Jordanians have staged a demonstration in the capital, Amman, to express their discontent with US President Barack Obama’s visit to the region.

Jordanian demonstrators gathered outside the US Embassy in Amman on Thursday, chanting slogans against the US president and burning American flags.

The US president will travel to Jordan to hold talks with King Abdullah II on Friday on the last leg of his Middle East tour.

The two sides are expected to discuss the crisis in neighboring Syria and the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Obama began its three-day trip to the region on Wednesday and held talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, where he reiterated strong support for the regime.

He also paid a visit to the occupied West Bank and met with acting Palestinian Authority Chief Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on Thursday.

Palestinians have also staged similar protest rallies against Obama’s visit over the past two days, saying he is not doing enough to stop Israel’s settlement activities and the arbitrary arrest of Palestinians by Israeli troops.

On Wednesday, Palestinian activists set up a protest camp on the controversial E1 area near al-Quds (Jerusalem) where the Israeli regime intends to build thousands of illegal settler homes.

They also took to the streets in Ramallah on Thursday and voiced their anger at Obama over his all-out support for the occupying Israeli regime.

MKA/MA

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been placed under a formal investigation over charges of taking financial advantages of the richest woman in France during his 2007 election campaign.

Sarkozy’s lawyer said Thursday that he was accused of receiving illegal donations from French billionaire Liliane Bettencourt, the elderly heiress of L’Oreal group, to fund the election campaign.

The former French president was unexpectedly summoned to the Bordeaux offices of Jean-Michel Gentil, the judge in charge of the case, where he encountered at least four ex-members of Bettencourt’s staff.

Gentil intended to determine how many times Sarkozy had visited Bettencourt during his successful campaign.

The former president said, however, that he had visited Bettencourt only once during the campaign, while the rich woman’s staff gave contradictory accounts of the event.

Sarkozy’s lawyers said they would file an appeal against the “legally incoherent and unfair decision” to formally investigate him over accusations of accepting thousands of euros from Bettencourt while she was vulnerable due to weakness.

Medical experts say the 90-year-old heiress’s mental capacity began to deteriorate from the autumn of 2006.

In 2010, Claire Thibout, Bettencourt’s former accountant, said she had given envelopes filled with cash to Bettencourt’s fortune manager on the understanding it was to be passed on to Sarkozy’s campaign treasurer.

Investigators suspect that up to four million euros (about $5.2 million) had been transferred to Sarkozy’s campaign, while the French law permits each individual to donate no more than 4,600 euros of campaign contribution.

Sarkozy had already been questioned over the case in November 2012.

The recent charges could shatter Sarkozy’s hopes of a comeback to the political arena as he has repeatedly hinted that he would once again run for president in 2017.

MKA/HSN

A South Korean academic says the recent cyber attack on South Korean television broadcasters and banks has taken a psychological toll on the country’s citizens, Press TV reports.

Lim Jong-in, with the Korea University, said on Thursday, “Broadcasters and banks cannot suffer physical or actual damage, but attacking such agencies can greatly affect the public psychologically.”

Lim added that the attack seems to have a “political purpose to cause confusion in our society.”

On March 20, a cyber attack coming from a single organization partially or entirely crippled computers at major South Korean broadcasters and banks, state media reported.

Only one of the banks was reported to be back online by Thursday, while all media companies expect a full recovery next week.

Won Jin, an office worker, said, “I’m a citizen of South Korea and a patron of these companies. I can’t help but feel uneasy about the hacking incident… I hope the situation does not occur again.”

South Korean cyber security experts have traced a malicious code to an IP address in China. However, Seoul suspects that hackers loyal to North Korea were responsible for the attack.

The cyber attacks caused major disruptions in commerce, public services and banking across the nation.

People in South Korea rely on a largely cashless system.

GMA/HSN

Wide divisions within the Conservative Party over how the Government should respond to Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands are revealed in Margaret Thatcher’s private papers which have been made public.

While the Tories publicly presented a united front in 1982, briefing notes prepared for the-then Prime Minister demonstrate the polarised opinions she had to contend with in the early days of the crisis.

Until now the backroom deliberations have remained largely private but the notes are among those released by the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust as it opens its files from a year which came to define Lady Thatcher’s career.

They range from Ken Clarke, then a junior minister, arguing to “blow up a few ships but nothing more” to West Devon MP Peter Mills who warned “my constituents want blood”.

Historian Chris Collins, from the trust, said the papers reflected the “chaos” within the party and more widely following the surprise attack.

He added: “These papers reveal how stressful this situation was, it was a massive undertaking which tested her to the full.

“In the early days of the conflict there was great confusion and doubt on behalf of the party and more widely.

“People were feeling very down about the whole process and what was going to happen next. There was tremendous chaos.

“But of course a party has to show a united face as far as it can.”

On April 6, four days after the incursion, the Chief Whip, Michael Jopling, prepared a note for the Prime Minister saying: “You may like to have general re-action to events in the Falkland Islands.”

Mr Clarke, along with Sir Timothy Raison, MP for Aylesbury, are attributed with the view: “Hopes nobody thinks we are going to fight the Argentinians. We should blow up a few ships but nothing more.”

Lady Thatcher has marked the comment with two blue biro lines.

Sir John Page was said to be “desperately depressed” by the situation and Ian Gilmour, later Baron Gilmour of Craigmillar, said: “We are making a big mistake. It will make Suez look like common sense.”

Five MPS urged Lady Thatcher to “keep calm” adding “we can get away without a fight” while others were “all taking a hard line”.

A similar note the following day described Stephen Dorrell as “very wobbly”.

It adds: “Will only support the fleet as a negotiating ploy. If they will not negotiate we should withdraw.”

Meanwhile, referring to Keith Stainton, the note reads: “Intends to attack the Government. His wife has large interests in the Falklands.”

Lady Thatcher is the first British Prime Minister whose private and official papers have been released in this way.

Charles Moore, her authorised biographer, said: “The Thatcher archive is a marvellous resource for all those interested in her career as Prime Minister and in this country’s recent political history.

“This release will provide the raw material to help researchers study and understand the changing political landscape of her first year as Prime Minister.”

The latest release is open to the public at the Churchill Archive Centre in Cambridge and is available online.

:: A hand-written note by Lady Thatcher, prepared after April 2, 1982, possibly in preparation for a speech or press conference, shows that she settled on a brief but broadly supportive position on the Duke of York’s deployment as part of the Falklands task force.

“If asked about Prince Andrew it is the express wish of The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and of Prince Andrew himself, that if the Invincible sails he sails with her,” it says.

:: The papers mention an early meeting with Robert Mugabe, who had been elected as Prime Minister of Zimbabwe in 1980 and was then still considered a hero by many after his role against white-minority rule.

At a lunch held in his honour on May 19, 1982, Lady Thatcher praised him for his “friendly and open manner”.

Tax rises of up to £9 billion could be imposed on British households and businesses after the next general election in 2015, a leading economic forecaster has warned.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), British Chancellor George Osborne’s fourth budget, presented this week, had paved the way for bigger tax increases after 2015 general election.

“That is after an election and it is much more possible that a future government will prefer to increase taxes instead,” said Rowena Crawford of the IFS.

This comes as he estimated tax rises, equal to 2 percent in the basic rate of income tax, could drag more British people into poverty.

In his speech at the House of Commons on Budget Day, Osborne said Britain’s economy will grow less this year and the next as the country is bracing itself for drastic austerity cuts.

The Chancellor warned the country’s growth would halve this year to 0.6 percent from the 1.2 percent.

Earlier in February, credit ratings agency Moody’s downgraded the British government’s bond rating from the top AAA to AA1 due to Britain’s rising debt and slowing growth.

There are speculations that Britain could face its second credit downgrade as a result of the country’s sluggish recovery.

MOS/HE

A Safe and a Shotgun or Publicly-owned Banks? The Battle of Cyprus

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Posted on Mar 22, 2013

loop_oh (CC BY-ND 2.0)

By Ellen Brown, Web of Debt

This article first appeared at Web of Debt.

“If these worries become really serious, . . . [s]mall savers will take their money out of banks and resort to household safes and a shotgun.”
–Martin Hutchinson on the attempted EU raid on private deposits in Cyprus banks

The deposit confiscation scheme has long been in the making. US depositors could be next . . . .

On Tuesday, March 19, the national legislature of Cyprus overwhelmingly rejected a proposed levy on bank deposits as a condition for a European bailout. Reuters called it “a stunning setback for the 17-nation currency bloc,” but it was a stunning victory for democracy. As Reuters quoted one 65-year-old pensioner, “The voice of the people was heard.” 

The EU had warned that it would withhold €10 billion in bailout loans, and the European Central Bank (ECB) had threatened to end emergency lending assistance for distressed Cypriot banks, unless depositors — including small savers — shared the cost of the rescue. In the deal rejected by the legislature, a one-time levy on depositors would be required in return for a bailout of the banking system. Deposits below €100,000 would be subject to a 6.75% levy or “haircut”, while those over €100,000 would have been subject to a 9.99% “fine.”

The move was bold, but the battle isn’t over yet. The EU has now given Cyprus until Monday to raise the billions of euros it needs to clinch an international bailout or face the threatened collapse of its financial system and likely exit from the euro currency zone. 

The Long-planned Confiscation Scheme

The deal pushed by the “troika” — the EU, ECB and IMF — has been characterized as a one-off event devised as an emergency measure in this one extreme case. But the confiscation plan has long been in the making, and it isn’t limited to Cyprus.

In a September 2011 article in the Bulletin of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand titled “A Primer on Open Bank Resolution,” Kevin Hoskin and Ian Woolford discussed a very similar haircut plan that had been in the works, they said, since the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The article referenced recommendations made in 2010 and 2011 by the Basel Committee of the Bank for International Settlements, the “central bankers’ central bank” in Switzerland.

The purpose of the plan, called the Open Bank Resolution (OBR), is to deal with bank failures when they have become so expensive that governments are no longer willing to bail out the lenders. The authors wrote that the primary objectives of OBR are to:

– ensure that, as far as possible, any losses are ultimately borne by the bank’s shareholders and creditors . . . . 

The spectrum of “creditors” is defined to include depositors:

At one end of the spectrum, there are large international financial institutions that invest in debt issued by the bank (commonly referred to as wholesale funding). At the other end of the spectrum, are customers with cheque and savings accounts and term deposits.

Most people would be surprised to learn that they are legally considered “creditors” of their banks rather than customers who have trusted the bank with their money for safekeeping, but that seems to be the case. According to Wikipedia:

In most legal systems, . . . the funds deposited are no longer the property of the customer. The funds become the property of the bank, and the customer in turn receives an asset called a deposit account (a checking or savings account). That deposit account is a liability of the bank on the bank’s books and on its balance sheet. Because the bank is authorized by law to make loans up to a multiple of its reserves, the bank’s reserves on hand to satisfy payment of deposit liabilities amounts to only a fraction of the total which the bank is obligated to pay in satisfaction of its demand deposits.

The bank gets the money. The depositor becomes only a creditor with an IOU. The bank is not required to keep the deposits available for withdrawal but can lend them out, keeping only a “fraction” on reserve, following accepted fractional reserve banking principles. When too many creditors come for their money at once, the result can be a run on the banks and bank failure.

The New Zealand OBR said the creditors had all enjoyed a return on their investments and had freely accepted the risk, but most people would be surprised to learn that too. What return do you get from a bank on a deposit account these days? And isn’t your deposit protected against risk by FDIC deposit insurance?

Not anymore, apparently. As Martin Hutchinson observed in Money Morning, “if governments can just seize deposits by means of a ‘tax’ then deposit insurance is worth absolutely zippo.” 

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A shooitng at a major US Marines base in Quantico, Virgina near Washington DC has so far killed three individuals with the suspect reportedly barricaded in barracks.

MFB/MA

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As Europe wakes up to what could be a tumultuous day, Handelsblatt reports that the ECB has decided that, due to the “great danger” of a bank run once they reopen next week, it will enforce capital controls independently of Cypriot (elected) officials. With perhaps a nod towards negotiating some ELA funding for Cypriot banks next week (if the government accepts this ECB-enforced ‘program’), the rather stunning restrictions on people’s private property include:

• Freezing Savings – no time-frame (it’s not your money anymore)
• Make bank transfers dependent on Central Bank approval (a money tzar?)
• Lower ATM withdrawal limits (spend it how we say?)

The capital controls will be designed “so that citizens have access to sufficient cash to go about their lives.” So, there it is, a European Union imposed decision on just how much money each Cypriot can spend per day. Wasn’t it just last week, we were told Europe is fixed?

Handelsblatt cites unidentified central bank sources so we wonder whether this is yet another strawman shot across the bow as the Cypriot government heads in for an early start of discussions at 10am (GMT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin holds hopes that the BRICS group of emerging economies will turn into “a full-scale strategic cooperation mechanism” and become more involved in global politics.

Putin gave an interview to the ITAR-TASS news agency ahead of the March 26-27 BRICS summit in Durban, South Africa. Apart from Russia, the bloc consists of Brazil, India, China and the host country.

ITAR-TASS: BRICS’ relatively new phenomenon attracts increased global attention due to the optimistic predictions about its development, especially against the backdrop of global crisis developments in the world economy. What is BRICS’ immediate and long-term significance for Russia? Is such a format practical for the development of relations among these countries?

Vladimir Putin: There are a number of long-term factors working on BRICS’ success. For the last two decades the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have been in the lead of global economic growth. Thus, in 2012, the average GDP growth rate in the group amounted to 4 per cent, while for the G7 this index was estimated at 0.7 per cent. In addition, GDP of the BRICS countries derived from the national currency purchasing power parity is currently over 27 per cent of the global GDP and its share continues to increase.

BRICS is a key element of the emerging multipolar world. The Group of Five has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to the fundamental principles of the international law and contributed to strengthening the United Nations central role. Our countries do not accept power politics or violation of other countries’ sovereignty. We share approaches to the pressing international issues, including the Syrian crisis, the situation around Iran, and Middle East settlement.

The BRICS’ credibility and influence in the world is translated into its growing contribution to the efforts to stimulate global development. This important matter will be specifically addressed at the BRICS Leaders — Africa Dialogue Forum to be held on the sidelines of the Durban summit.

BRICS members advocate the creation of a more balanced and just system of global economic relations. The emerging markets are interested in long-term sustainable economic growth worldwide and reforms of the financial and economic architecture to make it more efficient. This is reflected in last year’s joint decision to contribute $75 billion to the IMF lending program, thus increasing the participation of the fastest growing economies in the Fund’s authorized capital.

Russia, as the initiator of the BRICS format and chair at its first summit in Yekaterinburg in 2009, sees the work within this group among its foreign policy priorities. This year, I have approved the Concept of the Russian Federation’s Participation in the BRICS group, which sets forth strategic goals we seek to achieve through interaction with our partners from Brazil, China, India and South Africa.

Such cooperation in international affairs, trade, capital exchange and humanitarian sphere facilitates the creation of the most favourable environment for further growth of Russian economy, improvement of its investment climate, quality of life and well-being of our citizens. Our membership in this association helps foster privileged bilateral relations with the BRICS nations based on the principles of good neighbourliness and mutually beneficial cooperation. We believe it crucial to increase Russia’s linguistic, cultural and information presence in the BRICS member nations, as well as expand educational exchanges and personal contact.

ITAR-TASS: What are the group’s short-term objectives and how do you see strategic directions for BRICS’ economic development?

VP: BRICS identifies what is to be done based on action plans adopted at the group’s annual summits. Last year’s Delhi Action Plan outlined 17 areas of cooperation, including meetings of Foreign Ministers on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session, joint meetings of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors on the sidelines of the G20, World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings, as well as contacts between other agencies.

We are currently negotiating a new plan we will discuss at the meeting in Durban. I am confident that it will help us develop a closer partnership. We expect that we will be able to closer coordinate our approaches to key issues on the agenda of the forthcoming G20 summit in St Petersburg, increase our cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking and production, and our efforts to counter terrorist, criminal and military threats in cyberspace.

It is of great importance for Russia to increase its trade and investment cooperation with its BRICS partners and launch new multilateral business projects involving our nations’ business communities. In Durban we intend to announce the formal establishment of the BRICS Business Council designed to support that activity. The summit will be preceded by the BRICS Business Forum, which will bring together more than 900 business community representatives from our countries.

ITAR-TASS: The potential of the BRICS economies brings up not only the question of economic policy coordination but also that of close geopolitical interaction. What is BRICS’ geopolitical role and mission in today’s world? Does it go beyond the purely economic agenda and should the BRICS countries accept greater responsibility for geopolitical processes? What is their policy with regard to the rest of the world, including its major actors such as the United States, the European Union, Japan… What future do you see for this association in this regard?

VP: First and foremost, the BRICS countries seek to help the world economy achieve stable and self-sustaining growth and reform the international financial and economic architecture. Our major task is to find ways to accelerate global development, encourage flows of capital in real economy and increase employment. This is particularly important in the context of poor global economic growth rates and unacceptably high unemployment. Although this is mainly true of western countries, the BRICS states are also negatively affected; export markets are shrinking, global finance lacks stability, and our own economic growth is slowing down.

At the same time, we invite our partners to gradually transform BRICS from a dialogue forum that coordinates approaches to a limited number of issues into a full-scale strategic cooperation mechanism that will allow us to look for solutions to key issues of global politics together.

The BRICS countries traditionally voice similar approaches to the settlement of all international conflicts through political and diplomatic means. For the Durban summit, we are working on a joint declaration setting forth our fundamental approaches to pressing international issues, i.e. crisis in Syria, Afghanistan, Iran and the Middle East.

We do not view BRICS as a geopolitical competitor to western countries or their organisations – on the contrary, we are open to discussion with any country or organisation that is willing to do so within the framework of the common multipolar world order.

ITAR-TASS: Russia and China are important strategic and historic partners. How do you see the significance of such partnership not only for the development of the two countries, but also for the entire system of international relations and the world economy?

VP: Russia and China are two influential members of the international community, they are permanent members of the UN Security Council, and they are among the world’s largest economies. That is why the strategic partnership between us is of great importance on both a bilateral and global scale.

Today the Russian-Chinese relations are on the rise, they are the best in their centuries-long history. They are characterised by a high degree of mutual trust, respect for each other’s interests, support in vital issues, they are a true partnership and are genuinely comprehensive.

President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping is currently on a state visit to Russia. The fact that the new Chinese leader makes his first foreign trip to our country confirms the special nature of strategic partnership between Russia and China.

In the last five years only, the volume of bilateral trade has more than doubled. China has firmly taken the first place among our trading partners. In 2012 the Russian-Chinese trade turnover increased by 5.2 per cent to constitute $87.5 billion (in 2007 the figure was $40 billion).

The commonality of our approaches to fundamental issues of world order and key international problems has become an important stabilising factor in world politics. Within the framework of the UN, the Group of Twenty, BRICS, the SCO, APEC and other multilateral formats, we are working together, helping to shape a new, more just world order, ensure peace and security, defend basic principles of international law. That is our common contribution to strengthening sustainable global development.

Russia and China show an example of a balanced and pragmatic approach to solving the most critical issues, such as the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, nuclear problem on the Korean Peninsula, situation around Iran’s nuclear program.

ITAR-TASS: Before the BRICS summit your schedule features a working visit to South Africa. What do you expect from the upcoming negotiations with South African party? Will this visit give impetus to the development of bilateral relations?

VP: Russia and South Africa have old ties of friendship and mutual respect. Multifaceted cooperation is developing between our countries, with constructive political dialogue established at the highest level, between governments, ministries and agencies. Interparliamentary, interregional, business and humanitarian contacts are consistently expanding.

During the visit to South Africa we certainly hope to give new impetus to our bilateral relations. The adoption of the Declaration on Strategic Partnership between Russia and South Africa is being prepared; it will confirm the new quality of our relations, determine key areas of joint work in the future. We plan to sign a number of important intergovernmental and interagency documents in Durban: the declaration on strategic partnership, the agreements on cooperation in the energy sector, agriculture, etc.

Trade and economic cooperation will be in the focus of our attention during negotiations. Last year the volume of trade between Russia and South Africa grew by 66 per cent and reached $964 million (in 2011 the figure was $580 million). Big Russian businesses, including such companies as Renova, Norilsk Nickel, Evraz Group, Basic Element, Severstal, Renaissance Capital and Vnesheconombank are actively entering the South African market, they are interested in further expanding their presence in South Africa.

Russia and South Africa can significantly, by many times, increase the volume of bilateral trade and investments, the number of mutually beneficial projects in the mining sector, power industry (including nuclear power), space exploration, military and technical sphere.

We consider it important to develop cooperation in the field of education and culture by strengthening direct ties between universities, promoting Russian language teaching in South African educational institutions, organising film festivals and tours by leading artists, and exchanging museum exhibitions.

We will discuss practical steps to achieve these goals with President Jacob Zuma.

A US official has revealed that there may have been no chemical weapons used in a deadly incident occurring Tuesday in Syria’s Aleppo. Meanwhile the UN has launched a full-scale investigation into the disputed attack.

“Our growing sense is that weaponized chemical weapons were not used,” claimed the US official, speaking anonymously on Thursday. A European security official has taken the same stance, saying that the death toll in the event of a chemical attack would be much higher than presently recorded. He added that there was no evidence to support the allegation, despite prior accusations by a multitude of Western officials.

The Syrian government and rebel forced have been accusing each other of using chemical agents after a recent rocket attack near the province of Aleppo claimed 26 lives.

While Barack Obama reiterated his stance regarding President Bashar Assad, saying that he would be held accountable if found to have carried out the attack, UN chief Ban Ki-moon promised a probe as soon as possible. “I have decided to conduct a United Nations investigation into the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria,” Ban Ki-moon told reporters, specifying that the investigation will focus on the Aleppo attack, “the specific incident brought to my attention by the Syrian government.”

The UN investigators will cooperate with experts with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the World Health Organization (WHO). The incident will be investigated as a single case, which goes against France and the UK’s initial request to investigate another supposed attack, allegedly in Damascus.

Moscow has expressed hope that the US and France are not going to hamper the UN investigation into the Aleppo chemical attack in Syria. “I expressed hope that their initiatives are not attempts to postpone, hamper or prevent the investigation into what happened on March 19, because this issue needs urgent attention,” Russia’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Vitaly Churkin stated.

Churkin’s US counterpart, Susan Rice, supported the probe in a statement on Thursday. “As the U.N. proceeds with these efforts, we will also continue to work closely with our partners to obtain further information regarding any and all credible allegations of the potential or actual use of chemical weapons in Syria,” said Rice.

Meanwhile, Republican Senator John McCain and the Democrat Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, continued with the anti-Assad rhetoric, saying in a letter to President Obama that “the potential use of chemical weapons only makes the case for greater action more compelling and urgent.”

…

Still an austerity zone

Even though the financial crisis in Europe has faded, for the time being at least, the economic stress nurturing protest movements hasn’t. The best that can be said is that the incidence of austerity may not be as significant as it was in 2010-11

…

Backlash link to austerity

Let’s assume nothing changes, and that while European elites debate how — or if — they can build strong European banking, fiscal and economic institutions, with the required transfer mechanisms between creditors and debtors, the economic lot of European citizens, an unhappy one for five years now, shows no improvement. This seems a decent assumption.

…

The principal economic lesson is that an austerity regime with recurring reductions in public outlays won’t work a) when the private sector is trying to delever and shrink liabilities at the same time b) when it is a generic phenomenon and c) when its principal impact is to depress the level of money GDP and sustain the economy in a liquidity trap. But thanks to some interesting empirical work, another lesson concerns the corrosive and dangerous effects of large and sustained austerity in creating a social backlash that results in greater uncertainty, and therefore inertia, when it comes to corporate hiring and capital spending. As a result, output and public sector tax revenues suffer, reinforcing the negative dynamic between debt and the economy.

…

when expenditure cuts, specifically, rise to more than 2% of GDP, and particularly when they rise towards or over 5% of GDP, the number and the severity of incidents of unrest rise sharply.

…

Self-evidently, there have been heightened levels of social unrest and shocks to the political system in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy, but not in the UK or Ireland, or in the US, for that matter, though neither the US nor the UK, for example, have been immune to social unrest, sometimes requiring the force of the state to suppress it.12. But the main difference between many incidents of social unrest and the ones that damage the social fabric and the economic environment is the impact (sometimes more perceived than real, perhaps) of highly restrictive budgetary measures. Some governments may be better able to implement and absorb them, and sustain the trust or belief in citizens in perseverance. Mostly, this comes down to the robustness of local institutions, and the performance of leaders, as well as culture and history.

The most fundamental manifestation of this damage is, of course, unemployment. But this is only the most visible sign of the upheaval in Europe’s famed social model, and overlooks other important social and economic fault lines, including stagnant or declining real wages, rising income inequality, levels of youth unemployment of between 25% and 50%, and the rise in the numbers of long-term unemployed.

These phenomena didn’t begin with the financial and Euro crises, of course, but they have certainly been exacerbated by it and by the response of governments, and citizens are certainly making the connection, regardless.

So why are the streets relatively quiet?

The short answer is we don’t know. None of the reasons we can think of add up to much, but judge for yourself. It could have something to do with Europe’s rapid ageing demographic transition. The proportion of young adults, aged 15-24 has already been falling from peak levels seen in the mid 1980s, and is on track to decline further in the next 20 years. The proportion of 15-59 year olds, or what we might imagine as the part of the population most likely to express non-voting anger, is peaking now, but a significant decline is predicted. Perhaps the baby boomers have expended their protest energy!

Rapid growth in, and a rising proportion of, the numbers of young people, say aged 15-29, certainly feed the potential for social protest and upheaval. But they also need a catalyst, which could be the emergence of high inflation.

Empirically, there is an unequivocal association, but this is best applied, in contemporary times at least, to the experience of emerging and developing countries, for example, as in the Arab Spring. Although the European upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s were set against a backdrop of rising inflation, those in the 1930s and today are the product of depression and awkward questions of self-determination, not inflation.

Perhaps the relative calm in Europe has something to do with European family structures. The Bank Credit Analyst recently published a chart, emphasizing the role of the family as a shock absorber. The authors suggest that the countries with the highest youth unemployment rates are also those with the highest proportion of young adults living with their parents, who fulfill the role of effecting transfers and economic and social support.

We are not sure about this one either, although having an extended family structure on which to rely is clearly a mitigating factor against poverty and social exclusion. But the two variables may simply be spuriously correlated since both represent symptoms of a depressed economy. In any event, those countries with the highest youth unemployment and numbers living at home have already claimed the bragging rights for anti-austerity protest, while six of the other eight countries have been characterized by fallen or weakened governments, and the rise of nationalist and anti-immigrant political parties and policies.

A conclusion to this discussion is not possible.

In a benign outcome, the potential for social disorder will be defused by a new approach to economic burden-sharing, a re-sequencing of the pursuit of austerity and growth objectives, and steady progress towards the establishment of credible and trusted European banking, economic and political institutions, including financial transfer mechanisms. Motherhood, to be sure, and this has at least two vital caveats, namely the willingness of Germany and other northern European countries to accept significant sovereignty compromises, and the implications for the EU project, if this level of integration proves a bridge too far for UK voters in the promised 2017 referendum.

Social and political upheavals would doubtless haunt the worst-case outcome, where muddling through leads nevertheless to a fragmentation of the Eurozone, or, in extremis, a collapse, in spite of OMTs and the like. The possible consequences, including for the social fabric of Europe, have been well aired in the last couple of years.

The middle way, so to speak, is a muddling through that never scales the successful outcome hurdles, but carries on regardless. Political bonds, maybe fear, sustain the Euro system, but European leaders are unable to reach an agreed and acceptable framework for durable economic recovery and full integration. This outcome describes the status quo, and is the base case for most people. But it is also about stagnant, low growth, persistent high unemployment, retreating targets for debt sustainability, more bail-outs and bail-ins, latent financial instability, and likely sovereign default. The current Eurozone news could not be more apt, and doesn’t seem like the ideal scenario in which to expect European social unrest and political turbulence to fade away.

I blame John Amato for getting me hooked on the new Netflix Series, House of Cards. Kevin Spacey is fantastic, the pace is great, but unfortunately, the policy issues they tackle in this first season are predictably corporate.

Nothing screams corporate like the storyline about education reform. After Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) forces his colleague to abandon education reform because he’s “too left”, Underwood finds himself negotiating a package with union representatives that feels a lot like Reed Hastings’ dream “reform package.”

Adam Bessie introduces Ms. Reform, Hastings’ dream girl of education reform:

Ms. Reform is the Marilyn Monroe of domestic policy. The corporate media — and the President himself — can’t get enough of her.

It’s no surprise she’s become famous. Ms. Reform is sexy and seductive, especially to the powerful: she looks like a philanthropist — kind and nurturing, committed to helping the poor, forgotten black and brown children in the inner-cities. Who in their right mind could be against her plans to help our children — especially our most vulnerable and least privileged — have a fair shot in life? But inside — a side she never shows the camera, and when she does, it’s Photoshopped — Ms.Reform is a cutthroat businesswoman: she’s read Ronald Reagan’s economic advisor Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom from cover to cover, she has complete faith in “free enterprise,” she’s never heard of John Dewey nor deigned to teach a day in her life, and boy, does she friggin’ hate unions. In short, Ms. Reform appeals not just to the bleeding heart social justice Obamaites, but also, to venture capitalists that think Obama is fomenting a socialist take-over of America. The only surprise is that she didn’t become famous sooner.

Now, Ms. Reform is starring once again, this time, along (another) Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey in the NetFlix original seriesHouse of Cards, which explores the sordid underbelly of Washington politics. The protagonist Congressman Frank Underwood — who has no allegiance but to his own power — takes on the education reform bill for the new President, one which looks strikingly similar to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top: the bill increases charter schools, and ties test scores to teacher evaluation, echoing the corporate style, free enterprise reforms both bills have implemented. And of course, as is always the case, Ms. Reform is cast as heroine — and the unions, at best obstructionist and only interested in the needs of the teachers, and not the children (To be fair, though, it’s clear that the real villain in the show is not the unions, but Underwood himself — and as Underwood is supporting the bill, it might cast a negative light on the policies to some viewers).

[…]

To be clear, Ms.Reform’s on-screen portrayal mirrors Hasting’s values and his hefty investments. Hastings — who objectifies and commodifies education by characterizing it as business “space,” devoid of humanity — is invested both in for-profit, non-profit, and lobbying efforts that push for the very reforms reflected in House of Cards.

Alyssa Rosenberg at ThinkProgress noticed it too:

Elsewhere in the education fight, the only discussion of policy are facile mentions of charter schools, collective bargaining, and performance standards. A union official appears in one scene to declare that “Charters jeapordize our ability to organize, which is reason enough” to object to Frank’s draft of the bill. Otherwise, the movement is represented only by picketers who melt when Frank and his wife serve them barbeque, and by a paid lobbyist who is manipulated into decking Frank in his office, giving him the advantage he needs to force a settlement to a teacher’s strike and a legislative deadlock. When Frank manipulates Congressman Russo (Corey Stoll) into running for Governor of Pennsylvania, his opposition is largely personified by the head of a shipbuilder’s union decimated by the BRAC process that shutters a local shipyard.

It’s true that Hastings didn’t write the script, but I can’t help thinking he shaped a narrative that lends itself to such a script. The casual treatment and perception of unions as thugs, of teachers as incompetent, of solutions as simply privatizing the effort altogether while using data analysis as the benchmark for nearly everything is characteristic of today’s reform discussion.

News broke late tonight that Chicago Public Schools may be closing 50 public schools. FIFTY. There is absolutely no way the school system can absorb that kind of shock. I don’t think the number 50 is a coincidence. Back in the days when the Gates Foundation thought charters were the answer to everything, the foundation put millions into the district to create charter schools, including 50 new high schools under their “small high school” initiatve.

In 2012, the Gates Foundation announced they would not put any more funds into CPS, leaving the district with a choice as to which schools to de-fund and which to keep. That wouldn’t have anything to do with Chicago teachers going on strike last year, would it?

Shall we take bets on which schools stay open and which ones close? I’m betting on the charters staying open and the public schools closing. You?

It worries me that we’re seeing the reformers worm into popular culture without fully exploring all of the issues around education reform. I realize Reed Hastings, Bill Gates, Betsy DeVos and Michelle Rhee think they have all the answers, but they really don’t.

A show like House of Cards is uniquely positioned to honestly explore all facets of an issue like this in a fast-paced and entertaining way. It’s disappointing to see the writers reach for the corporate solution without even looking at the other side of things.

Last November, in an act of sheer monetary desperation, the ECB issued an exhaustive, and quite ridiculous, pamphlet titled “Virtual Currency Schemes” in which it mocked and warned about the “ponziness” of such electronic currencies as BitCoin. Why a central bank would stoop so “low” to even acknowledge what no “self-respecting” (sic) PhD-clad economist would even discuss, drunk and slurring, at cocktail parties, remains a mystery to this day. However, that it did so over fears the official artificial currency of the insolvent continent, the EUR, may be becoming even more “ponzi” than the BitCoins the ECB was warning about, was clear to everyone involved who saw right through the cheap propaganda attempt. Feel free to ask any Cypriot if they would now rather have their money in locked up Euros, or in “ponzi” yet freely transferable, unregulated BitCoins.

For the answer, we present the chart showing the price of BitCoin in EUR terms since the issuance of the ECB’s paper:

Therein, sadly, lies the rub.

As central banks have been able to manipulate the price of precious metals for decades, using a countless plethora of blatant and not so blatant trading techniques, whether involving “banging the close”, abusing the London AM fix, rehypothecating and leasing out claims on gold to short and re-short the underlying, creating paper gold exposure out of thin air with which to suppress deliverable prices, or simply engaging in any other heretofore unknown illegal activity, the parabolic surge in gold and silver has, at least for the time being – and especially since the infamous, and demoralizing May 1, 2011 silver smackdown – lost its mojo.

But while precious metals have been subject to price manipulation by the legacy establishment, even if ultimately the actual physical currency equivalent asset, its “value” naively expressed in some paper currency, may be in the possession of the beholder, to date no price suppression or regulation schemes of virtual currencies existed.

It was thus only a matter of time before the same establishment was forced to make sure that money leaving the traditional M0/M1/M2/M3 would not go into alternative electronic currency venues, but would instead be used to accelerate the velocity of the money used by the legacy, and quite terminal, monetary system.

After all, what if not pushing savers to spend, spend, spend and thus boost the money in circulation, was the fundamental purpose of the recent collapse in faith in savings held with European banks?

So, as we had long expected, the time when the global Keynesian status quo refocused its attention from paper gold and silver prices, to such “virtual” currencies as BitCoin has finally arrived.

The WSJ reports that, “the U.S. is applying money-laundering rules to “virtual currencies,” amid growing concern that new forms of cash bought on the Internet are being used to fund illicit activities. The move means that firms that issue or exchange the increasingly popular online cash will now be regulated in a similar manner as traditional money-order providers such as Western Union Co. They would have new bookkeeping requirements and mandatory reporting for transactions of more than $10,000. Moreover, firms that receive legal tender in exchange for online currencies or anyone conducting a transaction on someone else’s behalf would be subject to new scrutiny, said proponents of Internet currencies.

And just like that, there goes a major part of the allure of all those virtual currencies such as BitCoin that consumers had turned to, and away from such rapidly devaluing units of exchange as the dollar and euro. Because if there was one medium of exchange that was untouched, unregulated, and unmediated by the US government and other authoritarian, despotic regimes around the insolvent “developed world”, it was precisely transactions involving BitCoin.

That is no longer the case, as the bloodhound of the Federal Reserve has now turned its attention toward BitCoin, and will not stop until it crashes both its value to end-users, and its utility, in yet another attempt to force the USD, and other fiat, upon global consumers as the only forms of allowed legal tender.

More from the WSJ:

The rising popularity of virtual currencies, while no more than a drop in the bucket of global liquidity, is being fueled by Internet merchants, as well as users’ concerns about privacy, jitters about traditional currencies in Europe and the age-old need to move money for illicit purposes.

The arm of the Treasury Department that fights money laundering said Monday that the standard federal banking rules aimed at suspicious dollar transfers also apply to firms that issue or exchange money that isn’t linked to any government and exists only online.

Naturally, the actual object of US monetary persecution, is BitCoin:

“We are beyond the stage where this was just funny money and a fun online thing. This is used as a currency,” said Nicolas Christin, associate director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Information Networking Institute.

Bitcoins can be used in a host of legitimate transactions–for example, website Reddit allows users to upgrade services using bitcoins and blog service WordPress.com’s store accepts them as a form of payment. Pizzaforcoins.com also lets bitcoin savers pay for deliveries through Domino’s and other pizzerias.

The problem with virtual currencies is that defining what is permitted in a narrow regulatory sense, is impossible, which is why any definition will be as broad as possible: after all what better way to spook users than to make virtually any transaction borderline illegal:

Creating clear-cut rules for virtual currencies is difficult. A FinCen official said that anti-money-laundering rules would apply depending on the “factors and circumstances” of each business. The rules don’t apply to individuals who simply use virtual currencies to purchase real or virtual goods.

The new guidance “clarifies definitions and expectations to ensure that businesses…are aware of their regulatory responsibilities,” said Jennifer Shasky Calvery, FinCen director.

The FBI report last year said Bitcoin attracts cybercriminals who want to move or steal funds. “Bitcoin might also logically attract money launderers and other criminals who avoid traditional financial systems by using the Internet to conduct global monetary transfers,” the report said. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment when asked about the agency’s concerns regarding virtual currencies.

We were not the only ones to expect imminent intervention from Big Brother:

Some firms say they anticipated the rules. Charlie Sherm, chief executive of bitcoin payment processor BitInstant, said his company is already compliant.

Mr. Christin of Carnegie Mellon said that he believes Bitcoin’s dominant use right now is speculation.

“When you have a commodity or currency whose value has grown as rapidly as Bitcoin it makes sense to hold on to it as a speculative instrument,” he said. It also is commonly used for online black markets or gambling sites. “Whether used for money laundering…there is no smoking gun.”

As to the question of timing – why now – the answer is simple. Europe. After all, it was only yesterday that we wrote that “In Spain, The Bitcoin Run Has Started.” It is self-explanatory that if such an exodus away from legacy currencies and into BitCoin was left unchecked, more and more people would follow suit, which is why it had to be intercepted as early as possible.

The jump in the bitcoin exchange rate this week also coincides with concerns euros could be taken from retail bank accounts in Cyprus to fund a bailout. Internet blogs say speculators are looking toward currency alternatives.

Well, if internet blogs say… Of course, internet blogs also say that if and when the fascination with virtual currencies fizzles, all those who are disgusted with the abuse of fiat will not cease from seeking USD, EUR, JPY, GBP and CHF alternatives, but will merely go back to the safety of having hard assets as a currency, namely silver and gold, instead of electronic ones and zeroes, which the US government, in all its Orwellian benevolence may one day, for lack of a better word, hack right out of existence.

On the other hand, the regime’s desperation is reaching such a level that a Executive Order 6102-type confiscation of all hard asset currencies may not be far behind.

Because forewarned, is forearmed.

(language NSFW)

If there is any difference between one’s truth and one’s reality, I tried to explore it this morning. This was to be a pretty big show. Michelle Shocked agreed to come on with me to clarify the statements she made from the stage Sunday night at Yoshi’s in San Franciso. From her music and what I’ve seen in this woman whom I’ve interviewed a few times over the years, I believed her to be a compassionate, caring, far-from-bigoted person that was being reported by disgusted concert goers Sunday night.

So, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. I had a lengthy email conversation earlier this week with one of the attendees Sunday night who had a different opinion of the episode. Colin Epstein, who had been on a real high earlier during the Yoshi’s show as he was a fan who was able to accompany Michelle on harp during a song, believed that she was trying to say something different, albeit clumsily, and then mob rule took over.

“At the start of the second set, Shocked said a lot of disjointed, garbled things. These included thoughts about Jesus, sin, and gays, but for the life of me I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Some of it was even in Spanish for some reason. In my eyes, it was far too unfocused to qualify as any sort of rant. I do think some of the stuff was said ironically. I know she made one statement criticizing some Christians that seems to have gone completely unreported. She said (paraphrasing as accurately as I can from memory) “I’m tired of Christians who hide their hypocrisy behind the cross.” What did she mean? I don’t know. It was just one of many statements she made that lacked any apparent cohesion. The most infamous soundbite, (which I remember as “now y’all can go on Twitter and say Michelle Shocked says God hates fags,” though it’s been reported with drastically different syntax elsewhere) I took as sad, ironic surrender to how the crowd had turned on her and mis-read her rather than the boastful statement others are reporting. But the crowd took anything she said at full face value and things got ugly fast. While I wish Shocked had calmed down and explained herself instead of letting the reactionaries in the audience control the conversation, I’m not sure she could have.”

So when Michelle agreed to come on my show today, I was thrilled. I wanted to give her the opportunity to tell what happened — to reconcile what she was trying to say with the the words that we’ve all now heard with our own ears, as this recording surfaced yesterday:

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to ask her any of the questions I had hoped to, and didn’t hear her clarify anything this morning as she wouldn’t answer the phone when I called. And I tried. Repeatedly. When she did answer, she just read some of her “Open Letter” that was released yesterday. If I remember correctly, she picked up a second time, but was obsessed with the delay between the phone conversation and when the sound came through her computer speakers that her paranoia took over. I tried to tell her to turn down the sound on her computer and just talk to me on the phone, but she began counting the seconds of the delay. She later tweeted that to music journalist Chris Willman of Yahoo music that she thought I “was going to ‘fact check’ during the delay the way you do”. (Note: I’ve known Chris since my LA radio days when he wrote for the LA Times, and he bent over backwards to give Michelle the benefit of the doubt on this story, as I did. Yet she has attacked him mercilessly via Twitter) Instead of talking with me — human to human, Shocked decided she wanted to continue to speak her own, strange version of reality via twitter. Michelle seems to be somewhat obsessed with the Twitters these days. As you can hear from the recording from Sunday night, it was that way during the show. She actually agreed to come on the show via twitter:

When I texted her last night to confirm the interview today, she attempted to back out. I wasn’t going to release our text conversation, but thought it necessary in that she, again, went back on her word and did what she proposed last night, which I categorically did not agree with.

(Ed. Note: Text exchange is not readable via our graphics, please read exchange at Radio or Not)

Since we wanted to hear her words, I played much of the recording, embedded above, from the Sunday night show that surfaced yesterday on the show this morning, all the while attempting to get her to talk to me… to us! I really wanted to hear Michelle clarify what she was trying to say. Instead, she seems to be digging herself a deeper hole — and alienating the few people who’ve been attempting to help her. She lashed out at me in the final moments of the show, when she called back in as I was playing my favorite Michelle Shocked song, “Come a Long Way” — for the last time. I’m sorry she’s going through this, and I hope she can get some help. Perhaps she should go back and listen to the first hour of the show in which I had the pleasure of interviewing former Congressman Bob Ney. In Bob’s book, Sideswiped: Lessons Learned Courtesy of the Hit Men of Capitol Hill, and on my show this morning, Bob admitted the mistakes he made. He’s said he’s sorry. I have a lot more respect for Ney today than I do for Michelle Shocked. And I still wish I understood what point Michelle Shocked is trying to make with her Truth vs. Reality meme. She might be on to something, but I don’t think we’ll ever know.

Submitted by Elliot Brennan of The Diplomat,

As shale gas fever sweeps through Beijing, analysts are looking at the costs and benefits of extracting what is increasingly a controversial source of energy. But for China, with its growing middle class, the immediate and long-term demand for energy has the potential to spark a revolution in shale gas before sufficient and safe technological know-how and regulations are developed.

A very vocal debate continues to rage in the U.S. and Europe as to the environmental consequences of shale gas extraction. Meanwhile, China’s National Oil Companies (NOCs) continue to purchase and buy into North American oil and gas companies with specific expertise in shale gas extraction. For better or worse, China’s shale gas revolution looks set to be thrust into the public spotlight, both at home and abroad.

Extracting shale gas is tricky. Shale, a sedimentary rock that is typically highly porous and has low permeability, traps hydrocarbons as it is formed. To remove the gas, shale formations must be stimulated, most commonly using hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The technique involves pumping water, sand and chemicals at high pressure into the shale formation, cracking the rock and allowing the gas to be released to the surface. The 1 to 3 million gallons of water that are pumped into the shale formation must then either be recycled or pumped into water disposal wells in subsurface rock formations.

In addition to these skill-intensive practices, the extraction process also demands three-dimensional seismic surveying, which evaluates potential subsurface resources, and horizontal drillingtechnology. Both demand expertise and experience, yet the capability of most companies outside of North America, including China’s National Oil Companies (NOCs), to safely and effectively perform such high-tech extraction is limited.

The emergence of shale gas is a game changer. Countries that have traditionally relied on hydrocarbon exports for political clout (the Persian Gulf, Russia, Venezuela) will inevitably lose some of their petro power. Europe could become less energy dependent on Russian supply by importing liquid natural gas (LNG) from North America and by exploiting the potentially significant shale gas deposits in Poland and other countries. Australia, which has significant deposits and much of the pre-existing infrastructure to begin extraction, could see its clout in the energy politics of the region increase— forcing a significant redraft of Canberra’s “Australia in the Asian Century” White Paper.

In effect, the “shale revolution” signals the end of the peak oil debate. New technology means new resources, which in turn could mean a new geopolitical map. However the mere presence of the resources doesn’t mean that their extraction in the short-term is viable, a problem China knows all too well.

China’s oil fields are drying up. The International Energy Agency’s (IAE) World Energy Outlook for 2010predicts China will import 79% of its oil by 2030, a figure that demonstrates the pressing need for China to develop new energy sources. Enter shale gas and the “unconventionals.”

Estimates of China’s shale gas resources differ. China’s Ministry of Land and Resources estimates reserves of 886 trillion cubic feet (tcf), while the U.S. Energy Information Administration puts the country’s resources at 1,275 tcf. The upper estimates would mean China sits atop more shale gas than the U.S. and Canada combined. According to China’s 12^th Five-Year Plan, by 2015 China should be extracting 6.5 billion cubic meters of shale gas per year, with a view of producing 100 billion cubic meters by 2020. China’s goal is to meet 10 percent of the country’s energy demands from shale gas the same year. To successfully meet the goal, China’s oil and gas industry needs to bridge its large knowledge deficit. Despite some progress, recent successes in domestic extraction technology have been modest.

Under the Shale Gas Development Plan for 2011-2015, shale gas has been labeled by the Ministry of Land and Resources as a separate mineral from conventional hydrocarbons. This move frees shale resources from the clutches of “the big three;” Chinese state-owned majors — China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) — allowing Beijing to redistribute exploration contracts. Importantly, the move encourages competition among state-owned majors, local enterprises and foreign companies.

China’s NOCs, while not state-run, benefit from state financing. Their capital flows during the global downturn in 2008 gave them the flexibility to expand globally. For China’s NOCs, establishing partnerships with other international oil companies allows them to diversify risks and gain technical know-how through the supply chain.

At home and abroad China is making waves. The opening of a recent tender to foreign companies demonstrates the extent to which the often go-it-alone Chinese Communist Party feels it needs to secure a rapid and successful energy boom. Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and British Petroleum are alljointly surveying the key provinces of Sichuan and Guizhou with local companies. As part of the new tender, other joint ventures are expected to follow.

Flush with state financing, China’s NOCs have in recent years begun buying up stakes in North American energy companies and their subsidiaries. Some of their recent buy-ins have been the purchase of Nexen and a stake in Devon Energy Corp, one of the founders of shale gas extraction. Such purchases allow China’s NOCs to absorb expertise. While this in itself isn’t enough to meet their energy needs, it is a step toward building capacity for China’s NOCs in shale gas exploration and extraction.

China’s NOCs have been known to employ a “market-for-resources strategy,” whereby access to China’s market is granted to a resource holder in exchange for imports of resources from that country. This now looks to be morphing into a “market-for-know-how strategy.” In the early stages of coal bed methane exploration in China, foreign groups contributed 70 percent of the funding. With already significant foreign involvement, the shale gas industry looks set to emulate this model.

However, the all-important extraction process of shale gas, hydraulic fracturing, just as its name suggests, needs water — and large amounts of it. So while shale could provide energy, it will require large volumes of water that will be costly both to consume and to recycle. Water scarcity remains a key concern for the Chinese government, while water pollution is an increasing worry for the Chinese public. One recent report noted that already “up to 40 percent of China’s rivers were seriously polluted” and “20 percent were so polluted their water quality was rated too toxic even to come into contact with.”

Experts warn that China will face growing water shortages in coming years. Water-intensive industries such as mining are competing for increasingly scarce water sources. Low rainfall in the northwest of the country, where much of the shale is believed to be, means these areas will have to rely on limited and finite groundwater. In the face of these shortages, China established a special 25 million USD fund for a cloud seeding program in 2012 to operate in “areas prone to drought and haze.” Water can be transported into China’s northwest via pipeline but that would be costly and require significant new infrastructure, such as desalination plants and pipelines that would likely need to stretch across the country for thousands of kilometers — a similar feat to the 4,200 km Xijiang to Shanghai gas pipeline.

Shale gas has approximately half the carbon content of coal. For China, the replacement of coal for gas in power generation could reduce emissions and pollution.  It would kill two birds with one big stone, as criticism grows over the country’s pollution levels both in air and water. However, some warn that shale gas may also reduce investment in renewable energy sources.

In the U.S., environmental concerns dominate the debate. Public concern over water contamination and the release of harmful gases during shale gas extraction are gaining increasing media attention. This has been exacerbated by claims that research commissioned by industry-friendly lobby groups in the U.S., such as the American Petroleum Institute and the American Natural Gas Alliance, have muddied the water on the environmental impact of shale gas extraction. However, according to an IAE report, Golden Rules for a Golden Age of Gas, the environmental risks inherent in the process can be easily mitigated. The report outlines the “golden rules” required to address the environmental and social impact of developments in unconventional gas. It predicts that major risks can be decreased and safety improved if the cost of drilling and completing of a shale gas well is increased by 7 percent.

A dozen or more chemicals may be added to the water and sand pumped into a shale-gas well, including radioactive tracers that help assess the formation and relevant fractures. While these tracers are strictly monitored under guidelines handed down by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the U.S., in China the regulations may be less stringent. In addition, other radioactive material may be dislodged in the fracking process and may have to be disposed of from flowback water.

If strict regulations are not in place to seal the well from leaching, aquifers and ground water may become contaminated by run-off chemicals, methane or radioactive minerals displaced in the process. A 2011 US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report suggests that fracking may have resulted in the contamination of ground water.

Recent and successful protests in China to stop the construction of a chemical plant in Ningbo demonstrate growing public concern about some government-backed developments. The October 2012 protests followed other victories to stop the construction of petrochemical plants in Xiamen and Dalian. In Dalian, some 10,000 protesters took to the streets. With a growing middle-class, increasing internet and social media access, and more public involvement and activism in key local concerns, the government and local authorities will likely have to be accommodating of public displeasure in order to maintain stability as China grows. A Tiananmen-style alternative appears unlikely as it could backfire, both at home and abroad.

If the current hype proves correct and gas prices remain strong, China’s shale gas could be just the energy boom that Beijing seeks. It could allow China to meet its ambitious growth targets. As many commentators have suggested, however, shale gas may prove less of a blessing and more of a “resource curse,” spelling environmental disaster and nationwide instability. Either way, as Sino-American partnerships are forged and shale gas extraction in China ventures into unchartered waters, one thing is certain: The world will be watching.

The government of Cyprus wants to grab bank deposits, and the chief economist of the German Commerzbank has called for private savings accounts in Italy to be similarly plundered, and other nations may be moving in that direction as well.

The American government has seized private assets before, and President Obama authorized seizure of property again last year. (The Argentinian government grabbed 401k assets; and some in the American government have mulled the same thing. And the U.S. government’s take-down of Megaupload was also an exercise of the power to seize all of the legal property held in a storage facility because a handful of crooks have illegal property in theirs. )

Zero Hedge has been warning for years that Western governments — including the U.S. — would eventually seize bank assets.

Bernanke was asked yesterday whether a Cyprus-style grab of bank deposits is possible in the U.S. :

Question: I was wondering if you can tell me how if a run on the banks happens in Cyprus, how that might affect U.S. markets. And also is it possible for the U.S. to levy a tax on regular deposits here? Or why not?

Bernanke: As someone mentioned Cyprus is a tiny economy. I don’t think these issues as worrisome as they are and as concerned as we would be for the Cyprus people, I don’t think that they have a direct implications for the U.S. economy.

The only way that they would create a problem would be if the runs became contagious in some sense, if depositors in other countries lost confidence. But to this point I’m not aware of any evidence that that is in fact the case.

The argument the Europeans are making is that Cyprus is a unique situation, very different situation, and indeed, it is quite unusual to have a banking sector as large as they have relative to their economy.

In terms of the United States, the FDIC was founded in 1934, and we have insured deposits and they are very proud of the fact that no one has ever lost a dime in insured deposits.

And during the crisis the response of the government was in fact to increase the level of deposit or account sizes that were insured. So I consider that to be extremely unlikely in the United States.

Bernanke’s response is unsatisfactory for 2 reasons.

Initially, the FDIC only insures deposits up to $250,000. So deposits over that amount are unprotected.

Indeed, the FDIC has, in fact, come very close to being insolvent at various times. See the following articles from the New York Times, American Banker, Bloomberg, Zero Hedge and Mish.

True, the Treasury Department would likely just bail out the FDIC if the FDIC really went belly up. But that would take a political act of will. And so Bernanke should have said, “we will always make sure the FDIC has enough money”.

Second — and more important – Bernanke failed to answer the question altogether.  The question was not about whether the government would save bank depositors from economic conditions caused by others. The question was whether the government itself would grab deposits.

People didn’t think any European country would seize bank deposit assets. But the EU demanded that the government of Cyprus seize private bank deposits. The attempt of a government to seize private property is undermining confidence in Europe … and many people worry that that contagion will spread. That is what the question was about.

Bernanke entirely failed to answer the question which was actually asked … and has thereby caused a tsunami of distrust on the Internet.

In the same way that the Department of Justice’s wishy-washy assurances that it probably wouldn’t assassinate Americans on U.S. soil hasn’t reassured anyone, Bernanke shouldn’t have given a half-hearted reply. He should have said:

The U.S. will never, ever seize any American’s bank deposits under any scenario whatsoever … without exception. We respect the rule of law as the basis for our economy, and we will never do anything which interferes with private property rights.

Bernanke’s failure to reassure couldn’t have come at a worse time.

British MP Nigel Farage just gave the following advice in response to the Cyprus bank deposit grab:

Get your money out while you still can.

The failure of American economic “leaders” to provide real reassurance regarding our bank deposits will just increase mistrust.

Indeed, more and more Americans realize that the government has bailed out the super-elite of the big banks, and enabled their fraud … while hosing the little guy again and again (and again). People see that we have socialism for the rich, but cut-throat, sink-or-swim capitalism for everyone else. They see that we have a malignant synergism between D.C. politicians and giant companies. Look here, here, here.

Indeed, after Wall Street giants such as MF Global and JP Morgan got caught seizing segregated client funds — but were never prosecuted by the government — both amateur and sophisticated investors have lost trust in the American financial system and financial regulators. (It has become obvious to all that the government is trying to cover up for the stunning crimes of the big banks.)

Bachmann Says Obamacare Will Kill You, Fey Revives Palin Impression, and More

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Posted on Mar 21, 2013

Open for Business: By passing a $984 billion spending bill Thursday, the House has ensured the government will avoid a shutdown at the end of the month and stay funded through the end of the fiscal year. The bill, which was already cleared by the Senate, now heads to President Obama’s desk, where it’s expected to be signed. The House on Thursday also passed Paul Ryan’s atrocious plan, which promises a balanced budget by slashing social programs, repealing most of Obamacare and giving corporations and the rich a big tax break. However, as The Daily Beast noted: “It’s unlikely to go much further though: it pretty much has everything in it that President Obama campaigned against.” (Read more)

Pop the Question: With recent public opinion polls showing more and more Americans supporting gay marriage, Politico asked Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., whether his opinion on the issue had changed. In response, Chambliss said, “I’m not gay. So I’m not going to marry one.” It appears Chambliss selfishly believes that since he’s not going to get same-sex married, no one else should either. As Talking Points Memo Publisher Josh Marshall wrote, “So Sen. Saxby Chambliss has to become gay apparently before he’ll support marriage equality.” (Read more)

Death by Obamacare: Rep. Michele Bachmann insisted Thursday that President Obama’s health care law will “literally” kill people. In a speech delivered on the House floor on the topic of repealing Obamacare, Bachmann said, “We’re here because we’re saying let’s repeal this failure before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens. Let’s not do that. Let’s love people, let’s care about people. Let’s repeal it now while we can.” Bachmann loves and cares about people so much, in fact, that she wants to repeal a program that will provide millions with health insurance they could otherwise not afford and leave them with no health coverage. The clueless Bachmann must have missed the 2009 Harvard study that showed that nearly 45,000 Americans die each year because, in large part, they don’t have health care. (Read more)

For Your Information: Rising Republican star Rand Paul had some harsh words for Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh after they ripped the Kentucky senator’s plan to allow undocumented immigrants in the U.S. to work legally. It was an issue brought up to Paul by Fox News host Bill Hemmer during an interview Thursday. Hemmer pointed out to Paul that “Coulter and Limbaugh say that people like you are being suckered into an agreement here and what they argue is that conservative principles should not be sacrificed here.” Paul fired back with a “news flash” for them, arguing that “what we have now is de facto amnesty.” He added, “We have 11 million people here that have been here, some of them for a decade or more. No one is telling them to go home.” Paul also had another news flash for Coulter: “We haven’t been too competitive in the last two national elections,” he said. (Read more)

Video of the Day: One of the highlights of “Saturday Night Live” in 2008 was Tina Fey’s spot-on impression of then-Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. During a recent appearance on “Inside the Actors Studio,” Fey brought back the impeccable impersonation. So does Fey still got it? You betcha! Take a look.

–Posted by Tracy Bloom.

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March 21, 2013  |  

This article was published in partnership with  GlobalPossibilities.org.

Watkins Glen, New York made Yahoo! Travel’s top 10 list of America’s coolest small towns. This Finger Lake village is described as having “Award-winning wineries, awe-inspiring gorges and waterfalls, and a racetrack that draws visitors to auto-racing events.” The story mentions hiking, NASCAR and “crisp Rieslings.”

Here’s what it doesn’t say about this dream town: it’s at the heart of the battle over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for unconventional shale gas in the Marcellus. 

Companies aren’t drilling for gas here, but they’re drilling into the land in order to store fracked gas. Sandra Steingraber was among a group of individuals willing to put her body between drilling rig trucks and their destination on shores of Seneca Lake on Monday. Steingraber was arrested for her bravery, which is but one step in her evolving journey as a scientist, writer, and now activist.

Steingraber is a renowned scientist, currently a scholar in residence in Ithaca College. She’s also a lyrical writer, author of four books: Post-Diagnosis (written after being diagnosed with bladder cancer at age 20); Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (later optioned as a film); Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood; and most recently Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis.

On World Water Day, this is a good time to reflect on the threats of drought and water contamination, in which fracking plays a key role. Steingraber talked with AlterNet about the health effects of fracking, her own personal connection to the issue, and what keeps her up at night. (Spoiler: it’s cement, but more on that soon.)

Tara Lohan: If I’m reading the news correctly, it looks like you were arrested earlier this week.

Sandra Steingraber: Yes, I was.

TL: How did you get involved in that action?

SS: It has an odd trajectory. I was writing about three other people who were arrested for civil disobedience at that same facility last September. One of them, the night before, showed up on my front porch and asked me if I would come the next morning to bear witness to what he was about to do and be available to talk to the press about compressor stations, which was something I was researching. I was happy to talk about the kinds of chemicals that compressor stations put into the atmosphere and what the problem is with this whole project. The whole project being a storage facility for fracked gases that a company called Inergy from Kansas City is trying to build. The plan they have for this part of the world is to use depleted salt caverns where salt mining has been done for probably a century at least, and use it as a storage facility for gas from the fracking fields in Pennsylvania. The idea is that the gas would be pressurized to the point of liquidification, then injected into salt caverns.

So I went last September and served as a sort of science writer/interpreter and witness and what impressed me was that the three people who chained themselves to this fence were not young people. The youngest was my age and I’m 53, she was a nurse. And then there was Rev. Gary Judson who is a retired Methodist minister who is 72 and he spoke eloquently about the underground geology of these caverns, about the history of salt caverns being used to store liquified petroleum products and their terrible track record with catastrophic accidents in other states. And then there was also the moral and ethical issue of using these caverns to store something toxic and explosive knowing that they have cracks and fissures and that this is a source of drinking water for 100,000 people. He, himself was an avid fisherman and he felt strongly that this was a treasure and we are called to defend creation.

(h/t Scarce)

While support for gay marriage has surged the last ten years in America there are still those in the Senate that cling to the religious right’s archaic beliefs about the subject. And then there are those like Saxby Chambliss who are utterly asinine in how they express their views.

Support for gay marriage is picking up steam all over the country – except on Capitol Hill.Take Sen. Saxby Chambliss. When asked if his views had changed on gay marriage, the Georgia Republican quipped: “I’m not gay. So I’m not going to marry one.”

“I’m not gay. So I’m not going to marry one.” WTF does that mean? Gay marriage is not for non-gays, you ass. Gay marriage is for teh gays, hence the name, get it? How repulsive is this man? Is there any wonder why Congress is so frakked up with morons like this?

And then there’s Senator Rand Paul, the media darling of the past few weeks. Right after he stood up against the droning of US citizens on US soil he immediately began to kowtow to the religious right with his push for “Life at Conception Act” and when asked again about gay marriage, said this:

“I believe in traditional, historic and the religious nature of marriage,” said Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, the tea party Republican and possible 2016 presidential candidate. “Marriage is always a state issue, and I think it should remain a state issue.”

States’ rights doesn’t work as an excuse with this issue because married couples move from state to state all the time. And that’s not even getting into the civil rights issue either.

Oy, my head hurts. Please make it stop.

March 21, 2013  |  

$16 billion.

That’s how much JPMorgan Chase has paid in fines, settlements and other litigation expenses in the last four years alone.

More than half of that amount, $8.5 billion, was paid out in fines and settlements as the result of illegal actions taken by bank executives.

$8.5 billion is almost 12 percent of the net income the mega-bank brought in during the same period.

High Overhead

These figures comes from ” JPMorgan Chase: Out of Control,” an impressive analysis of the bank’s performance by Joshua Rosner, an investment analyst at GrahamFisher. And there’s more. Since Rosner published his report only last week, JPMorgan Chase has settled another dispute.

This latest agreement is with the trustee for customers of fraudulent investment firm MF Global.

The MF Global deal included a $100 million cash payout from Chase, and an agreement to waive the $417 million in claims it had made against MF Global’s clients. If you add in the full amount of this agreement, the bank has given up more than $9 billion in settlements since 2009.

Now we’re over 12 percent just in payouts. Throw in all the other litigation costs and the total comes to well over 20 percent of the bank’s net income in a four year period.

And illegalities aren’t the only thing that’s costing JPMorgan Chase’s shareholders a lot of money. There’s also the London Whale foul-up, an apparently illegal series of trades that’s already lost the bank $6.2 billion.

Add it all up. Then throw in the massive fines JPMorgan Chase paid before 2009, but after Dimon took the helm. Then add in the likely cost of the cases which loom before the bank today. You’ll find that the Price of Evil for Dimon & Co. is very high — at least by normal standards.

Bad Company

Is “evil” too harsh a word? Merriam-Webster defines evil as “morally reprehensible,” “arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct,” “causing discomfort or repulsion,” or “causing harm.” Which of those descriptions is not true for the leaders of an institutions that’s paid billions for misdeeds such as:

• Reportedly taking MF Global’s customers’ money as that firm was collapsing under the weight of its own fraud;
• Closing the bank account and freezing the credit card of a hedge fund manager because he criticized its handling of MF Global on television;
• Bribing officials in Jefferson County, Alabama, which subsequently went bankrupt;
• Fraudulently submitting court documents in support of its foreclosures, using a group of untrained college students and other young people (known in the firm as “Burger King Kids”) to prepare and submit the papers.

Follow the links at the bottom of the page if you want more information, but here’s a sneak preview: Angels, they ain’t.

The Gang That Couldn’t Cheat Straight

If “evil” strikes you as too harsh you may not like the word “incompetent” either. But the Office of the Controller of the Currency, which is not known for being overly aggressive with bankers, secretly downgraded its internal assessment of the bank’s management and ruled that its internal oversight “needs improvement.”

The OCC found that the “Matters Requiring Attention” within the bank include its much bragged-about risk management, its money-laundering controls, audit oversight, and its valuation of its trading positions.”

What’s a little laxity about money-laundering between friends?

They’re not just taking us for a ride. They’re bad drivers. By being both unethical and incompetent, the management at JPMorgan Chase has violated the moral principle expressed so eloquently the late, great country singer Vern Gosdin: “If you’re gonna do me wrong, do it right.”

March 21, 2013  |  

“If these worries become really serious, . . . [s]mall savers will take their money out of banks and resort to household safes and a shotgun.” — Martin Hutchinson on the attempted EU raid on private deposits in Cyprus banks.

The deposit confiscation scheme has long been in the making. US depositors could be next . . . .

On Tuesday, March 19, the national legislature of Cyprus overwhelmingly rejected a proposed levy on bank deposits as a condition for a European bailout. Reuters called it “a stunning setback for the 17-nation currency bloc,” but it was a stunning victory for democracy. As Reuters quoted one 65-year-old pensioner, “The voice of the people was heard.” 

The EU had warned that it would withhold €10 billion in bailout loans, and the European Central Bank (ECB) had threatened to end emergency lending assistance for distressed Cypriot banks, unless depositors — including small savers — shared the cost of the rescue. In the deal rejected by the legislature, a one-time levy on depositors would be required in return for a bailout of the banking system. Deposits below €100,000 would be subject to a 6.75% levy or “haircut”, while those over €100,000 would have been subject to a 9.99% “fine.”

The move was bold, but the battle isn’t over yet. The EU has now given Cyprus until Monday to raise the billions of euros it needs to clinch an international bailout or face the threatened collapse of its financial system and likely exit from the euro currency zone.

The Long-planned Confiscation Scheme

The deal pushed by the “troika” — the EU, ECB and IMF — has been characterized as a one-off event devised as an emergency measure in this one extreme case. But the confiscation plan has long been in the making, and it isn’t limited to Cyprus.

In a September 2011 article in the Bulletin of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand titled “ A Primer on Open Bank Resolution,” Kevin Hoskin and Ian Woolford discussed a very similar haircut plan that had been in the works, they said, since the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The article referenced recommendations made in 2010 and 2011 by the Basel Committee of the Bank for International Settlements, the “central bankers’ central bank” in Switzerland.

The purpose of the plan, called the Open Bank Resolution (OBR) , is to deal with bank failures when they have become so expensive that governments are no longer willing to bail out the lenders. The authors wrote that the primary objectives of OBR are to:

• ensure that, as far as possible, any losses are ultimately borne by the bank’s shareholders and creditors . . . .    

The spectrum of “creditors” is defined to include depositors:

At one end of the spectrum, there are large international financial institutions that invest in debt issued by the bank (commonly referred to as wholesale funding). At the other end of the spectrum, are customers with cheque and savings accounts and term deposits.

Most people would be surprised to learn that they are legally considered “creditors” of their banks rather than customers who have trusted the bank with their money for safekeeping, but that seems to be the case. According to Wikipedia:

In most legal systems, . . . the funds deposited are no longer the property of the customer. The funds become the property of the bank, and the customer in turn receives an asset called a deposit account (a checking or savings account). That deposit account is a liability of the bank on the bank’s books and on its balance sheet. Because the bank is authorized by law to make loans up to a multiple of its reserves, the bank’s reserves on hand to satisfy payment of deposit liabilities amounts to only a fraction of the total which the bank is obligated to pay in satisfaction of its demand deposits.

Police fired teargas to disperse several hundred of anti-government student protesters who clashed with supporters of late President Hugo Chavez in the Venezuelan capital Caracas, ahead of the upcoming snap presidential elections.

At least 300 students marched towards the election board’s headquarters in central Caracas to demand that the government not interfere in politics and to request that the electoral commission eliminate requirements that voters have their fingerprints recorded before voting. Students rallied carrying signs including “Free and fair elections” and “Nicolas is a liar” — referring to Chavez’s hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro.

They encountered over a hundred Chavez supporters, who began hurling stones, bottles and eggs at them after which fistfights broke out.

The students surrounded by splinter groups of Chavez supporters were trapped, as nearby side streets were blocked. “It’s horrible, they’re attacking us,” said 19-year-old student Boris Walcheff.

Police fired three canisters of tear gas and used plastic bullets on government supporters to disperse the crowd, forming a cordon between the two sides. No casualties were reported.

The unrest comes ahead of an April 14 vote to replace the late President Hugo Chavez, who died from cancer two weeks ago after a protracted treatment in Cuba. The acting president Nicolas Maduro was named as a preferable successor by Chavez before he died. Maduro promises to continue the late president’s radical socialism in Venezuela. His opponent, Henrique Capriles is the leading opposition candidate, who lost to Chavez in the previous election.

Capriles, who unlike Chavez and Maduro comes from a wealthy family of businessmen, is a free market proponent and disapproves of the regulation of the economy as practiced by Chavez. If he takes office, Capriles is also expected to change Venezuelan foreign policy dramatically, possibly strengthening relations with the US.

In the most recent Venezuelan election last October, Capriles got 44 per cent of the vote, giving Chavez a close shave — the incumbent winning with 54 per cent.

The ongoing campaign has been marked by an unpleasant atmosphere, with both sides trading bitter personal accusations as they rally supporters for the vote.

March 21, 2013  |  

Editor’s note: Michelle Aldrich, 66, has been working for marijuana legalization –which she defines as “the right to grow it for free in your backyard”– for most of her life.  She and her husband Michael live in a comfortable old apartment near the San Francisco Marina which they moved into 40 years ago. The following is adapted from a talk Michelle gave in July 2012 to the Women’s Visionary Congress.

I had smoked cannabis since 1967 but early in 2011 I kept saying I could not get high. I was smoking a lot. I now believe that THC was going to the tumor and lymph nodes, which is why the cancer did not spread more than it had.

On November 15, 2011,  I was supposed to have lunch with Diane Fornbacher from the NORML Women’s Alliance. I was too sick to go. I felt like I had the flu.

That week I got a call from Linda Ward, who is now my therapist. I had been looking for a new therapist since 2009, when I got off all the meds that I had been taking for 20 years for depression –Prozac, Lamictal, and Trazadone. Rick Doblin [director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies]  found Linda for me just when I really needed to talk to someone. The start of synchronicity.

I felt well enough to go see the doctor on November 22. It was my first visit with a physician’s assistant named Sally Holland. The first thing I told her was that I smoked marijuana. She asked if I vaporized? I told her I didn’t. Then I said my husband and I got the lifetime achievement award from High Times Magazine last June. Her response was that her brother was the general counsel for High Times. I knew at that point that Sally and I would get along and I could trust her and didn’t have to educate her about cannabis. Lovely…

Sally said that I had bronchitis, which I usually get at least once a year. She asked when was the last time I had a chest x-ray. I said a long time. She sent me for a chest x-ray and gave me antibiotics. The next day Sally called to tell me I had pneumonia.

I saw Sally again on November 30 for a follow-up. I was still sick and was given more antibiotics. Sally informed me that the x-ray showed a growth on my right lung, which would need to be checked out. My first response was “cut it out”  if it was so small. I wanted to be aggressive. I saw Sally again on December 9. She sent me for lab work and said the doctor wanted to see me.

On December 21, I saw Gary Feldman, MD, my primary care physician, who gave me a thorough workup. I told Gary about the heat I had felt in the middle of my chest for almost a year. The tumor and lymph nodes were right on my heart chakra. He sent me for a CT scan on December 23.

The CT scan showed that the tumor on my lung measured 23 x 28 millimeters. [25.4 millimeters = one inch.] There was also a growth on my left kidney.

On January 4th, 2012, I had another CT scan to evaluate the growth they had found on my kidney.

On January 5th I had an echocardiogram, a procedure using ultrasound to show a two-dimensional picture of the heart.

On January 6th I had a CT fine-needle aspiration biopsy of the lung. Tissue was taken for analysis in a lab.  

March 21, 2013  |  

You don’t have to be a Tea Party conservative to believe that the economy is threatened when there are too many “takers” and not enough “makers.” The “takers” who threaten the dynamism and fairness of industrial capitalism the most in the 21st century are not the welfare-dependent poor – the villains of Tea Party propaganda – but the rent-extracting, unproductive rich.

The term “rent” in this context refers to more than payments to your landlords. As Mike Konczal and many others have argued, profits should be distinguished from rents. “Profits” from the sale of goods or services in a free market are different from “rents” extracted from the public by monopolists in various kinds. Unlike profits, rents tend to be based on recurrent fees rather than sales to ever-changing consumers. While productive capitalists – “industrialists,” to use the old-fashioned term – need to be active and entrepreneurial in order to keep ahead of the competition, “rentiers” (the term for people whose income comes from rents, rather than profits) can enjoy a perpetual stream of income even if they are completely passive.

Rents come in as many kinds as there are rentier interests. Land or apartment or rental-house rents flow to landlords. Royalty payments for energy or mineral extraction flow to landowners. Interest payments on loans flow to bankers and other lenders. Royalty payments on patents and copyrights flow to inventors. Professions and guilds and unions can also extract rents from the rest of society, by creating artificial labor cartels to raise wages or professional fees. Tolls are rents paid to the owners of necessary transportation and communications infrastructure. Last but not least, taxes are rents paid to territorial governments for essential public services, including military and police protection.

All of these goods or services are necessary to make or distribute the goods and services generated by productive industry (which can be government-owned or nonprofit, as well as for-profit). If one or more of the sectors providing inputs or infrastructure to productive industry charges excessive rents, then industry can be strangled. Industry cannot flourish if too much rent is paid to landlords, if credit is too expensive, if excessive copyright protections stifle the diffusion of technology. Even progressives must concede that guilds or unions or professions can use the power of labor monopolies to demand excessive incomes for their members and that at some point high taxes really do strangle the economy. (The evidence of successful high-tax-big government countries like those of Scandinavia suggests that you can go safely up to about 40-50 percent of GDP going to government, assuming the taxes are well spent and raised largely by less-distortionary taxes including consumption, property and wealth taxes).

All of this suggests that, if we want a technology-driven, highly productive economy, we should encourage profit-making productive enterprises while cracking down on rent-extracting monopolies, whether they are natural products of geography and geology (real estate and energy and energy and mineral deposits) or artificial (chartered banks, professional licensing associations, labor unions, patents and copyrights). This is a valid distinction between “makers” and “takers.”

Unfortunately, with the exception of some leftist and liberal economic thinkers who distinguish “rentier capitalism” or “financial capitalism” from “industrial capitalism,” conventional political discourse doesn’t distinguish among profit-earning “makers” and rent-extracting “takers.” Many progressives and populists indiscriminately denounce “big business” and “the corporations” as though a productive consumer electronics manufacturer were no different than a company that monopolizes the tolls from a privatized municipal parking meter system. At the same time, the center-left, whose upscale supporters tend to be credentialed upper-middle-class professionals, tend to ignore the antisocial aspects of the rent-extracting schemes of the professional guilds – medicine, law and the professoriate – as well as of their elite accomplices, the credential-granting universities.

WASHINGTON – March 21 – The District of Columbia should adopt ethics reforms that would prohibit campaign contributions and expenditures by government contractors in D.C. elections without further delay, Public Citizen’s Craig Holman testified today.

“The District of Columbia is embroiled in accusations that business interests seeking lucrative government contracts from city government are footing the bill to elect those who have authority over awarding those contracts,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. “Pay-to-play abuses waste taxpayer dollars when contracts are awarded based on campaign donations rather than merit and undermine the public’s confidence in D.C. government.”

In the wake of the most recent allegations, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and Attorney General Irvin Nathan have drafted the “Comprehensive Campaign Finance Reform Amendment Act of 2013.” The measure offers a number of much-needed campaign reforms but, most importantly, it contains sweeping pay-to-play restrictions that would squarely address the recent campaign finance scandals of government contractors attempting to influence District elections.

Holman testified before the Committee on Government Operations. Another committee hearing is scheduled next week; the committee could vote as soon as April. The measure would then go to the full Council.

If adopted, the mayor’s pay-to-play reforms would be among the strongest in the nation. Government contractors would be prohibited from making campaign contributions to, or expenditures on behalf of, any District candidate or official who is or could be involved in awarding the contract.

“Government contractor” is broadly defined in the legislation to include all senior executives of the company seeking a contract, aggregated together as a single entity. The spouses and dependent children of the executives would be limited to contributions of no more than $300 per election to covered officials and their committees.

Moreover, the mayor’s proposal offers strong enforcement actions against egregious violations, including civil and criminal penalties for violations by government officials and disqualification from receiving future government contracts for violations by contractors.

“By taking the simple step of divorcing campaign contributions from government contracts, this reform proposal will go a very long way toward cleaning up District politics and ensuring the integrity of the government contracting process,” said Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division.

Holman’s testimony is available at http://www.citizen.org/documents/holman-dc-pay-to-play-testimony-march-21-2013.pdf.

WASHINGTON – March 21 – As the Budget Resolution debate begins, 100 diverse organizations, including The Presbyterian Church USA, Jubilee USA Network and various Catholic Religious Orders, expressed support to end corporate offshore tax loopholes in a letter to Senators. New estimates put the amount of lost revenue as high as $90 billion from corporate tax avoidance. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) amendment 264 to the Budget Resolution will create a reserve fund to reduce the deficit and create jobs by eliminating offshore tax abuse by large corporations.

“As people of faith, we believe our budget is a moral document that must end corporate tax avoidance,” said Eric LeCompte, Jubilee USA Network Executive Director. “These offshore tax abuses take from the poor and place additional tax burdens on everyday Americans.”

Due to the substantial loss of revenue, governments at all levels, here and around the world, cut programs and jobs that are critical to economic recovery and growth. “By closing these corporate tax loopholes we send a message around the globe that corporate tax avoidance is unacceptable whether in the developing or developed world,” said LeCompte. More than half of all banking assets and a third of multinational company investments are routed through tax havens. It is estimated that for every $10 a country receives in development aid, $15 exits the country as a result of tax dodging. Corporations are operating in developing countries and robbing resources by using offshore tax havens to hide their money instead of paying their taxes.

“By addressing this behavior in the US, it sends a strong message that this kind of behavior worldwide is unacceptable. This is behavior that makes dodgy business practices the status quo and perpetuates the cycle of poverty around the globe,” said LeCompte.

Jubilee USA Network supports the proposed Senate budget resolution by Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-WA) that calls for $975 billion in revenues by closing loopholes and eliminating wasteful spending in the tax code that benefits the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.

Jubilee USA Network also supports these two pieces of legislation:

• The Cut Unjustified Loopholes Act (S.268) introduced by Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), would close multiple offshore tax loopholes that would raise at least $190 billion over ten years
• The Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act (S.250), introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), would eliminate the ability of corporations to indefinitely keep profits offshore and raising nearly $600 billion over ten years

Robert Reich just wrote the piece “Selling the Store: Why Democrats Shouldn’t Put Social Security and Medicare on the Table,” which states: “Prominent Democrats – including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi – are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation.

“This is even before they’ve started budget negotiations with Republicans – who still refuse to raise taxes on the rich, close tax loopholes the rich depend on (such as hedge-fund and private-equity managers’ “carried interest”), increase capital gains taxes on the wealthy, cap their tax deductions, or tax financial transactions.

“It’s not the first time Democrats have led with a compromise, but these particular pre-concessions are especially unwise.”

MAX RICHTMAN, PAMELA CAUSEY [email]
Richtman is president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. Causey is communications director of the group. Today Richtman wrote a letter to Obama that his pledges regarding Social Security have been “contradicted by statements made in recent months that both the chained CPI and Medicare means-testing remain a part of your deficit reduction proposal. The ‘chained CPI’ is not a ‘technical tweak, and no amount of rationalization can make it so. In reality, the chained CPI is a benefit cut for the oldest and most vulnerable Americans who would be least able to afford it. To offer to trade it away outside the context of a comprehensive Social Security solvency proposal ignores the fact that Social Security does not even belong in this debate because it does not contribute to the deficit. Cutting Social Security benefits to reduce the deficit is unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans across all ages and political affiliation.

“Likewise, we are concerned about proposals to raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 and to increase the Social Security full retirement age from 67 to 69. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone is living longer or is able to work into their late 60s. While life expectancy has risen six years in the top half of income earners, workers in the bottom half have only gained 1.3 years. What is more, the bottom 40 percent of income earners depend on Social Security for nearly 90 percent of their total income. Benefit cuts through the chained CPI and delaying access to Medicare for millions of Americans would harm seniors, people with disabilities and children; and have a disproportionately negative affect on women and communities of color.

“When taken together, these benefit cuts will generate a tsunami of seniors living in poverty. …”

In today’s On the News segment: There is a new effort in Washington to loosen Wall Street regulations and water down the 2010 Dodd Frank Act is getting bipartisan support in Congress; Walmart is illegally targeting employees that took part in the Black Friday protests last year; Culinary workers in Las Vegas are standing up to Casino owners with acts of civil disobedience; and more.

Thom Hartmann here — on the news… 

You need to know this. Despite gridlock in Washington, a new effort to loosen Wall Street regulations and water down the 2010 Dodd Frank Act is getting bipartisan support in Congress.  Republican Representatives Patrick Henry and Scott Garrett are backing the measure, as is Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore.  Moore justified her support by saying the plan is only meant to relieve regulatory burdens on companies that do business with big banks.  Another democrat, Representative Jim Himes, even wants to roll-back Dodd Frank, and stick taxpayers with the bill, should the derivative market implode again.  But some Democrats still understand the dangers of banks-gone-wild, and are fighting for tougher regulations to protect us all.  Less than a week ago, Senator Carl Levin issued a scathing report on the devastation JP Morgan caused with risky multibillion-dollar derivative trades.  Levin said, “It is incredible that less than a week after new JPMorgan Whale hearings detailed how the bank’s London office piled up risk, hid losses, and dodged regulatory oversight, that some House members are again supporting the weakening of derivative safegaurds.”  It’s only been five years since the banksters crashed our economy by gambling with derivatives, and the modest legislation we’ve enacted is meant to prevent another economic meltdown.  Representative Alan Grayson, a leading voice for financial reform, criticized his colleagues for considering putting our nation at risk again. He said, “the road to hell is paved with these bills.”  We should be strengthening regulations on Wall Street, not giving banksters another free pass to gamble with our economic future.  Call Congress today and tell them they must stop the next derivatives debacle before it’s too late. 

In screwed news… On Black Friday last year, Walmart employees made national headlines by staging a walkout to protest low-wages, unsafe working conditions, and anti-union management practices.  And now it appears the mega-retailer is illegally targeting employees that took part in the protest.  According to a new report by The Nation, The National Labor Relations Board has issued a complaint alleging that four companies, which are involved in staffing and managing Walmart’s largest distribution center, have repeatedly threatened and punished warehouse workers for taking part in union activities.  The allegations include canceling employee breaks, increasing work hours, telling workers they are under surveillance, and even terminating six individuals for participating in pro-union activites.  As the NLRB was weakened by a recent Supreme Court ruling, that agency has been slow to process complaints and dole out punishments for Walmart’s illegal practices. One employee told The Nation, “they’re not terribly afraid to break labor law, because there’s not really a penalty for doing so.”  Because Republicans continue to block agency nominations — effectively neutering the NLRB, Walmart workers shouldn’t expect the agency to provide more help any time soon.  But employees have a legal right to demand higher wages and better working conditions, and they must not give up on this important fight.

In the best of the rest of the news… 

Culinary workers in Las Vegas are standing up to Casino owners with acts of civil disobedience.  Ninety-eight protestors were arrested yesterday for blocking traffic during a protest outside of the Cosmopolitan Hotel and Casino.  The workers have been in contract negotiations with casino management for about two years, demanding an agreement that outlines wages, benefits, and job security.  According to the Associated Press, the two-year-old casino is one of only a few in Las Vegas that is not unionized, despite the majority of workers saying they want representation. As protestors blocked the streets for about an hour, they chanted, “If we don’t get no contract, you don’t get no peace.”  Representatives of Deutsche Bank, that owns the casino, said they are stalling because they intend to sell the resort, and don’t want to be burdened with a union contract. Any sale worth making, and any casino worth buying, can afford to pay it’s workers a living wage.  Perhaps they should consider that it will be even more difficult to sell the casino if they can’t get employees to work there.  Unions are under attack throughout our nation, and this is one more battle in the fight to preserve collective bargaining. We’ll have to wait and see how this turns out. Stay tuned. 

In June of last year, Barclays Bank in the UK was fined 290 million Euros for it’s role in the international Libor rate-rigging scandal.  So, it stands to reason that the bank executives don’t deserve a reward for their actions… but yesterday, that’s exactly what they got.  According to The Guardian, Barclays attempted to “bury” the news of bankster bonuses by announcing it the same day much of the city was distracted with news on a city budget.  But, reports of the 38.5 million euro payouts did not go unnoticed. The bank did not respond to claims it tried to bury the news of massive bonuses, but a person close to the company said the announcement date was selected back in December. John Hunter, of the UK Shareholder Association, said “society’s first reaction is that bankers are a bunch of sleazeballs, and this makes them look even sleazier.”  It’s bad enough that banksters are getting rewarded for lying and manipulating the financial markets, but it’s even worse that they think no one will notice.  

And finally…  Talk about a return on investment. Reuters reports that an unnamed New York family bought a $3 dollar bowl at a yard sale, and they just sold the 1,000 year-old Chinese artifact at auction for $2.25 million dollars.  Apparently the family had the bowl displayed on a mantlepiece, and only learned of it’s value after speaking with experts.  A Sotheby’s representative said the piece is almost identical to one that’s been featured in the British Museum for over 60 years.  So, next time you consider getting rid of a few things around the house, you may want to look a little more carefully at what you sell. One man’s trash in another man’s treasure.  And in this case, that treasure happened to be worth over $2 million dollars. 

And that’s the way it is today — Thursday, March 21, 2013. I’m Thom Hartmann — on the news. 

Business Secretary Vince Cable has rubbished plans to reduce net immigration saying it would do “enormous damage” to the UK.

The Liberal Democrat said meeting a pledge to reduce immigration to under 100,000, was an “unattainable” target unless areas that benefited Britain, such as international student numbers, were hit. It wasn’t part of the Coalition agreement.

In an interview for parliamentary journal The House Cable said: “It isn’t Government policy, it is Conservative policy. And it’s also not true because that policy purely relates to non-EU people.

“We have obviously no control over the European Union and that is actually where much of the movement comes. And a lot of the public anxiety which is experienced in by-elections and elsewhere has actually been about people from Eastern Europe.

“Now, you can argue whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing but it’s got nothing to do with the non-EU, which is the area which is controlled by government.

“The reducing to under 100,000 is not Government policy and it would be unattainable without, if it was attainable enormous damage would be done, notably through overseas students, which is one of the biggest components, actually.”

Home Secretary Theresa May wants to reduce non-EU migration to the tens of thousands by 2015. Figures released by the Office for National Statistics last month show a net flow of 163,000 migrants came to the UK in the year to June 2012, down from 247,000 in the previous year.

But MPs on the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee have criticised the Government for refusing to take international students out of the target.

Asked if he believed the pledge would be hit by the end of the parliament, he replied: “The argument that Government can somehow deliver this, when you think about the logic of it: net immigration means reducing the number of people coming in or increasing the number of British people emigrating. Is that the policy objective? I don’t know.”

He added: “The problem we have in many of these emerging markets with prospective overseas students, it’s not the system, it’s what they’ve read in the newspapers of the system, it’s a perception issue, they’ve read ‘Britain is Closed’ and they don’t come here or they don’t apply, particularly in India. Less so in China where they don’t have independent newspapers to read.

“We want overseas students, they are good for us, they are not bad for us. They bring in lots of money. We want to have lots of visitors from all over the world coming here without hassle, an easy flexible visa system and we have lots of highly specialised people in engineers, top managers who we need in our companies and they’ve got to be able to come and go freely otherwise we are not going to be able to compete internationally. So I do have to keep banging the drum for that.”

Asked about the government’s immigration policy at a regular Westminster briefing, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “The government’s policy, it’s unchanged.”

In the wide-ranging interview, Mr Cable said he would stand for election again in 2015, pointing out he was in the company of great prime ministers by continuing in politics at an older age.

Asked if Gladstone was his role model: “Yes, well, he became Prime Minister when he was over 80, didn’t he? I think Churchill was over 70, wasn’t he?”

“Talking of role models, Deng Xiaoping totally transformed China in the last century. I think he was 80 when he took over. And he survived the Long March.”

O conclave do Vaticano elegeu o Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio como o Papa Francis I

Quem é Jorge Mario Bergoglio?

Em 1973 ele foi nomeado o “provincial” da Argentina para a Companhia dos Jesuitas.

Nessa capacidade Bergoglio foi o mais alto dignitário da Ordem Jesuíta da Argentina durante a ditadura militar liderada pelo General Jorge Videla (1976-1983).

Mais tarde ele foi nomeado bispo e depois arcebispo de Buenos Aires. O Papa João Paulo II o consagrou Cardinal em 2001.

Quando a junta militar abandonou o poder em 1983, o devidamente eleito presidente Raúl Alfonsin abriu um inquérito, a Comissão da Verdade, para investigar os crimes relacionados com que ficou conhecidos como a Guerra Suja — “La Guerra Sucia”.

A junta militar tinha sido encobertamente apoada por Washington.

O Secretário do Estado norteamericano, Henry Kissinger, fez o seu papel nos bastidores do golpe militar de 1976.

O vice-representante mais importante de Kissinger na América Latina, William Rogers, o informou dois dias depois do golpe que “teremos que esperar uma quantia considerável de repressão, provávelmente muita sanguenta, dentro em pouco tempo.”…(Arquivo da Segurança Nacional, 23 de março, 2006)

“Operação Condor”

Um grande julgamento foi ironicamente aberto em 5 de março 2013, uma semana antes da investidura do Cardinal Bergoglio como Pontífice. O processo sendo desenvolvido em Buenos Aires tem em vista:

 “uma avaliação da totalidade dos crimes cometidos abaixo da Operação Condor, uma campanha coordenada por vários ditadores da América Latina, apoiados pelos Estados Unidos nos anos de 1970 e 1980, para caçar, torturar e matar dezenas de milhares de oponentes desses regimes militares”

Para mais detalhes veja Operation Condor: Trial On Latin American Rendition and Assassination Program By Carlos Osorio and Peter Kornbluh,,March 10, 2013.

(Foto acima: Henry Kissinger e General Jorge Videla (anos de 1970)

NÃO CLASSIFICADO    8/3/76

DEPARTAMENTO DO ESTADO

Washington D.C.

DO:  Secretariado

PARA: ARA — Harry W. Shlaudeman

ARA RELATÓRIO MENSAL( JULHO)

A TERCEIRA GUERRA MUNDIAL E A AMÉRICA LATINA

Os regimes militares do cone sul da América do Sul veêm-se

como tendo que pôr-se em ordem de batalha:

—  de um lado pelo marxismo internacional e seus exponentes terroristas, e

— do outro lado pela hostilidade das democracias industriais que são enganadas pela propaganda marxista.

Em resposta eles estão se unindo no que se poderá tornar num bloco político de uma certa coesão. Mas, mais importante, eles estão juntando forças para erradicar a “subversão”, uma palavra que mais e mais vem se tornando num sinônimo de oposição não-violenta de esquerda, e de centro-esquerda. As forças de segurança do cone sul

— agora estão a coordenar mais estritamente suas atividades de inteligência;

— estão também operando nos territórios dos países uns dos outros em busca de “subversivos”;

— eles estabeleceram a Operation Condor para achar e matar terroristas do “Comité Revolucionário de Coordenação” nos seus próprios países, e na Europa. O Brazil está cooperando, mas não em operações homicidas.

A junta militar liderada pelo General Jorge Videla (a esquerda) foi responsável por incontáveis assassinatos, incluindo assassinatos de  sacerdotes e freiras que se opuseram ao domínio militar que acompanhou o golpe patrocinado pela CIA, golpe esse que derrubou o governo de Isabel Peron,  em 24 de março de 1976.

“Videla estava entre os generais que foram condenados por crimes contra os direitos humanos, crimes esses que incluiam  “desaparecimentos”, tortura, assassinatos, e sequestramentos. Em 1985, Videla foi sentenciado a prisão perpétua, na prisão militar de Magdalena.

Wall Street e a Agenda Econômica Neoliberal

Uma das nomeações mais importantes da junta militar (como consequência das intruções de Wall Street) foi a do Ministro da Economia, José Alfredo Martinez de Hoz, um membro do estabelecimento de negócios, comércio e investimentos da Argentina; um amigo íntimo de David Rockefeller.

O pacote neoliberal da política macro-econômica adotada sob Martinez de Hoz foi uma “cópia-carbono” daquela imposta em outubro de 1973 no Chile pela ditadura de Pinochet abaixo dos conselhos vindos dos “Meninos de Chicago”- “Chicago Boys”; política essa imposta depois do golpe de estado de 11 de setembro de 1973, e do assassinato do presidente Salvador Allende.

Os salários foram imediatamente congelados, por decreto. O poder aquisitivo real no país caiu em colápso por mais de 30 porcento, nos tres meses que se seguiram ao golpe militar de 24 de março de 1976. (Avaliações do autor, Cordoba, Argentina, julho de 1976). A população argentina ficou repentinamente empobrecida.

Abaixo da direçäo do Ministro da Economia José alfredo Martinez de Hoz, a política monetária do banco central foi em grande parte determinada por Wall Street e pelo FMI, o Fundo Monetário Internacional. O mercado de câmbio foi manipulado. O Peso argentino foi propositadamente posto acima do seu valor real, o que levou a um débito exterior insuperável. Toda a Economia Nacional foi precipitada à falência.

(Foto acima: Da esquerda para a direita: José Alfredo Martinez de Hoz, David Rockefeller e General Jorge Videla)

Wall Street e a Hierarquia da Igreja Católica  

Wall Street esteve sólidamente apoiando a junta militar que empenhava-se na “Guerra Suja” em benefício da mesma. Por seu turno, a hierarquia da Igreja Católica teve o papel, um papel central, de manter a legitimidade da junta militar.

A Ordem dos Jesuitas —que representava a Conservadora, mas no entanto a mais influente facção da Igreja Católica-  estava intimamente associada com a elite econômica da Argentina, e isso contra os chamados “de esquerda” do movimento Peronista.

“A Guerra Suja”: Alegações dirigidas contra o Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio

Condenar a ditadura militar (inclusive suas violações dos direitos humanos) era um tabú na Igreja Católica. Enquanto os altos escalões da Igreja apoiavam a junta militar, a base popular da mesma estava firmemente contra a imposição do governo militar.

Em 2005  a advogada de direitos humanos Myriam Bregman entrou com um processo judicial contra o Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, acusando-o de conspirar com a junta militar quando do sequestro de dois padres jesuítas em 1976.

Alguns anos mais tarde, os sobreviventes da “Guerra Suja” acusaram abertamente o Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio de cumplicidade nos sequestros dos padres Francisco Jalics e Orlando Yorio, assim como nos sequestros de seis membros de suas paróquias, (El Mundo, 8 de novembro de 2010)

(Foto acima: Jorge Mario Bergoglio e General Jorge Videla)

Bergoglio, que na época era o “provincial” da Companhia dos Jesuitas, tinha dado ordens para que os dois padres, jesuitas, “de esquerda”, e oponentes do governo militar “deixassem seus trabalhos paroquiais”, o que quer dizer que foram despedidos. Isso acompanhando divisões na Companhia dos Jesuitas quanto ao papel da Igreja Católica em relação a junta militar.

Enquanto os dois padres — Francisco Jalics e Orlando Yorio — sequestrados pelos esquadrões da morte em maio de 1976 foram soltos cinco meses mais tarde depois de terem sido torturados; outras seis pessoas relacionadas a paróquia, pessoas essas que também tinham sido sequestradas na mesma operação, foram dadas como “desaparecidas”. Esses sequestrados desaparecidos eram quatro professores e dois dos maridos de duas das professoras do grupo dos seis.

De quando de sua libertação o padre Orlando Yorio acusou Bergoglio de efetivamente os terem entregue [incluindo as seis outras pessoas] para os esquadrões da morte … Jalics se recusou a discutir a queixa depois de ter entrado em reclusão num monastério alemão.” (Associated Press, 13 de março de 2013, ênfases acrescentadas).

“Durante o primeiro julgamento da junta militar em 1985, Yorio declarou: “Eu tenho certeza de que ele mesmo deu uma lista com os nossos nomes para a Marinha.” Os dois padres tinham sido levados para o centro de tortura da Escola de Mecânica da Marinha (ESMA na sigla inglesa) e mantidos lá por cinco meses antes de serem arrastados e jogados numa cidade dos subúrbios. (Veja Bill van Auken, “The Dirty War” Pope, World Socialist Website and Global Research, March 14, 2013)

Entre aqueles “desaparecidos” pelos esquadrões da morte estavam Mónica Candelaria Mignone e María Marta Vásquez Ocampo. Mónica Mignone era filha do fundador do Centro de Estudos Legais e Sociais, CELS, e María Marta Ocampo era filha da presidente das Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Martha Ocampo de Vásquez (El Periodista Online, março 2013).

María Marta Vásquez, seu marido César Lugones (veja foto)  e Mónica Candelaria Mignone alegadamente “entregues aos esquadrões da morte” pelo provincial” jesuita Jorge Mario Bergoglio estão entre os milhares de “desaparecidos da “Guerra Suja” da Argentina, a qual foi encobertamente apoiada por Washington, abaixo da “Operação Condor”. (Veja memorialmagro.com.ar)

No decorrer do julgamento iniciado em 2005:

 “Bergoglio [Papa Francis I] por duas vezes invocou seu direito abaixo da lei argentina de poder se recusar a apresentar-se em tribunal público, e quando ele afinal testemunhou em 2010 suas respostas foram evasivas”. “Pelo menos dois casos envolviam Bergoglio diretamente. Um examinava a tortura de dois dos seus padres jesuitas — Orlando Yorio e Francisco Jalics — que tinham sido sequestrados em 1976 em bairros pobres onde eles defendiam a teologia da liberação. Yorio acusou Bergoglio de efetivamente os terem entregue aos esquadrões da morte … do quando recusando-se a declarar ao regime que ele endossava o trabalho desses dois seus padres.  Jalics recusou-se a comentar o caso depois de ter se retirado para um monastério alemão.” (Los Angeles Times, 1 de abril, 2005)

“Santa comunhão para os ditadores”

As acusações dirigidas contra Bergoglio em relação aos dois padres jesuitas e aos seis membros das paróquias dos mesmos, seriam sómente a ponta do icebergue. Conquanto Bergoglio fosse uma pessoa importante da Igreja Católica, ele não seria o único a apoiar a junta militar.

De acordo com a advogada Myriam Bregman:  “As próprias declarações de Bergoglio provam que representantes oficiais da igreja sabiam, e isso logo do começo que a junta estava torturando e matando seus cidadãos” e ainda assim endossaram publicamente os ditadores. “A ditadura não poderia ter agido dessa maneira sem esse apoio chave,” (Los Angeles Times, 1 abril de 2005, ênfases acrescentadas.

(Foto acima: General Jorge Videla comungando. A data e o nome do padre não confirmados)

Toda a hierarquia católica estava apoiando a ditadura militar patrocinada pelos Estados Unidos. Vale a pena recordar que em 23 de março de 1976, na véspera do golpe militar:

“Videla e outros conspiradores receberam a benção do arcebispo do Paraná, Adolfo Tortolo, que também serviu como o vigário das forças armadas. No próprio dia da tomada do poder, os líderes militares tiveram um longo encontro com os líderes da conferência dos bispos. Quando ele saiu dessa conferência o arcebispo Tortolo declarou que mesmo que “a igreja tenha sua própria missão específica … há circunstâncias nas quais ela não pode deixar de participar, mesmo quando isso relacione-se a problemas da ordem específica do estado.” Ele fez mesmo pressão moral para que os argentinos “cooperassem duma maneira positiva” com o novo governo.”   (The Humanist.org, janeiro de 2011, ênfases acrescentadas)

Numa entrevista conduzida pelo El Sur, o General Jorge Videla, que agora está servindo uma pena de prisão perpétua, por causa dos seus crimes contra a humanidade confirmou que:

 “Ele tinha mantido a hierarquia católica do país informada quanto a “fazer desaparecer” oponentes políticos, e que os líderes católicos tinham oferecido conselhos de como “conduzir” a política de desaparecimentos.

Jorge Videla disse que ele tinha tido “muitas conversações” com o Cardinal Raúl Francisco Primatesta, da Argentina, a respeito da guerra suja do governo contra os ativistas da esquerda. Ele disse que também havia havido conversações com outros bispos líderes da conferência episcopal na Argentina, assim como com o núncio papal do país na época, Pio Laghi. “Eles nos aconselharam a respeito da maneira de como lidar com a situação,” disse Videla” (Tom Henningan, Former Argentinian dictator says he told Catholic Church of disappeared, Irish Times, 24 de julho de 2012, ênfases acrescentadas)

É de valor o observar-se, que de acordo com uma declaração do arcebispo Adolfo Tortolo, os militares deveriam sempre consultar com alguma membro da alta hierarquia católica no caso de “prisão” de algum membro nas alas mais baixas da hierarquia do cléro. Essa declaração foi feita especialmente em relação aos dois padres jesuitas sequestrados, dos quais as atividades pastorais estavam abaixo da autoridade do “provincial” da Companhia Jesuita, Jorge Mario Bergoglio. (El Periodista Online, março de 2013).

Em endossando a junta militar, a hierarquia católica foi cúmplice de tortura e de morte de massas, num estimado de “22.000 mortos e desaparecidos, de 1976  a 1978. …  Milhares de outras vítimas foram mortas entre 1978 e 1983, quando os militares foram forçados a deixar o poder.” (Arquivo da Segurança Nacional, 23 de março de 2006).

O papel do Vaticano

O Vaticano abaixo da direção do Papa Paulo VI e do Papa João Paulo II fez um papel central em apoiando a junta militar argentina.

Pio Langhi, o Núncio Apostólico do Vaticano na Argentina admitiu o conhecimento a respeito de tortura e massacrres.

Langhi tinha contatos pessoais com membros da direção da junta militar incluindo o General Videla e o Almirante Emilio Eduardo Massera.

O Almirante Emilio Massera, em próximo contacto com seus dirigentes americanos, foi o mentor “Da Guerra Suja”. Abaixo dos auspícios do regime militar ele estabeleceu:

“um centro de interrogatório e tortura na Escola Naval de Mecânica — Naval School of Mechanics, ESMA [perto de Buenos Aires], … Esse era um estabelecimento sofisticado, para muitos fins, vital ao plano militar de assassinar cerca de 30.000 “inimigos do estado”. …Muitos milhares dos prisioneiros da ESMA, incluindo, por exemplo, duas freiras francesas, foram de maneira rotineira torturados brutalmente sem misericórdia, antes de serem assassinados ou jogados de algum avião no Rio de la Plata.

(Veja foto acima: O Nuncio do Vaticano Pio Langhi e o General Jorge Videla)

Massera, o membro mais vigoroso do triunvirato, fez o seu melhor para manter seus elos com Washington. Ele participou no desenvolvimentoo do Plano Condor, que era um plano de colaboração para coordenar o terrorismo sendo praticado pelos regimes militares sulamericanos. (Hugh O´ Shaughnessy,  Amiral Emilio Massera: Naval officer who took part in the 1976 coup in Argentina and was later jailed for his part in the junta’s crimes, The Independent, 10 de novembro de 2010, ênfases acrescentadas)

Relatórios confirmam que o representante do Vaticano Pio Laghi e Amiral Emilio Massera eram amigos.

(Foto: Almirante Emilio Massera, o arquiteto da “Guerra Suja” sendo recebido pelo Papa Paulo VI, no Vaticano)

A Igreja Católica: Chile vs Argentina

Tem valor por si mesmo o notar-se que nas águas do golpe militar no Chile, em 11 de setembro de 1973, o Cardinal de São Tiago do Chile,  Raul Silva Henriquez, tinha condenado abertamente a junta militar liderada pelo General Augusto Pinochet. Em forte contraste com a Argentina, a posição da hierarquia católica no Chile foi eficaz em pôr freio as ondas de assassinatos polítiocs, assim como conter a extensão das violações dos direitos humanos cometitas contra os apoiantes de Salvador Allende e os oponentes do regime militar.

O homem atrás do ecumênico, e não-partidário, Comité Pro-Paz era o Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez. Logo depois do golpe, Silva… tomou o papel de “atores” — “upstander”, esse sendo um termo em inglês que a autora e ativista Samantha Power criou para distinguir pessoas que se levantavam contra a injustiça — muitas vezes a custo de grandes riscos pessoais — dos que denominava então, de “expectadores”.

… Logo após o golpe, Silva e outros líderes da igreja do Chile publicaram uma declaração condenando as ações dos golpistas e exprimindo dor e desgosto pelo derramamento de sangue. Esse foi um ponto fundamental de reversão para muitos membros do cléro chileno … O Cardinal Raul Silva Henriquez visitou o Estádio Nacional, e escandalizado pela escala da violência desintegradora, instruiu seus auxiliares a começarem a documentar os acontecimentos reunindo informação das milhares de pessoas que voltavam-se as igrejas, para refúgio.

As ações do Cardinal Silva o levaram a um conflito aberto com Pinochet, que não hesitou em ameaçar a igreja e o Comité Pro-Paz (Taking a Stand Against Pinochet: The Catholic Church and the Disappeared — pdf)

Se a hierarquia católica na Argentina e Jorge Mario Bergoglio tivessem tomado uma posição semelhante a do Cardinal Raul Silva Henriquez, milhares de vidas teriam sido salvas, também na Argentina.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio não era, nas palvras de Samantha Powers um expectador, “bystander”. Ele foi cúmplice em crimes contra a humanidade, crimes esses que foram muito abrangentes.

O Papa Francis I não é “um homem do povo” cometido a “ajudar os pobres” nas pegadas de São Francisco de Assis, como retratado em côro pela mantra da mídia ocidental. Muito pelo contrário: os seus esforços durante a junta militar, consistentemente atacando progressivos membros do cléro católico, assim como os ativistas empenhados em salvaguardar dos direitos humanos, ativistas esses envolvidos em implementar programas contra a grande miséria e pobreza.

Em apoiando a “Guerra Suja” argentina, José Mario Bergoglio violou abertamente os próprios dogmas e doutrinas da moralidade cristã, dogmas e doureinas esses que dão grande valor a vida humana.

“Operação Condor” e a Igreja Católica

A eleição do Cardinal Bergoglio pelo conclave do Vaticano para servir como Papa Francis I terá repercussões imediatas em relação ao corrente julgamneto “Operação Condor”, em Buenos Aires.

A Igreja estava envolvida em apoiar a junta militar. Esse é um fator que irá emergir no decorrer dos procedimentos do processo judicial. Não há dúvidas de que lá haverá esforços para obscurecer o papel da hierarquia católica e a recente nomeação do Papa Francis I, que serviu como chefe da Ordem Jesuita da Argentina durante a ditadura militar.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio: O Papa de Washington no Vaticano?

A eleição do Papa Francis I tem grandes implicações para toda a região da América Latina

Nos anos de 1970, Jorge Mario Bergolio apoiou a ditadura militar patrocinada pelos Estados Unidos.

A hierarquia católica da Argentina apoiou o governo militar. O programa militar de tortura, assassinatos e “desaparecimentos” de milhares de oponentes políticos foi apoiada e coordenada por Washington, durante a “Operação Condor”, da CIA.

Os interesses da Wall Street foram sustentados através do gabinete de Jose Alfredo Martinez de Hoz no Ministério da Economia.

A Igreja Católica na América Latina tem influência política. A Igreja também exerce um controle sobre a opinião pública. Isso é sabido e compreendido pelos arquitetos da política exterior dos Estados Unidos, assim como dos sectores de inteligência dos mesmos.

Na América Latina onde governos estão agora desafiando a dominância dos EUA, se pode esperar — dado os antecedentes de Bergoglio — que o novo Pontífice Francis I, como líder da Igreja Católica na América Latina irá, de facto, desempenhar um papel político discreto e as encobertas, mas a favor de Washington.

Com Jose Mario Bergoglio, Papa Francis I no Vaticano — homem esse que fielmente serviu os interesses dos Estados Unidos no dias de apogeu do Generla Jorge Videla e Almirante Emilio Massera — a hierarquia da Igreja Católica na América Latina poderá mais uma vez ser efetivamente manipulada para underminar governos “progressistas”, ou seja, de esquerda, não só na Argentina (em relação ao governo de Cristina Kirschner) como também através de toda a região sulamericana, incluindo Venezuela, Equador e Bolívia.

A instalação de “um papa pro-EUA” ocorreu uma semana após a morte do presidente Hugo Chavez.

“Troca de Regime” no Vaticano  

O Departamento do Estado dos Estados Unidos como uma questão de rotina faz pressão sobre membros do Conselho de Segurança das Nações Unidas com o fim de influenciar os votos pertencentes as resoluções do Conselho de Segurança.

Também como uma questão de rotina as operações encobertas assim como as campanhas de propaganda dos Estados Unidos são empregadas com o objetivo de influenciar eleições nacionais, em diferente países ao redor do mundo.

A CIA de maneira similar também tem tido uma longa relação encoberta de afinidade com o Vaticano.

Teria o governo dos Estados Unidos tentado influenciar o resultado da eleição do novo pontífice?

Fortemente envolvido em servir os interesses da política exterior dos Estados Unidos na América Latina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio era o candidato preferido de Washington.

Teriam discretas pressões encobertas sido exercidas por Washington dentro da Igreja Católica, pressões essas que direta ou indiretamente, poderiam ter caido sobre os 115 cardinais, membros do conclave do Vaticano?

Notas do Autor

No começo do regime militar em 1976, eu estava trabalhando como professor visitante no Instituto de Política Social da Universidade Nacional de Cordoba, Argentina. O ponto focal da minha pesquisa, nesse tempo, era a investigação dos impactos sociais das mortais reformas macro-econômicas adotadas pela junta militar.

Eu era professor na Universidade de Cordoba durante a onda inicial dos assassinatos, a qual também mirava membros progressivos da bases populares do cléro católico.

A cidade industrial de Córdoba, localisada no norte da Argnetina, era o centro do movimento de resistência. Eu fui testemunha de como a hierarquia católica, activa e de maneira rotineira apoiava a junta militar, criando uma atmosfera de intimidação e medo através de todo o país. O sentimento geral nesse tempo era de que a Argentina tinha sido traida pelos altos escalões da Igreja Católica.

Tres anos antes quando do golpe militar no Chile em 11 de setembro de 1973,  o qual levou a derrubada do governo da Unidade Popular de Salvador Allende, eu estava trabalhando como professor visitante no Departamento de Economia da Universidade Católica do Chile, em Santiago do Chile.

Nas imediatas consequências do golpe do Chile eu fui testemunha de como o Cardinal de Santiago, Raul Silva Henriquez —  agindo em nome da Igreja Católica – confrontou a ditadura militar.

Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research (atualizado em 16 de março de 2013)

14 de março de 2013-03-18

Artigo em inglês :

“Washington’s Pope”? Who is Pope Francis I? Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Argentina’s “Dirty War”, March 16, 2013

Tradução Anna Malm — *Licenciatura: Economia e Psicologia; Bacharelado: Ciência Política e Economia.

Why Democrats Shouldn’t Put Social Security and Medicare on the Table

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Posted on Mar 21, 2013

By Robert Reich

This post originally ran on Robert Reich’s Web page.

Prominent Democrats – including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi – are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation.

This is even before they’ve started budget negotiations with Republicans – who still refuse to raise taxes on the rich, close tax loopholes the rich depend on (such as hedge-fund and private-equity managers’ “carried interest”), increase capital gains taxes on the wealthy, cap their tax deductions, or tax financial transactions.

It’s not the first time Democrats have led with a compromise, but these particular pre-concessions are especially unwise.

For over thirty years Republicans have pitted the middle class against the poor, preying on the frustrations and racial biases of average working people who can’t get ahead no matter how hard they try. In the Republican narrative, government takes from the hard-working middle and gives to the undeserving and dependent needy. 

In reality, average working people have been stymied because almost all the economic gains of the last three decades have gone to the very top. The middle has lost bargaining power as unions have shriveled. American politics has been flooded with campaign contributions from corporations and the wealthy, which have used their clout to reduce marginal tax rates, widen loopholes, loosen regulations, gain subsidies, and obtain government bailouts when their bets turn sour.

Now five years after the worst downturn since the Great Depression and the biggest bailout in history, the stock market has recouped its losses and corporate profits constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929. Yet the real median wage continues to fall – wages now claim the lowest share of the economy on record – and inequality is still widening. All the economic gains since the trough of the recession have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans; the bottom 90 percent continue to lose ground.

What looks like the start of a more buoyant recovery is a sham because the vast majority of Americans have neither the pay nor access to credit that allows them to buy enough to boost the economy. Housing prices and starts are being fueled by investors with easy money rather than would-be home buyers with mortgages. The Fed’s low interest rates have pushed other investors into stocks by default, creating an artificial bull market.

If there was ever a time for the Democratic Party to champion working Americans and reverse these troubling trends, it is now – forging an alliance between the frustrated middle and the working poor. This need not be “class warfare” because a healthy economy is in everyone’s interest. The rich would do far better with a smaller share of a rapidly-growing economy than a ballooning share of one that’s growing at a snail’s pace and a stock market that’s turning into a bubble.

But the modern Democratic Party can’t bring itself to do this. It’s too dependent on the short-term, insular demands of Wall Street, corporate executives, and the wealthy. 

It was Bill Clinton, after all, who pushed for repeal of Glass-Steagall, championed the North American Free Trade Act and the World Trade Organization without adequate safeguards for American jobs, and rented out the Lincoln Bedroom to a steady stream of rich executives.

And it was Barack Obama who continued George W. Bush’s Wall Street bailout with no strings attached; pushed a watered-down “Volcker Rule” (still delayed) rather than renew Glass-Steagall; failed to prosecute a single Wall Street executive or bank because, according to his Attorney General, Wall Street is just too big to jail; and permanently enshrined the Bush tax cuts for all but the top 2 percent.

Meanwhile, over the last several decades Democrats have allowed Social Security taxes to grow and its revenue stream to become almost as important a source of overall government funding as income taxes; turned their backs on organized labor and labor-law reforms that would have made it easier to form unions; and then, even as they bailed out Wall Street, neglected the burdens of middle-class homeowners who found themselves underwater and their homes worth less than what they paid for them because of the Street’s excesses.

In fairness, it could have been worse. Clinton did stand up to Gingrich. Obama did get the Affordable Care Act. Congressional Democrats have scored tactical victories against social conservatives and Tea Party radicals. But Democrats haven’t responded in any bold or meaningful way to the increasingly concentrated wealth and power, the steady demise of the middle class, and further impoverishment of the nation’s poor. The Party failed to become a movement to reclaim the economy and our democracy.

And now come their pre-concessions on Social Security and Medicare.

Technically, a “chained CPI” might be justifiable if seniors routinely substitute lower-cost alternatives as prices rise, as most other Americans do. But in reality, seniors pay 20 to 40 percent of their incomes for healthcare, including pharmaceuticals – the prices of which are rising much faster than inflation. So there’s no practical justification for reducing Social Security benefits on the assumption inflation isn’t really eating away at those benefits as much as the current cost-of-living adjustment allows. 

Robert B. Reich, chancellor’s professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, was secretary of labor in the Clinton administration. Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective Cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including the best-sellers “Aftershock” and “The Work of Nations.” His latest, “Beyond Outrage,” is now out in paperback. He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.

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Fed Chairman Bernanke: ‘I Agree With Elizabeth Warren 100 Percent’ on Big Banks

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Posted on Mar 21, 2013

AP/Alex Brandon

After seemingly clashing with Sen. Elizabeth Warren during a recent hearing over whether the problem of too-big-to-fail banks has been solved, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke now says he sides with the Massachusetts Democrat on the issue.

During last month’s Senate hearing, Bernanke seemed to imply that policymakers had come up with a solution to the problem that the failure of giant U.S. banks would be a major threat to the economy, though he appeared to waffle on that conviction the more he was pressed by Warren.

But on Wednesday, he said he now sided with Warren on the issue. “Too big to fail is not solved and gone,” Bernanke conceded during a news conference. He added, “I agree with Elizabeth Warren 100 percent that it’s a real problem.”

If Bernanke’s new stance is any indication, Warren, who was just sworn in this January, is already having a positive impact on Washington. Now if only we could say that about more of our nation’s lawmakers.

The Huffington Post:

He also sided with Warren against those banks and others who suggest that having gigantic banks is not really a problem at all.

“Too Big To Fail was a major source of the crisis,” he added a little later, “and we will not have successfully responded to the crisis if we do not address that successfully.”

He talked about some of the tools policy makers could use to address the problem, including Dodd-Frank rules forcing the biggest banks to hold more capital or pay regulators a little more than smaller banks.

“If we don’t achieve the goal” of solving too big to fail with these measures, Bernanke said, “we will have to take additional steps. It is important.”

Read more

–Posted by Tracy Bloom.

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This week marks the tenth anniversary of the “Shock and Awe” US invasion of Iraq.

The ravages of that invasion continue at home and in Iraq, the US is still at war in Afghanistan (troops and contractors remain in Iraq) and unofficially waging war on countries like Pakistan and Yemen, is aggravating aggression with North Korea as part of an Asian pivot encircling China, is putting more military into Africa and Obama is in Israel where he sings a duet for war with Netanyahu against Syria and Iran. Meanwhile, poverty, unemployment and homelessness continue to grow in the US with threats of austerity for everything except the national security state.

When we occupied Freedom Plaza in October, 2011, we made the connection between US Empire and the corporate control of our political process, between unlimited military spending and cuts to necessary domestic programs. We understood the misreporting in the corporate media about the Iraq War. Kathy Kelly from Voices for Creative Nonviolence was in Baghdad during Shock and Awe. On this tenth anniversary, she reminds us of the horrible price of war and warns of never ending war as the US seems to edge toward more war in the region. The need to understand those connections grows more important each day as we see the costs of war affecting people on every level.

And this report details the tremendous costs in loss of life, the US legacy of cancer in Iraq from poisons we brought there, the number of refugees, orphans, widows and people now living in poverty. Violence continues in Iraq including a series of attacks on the tenth anniversary that left 98 people dead and 240 wounded.

Iraq War veteran Tomas Young is bringing increased attention to the human costs at home as he prepares to die from his wounds. Over 130,000 Iraq vets have been diagnosed with PTSD. Over 250,000 are suffering from traumatic brain injuries. The ongoing costs of caring for veterans is expected to bring the total cost of the Iraq invasion alone to $6 trillion. And, vets fight homelessness, sometimes with the aid of Occupy activists who protest to save the homes of vets.  Veterans are also experiencing unemployment and medical debt.

These are some of the costs of war, not to mention that the US Military is the greatest polluter on the planet.

As we join the national week of actions in solidarity with the Strike Debt Rolling Jubileeand the coast-to-coast actions in support of the Tar Sands Blockade, let us remember that all of these issues are connected. As our allies at Veterans For Peace have been saying lately it is time to Stop the War on Mother Earth. VFP has been joining with groups like Radical Action for Mountain People’s Survival and the Tar Sands Blockade to protect the planet.

The breadth of opposition to the extraction economy that undermines the ecology of the planet is shown by the people involved in the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance and the “Sacred Journey for Future Generations,” a march across Canada by hundreds in support of the Idle No More Movement. The fracking movement has also shown the kind of culture of resistance needed to stop hyrdo-fracking as we saw in Watkins Glen, NYthis week.

Let us remember that there is strength in solidarity and all these issues are connected by policies that put corporate greed before human needs and protection of the Earth.

Solidarity has produced some real successes recently. In the UK, 21 climate activists were being sued by the energy giant EDF for shutting down an energy plant for 8 days. But when 64,000 customers signed a petition in support for the “No Dash for Gas” activists; EDF dropped its civil suit. Criminal charges remain, so solidarity with the activists continues to be important. And in Cyprus, the EU tried to impose a tax on the population in exchange for assistance with their debt. Massive protests resulted in the Cypriot Parliament saying no to the tax.

The plague of Wall Street banking affects people across the globe. Wall Street was a key focus of Occupy. This week, activists in Philadelphia explained their protest against Wells Fargo which led to their arrest and acquittal, indeed being thanked by the judge for their actions.  This was one of five recent court victories for Occupy. Now, people are standing up in New York with a class action lawsuit against the abusive stop and frisk searches which had beenprotested by occupiers and others.

Single payer groups are joining with Strike Debt to fight medical debt and our debt-based society. Chicago Teachers invited Occupy Wall Street to teach them protest skills. And, the Imokalee workers are walking across Florida to protest low wages. In Maryland, Fund Our Communities is holding a day long“Prosperity Not Austerity” Bus Tour that links issues such as health care, education and food security with the cost of war. The Strike Debt Resistor’s Manual provides a guide for communities to learn more about ways that debt affects them and what they can do about it.Perhaps you see opportunities for making connections around issues where you are?

It is through these connections that we can grow stronger and become more effective. And it is through these connections that we can have real conversations about the root causes of our shared situations, about the real needs that we have and how we can meet them together and build a unified movement that can say “No” to war at home and abroad. Let us not be afraid to talk about US imperialism and the effects of capitalism and a debt-based world. Let us look for the truth and not be lied into another war in Syria, Iran or North Korea. And let us all join together in the urgent need for climate justice.

We can succeed too. As we make connections and build solidarity, we are preparing for the day when we will shift power to the people. An important issue that needs your attention, particularly next week, is the hunger strike in Guantanamo. Don’t let these prisoners die in vain. Witness Against Torture is calling for a week of national solidarity actions starting March 24th. Join them.

This article is based on our weekly newsletter from October2011.org/OccupyWashington DC which covers protest and resistance movements.To sign up for this free newsletter, click here.

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

As the Eurozone financial crisis continues to plague the island nation of Cyprus, its citizens are receiving a crash course in how an out-of-control banking industry and its corrupt banksters can bring an entire economy to its knees.

The Cypriot economy has ground to a halt, thanks to massive losses that its oversized banking sector sustained from investments in Greece and a deep recession.

Banks in Cyprus have been shut all week, and are not due to reopen until next Tuesday at the earliest, to try to prevent a run on the banks.

When all is said and done, and if the Cypriot economy ever recovers from this financial collapse, Cypriots will hopefully have a new-found awareness of the banks, and implement better oversight and regulation over their financial industry.

That’s exactly what they did in Iceland, and its working wonders for the small island nation.

In 2008, when the global financial crisis began taking down economies one by one, Iceland was hit incredibly hard.

All three of the country’s major privately owned banks collapsed, and Iceland’s stock exchange, the OMX Iceland 15, plummeted. Pension funds were slashed, and businesses were wiped out.

Iceland could have responded to that financial crisis the same way that the United States did, and come up with a massive bailout package to save the banks, and let their crimes go unpunished.

Or, Iceland could arrest the banksters that brought down the economy, bail out those most affected by the collapse — the average Icelanders themselves — and begin to rebuild the financial industry.

Iceland chose the latter. Jail the bums.

In December of 2008, the Icelandic parliament passed a bill establishing an Office of the Special Prosecutor.

The job of this new office was to investigate suspected criminal conduct leading up to, in connection with, or in the wake of the banking crisis, and to follow up these investigations by bringing criminal charges against those responsible for the crisis.

Since the Office of the Special Prosecutor was created, Iceland has been rounding up their banksters one after another.

In March of 2011, Robert and Vincent Tchenguiz were arrested in London, as part of the Special Prosecutor’s Office investigation into the collapse of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing.

In December of last year, a Reykjavik court sentenced two of the top executives at Icelandic bank Glitnir to jail time.

And just yesterday, nine more banksters from the Iceland bank Kaupthing were indicted and charged for their roles in orchestrating five large-scale market manipulation conspiracies.

These are only a few of the arrests that have been made, as Iceland cleans up its banking industry, and holds its own corrupt banksters accountable for their actions in the 2008 financial collapse.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, the Wall Street banksters that brought our economy to its knees are still sitting pretty in their corner offices or retired with hundreds of millions of dollars of your money.

Just look at Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan.

In a recent report on JPMorgan’s monumental multi-billion dollar trading loss, Dimon is alleged to have criminally withheld from regulators key details about the bank’s daily losses.

And numerous other reports have suggested that Dimon may have been complicit in JPMorganChase engaging in additional criminal and/or unethical activity.

But Dimon and the rest of his fat-cat buddies are doing just fine today, continuing to rake in multi-million dollar bonuses or golden-parachute retirements.

And Dimon’s actions pale in comparison to executives at the HSBC bank, who recently admitted in court to allowing Mexican and Colombian drug cartels to launder nearly $900 million through their bank. If you’d done that, you’d be in jail for the rest of your life, but these are rich white banksters who give millions to politicians and political parties.

Executives of the banks also admitted to using various schemes to move around hundreds of millions of dollars to nations subject to trade sanction, including Iran, Cuba and Sudan. And, reports suggest that some of this money made its way into the hands of terrorist organizations. If you’d done that, you might be in Guantanamo. But, then again, you’re not a bankster.

Despite these egregious criminal actions, the United States has yet to jail a single HSBC bankster.

So, what’s the bottom line to all of this?

Eventually, when Cyprus’ economy recovers, the Cypriot government will have a choice to make.

They can choose to let their banksters go free, and risk another financial meltdown like we in the United States have chosen to do. Or they can take the Icelandic approach, crack down on corruption in their financial industry, and prosecute and jail those responsible for causing and worsening the collapse.

At the start of the 2008 worldwide economic collapse, Iceland was in worse shape financially than just about every country in the world.

Today, Iceland is home to one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

They got from there to here by throwing their banksters in jail.

Hopefully Cyprus will take a page out of the Icelandic playbook, and lock-up the banksters.

And America should do the same thing, too!

Worldwide, March brings about changing seasons, shifting temperatures and unpredictable weather — but the one thing we have come to count on is that March is also the month of choice for militarized intervention, armed conflict and declarations of all-out war.

As Michel Chossudovsky writes:

“With the exception of the War on Afghanistan (October 2001), all major US-NATO led military operations over a period of almost half a century — since the invasion of Vietnam by US ground forces on March 8, 1965 — have been initiated in the month of March.” (Read more in “The Pentagon’s “Ides of March”: Best Month to Go to War”)

Is this really a tradition we want to maintain? More importantly, is any time EVER the right time to go to war?

When is it appropriate to kill indiscriminately to further our own agendas?

When is it acceptable to commit unbridled, large-scale murder and label it “humanitarian intervention”?

When do we realize that no month, no season, no time is the right time to attack sovereign nations simply because they have the land we want, the resources we need and the unwillingness to hand them over merely to feed our greed?

How about… NOW?

NATO and the Pentagon have decided that March is the month of war, but the time has come for the people to put a change to that. The time has come to make March a time for PEACE, to END WAR, to enter a new season of AWARENESS.

And knowing the TRUTH about war is the first step in making this a reality.

As F. William Engdahl states:

“There are few online sites besides Global Research where we can go to find analyses of the world we live in today, with its escalating wars, conflicts, betrayal of trust. I strongly urge readers who value one of the few remaining serious sources of truthful analysis to not take that enjoyment passively but to actively support the work of Global Research by your financial contribution.”
— F. William Engdahl, author of “Seeds of Destruction” (available through Global Research) and “Myths, Lies and Oil Wars”

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The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments on March 18 to decide whether an Arizona statute that imposes restrictions on voter registration conflicts with federal law. The case could potentially decide the balance between the state and federal governments when it comes to elections and voting rights. After becoming law in Arizona, the bill at issue was adopted as a “model” by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

The case, Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, arises in the wake of the state’s efforts to narrow access to the ballot box through limits like restrictive voter ID requirements, and could have wider implications for the degree of latitude states have to regulate voting.

In 2004, Arizona voters approved a law requiring election officials to reject voter registration forms that did not include certain forms of documentation proving citizenship. Like many GOP-led efforts that make it harder for Americans to vote, the bill was pushed through the spectre of voter fraud.

There was little evidence of any widespread practice of undocumented workers voting in state or federal elections, and critics said the real intent of the law was to shut down successful community voter registration drives. The law also imposes additional burdens on naturalized citizens by, for example, requiring they bring their naturalization papers to the voter registrar, while native-born citizens use regular mail. Arizona rejected more than 30,000 registration applications, and the law was challenged by a variety of Native American, Latino, and Asian groups, as well as voting rights advocates.

In April 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Arizona law is preempted by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA). That decision has been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Appeals Court Finds AZ Conflicts with Clinton’s Motor Voter Act

The NVRA, also known as the “Motor Voter Act,” is a federal law designed to make voter registration simpler and more uniform, perhaps most notably by requiring states to accept registration using a uniform federal mail application (sent on a postcard). Arizona’s refusal to accept federal voter registration forms without proof of citizenship, the Ninth Circuit held in April 2012, imposed additional restrictions beyond what was called for under the federal law.

The Ninth Circuit ruled that the requirements under the NVRA and Arizona’s law “do not operate harmoniously” and “are seriously out of tune with each other in several ways.” The federal law requires states to “accept and use” the federal form which, the court found, is thwarted by Arizona rejecting forms that do not include the additional restrictions on proving citizenship that are imposed under the state law.

The federal court also spelled out a formula for judging when state election laws are preempted by federal law. The Ninth Circuit issued its ruling under the Constitution’s Election Clause, which gives Congress the final word over election procedures. According to the U.S. Constitution, states have authority to decide “the time, place and manner” of holding federal elections, but Congress is also authorized to “make or alter such regulations.”

The Election Clause is distinct from the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which is often cited as a basis for federal law preempting state law. The latter, however, generally presumes that a state law is not preempted without clear direction from Congress. Under the Election Clause, the Ninth Circuit found, Congress did not have to provide that it had a clear intention in the NVRA to override state procedures.

In its appeal to the Supreme Court, Arizona is arguing that the Ninth Circuit’s formulation of the Election Clause was incorrect and that the state’s proof of citizenship requirement should stand.

Arizona’s broader argument, though, is that the Election Clause only applies to the “time, place, and manner” of elections, leaving states the exclusive power to determine voter qualifications. Under this theory, if the NVRA were interpreted as telling states which voter qualifications to accept, the NVRA would be an unconstitutional infringement on state’s rights.

If the Court were to accept Arizona’s argument about the narrow scope of federal power under the Election Clause, such decision could significantly shift the power between states and federal government for regulating elections. Given the recent wave of legislation that makes it harder for many Americans to access the polls, voting rights advocates fear that giving states the exclusive power to determine “voter qualifications” could offer some state legislators with a new legal toehold to defend voter suppression efforts.

Adopted as ALEC Bill

Arizona Proposition 200 became law in 2004 and required election officials to reject voter registration forms that did not include documentation proving citizenship.

The law was another piece of anti-immigrant legislation supported by Arizona state Senator (and then-ALEC member) Russell Pearce. After Proposition 200 became Arizona law, Pearce brought the bill to ALEC, and in 2008 the “private sector” (corporate lobbyists and special interest group representatives) and legislative members of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force adopted Proposition 200 as a “model” they titled the Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act. (In 2009, that task force also adopted the “model” Voter ID Act, and versions of the legislation were proposed in numerous state legislatures over the following years.)

Pearce was also behind Arizona’s controversial SB 1070 law that required local law enforcement enforce federal immigration law. That same ALEC task force — whose corporate members included representatives of the private prison and private bail industries — approved the bill that became SB 1070 as an ALEC model in December 2009, before it was introduced in the Arizona legislature, in 2010. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down many parts of that law in June of 2012.

In 2011, Pearce was recalled by his constituents, largely because of his cozy relationships with out-of-state special interests and his controversial stances against immigrants.

Now-former State Senator Pearce nonetheless weighed-in on the Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizonacase before the Supreme Court with an amicus brief, as did his ally, Kansas’ anti-immigrant Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, among others.

Third Time AZ Law Goes to the Supreme Court

This is the third time Arizona’s law has been considered by the highest court in the country. In 2006, the Justices allowed Arizona to use the ballot measure provisions for elections that year, but without deciding on the validity of the law.

After that, the law was again challenged by civil rights organizations and voting rights advocates, which ultimately led the Ninth Circuit to hold that Arizona’s Proposition 200 (the ALEC Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act) was preempted by the NVRA.

In June of 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stay the Ninth Circuit’s decision, which had the effect of allowing the law to remain blocked for the 2012 elections. A full appeal is now before the court.

Oral argument in the case is scheduled for 10am Eastern on Monday.

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all–the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans–my fellow veterans–whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level–moral, strategic, military and economic–Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come.

I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live.

I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

An Iraq War veteran who joined the U.S. Army two days after 9/11 has written a powerful open letterto former President George W. Bush and ex-Vice President Dick Cheney accusing them of war crimes, “plunder” and “the murder of thousands of young Americans — my fellow veterans — whose future you stole.”Tomas Young, who was shot and paralyzed during an insurgent attack in Sadr City in 2004, five days into his first deployment, penned the letter from his Kansas City, Mo., home, where he’s under hospice care.

“I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney,” Young wrote in the letter published on Truthdig.com. “I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans — my fellow veterans — whose future you stole.”

© Truthdig.com Tomas Young

The 33-year-old, who was the subject of Phil Donahue’s 2007 documentary “Body of War,” continued:

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues.

Young believes he was injured fighting the wrong war:

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

“When Tomas Young saw President Bush on television speaking from the ruins of the Twin Towers, his life changed,” his bio on the “Body of War” website reads. “As his basic training began at Ft. Hood, he assumed that he would be shipped off to Afghanistan where the terrorist camps were based, routing out Al Qaeda and Taliban warriors. But soon, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq.”

In an interview with Truthdig.com, Young — who suffered an anoxic brain injury in 2008 — said he had been contemplating “conventional” suicide, but decided to go on hospice care, “stop feeding and fade away.”

He said, “This way, instead of committing the conventional suicide and I am out of the picture, people have a way to stop by or call and say their goodbyes,” Young said. “I felt this was a fairer way to treat people than to just go out with a note.”

Look: Yoko Ono’s Anti-Gun Tweets Include Photo of John Lennon’s Bloody Glasses

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Posted on Mar 21, 2013

Photo via Yoko Ono’s Twitter

In a plea to end gun violence, Yoko Ono has tweeted a powerful picture showing blood on the glasses that John Lennon was wearing when he was shot to death in New York City on Dec. 8, 1980.

Since that day, the text above the photo reads, more than 1,057,000 people have been killed by gun violence in the U.S.

The 80-year-old widow of the former Beatle included the photo in a series of anti-gun tweets Thursday, a day after what would have been the couple’s 44th wedding anniversary.

The Guardian:

Ono tweeted the image a further three times, with the messages: “31,537 people are killed by guns in the USA every year. We are turning this beautiful country into war zone”; “Together, let’s bring back America, the green land of peace”; and finally, “The death of a loved one is a hollowing experience. After 33 years our son Sean and I still miss him. Yoko Ono Lennon”.

Ono has been a political activist for decades, but her contribution to the gun control debate is notable in the aftermath of the shooting in December last year in which 20 young children were killed at a primary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

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–Posted by Tracy Bloom.

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WASHINGTON – March 21 – Four years into President Obama’s presidency, he has yet to have a single judge confirmed to the hugely influential Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. This lapse, caused initially by a slow start from the administration but perpetuated by a blockade of obstruction in the Senate, threatens to hinder progressive advances for years to come, argues a new report from People For the American Way.

The report, AMERICA’S PROGRESS AT RISK: RESTORING BALANCE TO THE DC CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS, can be found here.

“The D.C. Circuit is the most important court most Americans have never heard of,” said Marge Baker, Executive Vice President of People For the American Way. “The D.C. Circuit’s judges have the final word on scores of federal laws each year, from air pollution controls to financial regulations to workers’ rights. Republicans have long understood this, and have packed the court with far-right ideologues who threaten to hold back American progress for decades to come. And they have so far blocked confirmation of judges who would bring any balance to this court.”

President Obama is the first president since Woodrow Wilson to fail to have a single nominee confirmed to the D.C. Circuit during his first full term in office, despite the fact that four of the eleven seats on the court are now vacant. His first nominee to the court, the indisputably qualified Caitlin Halligan, was twice blocked by Senate Republicans for reasons widely recognized as spurious.

As a result, the D.C. Circuit continues to be dominated by judges pushing a right-wing ideology long rejected by the American people. The right-wing majority of the D.C. Circuit has continuously sought to dismantle progressive efforts to defend consumers, protect public health, and ensure the rights of workers. Recent D.C. Circuit decisions highlighted in the report include:

· Noel Canning v. NLRB: In January, the D.C. Circuit invalidated three presidential appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, undermining the Board’s ability to protect the rights of workers and giving the green light to Senate Republicans who wish to decimate any federal agency by blocking appointees.

· EME Homer City Generation v. EPA: In 2012, the D.C. Circuit sided with utility companies to strike down EPA air pollution regulations that would have prevented an estimated 34,000 premature deaths and saved $280 billion a year in healthcare costs.

· Business Roundtable v. SEC: In 2011, the D.C. Circuit overturned an SEC rule requiring greater accountability from corporations to their shareholders in selecting board members. One observer noted that in doing so the judges — none of them securities experts — had “waded into a political fight under the guise of dispassionate scientific oversight.”

· RJ Reynolds Tobacco v. FDA: Last year, the D.C. Circuit ruled that FDA regulations requiring cigarette manufacturers to place graphic, factually accurate warnings on their product violated tobacco companies’ First Amendment free speech rights.

· Hein Hettinga v. USA: George W. Bush nominee Janice Rogers Brown used a case about milk market regulation last year to issue a call to arms against eight decades of progressive reforms. Courts that have allowed the government to implement reasonable regulations of industry have, she said, put “property…at the mercy of pillagers.”

“President Obama has a chance in his second term to restore ideological balance to the D.C. Circuit,” added Marge Baker. “It is critically important that he do so. Otherwise, D.C. Circuit will continue to stand in the way of progressive reforms — reforms chosen by American voters — and threaten to roll back decades of hard-won protections for working people and consumers.”

China’s coastal waters are experiencing severe pollution, with the size of the worst affected areas up 50% on last year according to The State Oceanic Administration (SOA).

The SOA, found that 68,000 square kilometers (26,300 square miles) had the worst official pollution rating, up 24,000 square kilometers on 2011, it was reported by the China Daily Thursday.

Affected waters are deemed unsuitable for swimming, fish-farming, port use and are not even fit for some industrial purposes under this classification.

The SOA statement found that pollution from 72 monitored rivers increased by 17 million tonnes in 2012 and included 46,000 tonnes of heavy metals and 93,000 tonnes of oil. While discarded plastic rubbish accounted for 80% of pollution in coastal waters.

“The pollution of coastal waters and damage to the eco-system remained acute,” the statement read.

The SOA found that the impact on China’s estuaries, including the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas, which are huge centers of population and industry, were particularly badly affected. More than 80% of the coast of the Bohai Sea in northern China is built up with factories and other construction projects, while only 5% was still in a natural state.

The data reflects China’s rising environmental problems, which are a result of its rapid economic growth and booming economy and have sparked widespread public anger and protests.

China’s leaders have promised action on the country’s appalling pollution problems. Protests have reportedly grown by almost 30% a year since 1996.

The results of an eight year marine survey, some of which were revealed by the magazine Nature in November last year gave a disturbing picture of the overall marine environment in China.

China’s mangrove swamps have shrunk by 73% and coral reefs by 80% since the 1950’s, while coastal wetlands have declined by 57%.

It also revealed that over the past 20 years China’s coasts have suffered repeated harmful algae blooms. There has been an average of 83 ‘red tides’ a year, called thus because of the red pigment in the phytoplankton species.

‘Green tides’ of green algae occur mostly in the Yellow Sea, while ‘brown tides’, which kill shellfish, hit China in 2009.

As a result of the state of China’s coastal waters, some species of fish in the East China Sea are on the brink of extinction.

“There is an urgent need to set up a long-term monitoring network to access changes in coastal water chemistry and their impact on marine ecosystems,” Gao Kunshan, a marine ecologist, at Xiamen University, told Nature.

Nermeen Shaikh: On the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, a series of deadly bomb blasts has hit the capital city of Baghdad. The first attack came early morning Tuesday and killed a Finance Ministry official. It was followed by more than a dozen bombings that targeted a vegetable market, a bank and a restaurant. At least 65 people were killed, and hundreds more were wounded. The spate of violence comes as many Iraqis are reflecting on what has changed in their country since the invasion, which led to the ouster of longtime leader Saddam Hussein. Many say they have yet to see any of the benefits they were promised.

Ghali Al-Atwani: [translated] The decision to go to war in Iraq was incorrect. Firstly, Iraq was put under Chapter VII. Then the war was waged. Nothing has changed in Iraq. There was Saddam’s dictatorship before, but now there’s a collective dictatorship in Iraq. What has changed in Iraq? The economic situation is very bad. The public services are in poor condition. Baghdad was flooded with water because of heavy rains. So the Americans always bring destruction and death in every place they go and invade.

Amy Goodman:The almost nine-year U.S. occupation of Iraq led to the deaths of at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more. Many in Iraq continue to suffer the consequences of the invasion.

Later we’ll also talk about the war’s impact on U.S. military veterans, but first we’re joined by longtime Democracy Now! contributor Dahr Jamail, now an investigative reporter for Al Jazeera English in Doha. If you watched our coverage during the 10 years of the invasion, you will remember his reports from Fallujah and elsewhere. Dahr recently returned to Baghdad, where he filed several major reports. His recent stories for Al Jazeera include  and  He’s also reported on the million displaced Iraqis who are struggling without government aid. Dahr Jamail is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq and The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Welcome welcome back to Democracy Now!, Dahr. It’s good to have you with us. We last saw you when we were in Doha, as well. That’s where you are, at the studios of Al Jazeera. Dahr, talk about what you found in your most recent trip to Iraq.

Dahr Jamail:Well, it’s a huge question, Amy, because the situation in Iraq today, 10 years after the U.S.-led invasion and occupation began, it’s just utter devastation. It’s a situation where, overall, we can say that Iraq is a failed state. The economy is in a state of crisis, perpetual crisis, that began far back with the institution of the 100 Bremer orders during–under the Coalition Provisional Authority, the civil government set up to run Iraq during the first year of the occupation. And it’s been in crisis ever since.

The average Iraqi is just barely getting by. And how can they get by when there’s virtually no security across much large swaths of country to this day, where, you know, as we see in the headlines recently, even when there’s not these dramatic, spectacular days of dozens of people being killed by bombs across Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, on any given day there’s assassinations, there’s detentions, there’s abductions and people being disappeared and kidnapped? One of the demands, for example, of the ongoing Sunni protests in Fallujah and across much of Al Anbar province is to ban silencer weapons, as they describe them, because there are so many hidden executions happening. Iraq has basically become a lawless state where the government is laughingly referred to oftentimes as the “sidewalks government,” because one of the only things visible that they’ve actually accomplished is to install some new sidewalks across parts of Baghdad.

But it’s really hard to describe the amount of devastation. I mean, we’re having to talk about a country where, since 2003 began, we can cite the Lancet study that was published in the peer-reviewed Lancet medical journal in 2006, which way back in that time, seven years ago–excuse me, seven years ago now, found 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq. And that’s now a grossly outdated study, particularly given the level of violence we saw in 2006, 2007, and the low-level chronic violence that perpetuates to this day.

Nermeen Shaikh: Dahr Jamail, a lot of people say that what’s going on in Iraq now is not so much the result of the U.S. invasion but rather sectarian war between Sunnis and Shias. Could you respond to that? Do you agree?

Dahr Jamail:I don’t agree. I think all of this is a direct result of–either direct or indirectly a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation and the strategy applied. I mean, we saw something come out just last week in a joint investigation of BBC Arabic and The Guardian, which gave hard evidence, insider evidence, of the machinations of the U.S. using retired Lieutenant Colonel James Steele, infamous during the Reagan administration of orchestrating so many of the death squads in Central America along with Negroponte. Well, Negroponte happened to be the U.S. ambassador to Iraq for some of the occupation and, of course, brought in his old buddy James Steele to set up the same types of tactics, the detentions, the types of torture techniques that we’re seeing rampant across today–across Iraq today, the blatant attempts to foment sectarian violence, sort of a divide-and-conquer policy. Even Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld under Bush, back around 2006, 2007, referred to kind of casually using the “Salvador Option” in Iraq, and that’s precisely what he was describing.

So, the sectarianism fomented where, you know, we don’t have a natural sectarianism or animosities between the sects in Iraq, but it was only after the occupation began and these strategies were applied by the Bush administration that we saw the violence, the purging in the mixed neighborhoods, that continues to this day, and the sectarianism, and basically turning Iraqis against one another very effectively. And this is a direct result of the Bush administration policy, as well as bringing in Maliki as prime minister himself.

We have to remember that when neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad was the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Maliki was basically the guy that the U.S. government and Iran could agree with as having as prime minister. And so, there wasn’t a whole lot of democracy involved in that whatsoever. I say, tongue in cheek, he was basically appointed by Zalmay Khalilzad and agreed upon by the powers that be in Iran, and he of course remains prime minister to this day despite–we’ve had elections that clearly he has not won, yet he remains in power.

Amy Goodman:Dahr, I wanted to go to that Guardian/BBC Arabic report that found that a key U.S. general behind the effort, James Steele, as you said, had firsthand knowledge of brutal torture carried out by Iraqi surrogates but did nothing to stop it. Steele served as then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s liaison with Iraq’s Special Police Commandos. His stint in Iraq came 20 years after overseeing the U.S. special operations forces that trained government death squads in El Salvador. Speaking to The Guardian, an Iraqi general said Steele was unfazed when the torture of a young prisoner interrupted his lunch.

Gen. Muntadher Al-Samari:[translated] One of the detainees was screaming. By chance, James Steele was there outside, washing his hands. He opened the door and saw the detainee. He was hanging by his legs, upside down. James Steele didn’t react at all when he saw this man. It was just normal. He closed the door and came back to his seat in the advisers’ room.

Amy Goodman:Steele was a colonel. Dahr Jamail?

Dahr Jamail:Well, he’s a veteran of that kind of tactic. This goes way back to the ’80s all across Central America, which, you know, he clearly had plenty of opportunity to streamline his techniques. And that type of torture described in the clip that you just played is rampant.

The story that I did, talking primarily about the tactics and strategies being used by Maliki’s security forces, and particularly within the prisons–first of all, we have a situation where detentions across Iraq, primarily in Sunni-dominated parts of Baghdad, as well as in areas like Fallujah, predominantly Sunni cities, where people are being detained, en masse at times, nightly home raids, same type of stuff that the U.S. military used when they were in Iraq. And then the types of torture being described coming out of the prisons is truly horrific: people being hung by their ankles for days at a time while their heads are in buckets of water on the ground; people having their hands tied behind their backs and then hung from their hands for sometimes days at a time; electrical shock being used on people’s limbs, on their genitals, on their tongues; men being raped by broom handles as well as bottles; women in prison being raped. I spoke with one woman released just over a week ago at this point, talking about how she had been in prison for four years and was raped repeatedly by Iraqi forces.

Other types of techniques being used–and again, all of this comes back to the types of workings of Colonel James Steele, where as people are being–men are being threatened. And I interviewed several Iraqis who said this, that when they were detained, they said, “Look, they threatened me that if I didn’t talk and give them the information they wanted or give them some names that would help them acquire the information that they wanted,” that their sisters, their mothers, their wives would be brought in and raped repeatedly in front of them. So, of course people would just start giving them anything that they thought they wanted to hear.

But the types of torture is ongoing. It’s rampant. It’s one of the driving factors as to why we’re seeing massive Friday protests now, well into the three month, across Al Anbar province and the Adhamiyah district of Baghdad, where Sunnis are demanding a halt for the detentions, a halt of the so-called Article 4, which is the legislation passed and being used in the Iraqi government that–basically where they took a page out of the Bush playbook of giving them carte blanche to arrest anybody for any reasons under the guise of terrorism charges, of suspected terrorism, and then they can be held indefinitely. I spoke with people both at Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch about this, and they said one of the problems now is, it’s the detentions and the being held secretly is so rampant now by the Iraqi security forces that there isn’t really even a need for secret prisons anymore. Remember a ways back, we had–it all came out that there were secret Maliki prisons. Well, now, today in Iraq, they’re referring–they’re being referred to by a lot of Iraqis as “secret prisoners,” because people are being detained, their families aren’t–there’s no law requiring that the families be notified, nobody knows where these people are. They can be held in any prison anywhere in broad daylight, because no name is being registered anywhere. So, literally, we have untold numbers of people being detained, being treated horrifically.

And as people in Fallujah have told me, they said, “Look, we think that the Maliki regime tactics are even worse than the Americans,” because when the Americans–when they detain people, there was at least hope that they would eventually be released, and likelihood that they would. Under Maliki, that hope is gone; there’s not a hope. The Fallujahns also referred to as the Americans therefore being at least somewhat more merciful than the tactics being employed by the Maliki regime, because people are being detained and not being heard from again, except in one instance, I interviewed the mother of a young man. He was 17 years old when he was detained. He was held for a year and a half. They never could find him, until she received a phone call from him saying, “Look, I’ve been a prisoner in these prisons, and I’m getting one last phone call to say goodbye to you, because tomorrow I’m going to be executed.”

Amy Goodman:Dahr Jamail, we’re going to come back to you. Dahr Jamail, investigative journalist who has just returned from Iraq, he’s speaking to us from Al Jazeera headquarters in Doha. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back with him in a minute.

Yves Engler: Unprecedented aggressive lobbying campaign by Canada to push Obama to say yes to XL pipeline.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to this edition of The Engler Report with Yves Engler. He now joins us from Ottawa.

Yves is a commentator and an author. His most recent book is The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy.

Thank you for joining us again, Yves.

YVES ENGLER, AUTHOR, POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Thanks for having me.

Jay: So The New York Times came out and said now’s the time to say no to the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. There’s been a massive movement in the United States against it, the big protests and personalities coming out, trying to stop this pipeline taking Alberta tar sands oil in a pipeline down to Texas. How’s all this being received in Canada by, you could say, the public and by the Harper government?

Engler: Well, the Harper government is basically freaking out about the possibility that Obama would say no to the pipeline. They’ve launched a full-court press in terms of lobbying in the U.S. for the pipeline. John Baird, the foreign affairs minister, just the other day said it’s been the number-one priority for more than two years for a Canadian team based in Washington at the Canadian embassy there. And there was just access to information documents that came out about–detailed a little bit about the strategy to convince U.S. journalists to support the pipeline and Canadian officials taking a New York Times journalist out to the, you know, fancy restaurant, you know, paid $129 for, you know, two people to go out for dinner.

So the aggressiveness of the lobbying campaign is unprecedented, I think, certainly in the history of recent Canadian relations with the U.S. To have a government in this country so aggressively, basically, in a battle, political battle with a social movement in the U.S. is not something that I think maybe has ever been seen in the history of Canadian-U.S. relations.

Where the Canadian public is on the matter is a little bit unclear, but the dominant media is almost overwhelming in their endorsement of the pipeline. You have the premier from Saskatchewan, from Alberta, repeatedly going down to Washington [incompr.] lobby on behalf of the pipeline. So you have a strong, you know, full, political elite, really, in Canada supporting it.

But you know that there is significant opposition to the tar sands. One of the reasons why they need the pipeline down south is because of so much opposition to the Enbridge pipeline through B.C. and the Kinder Morgan pipeline through B.C. There’s so much opposition to the tar sands in B.C. that they need the southern route. But it is really an unprecedented political battle by the Conservative government in favor of this pipeline.

Jay: Now, I heard something about a potential pipeline that’s actually going to go through Toronto. What is that about?

Engler: Yeah. There is a reversal of a pipeline that’s currently in place, Line 9, and that’s before the National Energy Board right now. And that’s about getting tar sands oil over to refineries in Montreal and possibly in the Maritimes, but also moving some of that oil down to Portland, Maine.

And there’s been significant demonstrations in Vermont and in Maine against the pipeline. And recently, I think actually just last weekend, even, there were votes, municipal votes in Vermont where dozens of different municipalities–or counties, I guess, in the U.S. expressed overwhelming opposition in these referendums to tar sands oil coming through there.

So they’re desperate. The oil companies that have plans for, you know, doubling and tripling of tar sands extraction over the next couple of decades, they are desperate to find outlets for that oil. And, you know, the geography of Alberta means that it’s not so easy to get that oil out, and they’re trying all the different methods, the preference being, obviously, the Keystone XL, then taking it to the Gulf coast because the refineries are already there. They already have access to most of the international market [crosstalk]

Jay: Apparently, one of the bigger refineries that can deal with this heavy crude is owned by the Koch brothers.

Engler: They have significant interests. I believe they have some interest in the pipeline itself, even, they have some investment in the pipeline itself. And the lobbying, obviously, is, you know, really strong.

And one of the things that’s interesting about the Canadian lobbying is just how involved Canadian diplomats are with American oil companies and working with the American oil companies and really stoking their lobbying for the pipeline. It’s really an alliance, Canadian government really working in alliance with the most reactionary and big oil interests within the U.S.

Jay: And China’s also moved into the tar sands with some oomph, have they not?

Engler: A more than $15 billion investment, the state-owned oil company, that the Harper government approved a few months back. It was very controversial, the Chinese investment into the tar sands interests, and controversial within Canada because of the question of China–not controversial because of all the carbon that’s emitted from tar sands extraction, but controversial because of, you know, the sort of geopolitics of China being not a country that’s fully aligned with the Western powers.

Jay: And just–I guess, just as a little bit of background, particularly for American viewers, does Harper completely discount the whole issue of climate change? Or he pays lip service to it?

Engler: He pays lip service to it, a bare-minimum lip service to it. Even after Obama’s speech, his inauguration, where he, you know, referred to some of the climate disturbances, the Hurricane Sandy and other disturbances within the U.S. of recent, there were–a lot of the commentaries noted how you would never hear that from Harper. He doesn’t deny climate change. He did until pretty recent, before he took office, as late as 2002. There’s an infamous letter he sent that basically denied climate change. But since he’s taken office, that’s, you know, changed officially. But he certainly downplays it or rarely discusses it. He goes out of his way to cut funding to scientists, government-funded scientists that are investigating the matter, and obviously pulled Canada out of the Kyoto Protocol.

And they’ve really put their eggs in the tar sands basket. And that’s one of the reasons why the question of Keystone XL is so important to them, because if–currently, Canadian–or Alberta oil is sold at quite a significant discount on international markets, about $35 discount from the price that American oil is selling at. And that’s in large part because there is limited access to refining, limited pipeline capacities, and the difficulty of getting it to market. And so they’re very nervous that that price differential will continue and actually get worse, making the tar sands unviable economically. And so that’s, you know, a big part of their campaign.

They’ve been so tied into tar sands interests, and really to the detriment of much of the manufacturing sector of the Canadian economy. The price of oil [crosstalk]

Jay: Let me ask that question. How big or how significant is the tar sands in the Canadian economy?

Engler: Ultimately it’s–I don’t know the exact GDP proportion, but it’s, you know, a couple of points of GDP. It’s fairly small in the overall–you know, housing sector would be, you know, up there at the top end, and manufacturing probably still above it. But the price of oil being high and the reliance on tar sands and all the–.

Canada’s one of the few places that has lots of reserves that have completely opened to foreign investment, right? So there’s a huge influx of foreign investment into the tar sands. Most oil-producing countries have, you know, national state-owned energy companies that restrict, you know, foreign ownership. But because Canada doesn’t have that, it’s, you know, very sought after, obviously, by the big, you know, foreign multinational oil companies. And so that–the influx of money at that level has had a real pushing-up of the Canadian dollar, to the detriment of the Canadian manufacturing sector.

And so there’s been some studies–a recent one that came out just showing how few jobs are actually being created from the oil sands, from the tar sands sector, and yet they’re undermining, you know, tens of thousands more jobs in the manufacturing sector.

And there’s a regional component to this. The Conservative Party is very strong. Their base is in Alberta. And so that’s where the tar sands are. So there’s a regional component to that policy [incompr.] being so [incompr.]

There’s, you know, personal components. Harper has very strong personal ties to the oil sector.

So if the tar sands collapses, economically speaking, or even stagnates, they’ve put so many of their–they’ve put so much emphasis on that sector that that’s very dangerous for the Conservative government politically. I think that’s one of the reasons why they’re so aggressive in their lobbying in the U.S. to get the Keystone XL built.

And alongside that is the fact that this is starting to come back–it’s already come back to bite them a little bit, their pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, their constant criticism of the NDP, the opposition, for discussing a carbon tax, in the context of Obama’s recent declarations about a desire to bring in a carbon tax and, you know, concern about climate disturbances. This is–the Conservative Party policy has started to cause them a little bit of trouble politically within Canada.

And so they’ve already started changing their rhetoric a little bit because of the protests in the U.S. against the Keystone XL. They’ve been changing their rhetoric a little bit with regards to climate change. It’s–I think at this level it’s just a rhetorical thing. Whether it will move to policy, that’s sort of a matter of, you know, where things go in terms of–politically. But they’ve been really forced on the defensive.

So it’s an interesting dynamic where you have a social movement in the U.S. that’s basically forced a, at minimum, rhetorical shift in gears by a Canadian government on the question of climate change.

Jay: Alright. Thanks for joining us, Yves.

Engler: Thanks for having me.

Jay: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

Michael Hudson: Crippling student debt, which is also a drag on the whole ecnonomy, developed as governments pushed the burden of higher education costs onto students and pushed them into the arms of the banks.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Baltimore. And we’re continuing our discussion about the 80th anniversary of the inauguration of FDR and the New Deal.

Now joining us to continue our chat is, first of all, Professor Leo Panitch. He’s the Canada Research Chair in Political Economy and distinguished research professor of political science at York University in Toronto. And he’s the author of the book Global Capitalism and American Empire and coauthor of the book The Making of Global Capitalism.

Also joining us again, Professor James K. Galbraith. He’s the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Government and Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. And he’s the author of The Predator State and Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis.

Thank you both for joining us again.

So, Leo, we’ll start with you this time. So we ended part one basically that the Fed has been able to stop a crash of the global banking system, but they haven’t had the effect perhaps some thought they might in terms of actually restarting growth in the American economy and global economy. In fact, Europe is a total mess. We’re looking at deep recession in many of the countries of Europe. We don’t know about China. There’s been lots of talk about the burst in the China real estate bubble. And in terms of the American economy, many people are saying what’s needed is a massive government intervention, both in terms of spending and in terms of labor law, in terms of facilitating a general rise in wages, not just a $9 an hour minimum wage, which I don’t think is going to have that much effect on demand. So, first of all, do you think that’s what’s needed? But more so, is it possible given today’s politics?

LEO PANITCH, PROF. POLITICAL SCIENCE, YORK UNIVERSITY: I think that it isn’t possible given today’s politics. And it goes back to what I was saying in the first segment when I was pointing to the massive mobilizations, the influence of very radical communists on that mobilization, how that even affected the rhetoric that Roosevelt–and one can point to many others, including Truman–spoke at the time. And that’s missing. There’s nothing on the scale of it, although there certainly has been some stuff going on.

But I think it’s important to point out that what has been effective is a prevention of that financial crisis equating to what the 1929 crisis led to in terms of an economic crisis. The pouring of liquidity into the system, the coordination by the American state of the G20 other states agreeing not to engage in beggar-my-neighbor policies, in that sense to keep globalization going. That involves keeping all the unequal power structures of it going as well. But nevertheless, for a crucial period in 2007, 2008, 2009–there was a coordinated fiscal stimulus in 2009 as well–that prevented the spiral that one saw back in the Depression.

But the main point I’d want to make is this, that what the New Deal didn’t do–and this is what I was trying to get to before–was take the private banking system, the financial system, into the public domain. It certainly regulated private banking, it provided protections, and in that sense was important, but it incubated a banking system that returned, eventually, to the kind of competitive speculative dynamism that led us to the 2007 crisis.

And what I would say is that in terms of the kind of policies we need and shift in the balance of forces we need, that does involve beginning to take class power away from the banks, not just regulate them, because what you ended up getting, of course–and James was alluding to it in the first section–not only by 1951, but even earlier, was a reversion to the kind of relationship that the Fed and Treasury, very close relationship, inevitably have with Wall Street when Wall Street is the power that it is. So one needs to think in terms of a shift in the balance of power. Eventually, if we’re not going to be facing crises like this into the future, it seems to me we’re just going to have to turn banking into a public utility.

Short of that, we don’t have in any sense the political forces to do this. Short of that, one could at least have an ambitious enough president, a self-conscious enough president who would be prepared to undertake massive direct public expenditure and public employment, at least to call for it in the run-up to the next congressional elections so people know what’s at stake, because even though the level of unemployment is nothing like it was in 1933, Heaven knows it continues to be severe enough.

Jay: James?

Galbraith: Well, your question to begin with was can we have another New Deal. I think the answer to that is no. History is not going to repeat itself, and the conditions that gave us the New Deal are not going to recur. And in part the reason for that is that we had the New Deal, and the New Deal changed the nature of our economy in irreversible ways.

We are still fighting a battle to preserve the most important institutions of the New Deal, which are–include–New Deal and its successor, the Great Society, which are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and to preserve the larger regulatory functions that the federal government has assumed, and which in a complex economy are absolutely essential underpinnings to the functioning of the market. If air traffic control is curtailed, air travel will be curtailed, and everything that depends on it will also be affected.

So we are in a very different phase of, let’s say, the outfall from the last crisis than Roosevelt was four or five years after the crash of 1929.

That said, the New Deal would not have been possible in 1930 either. It would not have been possible, I don’t think, in 1931. It took a certain amount of time for the realization to set in that the system was not going to correct itself, that a truly great disaster, irreversible changes had occurred, and that fundamental institutional reconstruction was required. And that had happened by 1933.

I was just reading, for example, a little passage from Frances Perkins, who became the secretary of labor under FDR, talking about setting up, at Roosevelt’s instruction in the first days, some hearings with the coal mine operators who came in asking plaintively for the government to take over the coal mines. And Perkins, along with Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior, who was also deputized by Roosevelt to listen to these people, were saying, how on earth would we do that? The government doesn’t have anybody who knows how to run a coal mine. And they simply importuned the coal mine operators to keep going for a while until they could get some income flowing through a revival of demand, which in fact they achieved.

I disagree with Leo about the role of the New Deal with respect to the financial sector. I think the New Deal institutions did keep the financial sector effectively under discipline, and that the benefits of that extended well into the–through the ’60s into the early 1970s, and even a bit beyond. It was only really in the last 30 years that we have begun to revert to the idea that–or have reverted to the idea that banking institutions can call the tune that public policy has to dance to. And the culmination of that, a relatively recent reversion, was the crisis of 2009.

We do in fact [incompr.] back to, you know, agreement that we do in fact face a major problem with these unreformed massive institutions, heavily concentrated, in control–six institutions–of more than half of U.S. banking assets, which are not serving the purpose that a publicly chartered bank needs to serve. I think that is a big part of our problem.

The way you deal with that is to utilize, use the instruments that actually do already exist. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has the authority to assume control of banks when they are nearing insolvency, and so as to protect the government’s exposure via the insurance fund. And the new legislation, the Dodd-Frank legislation, does have in principle resolution plans even for large institutions that are more complicated than the FDIC felt it could handle in 2009.

Jay: Leo, just do you want to respond to this issue that the banks were regulated and there was–.

Panitch: The reason I’m confirmed in my socialism, I must say, is that I think that the financialization of capitalism in the ’80s and ’90s was a product of the contradictions that the New Deal reforms ran into by the 1960s, indeed by 1951, when, as James indicated, the Fed-Treasury Accord was established to further beef up the role of investment banks in New York.

The truce with business by 1938 had already preserved financial capital as a very powerful force in the United States, and it ran a rearguard campaign against Bretton Woods and already softened a good many of the New Deal reforms, including the labor reforms and others, by the end of the 1940s, if not earlier. So I do think it’s right to see in the long term the extent to which the preservation of especially financial power through the course of the New Deal era led to the contradictions when full employment started producing wage pressure and inflation, when a completely unregulated Euro dollar market in London began to make it very, very difficult for American banks not to try to escape the New Deal regulation [kju] limits on interest rates, etc. These were contradictions that eventually were to undo the New Deal reforms in a capitalist economy which the American state was sponsoring around the world from 1945 on.

So it wasn’t just a matter that some bad guys with bad ideas got in. It was that the Keynesian New Deal reforms were increasingly running into contradictions in the face of a dynamic and changing capitalism. And I think we need to draw the conclusion from this that we should be looking at this inherent crisis-ridden tendency of capitalism as an opportunity to educate people to the need to democratize our economies. And that has to begin with democratizing, turning into democratic public utilities those institutions that control the fundamental decisions about where investment is to go. That’s the conclusion, I think, that needs to be drawn in the long run, although I entirely agree that obviously the political horses aren’t there right now to even begin to put that on the American political agenda. But I think one even wins smaller reforms by putting that larger issue of the lack of democracy in the economy being at the core of the problem. If we put that on the agenda, I think even the smaller reforms are more easily won.

Jay: James, if you look at ’08, when the banks were so vulnerable, a time where perhaps there could have been this discussion of nationalization of some sector of it or some creation of public utility banking, what happens instead of that, the banks are, you know, bailed out, as everyone knows. But they also regain their political power so that you can’t even regulate them. Like, Dodd-Frank, the regulations to enact Dodd-Frank are, you know, filled with loopholes and holes. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission can barely pass the weakest position limits that the agencies you’re talking about that you say the tools are there, but given the politics, they can’t do anything. They’re getting underfunded. They’re becoming smaller. Their mandates are getting weaker.

Galbraith: What happened in late ’08 and early ’09 was, I think, an avoidable tragedy, really. And one had a competent federal agency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, under an eminently nonpolitical leader, a Republican, in fact, appointed by President Bush, Sheila Bair, who has written about this very clearly in her book Bull by the Horns, and who would have, I think, given her agency’s evaluation of the situation, moved to resolve at least several of the largest American banks at that time.

The decision to do so had to be approved by the Treasury Department. And when President Obama appointed Secretary Geithner to the Treasury Department, that option was foreclosed, and what one had was a Treasury which constantly took the line that nothing could be done along these lines because that would destroy the confidence of the financial markets, as if the confidence of the financial markets had not already been destroyed.

And I think one also has seen a complete failure of the Justice Department to pursue financial fraud, which underlay a great part of the development of the crisis, underlay the entire structure of the securitization of subprime mortgages–liar’s loans and so forth–in the run-up to the crisis. And we have seen figure after figure, insider after insider, being given a pass, to the point where one gets the impression that to be a senior officer of a major bank is to be immunized against criminal liability for practically anything, including, for that matter, the laundering of the money of the drug cartels in Mexico in a recent case.

So we are really seeing–have seen a very depressing example of the culture of complacency and power of the financial sector in the period since the crisis.

And the argument I would make is twofold. One is that this in fact has contributed seriously to the failure and inability to reconstruct the financial sector, because after all, who is going to trust a set of institutions which are known to be infested with fraud and where the fraud has been treated with the kind of impunity that it has in fact received? This is a very serious problem of economic functioning, not just a problem of justice and the rest. It has practical implications for the ability of the financial sector to actually return to a regular order in the aftermath, and secondly, that in fact the government does have and must have the power to begin to clean up this sector. It did in fact do so in the savings and loan debacle, and it could have done so in this series of events to a substantial extent. The methods are not secret. They are known to regulators and prosecutors and investigators, and they do tend to have a disciplining effect on the behavior of the sector for a time.

Now, Leo would like to, in some sense, say that, well, the whole system cannot be reformed, and therefore we have to resolve the contradictions in some other way. I say–to that I say, well, you know, I’m sympathetic, but good luck. The contradictions will always reemerge. There has to be what another Galbraith referred to as countervailing power. And it’s a never ending task of a reasonably well-functioning government to exercise that power and to keep the tendency of unregulated financial institutions from blowing themselves and the economy up under control. I do think that has to–we have to believe that that’s a possibility.

Panitch: To which I say, James, good luck. I mean, I agree with your diagnosis, but I think the way in which the Treasury and the other agencies are structured–and indeed, you pointed to a leader of one of the agencies who was prepared to go a little further, and she got smashed–the way they are structured is in terms of their embeddedness with Wall Street. And the notion that these institutions are interested or willing, or if you simply drop me or you or Paul Jay into them, that given the way they’re structured, they would play the kind of role that you think a regulated capitalist economy can play, I would say, good luck. I think that’s actually more utopian than–.

Galbraith: Well, I would start with reforming the Treasury Department. I think you could make out a reasonable program for achieving that. And that is largely a question of personnel, sure.

Panitch: No, I think it’s also–it’s personnel, but it’s also structure, certainly it’s also structure, especially in the case of the New York Fed, which is so embedded in Wall Street.

So, no, I think people like us have a lot of room for agreement. And I would want to put the stress on the contradictions that emerge when you leave a very powerful private capitalist class in place, which isn’t just the market. It isn’t just competing institutions that are engaged in private capital accumulation. They are a powerful social force. And when you leave that, that powerful social force in place and you expect the state to be able to rein it in, I think that’s relatively utopian. And I think we’ve seen the consequences. Sure, it took a very long time until it all worked itself out, but I think we’ve seen the consequences of the contradictions that emerged out of the New Deal.

And I would hope the lessons we would draw would–that were there to be the kind of mobilization from below, were there to be the kind of political leader who in his inauguration address would be self-confident enough to use the phrases that I quoted Roosevelt used–and I could have quoted many more–that I would hope that this time it would be to the end of developing some more radical perspective than thinking that we’re going to get a capitalist state to adequately sit on a capitalist financial system.

Galbraith: Well, I guess I can say I’m happy to play the role of the practical-minded conservative in this conversation. It’s not a role I get to play very often.

Panitch: That’s right. And I think this is a lovely conversation, I have to say.

Jay: Okay. We’re going to do one more final segment, one more segment. It will be the final segment. And I want to free the conversation up. So we’re going to imagine that there is such a mobilization, that there is a new alliance of forces that takes over the Democratic Party and is actually in power, and it’s in today’s world, more or less, although today’s world doesn’t have all those factors I just said. But what would that president do? That will be the next segment. Sort of we could say maybe it’s utopian, but a vision people could fight for.

Now, thanks again for joining us. Thank you both. And join us again for the continuation of this discussion on The Real News Network.

What Abigail Fisher’s Affirmative Action Case Is Really About

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Posted on Mar 21, 2013

AP/Susan Walsh

Abigail Fisher and Edward Blum, whose nonprofit is bankrolling Fisher’s lawsuit, outside the Supreme Court the day oral arguments were heard in the case in October.

By Nikole Hannah-Jones, ProPublica

This report was first published on ProPublica.

When the NAACP began challenging Jim Crow laws across the South, it knew that, in the battle for public opinion, the particular plaintiffs mattered as much as the facts of the case. The group meticulously selected the people who would elicit both sympathy and outrage, who were pristine in form and character. And they had to be ready to step forward at the exact moment when both public sentiment and the legal system might be swayed.

That’s how Oliver Brown, a hard-working welder and assistant pastor in Topeka, Kan., became the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that would obliterate the separate but equal doctrine. His daughter, whose third-grade innocence posed a searing rebuff to legal segregation, became its face.

Nearly 60 years after that Supreme Court victory, which changed the nation, conservatives freely admit they have stolen that page from the NAACP’s legal playbook as they attempt to roll back many of the civil rights group’s landmark triumphs.

In 23-year-old Abigail Noel Fisher they’ve put forward their version of the perfect plaintiff to challenge the use of race in college admissions decisions.

Publicly, Fisher and her supporters, chief among them the conservative activist who conceived of the case, have worked to make Fisher the symbol of racial victimization in modern America. As their narratives goes, she did everything right. She worked hard, received good grades, and rounded out her high school years with an array of extracurricular activities. But she was cheated, they say, her dream snatched away by a university that closed its doors to her because she had been born the wrong color: White.

The daughter of suburban Sugar Land, Texas, played the cello. Since the second grade, she said, she dreamed of carrying on the family tradition by joining her sister and father among the ranks of University of Texas at Austin alumni.

And the moment for her to lend her name to the lawsuit might never be riper: The Supreme Court has seated its most conservative bench since the 1930s. The Court is expected to issue a decision any week now in what is considered one of the most important civil rights cases in years. 

On a YouTube video posted by Edward Blum, a 1973 University of Texas graduate whose nonprofit organization is bankrolling the lawsuit, she is soft-spoken, her strawberry blond hair tucked behind one ear. Not even a swipe of lip gloss adorns her girlish face.

“There were people in my class with lower grades who weren’t in all the activities I was in, who were being accepted into UT, and the only other difference between us was the color of our skin,” she says. “I was taught from the time I was a little girl that any kind of discrimination was wrong. And for an institution of higher learning to act this way makes no sense to me. What kind of example does it set for others?”

It’s a deeply emotional argument delivered by an earnest young woman, one that’s been quoted over and over again.

Except there’s a problem. The claim that race cost Fisher her spot at the University of Texas isn’t really true.

In the hundreds of pages of legal filings, Fisher’s lawyers spend almost no time arguing that Fisher would have gotten into the university but for her race.

If you’re confused, it is no doubt in part because of how Blum, Fisher and others have shaped the dialogue as the case worked its way to the country’s top court.

Journalists and bloggers have written dozens of articles on the case, including profiles of Fisher and Blum. News networks have aired panel after panel about the future of affirmative action. Yet for all the front-page attention, angry debate and exchanges before the justices, some of the more fundamental elements of the case have been little reported.

Race probably had nothing to do with the University of Texas’s decision to deny admission to Abigail Fisher.

In 2008, the year Fisher sent in her application, competition to get into the crown jewel of the Texas university system was stiff. Students entering through the university’s Top 10 program – a mechanism that granted automatic admission to any teen who graduated in the upper 10 percent of his or her high school class – claimed 92 percent of the in-state spots.

Fisher said in news reports that she hoped for the day universities selected students “solely based on their merit and if they work hard for it.” But Fisher failed to graduate in the top 10 percent of her class, meaning she had to compete for the limited number of spaces up for grabs.

She and other applicants who did not make the cut were evaluated based on two scores. One allotted points for grades and test scores. The other, called a personal achievement index, awarded points for two required essays, leadership, activities, service and “special circumstances.” Those included socioeconomic status of the student or the student’s school, coming from a home with a single parent or one where English wasn’t spoken. And race.

Those two scores, combined, determine admission.

Even among those students, Fisher did not particularly stand out. Court records show her grade point average (3.59) and SAT scores (1180 out of 1600) were good but not great for the highly selective flagship university. The school’s rejection rate that year for the remaining 841 openings was higher than the turn-down rate for students trying to get into Harvard.

As a result, university officials claim in court filings that even if Fisher received points for her race and every other personal achievement factor, the letter she received in the mail still would have said no.

It’s true that the university, for whatever reason, offered provisional admission to some students with lower test scores and grades than Fisher. Five of those students were black or Latino. Forty-two were white.

Neither Fisher nor Blum mentioned those 42 applicants in interviews. Nor did they acknowledge the 168 black and Latino students with grades as good as or better than Fisher’s who were also denied entry into the university that year. Also left unsaid is the fact that Fisher turned down a standard UT offer under which she could have gone to the university her sophomore year if she earned a 3.2 GPA at another Texas university school in her freshman year.

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Democrats Also to Blame for Iraq War, Journalist Scahill Says

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Posted on Mar 21, 2013

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Nation writer Jeremy Scahill ripped into Republicans and Democrats on the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, claiming that both parties are to blame for the war during a recent appearance on MSNBC.

“I don’t see this as the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War,” Scahill told Martin Bashir. “This was a war that started in 1991 and was waged consistently by the United States, and it was a bipartisan war.”

He argued that the key members of the Obama administration, including Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry, should have to answer for their actions in the runup to the conflict.

But Scahill also said that Bush administration officials such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith “should not be able to show their faces in public in this country without getting confronted with what they did to Iraq.” He later added that Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were not deserving of being given “any honor in this society. They should be held accountable for the U.S. soldiers who were killed and the many more than 100,000 Iraqis that were killed.”

(h/t The Nation)

–Posted by Tracy Bloom.

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WASHINGTON – March 21 – Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Jason Chaffetz introduced in the Senate and the House today the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act, which would require a warrant from a judge based on probable cause before police can track someone using a GPS device or cell phone location data. The American Civil Liberties Union expressed support for the legislation, which was also introduced by Rep. Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Sen. Wyden (D-Ore.) last Congress.

“Cell phones are also portable tracking devices, and the law needs to catch up with technology to protect Americans from the indiscriminant use of this type of invasive surveillance,” said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel in the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. “Police routinely get people’s location information with little judicial oversight because Congress has never defined the appropriate checks and balances. Under the GPS Act, all that would change. Police would need to convince a judge that a person is likely engaging in criminal activity before accessing and monitoring someone’s location data. Innocent people shouldn’t have to sacrifice their privacy in order to have a cell phone.”

More information on government location tracking is at:
aclu.org/tracked

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) conserves America’s original civic values working in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in the United States by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Tomas Young Out Loud

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Posted on Mar 21, 2013

Democracy Now!

Tomas Young, the 33-year-old veteran and author of “The Last Letter: A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from a Dying Veteran,” appeared with his wife on “Democracy Now!” on Thursday to talk about his decision to end his life amid unrelenting pain and suffering from wounds sustained in the Iraq War, and to read his letter aloud.

“The reason I decided to do this now is I am, on one hand, sick and tired of being sick and tired, and on the other hand I don’t want to watch my body waste away,” Young said on the show.

When asked whether anything could persuade him not to end his life in the next few months, Young responded: “Not at this moment. There may come a time in the future when I say, ‘Hey, things are getting better; maybe I should reconsider this.’ But at this moment, nothing in this world has made me change my mind as to what I’m going to do.”

Phil Donahue, a former MSNBC talk show host who was fired from the supposedly liberal network in 2003 for bringing too many anti-war voices on his program, joined the conversation on “Democracy Now!” to discuss the mainstream media’s complicity in taking the nation into the now 10-year-old war.

–Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

‘Democracy Now!’:

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In a televised press conference from the city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, President Obama sparred with PA President Mahmoud Abbas over Israeli settlements and dismayed many Palestinians by denying the central role that the continued illegal construction has on the ability for meaningful peace talks to resume.

U.S. President Barack Obama (L) and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas leave after a joint news conference at the Muqata presidential compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah March 21, 2013. Obama said on Thursday that settlement building in the occupied West Bank did not “advance the cause of peace”, but stopped short of demanding a construction freeze to enable negotiations to resume. (REUTERS/Ammar Awad) “The core issue right now is how do we get sovereignty for the Palestinian people and security for Israeli people,” Obama said.

“That’s not to say settlements aren’t important. That’s to say if we solve those two problems, the settlement issue will be resolved,” he added.

President Abbas, however, responding in a tone that the Ma’an new agency described as “defiant,” pushed back by saying that the Palestinian refusal to negotiate while Israel continued to build homes in the occupied territories was something fundamental to the principle of sovereignty and that this position was widely supported by the international community.

“It isn’t just our perception that settlements are illegal. It is a global perspective. Everybody views settlements not only as a hurdle, but more than a hurdle to a two-state solution,” said Abbas.

“We are asking for nothing outside the international legitimacy. It is the responsibility of the Israeli government to halt settlement activities so we can at least speak.”

He added: “We hope that the Israeli government understands this. We hope they listen to the many opinions inside Israel itself speaking of the illegality of settlements.”

Earlier in the day, while addressing Israeli students and gathered dignitaries at a university in Jerusalem, Obama challenged the Israeli settlements but fell short of renewing his call for a “freeze” on construction.

“I’ve been clear with Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli leadership that,” Obama said, “… [the U.S.] does not consider continued settlement activity to be constructive, to be appropriate, to be something that can advance the cause of peace.”

But as The Guardian‘s Mideast editor Ian Black observed:

‘Counter-productive’ isn’t a very strong word. It is on the settlement issue that Obama has famously failed in his confrontation with Netanyahu … We didn’t see him repeat that demand that settlements be frozen, but he made no bones about the fact that it was urgent to restart those talks. I don’t think there were any messages in that that would have seriously discomfited the Israeli government.

And though Obama once again promised unwavering US support for Israel, he also asked Israelis to try to see the conflict through the eyes of Palestinians.

“Put yourself in their (Palestinians’) shoes. Look at the world through their eyes,” Obama said. “It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day.”

Despite thoughtful phrasing such as this, not all Palestinians were comforted by the words that seldom live up to the action–stronger pressure applied to Israel, for example–they believe is necessary.

As Ma’an News reports:

Palestinian analysts had not predicted any progress from the visit.

Muhammad Jadallah, a Palestinian leader in Jerusalem, told Ma’an that “We are a nation that welcomes all visitors but it looks like the Palestinians are not satisfied with Mr Obama’s visit.”

“They don’t respect him, and he is the worst US president. He used the (UN Security Council) veto to help the settlements and used it again against the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“For these reasons we can’t welcome the president, and we can’t consider him a peacemaker just because he got a Nobel prize for peace — he didn’t bring any peace during his presidency.”

He added: “After every visit of a US president to our land, we watch peace slip further away.”

___________________________________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Americans have been facing a number of momentous deadlines, including the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the “sequester” of $1 trillion from federal programs. But another critical deadline is fast approaching without attracting much notice. Statutes of limitations applicable to possible crimes committed by former President George W. Bush and his top aides, with respect to wiretapping of Americans without court approval and to fraud in launching and continuing the Iraq War, may expire in early 2014, less than a year from now.Vice President Dick Cheney, center, and senior administration officials, June 4, 2008. (Reuters/Larry Downing)

President Bush has publicly admitted to authorizing wiretaps of Americans on more than thirty separate occasions without a court order, an apparent violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In justification, Bush claimed legal advice exempted him as commander-in-chief from obeying FISA. Normally, a lawyer’s advice is not a defense to prosecution, particularly when the client shapes the advice. Here, the White House worked closely with Justice Department lawyer John Yoo on the legal opinion and blocked standard Justice Department review, even though the opinion was seriously flawed according to Yoo’s successors. The opinion bears the hallmarks of a handy stay-out-of-jail card, instead of a serious independent analysis prepared and relied upon in good faith.

Because secrecy still surrounds the Bush wiretaps, we don’t know the dates on which they may have ended and therefore cannot calculate exactly when the five-year statute of limitations expires. Assuming that the warrantless wiretapping ended when Bush left office on January 20, 2009, the statute would run out on January 20, 2014.

President Bush and his team may have also violated the Conspiracy to Defraud the United States statute, which was used to prosecute top officials in the Watergate and Iran/Contra scandals. Together with others in his administration, he made many misstatements to Congress about the Iraq War. In one noteworthy example, just before the invasion, he notified Congress that the invasion met conditions it had set for an attack, including that it was aimed at persons or nations that “planned” or “aided” the 9/11 attacks. But neither Saddam Hussein nor Iraq planned or aided the attacks of 9/11.

The five-year statute of limitations for defrauding the US started running the day President Bush left office, because the Iraq War was undertaken not just to remove Saddam Hussein and install a new government but also, as the former president explained, to secure “victory” and create a “stable” Iraq, an effort that lasted through the end of Bush’s second term. That means the statue of limitations will expire on January 20, 2014.

Since no prosecutions can be brought after the statutes run out, unless investigations are started soon, any crimes that did occur will go unprosecuted and unpunished, deeply entrenching the principle of impunity for top officials. This would be shameful for our country and strike at the heart of the rule of law

After carefully reviewing the facts and law, a fair-minded prosecutor may decide that no prosecution of President Bush and his team is justified. As a former prosecutor, I know that there is a big difference between an apparent violation of a statute and a prosecutable case. I also know, however, that the failure to investigate apparent violations of law because of the high positions of those involved undermines our democracy. There cannot be two standards of justice in America, one for the powerful and another for the rest of us.

Nothing would corrode Americans’ respect for the rule of law more than enshrining a perception of impunity for top government officials. Nothing would encourage future criminality by presidents more than a belief that they are above the law. That is why it is incumbent upon the attorney general to appoint a well-regarded, independent prosecutor promptly, so that appropriate investigations can be completed in the time remaining.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney may also be criminally culpable for waterboarding and other forms of torture. This should also be investigated now, even though there is no statute of limitations for waterboarding and other life-threatening forms of torture–those responsible may be prosecuted as long as they live. Both President Bush and Vice President Cheney have publicly admitted their involvement in waterboarding detainees abroad. The federal anti-torture statute makes it an apparent crime to have done so. Attorney General Holder’s previous exoneration of CIA agents relying on the Justice Department memos regarding torture should not apply to President Bush and Vice President Cheney, because of their role in producing the memos.

The attorney general does not need Congressional approval to appoint a special prosecutor. Nor can political opponents prevent it. President Obama, however, has said that he wants to look forward and not back, and, given the enormous hostility of the congressional Republicans to his existing agenda, it is understandable his attorney general might want to avoid the partisan animosity appointing a special prosecutor would generate.

Despite the political consequences, it is hard to justify letting these statutes expire without conducting any investigation. The president’s oath of office requires him to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, arguably leaving him little political discretion on a subject of this weight and importance. Moreover, justice requires an impartial investigation, not a particular outcome, so the appointment of a special prosecutor is not a partisan endeavor. The investigation may not lead to prosecution, and in any case Obama has the power to pardon Bush as Ford pardoned Nixon if he feels prosecution is unjust.

But failing to act at all, not even to investigate the ample indications of possible crimes, sends a toxic message that a president is above the law. Letting the clock run out on investigating Bush administration misdeeds is an omission which could have disastrous consequences for the rule of law and an unpredictable effect on President Obama’s own place in history.

© 2013 The Nation

The United Nations will launch an independent investigation into the recent use of chemical weapons in the Syria unrest, which would be “a crime against humanity.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced the decision on Thursday a day after the Syrian government called for an independent inquiry into the terrorist chemical attack in Aleppo.

“I have decided to conduct a United Nations investigation into the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria,” Ban told reporters in his office, adding that “I intend for this investigation to start as soon as practically possible.”

The UN chief said he is working with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which oversees the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the World Health Organization to set up the inquiry.

Ban also urged full cooperation from all parties involved in the Syrian unrest, including “unfettered access.”

On Wednesday, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin voiced Moscow’s support for the Syrian government’s call for an independent inquiry into the chemical attack by foreign-backed militants in Aleppo. He also accused Western powers, including France and Britain, of attempting to delay a UN probe into the incident.

At least 25 people were killed and many others injured after militants fired a rocket containing poisonous gas into Khan al-Assal village near Syria’s northern city of Aleppo on March 19.

The deadly attack came hours after Syria’s opposition coalition picked Ghassan Hitto, a naturalized American citizen, as the prime minister of the so-called opposition interim government.

HM/JR/SL

The most detailed map yet of the afterglow of the Big Bang has been revealed by the European Space Agency (ESA). The cosmological chart has shed further light on when exactly the universe began, what it is made of and where it is going.

The 50-million pixel image, which gives a glimpse of the universe soon after the Big Bang, was created with data captured by the ESA’s Plank space telescope.

“This is a giant leap in the understanding of the origins of the universe,” the agency’s director-general Jean-Jacques Dordain told a press conference in Paris.

“What we are seeing is a picture of the microwave sky, a picture of the universe as it was 380,000 years after the Big Bang,” George Efstathiou, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, told reporters.

The Planck craft has determined that the age of the universe is precisely 13.82 billion years old — 80 million years older than previous estimates. The ESA has also discovered that the universe is expanding at a slightly more leisurely pace than previously believed.

Information obtained from the satellite has further revealed that the composition of the cosmos entails slightly more ordinary matter than once believed — 4.9 per cent as opposed to 4.6 — and slightly less of the hypothetical dark energy that pervades all of space — 68.3 per cent compared to 71.

There is also a bit more of the non-light-emitting or -absorbing dark matter, which makes up a sizeable chunk of the cosmos — 26.8 per cent rather than 24 per cent.

The findings released Thursday bolster a key theory called inflation, which posits that the universe erupted at warp speed from subatomic size to its now-observable expanse in a fraction of a second.

Launched in May 2009, the US$900 million satellite mapped the heavens by studying the uniform, cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) which permeates the entire universe.

“This cosmic microwave background [CMB] shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities at very early times, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today,” the ESA said in a statement.

In line with inflationary models of the universe, CMB was emitted some 380,000 years after the big bang, when the universe was a cooling cauldron of protons, electrons and photons. As the universal thermostat dropped to below 2,700 degrees Celsius, protons and electrons joined to form hydrogen atoms, releasing light in the process.  

“Planck has produced the most precise picture of the CMB ever obtained,” Astronomy Now cites Professor George Efstathiou of the University of Cambridge as saying at an ESA press conference on Thursday.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has welcomed an announcement by US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) about the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan’s Maidan Wardak Province.

On Thursday, Karzai also said that “The decision for withdrawal follows repeated local complaints of harassment and annoyance by the American Special Forces, and a decision by the National Security Council as well as a presidential order.”

On Wednesday, President Karzai and Commander of US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) General Joseph Dunford agreed on a plan for phased withdrawal of coalition forces from the area.

“Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, the ISAF commander, met with President Karzai at the Palace earlier today to finalize the details on the way forward in Wardak Province,” the ISAF said in a statement.

The US-led forces will first withdraw from Nerkh District, which is currently controlled by afghan Local Police (ALP) aided by the Coalition forces, and then from other districts.

Based on the agreement, the Afghan government will soon move Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) into the area.

The statement did not mention the exact date for the withdrawal, only noting, “The timeline for moving the ANSF into Nerkh District will be determined by the Afghan Government.”

Late in February Karzai accused US Special Forces of killings and torturing villagers in Wardak Province and order them to leave the area within two weeks.

The deadline expired at midnight Saturday, March 9.

Karzai issued the order only days after US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta unveiled a proposal during a NATO meeting in Brussels, suggesting that US and European forces remain in Afghanistan beyond the 2014 withdrawal plan.

The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 under the pretext of combating terrorism.

The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but insecurity continues to rise across the country despite the presence of thousands of US-led soldiers.

MAM/JR/SL

The 24th fleet of Iran’s Navy has docked at a port in Sri Lanka after patrolling Southeast Asia’s Strait of Malacca and successfully conducting its mission in the Indian and Pacific oceans.

Commander of the 24th fleet of Iran’s Navy, Capitan Seyyed Omid Golestaneh, said the flotilla anchored at the Port of Colombo — the largest and busiest port in Sri Lanka – on Thursday. He added that the armada conveys the message of peace and friendship to regional countries, Eastern and Southeastern Asian states in particular.

The Iranian Navy’s 24th fleet of warships, comprising Sabalan destroyer and Kharg helicopter carrier, docked in Zhangjiagang port on March 4 after sailing 13,000 kilometers in 40 days.

In recent years, Iran’s Navy has been increasing its presence in international waters to protect naval routes and provide security for Iranian merchant vessels and tankers.

In addition, in line with the international efforts to combat piracy, the Iranian Navy has been conducting anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden since November 2008 to safeguard the vessels involved in maritime trade, especially the ships and oil tankers owned or leased by Iran.

MP/MA

Protesters raise their open palms showing the word “No” during an anti-bailout rally outside the parliament in Nicosia March 18, 2013. (Photo: REUTERS/Yorgos Karahalis)The Cyprus banking crisis presents, in microcosm, everything that is perverse about the European leaders’ response to the continuing financial collapse. And bravo to the Cypriot Parliament for rejecting the EU’s insane demand to condition a bank bailout on a large tax on small depositors.

If this crisis threatens to spread to other nations, it’s a good object lesson. Here is the punch line of this column: Its time for Europe’s small nations, who are getting slammed into permanent depression by the arrogance of Berlin and Brussels, to think about abandoning the euro. At least the threat would strengthen their bargaining position, and if they actually quit the euro, the result could hardly be worse than their permanent sentence to debtors’ prison. More on that in a moment.

This is not rocket science, folks–austerity doesn’t work.

The back story: Cyprus, with just over a million people, is not a poor country. Its per capita GDP is actually above the European Union average. Cyprus has only used the euro since 2008.

Once Cyprus was in the Eurozone, like the banks of Ireland and Iceland before them, the two main Cypriot banks got cute. They offered above-market interest rates to suck in lots of deposits, mainly, as it turned out, from Russians. Then, to pay the high interest, they made speculative investments. You can guess the rest.

When the Cyprus government turned to the EU and the European Central Bank for a bailout, the idiots in charge came up with a scheme requiring ordinary depositors to pay for the sins of the bankers. (Imagine if the Fed had done that when it bailed out Wall Street.)

Though the details are much more complex in the austerity schemes imposed on Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, the basic story is the same. The big guys get greedy and the little guys pay the price. This time, the double standard was even more naked than usual.

The Cyprus government went along, but after massive protests by ordinary citizens, the Parliament failed to approve the tax. So, what now?

The Cypriots tried to do a deal with the Russians, offering to sell them rights of offshore natural gas deposits, in exchange for a bailout by Moscow. But that doesn’t seem to be going forward. So now, the Cypriots, inadvertently, have the power of the weak. If they refuse to cave, their European masters may soften the terms.

Or not. The German government, in particular, is dug in. Fiscal sinners must pay dearly. For now, there’s a bank holiday, withdrawals are strictly limited, and the economy is grinding to a halt.

Interestingly, however, the ECB has not suspended advances to Cypriot banks, which would cause a total collapse with wider repercussions. So what’s really occurring is a high-stakes game of chicken.

Enough is enough, I’d say. These policies of no-mercy have pushed all of Europe into prolonged depression. Unemployment rates in Greece and Spain are upwards of 25 percent. Among the young, they approach 50 percent.

Britain, which doesn’t use the Euro, volunteered for austerity. They more they cut spending and raise taxes, the more the economy shrinks and the worse the ratio of debt to GDP gets–because GDP keeps shrinking as a consequence of the austerity.

This is not rocket science, folks–austerity doesn’t work.

But, austerity elsewhere is good for Germany, because it pulls in capital and leaves Germany with the Continent’s lowest interest rates, and because the euro is an undervalued currency where Germany is concerned, which is good for German exports.

It’s time for the peripheral European countries–Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and now Cyprus–to push back. Only a unified threat to quit the euro might get the attention of Brussels and Berlin.

What would happen if one or more countries actually reverted to their own currencies? Financial elites around the world say that would be catastrophic, but for Europe’s small nations, the catastrophe is now.

If Cyprus or Greece or Spain or Portugal (or better yet, all of them en bloc) decided to quit the euro and revert to drachmas and pesetas, they would need to block bank accounts, impose currency and capital controls, and default on some of all of their foreign debts, which would be re-denominated in the new local currency. There would be lawsuits up the gazork, but the IMF and ECB would have to step in to limit the broader damage even if they disapproved.

It would not be pretty, but it has been done before. In fact, in the past century, some 69 countries have abandoned currencies. It happened after the break-up of the Soviet Union. It happened after World War II. In fact, withdrawal of the Hitler-era Reichsmark in favor of the post 1948 Deutschmark was accompanied by massive debt relief for Germany. (How about that, Ms. Merkel?)

After a relative brief period of worse economic pain, these small nations would emerge with far greater freedom of action over their own economic destiny. They would have currencies that were a lot cheaper internationally, which would be good for exports and for tourism. In the short run, they would have to finance most of their capital needs internally, but foreign capital would soon return. It always does–especially once economies start growing again. And freed from artificial austerity burdens, these nations could resume growth.

The Germans, of course, would have fits. Because Germany enjoys the greatest advantage from the mismanaged euro and would suffer a relative loss if the Eurozone shrank and some debts to German banks were written off. But what are the Germans going to do–invade? Happily, the allies after World War II insisted on a very small German army.

Even if these nations did not end up actually quitting the euro, a credible threat might get the elite in charge to soften the terms of austerity.

In his poem, “I Sing of Olaf Glad and Big,” an ode to an abused conscientious objector who refused to be cowed by psychological torture and beatings, E.E. Cummings wrote:

Olaf (upon what were once knees)

does almost ceaselessly repeat

“there is some shit I will not eat.”

That’s not a bad credo for the small, peripheral, suffering nations of Europe.

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Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to this edition of The Engler Report with Yves Engler. He now joins us from Ottawa.Yves is a commentator and an author. His most recent book is The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy.Thank you for joining us again, Yves.YVES ENGLER, AUTHOR, POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Thanks for having me.JAY: So The New York Times came out and said now’s the time to say no to the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. There’s been a massive movement in the United States against it, the big protests and personalities coming out, trying to stop this pipeline taking Alberta tar sands oil in a pipeline down to Texas. How’s all this being received in Canada by, you could say, the public and by the Harper government?ENGLER: Well, the Harper government is basically freaking out about the possibility that Obama would say no to the pipeline. They’ve launched a full-court press in terms of lobbying in the U.S. for the pipeline. John Baird, the foreign affairs minister, just the other day said it’s been the number-one priority for more than two years for a Canadian team based in Washington at the Canadian embassy there. And there was just access to information documents that came out about–detailed a little bit about the strategy to convince U.S. journalists to support the pipeline and Canadian officials taking a New York Times journalist out to the, you know, fancy restaurant, you know, paid $129 for, you know, two people to go out for dinner.So the aggressiveness of the lobbying campaign is unprecedented, I think, certainly in the history of recent Canadian relations with the U.S. To have a government in this country so aggressively, basically, in a battle, political battle with a social movement in the U.S. is not something that I think maybe has ever been seen in the history of Canadian-U.S. relations.Where the Canadian public is on the matter is a little bit unclear, but the dominant media is almost overwhelming in their endorsement of the pipeline. You have the premier from Saskatchewan, from Alberta, repeatedly going down to Washington [incompr.] lobby on behalf of the pipeline. So you have a strong, you know, full, political elite, really, in Canada supporting it.But you know that there is significant opposition to the tar sands. One of the reasons why they need the pipeline down south is because of so much opposition to the Enbridge pipeline through B.C. and the Kinder Morgan pipeline through B.C. There’s so much opposition to the tar sands in B.C. that they need the southern route. But it is really an unprecedented political battle by the Conservative government in favor of this pipeline.JAY: Now, I heard something about a potential pipeline that’s actually going to go through Toronto. What is that about?ENGLER: Yeah. There is a reversal of a pipeline that’s currently in place, Line 9, and that’s before the National Energy Board right now. And that’s about getting tar sands oil over to refineries in Montreal and possibly in the Maritimes, but also moving some of that oil down to Portland, Maine.And there’s been significant demonstrations in Vermont and in Maine against the pipeline. And recently, I think actually just last weekend, even, there were votes, municipal votes in Vermont where dozens of different municipalities–or counties, I guess, in the U.S. expressed overwhelming opposition in these referendums to tar sands oil coming through there.So they’re desperate. The oil companies that have plans for, you know, doubling and tripling of tar sands extraction over the next couple of decades, they are desperate to find outlets for that oil. And, you know, the geography of Alberta means that it’s not so easy to get that oil out, and they’re trying all the different methods, the preference being, obviously, the Keystone XL, then taking it to the Gulf coast because the refineries are already there. They already have access to most of the international market [crosstalk]JAY: Apparently, one of the bigger refineries that can deal with this heavy crude is owned by the Koch brothers.ENGLER: They have significant interests. I believe they have some interest in the pipeline itself, even, they have some investment in the pipeline itself. And the lobbying, obviously, is, you know, really strong.And one of the things that’s interesting about the Canadian lobbying is just how involved Canadian diplomats are with American oil companies and working with the American oil companies and really stoking their lobbying for the pipeline. It’s really an alliance, Canadian government really working in alliance with the most reactionary and big oil interests within the U.S.JAY: And China’s also moved into the tar sands with some oomph, have they not?ENGLER: A more than $15 billion investment, the state-owned oil company, that the Harper government approved a few months back. It was very controversial, the Chinese investment into the tar sands interests, and controversial within Canada because of the question of China–not controversial because of all the carbon that’s emitted from tar sands extraction, but controversial because of, you know, the sort of geopolitics of China being not a country that’s fully aligned with the Western powers.JAY: And just–I guess, just as a little bit of background, particularly for American viewers, does Harper completely discount the whole issue of climate change? Or he pays lip service to it?ENGLER: He pays lip service to it, a bare-minimum lip service to it. Even after Obama’s speech, his inauguration, where he, you know, referred to some of the climate disturbances, the Hurricane Sandy and other disturbances within the U.S. of recent, there were–a lot of the commentaries noted how you would never hear that from Harper. He doesn’t deny climate change. He did until pretty recent, before he took office, as late as 2002. There’s an infamous letter he sent that basically denied climate change. But since he’s taken office, that’s, you know, changed officially. But he certainly downplays it or rarely discusses it. He goes out of his way to cut funding to scientists, government-funded scientists that are investigating the matter, and obviously pulled Canada out of the Kyoto Protocol.And they’ve really put their eggs in the tar sands basket. And that’s one of the reasons why the question of Keystone XL is so important to them, because if–currently, Canadian–or Alberta oil is sold at quite a significant discount on international markets, about $35 discount from the price that American oil is selling at. And that’s in large part because there is limited access to refining, limited pipeline capacities, and the difficulty of getting it to market. And so they’re very nervous that that price differential will continue and actually get worse, making the tar sands unviable economically. And so that’s, you know, a big part of their campaign.They’ve been so tied into tar sands interests, and really to the detriment of much of the manufacturing sector of the Canadian economy. The price of oil [crosstalk]JAY: Let me ask that question. How big or how significant is the tar sands in the Canadian economy?ENGLER: Ultimately it’s–I don’t know the exact GDP proportion, but it’s, you know, a couple of points of GDP. It’s fairly small in the overall–you know, housing sector would be, you know, up there at the top end, and manufacturing probably still above it. But the price of oil being high and the reliance on tar sands and all the–.Canada’s one of the few places that has lots of reserves that have completely opened to foreign investment, right? So there’s a huge influx of foreign investment into the tar sands. Most oil-producing countries have, you know, national state-owned energy companies that restrict, you know, foreign ownership. But because Canada doesn’t have that, it’s, you know, very sought after, obviously, by the big, you know, foreign multinational oil companies. And so that–the influx of money at that level has had a real pushing-up of the Canadian dollar, to the detriment of the Canadian manufacturing sector.And so there’s been some studies–a recent one that came out just showing how few jobs are actually being created from the oil sands, from the tar sands sector, and yet they’re undermining, you know, tens of thousands more jobs in the manufacturing sector.And there’s a regional component to this. The Conservative Party is very strong. Their base is in Alberta. And so that’s where the tar sands are. So there’s a regional component to that policy [incompr.] being so [incompr.]There’s, you know, personal components. Harper has very strong personal ties to the oil sector.So if the tar sands collapses, economically speaking, or even stagnates, they’ve put so many of their–they’ve put so much emphasis on that sector that that’s very dangerous for the Conservative government politically. I think that’s one of the reasons why they’re so aggressive in their lobbying in the U.S. to get the Keystone XL built.And alongside that is the fact that this is starting to come back–it’s already come back to bite them a little bit, their pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, their constant criticism of the NDP, the opposition, for discussing a carbon tax, in the context of Obama’s recent declarations about a desire to bring in a carbon tax and, you know, concern about climate disturbances. This is–the Conservative Party policy has started to cause them a little bit of trouble politically within Canada.And so they’ve already started changing their rhetoric a little bit because of the protests in the U.S. against the Keystone XL. They’ve been changing their rhetoric a little bit with regards to climate change. It’s–I think at this level it’s just a rhetorical thing. Whether it will move to policy, that’s sort of a matter of, you know, where things go in terms of–politically. But they’ve been really forced on the defensive.So it’s an interesting dynamic where you have a social movement in the U.S. that’s basically forced a, at minimum, rhetorical shift in gears by a Canadian government on the question of climate change.JAY: Alright. Thanks for joining us, Yves.ENGLER: Thanks for having me.JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

End

DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

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US President Barack Obama has repeated Washington’s call for the overthrow of the legitimate government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

During a key speech in al-Quds (Jerusalem) on Thursday, Obama asserted that Assad must step down so that Syria’s “future can begin.”

“America will also insist that the Syrian people have the right to be freed from the grip of a dictator,” he said.

The remarks come amid continued attempts made by Britain and France to arm anti-Assad militants even without an agreement with other European Union nations to lift a current arms embargo on the Arab country.

On March 18, US Secretary of State John Kerry said “Obama has made it clear that the United States does not stand in the way of other countries that have made a decision to provide arms, whether it’s France or Britain or others.”

However, Several European countries have voiced opposition to the influx of arms into the crisis-hit country warning that increasing the number of weapons on the ground will intensify the Syrian conflict.

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011. Many people, including large numbers of Syrian army and security personnel, have been killed in the violence.

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

Damascus says the West and its regional allies including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey are supporting the armed groups.

MRS/MA

Could a failed bank robbery in Cyprus cause the collapse of the euro? It’s hard to imagine how anything that happens in Cyprus, with less than one million people, could bring down the common currency shared by three hundred million Europeans, but there are few human behaviours as infectious as a run on the banks.Cyprus’ President Nicos Anastasiades (C) chairs a meeting with party leaders and governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus at the presidential palace in Nicosia March 20, 2013. Cyprus overwhelmingly rejected a proposed levy on bank deposits as a condition for a European bailout on Tuesday. (REUTERS/Yorgos Karahalis)

Strictly speaking, the Greek-Cypriots are not having a bank run, because their banks have all been closed since last Saturday and the cash machines will only give out 500 euros (about $650) per customer. But there would certainly be a nationwide bank run if they reopened the banks without strict limits on cash withdrawals and transfers overseas.

A financial disaster in remote Cyprus will not directly affect the fate of the rest of the European Union, but any suspicion that the bail-out of a EU country might involve the actual confiscation of money in people’s bank accounts is financial and political dynamite. The terms of the Cyprus bail-out have just confirmed that suspicion.

The banks in Cyprus had certainly got too big for their boots. They had grown fat on the deposits of Russians, many of whom were using the island republic as “a gigantic washing machine” to launder illegal funds. And they had lent out far too much money, especially to Greek banks and companies: their loans amounted to eight times the entire country’s national income.

Everything seemed all right until Greece’s economy crashed and needed not one but two bail-outs. During the second one, last year, foreign investors holding Greek bonds were forced to take a “haircut”: they had to agree to a 70 percent cut in the value of their holdings. That gave Greece a little relief, but it plunged the Greek-Cypriot banks into a nearly terminal crisis.

So now it was Cyprus’s turn for a 17 billion euro bail-out — but this time it was not the bond-holders who got a “haircut”; it was the depositors.

Cyprus was ordered to raise 5.8 billion euros of the bail-out money itself. It was to do it by confiscating 6.75 percent of the money in the savings accounts of everyone with less than 100,000 euros in their account, and 9.9 percent of the money in all larger accounts. In most people’s eyes, that is just straight theft. Worse yet, people in other EU countries realised the awful truth: EU bail-outs CAN cause bank runs.

If there’s going to be a run on the banks, you want to be first at the counter. If you think there might be an EU bail-out for your country, you should get all your money out right away, just in case. And while Cyprus is too small to be significant, much bigger EU countries like Italy and Spain, with one-third of the eurozone’s population, are also potential candidates for a bail-out. Bank runs in those countries could spell the end of the euro.

How did the geniuses who designed this bail-out get it so wrong? They included the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund, but the real culprit appears to be Germany. Wolfgang Schaeuble, the German Finance Minister, insisted on targeting bank accounts in Cyprus (although they have never been directly raided in any other bail-out), and the rest of the geniuses went along with it.

Schaeuble’s problem was that there will be an election in Germany in a few months, and German voters are deeply reluctant to see their money bailing out (as they see it) feckless Southern Europeans. They are particularly unhappy to see it being spent to save Cypriot banks, where some 40 percent of the money on deposit belongs to Russians and much of it is “dirty”.

So rather than make the Cypriot banks’ investors (mostly other banks) pay the price of their folly, Schaeuble made the depositors pay it instead. Some of them were very rich Russians — though the really big deposits were probably moved to Singapore or Dubai a year ago, at the first hint of trouble — but most of them were ordinary Greek-Cypriots who were seeing their savings taken to pay for rich people’s greed and stupidity.

So Greek-Cypriots took to the streets in protest, and they didn’t go home when the government promised to exempt accounts with less than 20,000 euros in them. Newly elected President Nicos Anastasiades urged parliament to back the bail-out, but in the vote on Tuesday not a single MP supported it.

The whole deal is dead, and Schaeuble is now warning that the banks in Cyprus may never reopen if it is not resurrected in some form. Cyprus’s finance minister is off in Moscow to see if the Russians will bail the country out. But the real crisis may be happening in other EU countries that are vulnerable to a bail-out, including Italy and Spain.

The geniuses swore that the Cyprus bank heist was a one-off, and that no such measure would ever be imposed on another EU country. Nobody in Spain or Italy believes them, of course, and the wealthy and well-informed will already be moving their euros to accounts in other countries. The less rich and knowledgeable will just be taking their money out of the bank and hiding it in socks under the mattress.

Could all this end up with bank runs that bring down the euro itself? It’s still unlikely, but it’s certainly not impossible.

Gwynne Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years, but he was originally trained as an historian. Born in Newfoundland, he received degrees from Canadian, American and British universities. His latest book, “Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats“, was published in the United States by Oneworld.

Speaking at a technology conference in New York City Wednesday night, CIA chief technology officer Ira Hunt stated that the CIA “fundamentally [tries] to collect everything and hang on to it forever,” referring to massive troves of personal data that have become increasingly accessible through online and wireless technology.

(Image: Thinkstock) Text messages, social media, online videos, and ‘cloud’ data storage technologies have proliferated in recent years and the CIA is hungry for more development in technology that could potentially store and organize all such information in unprecedented databases, referred to as ‘Big Data’.

“The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time,” Hunt said. “Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.”

Hunt did not reveal how and through what vehicles the CIA would gain access to every piece of cyber information that citizens put out there, but he did express the agency’s unrelenting desire for technology and intelligence capabilities–such as advanced storage facilities–that would allow them to do so.

“It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information,” Hunt said.

“You’re already a walking sensor platform,” he added. “You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where you are at all times, because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off,” he said. “You know this, I hope? Yes? Well, you should.”

Hunts statements arrive shortly after reports surfaced earlier this week that Amazon has signed a 10-year contract with the CIA worth $600 million to develop a vast cloud storage infrastructure for the agency–similar to the ‘big data’ capabilities Hunt was drooling over.

Watch Hunt’s speech:

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A recent report shows that China’s February crude oil imports from the Islamic Republic of Iran have increased by more than eighty percent compared to the corresponding period last year.

China, Iran’s top crude oil customer, bought nearly 2.0 million tons of Iranian crude in February, equivalent to about 521,330 barrels per day (bpd). The figure rose 81 percent from 288,576 bpd a year earlier, Reuters reported.

Earlier this month, China’s biggest refiner announced that it will process more Iranian crude oil at its second-largest plant in 2013 than in 2012.

“We have followed the government’s requirement to maximize our import volume from Iran (this year),” Yu Xizhi, president of Sinopec Maoming Petrochemical Corp, said.

“After all, China and Iran enjoy good relations,” he noted.

At the beginning of 2012, the United States and the European Union (EU) imposed new sanctions on Iran’s oil and financial sectors.

On October 15, 2012, the EU foreign ministers agreed on another round of sanctions against Iran.

The illegal US-engineered sanctions were imposed based on the unfounded accusation that Iran is pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy program.

Iran rejects the allegation, arguing that as a committed signatory to Non-Proliferation Treaty and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has the right to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

MP/MA

UPDATE: Cyprus Central Bank says hasn’t been informed of closure (and then back-pedals)…

• *CYPRUS CENTRAL BANK HASN’T BEEN INFORMED, TAKEN SUCH DECISION
• *CYPRUS CENTRAL BANK SAYS REORGANISATION NOT SAME AS CLOSURE

Refuting earlier comments from the regulator that Cyprus Popular Bank would not be shuttered, CYBC is reporting (following the failure to sell it to the Russians) that the bank is to be shut down, split into good-bank-bad-bank, and that deposits under EUR100,000 will be protected.

• *CYPRUS POPULAR BANK TO BE SHUT DOWN, STATE-RUN CYBC SAYS
• *CYPRUS POPULAR BANK TO BE SPLIT IN GOOD, BAD BANKS: CYBC
• *CYPRUS POPULAR BANK ASSET PROCEEDS TO BE RETURNED TO DEPOSITORS
• *CYPRUS POPULAR BANK DEPOSITS OF LESS THAN EU100,000 GUARANTEED

Of course, we await the re-refutation but for now it seems the latest news trumps the regulators ‘lies’ earlier.

Remember that infamous business school in Illinois known for its farcical and utterly ridiculous hypothesis that the market is efficient? We disagree. Exhibit A: nationalized mortgage lender, Fannie Mae, and no news.

Fannie Mae has been in much demand in recent days. Having risen from $0.295 to $1.08, it smashed higher today to $1.47 (~50% surge from the close) only to plunge minutes later in a linearly spectacular way that only an efficient human could execute we are sure, to $0.55 (a 50% plunge from the close)…

and over the last few days… ‘normal’

The US newspaper that helped expose the phone-hacking scandal has slated proposed new controls for Britain’s press.

The New York Times said the “unwieldy” measures agreed by David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg would “chill free speech.”

The New York Times helped expose phone-hacking

The newspaper played a key role in uncovering the scale of phone-hacking at the News of the World, with a 2010 investigation uncovering widespread abuse.

On Monday Britain’s three main parties agreed a Royal Charter – backed up by law – to enforce the power of a new independent regulator to manage the press in the aftermath of the Leveson Inquiry.

• Sir Christopher Meyer: Britain’s international humiliation over Leveson

The measures were welcomed by Hugh Grant’s pressure group, Hacked Off, but have been criticised by most national newspapers.

The New York Times said the shakeup would “threaten the survival of small publishers and Internet sites.”

“Publishers who do not agree to subject themselves to the jurisdiction of this body – and many have already said they will not – could still take their chances in court but could be hit with higher, punitive fines if they were found liable.”

Cameron has insisted that using a Royal Charter means there is no press law needed.

But the New York Times editorial adds: “That is a distinction largely without substance.

“In reality the proposal would effectively create a system of government regulation of Britain’s vibrant free press, something that has not happened since 1695, when licensing of newspapers was abolished.”

Phone-hacking and other abuses are already catered for by the criminal and civil law, it said.

George Osborne has been sharply criticised by the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) for shifting spending into next year in order to avoid political embarrassment.

Paul Johnson said the chancellor wasted civil servants’ time by asking them to find a way to allow him to say he will be able to bring borrowing in this year below last year’s total – down from £121 billion to £120.9 billion.

“There is every indication that the numbers have been carefully managed with a close eye on the headline borrowing figures for this year. It is unlikely that this has led either to an economically optimal allocation of spending across years or to a good use of time by officials and ministers,” Johnson said.

Speaking at a post-Budget briefing in central London on Thursday, Johnson said: “The truth is that borrowing is the same this year as it was last year and it will be the same next year as this year. Because of that, this year’s precedent suggests that there must be a risk that effort will be expended again next year to shift spending into 2014-15.”

Johnson said the borrowing figures were “desperately disappointing” for Osborne, who would now have to borrow £70bn more in 2013-15 than he had originally hoped.

The IFS also warned that Wednesday’s Budget could lead to “severe” public spending cuts and possible tax rises after the next election in 2015.

The economic forecaster said that given healthcare, schools and international development were protected from spending cuts the outlook for other departments was “grim”.

“While the overall spending envelope has not been increased since the eye wateringly tight one implied by the Autumn Statement, nearly £5bn of additional spending on capital, childcare and social care has been committed to. That leaves even less for everything else,” Johnson said.

The economic forecaster said the chancellor’s decision to cancel the rise in fuel duty and increase the income tax allowance threshold and cut corporation tax meant he would be spending a “remarkable” £24bn a year on those changes by 2016-17.

“That would be a big investment at any time. In the current fiscal climate this is a striking investment in an arrow range of priority areas,” he said.

Osborne was defended by former Tory chancellor Norman Lamont, who told HuffPost UK he did not believe there had been a “fiddling of the accounts” as Treasury officials “don’t let you get away with” such “tricks”.

Related on HuffPost:

Given the public unrest of the last few days, it would appear that the Cypriot government, having tried and failed with Plan A (wealth tax versions 1 and 2) and Plan B (beg the Russians directly), they have decided to go with Plan C (Collateralized Cypriot Obligations). The current proposal, ekathimerini reports, to theoretically be voted on in a few hours (about to be in cabinet), is that Cyprus will form an investment fund to raise the capital needed to payoff their EU overlords. This fund will be collateralized by state assets, possibly including natural gas revenues, church property, and social security fund reserves. Though some form of deposit tax was ‘apparently’ not ruled out, it seems the next last best hope for Cyprus is begging the Russians to extend a loan and begging the world to fund more debt from a nation about to see huge capital outflows. The approach is, it appears, a ‘solidarity’ approach – rather than tax the current wealth of depositors (and hand it over to Troika), ‘tax’ the future possibility of wealth creation and sell that to the next greater fool sovereign wealth fund (or will the ECB decide that these CCOs are acceptable collateral?)

Via ekathimerini,

Political leaders in Cyprus have agreed that their country should form an investment fund to raise the capital needed to agree a bailout with the eurozone and International Monetary Fund and avert a collapse of its banking system.

…

“We will find a solution,” said Neofytou. “We have no other choice. We are making a united effort to avoid our country’s bankruptcy and I think we will succeed.”

Nicosia plans to create a fund collateralized by state assets, possibly including natural gas revenues, church property and social security fund reserves. A proposal is due to be submitted to the House of Representatives on Thursday evening.

A government official who declined to be named told Bloomberg that some kind of deposit tax was not being ruled out.

…

“We are asking for help clearly, but something that would make also economic sense for Russia,” Sarris told reporters earlier.

Cyprus is also asking Moscow to extend the maturity of an existing 2.5-billion-euro loan. Sarris said that Russia was unable to provide Cyprus with a new loan.

Neofytou said that Cyprus would welcome Russian assistance but still needed to balance this against the requirements of remaining in the eurozone.

“We cannot reject any form of help but we are in the euros and we need the continue support of the ECB for liquidity,” he said. “Any support is welcome but we should not forget that we are in Europe and we need European institutions to stabilize our economy.”

Earlier, the ECB warned Cyprus on Thursday morning that the island’s banks might not qualify for emergency lending when they reopen next week.

“The Governing Council of the European Central Bank decided to maintain the current level of Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) until Monday, 25 March 2013,” it said in a statement.

“Thereafter, Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) could only be considered if an EU/IMF programme is in place that would ensure the solvency of the concerned banks.”

It is thought Cyprus Popular Bank (Laiki) — the island’s largest lender – would not be eligible for emergency funding under the ELA terms as it would be deemed insolvent.

…

Speaking to a European Parliament committee, Eurogroup chief Jeroen Djisselbloem said he felt a solution including some kind of deposit levy would be found.

…

“In the present situation I think there is definitely a systemic risk and I think the unrest of the last couple of days has proven this, unfortunately,” he said

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has expressed Russia’s content over the latest round of expert-level talks between Iran and the six major world powers in the Turkish city of Istanbul.

“We believe there’s been a certain progress following the expert panel in Istanbul,” Ryabkov said at a press briefing in Moscow on Thursday.

He added, “It is tangible but not sufficient to call it a breakthrough.”

“The dynamics of these talks suggest that this progress can still be reversed. We find it a bit unsettling, although the discussion has taken on a more serious, deep and businesslike approach after the string of negotiations,” the Russian diplomat noted.

Iran and the P5+1 group — China, Russia, France, Britain and the US plus Germany — held their latest round of expert-level negotiations in Istanbul on March 17-18.

Iran and the P5+1 agreed to hold the expert-level meeting during their previous negotiations in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on February 26-27. The two sides agreed to convene again in Istanbul on April 5-6 to continue the negotiations.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said during their meeting in Istanbul, the Iranian and P5+1 experts discussed various aspects of the proposals put forward by both sides.

According to the statement, the discussions revolved around proposals presented by Iran during the meeting in Moscow in June 2012, and offers given by the P5+1.

Michael Mann, a spokesman for European Union (EU) foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, also said in a statement on Tuesday that the meeting provided an opportunity for experts of both Iran and the P5+1 group to explore each other’s positions on a number of technical subjects.

The United States, Israel and some of their allies have repeatedly accused Iran of pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy program.

Iran has categorically rejected the allegation, arguing that as a committed signatory to NPT and an IAEA member, it is entitled to acquire and develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

In addition, the IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities but has never found any evidence showing that the Iranian nuclear program has been diverted toward military objectives.

MP/MA

	TRNN has… made its mark with amazing original reporting on the Middle East and international protest movements. – Caroline Lewis Log in and tell us why you support TRNN

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Baltimore.A recent New York Times editorial about the student debt says this:”The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently released a study showing just why many young people are being strangled by student loans. It found that 43 percent of 25-year-olds had student debt in 2012, an increase from 27 percent in 2004.”Further on in the editorial, they say:”According to the new study, student debt almost tripled between 2004 and 2012, and is approaching $1 trillion, while the percentage of borrowers who were more than 90 days delinquent had risen to 17 percent, from 10 percent in 2004. In addition, student loan debt was the only kind of household debt that continued to rise through the Great Recession, and it is now the second largest after mortgage debt.”Further on:”The Federal Reserve study estimates that nearly 18 percent of borrowers now have student loan debts of $25,000 to $50,000, and nearly 4 percent have balances greater than $100,000.”Now joining us to talk about the underlying causes of the student debt, possible solutions to it, is Michael Hudson. He was a Wall Street financial analyst and is now a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His recent books are The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents.Thanks for joining us, Michael.MICHAEL HUDSON, RESEARCH PROF., UMKC: Thank you, Paul.JAY: So let’s get into the sort of underlying systemic reasons why there was so much student debt, and then let’s talk about what could be done about it.HUDSON: Well, one reason there’s so much student debt is the whole educational system has been transformed completely in the last generation. When I went to school at the University of Chicago, it cost about $500 a semester for me to go there in the 1950s. Now it’s about $25,000 a semester.JAY: Twenty-five thousand’s a deal compared to some schools.HUDSON: To some schools. And what it means now is that people had thought that getting a higher education was going to be the way into the middle class. But now it’s become a larger burden on them than the mortgage debt, and especially now that the lower fifth of Americans can’t get mortgage debts. Student loans can absorb 25 or 30 percent of their income, as much as housing used to do.So the problem is that education has been financialized. Just like roads are being turned into toll roads and sold off to Wall Street firms, you’ve had the school system basically become an appendage of the commercial banking system.And it’s interesting that when The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal talk about student debt, they talk about it from two perspectives. One, how can we politicians save the banks from losing money on the debt? By tightening the screws on the debtors. We’ve got to make these deadbeats pay. And The Wall Street Journal today said, well, student loans are just another example of Obama’s socialism. Well, it’s not socialism when you don’t have the state running the education.But when you have a privatized education department school running it and when you’ve had a phenomenon of last ten years of–first of all, you’ve had much less public support of education, less revenue sharing from the government, less state support. And at the same time, you’ve had an increasing financialization of the organization of the schools.For instance, the presidents of the universities, their cronies, their middle management, their sub middle management, and their top middle management with no-show jobs have proliferated. And how do they pay the top administrators? People like the new Treasury secretary, Lew, was at NYU, and there was a big to-do.This week at New York University there was a no-confidence vote in the president of the university, because they say, you turned a school into an adjunct of the bank. In New York City, the second- and third-largest real estate owners were Columbia University and New York University. So in essence, New York University was a real estate company that got tax exemption on its holdings in exchange for holding classes in some of its universities. When New York University bought a spaghetti company, they said, that’s part of the educational process; we want tax exemption on that. It went to court. They weren’t allowed to pull that trick.But basically now that they have raised the tuition so sharply that the results of the tuition have not gone to pay for higher professors. They have been replacing full-time tenured professors with part-time professors. The president of New York University last week said, we’re in business to make money, basically, and if we can save money by hiring part-time professors at one-tenth the rate of tenured professors, we’re going to do it. And let me tell you, nobody has job security at New York University. So you’re having the tuition go up.And the question is: how are they going to make the students pay for it? Well, in 2005 they rewrote the bankruptcy law so that the government would guarantee student loans, so they would create this vast, $1 trillion market for the banks in making student loan, a market bigger than the banks’ credit card. And at the same time, the Republicans in Congress–or the Democrats got the Republicans to pressure them to say, well, if the public’s guaranteeing it, we have to make sure that the students who borrow cannot wipe out this loan by bankruptcy.In America, normally in every country, if you go into debt, you’re allowed to wipe out your loan when you go bankrupt and you can’t pay. Well, students are graduating now with a $200,000, $300,000 worth of student loan debt. They are unable to get jobs. They’re living with their parents. They cannot afford to marry and form new households.JAY: In fact, there was a recent study that the majority of new jobs won’t even require a high school diploma, never mind a university education.HUDSON: That’s right. But all the same, getting a university education is the entry price to the middle class. But instead of being an entry price to the middle class, it’s the road to debt peonage.JAY: Okay. So if you look at the New York Times editorial I was quoting, when it comes to solutions, it’s a public-private partnership for refinancing. It’s not about breaking the chains between students and banks.HUDSON: That’s right. And the result is what they’ve done is raise the cost of living tremendously.Basically, 100 years ago everybody thought of education as being a public service, much like roads and public utilities. And the idea was to keep down the price of public services so that you lower the cost of living. And that lowers the cost of business, because companies don’t have to pay new recruits, new labor, so much that they have to pay for these services. The idea was to make the economy more competitive.When people are talking about de-industrialization of America and you realize what an engineer, a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer has to pay to get through school, you realize why American labor is being priced out of the market. So much of the income of–25 percent to 30 percent of the income goes to pay the student loan debt, 40 percent–43 percent now under government guarantees just for mortgage debt. Then already you’re dealing with about 70 percent of income before you begin to pay the other 15 percent in wage withholding for Social Security and Medicare. When people ask, why is the economy slowing down so much, why are people not buying the goods and services they produce, well, the reason is they’re paying the banks.So what they’ve done by insisting on tight credit standards for the debtors, by not letting them wipe out the debt through bankruptcy, by not reducing the student loans to the real ability to repay, they’re contributing to the depression.And the government is–if it were running schools like a public utility, like an electric company or a gas company, they wouldn’t let the upper management be taking more and more money. They wouldn’t let Mr. Lew, who was not even the president of NYU, make $1.2 million in salary, get paid $3 million when he left. They wouldn’t let this kind of siphoning off of wealth at the top, pressing down the professors, lowering the teaching standards, and just telling the students, we’re here not to give you education, we’re here to give you a union card to get into the middle class, and it’s going to cost you. And that’s what they’re selling. They’re selling the union card to get into–.JAY: The demand that came out of the Quebec student strike last summer, which–hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, and it’s a demand you can see in student movements in different parts of the world, is that university, as all education, should be a right and there should actually be no tuition. Is that what it means when you’re saying education should be a public utility?HUDSON: Yes, and that’s how it used to be 100 years ago. For instance, in New York City, it cost more money to get your child into kindergarten and grade school than it does to go to college in most universities throughout the whole country.JAY: Private. Private. Private.HUDSON: Private school. America was divided into squares all for the local education districts, and the whole American tax system, the American geography was shaped by public education. Here is a school district. It’s going to finance itself by local property taxes. Well, now what’s happened is there’s been a disconnect between property taxes and education. The property owners, especially the schools that are the largest ones, don’t have to pay property taxes. All of a sudden, instead of having the property owners pay for education, you freed property owners in this country from having to pay. The government is refusing to pay and is pushing all of the pressure for education on the students. And because students haven’t yet got a job, they’re lent the money.So somehow they’ve turned the educational system into an adjunct of the banking system and the real estate system, just to make more money for–a vehicle for banks to make money that is guaranteed. They’re guaranteed at a markup. And then they say, our most profitable area of lending is student loans, and that’s our compensation for risk. And the risk, apparently, is that they can’t give enough money to the politicians to guarantee to pay all of the loans for the defaults that you mentioned at the beginning of this interview.Of course there are defaults. If you graduate and the economy’s shrinking and there are no jobs, of course you’re not going to be able to pay. Of course you’re going to live with your parents unless your parents give you a trust fund. And you’re not going to be able to buy new apartments. And the educational–the student loan debt is part of the overall financial problem that’s depressing the economy right now.JAY: Great. Thanks very much, Michael.HUDSON: Thank you.JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

End

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Overly optimistic expectations are commonplace in non-recessionary periods, and confirming what we discussed here, estimates have continued to decline over the past few quarters while markets have pushed higher. In fact, as JPMorgan notes, and despite the protestations of the commission-takers, S&P 500 EPS are now forecast to be less than they were at the previous peak in 2007/2008. Of course, the multiple expansion argument comes to save them but we note that given where we are in the profit cycle with margins at their current levels (as discussed here) the majority of earnings growth moving forward must come from revenues rather than margin expansion. Revenues for the S&P 500 have historically grown in-line with nominal global GDP, so let’s hope that FDX, CAT, and ORCL are all one-offs. So given indices are at all-time highs but EPS expectations are well below the previous peak – we wonder just how this market is deemed ‘cheap’?

Alex Salmond is not a Scot made of the dour Gordon Brown-cloth, but an altogether gregarious politician, boasting eyebrows that could shelter a family of five.

Scotland’s robust First Minister may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but he’s finally (finally!) named a date for the much-anticipated Independence Referendum. It will take place on 18 September 2014.

According to the opposition, Salmond is having a laugh with some of his cock-eyed policies.

Well, he’s certainly a man who likes a good guffaw, as these photographs show. Take a look through the evolution of the First Minister’s laugh. It looks like running Scotland’s a lot easier than dealing with stressed-out Southerners.

Celebrated Scientist Renounces National Academy and War

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Posted on Mar 21, 2013

lubrio (CC BY 2.0)

Members of the Yanomami give a cultural demonstration in Caracas, Venezuela, in 2011.

Last month, University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences to protest the election to the group of Napoleon Chagnon, a peer whose specious arguments in favor of a natural human tendency toward violence have helped militarize the discipline and legitimize wars of aggression.

Saint Martin’s University anthropology professor David Price writes in CounterPunch that Chagnon descended into infamy in the eyes of many of his colleagues when he published a best-selling and widely influential ethnography that described the Yanomami of Brazil (whom he observed during fieldwork in the 1960s and ’70s) as “the fierce people.” He did this, he says, because of the high levels of violence he witnessed within the group and against neighboring tribes. Chagnon put his observations forward as evidence that humans are innately violent, in what he claimed (erroneously, as many anthropologists contend) to be their natural state.

Chagnon’s conclusions have been criticized as being the result of bad scientific practice. Anthropologist Jon Marks, on his blog Anthropomics, recently described Chagnon as an “incompetent anthropologist.” He clarified as follows:

Let me be clear about my use of the word “incompetent”. His methods for collecting, analyzing and interpreting his data are outside the range of acceptable anthropological practices. Yes, he saw the Yanomamo doing nasty things. But when he concluded from his observations that the Yanomamo are innately and primordially “fierce” he lost his anthropological credibility, because he had not demonstrated any such thing.  He has a right to his views, as creationists and racists have a right to theirs, but the evidence does not support the conclusion, which makes it scientifically incompetent.

Throughout his career, Sahlins has worked to demonstrate that culture can motivate people in ways that have nothing to do with biology. This puts him at direct odds with Chagnon, whose controversial and broadly contested view is that biology is the prime driver of social behavior. Sahlins’ response to the academy’s granting one of its few limited seats to Chagnon echoes Marks’:

By the evidence of his own writings as well as the testimony of others, including Amazonian peoples and professional scholars of the region, Chagnon has done serious harm to the indigenous communities among whom he did research. At the same time, his “scientific” claims about human evolution and the genetic selection for male violence—as in the notorious study he published in 1988 in Science—have proven to be shallow and baseless, much to the discredit of the anthropological discipline. At best, his election to the NAS was a large moral and intellectual blunder on the part of members of the Academy. So much so that my own participation in the Academy has become an embarrassment.

Another reason for his resignation, he added, was a moral objection to the academy’s increasing role in research that facilitates the United States’ general posture of war:

Nor do I wish to be a party to the aid, comfort, and support the NAS is giving to social science research on improving the combat performance of the US military, given the toll that military has taken on the blood, treasure, and happiness of American people, and the suffering it has imposed on other peoples in the unnecessary wars of this century. I believe that the NAS, if it involves itself at all in related research, should be studying how to promote peace, not how to make war.”

Scientists worldwide have risen to support Sahlins’ principled stance. Professor Eduardo Viveiros de Castro of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro told Sahlins and others in an email that Chagnon is “an enemy of Amazonian Indians,” and thanked “Prof. Sahlins for his courageous and firm position in support of the Yanomami and of anthropological science.”

The controversy raises an issue that has plagued the scientific community since its clear emergence in the Enlightenment: How can people of conscience keep science from becoming a pawn for power?

–Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

David H. Price at CounterPunch:

We are left to wonder what is to become of science, whether practiced with a capital (at times blind) “S” or a lower case inquisitive variety, when those questioning some its practices, misapplications and outcomes are increasingly marginalized, while those whose findings align with our broader cultural values of warfare are embraced. The NAS’s rallying around such a divisive figure as Chagnon, demonizing his critics, claiming they are attacking not his practices and theories, but science itself damages the credibility of these scientists. It is unfortunate that the National Academy of Sciences has backed itself into this corner.

The dynamics of such divisiveness are not unique to this small segment of the scientific community. In his 1966 essay on, “The Destruction of Conscience in Vietnam,” Sahlins argued that to continue wage the war, America had to destroy its own conscience–that facing those destroyed by our actions was too much for the nation to otherwise bare, writing: “Conscience must be destroyed: it has to end at the barrel of a gun, it cannot extend to the bullet. So all peripheral rationales fade into the background. It becomes a war of transcendent purpose, and in such a war all efforts on the side of Good are virtuous, and all deaths unfortunate necessary. The end justifies the means.”

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Picture this. A man, armored in tattoos, bursts into a living room not his own. He confronts an enemy. He barks orders. He throws that enemy into a chair. Then against a wall. He plants himself in the middle of the room, feet widespread, fists clenched, muscles straining, face contorted in a scream of rage. The tendons in his neck are taut with the intensity of his terrifying performance. He chases the enemy to the next room, stopping escape with a quick grab and thrust and body block that pins the enemy, bent back, against a counter. He shouts more orders: his enemy can go with him to the basement for a “private talk,” or be beaten to a pulp right here. Then he wraps his fingers around the neck of his enemy and begins to choke her.

No, that invader isn’t an American soldier leading a night raid on an Afghan village, nor is the enemy an anonymous Afghan householder. This combat warrior is just a guy in Ohio named Shane. He’s doing what so many men find exhilarating: disciplining his girlfriend with a heavy dose of the violence we render harmless by calling it “domestic.”

It’s easy to figure out from a few basic facts that Shane is a skilled predator.  Why else does a 31-year-old man lavish attention on a pretty 19-year-old with two children (ages four and two, the latter an equally pretty and potentially targeted little female)? And what more vulnerable girlfriend could he find than this one, named Maggie: a neglected young woman, still a teenager, who for two years had been raising her kids on her own while her husband fought a war in Afghanistan? That war had broken the family apart, leaving Maggie with no financial support and more alone than ever.

But the way Shane assaulted Maggie, he might just as well have been a night-raiding soldier terrorizing an Afghan civilian family in pursuit of some dangerous Talib, real or imagined. For all we know, Maggie’s estranged husband/soldier might have acted in the same way in some Afghan living room and not only been paid but also honored for it.  The basic behavior is quite alike: an overwhelming display of superior force. The tactics: shock and awe. The goal: to control the behavior, the very life, of the designated target. The mind set: a sense of entitlement when it comes to determining the fate of a subhuman creature. The dark side: the fear and brutal rage of a scared loser who inflicts his miserable self on others.

As for that designated enemy, just as American exceptionalism asserts the superiority of the United States over all other countries and cultures on Earth, and even over the laws that govern international relations, misogyny — which seems to inform so much in the United States these days, from military boot camp to the Oscars to full frontal political assaults on a woman’s right to control her own body — assures even the most pathetic guys like Shane of their innate superiority over some “thing” usually addressed with multiple obscenities.

Since 9/11, the further militarization of our already militarized culture has reached new levels. Official America, as embodied in our political system and national security state, now seems to be thoroughly masculine, paranoid, quarrelsome, secretive, greedy, aggressive, and violent. Readers familiar with “domestic violence” will recognize those traits as equally descriptive of the average American wife beater: scared but angry and aggressive, and feeling absolutely entitled to control something, whether it’s just a woman, or a small wretched country like Afghanistan.

Connecting the Dots

It was John Stuart Mill, writing in the nineteenth century, who connected the dots between “domestic” and international violence. But he didn’t use our absurdly gender-neutral, pale gray term “domestic violence.” He called it “wife torture” or “atrocity,” and he recognized that torture and atrocity are much the same, no matter where they take place — whether today in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Wardak Province, Afghanistan, or a bedroom or basement in Ohio. Arguing in 1869 against the subjection of women, Mill wrote that the Englishman’s habit of household tyranny and “wife torture” established the pattern and practice for his foreign policy.  The tyrant at home becomes the tyrant at war. Home is the training ground for the big games played overseas.

Mill believed that, in early times, strong men had used force to enslave women and the majority of their fellow men. By the nineteenth century, however, the “law of the strongest” seemed to him to have been “abandoned” — in England at least — “as the regulating principle of the world’s affairs.” Slavery had been renounced. Only in the household did it continue to be practiced, though wives were no longer openly enslaved but merely “subjected” to their husbands. This subjection, Mill said, was the last vestige of the archaic “law of the strongest,” and must inevitably fade away as reasonable men recognized its barbarity and injustice. Of his own time, he wrote that “nobody professes” the law of the strongest, and “as regards most of the relations between human beings, nobody is permitted to practice it.”

Well, even a feminist may not be right about everything. Times often change for the worse, and rarely has the law of the strongest been more popular than it is in the United States today. Routinely now we hear congressmen declare that the U.S. is the greatest nation in the world because it is the greatest military power in history, just as presidents now regularly insist that the U.S. military is “the finest fighting force in the history of the world.” Never mind that it rarely wins a war. Few here question that primitive standard — the law of the strongest — as the measure of this America’s dwindling “civilization.”

The War Against Women

Mill, however, was right about the larger point: that tyranny at home is the model for tyranny abroad. What he perhaps didn’t see was the perfect reciprocity of the relationship that perpetuates the law of the strongest both in the home and far away.

When tyranny and violence are practiced on a grand scale in foreign lands, the practice also intensifies at home. As American militarism went into overdrive after 9/11, it validated violence against women here, where Republicans held up reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (first passed in 1994), and celebrities who publicly assaulted their girlfriends faced no consequences other than a deluge of sympathetic girl-fan tweets.

America’s invasions abroad also validated violence within the U.S. military itself. An estimated 19,000 women soldiers were sexually assaulted in 2011; and an unknown number have been murdered by fellow soldiers who were, in many cases, their husbands or boyfriends. A great deal of violence against women in the military, from rape to murder, has been documented, only to be casually covered up by the chain of command.

Violence against civilian women here at home, on the other hand, may not be reported or tallied at all, so the full extent of it escapes notice. Men prefer to maintain the historical fiction that violence in the home is a private matter, properly and legally concealed behind a “curtain.” In this way is male impunity and tyranny maintained. 

Women cling to a fiction of our own: that we are much more “equal” than we are. Instead of confronting male violence, we still prefer to lay the blame for it on individual women and girls who fall victim to it — as if they had volunteered. But then, how to explain the dissonant fact that at least one of every three female American soldiers is sexually assaulted by a male “superior”? Surely that’s not what American women had in mind when they signed up for the Marines or for Air Force flight training. In fact, lots of teenage girls volunteer for the military precisely to escape violence and sexual abuse in their childhood homes or streets.

Don’t get me wrong, military men are neither alone nor out of the ordinary in terrorizing women. The broader American war against women has intensified on many fronts here at home, right along with our wars abroad. Those foreign wars have killed uncounted thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, which could make the private battles of domestic warriors like Shane here in the U.S. seem puny by comparison. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the firepower of the Shanes of our American world. The statistics tell us that a legal handgun has been the most popular means of dispatching a wife, but when it comes to girlfriends, guys really get off onbeating them to death.

 Some 3,073 people were killed in the terrorist attacks on the United States on 9/11. Between that day and June 6, 2012, 6,488 U.S. soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the death toll for America’s war on terror at home and abroad to 9,561. During the same period, 11,766 women were murdered in the United States by their husbands or boyfriends, both military and civilian.  The greater number of women killed here at home is a measure of the scope and the furious intensity of the war against women, a war that threatens to continue long after the misconceived war on terror is history.

Getting the Picture

Think about Shane, standing there in a nondescript living room in Ohio screaming his head off like a little child who wants what he wants when he wants it. Reportedly, he was trying to be a good guy and make a career as a singer in a Christian rock band. But like the combat soldier in a foreign war who is modeled after him, he uses violence to hold his life together and accomplish his mission.

We know about Shane only because there happened to be a photographer on the scene. Sara Naomi Lewkowicz had chosen to document the story of Shane and his girlfriend Maggie out of sympathy for his situation as an ex-con, recently released from prison yet not free of the stigma attached to a man who had done time. Then, one night, there he was in the living room throwing Maggie around, and Lewkowicz did what any good combat photographer would do as a witness to history: she kept shooting. That action alone was a kind of intervention and may have saved Maggie’s life.

In the midst of the violence, Lewkowicz also dared to snatch from Shane’s pocket her own cell phone, which he had borrowed earlier. It’s unclear whether she passed the phone to someone else or made the 911 call herself. The police arrested Shane, and a smart policewoman told Maggie: “You know, he’s not going to stop. They never stop. They usually stop when they kill you.”

Maggie did the right thing. She gave the police a statement. Shane is back in prison. And Lewkowicz’s remarkable photographs were posted online on February 27th at Time magazine’s website feature Lightbox under the heading “Photographer As Witness: A Portrait of Domestic Violence.”

The photos are remarkable because the photographer is very good and the subject of her attention is so rarely caught on camera. Unlike warfare covered in Iraq and Afghanistan by embedded combat photographers, wife torture takes place mostly behind closed doors, unannounced and unrecorded. The first photographs of wife torture to appear in the U.S. were Donna Ferrato’s now iconic images of violence against women at home.

Like Lewkowicz, Ferrato came upon wife torture by chance; she was documenting a marriage in 1980 when the happy husband chose to beat up his wife. Yet so reluctant were photo editors to pull aside the curtain of domestic privacy that even after Ferrato became a Life photographer in 1984, pursuing the same subject, nobody, including Life, wanted to publish the shocking images she produced.

In 1986, six years after she witnessed that first assault, some of her photographs of violence against women in the home were published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and brought her the 1987 Robert F. Kennedy journalism award “for outstanding coverage of the problems of the disadvantaged.” In 1991, Aperture, the publisher of distinguished photography books, brought out Ferrato’s eye-opening body of work as Living with the Enemy (for which I wrote an introduction). Since then, the photos have been widely reproduced.Time used a Ferrato image on its cover in 1994, when the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson briefly drew attention to what the magazine called “the epidemic of domestic abuse” and Lightbox featured a small retrospective of her domestic violence work on June 27, 2012.

Ferrato herself started a foundation, offering her work to women’s groups across the country to exhibit at fundraisers for local shelters and services. Those photo exhibitions also helped raise consciousness across America and certainly contributed to smarter, less misogynistic police procedures of the kind that put Shane back in jail.

Ferrato’s photos were incontrovertible evidence of the violence in our homes, rarely acknowledged and never before so plainly seen.  Yet until February 27th, when with Ferrato’s help, Sara Naomi Lewkowicz’s photos were posted on Lightbox only two months after they were taken, Ferrato’s photos were all we had. We needed more. So there was every reason for Lewkowicz’s work to be greeted with acclaim by photographers and women everywhere.

Instead, in more than 1,700 comments posted at Lightbox, photographer Lewkowicz was mainly castigated for things like not dropping her camera and taking care to get Maggie’s  distraught two-year-old daughter out of the room or singlehandedly stopping the assault. (Need it be said that stopping combat is not the job of combat photographers?) 

Maggie, the victim of this felonious assault, was also mercilessly denounced: for going out with Shane in the first place, for failing to foresee his violence, for “cheating” on her already estranged husband fighting in Afghanistan, and inexplicably for being a “perpetrator.” Reviewing the commentary for theColumbia Journalism Review, Jina Moore concluded, “[T]here’s one thing all the critics seem to agree on: The only adult in the house not responsible for the violence is the man committing it.”

They Only Stop When They Kill You

Viewers of these photographs — photos that accurately reflect the daily violence so many women face — seem to find it easy to ignore, or even praise, the raging man behind it all. So, too, do so many find it convenient to ignore the violence that America’s warriors abroad inflict under orders on a mass scale upon women and children in war zones.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had the effect of displacing millions from their homes within the country or driving them into exile in foreign lands. Rates of rape and atrocity were staggering, as I learned firsthand when in 2008-2009 I spent time in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon talking with Iraqi refugees. In addition, those women who remain in Iraq now live under the rule of conservative Islamists, heavily influenced by Iran. Under the former secular regime, Iraqi women were considered the most advanced in the Arab world; today, they say they have been set back a century.

In Afghanistan, too, while Americans take credit for putting women back in the workplace and girls in school, untold thousands of women and children have been displaced internally, many to makeshift camps on the outskirts of Kabul where 17 children froze to death last January. The U.N. reported 2,754 civilian deaths and 4,805 civilian injuries as a result of the war in 2012, the majority of them women and children. In a country without a state capable of counting bodies, these are undoubtedly significant undercounts. A U.N. official said, “It is the tragic reality that most Afghan women and girls were killed or injured while engaging in their everyday activities.” Thousands of women in Afghan cities have been forced into survival sex, as were Iraqi women who fled as refugees to Beirut and particularly Damascus.

That’s what male violence is meant to do to women. The enemy. War itself is a kind of screaming tattooed man, standing in the middle of a room — or another country — asserting the law of the strongest. It’s like a reset button on history that almost invariably ensures women will find themselves subjected to men in ever more terrible ways. It’s one more thing that, to a certain kind of man, makes going to war, like good old-fashioned wife torture, so exciting and so much fun.

Whew! Cyprus parliament began the week rejecting the tax on depositors. It has been scrambling to find an alternative source of funds. As a percentage of GDP, the 10 bln euro EU package that has been offered to Cyprus is larger than the initial package for Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Still 5.8 bln euros that Cyprus is being demanded to pony up is incredibly difficult. There are no easy answers.

The solution proposed to raiding the pension funds, giving them government bonds, which all three rating agencies as well below investment grade, seems to likely target many of the same people who would have been hurt by the tax on small depositors. Moreover, that would not stabilize the debt/GDP ratios, making it more likely that the government debt is restructured.

 
Given the bank holdings of government bonds, a restructuring of the government debt would also spur a banking crisis and likely trigger the deposit insurance, which Cyprus cannot make good on. The two largest Cyprus banks had a combined 50 bln euros of deposits at the end of 2011. This is more than twice the country’s GDP.  In addition, another obstacle to a sovereign restructuring is that much of the country’s debt is under the governance of UK law, which make it easier for the creditors to block it.

Cyprus initially request assistance last summer. However, because the president at the time refused to consider privatization and that the creditors wanted to do their own analysis of Cyprus’ banking system even though the OECD had previously said that Cyprus has met the 40 EU directives against money laundering. In November, a German study found that more than 21 bln euros of Russian and Middle East funds had found a home in the Cyprus haven.

Cyprus banks have not been good guardians of those foreign or domestic deposits. With roughly 50% of their deposits they bought Greek bonds. This was a huge leveraged carry trade that collapsed. The loan book has also soured. In Q3 last year, the top two banks tripled (Bank Popular/ Laiki) and quadrupled (Bank of Cyprus) their loan loss reserves.

Cyprus banks have long run out of collateral that is acceptable to the ECB. They have relied on Emergency Lending Assistance (ELA), which is provided by the national central bank, at its own risk, but with the ECB’s approval. In January, the ECB warned Cyprus banks that they had two months to recapitalize or it would no longer sanction ELA funding. Those two months are up and the ECB now says officials have until Monday to reach an agreement.

There was a conference call yesterday, according to wire accounts, among euro area officials to discuss views and potential solutions. Cyprus officials reportedly did not take part, leaving European officials dumbfounded.

Clearly, the risk of an exit from the euro area has increased.   Many of the critics of EMU, who think it is better to be out, may be able to test their hypothesis. We think Cypriots’ lives will be made significantly worse on an exit. Small depositors will not simply seen 6 1/2 of their savings taken, but will lose much of savings. The banking system will collapse and the means to recapitalizing it are not obvious. The economy will collapse and unemployment will soar. The social fabric will be torn asunder.

The increase in miser in Cyprus, however, will likely have minimal impact on the euro area. If anything the misery of Cyprus, if our analysis of what an exit would mean, may be sufficient to scare other weak members of the euro area and convince them that it is better in, with all the yielding of sovereignty that it entails, than outside, where the degrees of freedom are limited, although in different ways.

Because of the economic and financial integration, Greece appears to be the most vulnerable to a Cyprus exit. A bankrupt Cyprus, cut off from the EMU and EU, may vulnerable, from a geopolitical vantage point, which also needs to be considered.

Although our medium term outlook is for a weaker euro ($1.20 for year end), we suspect that once there is closure on Cyprus, one way or the other, the euro may bounce. We continue to place technical significance in the gap on the bar charts created by Monday’s sharply lower opening, The gap now extends from last Friday’s low of $1.30 to yesterday’s high near $1.2980. A move above the gap would be constructive and suggest another 1-2 cent advance. Until that gap is closed though, the risk is on the downside, where our next target is in the $1.2680-$1.2700 area. 

Climate Change Is Here; Why Aren’t We Doing Anything About It?

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Posted on Mar 21, 2013

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Regarding the impending climate crisis, Yale scientist Anthony Leiserowitz tells Bill Moyers: “You almost couldn’t design a problem that is a worse fit with our underlying psychology.” The solution? Part of it involves turning the issue into talking points for conservatives.

How about describing global warming as a threat to Americans’ freedoms? “If you’re a rancher or a farmer in the Great Plains today,” Leiserowitz says, “your freedom is enormously constrained by the fact that you’re in the midst of a two-year severe drought, OK. You don’t get to choose what you’re going to plant. You don’t get to choose what cows you’re going to slaughter. In fact, we’ve just seen in Texas in the past year 2 million head of cow, cattle are no longer in Texas; they had to move them out because they couldn’t provide the food and forage and water for them because of that drought. That’s not freedom, OK. You are literally not able to do the thing that you were raised and that you believe in as part of your culture because the climate has changed.”

Another approach Leiserowitz recommends, however difficult it is to imagine gaining traction among the Republican Party’s entrenched corporate backers, is to cast support for climate change legislation as an opportunity to win more votes from the American public.

Read a transcript of their conversation here.

–Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

‘Moyers & Company’:

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Germany’s super rich are stashing their cash as far afield as Panama in search of an offshore tax haven, newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung has uncovered. A number of high profile names have emerged from the report, including Porsche and Jacobs.

The German publication obtained data dug up by British hacker Dan O’Huiginn, who published information from national records on various German multi-millionaires with Panamanian companies under their names on his blog.

The Porsche and Piech families, owners of the billion-dollar car brands Volkswagen and Porsche were found to have several companies in Panama registered under their names, founded between 2005 and 2007.

Contacted for comment by the German publication, a representative of the Porsche family stated that the companies were inactive and categorically denied claims of tax evasion. In addition, Germany’s richest woman Silvia Quandt claimed to have no knowledge of an investment under her name in Panama.

Panama has a longstanding reputation as a tax haven, given that over 50 per cent of international investments are not taxed in the Caribbean country, tax expert Markus Meinzer said.

Meinzer told the publication that he could see no viable reason why a German citizen would have an offshore company in Panama other than to take advantage of the lucrative tax regime. However, he signaled that the investment of such capital in Panama could have a significant negative effect on the country’s economy.

Panama’s economy has been going from strength to strength recently, despite the worsening financial crisis in the US and Europe. Panama’s GDP grew by over 10 per cent last year and is slated to expand by a further 8.5 per cent this year, according to government estimates.

However, the country’s economic boom has been dogged by widespread reports of corruption among government officials.

“Panama’s geographic location makes it very attractive for international mafia organizations,” said Jose de Gracia from Interpol to Panamanian publication Critica. He went on to say that mafia organizations flocked to the Central American nation because of its highly lucrative illicit drugs trade.

The same week President Obama honored Rosa Parks Parks’ 100th birthday, Israel announced two newly segregated bus lines for Palestinian workers traveling to Israel from the West Bank. The “Palestinian only” buses were introduced after Israeli settlers complained that fellow Palestinian passengers posed a “security risk.”

The timing of Israel’s announcement set the internet abuzz with moralizing references to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Jim Crow. If only Palestinians could produce their own Rosa Parks. More sophisticated Palestine analysts observed that for Palestinians, segregation is already routine. Israeli society functions thanks to a complex web of segregated highways, neighborhoods, and educational institutions. Potential Palestinian “Martin Luther King Jr.’s”cycle in and out of Israeli jails.

Of course, President Obama avoids Jim Crow/Israel analogies. His administration continues to oppose international efforts to recognize Palestinian self-determination and the itinerary for Obama’s upcoming Israel trip resembles a POTUS version of Birthright. His first activity is a photo op with missile battery. Obviously, a spell of liberal indignation over bus segregation and a brief flurry of Rosa Park’s references will not translate into US policies shifts on Israel/Palestine. But in this faux-outrage, there is something valuable to be learned about the shortcomings of liberalism and its failure to fully comprehend both the plight of Palestinians and America’s own history of racial oppression.

As Samir Sonti pointed out in Jacobin last week, contemporary liberals sanitize the movement for black liberation as a fundamentally individual struggle for “civil rights,” stripped of its working class roots, revolutionary goals, and strong ties to organized labor.

For liberals, racial oppression is an uncomfortable concept because it lays the blame for inequality at the feet of society at large and implicates the very legitimacy of liberal institutions. For that reason, Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered more for his leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott – with its modest goals of bus integration – than for his Poor People’s Campaign and his deeper indictment of American society.

Liberals who generally support Israel, but find themselves cringing when Israeli politicians make racist remarks, seize on incidents like Israeli bus segregation because it packages the conflict in digestible terms. This impulse does signal some empathy for the Palestinian plight. But it also smacks of triumphalism. Realizing African American civil rights, we are told, is the landmark achievement of 20^th century liberalism – a hard but necessary journey. When we chastise Israel for segregating buses there is a clear subtext: America has come so far from the days of Jim Crow and our little sibling in the Middle East has some catching up to do.

But Palestinians know that bus segregation is merely a cosmetic feature of their oppression. Commuter discrimination amounts to a red herring. The separate buses are only significant for how they reflect on the general ideological predicament of Israeli society. In fact, many of the Palestinian workers who actually ride the buses welcome the segregation. The new routes are more direct and save the Palestinians from having to endure harassment from settlers.

The perspectives of Palestinian laborers fail to register with liberals, who are desperate to recast Palestinian oppression as an individualistic struggle for civil rights. For them, Palestinian oppression is comfortably framed as “inequality before the law,” a condition easily remedied by extending the largess of the Jewish state. This limited understanding works to reinforce the primacy of Israel – its courts, government, and military – as flawed but ultimately legitimate liberal institutions capable of reform.

If the problem is primarily a problem of civil rights, an issue of inequality rather than oppression, then the solution must be new laws, better courts ,and more sensitive politicians. This is a very comfortable position for liberals because it forecloses far reaching criticism of Israeli society at large and quashes difficult questions about the very foundation of that state.

By sidestepping the question of oppression and dismissing the potential for restructuring Israeli society, liberals do not pause to consider the claims of Palestinians. The age-old Palestinian demand for the “right of return” is considered inconceivable because it would undermine the very nature of the Jewish state. Palestinians are encouraged to set aside their historic grievances and embrace the existing “facts on the ground.” The liberal view holds that by working within the system Palestinians can overcome inequality. It does not leave much room for, in MLK’s words, “radically restructuring society itself.”

The same tendency infects the liberal civil rights mythos. In the push for a color blind society, any system-wide attempts to reach equal racial outcomes are cast outside the mainstream. The ultimate watchdog of American liberalism, the U.S. Supreme Court, is poised to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, one of the lone vestiges of a transformative approach to racial equality. For liberals, contemporary racism is the fault of a few bad apples and any push to fundamentally alter the distribution of resources is considered in poor taste.

Rosa Parks is cast as an ordinary woman, fed up with the indignity of her commute, rather than a lifelong activist with revolutionary aspirations and ties to the American Communist Party. Thus, the sanitized perception of Rosa Parks enables people like Mitch McConnell to bask in the achievement of civil rights alongside President Obama.

As liberalism fails to offer compelling solutions to racial inequality, a growing chorus of voices on the Left are shining a light on persistent Jim Crow-like segregation in American society. Under the “New Jim Crow” one in three black men are destined to go to prison and blacks are ten times more likely than whites to be incarcerated for drug crimes.

Critical race theorists like Charles Lawrence III have long anticipated this reconfiguration of racial castes. Lawrence III warned that the dominant individualistic understanding of racial inequality would prove inadequate to reverse centuries of oppression: “Racial equality [should be seen] as a substantive societal condition rather than as an individual right.” Yet radical solutions to persistent racial inequality – more aggressive affirmative action, slavery reparations, dismantling the criminal justice system as we know it, legalizing drugs that are the overwhelming cause of black incarceration – all fall beyond the purview of liberal criticism.

Liberals bring this same limited scope to their understanding of Israel/Palestine and their range of solutions for the conflict exposes grave ideological contradictions. Of course, Palestinians deserve equal rights, liberals proclaim, but fundamental questions about the very nature of Israel and its foundation remain taboo. Those who oppose the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state are quickly labeled anti-semites.

Liberals balk at racism within Israeli society but the roots of that racism go unexamined. Religion and State should be kept separate, say the liberals, but theocratic and overtly racist Israeli political parties continue to grow. For the foreseeable future Israeli politics will increasingly ruffle liberal sensibilities, but the liberal frame will continue to view Palestinian oppression as an understandable, if regrettable, blip in Israel’s democratic journey.

The economic news this week highlights what happens when governments are unable to confront the root cause of the financial collapse — the risky speculation and securities fraud of the big banks. What happens? They blame the people, cut their benefits, tax their savings and demand they work harder for less money.

In the United States there have been no criminal prosecutions for securities fraud in the big banks. Just as the Justice Department has made it clear that the big banks are too big to jail because doing so jeopardizes the stability of the banking system; financial fraud investigator Bill Black points out that the SEC cannot institute fines that are too big for the same reason. “The art is to make the number sound large to fool the rubes, but to insure that the fine poses only a modest inconvenience to our ‘most reputable’ fraudulent banks.” So, the SEC trumpets “more than 150 firms and individuals, with sanctions totaling $2.7 billion.” Black points out that this number sounds big, but it isn’t compared to the losses caused by the fraud epidemic in the US which are well in excess of $15 trillion. A trillion is a thousand billion. Are we, ‘the rubes’ or do we know that our government is in cahoots with big finance?

In fact, the big banks have been engaged in all sorts of nefarious activity for a long time, asWashington’s Blog points out with this jaw-dropping list of crimes, and are rife with fraud. And, this week the biggest of the too big to prosecute, JP Morgan, had its financial fraud and disrespect for government on display when the Senate Banking Committee issued a massive 300 page indictment, errr report, documenting the $6.2 billion “London Whale” scandal. The report traces the scandal right to the top, CEO Jamie Dimon, and shows how the bank lied to bank examiners and investors. Experts state the obvious from this evident fraud; investigations and fines, and possibly a large monetary settlement are possible but a prosecution by DOJ remains unlikely. Obvious because everyone knows the game in Washington is one of no criminal prosecutions.

Although, another too big to jail bank, Goldman Sachs did have a loss in court this week, when the US Supreme Court refused to overturn a Court of Appeals decision requiring the bank to defend a civil suit by investors claiming securities fraud. There are lots of hurdles ahead, but this provides a glimmer of hope.

This week our too big to prosecute philosophy of the (lack of) Justice Department was shown to apply to foreign banks as well. The second largest bank in Germany got a pass when it offered a job to an IRS agent who cut its tax burden. Again, the rubes were told that Commerzbank paid $210 million in tax liability, sounds good, but it was only 62% of what it owed. The day after the agreement the IRS officer was offered a job at Commerzbank. The agent pled guilty to charges this week, but the bank and the officers involved were not prosecuted.

Europe is showing us what happens when government fails to confront the big banks — the people pay and the economy collapses into depression. Is this our future?

The horror story of the week for struggling workers and poor countries has to be Cyprus. The country was being built up as a big banking area but when it all went sour, they went to the EU for a bailout. The EU hemmed and hawed and finally agreed, but with a very big requirement which takes structural adjustment to a new level of abuse — they required “a one-off 10 percent tax on savings over €100,000 and a 6.75 percent tax on small depositors. Senior bank bondholders and investors in Cyprus’ sovereign debt will be left untouched.” [See update below.]

This is causing a run on the banks in Cyprus, but is also raising red flags in many other struggling Euro countries. Can bank accounts in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal or any other country in Europe be safe? Are more and more people going to take their money out of the banks and keep it under their mattress? It may seem like the sane thing to do but a run on the banks will just weaken shaky banks further.

Leaders of the EU, IMF and Germany are all staying with their demand for more austerity and greater productivity (i.e. lower wages for greater output). At the same time they are urging bailout of the banking system which remains weak. This same leadership recognizes their approach may lead to a “social explosion” and Standard & Poors is also warning that the situation is socially explosive. The reality is that southern Europe is essentially in a depression and Germany, EU and IMF are demanding that they squeeze more money out of impoverished people.

In Washington, DC, the two Wall Street parties keep talking about cuts to the budget — austerity measures that will hurt the old, the poor, the young and working class — and disregard the fact that government spending is actually not the problem. While they push austerity, they remain silent as big business interests go into their sixth year of big tax avoidance. Paul Buchheit summarizes “For over 20 years, from 1987 to 2008, corporations paid an average of 22.5 percent in federal taxes. Since the recession, this has dropped to 10 percent — even though their profits have doubled in less than ten years.” He highlights the worst of the worst. On top was Obama’s jobs czar, General Electric.

There is some sanity, but not much, among the US financial elite. Dallas Fed Chairman Richard Fisher told the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was time to break up the big banks and end the crony capitalism that protects them.  Liberal Democrat Sherrod Brown has introduced a bill to do just that. Of course it is opposed by the administration so it will probably not go anywhere.

Instead, President Obama is pushing the anti-democratic Trans Pacific Partnership which is a gift to the big banks and other transnational corporate interests. For the big banks it will require countries to let capital flow in and out without restriction, not allow the banning or regulation of risky investments like derivatives and credit-default swaps and will prevent the formation of much-needed public banks. Our Wall Street government continues to serve Wall Street first at the expense of the people’s necessities.

All of this shows it is time to remake the banking system: hold security fraud violators criminally accountable, break up the too big to jail banks, support community banks and credit unions and create public banks at least at the state and local level; and make the Fed transparent and accountable to democracy. This would be a transformed banking system that would serve the people and the economy, move toward economic democracy and take power away from corrupt Wall Street. Failure to confront and remove the plague of Wall Street-centered banking will continue to infect the entire economy.  Is Cyprus in our future? It doesn’t have to be.

Update: On Tuesday, March 19, the Parliament in Cyprus rejected the tax on bank accounts after mass protests by the people. This leaves Cyprus in a mess with no bailout and no money to contribute to a bailout. Will Russia invest in future oil found recently off the coast of Cyprus in return for the Parliament protecting $30 billion in Russian deposits that are in Cyprus banks? Will Germany and the EU bend, not requiring Cyprus to raise money for the bailout? Will Cyprus leave the EU? Lots of questions without answers right now, but the banks in the country will remain closed until they figure it out.

Companies looking to take control of public services are winning government contracts for a wide array of services ranging from state prisons to local water systems to public schools, and often without much public oversight.

Private contractors are circumventing open records and sunshine laws as state and local governments push to privatize public services. For example, for-profit prison contractors are escaping scrutiny about prison conditions, financial information about government services that was once public such as management salaries and employee wage rates becomes “proprietary information” exempt from disclosure and even the names of corporations bidding to take control of public services are kept from the public. In Allentown, Pennsylania, the Mayor refused to release the identities of potential contractors that responded to his proposal to privatize the water system.

A 2012 report by In the Public Interest, demonstrates the real world consequences of privatization on government transparency. Recent examples show that some states are taking steps to strengthen their open records laws, while others are failing to protect public information.

For example:

In both New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the governors’ efforts to privatize the states’ lottery systems have been rushed, top-down approaches occurring outside of the public’s view. In Pennsylvania, Governor Corbett went so far as to award the operations contract to the sole bidder, Camelot Global Services, without full input from the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board and the General Assembly. Ultimately, the proposal was rejected by the state’s attorney general.

As companies continue to evade transparency laws, demands for transparency are increasing. Recent court rulings across the country have ruled in favor of increased transparency of government contracting.

For example:

The Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled that the for-profit prison giant, Corrections Corporation of America, must make public certain documents that they previously refused to disclose, including reports and audits in which they had been found in violation of their contracts and lawsuit settlements where the company had to pay damages.

The Florida circuit court ruled that Aramark, the company that took control of housekeeping and maintenance services at the Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee, must divulge information regarding the number of formerly public employees that were offered positions with the company following the privatization effort.

Stronger open records laws and more transparency would render these court cases unnecessary.

Several states are taking action to protect access to information and public input in the contracting process. Virginia recently passed a bill that requires contractors engaging in public-private partnerships for transportation services to make their proposals readily available to the public. New Mexico legislators are advancing legislation that would require large government contractors to disclose their political contributions and post them on the state’s Sunshine Portal.

Federal and state-based open records and sunshine laws are essential accountability protections and help ensure that public services operate in our best interests. The more we privatize, the less we know and the less control we have over our public services. Stronger open records laws are the right step towards maintaining that control.

Picture this. A man, armored in tattoos, bursts into a living room not his own. He confronts an enemy. He barks orders. He throws that enemy into a chair. Then against a wall. He plants himself in the middle of the room, feet widespread, fists clenched, muscles straining, face contorted in a scream of rage. The tendons in his neck are taut with the intensity of his terrifying performance. He chases the enemy to the next room, stopping escape with a quick grab and thrust and body block that pins the enemy, bent back, against a counter. He shouts more orders: his enemy can go with him to the basement for a “private talk,” or be beaten to a pulp right here. Then he wraps his fingers around the neck of his enemy and begins to choke her.A US Marine kicks in a locked door during a search of the village of Khabargho, Afghanistan in this photo from 2004. (Source: Wikimedia commons)

No, that invader isn’t an American soldier leading a night raid on an Afghan village, nor is the enemy an anonymous Afghan householder. This combat warrior is just a guy in Ohio named Shane. He’s doing what so many men find exhilarating: disciplining his girlfriend with a heavy dose of the violence we render harmless by calling it “domestic.”

It’s easy to figure out from a few basic facts that Shane is a skilled predator.  Why else does a 31-year-old man lavish attention on a pretty 19-year-old with two children (ages four and two, the latter an equally pretty and potentially targeted little female)? And what more vulnerable girlfriend could he find than this one, named Maggie: a neglected young woman, still a teenager, who for two years had been raising her kids on her own while her husband fought a war in Afghanistan? That war had broken the family apart, leaving Maggie with no financial support and more alone than ever.

But the way Shane assaulted Maggie, he might just as well have been a night-raiding soldier terrorizing an Afghan civilian family in pursuit of some dangerous Talib, real or imagined. For all we know, Maggie’s estranged husband/soldier might have acted in the same way in some Afghan living room and not only been paid but also honored for it.  The basic behavior is quite alike: an overwhelming display of superior force. The tactics: shock and awe. The goal: to control the behavior, the very life, of the designated target. The mind set: a sense of entitlement when it comes to determining the fate of a subhuman creature. The dark side: the fear and brutal rage of a scared loser who inflicts his miserable self on others.

As for that designated enemy, just as American exceptionalism asserts the superiority of the United States over all other countries and cultures on Earth, and even over the laws that govern international relations, misogyny — which seems to inform so much in the United States these days, from military boot camp to the Oscars to full frontal political assaults on a woman’s right to control her own body — assures even the most pathetic guys like Shane of their innate superiority over some “thing” usually addressed with multiple obscenities.

When tyranny and violence are practiced on a grand scale in foreign lands, the practice also intensifies at home.

Since 9/11, the further militarization of our already militarized culture has reached new levels. Official America, as embodied in our political system and national security state, now seems to be thoroughly masculine, paranoid, quarrelsome, secretive, greedy, aggressive, and violent. Readers familiar with “domestic violence” will recognize those traits as equally descriptive of the average American wife beater: scared but angry and aggressive, and feeling absolutely entitled to control something, whether it’s just a woman, or a small wretched country like Afghanistan.

Connecting the Dots

It was John Stuart Mill, writing in the nineteenth century, who connected the dots between “domestic” and international violence. But he didn’t use our absurdly gender-neutral, pale gray term “domestic violence.” He called it “wife torture” or “atrocity,” and he recognized that torture and atrocity are much the same, no matter where they take place — whether today in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Wardak Province, Afghanistan, or a bedroom or basement in Ohio. Arguing in 1869 against the subjection of women, Mill wrote that the Englishman’s habit of household tyranny and “wife torture” established the pattern and practice for his foreign policy.  The tyrant at home becomes the tyrant at war. Home is the training ground for the big games played overseas.

Mill believed that, in early times, strong men had used force to enslave women and the majority of their fellow men. By the nineteenth century, however, the “law of the strongest” seemed to him to have been “abandoned” — in England at least — “as the regulating principle of the world’s affairs.” Slavery had been renounced. Only in the household did it continue to be practiced, though wives were no longer openly enslaved but merely “subjected” to their husbands. This subjection, Mill said, was the last vestige of the archaic “law of the strongest,” and must inevitably fade away as reasonable men recognized its barbarity and injustice. Of his own time, he wrote that “nobody professes” the law of the strongest, and “as regards most of the relations between human beings, nobody is permitted to practice it.”

Well, even a feminist may not be right about everything. Times often change for the worse, and rarely has the law of the strongest been more popular than it is in the United States today. Routinely now we hear congressmen declare that the U.S. is the greatest nation in the world because it is the greatest military power in history, just as presidents now regularly insist that the U.S. military is “the finest fighting force in the history of the world.” Never mind that it rarely wins a war. Few here question that primitive standard — the law of the strongest — as the measure of this America’s dwindling “civilization.”

The War Against Women

Mill, however, was right about the larger point: that tyranny at home is the model for tyranny abroad. What he perhaps didn’t see was the perfect reciprocity of the relationship that perpetuates the law of the strongest both in the home and far away.

When tyranny and violence are practiced on a grand scale in foreign lands, the practice also intensifies at home. As American militarism went into overdrive after 9/11, it validated violence against women here, where Republicans held up reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (first passed in 1994), and celebrities who publicly assaulted their girlfriends faced no consequences other than a deluge of sympathetic girl-fan tweets.

America’s invasions abroad also validated violence within the U.S. military itself. An estimated 19,000 women soldiers were sexually assaulted in 2011; and an unknown number have been murdered by fellow soldiers who were, in many cases, their husbands or boyfriends. A great deal of violence against women in the military, from rape to murder, has been documented, only to be casually covered up by the chain of command.

Violence against civilian women here at home, on the other hand, may not be reported or tallied at all, so the full extent of it escapes notice. Men prefer to maintain the historical fiction that violence in the home is a private matter, properly and legally concealed behind a “curtain.” In this way is male impunity and tyranny maintained. 

Women cling to a fiction of our own: that we are much more “equal” than we are. Instead of confronting male violence, we still prefer to lay the blame for it on individual women and girls who fall victim to it — as if they had volunteered. But then, how to explain the dissonant fact that at least one of every three female American soldiers is sexually assaulted by a male “superior”? Surely that’s not what American women had in mind when they signed up for the Marines or for Air Force flight training. In fact, lots of teenage girls volunteer for the military precisely to escape violence and sexual abuse in their childhood homes or streets.

Don’t get me wrong, military men are neither alone nor out of the ordinary in terrorizing women. The broader American war against women has intensified on many fronts here at home, right along with our wars abroad. Those foreign wars have killed uncounted thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, which could make the private battles of domestic warriors like Shane here in the U.S. seem puny by comparison. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the firepower of the Shanes of our American world. The statistics tell us that a legal handgun has been the most popular means of dispatching a wife, but when it comes to girlfriends, guys really get off on beating them to death.

Some 3,073 people were killed in the terrorist attacks on the United States on 9/11. Between that day and June 6, 2012, 6,488 U.S. soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the death toll for America’s war on terror at home and abroad to 9,561. During the same period, 11,766 women were murdered in the United States by their husbands or boyfriends, both military and civilian.  The greater number of women killed here at home is a measure of the scope and the furious intensity of the war against women, a war that threatens to continue long after the misconceived war on terror is history.

Getting the Picture

Think about Shane, standing there in a nondescript living room in Ohio screaming his head off like a little child who wants what he wants when he wants it. Reportedly, he was trying to be a good guy and make a career as a singer in a Christian rock band. But like the combat soldier in a foreign war who is modeled after him, he uses violence to hold his life together and accomplish his mission.

We know about Shane only because there happened to be a photographer on the scene. Sara Naomi Lewkowicz had chosen to document the story of Shane and his girlfriend Maggie out of sympathy for his situation as an ex-con, recently released from prison yet not free of the stigma attached to a man who had done time. Then, one night, there he was in the living room throwing Maggie around, and Lewkowicz did what any good combat photographer would do as a witness to history: she kept shooting. That action alone was a kind of intervention and may have saved Maggie’s life.

In the midst of the violence, Lewkowicz also dared to snatch from Shane’s pocket her own cell phone, which he had borrowed earlier. It’s unclear whether she passed the phone to someone else or made the 911 call herself. The police arrested Shane, and a smart policewoman told Maggie: “You know, he’s not going to stop. They never stop. They usually stop when they kill you.”

Maggie did the right thing. She gave the police a statement. Shane is back in prison. And Lewkowicz’s remarkable photographs were posted online on February 27th at Time magazine’s website feature Lightbox under the heading “Photographer As Witness: A Portrait of Domestic Violence.”

The photos are remarkable because the photographer is very good and the subject of her attention is so rarely caught on camera. Unlike warfare covered in Iraq and Afghanistan by embedded combat photographers, wife torture takes place mostly behind closed doors, unannounced and unrecorded. The first photographs of wife torture to appear in the U.S. were Donna Ferrato’s now iconic images of violence against women at home.

Like Lewkowicz, Ferrato came upon wife torture by chance; she was documenting a marriage in 1980 when the happy husband chose to beat up his wife. Yet so reluctant were photo editors to pull aside the curtain of domestic privacy that even after Ferrato became a Life photographer in 1984, pursuing the same subject, nobody, including Life, wanted to publish the shocking images she produced.

In 1986, six years after she witnessed that first assault, some of her photographs of violence against women in the home were published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and brought her the 1987 Robert F. Kennedy journalism award “for outstanding coverage of the problems of the disadvantaged.” In 1991, Aperture, the publisher of distinguished photography books, brought out Ferrato’s eye-opening body of work as Living with the Enemy (for which I wrote an introduction). Since then, the photos have been widely reproduced. Time used a Ferrato image on its cover in 1994, when the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson briefly drew attention to what the magazine called “the epidemic of domestic abuse” and Lightbox featured a small retrospective of her domestic violence work on June 27, 2012.

Ferrato herself started a foundation, offering her work to women’s groups across the country to exhibit at fundraisers for local shelters and services. Those photo exhibitions also helped raise consciousness across America and certainly contributed to smarter, less misogynistic police procedures of the kind that put Shane back in jail.

Ferrato’s photos were incontrovertible evidence of the violence in our homes, rarely acknowledged and never before so plainly seen.  Yet until February 27th, when with Ferrato’s help, Sara Naomi Lewkowicz’s photos were posted on Lightbox only two months after they were taken, Ferrato’s photos were all we had. We needed more. So there was every reason for Lewkowicz’s work to be greeted with acclaim by photographers and women everywhere.

Instead, in more than 1,700 comments posted at Lightbox, photographer Lewkowicz was mainly castigated for things like not dropping her camera and taking care to get Maggie’s  distraught two-year-old daughter out of the room or singlehandedly stopping the assault. (Need it be said that stopping combat is not the job of combat photographers?) When Maggie refused, Shane began grabbing her by the face and neck, choking her. “You can either get beat up here, or we can go talk alone,” he said. “Your choice.” (Photo: Sara Naomi Lewkowicz)

Maggie, the victim of this felonious assault, was also mercilessly denounced: for going out with Shane in the first place, for failing to foresee his violence, for “cheating” on her already estranged husband fighting in Afghanistan, and inexplicably for being a “perpetrator.” Reviewing the commentary for the Columbia Journalism Review, Jina Moore concluded, “[T]here’s one thing all the critics seem to agree on: The only adult in the house not responsible for the violence is the man committing it.”

They Only Stop When They Kill You

Viewers of these photographs — photos that accurately reflect the daily violence so many women face — seem to find it easy to ignore, or even praise, the raging man behind it all. So, too, do so many find it convenient to ignore the violence that America’s warriors abroad inflict under orders on a mass scale upon women and children in war zones.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had the effect of displacing millions from their homes within the country or driving them into exile in foreign lands. Rates of rape and atrocity were staggering, as I learned firsthand when in 2008-2009 I spent time in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon talking with Iraqi refugees. In addition, those women who remain in Iraq now live under the rule of conservative Islamists, heavily influenced by Iran. Under the former secular regime, Iraqi women were considered the most advanced in the Arab world; today, they say they have been set back a century.

In Afghanistan, too, while Americans take credit for putting women back in the workplace and girls in school, untold thousands of women and children have been displaced internally, many to makeshift camps on the outskirts of Kabul where 17 children froze to death last January. The U.N. reported 2,754 civilian deaths and 4,805 civilian injuries as a result of the war in 2012, the majority of them women and children. In a country without a state capable of counting bodies, these are undoubtedly significant undercounts. A U.N. official said, “It is the tragic reality that most Afghan women and girls were killed or injured while engaging in their everyday activities.” Thousands of women in Afghan cities have been forced into survival sex, as were Iraqi women who fled as refugees to Beirut and particularly Damascus.

That’s what male violence is meant to do to women. The enemy. War itself is a kind of screaming tattooed man, standing in the middle of a room — or another country — asserting the law of the strongest. It’s like a reset button on history that almost invariably ensures women will find themselves subjected to men in ever more terrible ways. It’s one more thing that, to a certain kind of man, makes going to war, like good old-fashioned wife torture, so exciting and so much fun.

© 2013 Ann Jones

Ann Jones, writer and photographer, is the author of seven previous books, including War Is Not Over When It’s Over, Kabul in Winter, Women Who Kill, and Next Time She’ll Be Dead. Since 2001, Jones has worked with women in conflict and post-conflict zones, principally Afghanistan, and reported on their concerns. An authority on violence against women, she has served as a gender adviser to the United Nations. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Nation. For more information, visit her website.

One of the chancellor’s closest allies has said that George Osborne “should stick to the strategy” of deficit reduction, despite admitting that austerity measures have had an “effect” on “meagre” economic growth in the UK.

Reacting to Wednesday’s Budget, former Conservative chancellor Norman Lamont told the Huffington Post UK that George Osborne “was a man with his back to wall, [with] very little room for manoeuvre… in the circumstances, he did as well as anyone could”.

However, in response to comments about deficit reduction having “stalled”, from the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), Robert Chote, Lord Lamont conceded: “No one can argue reducing the budget deficit or cutting spending has no effect on the growth of an economy. It has some effect, but equally doing nothing carries a huge danger.”

Lamont, who served as chancellor of the exchequer in the John Major government between 1990 and 1993 and has advised Osborne in the past, rejected the argument that “there has been too much austerity”: “It is an absurd argument. What stands out is that Britain has been much more gradualist and much more moderate in its attempts to redice its deficit than most other countries in the world.”

It is “facile”, he added, to claim the deficit hadn’t “gone down as planned”. For Lamont, “the main problem for the British economy has been exports. The domestic economy has performed pretty well in line with the OBR’s forecasts. Even the consumer has not been completely cowed. We have had this growth in employment reflecting a domestic economy that is not doing badly in some respects.”

Lamont said that he didn’t think “anyone’s surprised” by the OBR’s downgrade to its forecast for growth in 2013 – from 1.2% to 0.6%. “You could make similar comparisons of expectations for growth for all the countries in the eurozone,” said the former chancellor. “It just hasn’t happened. Meagre as they are, ours are slightly better than those of the Eurozone as a whole.”

He added: “The gradualist approach, the moderate approach, that [the coalition] chose was right. They were trying to take advantage of the fact that we do have our own currency which gives us certain… freedoms that they don’t have in the eurozone. Austerity does have an impact but it’s not the only factor.”

In remarks pointed at the chancellor’s Tory critics on the backbenches, Lamont said he believes “as passionately as anyone else on the right wing of the Conservative Party, in smaller, more effective government but there is a tendency sometimes for people to believe that tax cuts always finance themselves… It doesn’t make sense always to cut taxes. I believe that tax cuts that are funded by borrowing can’t be justified.”

“I’m not going to criticise them but obviously there’s a lot nervousness in the Conservative Party… and the obviously difficult circumstances in which the government finds itself.”

The Tory peer also predicted that other major economies could lose their triple-A credit ratings as well: “I think that we’ll probably end up with a situation in which there are no large, triple A credit ratings. All of them, even Germany, could lose their triple-A rating eventually. It’s quite a possibility.”

Lamont defended Osborne’s 2012 cut to the 50p top rate of tax – despite the energetic attack that Labour leader Ed Miliband launched on Tory ministers over this particular issue in the Commons on Wednesday. “I personally don’t believe that it resonates in the way that [Miliband] obviously believes it [does]…. I personally believe it was the right thing to do.” Lamont added that the Tory leadership would have liked to have reduced the top rate to 40p, rather than 45p, but “there’s something called the coalition”.

At a post-Budget briefing by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) on Thursday lunchtime, IFS director Paul Johnson said the chancellor had “carefully managed” his “headline borrowing figures for this year – but Lamont told HuffPost UK that he didn’t believe “there’s been a fiddling of the accounts”. He said that Treasury officials “don’t let you get away with” such “tricks”.

The former chancellor, however, said it was “absolutely” right that the Treasury is conducting an inquiry “into the practice of the proactive pre-releasing of Budget information”, in the wake of the Evening Standard fiasco yesterday, and said it must have had an impact on Osborne’s delivery.

“I guess he must have felt pretty uncomfortable, with Balls waving it around… But the hero of the hour was Mr Deputy Speaker.”

Responding to Lord Lamont’s intervention, Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute for Economics and Social Research (NIESR), told HuffPost UK: “It’s simply a matter of fact, as the IMF has repeatedly said, that there was sharp fiscal consolidation in the first two years of this Parliament. I do not think anyone seriously questions that this was a major policy mistake which did considerable damagne. Taxes also went up substantially.”

Portes, a former (civil servant) speech writer to Lamont at the Treasury, added: “The irony is that in the early 1990s Norman Lamont put in place a plan that did precisely the reverse of what we are seeing now – no deficit reduction until the recovery was well under way; indeed, the Lamont/Clarke spending cuts and tax increases didn’t really kick in until growth was well over 3%.

“That is, of course, textbook economics and the result was both a strong recovery and the relatively painless elimination of the deficit. “

One of the chancellor’s closest allies has said that George Osborne “should stick to the strategy” of deficit reduction, despite admitting that “no one can argue” austerity measures have had an “effect” on “meagre” economic growth in the UK.

Reacting to Wednesday’s Budget, former Conservative chancellor Norman Lamont told the Huffington Post UK that George Osborne “was a man with his back to wall, [with] very little room for manoeuvre… in the circumstances, he did as well as anyone could”.

However, in response to comments about deficit reduction having “stalled”, from the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), Robert Chote, Lord Lamont conceded: “No one can argue reducing the budget deficit or cutting spending has no effect on the growth of an economy. It has some effect, but equally doing nothing carries a huge danger.”

Lamont, who served as chancellor of the exchequer in the John Major government between 1990 and 1993 and has advised Osborne in the past, rejected the argument that “there has been too much austerity”: “It is an absurd argument. What stands out is that Britain has been much more gradualist and much more moderate in its attempts to redice its deficit than most other countries in the world.”

It is “facile”, he added, to claim the deficit hadn’t “gone down as planned”. For Lamont, “the main problem for the British economy has been exports. The domestic economy has performed pretty well in line with the OBR’s forecasts. Even the consumer has not been completely cowed. We have had this growth in employment reflecting a domestic economy that is not doing badly in some respects.”

Lamont said that he didn’t think “anyone’s surprised” by the OBR’s downgrade to its forecast for growth in 2013 – from 1.2% to 0.6%. “You could make similar comparisons of expectations for growth for all the countries in the eurozone,” said the former chancellor. “It just hasn’t happened. Meagre as they are, ours are slightly better than those fo the Eurozone as a whole.”

He added: “The gradualist approach, the moderate approach, that [the coalition] chose was right. They were trying to take advantage of the fact that we do have our own currency which gives us certain… freedoms that they don’t have in the eurozone. Austerity does have an impact but it’s not the only factor.”

In remarks pointed at the chancellor’s Tory critics on the backbenches, Lamont said he believes “as passionately as anyone else on the right wing of the Conservative Party, in smaller, more effective government but there is a tendency sometimes for people to believe that tax cuts always finance themselves… It doesn’t make sense always to cut taxes. I believe that tax cuts that are funded by borrowing can’t be justified.”

“I’m not going to criticise them but obviously there’s a lot nervousness in the Conservative Party… and the obviously difficult circumstances in which the government finds itself.”

The Tory peer also predicted that other major economies could lose their triple-A credit ratings as well: “I think that we’ll probably end up with a situation in which there are no large, triple A credit ratings. All of them, even Germany, could lose their triple-A rating eventually. It’s quite a possibility.”

Lamont defended Osborne’s 2012 cut to the 50p top rate of tax – despite the energetic attack that Labour leader Ed Miliband launched on Tory ministers over this particular issue in the Commons yesterday. “I personally don’t believe that it resonates in the way that [Miliband] obviously believes it [does]…. I personally believe it was the right thing to do.” Lamont added that the Tory leadership would have liked to have reduced the top rate to 40p, rather than 45p, but “there’s something called the coalition”.

At a post-Budget briefing by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) on Thursday lunchtime, IFS director Paul Johnson said the chancellor had “carefully managed” his “headline borrowing figures for this year – but Lamont told HuffPost UK that he didn’t believe “there’s been a fiddling of the accounts”. He said that Treasury officials “don’t let you get away with” such “tricks”.

The former chancellor, however, said it was “absolutely” right that the Treasury is conducting an inquiry “into the practice of the proactive pre-releasing of Budget information”, in the wake of the Evening Standard fiasco yesterday, and said it must have had an impact on Osborne’s delivery.

“I guess he must have felt pretty uncomfortable, with Balls waving it around… But the hero of the hour was Mr Deputy Speaker.”

Responding to Lord Lamont’s intervention, Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute for Economics and Social Research (NIESR), told HuffPost UK: “It’s simply a matter of fact, as the IMF has repeatedly said, that there was sharp fiscal consolidation in the first two years of this Parliament. I do not think anyone seriously questions that this was a major policy mistake which did considerable damagne. Taxes also went up substantially.”

Portes, a former (civil servant) speech writer to Lamont at the Treasury, added: “The irony is that in the early 1990s Norman Lamont put in place a plan that did precisely the reverse of what we are seeing now – no deficit reduction until the recovery was well under way; indeed, the Lamont/Clarke spending cuts and tax increases didn’t really kick in until growth was well over 3%.

“That is, of course, textbook economics and the result was both a strong recovery and the relatively painless elimination of the deficit. “

Iraq is wracked by detentions, torture, and executions, and fingers are pointing at Prime Minister Maliki.

Baghdad – Heba al-Shamary (name changed for security reasons) was released last week from an Iraqi prison where she spent the last four years.

“I was tortured and raped repeatedly by the Iraqi security forces,” she told Al Jazeera. “I want to tell the world what I and other Iraqi women in prison have had to go through these last years. It has been a hell.”

Heba was charged with terrorism, a fate faced by many Iraqis who are detained by security forces.

“I now want to explain to people what is occurring in the prisons that [Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki and his gangs are running,” Heba added. “I was raped over and over again, I was kicked and beaten and insulted and spit upon.”

Heba’s story, horrific as it is, unfortunately is but one example of what a recent report from Amnesty International refers to as “a grim cycle of human rights abuses” in Iraq today.

The report, “Iraq: Still paying a high price after a decade of abuses”, exposes a long chronology of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees committed by Iraqi security forces, as well as by foreign troops, in the wake of the US-led 2003 invasion.

One Iraqi woman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said her nephew was first detained when he was just 18. Held under the infamous Article Four which gives the government the ability to arrest anyone “suspected” of terrorism, he was charged with terrorism. She told, in detail, of how her nephew was treated:

“They beat him with metal pipes, used harsh curse words and swore against his sect and his Allah (because he is Sunni) and why God was not helping him, and that they would bring up the prisoners’ mothers and sisters to rape them,” she explained to Al Jazeera. “Then they used electricity to burn different places of his body. They took all his cloths off in winter and left them naked out in the yard to freeze.”

Her nephew, who was released after four years imprisonment after the Iraqi appeals court deemed him innocent, was then arrested 10 days after his release, again under Article 4. This law gives the government of Prime Minister Maliki broad license to detain Iraqis. Article four and other laws provide the government the ability to impose the death penalty for nearly 50 crimes, including terrorism, kidnapping, and murder, but also for offenses such as damage to public property.

While her nephew was free, he informed his aunt of how he and other detainees were tortured.

“They made some other inmates stand barefoot during Iraq’s summer on burning concrete pavement to have sunburn, and without drinking water until they fainted. They took some of them, broke so many of their bones, mutilated their faces with a knife and threw them back in the cell to let the others know that this is what will happen to them.”

She said her nephew was tortured daily, as he wouldn’t confess to a crime he says he didn’t commit. He wouldn’t give names of his co-conspirators, as there were none, she said.

“Finally, after the death of many of his inmates under torture, he agreed to sign up a false confession written by the interrogators, even though he had witnesses who have seen him in another place the day that crime has happened,” she added.

He remains in prison, where he has told his aunt he is now being tortured by militiamen and one of his eyes has been lanced by them.

Yousef Abdul Rahman has an equally shocking story, from being detained in 2011 and spending four months in “the worst of prisons”.

“I was kept in a Maliki prison, where they dumped cold water on me and used electricity on me,” he told Al Jazeera. “Many of the prisoners with me were raped. They were raped with sticks and bottles. I saw the blood on their bodies, and I saw so many men this happened to.”

In today’s Iraq, it is unfortunately all too easy to find Iraqis who have had loved ones who have been detained and tortured, and the trend is increasing, according to Iraqis Al Jazeera spoke with, along with several human rights groups.

‘This was really harmful to me’

Ahmed Hassan, a 43-year-old taxi driver, was detained by Iraqi police at his home in the Adhamiyah district of Baghdad in December 2008. He was charged with “terrorism”, and held in a federal police prison in nearby Khadimiyah.

Hassan told Al Jazeera the prison was run by the Ministry of Interior, but alleged it was overseen by Prime Minister al-Maliki himself.

He said he was regularly tortured and held in a six-by-four metre cell with “at least 120 detainees, with a small toilet that has no door, and scarce running water”.

Prisoners received one meal a day that was often undercooked. And it was so crowded that “most of us would be forced to sleep standing”, he said.

Hassan explained that his jailors had “various techniques of torture”.

Iraqis held in what are now commonly referred to as “Maliki’s jails” are telling horror stories of torture techniques used, including beatings, hangings, and electricity. [GALLO/GETTY]

“They forced me to drink huge amounts of water and then would tie up the head of my penis so I could not urinate. This was really harmful to me,” said Hassan.

Another method was to “take off my fingernails with a pair of pliers, one by one.”

This was an attempt to elicit confessions for crimes he said he never committed.

Hassan said he was also hung upside down from his feet with his head placed in a bucket of water while he was whipped with plastic rods.

Stories of detentions and torture and executions are everywhere in today’s Iraq.

Sheikh Khaled Hamoud Al-Jumaili, a leader of the ongoing demonstrations in Fallujah against the Maliki government, told Al Jazeera there that “thousands of Fallujans have been detained and we don’t know how many are now dead or on death row.”

“The fighting from 2004 has never stopped,” he added. “We simply switched from fighting the Americans to fighting Maliki and his injustice and corruption.”

Another Fallujah sheikh, who asked to speak on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera he was detained and tortured by “Maliki’s forces” in 2012.

“I was taken to the Khadamiyah prison [in Baghdad] and tortured there,” he said while pulling up his shirt to reveal dark puncture wounds across his back. “I was beaten with sticks, punched, starved, spit upon, and hung by my ankles and then wrists. Maliki is even worse than the Americans.”

Iraq currently has one of the highest rates of death sentences in the world, and Sunnis say they are suffering disproportionately from the killings.

Stories like those from Jassim and Hassan are exactly the kind referenced in the recent Amnesty International report.

“Torture is rife and committed with impunity by government security forces, particularly against detainees arrested under anti-terrorism while they are held incommunicado for interrogation,” the report states.

“Detainees have alleged that they were tortured to force them to ‘confess’ to serious crimes or to incriminate others while held in these conditions. Many have repudiated their confessions at trial only to see the courts admit them as evidence of their guilt, without investigating their torture allegations, sentencing them to long term imprisonment or death.”

Executions and International Condemnation

Saadiya Naif, 60, has had three of her sons executed — two by American forces during the occupation, and one in 2008 by Iraqis.

“Baker was arrested by Iraqi police and held for one and a half years,” she told Al Jazeera, while weeping. “He was only 19 when they executed him. I tried to use lawyers to get him out of prison, but all three of them received death threats. Then, after one and a half years in prison, he phoned me to say goodbye, because he was to be executed the next day.”

According to international human rights groups, at least 3,000 Iraqis received death sentences since 2005, which was the year capital punishment was reinstated after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

At least 447 prisoners have been executed since 2005, and hundreds of prisoners wait on death row. In addition, 129 prisoners were hanged in 2012.

The government of Prime Minister Maliki has been strongly criticised by both the UN and several other human rights groups for the number of executions being carried out.

Christof Heyns, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said last year he was alarmed by reports of individuals who remain at risk of execution. “I am appalled about the level of executions in Iraq. I deeply deplore the executions carried out.”

The surge in state-sanctioned killings has also drawn sharp criticism from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, who called it “a sharp increase from previous years”.

“Given the lack of transparency in court proceedings, and the very wide range of offences for which the death penalty can be imposed in Iraq, this is truly a shocking figure,” Pillay said.

Human Rights Watch’s deputy Middle East director, Joe Stork, said Iraq “has a huge problem with torture and unfair trials”.

Lisa Hajjar is a professor of sociology at University of California Santa Barbara and a visiting professor at American University Beirut. Her work focuses on torture and detention issues in the context of war.

She said the situation in Iraq is common in ongoing civil wars, with the regime in power attempting to eliminate opponents from the past. Hajjar described the executions and torture as “intentional state terror”.

“I call it terroristic torture,” Hajjar told Al Jazeera. “When people are tortured or there are extrajudicial executions, the purpose is to dissuade others. The goal is to create a visible spectacle, and the purpose is to terrorise communities into quiescence.”

In response to this kind of international criticism, Iraq’s Justice Ministry said torture might happen in isolated incidents, and the media exaggerates it.

“The international community has not been fair with the Iraqi people,” Justice Ministry spokesman Haider al-Sadee recently told Al Jazeera. “When there is an explosion in America the whole world is rocked and countries are invaded as a result. But when Iraq defends its rights and executes a person after convicting him of a crime, international organisations condemn it.”

“Speaking as an Iraqi citizen,” he added. “I believe the least that should be done to show justice to the families of victims is to execute them publicly.”

This cavalier attitude, along with increasing rates of detentions, reports of ongoing torture, and increasing executions, have factored largely into why predominantly Sunni areas of Iraq, like Baghdad’s Al-Adhamiyah neighbourhood and much of Al-Anbar province, are holding regular demonstrations against Maliki’s government.

Protests

Every Friday in Fallujah, for three months now, hundreds of thousands have demonstrated and prayed on the main highway linking Baghdad and Amman, which runs just past the outskirts of that city.

People in Fallujah, and the rest of Iraq’s vast Anbar province, are enraged at the government of Prime Minister Maliki. They say his security forces, heavily populated by members of various Shia militias, have been killing and detaining Sunnis in Anbar Province, as well as across much of Baghdad.

Sheikh Khaled Hamoud Al-Jumaili, a leader of recent demonstrations, made it clear to Al Jazeera why the protests have been ongoing.

Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is currently being accused of “being worse than the Americans” by people in Fallujah, or told Al Jazeera of ongoing detentions and executions being carried out by the Maliki government [GALLO/GETTY]

“We demand an end to checkpoints surrounding Fallujah, we demand they allow in the press, we demand they end their unlawful home raids and detentions, we demand an end to federalism and gangsters and secret prisons,” he told Al Jazeera inside a tent just prior to recent Friday demonstrations.

Sheikh Jumaili went on to tell Al Jazeera that the millions of people in Anbar province had withdrawn all their demands on the Maliki government, because none of them had been met.

“Now we demand a change in the regime and a change in the constitution,” he said. “We will not stop these demonstrations.”

The Sheikh was then asked what would happen if the Maliki government did not listen to the demands of the protestors.

“Maybe armed struggle comes next,” he replied.

While there is no way of linking the events, on March 14 Iraq’s Ministry of Justice was attacked by at least one car bomb and a suicide bomber, as part of a series of coordinated attacks that rocked Baghdad, killing 24 and injuring at least 50 others.

Meanwhile, protests against the Maliki government’s ongoing use of detentions, torture, and executions continue in Sunni areas around Iraq, with no sign of abatement.

Ongoing Condemnation

“Death sentences and executions are being used on a horrendous scale,” Amnesty International’s Hadj Sahraoui said in the group’s recent report. “It is particularly abhorrent that many prisoners have been sentenced to death after unfair trials and on the basis of confessions they say they were forced to make under torture.”

“It is high time that the Iraqi authorities end this appalling cycle of abuse and declare a moratorium on executions as a first step towards abolishing the death penalty for all crimes,” he added.

Human Rights Watch’s Erin Evers, a Middle East Researcher working on Iraq, said she has received a wide range of figures from various sources as to the number of actual detainees.

“Iraq’s Ministry of Justice claims 30,000 people in Ministry of Justice and Interior Ministry detention facilities, but there are a lot contradictions from the government,” Evers told Al Jazeera. “I’ve had another source put the number at 50,000. The fact that the number varies so widely and that information on where and how people are detained is not widely available points to a larger problem.”

A point made to Al Jazeera by many Iraqis is this: perhaps the Maliki government does not need secret prisons anymore, because it instead has “secret prisoners.”

What is meant by this is that since the Iraqi security apparatus is not operating by the rule of law by carrying out arbitrary detentions and no due process, it is thus easy enough to detain people and hold them in normal facilities without having any record of them.

In this way it is possible for the government to interrogate ordinary Iraqis using any method it chooses, because the families and friends of the detainees have no idea where the detainee is, or how long they will be kept there.

Human Rights Watch told Al Jazeera the problem in Iraq today is “secret prisoners” since so many Iraqis are being detained that are not being registered with the government [GALLO/GETTY]

Evers went on to point out that the fact that the Iraqi justice system is so opaque points to the route of the problem.

“Which is that these institutions are failing, and it is a misnomer to call it a justice system as it’s certainly not actually meting out justice,” she said.

Amnesty International’s report is based on information gathered from multiple sources, including interviews with detainees, victims’ families, refugees, lawyers, human rights activists and others, plus reviews of court papers and other official documents.

Amnesty International sent its latest findings to the Iraqi government in December 2012 but has yet to receive any response.

“The real tragedy here is that not only are ordinary Iraqis suffering from ongoing terrorist attacks, but from the fact that the institutions that are supposed to protect them are instead targeting them,” Evers concluded. “By invoking ordinary Iraqis’ suffering from ongoing terrorist attacks and instability, the government implies that somehow it’s OK to violate people’s human rights under the guise of protecting them, and clearly even this not working.”

Scotland‘s first minister, Alex Salmond, has announced that the country’s independence referendum will take place on Thursday September 18th 2014.

Salmond said this would be the day “we take responsibility for our country” and “stand on our own two feet”.

There had been speculation over whether it could coincide with significant events such as the Commonwealth games or the anniversary of Bannockburn when patriotism would be high, but the date does not have any particular resonance.

Salmond emphasised the “parties n this chamber disagree fundamentally on independence”

Mr Salmond said that in the ballot the people of Scotland would have a choice.

“Next year the choice facing the people is one of two futures. A No vote means a future of governments we didn’t vote for, imposing cuts and policies we didn’t support.

“A Yes vote means a future where we can be absolutely certain, 100% certain, that the people of Scotland will get the government they vote for,” he said.

“I am honoured to announce that on Thursday September 18 2014 we will hold Scotland’s referendum – a historic day when the people will decide Scotland’s future.”

Scottish Labour leader, Johann Lamont, took her turn to ask questions on starting with a jibe.

Lamont said: “If the hand of history is on Salmond’s shoulder, I wish it would give him a shove and tell him to get on with it.”

She added: “This should be the day when the FM breaks the habit of a lifetime and starts answering questions.

“What’s the plan, Alec?”

“This is a fair, democratic test of the people of Scotland,” said Salmond.

The Scottish parliament also published its draft referendum bill, the legislation needed to hold the crucial vote and “the most important to be introduced at Holyrood”, according to Salmond.

Scottish deputy first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, told the BBC: “Everybody in Scotland, no matter what side of the debate they are on, will recognise this as a key milestone on the road to the referendum.

“The day of the referendum will be confirmed, when we can decide to take our own future into our own hands to vote for independence and the powers we need to build a fairer, more prosperous country that we all want to see.”

Speaking to Daily Politics she said that whatever date is chosen ”the sun will be definitely shining”.

There has also been much deliberation over recent months the phrasing of the question used in the referendum.

After accusations that Salmond was trying to introduce loaded terms a simple “Should Scotland become an independent country?” will be used.

The issue of independence has consumed Scottish politics since the Scottish National Party (SNP) took power almost two years ago.

Lamont, has accused Salmond in the past of being “dishonest” about independence at the expense of “every Scottish family”.

In Westminster, David Cameron has staunchly defended the union saying Scotland would be “better off in Britain”.

Vital questions still remain on the technicalities of an independent Scotland.

Issues such as North Sea gas and oil, defence, intelligence sharing and the Trident nuclear deterrent which is based in Scotland still remain largely unresolved.

Another major continuing issue is an independent Scotland’s relationship with international institutions such as the EU.

Alex Salmond will announce the date of the Scottish independence referendum vote on Thursday no doubt boosting feelings of national pride across the border.

As Scotland prepares to tread the route towards deciding the future of the union the Huffington Post UK asks:

Who is your favourite Scot?

Some serious, some silly, have a look through our slideshow and let us know who gets your vote…

WASHINGTON – March 21 – “[On Wednesday] the Senate passed a continuing resolution that was laden with special interest policy riders. Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) and Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) abdicated their responsibility by offering a stale spending bill from last year that is loaded with special legislative giveaways to big agribusiness companies. The heavy-handed and undemocratic process used to force the Senate to accept a deeply flawed proposal allowed votes on only nine amendments.

“The Senate was not allowed to consider two amendments offered by Senator Tester (D-Montana) that would have removed policy riders that favored the largest seed companies and the largest meatpackers. Senator Tester rightly observed that these policy riders were worth millions of dollars to these companies.

“One of Senator Tester’s amendments would have removed a provision that prevents the U.S. Department of Agriculture from implementing livestock marketing and contract fairness rules that were included in the 2008 Farm Bill. Food & Water Watch and hundreds of farm groups worked to include these vital livestock provisions in the 2008 Farm Bill to protect farmers from unfair and deceptive practices by meatpacking and poultry companies.

“Another of Senator Tester’s amendments would have removed a giveaway to genetically engineered seed companies that would allow the continued planting of GE crops even when a court of law has found they were approved illegally. This provision undermines USDA’s oversight of GE crops and unnecessarily interferes with the judicial review process. This favor to the biotech industry was not included in the House-passed continuing resolution and should never have been included in the Senate version.

“One thing that the Senate got right was finding a solution for funding meat and poultry inspection that would avoid USDA inspector furloughs. The funding cuts triggered by sequestration would have required USDA to furlough its meat and poultry inspectors for up to two weeks this summer, causing the plants they inspect to stop operating. The House should maintain this funding for USDA meat and poultry inspection to ensure that this critical consumer protection program can continue to operate.”

George Osborne delivered his Budget to the House of Commons on Wednesday – but close analysis of his speech reveals some shocking new policies. Just take a look, above.

(Created for HuffPost UK Comedy by David Schneider, Robin Flavell and Handface.)

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The budget put forth by the Progressive Caucus (CPC) in the House went down in expected defeat on Wednesday with a vote of 84-327.

In this March 18, 2013 file photo, House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington. It’s not this man, however, that progressives should be most worried about. It’s Democrats and what they’re willing to do in the name of ‘compromise.’ (Photo: AP) “The Back-to-Work budget is common sense, and it reflects the values of the American people,” said CPC co-chair Rep. Raul Grijalva from the floor ahead of the vote. “It recognizes the realities of our economic and social times. This budget is about investment, and the greatest resource we have in this country is the American people, we need to invest in them.”

It was not to be.

The Senate budget, approved by the Democratic-controlled upper-chamber, was also voted down in the House by a margin of 154-261. Among those who voted against it were 35 Democrats.

Also struck down was the the budget proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). That vote was 105-305, with Democrats split with 105 in favor and 80 voting against it.

A vote on the Republican House budget, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan, is expected for a vote on Thursday. It will likely pass, of course, but will be dead on arrival in the Senate.

“Before we pass a grand bargain, we have got to take a hard and sober look at what’s happening economically in our country today.” – Sen. Bernie Sanders

All votes more or less expected, but the story their failures reveal is one of continued budgetary gridlock in a split Congress and a country stuck in an economic crisis that continues to pit the good of all against the interest of the wealthiest few.

Above all, the failure to pass a budget agreement in Congress pushes President Obama to stay on a trajectory to willingly foster cuts–in the name of “compromise” and “shared sacrifice”–to key social programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as he succumbs to the invented mantra that instead of a massive crisis of unemployment and income inequality, the US economy is suffering from annual deficits or a tax code not preferential enough to corporate interests.

In the name of this ‘fabricated crisis,’ Obama and other Democrats, according to economists and progressive critics, are falling victim (or willingly playing along) to the Republican budget intransigence that has been their hallmark since Obama first took office in 2008.

As recently as last week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she would be willing to consider the ‘chained CPI’, which economists widely agree is fundamentally a cut to Social Security. She also said she would consider means-testing Medicare, a shift that could undermine the public support it has long enjoyed.

It’s not the first time the Democrats have toyed with cutting program their constituents widely support, as economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich points out Thursday, but the Party’s current willingness to “lead with compromise” is particularly unwise and harmful.

“If there was ever a time for the Democratic Party to champion working Americans and reverse these troubling trends, it is now,” argues Reich. The Democrats should be “forging an alliance between the frustrated middle [class] and the working poor” and arguing that even the rich would be doing better “with a smaller share of a rapidly-growing economy than a ballooning share of one that’s growing at a snail’s pace.”

“The modern Democratic Party [is] too dependent on the short-term, insular demands of Wall Street, corporate executives, and the wealthy.” – Robert Reich

Unfortunately and frustratingly, however, Reich continues, “the modern Democratic Party can’t bring itself to do this. It’s too dependent on the short-term, insular demands of Wall Street, corporate executives, and the wealthy.”

And independent Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders, who has repeatedly vowed to protect Medicare and Social Security and other earned benefit programs, warned Obama on Wednesday that a ‘Grand Bargain’ with Republicans should really be seen as a ‘Grand Sellout.’

Writing in The Hill newspaper, Sanders said:

At a time when the middle class is disappearing, 46 million Americans are living in poverty and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider, we need a “grand bargain” that protects struggling working families, not billionaires.

With corporate profits at record-breaking levels while the effective corporate tax is at its lowest level since 1972, and 1 out of 4 profitable corporations pays nothing in federal income taxes, we need a grand bargain that ends corporate loopholes and demands that corporate America starts helping us with deficit reduction. We must not balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor. We must not cut Social Security, disabled veterans’ benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, education and other programs that provide opportunity and dignity to millions of struggling American families.

Before we pass a grand bargain, we have got to take a hard and sober look at what’s happening economically in our country today. In doing so, we must acknowledge that the United States has the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth and that inequality is worse today than at any time since the late 1920s. Today, the wealthiest 400 individuals in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of America – 150 million Americans. The top 1 percent owns 38 percent of all financial wealth, while the bottom 60 percent owns just 2.3 percent. Incredibly, the Federal Reserve reported last year that median net worth for middle-class families dropped by nearly 40 percent from 2007-2010. That’s the equivalent of wiping out 18 years of savings for the average middle-class family.

And Isaiah Poole, writing about the defeated ‘Back to Work Budget’–which his Campaign for America’s Future fought hard to support–said:

Though this push has ended, the fight is not over. There will be other battles ahead in the coming weeks in which Congress will be forced to choose priorities, and the Back to Work Budget has made one thing clear: There is a right road to economic recovery and eventual deficit reduction, and progressives have it. Millions of Americans agree, and their representatives have been put on notice.

Stating clearly his priorities going forward, Sen. Sanders said:

We need a budget that puts millions of Americans back to work in decent-paying jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and transforming our energy sector away from fossil fuels and into renewable energy and energy efficiency.

We need a budget that keeps the promises we have made to our seniors, veterans and the most vulnerable by protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits.

We need a budget that makes sure that the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes. We must end corporate loopholes that allow Wall Street banks, large corporations and the wealthy to avoid more than $100 billion a year in federal taxes by stashing their profits in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens.

And Reich concludes by arguing that the false narrative that the US is financially “broke” must be upended:

We are the richest nation in the history of the world – richer now than we’ve ever been. But an increasing share of that wealth is held by a smaller and smaller share of the population, who have, in effect, bribed legislators to reduce their taxes and provide loopholes so they pay even less.

The budget deficit “crisis” has been manufactured by them to distract our attention from this overriding fact, and to pit the rest of us against each other for a smaller and smaller share of what remains. Democrats should not conspire.

Needy children should be getting far more help, better pre-school care, better nutrition. Seniors need better healthcare coverage and more Social Security. All Americans need better schools and improved infrastructure.

The richest nation in the history of the world should be able to respond to the legitimate needs of all its citizens.

______________________________________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

My friend and I meet early for breakfast, cappuccinos and chocolate croissants at a French bakery in downtown Brooklyn, N.Y. My friend — I’ll call him Abraham – shows up in a dark suit and tie, an overcoat and a top hat, minus the prayer cap he sometimes wears.A photo of “Abraham,” an Iraqi who became an American citizen on the anniversary of the U.S. invasion. He asked that his identity be protected. (Photo courtesy of the author)

“Are you nervous?” I ask.

“A little bit,” he says, as we walk through a rainy morning toward the courthouse.

On the way his father calls to check in, and to share news from home. Multiple bombings in Baghdad. More than 60 dead. “He’s on old man now, he deserves to live in peace.” Abraham sighs, and lights a cigarette as we cross busy Jay Street and turn the corner toward Cadman Plaza, heading toward the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Courthouse, a shiny new building a few blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge. “But just for this one morning I feel like acting like a selfish American. I don’t want to worry about it. I want to be happy.”

It’s Tuesday, March 19, 2013, 10 years to the day after the U.S. invaded Iraq and began an occupation that spawned a bloody civil war and led to one of the worst refugee crises in the Middle East in half a century. Abraham fled death threats in Baghdad to become one of those millions of refugees, and here he is today with a letter in his hand from the U.S. government confirming that he’s passed his citizenship test, and inviting him to take the oath of citizenship. And because I’ve never been to a swearing in ceremony before, and because over the years Abraham and I have developed a deep and quirky friendship that isn’t quite like any other I have in this town, here I am too.

At the courthouse we relinquish our phones and cameras at the door and pass through the metal detectors. Abraham is ushered into a packed courtroom, and I’m sent up to a crowded cafe on the floor above where other friends and relatives of soon to be naturalized Americans are sitting, waiting and watching a big-screen TV in the corner that functions as a sort of “Big Brother Courtroom,” broadcasting the proceedings downstairs in real time, which for quite some hours is also mostly people sitting, watching, waiting.

Then there’s Abraham up on the big screen, fidgeting and standing in line to pass in his old travel documents, and I feel this immense surge of feelings for the guy. For all he’s been through. For all this country has put him through, has put his family through, has put his country through. And for everything that’s been possible for him here, and what will continue to be possible for him here now. And I think, “Goddamn, he deserves this.” Goddamn, he’s an American now.

© 2013 Salon.com

Joseph Huff-Hannon is an award-winning writer and a Senior Campaigner with Avaaz.org, a global human rights and social justice campaigning network with 20+ million members. See more of his work at josephhuffhannon.com

WASHINGTON – Rights groups and government officials here have been testifying in a string of hearings, before both bodies of the U.S. Congress, on how to overhaul the United States’ huge immigration detention system, the scope of which has expanded massively in recent years in ways that some suggest impinge on civil and human rights.

Over the past two decades, the U.S. government has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into stepping up border security and taken an increasingly hard line on immigration issues. (Photo: Getty images) According to official estimates, the federal government will detain some 400,000 people on immigration charges this year, at a cost of around two billion dollars. Activists say the size and functioning of the immigration detention system are out of alignment with “U.S. values” — and, increasingly, Washington politicians appear to agree.

“We are a nation of immigrants, but our immigration law is inconsistent with America’s values,” Senator Chris Coons stated at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday. “Our immigration system exacts a high cost on families, on civil liberties and on human dignity. This cost is unnecessary, unwarranted and unfair.”

Coons said the U.S. government is currently paying more than 160 dollars per day for those kept in some 250 immigration detention centres. He also noted that Congress-stipulated “bed quotas” — around 34,000 at any given time — for these centres appear to be driving policies at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and are responsible for keeping far more people under detention than otherwise would be necessary.

If these people are not public safety risks … why are they detained at all?

That’s “enormously expensive”, Coons noted. “It could be cheaper while also better serving both our national security and our national commitment to civil rights.”

Indeed, the hearings come in the aftermath of a surprise announcement, early this month, that the government would be releasing nearly 2,300 people awaiting immigration trials. That number included “many who did not require detention by law”, according to testimony at the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday by John Morton, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

While Morton explained the move as a necessary cost-cutting measure given the massive budget-cutting that came into effect at the beginning of March, the decision has outraged some conservatives. Yet ICE will save tens of millions of dollars on this move alone, simply in allowing immigrants awaiting trial to remain out on their own recognisance.

“It looks to me like maybe there’s an overuse of detention by this administration,” Representative Spencer Bachus, a conservative, told Morton, at Tuesday’s House hearing. “If these people are not public safety risks … why are they detained at all?”

In response, Morton admitted, “For many of the long-term residents, frankly, it doesn’t make any sense either as a matter of policy.”

The hearings are part of a flurry of bipartisan activity, both in Washington and nationally, aimed at reforming the United States’ sprawling, creaky immigration system. On Wednesday, Nancy Pelosi, a key Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, expressed optimism that the Congress would approve a comprehensive immigration reform package “before summer”.

Yet Senator Coons, who chaired Wednesday’s Senate hearing, warned that comprehensive reform “cannot be truly comprehensive if it does not address serious current flaws that deny immigrants minimum due process rights that are consistent with America’s values.”

He warned that today’s detention system “looks in many ways like a criminal proceeding”. Unlike in an actual criminal case, however, U.S. law does not offer those brought up on immigration charges the right to an attorney.

Compromised, punitive process

Over the past two decades, the U.S. government has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into stepping up border security and taken an increasingly hard line on immigration issues. The swollen detention system is one unintended corollary of this focus.

Legislation was significantly tightened in 1996, which among other things vastly expanded the number of immigration-related offences considered felonies and which would require automatic deportation. Some of these laws were again strengthened on terrorism worries in the aftermath of the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, but President Barack Obama has surprised many by deporting far more people than his predecessors had.

Rolling back some of these automatic penalties are now a central part of the push for reforms. Under the 1996 law, for instance, Congress largely did away with immigration judges’ discretion in ruling on immigration violations — for instance, taking into account how long a migrant had been in the country, the person’s work experience and the hardship that deportation may impose on his or her family.

“This change made for a far more punitive system,” Muzaffar Chishti, director of the New York office of the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank, told IPS. “Since 1996 especially, we’ve had a much more compromised review process, both at the administrative level and at the official level.”

By 2002, an immigration-specific appeals system was experiencing a massive backlog, prompting officials to allow the appeals process to proceed on a simple up-or-down decision by a single judge, with no explanation for verdicts. This led to a huge increase in the amount of cases appealed to the federal court system, Chishti says, to the point where half of the caseloads in some circuits today are immigration cases.

At Wednesday’s Senate hearing, Ahilan T. Arulanantham, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, noted that immigration defendants were being forced to spend months or even years behind bars awaiting trial. He also noted that new technologies are available today that would cheaply and efficiently allow the accused to remain outside of detention but still ensure that they appear at required court dates.

Commitment to refuge

Meanwhile, some within the U.S. immigration detention system probably shouldn’t even be there in the first place. Critics point in particular to refugees and asylum-seekers.

“The United States has a long history of protecting and providing refuge to victims of persecution,” Sarah Ibrahim, with Human Rights First, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“But what we’ve seen recently is the U.S. faltering in this commitment — for instance, by imposing deadlines that require asylum applications to be filed within a year of entry into the United States. We are also failing these people by keeping those under detention in jails and jail-like facilities without prompt judicial review, and at the behest of an underfunded and overstretched court system.”

In February, Human Rights First and more than 160 other organisations sent a letter to President Obama stating that “immigration reform legislation must include key changes to the U.S. asylum system to better ensure that refugees who seek the protection of the United States are afforded meaningful access to a fair, effective and timely asylum adjudication process.”

© 2013 IPS North America

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Prominent Democrats – including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi – are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last week she’s willing to consider cuts to Social Security as part of a sweeping deficit-reduction package, the so-called ‘Grand Bargain.’. (Photo: File)

This is even before they’ve started budget negotiations with Republicans – who still refuse to raise taxes on the rich, close tax loopholes the rich depend on (such as hedge-fund and private-equity managers’ “carried interest”), increase capital gains taxes on the wealthy, cap their tax deductions, or tax financial transactions.

It’s not the first time Democrats have led with a compromise, but these particular pre-concessions are especially unwise.

For over thirty years Republicans have pitted the middle class against the poor, preying on the frustrations and racial biases of average working people who can’t get ahead no matter how hard they try. In the Republican narrative, government takes from the hard-working middle and gives to the undeserving and dependent needy.

In reality, average working people have been stymied because almost all the economic gains of the last three decades have gone to the very top. The middle has lost bargaining power as unions have shriveled. American politics has been flooded with campaign contributions from corporations and the wealthy, which have used their clout to reduce marginal tax rates, widen loopholes, loosen regulations, gain subsidies, and obtain government bailouts when their bets turn sour.

Now five years after the worst downturn since the Great Depression and the biggest bailout in history, the stock market has recouped its losses and corporate profits constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929. Yet the real median wage continues to fall – wages now claim the lowest share of the economy on record – and inequality is still widening. All the economic gains since the trough of the recession have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans; the bottom 90 percent continue to lose ground.

If there was ever a time for the Democratic Party to champion working Americans and reverse these troubling trends, it is now – forging an alliance between the frustrated middle and the working poor.

What looks like the start of a more buoyant recovery is a sham because the vast majority of Americans have neither the pay nor access to credit that allows them to buy enough to boost the economy. Housing prices and starts are being fueled by investors with easy money rather than would-be home buyers with mortgages. The Fed’s low interest rates have pushed other investors into stocks by default, creating an artificial bull market.

If there was ever a time for the Democratic Party to champion working Americans and reverse these troubling trends, it is now – forging an alliance between the frustrated middle and the working poor. This need not be “class warfare” because a healthy economy is in everyone’s interest. The rich would do far better with a smaller share of a rapidly-growing economy than a ballooning share of one that’s growing at a snail’s pace and a stock market that’s turning into a bubble.

But the modern Democratic Party can’t bring itself to do this. It’s too dependent on the short-term, insular demands of Wall Street, corporate executives, and the wealthy.

It was Bill Clinton, after all, who pushed for repeal of Glass-Steagall, championed the North American Free Trade Act and the World Trade Organization without adequate safeguards for American jobs, and rented out the Lincoln Bedroom to a steady stream of rich executives.

And it was Barack Obama who continued George W. Bush’s Wall Street bailout with no strings attached; pushed a watered-down “Volcker Rule” (still delayed) rather than renew Glass-Steagall; failed to prosecute a single Wall Street executive or bank because, according to his Attorney General, Wall Street is just too big to jail; and permanently enshrined the Bush tax cuts for all but the top 2 percent.

Meanwhile, over the last several decades Democrats have allowed Social Security taxes to grow and its revenue stream to become almost as important a source of overall government funding as income taxes; turned their backs on organized labor and labor-law reforms that would have made it easier to form unions; and then, even as they bailed out Wall Street, neglected the burdens of middle-class homeowners who found themselves underwater and their homes worth less than what they paid for them because of the Street’s excesses.

In fairness, it could have been worse. Clinton did stand up to Gingrich. Obama did get the Affordable Care Act. Congressional Democrats have scored tactical victories against social conservatives and Tea Party radicals. But Democrats haven’t responded in any bold or meaningful way to the increasingly concentrated wealth and power, the steady demise of the middle class, and further impoverishment of the nation’s poor. The Party failed to become a movement to reclaim the economy and our democracy.

And now come their pre-concessions on Social Security and Medicare.

Technically, a “chained CPI” might be justifiable if seniors routinely substitute lower-cost alternatives as prices rise, as most other Americans do. But in reality, seniors pay 20 to 40 percent of their incomes for healthcare, including pharmaceuticals – the prices of which are rising much faster than inflation. So there’s no practical justification for reducing Social Security benefits on the assumption inflation isn’t really eating away at those benefits as much as the current cost-of-living adjustment allows.

Likewise, although a case can be made for reducing the Medicare benefits of higher-income beneficiaries, as a practical matter their savings are almost as vulnerable to rising healthcare costs as are the more modest savings of middle-income retirees. “Means-testing” Medicare also runs the risk of transforming it into a program for the “less fortunate,” which can undermine its political support.

Medicare for all, or even a public option for Medicare, would give the program enough clout to demand health providers move from a fee-for-service system to one that paid instead for healthy outcomes.

In short, Medicare isn’t the problem. The underlying problem is the sky-rocketing costs of health care. Because Medicare’s administrative costs are a fraction of those of private health insurance, Medicare might be part of the solution. Medicare for all, or even a public option for Medicare, would give the program enough clout to demand health providers move from a fee-for-service system to one that paid instead for healthy outcomes.

With healthcare costs under better control, retirees wouldn’t be paying a large and growing portion of their incomes for healthcare – which would alleviate pressure on Social Security. I’m still not convinced a “chained CPI” is necessary, though. A preferable alternative would be to raise the ceiling on the portion of income subject to Social Security taxes (now $113,600).

Besides, Social Security and Medicare are the most popular programs ever devised by the federal government, which is why Republicans hate them so much. If average Americans have trusted the Democratic Party to do one thing it has been to guard these programs from the depredations of the GOP.

Putting these two programs “on the table” is also tantamount to accepting the most insidious and dishonest of all Republican claims: That for too long most Americans have been living beyond their means; that we are rapidly approaching a day of reckoning when we can no longer afford these generous “entitlements;” and that prudence and responsibility dictate that we must now begin to live within our means and cut back these projected expenditures, particularly if we are to have any money left to invest in the young and the disadvantaged.

The truth is the opposite: That for three decades the means of most Americans have been stagnant even though the overall economy has more than doubled in size; that because almost all the gains from growth have gone to the top, most Americans haven’t been able to save enough for retirement or the rising costs of healthcare; and that because of this, Social Security and Medicare are barely adequate as is.

Democrats shouldn’t succumb the lie that the elderly and young are in competition for a portion of a shrinking pie, when in fact the pie is larger than ever. It’s just that those who have the largest and fastest-growing portions refuse to share it.

Paul Ryan’s House Republican budget takes on Medicare, but leaves Social Security alone. Why should Democrats lead the charge on either?

The Republicans are already slashing help for the young and the disadvantaged. Democrats shouldn’t succumb the lie that the elderly and young are in competition for a portion of a shrinking pie, when in fact the pie is larger than ever. It’s just that those who have the largest and fastest-growing portions refuse to share it.

We are the richest nation in the history of the world – richer now than we’ve ever been. But an increasing share of that wealth is held by a smaller and smaller share of the population, who have, in effect, bribed legislators to reduce their taxes and provide loopholes so they pay even less.

The budget deficit “crisis” has been manufactured by them to distract our attention from this overriding fact, and to pit the rest of us against each other for a smaller and smaller share of what remains. Democrats should not conspire.

Needy children should be getting far more help, better pre-school care, better nutrition. Seniors need better healthcare coverage and more Social Security. All Americans need better schools and improved infrastructure.

The richest nation in the history of the world should be able to respond to the legitimate needs of all its citizens.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including his latest best-seller, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future; The Work of Nations; Locked in the Cabinet; Supercapitalism; and his newest, Beyond Outrage. His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.

Food Justice advocates have always argued that trade agreements need to respect and promote human rights, not drive a process of globalization that privileges commercial interests and tramples on public interests. In my new paper on land grabs from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, that position is affirmed.(Photo by Limaoscarjuliet under a Creative Commons license from flickr.com)

“Land grabs” are large-scale purchases or leases of agricultural or forested land on terms that violate the rights of the people who live on or near that land. The problem has commanded enormous public policy and media attention for the last few years. In our paper, IATP sets some context for the land grabs phenomenon. We focus on two forces that have contributed significantly to the problem:

Globalization, or the deregulation of trade and foreign investment laws, which has greatly eased cross-border capital flows; relaxed the limits on foreign land ownership; and, opened markets to agricultural imports.

The food price crisis of 2007-08, which highlighted how fragile food systems in many parts of the world have become, and which shattered the confidence of net-food importing countries in international markets as a source of food security.

The situation is compounded by climate change and the resulting destabilization of weather patterns, which in turn has made agricultural production less predictable. Climate change has made domestic food supplies less certain and exports, too. In 2012, The United States, still a huge source of grains for international markets, lost 40 percent of a record large number of acres planted with corn to drought.

The sense of food insecurity has driven some of the richer net-food importers–countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait–to invest in growing food abroad for import to their domestic markets. That is one driver of land grabs.

The sense that our food systems are fragile and that supplies are scarce, where for decades they have been abundant, is another driver–companies such as South Korea’s Daewoo are looking to source raw materials directly, rather than buying them on the market.

It’s not that investment in agriculture is a bad thing. Indeed, it’s sorely needed. But unless we have the conversation about what kind of investment, in what kind of agriculture, and in whose interests, then the investment does more harm than good.

Land grabs, as the label implies, have been overwhelmingly negative. They are associated with weak institutional capacity (and sometimes corruption) in the recipient country governments, as well as authoritarian governments in the investors’ home countries, making it hard to bring pressure there for better practices. The communities whose land is leased or bought are not adequately protected.

IATP proposes four linked policy shifts to create a more stable and transparent international food system:

1) Reformed trade rules that ensure export restrictions in times of crisis are subject to transparency and predictability requirements and that allow all countries policy space for food security policies;

2) Publicly-managed grain reserves to dampen the effects of supply shocks;

3) Readily accessible funding for the poorest food importers, which would be triggered automatically when prices increase sharply in international markets; and

4) The development of strong national and international laws to govern investment in land, respecting the principles and guidelines set out in the Voluntary Guidelines on Land Tenure. Tanzania’s recently announced limits on how much land foreign and domestic investors can lease is a hopeful example of a national government taking the initiative to get serious about regulation.

The world, and agricultural production along with it, is getting less predictable. In thinking through how to manage demand given our planetary boundaries and the imperative of social justice, it’s clear that the scale and pace of land investment now underway is a threat to food security and a threat to sane and just outcomes for our planet and its people. Let’s change the rules that make land grabs possible.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Sophia Murphy is a senior adviser at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy where her work focuses on agricultural trade rules, U.S. trade and agriculture policy, and the interests of developing countries in the multilateral trade system.

Those who hoped that Barack Obama would be arriving in Israel to bang Israeli and Palestinian heads together, after four years of impasse in the peace process, will be sorely disappointed.US President Barack Obama, left, and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netayahu laugh during a welcoming ceremony upon Obama’s arrival at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv, Israel, Wednesday, March 20. (Photo: AP)

The US president’s trip this week may be historic — the first of his presidency to Israel and the Palestinian territories — but he did everything possible beforehand to lower expectations.

At the weekend, Arab-American leaders revealed that Obama had made it clear he would not present a peace plan, because Israel has indicated it is not interested in an agreement with the Palestinians.

Any lingering doubts about Israel’s intentions were removed by the announcement of a new cabinet, hurriedly sworn in before the president’s visit. This government makes Benjamin Netanyahu’s last one, itself widely considered the most hardline in Israel’s history, look almost moderate.

Ynet, Israel’s popular news website, reported that settler leaders hailed this as their “wet dream” cabinet. Zahava Gal-On, leader of the opposition Meretz party, concurred, observing that it would “do a lot for the settlers and not much at all for the rest of Israeli society”.

The settlers’ dedicated party, Jewish Home, has been awarded three key ministries — trade and industry, Jerusalem, and housing — as well as control of the parliamentary finance committee, that will ensure that the settlements flourish during this government’s term.

There is no chance Jewish Home will agree to a settlement freeze similar to the one Obama insisted on in his first term. Rather, the party will accelerate both house-building and industrial development over the Green Line, to make the settlements even more attractive places to live.

Uzi Landau, of Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right Yisraeli Beiteinu party, has the tourism portfolio and can be relied on to direct funds to the West Bank’s many Biblical sites, to encourage Israelis and tourists to visit.

The new defence minister, who oversees the occupation and is the only official in a practical position to obstruct this settler free-for-all, is Likud’s Moshe Yaalon, a former military chief of staff known for his ardent support of the settlements.

True, Yair Lapid’s large centrist party Yesh Atid is represented too. But its influence on diplomacy will be muted, because its five ministers will handle chiefly domestic issues such as welfare, health and science.

The one exception, Shai Piron, the new education minister, is a settler rabbi who can be expected to expand the existing programme of school trips to the settlements, continuing the settlers’ successful efforts to integrate themselves into the mainstream.

Far from preparing to make concessions to the US president, Netanyahu has all but declared his backing for Jewish Home’s plan to annex large parts of the West Bank.

The only minister with any professed interest in diplomatic talks, and that mostly driven by her self-serving efforts to stay popular with the White House, is Tzipi Livni. She is well aware that opportunities for negotiations are extremely limited: the peace process received just one perfunctory mention in the coalition agreement.

Obama, apparently only too aware he is facing an Israeli government even more intransigent than the last one, has chosen to avoid addressing the Knesset. Instead he will direct his speech to a more receptive audience of Israeli students, in what US officials have termed a “charm offensive”.

We can expect grand words, a few meagre promises and total inaction on the occupation.

In a sign of quite how loath the White House is to tackle the settlements issue again, its representatives at the United Nations refused on Monday to take part in a Human Rights Council debate that described the settlements as a form of “creeping annexation” of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Obama’s hands-off approach will satisfy his constituency at home. A poll for ABC-TV showed this week that most Americans support Israel over the Palestinians — 55 per cent to 9 per cent. An even larger majority, 70 per cent, think the US should leave the two sides to settle their future for themselves.

Ordinary Israelis, the US president’s target audience, are none too keen on his getting involved either. Recent survey data show that 53 percent think Obama will fail to protect Israel’s interests, and 80 per cent believe he will not bring progress with the Palestinians over the next four years. The mood is one of indifference rather than anticipation.

These are all good reasons why neither Obama nor Netanyahu will be much focused on the Palestinian issue over the three-day visit. As analyst Daniel Levy observed: “Obama is coming first and foremost to make a statement about the US-Israel bond, not the illegal occupation.”

That is also how it looks to most Palestinians, who have grown increasingly exasperated by US obstructionism. US officials who went to Bethlehem in preparation for Obama’s visit on Friday found themselves caught up in anti-Obama demonstrations. More followed in Ramallah on Wednesday.

Other Palestinians protested his visit by establishing a new tent community on occupied Palestinian land next to Jerusalem. Several previous such encampments have been hastily demolished by Israeli soldiers.

The organisers hope to highlight US hypocrisy in backing Israel’s occupation: Jewish settlers are allowed to build with official state backing on Palestinian land in violation of international law, while Palestinians are barred from developing their own territory in what is now considered by most of the world as the Palestinian state.

The unspoken message of Obama’s visit is that the Netanyahu government is free to pursue its hardline agenda with little danger of anything more than symbolic protest from Washington.

The new Israeli cabinet lost no time setting out its legislative priorities. The first bill announced is a “basic law” to change the state’s official definition, so that its “Jewish” aspects trump the “democratic” elements, a move the Haaretz newspaper termed “insane”.

Among the main provisions is one to restrict state funding to new Jewish communities only. This points to a cynical solution Netanyahu may adopt to placate the simmering social protest movement in Tel Aviv, which has been demanding above all more affordable housing.

By freeing up even more cheap land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, he can expand the settlements, further eat away at Palestinian territory, silence the protests, and wrong-foot the opposition. All he needs is Obama’s blessing.

Tomas Young. (Photo by Claudia Cuellar)Tomas Young was in the fifth day of his first deployment to Iraq when he was struck by a sniper’s bullet in Baghdad’s Sadr City. The single bullet paralyzed him from the chest down, and changed his life forever. Now, nine years later, at the age of 33, Tomas has decided to end his life. He announced recently that he will soon stop his nourishment, which comes in the form of liquid through a feeding tube.

Tomas was the subject of the award-winning documentary “Body of War,” made by legendary TV talk-show host Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro. The 2007 film follows Tomas’ rehabilitation, struggles with his injuries and his political awakening to become one of the most prominent anti-war U.S. veterans of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He was first moved to action by the efforts of Cindy Sheehan to speak with President George W. Bush while he was on vacation at his so-called ranch in Crawford, Texas. Sheehan’s son, Casey, was killed in Baghdad, on the same day that Tomas was shot. She wanted to ask Pres. Bush, “For what noble cause did my son die?”

I asked Tomas if anything would change his mind about his decision to end his life. “No,” he said, adding that if he were not in such intense, constant pain, then he would not be taking this course. “We wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he said.

“I fought as hard as I could to keep young men and women away from military service. I fought as hard as I could to keep another me from coming back to Iraq. That is what I want to be remembered for.”

This week, Tomas released a letter titled “The Last Letter: A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran.”

In it, Tomas wrote, “You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans–my fellow veterans–whose future you stole.”

Phil Donahue has stayed in touch with Tomas for years since making “Body of War.” Donahue told me the making of the film was a “spiritual experience … a chapter of our lives.” He says he understands Tomas’ decision: “Four years after being shot in Sadr City, he sustained a pulmonary embolism. So he struggles now to speak, although you can understand him. He has difficulty grasping silverware, his opposable thumbs are at a serious deficit … so he has to be fed. When he and his wife, Claudia, have gone out to dinner, she would look for a corner of the restaurant, so when she fed him, they wouldn’t be stared at. He now has pressure sores, with exposed bone. He recently had a colostomy, so he has a bag on the side of his body. He is fed through a tube, and every other commercial he sees on television is about food. It is beyond awful what Tomas has sustained. He now lies immobile, in a dark bedroom in Kansas City, dutifully cared for by his wife, Claudia, who has been with him for five years.”

He added: “Throughout this whole ordeal, I have been with him often enough to know, he wanted to live. That is what makes it extra sad. He wanted to live. He has fought back against every setback, from the inadequate treatment at the Veterans Administration, to his own PTSD. Now the situation is so dire, that no one who is close to him can claim to not understand: He has given up.”

Donahue reflected: “When I look down on this young man, all I can think of is President Bush saying, ‘Bring ‘em on.’ There is almost no remorse. Everybody’s hiding. Richard Perle doesn’t get around much anymore. Cheney is speaking for six-figure fees. I don’t know where Wolfowitz is. Bush is behind a well-secured home.”

Tomas recently appeared via video call from his home in Kansas City, Mo., before a group in Ridgefield, Conn., where Phil Donahue screened “Body of War” and asked Tomas questions. It was at this February event that Tomas publicly announced his intention to die. When asked how he wants to be remembered, Tomas Young replied: “That I fought as hard as I could to keep young men and women away from military service. I fought as hard as I could to keep another me from coming back to Iraq. That is what I want to be remembered for.”

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

© 2013 Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 1,100 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

Amid US President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel, Palestinian activists have set up a protest camp on a controversial site near al-Quds (Jerusalem) where the Israeli regime intends to build thousands of illegal settler homes.

Palestinian protesters pitched some 15 tents in E1 outside al-Quds on Wednesday to express their discontent with Obama’s visit to hold talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The demonstrators said Obama was not doing enough to stop the Israeli regime’s illegal settlement activities.

Abdullah Abu Rahma, one of the protest organizers, said the move is to send a “message to Obama to tell him: Obama – enough with bias and support for Israel.”

“This is our land and we are opposed to settlements and occupation which are backed by the US administration,” he added.

Mustafa Barghouthi, a senior Palestinian politician, also said, “We are here to send a message to President Obama, our struggle, our non-violent peaceful resistance will continue until we are free.”

The US president is set to arrive in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah for talks with acting Palestinian Authority Chief Mahmoud Abbas later on Thursday.

Obama will only spend a few hours in Ramallah, before heading to al-Quds to deliver a speech.

Ahead of Obama’s first visit to Israel as president, Palestinians held a a similar demonstration in the occupied West Bank and defaced banners bearing Obama’s image.

E1 is a sensitive zone between East al-Quds and the West Bank and its expansion has been on Israel’s agenda since the 1990s.

More than half a million Israelis live in illegal settlements built since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds in 1967.

The Israeli settlements are considered illegal by much of the international community. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the settlement construction is part of Tel Aviv’s policy and will not stop.

MKA/HMV

British Chancellor George Osborne’s policies on personal tax allowance will do almost nothing for poor children in the country who are going to be hit by the government’s squeeze on tax credits and benefits, a charity warns.

Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) warned that the 2013 budget, delivered by Osborne yesterday, has failed to change the fact that 600,000 more children will be dragged into poverty during the coalition’s time in office.

“The chancellor described it as a budget for families, with children, looking to work hard and aspiring to get on,” said Alison Garnham, chief executive of the charity group.

“But most low-income families have very few reasons to be cheerful and plenty to be fearful.”

She also argued that the Chancellor’s plans for raising personal tax allowance, from £8,105 to £9,440 next month and to £10,000 from April 2014 will do almost nothing for the parents on the lowest incomes.

“Some don’t pay tax anyway, while others keep just 15 percent in every extra £1 because their in-work benefits like housing benefit get withdrawn,” she said.

Earlier in March, Britain’s largest unions body the Trades Unions Congress (TUC) announced that over half a million more British children will be pushed “below the breadline” in the next two years as a result of the government’s welfare cuts, tax rises and wage freezes.

MOS/HE

At least three people in Myanmar have been killed with five wounded as extremist Buddhists set fire to several mosques in the city of Meiktila.

Clashes erupted late on Wednesday between extremist Buddhists and Muslim Rohingyas, according to a report issued by the Myanmar Police Force.

Police imposed an overnight curfew to control the situation, saying that at least three mosques had been destroyed.

“The situation is unpredictable,” said a local man, adding, “I can’t guess what will happen next. The violence could get worse.”

The unrest comes amid heightened tensions between the two sides which have left at least 180 people dead and more than a 100,000 Muslims displaced since June 2012.

On October 21, 2012, at least 11 Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar were killed after extremist Buddhists set fire to their houses in two Muslim villages in the city of Sittwe in the western Rakhine state.

The silence of the human rights organizations toward abuses against the Rohingya Muslims has emboldened the extremist Buddhists and Myanmar’s government forces.

The Buddhist-majority government of Myanmar refuses to recognize Rohingyas and has classified them as illegal migrants, even though the Rohingyas are said to be Muslim descendants of Persian, Turkish, Bengali, and Pathan origin, who migrated to Myanmar as early as the 8th century.

GMA/HMV/SS

At least 12 people have been killed and 20 others wounded in a bomb attack at a refugee camp in Pakistan’s northern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

GMA/SS

Leading a high-ranking delegation, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has departed Tehran for Turkmenistan’s capital of Ashgabat for an official visit.

President Ahmadinejad left Tehran Thursday morning for a one-day visit to Iran’s northeastern neighbor at the invitation of his Turkmen counterpart Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow to participate in the International Nowruz Festival, which will be held with the theme of peace and humanity.

Nowruz, the first day of spring, marks the New Year for a number of regional countries, including Iran and Turkmenistan.

During his visit, the Iranian president further plans to meet the leaders of some regional and neighboring countries that will also partake in the conference in Ashgabat to discuss expanding bilateral ties and cooperation.

In a press briefing before his departure, the president described Nowruz as a divine celebration, saying that “culture-rich Iran” has celebrated the occasion for thousands of years and this “celebration of humaneness” serves as a reminder of monotheism, love, justice, beauty and truth to human beings.

Iran’s chief executive is accompanied in the trip by Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi; Presidential Advisor Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, who also chairs the secretariat of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM); and Vice President for Executive Affairs Hamid Baqaie.

The international Nowruz celebration was held in Tajikistan’s capital of Dushanbe last year and in Tehran a year before that.

Leaders and high-ranking representatives of 10 countries, including the Islamic Republic, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan are due to participate in this year’s Nowruz event in Ashgabat.

The people of Turkmenistan have been celebrating Nowruz on the first two days of spring (March 21 and 22) since 1992.

MFB/HMV/SS

Russia has accused Britain, France, and the United States of trying to torpedo an urgent investigation into the alleged use of chemical weapons by armed insurgents in Syria.

Russia condemned Britain and France for delaying a potential UN probe into the alleged use of chemical weapons by militants in the Arab country at the United Nations (UN) Security Council on Wednesday, March 20.

Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin told the reporters that Britain and France wanted to focus on two alleged chemical weapons attacks rather than the one in Aleppo, adding that the countries were engaged in unnecessary “delaying tactics”.

“Instead of launching those propaganda balloons I think that it’s much better to get our focus right and I hope this is what the secretary general is doing,” Churkin said.

Syria asked the United Nations on Wednesday to order an “independent” investigation into the use of chemical weapons by foreign-backed militants in the northwestern city of Aleppo which killed at least 25 people.

The Arab country has been experiencing unrest since March 2011. Many people, including large numbers of Syrian army and security personnel, have been killed in the violence.

MOS/HE

While one night in Bangkok is enough for most, the following images (via Reuters) taken over nine days in Tiananmen Square, Beijing should highlight just how appalling the smog situation is in that country. As we discussed recently, this is more than a major problem for health, the reforms that the government proclaims means significant shifts in the economy (to say nothing of the increasing appeals for clean water and purchased clean air).

Click image for interactive version at Reuters…

Day 1 – March 6th

Day 2 – March 7th

Day 3 – March 8th

Day 4 – Macrh 9th

Day 5 – March 10th

Day 6 – March 11th (misdated)

Day 7 – March 12th

Day 8 – March 13th

Day 9 – March 14th

Two out of nine ain’t bad!

Source: Reuters

Downloading music illegally does not harm the music industry — in some cases it even helps it — according to a new study by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.

The results have been published in a paper entitled ‘Digital Music Consumption on the Internet: Evidence from Clickstream Data’, which can be found online. The study took a sample of some 16,000 Europeans and had as its main objective to find a link between music piracy and subsequent visits to legal digital music stores. It concludes that piracy can actually provide a boost to music revenues online, irrespective of the genre, and that it should not be viewed as a pressing issue by the industry at all.

“It seems that the majority of the music that is consumed illegally by the individuals in our sample would not have been purchased if illegal downloading websites were not available to them”, according researchers at The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, which is part of the EC Joint Research Centre.

There has been a widely held belief that free and legal streaming websites were another part of the problem, but they were also in the scope of the study and likewise were found not to have a detrimental effect on online music purchasing habits. “The complementary effect of online streaming is found to be somewhat larger, suggesting a stimulating effect of this activity on the sales of digital music”, researchers concluded.

Those involved conducted the stuffy by first determining a person’s interest in music. It was then a case of finding a spike in online purchases and whether it followed a visit to a pirate website. The results showed a positive link. The scientists claim that “if this estimate is given a causal interpretation, it means that clicks on legal purchase websites would have been 2 percent lower in the absence of illegal downloading websites.”

Compared to those 2 per cent, a much larger 7 per cent increase was found when correlating visits to legal streaming services with subsequent visits to music purchasing websites and stores. Although, admittedly, there can be a multitude of other factors affecting consumer behavior, the researchers emphasize the fact that at least no negative effects were witnessed on music revenues in the course of the study. In fact, in Europe the relationship between piracy and music sales has only been a positive one.

Hammering the point home, the researchers concluded that “taken at face value, our findings indicate that digital music piracy does not displace legal music purchases in digital format. This means that although there is trespassing of private property rights, there is unlikely to be much harm done on digital music revenues”.

Although the researchers stated that they don’t wish to involve themselves in a policy discussion, at least now, the growing number of people opposed to increased government surveillance will have some argument to fall back on, while, predictably, the anti-piracy lobby is likely to feel threatened.

And this is already evident in the backlash from the international music industry body, the IFPI, who are quite critical of the study. A statement of theirs points to the fact that the body conducting the research was heavily relying on “conclusions based on approximations and estimates of music activity” and that transactions aren’t studied in detail, providing a very limited scope of consumer behavior.

When someone tells the Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke CFA, Series 7 and 63, certified, that “the stock market has been hitting all time highs, it’s recovered all of its losses from the financial crisis” and then proceeds to ask, even jokingly, during the Q&A of the most important monetary policy conference in the world, if he “still has time to get in,” you know it has all become, quite literally, one big joke.

The joke gets even funnier when the abovementioned chief stock market strategist of the Fed responds: “we are not targeting asset prices“, in direct refutation of his numerous prior statements which confirm the Fed is doing precisely this, and that he is not “measuring success in terms of the stock market” or that he does not see “anything that is out of line with historical patterns“, then you know the joke’s on you. Because this exchange, joke or not, is most comparable to this hypothetical one from 2007: “Mr Chairman, Bernie Madoff asset management is up 100% so far this year. Is there still time to get in?“

Fast forward to 29:48 in the clip below

HSBC’s China Flash PMI just printed above expectations at 51.7, disappointing those hoping for more stimulus but just Goldilocks enough to satisfy the world that China is firing on all cylinders… But, and there’s always a but, the following chart suggests that the diffusion-driven survey-based PMI data may be just a little different from the hard data on the ground. Of course, everything could have magically turned around in the last 3 weeks (aside from Copper demand and PBoC repo/rev. repo that is). For now, we tip our hat to the well planned PMI print as indicative that all is well in the smog-ridden pig-barren nation but scratch our chin at just what is powering all this growthiness…

HSBC’s Flash PMI upticked more than expected but remains in that neverland zone…

and here are the stunning sub-indices showing the ‘surges’ – hhmm – employment? pricing? even New Export Orders are in ‘fence-sitting’ mode…

But when judged against the history of a relatively tight relationship to Electricity production… is it any wonder we call it the WTF Chart of the Day…

It seems we are about to witness a jump from -13% YoY decline (as we discussed here the largest ever) to a +10% YoY rise in the span of just one month…

Charts: Bloomberg

February marks the first three-months of consecutive declines in restaurant sales in almost three years as Bloomberg reports consumers caught in “an emotional moment” spooked by higher payroll taxes, surging healthcare premia, and spiking energy costs. “February was pretty ugly” for many chains after January delivered an initial blow.”

Malcolm Knapp notes that “it’s important to keep in mind that companies also are facing unusually tough comparable sales because of favorable weather in 2012,” so the result is an industry that’s been “a lot softer so far this year.”

It will hardly be a surprise to ZH readers but it appears that gas prices are key as Knapp notes, “that one-week spike was a killer; it destroyed sales in the first week of February,” and has overall put “meaningful pressure on the discretionary purchasing power,” of restaurants’ (like Darden) customers.

“People are acting fearfully, or you could almost say rationally in a way,” because it’s not surprising they change their dining habits when they feel less confident as once again it’s the middle class that appears under pressure. Casual dining is “definitely being squeezed” because “it’s not food on-the-go and it’s not high-end food for people trying to treat themselves.”

Via Bloomberg,

Restaurants are reeling from their worst three months since 2010, as American diners spooked by higher payroll taxes cut back on eating out.

Sales at casual-dining establishments fell 5.4 percent last month, after declining 0.6 percent in January and 1.6 percent in December, according to the Knapp-Track Index of monthly restaurant sales. This was the first three months of consecutive declines in almost three years, with consumers caught in a “very emotional moment,” said Malcolm Knapp, a New York-based consultant who created the index and has monitored the industry since 1970.

“February was pretty ugly” for many chains — and probably will be the worst month of the year — after January delivered an “initial blow” while Americans grappled with increased payroll taxes and health-care premiums, rising gasoline prices and budget debates in Washington, Knapp said. “It’s important to keep in mind that companies also are facing unusually tough comparable sales because of favorable weather in 2012,” so the result is an industry that’s been “a lot softer so far this year.”

…

U.S. paychecks have shrunk this year after Congress and President Barack Obama let the tax that funds Social Security benefits revert to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent. Meanwhile, the average price of a gallon of regular unleaded has risen about 12 percent since Dec. 31, to $3.69, including a one-week jump of 17 cents between Jan. 27 and Feb. 3, based on data from Heathrow, Florida-based AAA, the largest U.S. motoring organization.

“That one-week spike was a killer; it destroyed sales in the first week of February,” Knapp said.

All this has “put meaningful pressure on the discretionary purchasing power” of Darden’s customers, causing the company to pre-announce a decline in same-restaurant sales…

…

Consumers and industry contacts in surveys conducted this month by RBC Capital Markets said higher payroll taxes have been the biggest impediment to sales this year, hurting business for about 63 percent of companies, up from 36 percent last month. Meanwhile, 54 percent of Americans said they already cut back on dining out or intend to do so, the No. 1 reduced expense, followed by clothing and vacations.

“People are acting fearfully, or you could almost say rationally in a way,” because it’s not surprising they change their dining habits when they feel less confident, said Larry Miller, an analyst in Atlanta with RBC. The difference of five guests a day could move a restaurant’s traffic counts by 1 percentage point because the business is “very sensitive to marginal changes.”

…

Casual dining is “definitely being squeezed” because “it’s not food on-the-go and it’s not high-end food for people trying to treat themselves,” said Matthew Beesley…

“It seems to me Darden is caught between those two buckets of expenditures,” Beesley said. A sit-down meal away from home is “extremely discretionary,” while there’s also an excess of supply.

…

Although casual-dining sales took the biggest hit in February — down 4.9 percent — the weakness was broader, according to “channel checks” conducted by RBC. …

The environment still is “very, very tough” for Yum! Brands, operator of Taco Bell and KFC, said Chief Executive Officer David Novak. The Louisville, Kentucky-based company is bracing for “a tentative consumer, a tentative economy,” which probably will lead to a difficult year, …

…

In addition, Americans aren’t cutting back equally on where they eat out. Sales have varied based on the type of food offered, with steakhouses showing more strength, Miller and Knapp agreed.

…

March 20, 2013  |  

A backlash against energy drinks is afoot. 

On Long Island, Suffolk County passed three new bills “aimed at keeping energy drinks out of the hands of minors, citing health concerns, over objections of beverage industry lobbyists who called it unfair,” reported Long Island Press. The bills haven’t been signed yet by the county executive.  

There is concern over the consumption of caffeine by kids, which has led many people to speak out, something that hasn’t made energy drink companies too happy. One of those, Monster Beverage, has threatened to sue nutritionist Deborah Kennedy who publishes a newsletter sent to elementary school children. The New York Times reports that the company, “objected to several statements in the newsletter, Build Healthy Kids, including one that said children had died from energy drinks and should ‘never drink’ them.”

Kennedy is not alone in her concern. Bloomberg reported that 18 doctors — including those from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the University of Maryland School of Public Health– sent a letter to the FDA commissioner saying that energy drinks should not be allowed to have more caffeine than sodas and the caffeine content should be listed on labels.

Bloomberg reports: 

Products including Monster Beverage Corp. (MNST)’s signature energy drink and Living Essentials LLC’s 5-Hour Energy have been linked to reports of deaths, increased heart rate and abdominal pain, though no direct causation has been proven by regulators. The FDA, which didn’t immediately respond to the letter, said in November it was investigating whether energy drinks are dangerous and may need more regulation. …

Caffeine in energy drinks often ranges from 160 milligrams to 500 milligrams a serving, the FDA has said. Soda typically can have as many as 71 milligrams of caffeine per 12 ounces and be considered safe by the FDA.

Writing for the military publication Stars and Stripes, Pieter Cohen, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Erin Edgar, a command surgeon for U.S. Central Command, expressed concern over energy drinks on military bases. They write:

So where might energy drinks go wrong? Caffeine, like any drug, has an upper limit to its efficacy and safety. When it comes to energy drinks, there’s no limit to the amount of caffeine that can be added, nor a requirement that the amount be disclosed. At high doses, caffeine can play havoc on the nervous system: nervous tremors, racing hearts and deteriorating cognitive performance.

Energy drinks sent 20,783 civilian men, women and children to hospital emergency rooms in 2011, an increase of 37 percent from 2010, according to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study published this year. Civilians may only require rest and intravenous fluids to recover from caffeine overdoses. But the consequences for our troops in combat, 45 percent of whom use energy drinks daily (according to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study), may be far more serious.

So what do they propose?

Ideally, the loopholes in the law should be closed to limit the amount of caffeine that can be added to any food or supplement, and to ensure that the amount of added caffeine is clearly indicated on the label. If these changes are made, our troops will be able to make informed decisions for themselves about the merit and safety of consuming energy drinks and sports supplements. 

No regulation is forthcoming, but two energy drink companies, Monster and Rockstar, have reclassified their products from “dietary supplement” to “beverage.” There is one piece of good news along with that: the New York Times reports that, “Monster Beverage’s new cans will also disclose caffeine content for the first time.”

Something extreme is happening in Europe. Since Sunday, Bloomberg Businessweek reports a trio of Bitcoin apps have soared up Spain’s download charts, coinciding with news that cash-strapped Cyprus was planning to raid domestic savings accounts to pay off a $13 billion bailout tab. “This is an entirely predictable and rational outcome for what’s happening in Cyprus,” says ConvergEx’s Nick Colas. “If you want to get a good sense of the stress European savers are feeling, just watch Bitcoin prices.”

The value of the virtual currency has soared almost 30 percent in the last two days. “One hundred percent of that is due to Cyprus,” says Colas. “It means the Europeans are getting involved.” As German economist Peter Bofinger warned in an interview with Spiegel Online: “European citizens must now fear for their money.”

The same apps download data, however, showed that Italians aren’t ready to abandon commercial banking, remarkable as many Italians still recall that black day in 1992 when they woke up to a levy on their savings accounts to prop up the nation’s teetering finances.

The EUR price for a Bitcoin has jumped from around EUR37 to over EUR50 in the last two days as reality hits… and look at the volume…

Nassim Taleb (On Reddit) – via Mike Krieger (@LibertyBlitz):

“Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without government, something necessary and imperative.”

Chart: Bitcoincharts

It appears Abe and his henchmen had better stop doing things and say something as the huge devaluation of the JPY so far is NOT having the effect he had hoped for. Exports dropped 2.9% – more than expected – and while imports rose less than expected, the currency drop still meant an 11.9% surge in imports. All this means is that on a seasonally-adjusted basis, the Japanese Trade Balance just hit a new all-time record low (negative). USDJPY is strengthening on the news… it seems that well-placed non-news headline at 2am Japan time is well worth it now to cover this debacle… We assume the lesson is – just wait, “if we devalue, they will come.”

and the reaction…

Professor Wolff is joined by Victor Wallis to discuss ecology and economics comparing capitalist and socialist responses to environmental crisis. Part 2 deals with Keynesian economics as a theory that clashes with both the mainstream economics (“neoclassical”) that celebrates private capitalism and with critical theories such as Marxian economics that are opposed to capitalism.

On Economic Update with Professor Richard Wolff, Wolff and guests will discuss the current state of the economy, both locally and globally in relation to the economic crisis.

Wolff will focus on wages, jobs, taxes, and debts – and on interest rates, prices, and profits. We aim to explain why certain economic changes are happening and other changes get postponed or blocked and we will explore alternative ways to organize enterprises, markets, and government policies. Economic Update is a weekly show for people who want to understand and change not only their own financial situation but also the larger economy we all depend on.

To listen in live on Saturdays at noon, visit WBAI’s Live Stream

Economic Update is in partnership with Truthout.org

Your radio station needs Economic Update! If you are a radio station, check this out. If you want to hear Economic Update on your favorite local station, send them this.

Comedian Jim Davidson has been re-arrested over fresh allegations of sexual offences, it has emerged.

The 59-year-old answered bail today after he was held in January by detectives working on Operation Yewtree, the national investigation prompted by the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said a 59-year-old man had been “further arrested on suspicion of sexual offences in connection with further allegations made to Operation Yewtree”.

Davidson’s solicitor said tonight that the comedian “vigorously denies” the allegations made against him.

More follows…

From the cover pages of The Bank of Cyprus 2011 Annual Report…

or is this the view pre-belly flop?

And then there is this… All the gleaming shining awards for The Bank Of Cyprus…

(h/t Alex Gloy @Gloeschi)

By William Schomberg and David Milliken

LONDON (Reuters) – Chancellor George Osborne turned to the Bank of England on Wednesday to do more to help spur the country’s stagnant economy as he announced a halving of this year’s growth forecast.

In an annual budget statement peppered with cat-calls from opposition politicians, Osborne said the central bank’s inflation target would remain at 2 percent a year – but that that was not enough.

“As we’ve seen over the last five years, low and stable inflation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for prosperity,” he told parliament.

Osborne said the country’s economy was now expected to grow only 0.6 percent this year, half the rate predicted only three months ago, but he vowed to stick the course on austerity.

“It is taking longer than anyone hoped, but we must hold to the right track” he said.

Osborne said he was publishing a review of the Bank of England’s mandate and said the central bank might need to use “unconventional monetary policy instruments” and give a clearer idea of what it will do in the future.

Such instruments in the past have included printing money to buy assets as a way of pumping cash into the moribund economy.

“The new remit explicitly tasks the MPC (Monetary Policy Committee) with setting out clearly the tradeoffs it has made in deciding how long it will be before inflation returns to target,” he told parliament.

Such a change might make the Bank operate in a way similar to the U.S. Federal Reserve which has given increasingly explicit signs about how long it will continue to provide support to the U.S. economy.

Sterling briefly fell against the dollar and was weaker against the euro. British bond, or gilt, futures pared losses.

The Bank moves coincide with the arrival in July of a new governor of the Bank, Mark Carney, currently the head of the Bank of Canada. Carney has previously said he wanted a debate on the role of the Bank.

Osborne said Carney and the central bank’s current governor Mervyn King both agreed with the new remit which is set by the Chancellor each year.

A further review of the mandate would be carried out before the end of 2019.

CRAWLING

Shortly before Osborne began speaking in parliament, some details of his market-sensitive statement were leaked on the Internet, prompting goading by opposition leader Ed Miliband.

The Labour opposition argues that the Conservative-led government has stuck too long to austerity, failing to provide needed growth.

Forecasts by Britain’s budget watchdog showed growth was expected to pick up to 1.8 percent in 2014, after the 0.6 percent this year, Osborne said.

That was also lower than the watchdog’s December forecast but Osborne said UK growth was expected to be stronger than in France and Germany in 2013 and next year, Osborne said.

He said Britain remained on track to eliminate its underlying budget deficit within five years. But a secondary target of stopping the rise of debt as a share of GDP would take a year longer than forecast in December, when it was also pushed back by a year.

Despite a slump in opinion polls, Osborne and Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron have stuck to their push to fix Britain’s budget deficit and rising public debt, hoping for a recovery before they fight for re-election in two years time.

Britain’s economy may be back in a recession again, while rising inflation is hurting households.

Osborne announced several tax changes including a cut in corporation tax to 20 percent in 2015 and a cut in employment taxes for businesses.

Individuals would be able to pay no income tax on their first 10,000 pounds of income from 2014, a year earlier than previously expected.

(This story corrects name of opposition leader in 14th paragraph)

(Additional reporting by UK bureau; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

The gross slashing of funds for public universities has caused a “surge” in tuition prices, disproportionately impacting low-income students says a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

States are spending an average of 28 percent less this year on public university funding than they did in 2008–a decrease of $2,353 per student. According to CBPP, thirty-six states cut funding by over 20 percent and eleven slashed their budgets by more than one-third. Arizona and New Hampshire have cut their higher education spending in half.

To compensate for this massive gap in funding, the burden of cost has shifted to students in the form of surging tuition which, at four-year public colleges, has grown 27 percent since the 2007-08 year.

“These numbers are a vivid demonstration of why Washington’s post-recession path has been so disastrous,” said the Atlantic’s Jordan Weissman in response to the report.

According to the report:

Average annual tuition at four-year public colleges has grown by $1,850, or 27 percent, since the 2007-08 school year when adjusted for inflation. In seven states – Arizona, California, Florida, Washington, Georgia, Hawaii, and Alabama – average tuition has increased by more than 50 percent. In Arizona and California, tuition has risen by more than 70 percent.

“It’s very clear that rising costs dissuade students from attending college, particularly students from low-income families,” said CBPP policy analyst Phil Oliff on a call with reporters. Citing a 1995 study by Harvard University researcher Thomas Kane, CBPP notes that states that had the largest tuition increases during the 1980’s and early 1990’s “saw the greatest widening of the gaps in enrollment between high- and low-income youth.”

Compounding these rising costs, the rate of growth for public university tuition has outpaced the growth in median household income nearly 159 to 3 percent between 1991 and 2011, leaving students and families beholden to mounting levels of debt to cover the exploding cost of schools.

According to CBPP:

Between the 2007-08 and the 2010-11 school years, the amount of debt incurred by the average bachelor’s degree recipient at a public four-year institution grew from $11,800 to $13,600 (in 2011 dollars), an inflation adjusted increase of $1,800, or 15 percent. The average level of debt incurred had grown from $11,100 to $11,800, an increase of $700, or about 6 percent, over the previous eight years.

“We’re going to be living with the effects of these cuts for a long time,” added Weissman. “We’ll see them in the form of higher student loan bills and students who can’t graduate on time, because the classes they needed filled up too quickly.”

The report concludes that these disturbing figures will have widespread impacts on an already weak national education system and consequently, states’ future economic success. “At the very least,” the authors write, “states must avoid shortsighted tax cuts, which would make it much harder for them to invest in higher education, strengthen the skills of their workforce, and compete for the jobs of the future.”

_____________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

The gross slashing of funds for public universities has caused a “surge” in tuition prices, disproportionately impacting low-income students says a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

States are spending an average of 28 percent less this year on public university funding than they did in 2008–a decrease of $2,353 per student. According to CBPP, thirty-six states cut funding by over 20 percent and eleven slashed their budgets by more than one-third. Arizona and New Hampshire have cut their higher education spending in half.

To compensate for this massive gap in funding, the burden of cost has shifted to students in the form of surging tuition which, at four-year public colleges, has grown 27 percent since the 2007-08 year.

“These numbers are a vivid demonstration of why Washington’s post-recession path has been so disastrous,” said the Atlantic’s Jordan Weissman in response to the report.

According to the report:

Average annual tuition at four-year public colleges has grown by $1,850, or 27 percent, since the 2007-08 school year when adjusted for inflation. In seven states – Arizona, California, Florida, Washington, Georgia, Hawaii, and Alabama – average tuition has increased by more than 50 percent. In Arizona and California, tuition has risen by more than 70 percent.

“It’s very clear that rising costs dissuade students from attending college, particularly students from low-income families,” said CBPP policy analyst Phil Oliff on a call with reporters. Citing a 1995 study by Harvard University researcher Thomas Kane, CBPP notes that states that had the largest tuition increases during the 1980’s and early 1990’s “saw the greatest widening of the gaps in enrollment between high- and low-income youth.”

Compounding these rising costs, the rate of growth for public university tuition has outpaced the growth in median household income nearly 159 to 3 percent between 1991 and 2011, leaving students and families beholden to mounting levels of debt to cover the exploding cost of schools.

According to CBPP:

Between the 2007-08 and the 2010-11 school years, the amount of debt incurred by the average bachelor’s degree recipient at a public four-year institution grew from $11,800 to $13,600 (in 2011 dollars), an inflation adjusted increase of $1,800, or 15 percent. The average level of debt incurred had grown from $11,100 to $11,800, an increase of $700, or about 6 percent, over the previous eight years.

“We’re going to be living with the effects of these cuts for a long time,” added Weissman. “We’ll see them in the form of higher student loan bills and students who can’t graduate on time, because the classes they needed filled up too quickly.”

The report concludes that these disturbing figures will have widespread impacts on an already weak national education system and consequently, states’ future economic success. “At the very least,” the authors write, “states must avoid shortsighted tax cuts, which would make it much harder for them to invest in higher education, strengthen the skills of their workforce, and compete for the jobs of the future.”

_____________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Ronnie Biggs had a defiant message for the press at the funeral of fellow great train robber Bruce Reynolds, as he flipped the “V” sign to photographers.

Biggs, 83, who was freed four years ago after claims he was close to death due to a series of strokes, was among 200 people who paid tribute to his late friend.

Reynolds, who masterminded the 1963 robbery, died just months before the 50th anniversary of the famous heist, hailed as one of the most audacious crimes of the 20th century.

The gang targeted a Glasgow to London mail train and escaped with a then record haul of £2.6m, the equivalent of £40m today.

The train driver Jack Mills was struck with an iron bar and never worked again.

Reynolds died in his sleep on February 28 after a period of ill health and has been laid to rest at a private service at St Bartholomew The Great, a church in the City of London.

Biggs described him as a “good man”.

In a tribute read on his behalf, Biggs said: “Bruce was a true friend, a great friend. A friend through the good and the bad times, and we had many of both.

“He was a good friend to me and my family. My thoughts are with Nick, his son.

“It was Bruce who set me off on an adventure that was to change my life, and it was typical of Bruce that he was there at the end to help me back from Brazil to Britain.

“I am proud to have had Bruce Richard Reynolds as a friend. He was a good man. I miss him already.”

A number of other men with criminal backgrounds attended the funeral, including Freddie Foreman, Dave Courtney and Chris Lambrianou.

An emotional Nick Reynolds described his father as his best friend and greatest inspiration.

“He was a romantic, a true adventurer, a journeyman who chose a lunatic path and paid the price,” he said.

“He was an artist at heart and although he referred to the train robbery as his Sistine Chapel, his greatest triumph was in reassessing himself and changing his attitude about what is important in life.”

Mr Reynolds said his father’s death was “a terrible shock”, but he took comfort from being with him when it happened.

He also said Reynolds had “no interest” in the 50th anniversary of the heist.

The congregation laughed when he added: “So perhaps, true to form, as he had so often done in the past when wanted for questioning, he chose to split the scene.”

A tribute from Gordon Goody, who was Reynolds’ deputy in planning the robbery, was also read out.

It claimed they were the “most infamous rogues in British criminal history”.

He said: “Whatever Bruce did – and he did a lot – his driving motivation was for the betterment of his family.”

During the funeral, Nick Reynolds and his band Alabama 3 performed their song Too Sick To Pray, while John Cooper Clarke read out a poem he wrote after Reynolds’ death.

Tributes were given by Sky News crime correspondent Martin Brunt, actor David Thewlis and novelist Jake Arnott.

After the service, Reynolds’ coffin was carried out of the church and placed in a hearse, to be taken to the West London Crematorium.

The robbery took place in August 1963. The gang pounced shortly after 3am as the train passed through the Buckinghamshire countryside close to Cheddington.

Antiques dealer Reynolds was nicknamed Napoleon and after the robbery he fled to Mexico on a false passport and was joined by his wife, Angela, and son, Nick.

They later moved on to Canada but the cash from the robbery ran out and he came back to England.

FedEx started the day down around 4% (on the disaster that we noted earlier) and has not looked back. Now at the lows of the day, down 7% (and 8.5% from its highs yesterday) this is the biggest drop and biggest volume (with 30 minutes left in the day) in 18 months.

So much for global trade volumes…

Troubled former England star Paul Gascoigne has said negative press coverage helped him in his battle with alcoholism.

The popular ex-footballer has struggled with addiction for years, but told Sky Sports News that critical media stories forced him to face up to his situation.

Speaking just weeks after completing a stint at a US rehabilitation clinic, the 45-year-old said: “Over the last 11 years, I’ve probably drank 14 months out of it.

“The press say I’m drinking all the time. It’s not (true). I was three years sober, then I have a three-week binge and I’m in treatment again.

“I’ve just got to stop them binges … well, just don’t pick up a drink. What the press wrote, not only did it probably help myself, but it probably helped other alcoholics how close I was to passing away.”

Gascoigne said fellow former players had rallied around him after his plight was revealed in a series of stories.

“When I’m drinking I forget about everyone,” he said.

“I don’t realise the hurt I’m doing to others but, you know, I’ve got to think about the hurt I was doing to myself.

“People come up (and say) ‘never touch a drink again’. I don’t know (if) I’m going to touch a drink again. I just know that I’m not drinking today.”

Inequality hurts us all.

Imagine if you could go back 45 years to 1968. That year, after three decades of creative policy from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal through President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, the United States was one of the world’s most equal nations.Picturing Economic Growth (OtherWords cartoon by Khalil Bendib)

Now imagine that instead of falling into the extreme inequality of today, the United States had stayed at the levels of greater equality of that era. What would be the benefits?

There would be a lot of them. This is the finding of a new study, “Closing the Inequality Divide,” that my organization, the Institute for Policy Studies, recently released with the Center for Sustainable Economy.

Our report looks at the world from the vantage point of the poorest fifth of people in my relatively affluent state of Maryland. Today, on average, the poorest fifth of the state earns about $15,000 a year. Maryland ranks among the country’s top-five states in terms of per-capita income. Yet many Marylanders work hard to earn the minimum wage, which remains painfully low at $7.25/hour, barely enough for them and their families to scrape by.

Consider this: If the levels of greater income equality of 1968 still prevailed today, that same poorest fifth of Marylanders would be earning twice what they take home now. Imagine the differences. They’d be able to purchase more goods and services, which would generate more jobs and income throughout the state.

We’d also be a lot healthier. We’d suffer less crime. Fewer of us would be injured and killed in car crashes. We’d suffer fewer divorces. We’d get the benefits of more education. Since a higher percentage of African-Americans and Latinos are poorer than whites, greater income equality would also reduce race inequality.

How do my colleagues and I who wrote this report know all of this? Well, thanks to a bold move by Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley in 2009, that state now collects information on 26 measures of social, environmental, and economic well-being known as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). In addition to measuring inequality, each year employees of the Maryland government are charting critical things such as the costs of pollution and crime, as well as the value of volunteer work and higher education.

In other words, measure what you treasure.

The idea is that these broader measures of well-being offer a better sense of how a state and its people are doing than the traditional economic measure of gross domestic product (GDP). That traditional measure only counts the increase in production of goods and services and doesn’t distinguish between the growth of “bad” things – like cancer or polluting industries – versus “good” things – like wind energy and sustainable farming.

Are there steps we can take to move in the direction of the greater equality we enjoyed a couple of generations ago?

Yes. Our research points to the good work of a wide range of Maryland organizations that have practical ideas on how to reduce inequality. A broad coalition has come together to raise Maryland’s minimum wage to $10.00 an hour by 2015, with an increase for restaurant workers and others who make tips as well. This state-level momentum is strengthening the efforts to pass a national bill introduced by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative George Miller to increase the minimum wage to $10.10 across the country.

President Barack Obama backed an increase in his February State of the Union address, and polls show strong public support. In early March, a Gallup poll showed 71 percent of Americans supporting an increase in the minimum wage to $9 an hour, the level Obama recommended.

We know how to make both Maryland and this country more equal, in part because we’ve done it before, from the 1930s to the 1960s. And we would all benefit from this shift.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

John Cavanagh is the director of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank celebrating its 50th year.