged the Israelis as well as AIPAC in Washington, again to no constructive purpose other than to the beleaguered Palestinians.

The negotiations Mr. Kerry wants resumed began in 1993, when the Palestine Liberation Organization was recognized by Israel as representative of the Palestinian people, and have intermittently and inconclusively continued ever since, to no purpose or avail, with no serious prospect of success. And behind the scenes, there remains the permanent possibility that things erupt into still another open struggle, as if another were needed.

Visit William Pfaff’s Web site for more on his latest book, “The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy” (Walker & Co., $25), at www.williampfaff.com.

© 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

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May 7, 2013  |  

As the FBI and Cleveland police try to figure out how three women and a six-year-old girl were kept captive in a house for more than a decade in a dense urban neighborhood, the answers might be found in remarks and anecdotes from other victims of similar horrors.

Elizabeth Smart was a 14-year-old girl who was abducted from her bedroom in Salt Lake City, Utah, in June 2002. She was spotted traveling with her kidnappers–a couple–nine months later, in March 2003. Though she did not comment about how she was treated at that time, she has been speaking out recently about how the daily sexual assaults she endured destroyed her self-esteem and left her with no willpower to try to escape.

Speaking at a recent conference on human trafficking at Johns Hopkins University, Smart said she “felt so dirty and so filthy” after being raped that she could understand why a woman in those circumstances wouldn’t try to escape “because of that alone.” She said that her deeply religious upbringing contributed to her shame and kept her in captivity.

Smart’s experience has echoes of what happened to Elisabeth Fritzl in Austria, who was freed in 2008 after a 24-year ordeal. Fritzl was held captive by her father in a cellar behind a series of locked doors and was sexually assaulted thousands of times, leading to the birth of seven children. Some of the children were kept in the basement prison, while others were raised by Fritzl’s father and his wife, who was told the children had been abandoned by Elisabeth after she ran away from home.

The U.K. Guardian’s followup report on the case describes how Elisabeth Fritzl was similarly paralyzed during her captivity and its aftermath by deep shame:

Soon after her release she started to develop an obsession with cleanliness, showering up to 10 times a day. Her children were traumatized in different ways. The cellar children found it hard to relate to their siblings who had led normal lives. What, they asked, was the reason? The upstairs children felt guilty for having been spared.  

Despite newspaper reports that both women have returned to some semblance of a “normal” life–with Smart working publicly against sexual trafficking and violence, and Fritzl living in a heavily guarded home with all of her children–it seems that whatever healing was possible came only after their assailants were held accountable in court and received lifetime prison sentences.

Psychiatrists such as Dr Adelheid Kästner say that Elisabeth’s… most significant catharsis occurred at her father’s trial almost exactly a year ago. The press and public were banned from the court to allow a videotaped recording of Elisabeth giving evidence to be played. Elisabeth crept into the court in person to witness her father’s reactions. Then Josef turned round and saw her for the first time since her escape. He broke down and wept. At that moment Elisabeth knew she had won.

In the Cleveland case where three women were held captive for more than a decade, three brothers–Ariel Castro, 52; Pedro Castro, 54; and Onil Castro, 50–have been identified by police as suspects, Deputy Chief Ed Tomba, has told the media. One of the women, Amanda Berry, is being called a “hero” after making a key 911 call.

According to press reports, Berry called the police and pleaded with them to show up “before he gets back,” revealing the depth of her fear and the power her kidnappers had over her. 

But as Elizabeth Smart told the Johns Hopkins audience, she had been so damaged by the sexual assaults and her loss of self-esteem, she did not even think about escaping for years. “Why would it even be worth screaming out?” she said. “Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.”

May 7, 2013  |  

I was 14 years old when I married Jesus. Not Jesus, the Panamanian who worked at Six Flags. I mean Jesus Christ, the Lord. My parents sent me off to Baptist youth camp in Panama City Beach for the week, and I came home with a tan and a purity ring. I sat with my legs crossed, cramped in a theater with 200 sweaty, sobbing teens as our pastor described the unwavering bonds of sex and why it should only be experienced within the confines of marriage.

The lyrics echoed in the background as he shouted about STDs and unplanned pregnancy from the pulpit. Cause I am waiting for you, praying for you darling, wait for me too, wait for me as I wait for you. One by one we each placed a ring on our fourth finger and made vows to an apparently bi-curious Jesus who took teenage husbands and wives by the dozen that night.

I didn’t buy into a word of it. Jesus as my husband: Were they kidding? But that ring! Silver and engraved with entwined hearts — everyone I knew was wearing one and I’d finally been given the opportunity to get my hands on it. And it wasn’t just the ring. This was a movement with T-shirts and hats and the added bonus of superiority over kids in school who couldn’t keep their clothes on, those sinners. After an intense and very detailed sex talk with my mother , where she stuttered and I blushed and we both used the word “flower,” I was terrified of sex. That and the slide show in sex ed didn’t help one bit. So I scribbled Jesus + Jess on my Bible cover, and I casually mentioned my virginity in daily conversations. I committed to the idea hoping it would ensure a successful marriage. Instead, it led to my divorce.

I don’t know many people these days who married still a virgin. But going to high school in the furniture capital of North Carolina, it didn’t seem so strange that I wore an engagement ring at the age of 19. People admired my decision to marry my college sweetheart and were enthusiastic about my goal of waiting until marriage to have sex. (He actually wasn’t a virgin, but he was willing to wait for me.) Over time, I’d watched my brothers and sisters in Christ lose sight of their celibacy around the time they felt the pull of raging hormones combined with slots of unsupervised co-ed time. But I pressed on in stubbornness until finally, the time had come to replace Jesus as my other half. Twenty may sound early to get married, but tell that to the girl who had her knees locked since puberty and the boy who spent years trying to convince her that just the tip didn’t count.

The morning of my wedding day, I threw up. Everyone assumed that I was nervous about having sex. I wasn’t. But it dawned on me how much we hadn’t learned yet about one another. We had known each other for three years by this point, but there was so much unexplored territory. So what was I supposed to do when my “aha moment” came as a dress was heaved over my head by seven bridesmaids? Plus, my mother had mentioned no less than 400 times, this wedding was costing them a fortune; I was getting married, there was no way out.

“I’ll give you a five-minute head start if you want to run,” my dad said with a half-smile as we walked up the aisle. I held onto his arm tighter, afraid my legs might just take him up on that offer.

We Are Family

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Posted on May 7, 2013

Shutterstock illustration of man with flag.

By Richard Reeves

Just about 30 years ago, I wrote a “Reporter at Large” article for The New Yorker magazine about Mexicans and Mexican-Americans living, illegally and legally, in Southern California. The Mexican and Chicano population of Los Angeles was the second-largest Mexican city in the world, behind only Mexico City itself.

For a New Yorker, a stranger in a strange land, the reporting launched fireworks of new ideas and revelations. The first and most astounding thing to me was that white Angelenos were the only middle-class Americans I had seen who had servants–maids, nannies, gardeners, nurses and handymen–all Mexicans, some naturalized or second- and third-generation American citizens.

Whatever their immigration status, they were great workers and good people, usually raising their children as English-speaking, Americanized young people. Spanish accents were fading then. Now, most of my Mexican-American students at the University of Southern California sound just like any boys and girls from the San Fernando Valley and other points Angeleno. I haven’t seen their papers or documents, but they are as American as me or you.

Obviously, the people hiring for about half-price compared with other American workers loved them, even if they grumbled now and then about “foreigners” and “wetbacks,” a word used back then. The other thing that I learned, and something that has enormous political importance now, is that the “legals” and the “illegals,” the “documented” and the “undocumented” were related. They were family.

Mexican-Americans did not vote much then, but they were extremely sensitive to any political or governmental moves that denied American rights to the undocumented, their parents, uncles, brothers and sisters. They do vote now, as Republican candidates learned last year. Despite socially conservative views about everything from marriage to work, they are voting Democratic by large margins. And that is one reason Barack Obama won a second term as president and Antonio Villaraigosa has been the mayor of Los Angeles for the past eight years. They think Republicans hate them and hate any liberal governance aimed at helping working people or poor people. Perhaps this will change when there are Chicano hedge funds.

In sifting through the election returns of last year, some of the clueless Republicans and conservatives did get some clues. Losing focused their minds for a bit.

Last week, one of the stars of the “soft” right, David Brooks of The New York Times, wrote a wake-up column with implications for readers who not only do not much like dark-skinned immigration, but are also hostile to such kindling issues as gay marriage and abortion. They seem incapable of understanding, once more, that these are family issues. Gays and women who choose abortion are our relatives. They are in our families. We love them–even Republican senators with gay children love them–and we don’t like seeing them pushed around by our government. The Republicans like to talk about “family values,” but they certainly don’t appreciate some of them.

What Brooks wrote to his clueless friends included this:

“Immigration opponents are effectively trying to restrict the flow of conservatives into this country. In survey after survey, immigrants are found to have more traditional ideas about family structure and community than comparable Americans. They have lower incarceration rates. They place higher emphasis on career success. They have stronger work ethics. Immigrants go into poor neighborhoods and infuse them with traditional values….

“Immigration opponents are trying to restrict assimilation. The evidence about this is clear, too. Current immigrants enter this country because they want to realize the same dreams that inspired past waves. Study after study shows current Hispanic immigrants are picking up English at an impressive clip, roughly as quickly as earlier immigrant groups. They are making steady gains in homeownership rates, job status and social identity. By second generation, according to a Pew Research Center study released earlier this year, 61 percent of immigrants think of themselves as ‘typical Americans.’”

Soon they may be more typical than Republicans.

© 2013 UNIVERSAL UCLICK

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The radar coverage of the United States airspace is nearly complete. In particular the northeastern area, where all four hijackings took place on 9/11, has no “gaps” whatsoever in radar coverage. Nonetheless there was radar loss on 9/11 with respect to the third hijacked plane, American Airlines Flight 77, which was reported to have hit the Pentagon.

American 77 took off at 8:20 a.m. EST and was hijacked more than half an hour later. It began to change its course at 8:54 and, while slowly turning to the left, its transponder was switched off at 8:56.¹ Until then it had been displayed on the radar scopes of air traffic control via the Higby radar site. This was a “beacon-only” site, meaning a site that could only display transponder signals. When American 77´s transponder was turned off, the plane was no longer visible to Higby radar.²

Image 1: Higby Radar Coverage

Nonetheless the area was covered by additional radar sites.³ Several sites that were not “beacon-only” tracked American 77 after its transponder had been turned off. However the plane was lost to controllers because of the way computers processed the radar data — and because of an unexplained wide-ranging radar failure.

For the computer managing the incoming radar data, the airspace is divided into “radar sort boxes” (illustrated by the red grid in the map above). Each sort box is 16 nautical miles wide and each is assigned to a single radar site. Additionally each sort box is assigned to a second “supplemental” radar site for safety. If the first assigned site is declared to not work properly, for example because it is taken down for maintenance, the computer starts to display the data from the supplemental site on the controller´s scope. The data from all other radar sites covering the area of the sort box is rejected and not visible at all to air traffic controllers. This computer process is called “selective rejection”.⁴

Unfortunately, the exact assignments for the radar sort boxes crossed by American 77 during its flight are not publicly available. As former air traffic controller Tom Lusch, an expert on the problem of “selective rejection,” pointed out: “Missing is the information that informs us how the radar sort boxes were adapted.”⁵ It is also unclear if the 9/11 Commission ever obtained those specific records. However, the assignments can also be estimated from the distance of the nearest radar sites to the specific sort box if it is assumed that the nearest long range radar sites would always be assigned to a sort box.

The specific sort box that American 77 was crossing when the transponder was turned off was assigned to the Higby radar site. Supplemental to this was the Lynch radar site (see map below). This precise information is not an estimate but was reported by the FAA.⁶

Image 2: Lynch Radar Coverage

Thus, when the controller lost the transponder signal and switched to “primary radar” on his scope, the computer started displaying the radar data received from Lynch. The problem: Lynch operated poorly. For unknown reasons it did not “see” American 77 in the precise area where the transponder was turned off. That is why the plane got lost for about 8 minutes, exactly when it turned.

The problem with the Lynch radar site was known to air traffic controllers and managers at the Indianapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center (Indy Center) before 9/11, as interview notes by the 9/11 Commission reveal.⁷ However, the Commission apparently failed to investigate why Lynch operated so poorly and also why the FAA, being in charge of the radar sites, had allowed this.

In fact, planes do disappear temporarily from radar from time to time for a number of technical reasons. Yet the instance of turning off a transponder in a small zone, internally assigned to a supplemental radar site which is known to insiders to be faulty, appears suspicious.

American 77 reappeared on the scopes of Indy Center only at 9:04 via Lynch radar site. At 9:07, the plane apparently crossed into a sort box that was assigned to the Bedford radar site and was subsequently displayed via Bedford without a problem.⁸

It is also worth mentioning that Flight 77 did not turn off its autopilot while being hijacked. Instead the autopilot was functioning throughout the radical change in course back to Washington. It stayed on until approximately 9:08 when it was shut off for three minutes and turned on again.⁹

Now, what are the conclusions? Miles Kara, who investigated the issue for the 9/11 Commission, said that he was also intrigued by the location of the turn initially. However he is convinced that it was not more than a coincidence.¹⁰ Nonetheless, an important question is why the alleged hijackers waited for more than half an hour before they took over and turned the plane. One can only guess because there is no clear explanation for this behavior. One thing is very obvious, however: the earlier the plane would have been turned, the more likely the plot would have been successful. Why wait for more than 30 minutes, while flying away from the intended target? For example, American Airlines Flight 11 was apparently hijacked only 15 minutes after take-off.

On the other hand, it is clear from investigating the radar sort box programming that American 77 would have remained completely visible to air traffic control if it had turned 6 to 8 minutes before or even earlier.

Were the alleged al Qaeda hijackers aware of this? We do not know, but probably not. At least there is no evidence for any contact between al Qaeda operatives and insiders with knowledge of the Lynch radar gap. Could some planners outside al Qaeda have known? Yes, this is possible. As mentioned, the information was not public, but was available only to insiders before 9/11.

Therefore it all depends on a specific interpretation: Was the location of the turn a coincidence or not? Disappearing from radar screens actually was essential for the success of the terrorists’ mission. What would have happened if the plane had not become lost to controllers at 8:56?

First, air traffic control would have observed the full 180-degree turn of American 77. At 9:00 it was heading east. For the past five minutes controllers had tried to contact the plane via radio without success. So there was loss of communication and the plane was dramatically off course. Additionally the transponder signal had disappeared. Altogether, 9:00 a.m. would have been the appropriate time to alert the military and call for the scrambling of fighter jets. In reality this had not happened only because, without any radar signal, controllers had apparently thought that the plane had crashed.

If the military had received the call at 9:00, Langley Air Force Base would have been able to get fighters in the air at about 9:15. This was the case at Otis Air Force Base, where NEADS had received a call at 8:38 and the jets were in the air at 8:52. If the Langley jets had taken off at 9:15, they would have been vectored to American 77 and would have reached the plane then at approximately 9:27 — about 10 minutes before it crashed.

It is doubtful if a shoot-down order could have been issued by that time. But at least — and the following fact is constantly underestimated — the fighter pilots could have taken a deep look into the cockpit of the hijacked plane to see who was actually at the controls. This would have helped to confirm if it really was Hani Hanjour, the alleged pilot, who reportedly could not even fly a Cessna safely, and whose presumed boarding is not backed by any airline check-in data.¹¹

But that did not happen because of the loss of radar precisely at the turning point of American 77.

Interview with author Paul Schreyer on GRTV

Paul Schreyer, born 1977, is a German author and journalist, writing for the online journals Global Research, Telepolis, and others. He is author of the book “Inside 9/11.” At the Journal of 9/11 Studies he previously published the paper “Anomalies of the air defense on 9/11,” in October 2012. His website is www.911-facts.info.

Notes

(1) 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 9, 25 http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf

(2) FAA Memorandum “AAL 77 Flight Path Information,” 17.09.01 http://de.scribd.com/doc/13950396/T8-B3-FAA-Gl-Region-Fdr-AA-77-Radar-Info-Emails-Withdrawal-Notice-Memo-and-Questions

(3) Tom Lusch´s Website, June 2010 http://tomlusch.com/tomlusch/tomlusch/AAL77.html

(4) “Selective Rejection of Low Altitude Radar Data at Air Route Traffic Control Centers: An Unsatisfactory Compromise,” 26.09.1988, Thomas G. Lusch http://www.tomlusch.com/tomlusch/tomlusch/index_files/SelRej.pdf

(5) Email from Tom Lusch, 11.01.13

(6) FAA Memorandum „AAL 77 Flight Path Information“, 17.09.01 http://de.scribd.com/doc/13950396/T8-B3-FAA-Gl-Region-Fdr-AA-77-Radar-Info-Emails-Withdrawal-Notice-Memo-and-Questions

(7) Tom Lusch´s Website, see “May 7, 2012 update” http://tomlusch.com/tomlusch/tomlusch/AAL77.html

9/11 Commission, Interview notes Charles Thomas, 04.05.04 http://tomlusch.com/tomlusch/tomlusch/AAL77_files/NARA to Lusch 20090820.pdf

(8) Email from Tom Lusch, 15.01.13, information based on NTAP flight data for AAL 77

(9) NTSB, Office of Research and Engineering, Flight path study — American Airlines Flight 77, February 19, 2002 http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB196/doc02.pdf

(10) Email from Miles Kara, 13.11.12, 9/11 Blogger, “Discussion with Miles Kara about 9/11 air defense,” 16.12.12 http://911blogger.com/news/2012-12-16/discussion-miles-kara-about-911-air-defense

(11) 9/11 Commission Report, p. 452, note 11 http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf

9/11 Commission, Team 7, Box 18, “American Airlines´ response to the February 3, 2004 requests by the 9/11 Commission C&F Ref: DTB/CRC/28079,” 15.03.04, Desmond T. Barry / Condon & Forsyth LLP, on behalf of American Airlines, p. 96 http://www.911myths.com/images/7/71/Team7_Box18_AAL-QFR-Responses.pdf

May 7, 2013  |  

In the final stretch of his campaign for re-election as mayor of Jersey City,  Jerramiah Healy revealed a bizarre twist to an already scandalous story from his 2004 campaign. Nine years ago, the NY Times reported on photographs showing Healy standing naked on his porch. At the time, Healy told the NY Times the shots were a result of “a night out drinking six to eight beers over a three-hour period,” though he did not recall how he ended up on the porch.

Now, in an apparent memory revival, Healy has embellished his tale with a few sexual and racially offensive details. 

He told Star-Ledger columnist Tom Moran last week that “three young women woke him by banging trash cans outside his house, so he rose from bed, wrapped a towel around himself, and went to investigate.”

According to the Star-Ledger article, Healy described the women as “Three Hispanic girls, young kids,” adding, “So I go out on the porch and they pulled the towel off me. Now I start laughing, and then they started doing other stuff. I said, ‘I’m old enough to be your grandfather.’ ”

Moran asked Healy “What other stuff?” and received the response, “It was filthy. …I chased them away, and I just sat down.” At that time, Healy says, a political enemy snapped the notorious photograph.

The Jersey City mayor is not new to strangeness. In 2007 he was convicted for a run-in with the police. However, given the election results following the 2004 incident, the public seems not to mind the man’s weird behavior. As Tom Moran puts it, “People like him.”

Moran acknowledges that Healy has a certain charm, but warns readers not to get too “warm and fuzzy” feeling about Healy and his quirks because his administration has been proved to be thoroughly corrupt.

“Healy is one of the few survivors in his inner circle who was not convicted in the famous 2009 FBI bust known as ‘Operation Bid Rig,'” Moran writes. 

Operation Bid Rig consisted mainly of “old school stuff” like cash in envelopes in return for needed permits. The list of Healy administration members convicted includes his deputy mayor, three city council members who ran on his ticket, his housing commissioner, two senior managers in his health department, the building inspector and a commissioner at the utilities authority. 

Regarding his recent scandalizing comments about the “Hispanic” women, Healy’s rival politician, Councilman Steven Fulop, told Star-Ledger, “It’s another embarrassment in a statewide newspaper courtesy of Jerry Healy and it’s sad that 10 years after the fact, he now decides to blame Hispanic women for his personal problems.”

Councilwoman Nidia Lopez said the Hispanic community deserves an apology, then added that she thinks the mayor needs psychological help. 

“For this mayor to degrade Hispanic women by creating this wild story eight years later … three young kids molested him, he’s laughing about it. How the hell did he know they were Hispanic?” She added, “When I ran in 2009, I asked him if that was really him on the stoop, and he said, ‘I don’t know baby. I was so drunk I don’t remember.’ Those were his exact words to me …. There is absolutely something wrong with this picture.”